Not much to say really, except:
I think its something to do with Japanese porn in games/movies or something, isn’t it? What is Hentai?
(I did do some googling, but all the links looked too scary to open at work!)
Not sure exactly what it means in Japanese.
In English, it means “Pornographic Japanese or Japanese-style Anime, ranging in severity from what an American would call PG-13 to X to… beyond. Especially in the popular Japanese “tentacle rape” genre.”
Go to Something Awful.com. They have Hentai reviews. Very amusing.
Hentai is a Japanese word for ‘pervert’/‘perversion’. It’s commonly used to refer to drawn (sometimes animated) porn. Games, comics, and animated movies all fall under the banner.
Hentai stuff ranges from fairly vanilla (save for the fact that one or more of the participants is often a catgirl, alien, demon, angel, robot…), to hard bondage, to out and out rape scenarios.
Thanks. So whats with all the rape / tentacles? I’m sure I’ve heard about that more than once. Why would people want to watch that stuff? We’re not talking about a small fetish thing, hentai seems to be huge.
Maybe the tentacles are related to the fact the Japanese eat a lot of seafood…
Not sure.
Over there, “tentacle porn” is fairly mainstream, no harder to get than foot fetishist videos.
I have NO idea what the appeal is. Then again, I don’t get foot fetishism, either…
Tentacle porn was an attempt to do an end-run around censorship laws. It was (is?) illegal to show a penis penetrating a vagina (or to show pubic hair, thus even hardcore stuff will be censored in that area). But, by using something that is like a penis, but is not, in fact, a penis, you can show it.
Add in a market that will accept fantasy and sci-fi in porn, a folklore rich in demonology, and (apparently) a larger market willing to accept rape, and tentacle porn is born.
Thanks you, Menocchio and others - I am enlightened.
So, its illegal to show a penis entering a vagina, but its OK to show bizarre beastiality? Its enough to boggle the mind…
I missed Modern Japan the day my professor showed a slide of an old woodcut or something called “The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife”, but if the description of my friends can be trusted then this whole tentacle porn thing goes back more than a century.
It is true, I was just having this conversation with an art history student friend. Some ancient Japanese art and folk tales have depicted women having sex with (or being violated by) tentacles, from either sea monsters or demons. The hentai stuff isn’t necessarily new.
I’m a fan of hentai – as has been pointed out, it’s not all tentacle rape, as in “La Blue Girl” (which has some pretty good character design, plotting and animation) but there are also some that are basically adventure stories with some sex thrown in (as in Fencer of Minerva or the “Maya” episode of Cool Devices.
Some of the tentacle stuff can be kind of sexy, with all these slithery cocks invading the gals’ every orifice simultaneously, while she writhes helpless/ecstatically/both. Some pretty intense imagery.
Other weird qualities of hentai: why is that a bad guy – or sometimes a good guy – can sneak into a woman’s room, secretly videotape her masturbating in the privacy of her bedroom, then use that videotape to blackmail her into all sorts of stuff? I mean, why would a woman publicly do gangbangs and lesbian stuff with toys and bondage just to hide the fact that she masturbates in private? Kinda weird.
Also, some of the scenes feature chicks with dicks. Except we’re not talking trannies here, we’re talking scenes where for various reasons the women have sprouted dicks just above their vaginas. What’s that all about?
That said, Japanese hentai are several orders of magnitude more imaginative than U.S. porn as a general rule.
LOL, Evil Captor; if you think the situations in the movies are ridiculous, try playing the video games!!
Example: in one, for no reason at all the main character (you) gets pissed off at a girl he’s talking to (who happens to be a virgin) and rapes her. Immediately following this he bursts in on her in the shower and “makes love to her” as an apology!
And I just love how sex is often made a tool to “straighten a girl out,” in any type of hentai. It’s like, oh, hey, I was making bad grades/being a bitch/super-unconfident/a lesbian, but with one touch of your magical dick, I’m cured! :rolleyes:
…yeah, hentai logic often ain’t so logical. But it’s always good for a laugh, eh?
There was also a discussion of this a few months back which may be of interest.
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=165065&highlight=hentai
You may also want to check out (when you’re safely away from work) the website Hentai Jump!, which gives halfway-serious reviews of anime hentai.
IIRC, it was one of the requirements imposed by the Americans on Japan after WWII. Probably something about “decency”.
ONe thing I noticed about Hentai Jump was that the guy who writes the reviews does not care at all for bondage and domination or rape themes in his stories. This will SERIOUSLY limit your appreciation of hentai, as almost all of it contains bondage imagery at the very least, and the bondage generally starts out consensual. I think this flaws his ability to judge them as stories as a result – he gives high marks to hentai simply becaus they don’t contain any bondage imagery. Since the vast majority of hentai contain bondage imagery, it produces skewed results. That said, Tales of Titillation is pretty durned good.
As for hentai, whatever it means in Japan, and whatever ecchi means in Japan, “hentai’s” usage in America has come to mean any anime that have adult content, period, and “ecchi” is rarely used.
I’m gonna do a quick list of hentai I’ve seen and liked: full disclosure, my homepage site, found in my user profile, is a bondage humor site which features lots of movie reviews. Bondage imagery doesn’t bother me, as I see it as a power/sex fantasy and not as an earnest desire to commit rape. If bondage imagery bothers you, your mileage probably will vary. I also look for strong storylines in hentai, as I think porn without a story is just boring.
I’m working on an essay which explains my thoughts about hentai so others will understand the context of my reviews a little better, I’ll post it when I finish it next week.
In no particular order:
Cool Devices – The class of the hentai category, IMHO. A series of vignettes described as Operations (there are 11 of them. Quality varies from great to mediocre). All have jazzy scores and tightly written stories. Bondage imagery predominates, but there’s also some stories dealing with themes of incest, pissing, etc., but all done with an intelligent and, well, cool approach to the subject matter.
Bizarre Cage Series – Workers at what looks a lot like Disney World (but is never called such) discover that someone has sabotaged the computer control program and the rides are going berserk. They work frantically to restore order to the part, meanwhile someone evil is kidnapping beautiful young park workers. Bondage and vanilla sex imagery, quite explicit. Nothing remarkable but I give it high marks for a strong plotline.
Living Sex Toy Delivery Service – A group of women hold a party, and the sole male guest at the party is drugged, rendering him paralyzed with his cock at full attention, unable to “relax” again. They have sex with him repeatedly, “milking” him of his sperm, which they collect. Then they leave him, still paralyzed in a cardboard box, which they place on the railroad tracks. But he manages to regain control of his muscles just before an oncoming train crushes him. That’s the opener. The rest of the story deals with him kidnapping guests at the party to get revenge on them, disguised as a deliveryman. The revenge always involves explicit sexual bondage and rape. It’s unusual for hentai in that the victims are actually guilty of something in this instance (most of the time, the females who get assaulted by bad guys and (sometimes) good guys in hentai are totally innocent). Also makes extensive use of the Japanese blackmail cliche, wherein women are photographed masturbating in private, then those photos are used to get the women to allow themselves to be kidnapped. It’s a very intricate overall plot structure, but each episode is a lot like the previous one, so I don’t rate it that highly. Also, not much character development.
Dragon Pink – A parody of RPGs in which a group of the usual adventurers – a warrior, a strongman, a witch and a cat slave – travels about slaying monsters and looking for treasure. Pink, the cat slave, is constantly being captured, tied up and tortured/molested by bad guy and gals, necessitating her rescue. She’s in love with her master Santa, who is easily swayed by the charms of others. I found the series to be great fun as it has a pleasant, lighthearted spirit, unlike a lot of hentai.
I’ll post some more reviews as I have time, if folks are interested.
This is almost correct. Actually, you’re not really allowed to show anything entering a vagina, not even more normal things like fingers and bolognas. But there is usually a sort of “whited out” area around the penetration taking place, and I think that with tentacle porn (at least in mainstream tentacle porn) that whited out area can be a bit smaller.
Of course, in many of the more “underground” porn comics, the white out is reduced to a mere swipe about a cm thick, just for the sake of formality. It’s practically blatant penetration.
Also (happily), it has been okay to show pubes in Japanese porn for quite some time now. It is called “hair nude,” in order to differentiate it from the more old-fashioned stuff that couldn’t show pubic hair.
Another funny thing; there are guys whose job it is to go through imported playboy and penthouse magazines and use a razor blade to scratch out all the naughty bits. If I were one of those guys, I would occasionally oops! leave one of them unscratched, kind of like a lottery for the salarymen.
Last thing: I must confess I particularly like the ones where the schoolgirl wakes up one day with a massive cock between her legs. She goes to school and happens to catch her two best (and biggest breasted) friends performing oral sex on eachother and drinking eachother’s pee. Her new penis becomes so excited that she has to rush to the bathroom and jerk it off. Whereupon her friends of course find her and all sorts of hilarity and hijinks ensue.
The only thing more fun than making fun of hentai comics is enjoying them in the privacy of your own home.
G I just had this vision, Jerry Seinfeld at the Anime Con 
And yes, there is a tradition in Japanese erotica of highly stylized/exaggerated representations that predates the postwar censorship. But that was not always mass-consumption art. There seems to be a synergy at work there.
Kyo’s right, the pubic-hair ban AFAIK is no longer law, per se, but remains an “industry standard” among some publishers/producers. Direct portrayal of penetration is still off-limits, but more and more, in recent times you find material where the “censorship” is a joke – like a two-pixel-wide “blur” exactly at the point o’ pucker, or something like that. And in doujinshi it’s not impossible to find it simply uncensored.
One of the things, though, that does bear repeating is of course the logic is twisted and the plot predictable (OK, so maybe Kyo’s example is not predictable to the average non-otaku, but it’s quite common!). It’s mass-market porno, the least it can be connected to everyday reality, the better 