Wednesday, March 11, 2009

Psycho-Babble: Understanding Hentai

Relationships, love, hate, whatever it is, can all be explained by hentai.

Amidst the swirls of blue and green hair and the ferocity of tentacle rape, is a succint demonstration of human nature.

Hentai is the Japanese animation sub-genre dealing with the erotic and downright hardcore pornographic. Basically, it's cartoon porn. From Japan.

It is part of a multi-billion dollar global animation industry. Estimates in 2003 puts Japanese animation and comics alone at USD3 billion per annum. The industry has grown since then, moving from the pages of weekly comics to TV and movie screens as well as in games and the Internet.

If you want a recap of animation as a business and trends in the industry, go fuck yourself somewhere else.

This is about hentai.

The first pure hentai stuff to reach our shores was Twin Dolls. Twin Dolls was to hentai what Akira was to anime. It announced the presence of such stuff, available on CDs, to the public.

Ninja Scroll had one or two fan service moments. And then, there was no turning back.

The envelope was pushed from tentacle rape and monsters with monstrous dicks to human -human rape fantasies, crazy, absurdist humour stuff like Ogenki Clinic (which has, amusingly, dicks wearing glasses and having personalities), sword-and-sorcery, 'furry' genre Words' Worth, the standard bondage, discipline, sado-masochism combo and even multiple perversions in COol Devices (including incest), ending with preteen rape fantasies in Kite.

A lot of people asked me, "Why do you watch hentai, when you have access to normal, human porn?"

The answer, my friends, is that hentai, as with all comics and animation, is the ideal everyone looks for. Not that everyone wants to have rape a blue-haired Ninja-Sex half-demon with multiple dicks, but the very fact that these characters exist as ideas of what you want.

When you like a woman or a man, you do not actually like him or her. You like the idea of that person. The person you like is not in the real world. It is merely in your heads, giving you head.

That's why, people constantly disappoint us.

"I thought you'd be taller/wiser/older."

"I didn't think you would do this to me. Boo fucking hoo!"

"How DARE you do this to me. Nyeee!"

Our expectations of others are based on the idea of them.

Anwar is a God. Anwar is a queen. Anwar is a lying, self-centered bitch queer assfuck twins.

Which one is your idea of him? Take a pick. Or you might have your own.

Anwar < --- This is not Anwar. This is an alphabetical representation of him.

As much as 'This is not a pipe'.

And so, hentai, unlike porn and unlike reality and real people, is almost pure ideas. Just lines, colour, shading and voices. Between the lines, we add our own idea of what Miko Mido is like, or how does it feel to have multiple dicks inside women.

It's a fill-in-the-blanks kinda thing, and we are more than willing to do that with our ideas and our ideals. It would be the closest thing to perfection as we can get.

Because people, being people, are untrustworthy and unreliable. Especially when it comes to sex. Hentai gives an opportunity for complete control, complete creation within our minds.

And so, go forth, wankers! Go forth and spread hentai and spread your legs, for a better tomorrow.