Making hentai – Quantifying watchability
Posted on | November 13, 2008 | 5 Comments |
Since I’ve purged this year’s fanfiction urge from my fanboy bones, I thought I would try and woo back the rest of my readership (who hate fanfiction) by returning to my hentai roots. This week – more on the originality of hentai storylines.
This topic is nothing new – I’ve debated Western pornography at length before, coming to the conclusion that all Western pornography is intrinsically boring, even when producers go out of their way to try and make it non-conformist (There’s only so much you can do with miscellaneous penis sawing in and out of debatably hot slut after all).Why introduce such things as storyline and character development if all the impact it’s going to have is a press of the “next scene” button. So why should hentai be any different? My thoughts before were that hentai generally tends to be more interesting, since by neglecting the rules of gravity, physiology and general reality the normal bounds are increased. Sex scenes generally tend to have more bite if the man can come more than once and the woman can accommodate things the size and shape of the Bahamas without significant injury, even if it is pixellated to kingdom come.
However, despite the possibilities, hentai has generally tended to be dull and lifeless as a genre. Part of this is down to the poor production values, since potential sales are lower than the mainstream and therefore characters are rendered with an increased uggles value. Repeated animations abound just to pad the whole thing out and many end up with the feel that someone has spent a day banging this out in his garage (no pun intended). Storyline is where hentai has the greatest ability to shine. For many reasons, I think that Japanese otaku will generally tend to hit the fast-forward button less. The reasoning behind this is that if otaku are prepared to play through countless visual novel style H-games to get to a few stills of nudey girls being pixellated by dismembered penises, then they’re probably going to be watching hentai all the way through.
It’s in the culture. Probably.
But contrary to the potential that hentai has to be everything Western porn isn’t, somehow the greatest proportion of it ends up with about as much thought as there is art budget. It is as if they are pigeonholing the hentai audience into one of two…no maybe three camps.
1. People who want to see lascivious women slutting around with the protagonist at the drop of a hat.
2. People who want to see innocent women being gangraped by various people/tentacles/creatures of the night
3. People who want to see nice art and proper storylines.
OK, I know that that’s a gross oversimplification. But let’s stick with it for now.
In short form, we can abbreviate these to Slut, Rape and Nice.
Slut type hentai is probably most akin to Western style pornography – usually with a single male protagonist (let’s do our best to make him non-offensive and not annoying please, eh?) and a bunch of women who he has sex with…because obviously women just have sex with men they’ve just met with no strings attached. You mean yours doesn’t? Didn’t you read the instruction manual? This is the default storyline that occurs when you either directly port an average visual novel to animation (imagine just flicking through the scene replay section) or have no imagination and a storyboard of ridiculously proportioned characters. It shares the same weaknesses as it’s distant non-animated cousins – it takes a lot to elevate Slut type hentai above your usual snore fest. The sex is usually fairly vanilla and there are extra points for including extra kinks. A good guide system I’ve invented to assess whether this type of hentai is tolerable to watch is the MAKE system:
Male protagonist – Not annoying? = 1
Art – Good? = 1
Kinks – Is there – Anal? Threesomes? Yuri? Score 1 for each
Ejaculate – Voluminous? = 1
A score of 3-4 is generally enough to justify watching.
Rape type hentai is probably aimed at the fetish market. As rape is rather prevalent in the Japanese doujinshi circle, it is often seen as essential for inclusion of the more outlandish fetishes such as futanari, tentacles, bestiality, bodymod, guro and their kin. At the basic level, this type is typified by generic girls who are unwillingly raped by an indeterminate number of generic penises. At the end, she probably likes it. God knows why. At the other end of the scale is the same innocent girlies being violated by all manner of unworldly objects – minotaurs, live dildos, tentacle monsters, futanaris to name but a few. However, the basic premise usually remains the same.
Origins of this type are probably also rooted in the ero-game. There are a few H-game companies such as Lilith who specialise in these type of scenarios. As such, to balance the amount of Slut hentai, these extreme and rape animations allow the other, less vanilla side of the market to be tapped. For speculations as to why the Japanese are so hung up on rape and gangbangs please see my March is Fetish month #1 post.
Judging whether a Rape type hentai is good enough to watch is more difficult, as it depends on the fetishes involved and whether they are your cup of tea. Since these types of hentai are likely to be fetish heavy, it is not the number of kinks that are showcased, but whether you like them. This is my FAME scoring system:
Fetishes – Score 1 for each fetish that is both included and relevent to your interests, score -1 for every fetish included that you dislike (Max 3)
Art – Good? = 1
Men – Score -1 for every annoying generic male face or stupid delinquent accent heard.
Ejaculations – Number shown – score +1 for <5, +2 for 5-10, +3 for >10. Score -1 if there is an annoying ejaculation sound effect with each one.
A score of 3 is sufficient, but usually I would go for hentai that scored 4+.
Nice hentai are a bit of an aberration. Real love and sex? Animated? Surely not! Jokes aside, it seems that hentai showcasing real nice love are generally on a better par than most. The animation quality is usually higher, symptom of a higher budget, and presumably aimed at the more discerning market of porn enthusiasts (or ones that want posters of hentai characters in their rooms that are not going to get so many raised eyebrows). Good examples of this genre are “Sora no iro mizu no iro” and “Hatsu Inu”, both showcasing perhaps not a real love story, but a fantastic account of an entertaining and titillating tale of love and hijinks. The reason why these are not more prevalent is fairly obvious – it doesn’t make as much profit. Since it has greater production costs, it is a brave move to make, since if it doesn’t sell, the company will make greater losses. As such, most either stick with the tried and tested Rape and Slut formulae OR make their visual novel into a perfectly respectable non-ero anime (Kimi ga Nozomu eien, to name one example).
These hentai need no scoring system, since they are usually worth watching. On the other hand, they are rare, so take a lot of watching out for.
So what can we conclude from all this debate? First is probably that to maintain equilibrium in the hentai universe, an equivalent amount of Slut and Rape anime must exist at any one time in order to prevent collapse and anarchy. Nice hentai act as a kind of freelance factor, buoying up the industry when it needs it and renewing faith that hentai can indeed be an art form to weird overanalysing bloggers such as myself.
Oh, and I really like those scoring systems. It’s always good to quantify, isn’t it? ^^;; Yay science.
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November 14th, 2008 @ 4:16 pm
I am always impressed by your ero-geniusness.
Out of 10 I would give:
Slut Harem 3-7
Fetish Rape 1-9
Nice 8-10
Aside from Sora no Iro and Hatsu Inu, do you know of any other recent “Nice” hentai? Enbo and Sexfriend seem to be bordering on nice though they are noticably old. Stringendo is pretty good too.
November 15th, 2008 @ 3:07 am
Yeah, it’s been a while since I’ve seen “Nice” hentai… Anyone got some recommendations?
And quantifying hentai is a stroke of genius, although personally I don’t like rape hentai at all. I guess the whole idea of rape is a kind of turn-off for me.
November 18th, 2008 @ 11:04 pm
I was wondering how would you rate diary of purimu 2 volume manga series?
March 6th, 2009 @ 7:49 pm
[...] also posted a while back if anyone remembers, on hentai in general, postulating that most, if not all of hentai can be classified into 3 broad categories – Slut (or [...]
March 28th, 2010 @ 1:48 am
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