What is hentai?

Cafe Society
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School of Bondage – On a college campus (note: Japanese higher ed schools are not exactly like ours, the uniforms worn by the women in the school indicate it’s probably a tech school equivalent, except their tech schools are not really equivalent to ours, so I just say “college” and to hell with it) women are being mysteriously kidnapped (well, it’s not so mysterious if you’ve seen a lot of hentai). Seems a bad guy has gotten ahold of some concoction that turns women into slavering loves slaves, so he’s kidnapping coeds, tying them up in an attic, giving them the concoction, and having his way with them.

The hero of the story figures out that the women are being kidnapped and heads out to find them, but is constantly being distracted by all the beautiful coeds who want to have sex with him. It’s just durned difficult to get anything done under such circumstances. The bulk of the hentai aternates between scenes of the bad guy molesting his kidnap victims and the good guy slowly working his way through all the coeds toward the bad guy’s attic. Plenty of consensual vanilla sex, plenty of nonconsensual bondage sex. It’s a fairly mediocre hentai, in short, whose major redeeming feature is its lightheartedness.

F-Force – From the cover copy, I was expecting a sort of Charlie’s Angels story here. Well, if Charlie’s Angels was set in medieval times, maybe so. In a remote mountain kingdom, demons are kidnapping all the kingdom’s beautiful daughters. In fact, they HAVE kidnapped ALL the kingdom’s beautiful daughters, except for the king’s daughter. So the call goes out for some monster killers, bringing a lone male monster slayer and a trio of beautiful female monster slayers.

The guy arrives just in time to save the king’s daughter from being kidnapped by a horde of demons who easily kill her retinue, but have more trouble with the monster slayer. He spirits the daughter away from them. At the village, he’s joined by F-Force, the trio of female monster hunters. Shortly thereafter, the demons mount an attack in force on the village, and the four monster hunters unite to fight them off. They wind up taking the battle to the leader of the demons, a powerful creature who, among other things, collects panties. So you know he’s bad.

Turns out the attacks are related to the re-appearance of “Four Pillars of Light” that were involved with the sinking of an entire continent in ancient times. There’s a fairly involved plot associated with this one and some lively characters, too. Explicit tentacle sex, vanilla sex, some explicit bondage sex. I haven’t seen the final ep of this so I don’t know how it comes out. Although I found the fundamental plot engaging, the characters didn’t interest me all that much, so I don’t know if I will bother.

Slave Doll – Deals with the exploits of a beautiful young android maid who serves her owners in every way imaginable, if you get my drift. Lots of vanilla sex, some bondage, but the character is such a sad little wimp of a female Pinocchio with lots of submissiveness thrown in that the cartoon was painful to watch. In the opening we see her explaining that her duty is to be a sex slave to her master, 24 hours a day, every day, while an android tear courses down her cheek in manufactured sorrow at her plight. The rest of the story consists of vignettes in which she serves as a sex slave to her master, 24/7. In short, there is no plot to speak of. Boooo-ring.

42

School of Bondage – On a college campus (note: Japanese higher ed schools are not exactly like ours, the uniforms worn by the women in the school indicate it’s probably a tech school equivalent, except their tech schools are not really equivalent to ours, so I just say “college” and to hell with it) women are being mysteriously kidnapped (well, it’s not so mysterious if you’ve seen a lot of hentai). Seems a bad guy has gotten ahold of some concoction that turns women into slavering loves slaves, so he’s kidnapping coeds, tying them up in an attic, giving them the concoction, and having his way with them.

The hero of the story figures out that the women are being kidnapped and heads out to find them, but is constantly being distracted by all the beautiful coeds who want to have sex with him. It’s just durned difficult to get anything done under such circumstances. The bulk of the hentai aternates between scenes of the bad guy molesting his kidnap victims and the good guy slowly working his way through all the coeds toward the bad guy’s attic. Plenty of consensual vanilla sex, plenty of nonconsensual bondage sex. It’s a fairly mediocre hentai, in short, whose major redeeming feature is its lightheartedness.

F-Force – From the cover copy, I was expecting a sort of Charlie’s Angels story here. Well, if Charlie’s Angels was set in medieval times, maybe so. In a remote mountain kingdom, demons are kidnapping all the kingdom’s beautiful daughters. In fact, they HAVE kidnapped ALL the kingdom’s beautiful daughters, except for the king’s daughter. So the call goes out for some monster killers, bringing a lone male monster slayer and a trio of beautiful female monster slayers.

The guy arrives just in time to save the king’s daughter from being kidnapped by a horde of demons who easily kill her retinue, but have more trouble with the monster slayer. He spirits the daughter away from them. At the village, he’s joined by F-Force, the trio of female monster hunters. Shortly thereafter, the demons mount an attack in force on the village, and the four monster hunters unite to fight them off. They wind up taking the battle to the leader of the demons, a powerful creature who, among other things, collects panties. So you know he’s bad.

Turns out the attacks are related to the re-appearance of “Four Pillars of Light” that were involved with the sinking of an entire continent in ancient times. There’s a fairly involved plot associated with this one and some lively characters, too. Explicit tentacle sex, vanilla sex, some explicit bondage sex. I haven’t seen the final ep of this so I don’t know how it comes out. Although I found the fundamental plot engaging, the characters didn’t interest me all that much, so I don’t know if I will bother.

Slave Doll – Deals with the exploits of a beautiful young android maid who serves her owners in every way imaginable, if you get my drift. Lots of vanilla sex, some bondage, but the character is such a sad little wimp of a female Pinocchio with lots of submissiveness thrown in that the cartoon was painful to watch. In the opening we see her explaining that her duty is to be a sex slave to her master, 24 hours a day, every day, while an android tear courses down her cheek in manufactured sorrow at her plight. The rest of the story consists of vignettes in which she serves as a sex slave to her master, 24/7. In short, there is no plot to speak of. Boooo-ring.

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Man that sounds like almost every episode of Superfriends with Aquaman being Pink. Oh no, off to save Aquaman again. The strongman is obviously Superman. And I guess that the witch could have been Jana (?) from the wondertwins.

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Just an FYI… only Americans refer to it as “hentai.” The Japanese say “h.” If you tell a Japanese fan that you like “hentai” they are going to think something far worse. :stuck_out_tongue:

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yet more hentai reviews …

Imma Youjo 2: Maya – In a futuristic city reminiscent of BladeRunner’s L.A., only the weather is a lot drier, a brilliant android maker has a gig manufacturing android love slaves for a bunch of gangsters that run a bordello for such androids.

The scientist’s current project is Maya, a SUPER android love doll. Her responses are much more human than that of a normal android love doll, so much so that she could easily pass as human. (Which begs the question, if being humanlike is such a great android trait, why not save yourself all the trouble and just date a nice girl from the neighborhood? I mean, isn’t the POINT of android love dolls their inhumanity, i.e., their programmability, if you get my drift?)

Relations between the scientist and the gangsters are strained, they being vicious thugs and he being a nice guy who just wants to be left alone to build robot sex slaves in peace. As soon as he has Maya complete, he and his trusty robot guard dog take a powder along with Maya. They go to a lakeside villa and have a wonderful idyllic interlude while they wait for the gangsters to find them. Love blossoms between Maa and her creator, who has neglected to tell Maya she’s a robot sex slave. Romantic love, which means they smile at each other a lot before they have the vanilla sex scene.

The gangsters find the villa of course, destroy the robot guard dog, tie up Maya and her creator, then by way of explaining her actual position in life, rape her while her creator watches helplessly. They leave the creator a broken man, and haul Maya off to their bordello where they have a great sex slave job for her, which she doesn’t even have to interview for.

Maya works out just fine as a bordello whore, in fact she’s soon their star “performer.” There’s more to the plot including a surprising final status for Maya, but why give it ALL away.

This is definitely one of the better hentai, and worth watching for the story alone. Has some vanilla sex, a couple of bondage scenes, and a lot of sex that’s just plain questionable. I mean, does consensuality mean anything when you’re talking about an android love doll? Sure, the Maya doll doesn’t seem real happy to be doing anyone that comes into the bordello’s doors at first, and given the Pinocchio syndrome that’s commonplace among Japanese anime/hentai that deals with robots, it’s probably reasonable to treat them with human standards. Still, I would tend to think Maya’s sadness is as programmed as the rest of her responses, hence that it’s meaningless.

My My Mai – This is a fun little hentai about a fun little prostitute called Mai. Mai is fun because she likes her job. She likes having sex with all the middle-aged men who visit her brothel, and they like having sex with her. There wouldn’t SEEM to be much of a potential for a plot here, but the writers handle that problem easily.

My My Mai is a series of vignettes about Mai’s adventures. There’s the guy who’s convinced thqat a pleasant, outgoing gal like Mai must have been forced into prostition and so he keeps trying to rescue her, much against her will. There’s the gal who’s basically using a young guy, promising him her affection in return for transportation and other useful services, but never “paying off.” When she finds out that her tool has been going to Mai for sexual relief, she becomes jealous and challenges Mai to a sex contest. And there’s the story of Mai becoming just too popular one day and having too much sex even by her generous standards.

I highly recommend this hentai to those who don’t like rape/forced/bondage scenes. All the sex is consensual, even though money is the rationale for it. Mai is portrayed as a pleasant, cheerful gal who like sex a lot, her clients as guys who realize what a great gal she is and are happy for the chance to avail themselves of her services. To Western eyes it’s an unrealistic portrayal of prostitution, but its cheerfulness and warmth makes up for a lot.

G-Taste – This is a hentai that is not to be confused with the anime G-Force, much like the hentai F-Force (already reviewed).

G-Taste is a series of short which have a fetish theme.

The first involves a woman who enjoys wearing pantyhose and rubbing them on things? What things? Oh, just 'bout everything. That’s it, that’s the whole of the story, the young woman who wears out the crotch panel of her pantyhose on everything she can.

In the most well-developed vignette, a young woman goes to work as one of the maids at a mysterious mansion. Its owner wears a mask and is almost never seen by the maids, but is instead seen by his female chief of staff who oversees the maids and also has sex with the owner, who wears the mask during sex and like to have his factotum sit on the mask as he wears it.

The maids’ main job is keeping the grounds tidy and serving guests, and the new maids are told that whenever a room has a mask on the door, they are not to open the door, enter the room, or even think about what might be going on behind that door.

Of course, in no time flat the new maid opens the door and discovers one of the maids kneeling with her face on the floor and her hands tied behind her back, while the chief of staff rubs her foot into the maid’s panties from behind.

Well, the maid is being “punished” for losing track of the maid who has just entered the room, and who has also to be punished for entering a room she shouldn’t enter. But it turns out the maid who’s being “punished” actually has a fetish for shoes and is enjoying the hell out of her punishment. The new maid is enlisted to aid in the punishment, and in the way of hentai pretty soon they’re whipping out the ballgags and the strap-on dildos and whatnot. It all leads to a big party where drooling is used as a torment (don’t ask) and the mansion burns down. (Mansions burn down a lot in hentai – offhand, I can recall it happening in an ep of Cool Devices, in Mysteries of the Necronomicon, and a few others. It does sometimes add a sense of finality when your plot has gone nowhere, I suppose.)

I found this watchable in the sense that it wasn’t all that mean-spirited, but the plot went nowhere. There was a little character development, but not much. The animation was nice in the sense that it was a little more Western than most … the women didn’t ALL look like bobble-heads of Keene dolls mounted on pornstar bodies.

In short, this is a mediocre hentai, of greatest interest to fetishists, though it does have some nice imagery.

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Maya: Imma Youjo V – The fifth entry in the Imma Youjo series is a pretty good watch, although it seems to have every hentai cliché in the book going for it, starting with the lead female’s name, Maya. (Cliché #1: many hentai heroines are named Maya or some variation of that, such as Mai or Mia). Maya is a young woman who’s starting a new job as a maid (Cliché #2: maids are so commonly objects of lust that the Japanese term for “maid” is prolly something along the lines of “Bend Over Girl”).

Her new boss resides in an isolated mansion (Cliché #3: really, I don’t know how you can dominate anyone unless you live in a mansion) and is of course very wealthy (Cliché #4: goes with the mansion, I guess). There’s already a maid working at the mansion (Tomoka) who shows Maya the ropes (no, not THOSE ropes) and gives her a drugged drink every night so she won’t notice all the sexual bondage acitivity she engages in with the mansion’s owner and his sunglasses-wearing henchman (Cliché #5: to be sure, this is a general sort of cliché and not hentai specific).

Tomoka’s master is training her to participate in a sex contest on his behalf. It seems that businessmen in master’s circles cement deal with sexual surrogates. Each presents his surrogate (or “collection”) onstage at a party and they have sex with one another. First surrogate to come loses, not just on her own behalf, but on her master’s behalf as well in some real-world business deal of considerable import. (Hmm, d’ ya suppose Enron … and Worldcom … and Adlephia … bad surrogates? … naaaaah!).

Well, Tomoka blows it on her debut, leaving her master considerably less wealthy, but master has another card up his sleeve … Maya! So he’s ready to start training Maya via BDSM sex. But the Master’s mentally dirsturbed son has feelings for Maya, and so Oedipal conflict ensues. How does it all end? Well, let’s just say the mansion burns down (Cliché #6 – see the review of G-Taste for the particulars on this one.)

Depsite all the cliches, Imma Youjo V rolls right along and is a good watch. Its predictable plot and threadbare characterization mean it isn’t gonna show anything new, but at least it has a story to tell.

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Much as I hate to rouse this thread from its two-month slumber, I would like to announce that I have finally gotten the hentai review site that I threatened up and running. “Happy Hentai Land” is now extant on the web, and contains reviews and essays about hentai. It’s illustrated, of course. The link that follows is work safe, as it’s a warning that the site you’ll be visiting has adult content The site itself is NOT work safe. Repeat, NOT work safe. Don’t go getting yourselves in trouble, folks.

http://www.jollyroper.com/hentai/index.html

Enjoy! Feel free to post comments about the site or any of my reviews here, if you want to take issue or just agree wholeheartedly.

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Needs more reviews and a better design. But overall, the reviews are intelligent and worth the read

I can help you with both if you want

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I remember that one. Too bad my agent couldn’t work out a deal. :smiley: