Speak, penis, for you have the floor… and the p[nyan]y.
My reluctant review of F[crash]k You! Actually F[horn]ks You Into the Harem ended with a mention of another series that was pushing the envelope, so much so that it took Funimation three episodes to realize it might as well have been hentai. And looking at it’s content, I really wanna go back in time to Funimation’s as of yet unclaimed office, stare the big boss/manager/whatever in the face and say, “With a premise like this, what were you expecting? Raunchier KonoSuba?”
No matter the intention, learning about this led to a Streisand effect in the animanga community, whereby, those who weren’t watching it yet, checked it out to see why Funimation would choose not to continue airing a current anime series. Once they saw why, it made sense.
If I was in charge of a streaming service, I’d put this behind an older teen or 18+ section. Simply change your user settings to be able to view hentai and ecchi freely and voila! Enjoy your culture, ladies and gentlemen.
The premise is simple: a fantasy world where every monster girl is available and about 90% of them work in a legalized sex industry, Stunk the human and his bestie Zel the elf embark on an adventure to f[crumble]k every monster girl they can find. Shortly after their quest begins, they meet an angel named Crimvael who has both sets of genitalia, but defaults male to lessen the confusion when being addressed by others. And wouldn’t you have it, the little angel is the most well-endowed of the three. It’s like Team Four Star’s take on Krillin, smacking him around all throughout the Abridged Dragon Ball run until finally giving him the golden ticket in Android 18.
A typical episode begins with the trio heading to a brothel under the ownership of a type of monster girl, they ask for the services and perhaps through power of Post Nut Enlightenment, their reviews of the girls read like Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy at times. Aiding your prostate apparently brings out the poet when describing how well (or poorly) these girls use their bodies to help the reviewer reach a satisfying climax. Not the first or last time such an observation would be made, as PornHub comments and the Zenless Zone Zero community can attest.
D[clank]ks out, tits out, spurt like a faucet and cover in baby batter, rate us on Yelp, hope to clean your fluids off our floors again… but would you believe me if there was more than an absurd number of fetishes in this series? The culture of individual monster girls plays a significant role to some degree. For instance, minotaur/cow-girls have the biggest breasts and their speech patterns are cattle-influenced; the succubi are so extremely depraved that they can f[pop!]k you to death; fairy girls are predictably Tinker Bell-sized, so good look trying something remotely kinky; elf girls are all GILFs by default due their aging process compared to human beings, etc. etc. etc.
This also leads to a few dark moments in the series. Away from the brothels where penises get played with like any other toy, sometimes venues make a strip show of things. Venturing into even more inappropriate territory sheds light on a certain episode involving egg-laying. And that’s the most I’ll reveal about that episode. Another moment involves them making a sex doll in the shape of their bird girl friend and tavern waitstaff, Meidri. After the men take their turns, word gets around and let’s just say arms and legs don’t bend in three places for a reason.
Yeah, it begins on a funny note and evolves into WTF?! over the course of its twelve episodes. The manga is apparently still going on and it has two light novels. Competitive Harem Rapist still outmatches it by it’s sheer gratuitous sex and sexual assault scenes (everyone sins in that goddamn anime!!), but an animanga based around sex work and the various girls that can be found in the Red Light district… outclassed or not, I’d give it a watch. I saw it through to the end in 2021, and it’s worth a rewatch, especially for the opening:
Channel: mediafactory
Knowing what ecchi is now, it’s nice to see the ones that helped push the envelope, no matter how they age.
Don’t let the title of this post deceive you, reader. This isn’t a sharp left turn into chronicling French President Emmanuel Macron’s married life, nor is it me announcing that I contacted an old teacher and got down on one knee for a short-lived matrimony. Instead, we’re diving back into my community college days where I watched an ecchi anime known only as Why the Hell Are You Here, Teacher!?
Known in Japanese as Nande Koko ni Sensei ga!?, the series is about a quartet of female high school teachers of different personalities and subjects who develop romantic feelings for their students. A slice of forbidden fruit that can’t work due to a power dynamic that this anime seems to have a lot of fun with and far from the only series animated or not to try this. Most other anime go the “incest = wincest” route of forbidden fruit. From what I’ve seen, there’s a bit of overlap between teacher-student romance and office worker romance, appearance-wise as both tend to feature smartly dressed love interests with professional presentations, but under scrutiny these “professionals” aren’t immune to clumsy f[clicks]k-ups from time to time.
What I remember from Sexy Teacher, Bombshell Wife was that the four teachers all behaved different in front of their respective classes compared to their love interests. Language teacher Kana Kojima was dubbed “Kojima the Demon” because she’s known to be demanding in class, but in front of her love interest, Ichiro Sato, she can behave just like Hinata Hyuga, albeit less creepy. Art teacher Mayu Matsukaze is a busty shortstack with a demure personality, affectionately nicknamed “Lady Matsukaze” for her kind personality. Cupid’s Arrow also makes a fool of her when she’s next to her love interest, the towering gentle giant Rin Suzuki who “helped” her deliver important paperwork. For romantic backstories, this is right up there with a comedic plot of being helped by the protagonist and the “help” in question was just a dropped pencil, or a notice of an untied shoe. Well, it’s simple…
Gym teacher Hikari Hazakura is a trademark, tanned, big tittied tomboy, the kind who’d encourage a novice swimmer to improve by starting at the deep end and giving an after action report, hoping to see her students become Michael Phelps. One student, Takashi Takahashi, is the one she gets real touchy-feely with. They later develop romantic feelings with each other. Finally, there’s the school nurse: a Kuudere named Rei Ayanami Chizuru Tachibana, who’s been dubbed “Absolute Zero,” and the nickname isn’t lost on her in the series. She wants to be closer to the students, notably one Ko Tanaka, and over the course of their arc, they grow so close they lose their virginities together in a love hotel. Going further than Kojima who was engaged to Sato at the end, a bonus chapter reveals that they started a family together. Obligatory, “silent in the streets, freaky in the sheets.”
Ecchi funtimes all around, but with most anime these days merely advertising the manga without guaranteeing a longer run, the anime covered four arcs spread across a miserable 12 episodes. We’re far and away from the likes of Azumanga Daioh and few are expecting a Yotsuba-to! adaptation anytime soon, but AzuDaioh was able to stretch and progress a four-panel manga over the course of 26 episodes in 2002.
But expanding on a romcom could ruin it, you’d argue and if The Way of the Househusband on Netflix is an indicator, then yes, putting effort where it isn’t needed and ignoring it where it is needed would’ve netted us a piss-poor adaptation of Yakuza Yesterday, Husbando Today. So why don’t I look back at Why Does My Teacher Want My Heart? as fondly as others? Largely because of its length.
I gave it some slack yonks ago when I watched it because it did make me laugh with the short time I had with it and also the horniness at the time was on autopilot. My braincells fired up at the end when all the teachers and love interests got together toward the end to announce that some of them were dating, engaged, married, or expecting.
And then it just ended. I didn’t know at precisely at the time, but with only 12 episodes, it felt like more could’ve done even with just the Fab Four and their Lovely Maidens. The source material even lists more than just the characters that got to the anime. So, is this a recommendation in favor of the series or not?
Again, the braincells were out to lunch while the horniness took command, but looking back it’s nothing more serious than a “haha look at this fanservice” gradually evolving into “you may now kiss the bride.” My post history is the evidence needed when I say that I’ve seen this s[bells]t before. It’s also evidence that I know what I like and while I’m not gonna say it wasn’t up my alley, if I’m gonna watch ecchi/fanservice/hentai, a plot can go a long way. Came for the booba, stayed for the story gambit and this may be part of the pipeline into erotic fiction, or it may have been a bit earlier than that… Hmmm…
I cannot say with certainty. For my recommendation, you’re more than welcome to see I Found My Wife in High School, and She Wasn’t a Fellow Classmate up to the last episode and continue in the manga to see what didn’t make the cut, it has 12 volumes and the anime was followed up with an OVA I haven’t seen in 2019. But for something somewhat more grounded, feel free to pair it with 2002’s Please Teacher!
Off topic, I simultaneously adore this old art style and can’t disassociate it from some hentai I’ve seen or read recently.
Doesn’t get any simpler than the title, eh? I’ve gotta confess first that I was so busy all week preparing for Army things to last the next few months (not a deployment or rotation, that would last way longer) that I didn’t even think to look at my topics list until last night and even then I was so tired I didn’t have much prepared until this morning save for this opener. Now that I’m well-rested and caffeinated, I’m going to spend this post talking about my journey into hentai, some of my favorite artists, and some updates; one related to work which may or may not have an impact on future blog posts, and one that covers an event in the city where I’m currently stationed.
Now, what is hentai? If you’ve been around the internet or can call yourself a veteran weeb, you might have instantly thought of an image involving an anime girl, tentacles, or in some cases, both. By which I mean a tentacle girl.
And there’s a reason the image of tentacles of have stuck with the genre for decades. For as long as art has been a thing, humanity has been sculpting, painting, and carving images of exaggerated and unrealistic human or humanoid bodies, to include depictions of deities. Travel the world and tell me about all the fertility statues you can find. In recent memory, I’ve stumbled upon a photo of this Indian Yakshini statue.
Shame the head’s missing, but simply what’s left is enough inspiration for countless artists, even today. Observe:
In the context of hentai and overall Japanese pornographic works (live and drawn), the term “hentai” originally carried to connotations denoting strange or inexplicable behavior, not necessarily erotic or sexual in nature. Over time, the term has been so associated with animated porn that search engines preface that the results are censored or otherwise NSFW. For erotic art in Japan, early sources of erotic works of art can be traced all the way back to the Heian period. Theoretically, a daimyo who had some control of the Taira or Minamoto clans at the time likely had a stash of erotic art. Maybe a samurai clan had a treasure trove up until the Meiji Restoration or priceless art where everyone’s bits are out. Who knows?
One of the most famous erotic artists in history was one Katsushika Hokusai and his painting “The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife.”
An early depiction of a woman being sexually pleasured by countless appendages and a fixture that will grace the genre centuries later.
From these humble beginnings, come manga. The associated wikipedia page clarifies that what you think of as manga today meant something completely different during the Tokugawa period. I’m not talking about animanga series set in the Edo period (a completely different topic that I have no problem exploring in the future), manga at this time wasn’t made up of structured stories like a serialization or even a yonkoma. The pictures were unrelated and predictably more difficult to make, but if it can be put into a book format and follow a kind of plot with boobs, d[foghorn]ks, and p[tiger]y playing some kind of part in it (and not just in a playfully teasing manner) then by all accounts it’s an erotic manga. These days, we know them as doujinshi, the Japanese term for a self-published work that not a lot of people realize is itself a broad term not necessarily exclusive to hentai and not always limited to physical releases. Name your favorite artist on Twitter or Pixiv or Bilibili, they may or may not have dabbled in putting plot to artwork. Here’s a sneak-peek of one of my favorites:
Source: Tatsunami Youtoku
After manga came adaptations into the form of animation/anime. Classic examples to some of you veterans may include Bible Black or Sailor and the 7 Ballz or for all you Eva fans reading this, the enigmatic Human Salvation Project (the latter of these I found out about yesterday morning). All classics, but none of them are the oldest examples of animated hentai/porn, neither in Japan or elsewhere. Saberspark has an example of one such animation from the late 1920s. His video is below with more details.
Channel: Saperspark
I stand corrected, a link to his video is here with more details. The wikipedia page for the short film is also linked. Six-and-a-half minutes and not too out of place for the Betty Boop-era.
The true earliest form of animated hentai was an Osamu Tezuka directed film adaptation of the 18th-century Middle Eastern folktale 1001 Arabian Nights. There’s two films with the same name released a decade apart in different countries. The American produced 1001 Arabian Nights released in 1959, and the Japanese produced One Thousand and One Nights released in 1969. I probably shouldn’t be surprised that the father of Astro Boy is behind this one. When your contributions kick a genre or medium into overdrive you have to go multiple different places. Still fascinating to see Tezuka’s name on such a thing.
Not as famous as the 1972 raunchy animated film Fritz the Cat, but preceding that film by about three years puts more points in that basket to me.
The more accurate adaptation of the Middle Eastern story isn’t the only one with Tezuka’s name on it as he also helped direct a raunchy retelling of Cleopatra’s life. After that erotic and hentai-like adaptations lay dormant and sparsely touched until the mid-1980s. Considering their laws addressing such material is from the late Meiji era when lines on maps were the most important thing in the world, in Japan’s case all hands on deck would be needed for such endeavors and leaving erotica uncensored was grounds for imprisonment. These days, it still is, which is why so many doujins and even live-action porn, known in Japan as adult videos, are censored even though the intended demographic is 18+… I won’t lie, I was a horny teen once.
I’m not a lawyer and I can’t argue in favor of either censoring or uncensoring Japanese porn and hentai, but what I do know is that the restrictions in place have inspired many geniuses ever since. An uncensored penis is how the artist gets slapped on theirs with a giant dildo bat not seen since Saints Row, but similarly shaped phalluses are not, which is all an artist needs to simulate pentrative intercourse or self-pleasure without the addition of censor bars, pixels, or more recently the lightsaber effect. The earliest of phallic replacements for the penis was tentacles which brings me back to Hokusai’s famous painting. We began with the likes of an octopus or other cephalopod caressing a naked woman’s body and have not looked back ever since.
Nowadays, references call back regularly to these early depictions of hentai online with comments showing tentacles in any such manner being some amalgamation of “I’ve seen enough hentai to know how this ends.” The genre wasn’t even done evolving. Where else could you find erotic anime-style scenes? Video games. Specifically, visual novels.
You might be familiar with early attempts at adult video games and the continuing legacy that I’ve found myself a part of recently, and that’s just speaking of the west where earlier depictions have fallen into controversy even in the wild times of the 1970s and ’80s. The time where the sexual revolution helped boost many names in porn and the video game industry hadn’t found its legs yet. The most infamous examples of adult-themed video games with any such action come in the form of the controversial Custer’s Revenge and X-Man, the latter of which is notorious for the pixely depiction of a Civil War and Indian Wars general George Armstrong Custer taking advantage of a bound, nude Amerindian woman.
Crazy that it took until Mortal Kombat and Night Trap to create the ESRB. Considering this s[bricks]t exists, it should’ve happened sooner.
From woodblock ukiyo-e print to manga to moving frames to playable frames, having dumped all that lore on the history of anime pornography on you, before I list my favorites, I must make another confession. My history with hentai is simultaneously a blindspot and a poorly-explored endeavor. Some of my recommendations come from the appropriate subreddits, but I’ve made a habit of saving so many posts and links that it’d take longer to find and paste the links into a browser than it would to view it all. As for what I have seen, Reddit’s not the only place I’ve seen what can be classed as hentai. Pixiv, Danbooru, Gelbooru, and even Twitter allow users to view and/or upload porn in some manner, though Pixiv and Twitter require age verification, Twitter especially recently.
My introduction to hentai actually came in the form of ecchi series like High School DxD and Shimoneta (both of which I’ve written about already). Shimoneta had a message about censorship hidden in between all the boobage and panty shots while DxD didn’t exactly have that same message and was merely about angels and devils with a side of T ‘n A, which sounds like the worst possible way to describe the Neon Genesis Evangelion franchise.
Credit: u/thot_patrol117, s/EvangelionMemes
Try not to look for deeper meaning amongst the Eva memes. It’s not the deep. But the franchise definitely is, if you’re willing to take Hideaki Anno at face value.
I believe I’ve said it before that DxD and Shimoseka were gateways to pornographic animanga and I hold onto that dearly. They got the ball rolling by proudly showing Rias’ tits and boldly displaying the consequences of a horny (read: predatory in this context) awakening and thus led me to discover more hentai series. I’ve seen many and read many but my personal favorites have to be as follows:
I Want to do Sexy Things with my Tall Younger Cousin
Seika Jogakuin Koutoubu Konin Sao Ojisan; and
Twin Milf
Admittedly something of a one-shot with an incest angle, the central themes of this plot boil down to a tall girl fetish. The fantasy lies in a shorter male scaling a taller female like summiting Mt. Everest on the journey to her Mt. Everests. See what I did there? It also does away with the cutesy embarassed trope. The two main leads are hardly what I’d call shy, in fact, they both confidently know what they want with hints in the doujin alluding to a history of having done this type of thing. What really reels me in is the tomboy trope of the female lead. Cute and playful, she reminds me of Tomo Aizawa from Tomo-chan is a Girl in some ways. Hardly anything deeper than surface level though so those who wanted some drama may have to look elsewhere.
Created by Kurosu Gatari, it translates to English as Seika Girls’ Academy Official Sanctioned Gigolo. This one does have a plot to go with the mountains and valleys. A man with a friend in debt agrees to share some of that debt to help the first guy get back on his feet, this means he has to repay the remaining debt and to do so he takes a job as a gigolo for an all girls’ school. The test involving sex with the dean of the school, before passing and being allowed to exercise this blessing on a select number of students. The operative logic behind this move is hands-on stress relief seeing as sex is a great way to relieve stress and burn calories.
Each of the girls is unique in their own right, one of them having deep-seated daddy issues that don’t arise until she reluctantly uses these gigolo services herself where she gradually evolves from bitch of the school to stern hand. Getting d[monkeys]ked down by the school man-whore softens her up so much that it leads to a personality change. From punishing a tiny infraction to brushing it off like a levelheaded adult, I haven’t crossed that bridge yet but with so many stories corroborating this, a little bit of bumping uglies does seem to go a long way. For the male lead, he’s drawn like an ugly bastard, but is merely just a middle-aged gentleman facing an unusual problem. Debt he can handle, but feeling like a hooker to pay some of it off over time was the last thing he was expecting. What makes his situation more tricky is that he’s married with a daughter no older than the girls he’s getting paid to sexually pleasure, so life at home gets extra awkward when his side job is to mingle with girls like this to make some extra cash. So if you want more drama than the last entry’s “tall girl fantasy,” have at it.
Created by a master of MILF hentai Tatsunami Youtoku, Twin Milf is exactly as advertised on the tin, identical twin sisters with voluptuous body types. A college student and avid soccer player/fan is neighbors with a thick, busty woman. In one such incident, water leaks down into his apartment where she comes down personally to apologize, only for him to accidentally grope her breasts and realize she put something on very quickly (i.e. no bra). From there, he spills the beans to his best bro who’s stuck with a tsundere girlfriend who doesn’t suffer perverts. Main MC presumably runs into his MILFy neighbor again only she’s more perverted than originally introduced and invites him to f[cannonball]k her in her own car.
It isn’t until after this he realizes she’s a twin and the rest of the series takes off. Like Kurosu Gatari, Tatsunami has a type and it’s a woman so thick the clapping of her ass cheeks alerts all of Western Australia and part of Jakarta.
These aren’t exhaustive recommendations as I have more from the same artists and then some so consider this another gateway that I’ll leave open for you to enter.
Now for those updates: without revealing too much, starting on June 16 and continuing until October, my unit will be travelling periodically back and forth between Fort Bliss in El Paso and a missile range in New Mexico. Thankfully, the first week will only be about three days long since Juneteenth is a federal holiday that I have off, so I can get the next topic out in time. We won’t be there during the weekends to my understanding so until later this year the posts will see a Saturday or Sunday release at the latest. If not, then delays are to be expected.
For the event happing in El Paso, I’m currently writing this whilst I have a ticket to an anime convention in El Paso lasting June 14 and 15 until the evening hours. I don’t exactly plan to write about my experiences in detail as each one is different, but it will be my first one in a different city, having attended one in Augusta during AIT last June. If I do, it’ll be more spur of the moment than regularly scheduled.
I’ve made it a point several times that I don’t default to isekai, but I don’t remember clarifying what that means. I make a beeline for shows I find interesting, that some of them are isekai is pure coincidence. I’m not an isekai junkie like Gigguk or an isekai avoider like The Anime Man. I’m in the middle of it, all things considered. Of course, I’ve made it clear that I don’t always find contemporary anime to watch, but the subject of this week’s blog was all the rage when it was airing.
Alternatively titled Okaasan Online, Do You Love Your Mom and Her Two-Hit Multi-Target attacks began life as yet another light novel but from the late 2010s rather than the early 2010s, complete with a manga adaptation as a companion piece running concurrently with the light novel. Shame it was subject to a simple 13-episode series, though this might be par for the course for series that only run for the same length of time as a single US presidential term. The unofficial name for this series is called MILF-sekai and the reasons below explain it better than the cover for the light novel:
The MMORPG parody is strong with this one.
The gist of the story is an ungrateful, angsty teenage boy named Masato Osuki tries to push his clingy mother, Mamako, away. Both of them are suckered into an isekai video game and go on an adventure together, interacting with other characters who have fallen for the same trap. The best joke this series tells is that it plays coy with the incestuous, MILF-y tropes that accompany the genres without exploring them on purpose. The most the anime will do is strip Mamako naked and have her son comedically fall on top of her in the second episode. Damn, I’ve read NTR doujins and felt less cucked there than in this series. That’s pretty much the height of the MILF antics, but the OVA has more to show in that regard.
As far as actual plot goes, Masato’s relatability comes in the form of wishing he were someone else with a doting mother whom he wishes was a different person, at the outset. Then he meets the future members of his party and their mothers and annoying as it may be to have a mom, let alone parents, who embarass you at every turn, it’s better than one with godly expectations or one who can’t help but let their vices enslave them. In the former example, one party member, Medhi, has a mother who’ll chastise her in private for not being perfect like a Cell after losing a competition, leading to feelings of doubt and self-loathing in the poor girl. For the latter example, party member Wise and her own mother, had a frought relationship in real life and used the game as a means to better bond, but when Wise’s mother learned that she could make a harem of men at her beck and call, she made a beeline for that and never went back. At least it beats what this girl was going through:
I’m almost tempted to catalogue some of the worst mother’s in media, but I don’t wanna abandon my faith in humanity just yet.
The show’s ecchi-leaning comedy make it the butt of a few jokes, but it’s not like it doesn’t know what its talking about. It’s different from a thinking man’s anime, but has a lot of the same story beats as one. Between the JRPG satire and the ecchi satire, it tries its best to split them evenly, though lacks in some other areas. I want to blame this on the anime for cramming so much into so little time, but on the whole that does nothing to specify which anime I’m talking about, for this series specifically, that’s an inaccurate and misleading conclusion to draw seeing as the light novel and manga were still running when the anime was airing in 2019, putting it in the category of yet another anime promoting the source material. And as a manga reader, I’d rather explore manga naturally than be given homework. At least not every series does that to me:
I’ll put this one in the timeline somewhere.
So how does Okaasan Online work as a series? Fine… it knocks out the important points like Kazuma at the batting cages, and generally speeds through them in about one or two episodes. But it also doesn’t really explore anything in much detail beyond “here’s a trope, give me my laughs.” Funny enough, the anime doesn’t do this as perfectly as presented. Two characters’ origins with their own mothers are explored, but one such character, Porta, is a one-off. No such relationship status between her and her own mother are revealed in the source material or the anime; she’s simply the little mage that behaves the most like a little sister to Masato and young daughter to Mamako.
Now that I’ve written that, Porta behaves the most like a little puppy or a kitten. The party leader status is shared between mother and son and awkward as it seems to point this out, they’re like the parents to the other three girls even though Masato and Mamako are mother and son. F[Nyan]k, even I couldn’t avoid the incest trope. Again, not explicit or even acted upon in any media, but it’s there.
So, Tiberius, do you recommend it? Eh, I’m indifferent. I watched it all the way through and 20-year-old me felt naughty things thanks in no small part to the visuals. Fast-forward five-and-a-half years later and looking back, it may have served as a gateway to lewder and racier things without meaning to. Basically, what I’m saying is, before, during, and after its run, the series has been outdone. I won’t persuade you to watch it or dissuade you from doing so, just know that while you could sit down and spare some time to give this one a watch, it co-exists with better shows, so don’t expect me to show up at your door at 3AM like this:
Add it to your isekai library if you feel like it.
Of all the media I’ve covered since this blog’s creation, animanga takes center stage followed by video games, TV, and to a lesser extent, music. And with all that content there’s still a blind spot that not only affects my coverage but also coverage of several other creators. Name any anituber and they’ve covered some of the most popular animanga series to debut in recent or even living memory. Bonus points if they’ve also promoted series that few people ever paid attention to.
I was recommended this on Reddit once when I put the manga Rokudenashi Blues in a 3×3 post. Here’s a video review of it.
Obviously, Japanese manga solos the graphic novel charts overtaking western comics roughly 95% of the time, but Japan’s not the only country producing graphic novels of its own. China has manhua and Korea has manhwa; same concept, different spelling when Romanized. There was a point in my life during the second half of community college that I took in an extensive amount of manhwa along with my manga intake. I remember browsing a porn site late into the night and next to the generic “Hot MILFs in Your Area” pop up ads, there was one that stood out. An ad (or in this case: promotion) of a manhwa hosting site called Toomics.com
I joined it back in 2018, before it put up some fancy new paywalls. Not working at the time, my best way around it for the series I was reading was the age-old “find a manhwa pirate site and hope it isn’t hiding malware in its ads.” On mobile, at least. I was careful not to try anything with my laptop because my mom would occasionally borrow it to complete important work. She did respect my privacy but you can never be too careful.
Toomics was what I’d call a gateway site as far as manhwa. The ad in question was for a manhwa called My Stepmom, interestingly enough. If it wasn’t obvious yet, it was one of the several manhwa series that was porn. I did see it on a porn site, after all. With that came several more manhwa, adult content notwithstanding, and speaking of adult content, a feature of the website is the NSFW filter, so you don’t have to worry about being the subject of a popular copypasta.
I wasn’t joking when I said a majority of my readership was pornographic. For the 30% wholesome, safe for work series, they bounced around between action and dramady, but for some of these, while not explicitly pornographic in nature, they were still intended for mature audiences by covering complicated topics from war to illegal trades to gambling to alcoholism and drug abuse among numerous others.
Then there’s the purely wholesome romcom manhwa where “are they dating? worse they’re stupid” has a full dormitory. Pick your favorites: mine has to be one called Annoying Alice; about office workers starting off with playful teasing only to come together towards the end. Hopefully, that was vague enough to not warrant a spoiler alert. I briefly took a pause from manhwa around the same time as my first go at the Army in 2021. But like with manga, I did come back though I don’t read as much manhwa as I would like.
All that aside, a question I have regarding manhwa is about why I don’t hear more about it. The genre has a dedicated subreddit some 1.1 million members strong, there are numerous legitimate and underground websites hosting the chapters with an untold number of teams hard at work localizing them for the broke and hungry populace, as well as those bringing us the raw scans for those who want a better grasp of Hangul.
Further, this is an argument in favor of Korean culture’s spread throughout the world. Next to K-Pop and K-drama, I believe manhwa is another instance of the Korean Wave or Hallyu spreading, but it gets less attention than the aforementioned, and circling back to Chinese culture spreading–without demeaning or scolding–can you, the reader name at least one C-drama or Chinese manhua? It’s okay if you can’t because neither can I.
This was an interesting find during the 2020 election season.
I only have hypotheses for why manhwa seems so unsung and underground compared to its Japanese counterpart. One hypothesis I have is in some manner connected to how some people find it, or how it finds audiences. I can’t speak for everyone, but with the adage of “sex sells,” a bold (or desperate depending on how you see it) move is to advertise the site and/or a series on a porn site in between the rest of the dreck on the sidebar getting in the way of some scripted T ‘n A. Another I have may be due to the proliferation of manga compared to manhwa/hua, and the history behind adaptations of famous manga. Even since before the Tezuka and Ishinomori days, manga has been a thing and so has anime; and it’s become expected of manga to eventually become anime. Sometimes there’s even a pipeline of light novel to manga to anime. Even movies.
Speaking of history, you’ll notice that Osamu Tezuka’s days were the mid-1940s up until his death in 1989, inspiring future mangaka in the years since. Araki, Toriyama, Kishimoto, Arakawa, Oda, and far too many to list.
The tragedy of his magnum opus was that it took so long to properly adapt it, leaving behind years of lost media in its trail.
Even if a manga is adapted after years in slumber, it’s still more likely to get a wide reach through a faster-paced medium like animation, but most Korean manhwa aren’t as lucky, from what I’ve seen. There’s a few coming out in recent memory like Solo Leveling, Tower of God, and God of Highschool in the last few years, but manhwa is far older than that. I think it may have something to do with the history of Korean politics and its government. Post-war Japan is extremely sedated, and the dismantling of the Japanese Empire meant the ad hoc independence of its former territories, repatriation of its non-Japanese subject, and/or the transfer of its territories to the Allies, the most famous of the lot being Korea split in twain by the Soviets and Americans.
Both were led by unassuming statesmen who had notorious reputations for being ruthless dictators. The South had long been an anticommunist state to the point of carrying a dictatorial slant until true democratization in the late 1980s. I’m prepared to be corrected for this, but I’ve got a sneaking suspicion that this roughly 40-year post-independence timeline of strongmen had an influence on a lot of Korean culture and popular media. There’s a Last Week Tonight segment on Taiwan and in the latter half of the segment, the dictatorship on the island stamped hard on anything that even slightly criticized or satirized the government. I think Korea had the same issue at the time, overzealously stating its independence and opposition to communism in the face of its neighbors, but at the cost of its inhabitants. In a dictatorship, the freedom to read, write, and speak freely is severely under threat. With that knowledge, aspiring comic artists would’ve had three options: Comply with Seoul’s wishes; emigrate to a freer nation; or self-publish your works and await the consequences. South Korea and Taiwan don’t have flawless human rights records, but compared to Kim Il-Sung’s or Mao Zedong’s regimes, they were on the opposite ends of the spectrum.
Another hypothesis, one I’ve come across on r/manhwa posits that there’s a mix of western exoticism and self-loathing within the community due to an influx of manhwa set in medieval European-adjacent royalty, which speaks to a wider conception of the culture. It’s a stereotype that East Asia is unforgiving on its own people and if Japanese Isekai is any indicator, then the blend of escapism and exotic fantasy is more widespread than you might’ve previously believed. Don’t we all want to travel to an alien world and jive with the locals?
The premise of this series.
The last hypothesis would probably come with the reputation of some western manhwa publishers and localizers. If you follow Rev Says Desu and Hiro Hei, you may have been made aware of a select few English voice actors of anime shotgunning their kneecaps off on social media while their Japanese counterparts either keep quiet or promote what they like (see: Aoi Yuki for more details). In a similar vein, a subsect of activist-minded artists have discovered the publisher Webtoon and are said to have been aggressively pushing their works on the platform, negatively impacting the reputation of the site and driving more innocuous publishers away and onto sites with different criteria for vetting and publishing comics. I’ve heard these arguments as well as the purported reputation of another web-series and I can’t say for sure which is the true culprit, but there’s a lot of power behind a perception. I’m pretty sure Toomics and Lezhin comics don’t have that much dirt under their heals though…
Whatever the case, on a scale of All the Luck to There Ain’t S[burp]t to Gamble With, Korean manhwa is closer to the latter with even Chinese manhua getting adaptations from time to time, though not nearly as much as Japanese animanga. Normally, I champion underground series, but this is a rare moment where I’d rather see more variety in this hardly tapped market. Even if you’re not in the market for sexual content, there’s a handful of series I can recommend off the bat that hardly ever touch that or even encourage the reader for touching themselves.
My top 3 would be these:
Devilish Romance: a powerful demon is reincarnated as a Korean investigator and initially attempts to reclaim his honor as the most feared demon in the underworld, but is paired with a strict, if goofy prosecutor.
Annoying Alice: Office romance between a pair of pure coworkers who like to mess with each other which gradually evolves into tender, loving romance.
High School Devil: local delinquent is implored to change schools and start anew but his reputation as a brawler gets him into trouble not 5 minutes into admission to the school.
As a bonus, a dystopian manhwa by the name of Shaman centering on a special forces agent tasked with safeguarding a K-pop idol duo.
Also, circling back to the porn part of my manhwa arc, it was where I first discovered that the black bars were cast out in favor of the lightsaber in pornhwa and hentai. Whichever came first (no pun intended), I’d like to believe there’s an influence, if not a cross-cultural pollination.
Yonks ago, I mentioned an upcoming post that was initially meant to be just another double bill, but it occurred to me that there was a third series that I felt was appropriate to lump in with the other two. These are the three anime that I watched all through college:
Shimoneta: A Boring World Where the Concept of Dirty Jokes Doesn’t Exist
High School DxD, and;
Monster Musume
And we’ll go through them one-by-one. The titles of each should be a giveaway but just in case: each of these series contains sexually suggestive themes, language and imagery. Reader discretion is advised.
Shimoneta (2015):
Another anime to get its start in the world of early 2010s light novels, Shimoneta’s concept is exactly as it says on the tin. All language of a sexually suggestive or provocative nature is illegal and if uttered, the speaker(s) is/are arrested by the Decency Squad, a specialized morality police unit whose purpose is to track down and subdue anyone who dares utter such obscene words.
How do they know people are saying s[poop]t, f[moans]k, and ass? By the collars around their necks. They’re designed (read: programmed) to monitor different trigger words, I suspect, by way of detecting the movements of the mouth when certain words are spoken, sort of like how most YouTubers, TikTokers, etc. have to censor/monitor their own speech to keep from the Demon of Demonitization at bay. (Side note: f[plastic wrap]k the algorithm for doing that to our favorite creators.)
One such character is the protagonist, Tanukichi Okuma. He’s a brand new student to Tokioka Academy and a witness to the indecency of another character he meets later: Blue Snow, real name Ayame Kajou. Ayame takes the alias of Blue Snow whilst on a crusade to dismantle the shackles of this dystopian system of policing speech by way of challenging the response time of the Decency Squad. Under normal circumstances, suggestive language is how you get slapped on the dick (or in Ayame’s case, the tits), but she evades that by dialing a number on her cellphone that deactivates the collar on her neck for three minutes a day, letting her unleash a bevy of inappropriate sayings.
Based on her appearance here, Ayame adopts a Clark Kent persona when around others only to don a mask (a pair of panties, yes, really) when it’s time for her 180 seconds of lewd infamy.
The series isn’t just a man vs society conflict at play, there’s an actual antagonist in the series and she starts off as innocent and pure until the following happens to her:
Channe: Khánh Senseii Anime Kiss
The birth of the villainess of this series. Anna Nishikinomiya begins the series as the class president of Tokioka, but after a mishap in one of the episodes, Okuma plants a kiss on her by accident. If she had any knowledge of even romance, she’d probably have a normal reaction, but this unleashes metaphorical and literal floodgates. She conflates love with lust and 85% of the scenes that she’s in is a display of female-on-male sexual assault/rape. I’m not kidding.
Obviously, it’s played for laughs in the series and there’s a lot to be said about societal discourse surrounding male victims and their female perpetrators (a discussion I’m not qualified to talk about on a blog based on entertainment, but would have no problem entertaining in mixed company), but without getting too dark and focusing mainly on the central theme of the series, Shimoneta is a display of the consequences of policing morality and human behavior. If you’ve been on the internet for quite some time, you may recall an era when cancel culture went haywire and a small fraction of forum posters chastised trolls online to hell and back for a few racy comments here and there. Not that it was unwarranted, the internet around the time of the GamerGate controversy was an interesting time to be on the internet, but interspersed with genuine policing were impromptu witch hunts conflating ignorance with curiosity, and this went beyond just suggestive or provocative commentary, lest we forget the cultural appropriation vs appreciation argument that was prevalent at the time. Though these days, the conversation has moved towards intentionally ignoring sex organs, due to a variety of factors that have massively influenced the internet. Sorry, digressing.
In Shimoneta’s case, it proves how difficult at the least; Sisyphean at the most such a task of policing even speech can be. Not to mention a shortfall that accompanies the series from start to finish about how to go about this. You’ll notice that speech patterns themselves are the main crime, not the physical aspect itself. Now, there would still be procreation which this world would likely allow for survival’s sake, but another conversation can be had about how conspiracy to commit is addressed more seriously than an actual crime in this world.
This blog from 2018 has more to say about Anna herself and with a finer brush than the broadstrokes I employed here.
Having said all that, I still recommend this anime for anyone wanting a closer look at an example of how bad overpolicing behavior can get or if you just wanna see the most athletic Japanese school girl in the world hunt down the object of her “affection.” Beware her homemade cookies, IYKYK. Now onto:
High School DxD (2012-2018)
My personal favorite for being R-rated and uncensored, the light novel ran from 2008 to 2018, ending around the same time as the anime’s fourth season. Whereas Shimoneta’s content is light on explicit nudity and fan service, High School DxD throws the censorship to the wind. Back during the Funimation days, the English dub played up both the nudity and the jiggle physics. From threatening to get naked to actually getting naked; I like the progression so far.
In High School DxD, Kuoh Academy recently transitions into a co-ed school for the new schoolyear. A few male students enroll, likely taking advantage of the 8 to 1 ratio of girls to boys in the hopes of scoring big before Kuoh fully integrates. One of these boys is a massive pervert and otaku named Issei Hyoudo. He initially fits the bill of a stereotypical otaku in all but appearance. Body pillows, an alarm clock with different anime girl archetypes waking him up every morning, an extensive hentai and porn collection shared with his two other friends, and a MIGHTY NEED to get some titty.
It just so happens that one particular set of breasts happens to belong to this devilishly gorgeous redhead, Rias Gremory. More than just a sight for sore eyes, Lady Rias is a fierce fighter and one to defend those she cherishes to her dying breath. Outside of battle, she’s a kindhearted young woman, compassionate, and reliable. She’s the head of Kuoh’s occult club, thinly masking her connection to the paranormal as a devil herself and making great use of the common tropes associated with angels and demons/devils: angels are depicted as bone ugly to ward off evil while demons are depicted as drop dead gorgeous to tempt mankind into following their id. In an ironic twist, the series depicts devils as more heroic than the beings they fight against.
As much as I make that sound like an engagement wearing the clothes of praise, there’s an actual plot behind the plot here. It takes a lot of cues and tropes from the Christian bible with the concept of angels, devils, and fallen angels. Following the devils, their depiction seems more sympathetic in the series as the factions do have a fair share of shady and unscrupulous characters. The overall plot plays up the biblical angle with the fan service going into overdrive, so Rias, Issei, and the Occult club are all (knights) in service of Satan, or in this case, in service of one of those appointed as a satan. To quote Anton Szandor LaVey, founder of the Church of Satan, “if you’re gonna be a sinner, be the best sinner on the block,” and it seems that Issei is guaranteed to live up to those ideals.
The juxtaposition of magical action and theological babble with T and A and convenient panty shots is what kept me going until about halfway through the fourth season. When it comes to censorship, normally I’m an opponent depending on the company I’m with. Throwing out f[crunch]ks, s[footsteps]ts, damns, asses, and other such forbidden words in a room full of bureaucrats allergic to the sun makes you seem immature compared to a gathering of mobsters, gangsters, or even servicemembers, all things considered. I censor swearing and nudity here for presentability and professionalism, but seeing as I’m writing about a trio of anime that joke or outright show you uncensored boobs, if it wasn’t for the presentation, this whole blog would have no reins. Before we move on to the third and final series I want to talk about, let this ending convince you to watch High School DxD if the above hasn’t already:
Channel: SE NPAI
And last but certainly not least:
Monster Musume (2015):
A harem series like High School DxD but appealing to even more fetishes while also putting the protagonist in a tricky situation like Shimoneta, though with a different context. The plot of this horny adjacent series is that monster girls of various mythical origins are enrolled in a program not dissimilar from foreign exchange student programs in real life and one of the people who is accidented/voluntold into the program is regular human person No. 4986 Kimihito Kurusu.
One of the coordinators, Agent Smith, mistakenly sends a lamia (snake girl) Miia to his house to take care of her under the the circumstances that they refrain from conflict or copulation. Easy rules for Kurusu to follow considering the consequences, but as the series goes on and more and more monster girls share a roof with the man, his physical restraints are put to the test seeing as these women are physically capable of bending him like straw. More than once, he’s been grievously injured through accidents as none of the girls are even remotely aware of their gap in human endurance and their own strength.
Basically, it’s the equivalent of swapping Kratos, a character of pure strength and raw anger with Lester the Unlikely from his titular game. Kurusu exists in a world where monster girls damage him even without the promise or threat of snu snu, and yet, he’s not that kind of guy to engage in his temptations. Using Okuma and Issei as a scale of unfortunate to pervy, Kurusu is definitely closer to Okuma, yet we can put in a different category for him specifically seeing as how he doesn’t exactly live to fulfill is silly desires. He’s a blank slate of sorts that the viewer may put themselves in the shoes of.
Monster Musume has the makings of a horror show without the horror. It’s a harem romcom slice of life with horror elements featuring a protagonist who simply wants to live the most normal life allowed by this society, but is forced to share not only this world, but his dwelling with a harem of monster girls he’s forbidden from touching intimately because the agent that f[piano]ked him is functionally identical to Aqua from KonoSuba.
Don’t let the Matrix reference fool you, she’s not as efficient as those clones. But she does look good in a suit.
Another thing worth mentioning is that while the other two series in this post began as light novels, Monster Musume is a manga first, with a spin off light novel series that also got an anime adaptation: Monster Girl Doctor.
Take these three as my recommendations for when you think there’s too much wholesomeness to go around and not enough lewdness. There’s the possibility of getting muscled by the thirstiest girl in the world whilst on a crusade to curtail censorship; a harem of lovely ladies whose tits shake even when still; and a harem of lovely mythical monster ladies who’d each be wife material all their own if it wasn’t for the rules.
Whatever pirate site you watch your anime on (don’t worry, your secret is safe with me), give these all a watch if you haven’t done so already. And if you’ve seen them, see them again! Do it!!
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