As we all know, it’s fairly commonplace in Japan for anime makers to sell latex replicas of popular characters like Sailor Moon and Dragon Ball Z and what have you.
And in the case of female characters, they often dress in skimpy costumes and pose in ways that cry out “fan service!”
But I’ve noticed that there’s a set of figurines for an adult anime series called “G-Taste” that’s selling in places like “previews” and the J-List along with the “Oh My Goddess” and “Chobits.” Their costumes are a little skimpy but no skimpier than the “fan service” outfits worn by mainstream figurines.
So what’s going on here? It’s like coming across a set of Jenna Jameson and Nikki Dial dolls along with Charmed and Buffy the Vampire Slayer dolls.
I’ve not noticed this with any other adult anime figures, so I gotta wonder: what’s going on here?
J-List is no different than any other store with a geek-niche costomer base in carrying both adult and non-adult (including children’s) content. J-List carries everything from Porno to Pocky to Pokemon - just like the comic shop I go to. They didn’t have the porn stars collectors figures, but two blocks away, and you get them, Buffy, Final Fantasy and Thunderbirds all hanging around.
You have a point here – the base to which the “adult” dolls appeal has a wide range of interests from Porno to Pokemon. The thing about the G-Taste dolls is that, unlike the Jenna Jameson doll cited above, you’d never know from the dolls themselves that they’re based on hentai characters … they look about like fanservice- style dolls for any mainstream anime.
Let me fill out my previous post. I was thinking G-Taste might be a kind of ‘stealth’ thingie, the way John Norman’s Gor novels were initially marketed as straight-up mainstream fantasy novels before the kinky bondage became prevalent in them … and thus they continued to be marketed as such.
Actually, Jenna is part of a whole line of “Adult Superstars” action figures from a company called Plastic Fantasy. Their website is obvious enough, their name plus “.com”, but it obviously isn’t work-safe.
The facial sculpts aren’t very good on any of the figures, making for poor likenesses, and their bodies are pre-posed little statues. As an action figure collector, I would’ve expected super-poseable, highly articulated body types, just due to the nature of these figures! Of course their clothing (molded plastic, not cloth costumes) is removable, and they are anatomically correct underneath. As you would expect, they mainly make the women of porn, but they did sneak a Ron Jeremy figure into the rotation since everyone likes him.
Well, G-taste is pretty obviously adult material. But I’d say it’s more of a marketing strategy – they figure that the same fanboy who wants figurines of a tarted-up version of Rei Ayanami (and you know, Gainax authorizes VERY eroticized renditions of this gal!) on the curio cabinet will be very amenable to getting one from G-taste, if presented in the same style.
I think you’re probably on to something, with that “if presented in the same style” being key. I’m surprised other adult anime makers haven’t tried this. Frex, the “Fallen Angel Rina” character from Cool Devices Op 11 wears a sling thong during the op that would work very nicely along these lines.
I’m not surprised at any of this … any culture where a corporation would be cool with authorizing a “Hello Kitty” vibrator is not gonna cavil at a few sexy latex figurines.
Sanrio was very much not cool with the idea of a “Hello Kitty vibrator”, and no such product was ever authorized. What was approved was a perfectly innocent shoulder massager (given the amount of time students and office workers spend hunched over desks, there’s a big market for them), which was only later marketed as a sex toy. This was against Sanrio’s wishes, and the company took drastic steps to put an end to it.
According to thisSalon.com review, the Kitty-chan massager doesn’t even make a particularly good sex toy. See also here for photos of the product in question and more detailed information about its history.
A comparable American product might be the infamous Harry Potter Nimbus 2000 Broom, a toy broom that made “flying noises” and vibrated. Right after it hit the market a bunch of Internet jokesters started posting reviews on varius online toystores about how much their kids (especially teenaged girls!) enjoyed playing with them…alone…in their rooms. I don’t know if the controversy was sufficient enough for Mattel to pull the toy, though.
As for G-taste, it is an adult anime and comic, On Google one can enter: “G-taste review”, and the first link will explain a little bit more and show a line of products, not safe for work if they disapprove of cartoon boobies.
It looks like it is mostly an S&M and lesbian title.
On the shoujo (girl’s) side, “fan service” usually mean the inclusion of cute boys and sometimes the implication of a “slash” relationship, such as Qatre and Trowa from Gundam Wing.
I dunno, Lamia, sounds like a CYA thing by an exec who’s screwed up. “It’s a perfectly innocent SHOULDER massager, see? See how good it feels on your shoulder, oh, yeah, that feels great! It’s not made for Those Other Purposes women put massagers to, no sirree bob!”
Exclusively? Here, in the seventies, I only saw Hello Kitty products in the hands of juvenile asian girls. (Of course I was more likely to meet them than any hypothetical adult fans.) Now I think more adult women have Hello Kitty stuff than the kids do – the clientelle at the insanely pricey Sanrio storefronts seem to be in their 20s and 30s, mostly. I don’t believe I’ve ever seen a gaggle of little girls in there, like you’d expect to see in the Barbie Pink aisle at Toys R Us.
Heh-- my best friend laments that, since the arrival of her daughter, (now nearly four) she can’t feed her Hello Kitty jones. Any HK stuff that comes into the house is claimed by the wee one, who can’t be persuaded that it belongs to Mommy. Of course, all her old gear is forfeit, too. The scissors had to be hidden.
And don’t get me started on the girl I worked with a couple of years ago who wore a pair of tight-fitting Taiwanese Oshkosh-style Hello Kitty bootlegged jeans, where the word “KITTY” was innocently substituted with “PUSSY.” On the ass. She had no idea. (I giggled at her “Winnie the Poo” sweater, too-- but at least that didn’t inspire wicked and distracting thoughts.)
Even if that were true, it’s a far cry from “a corporation being cool with authorizing a Hello Kitty vibrator”. Do you also believe the Harry Potter toy broom was genuinely designed as a sex toy by Mattel? Sanrio approved a shoulder massager, a common product that there’s a large market for, and it was only much later that third-party vendors began to promote it as an “adult” toy. Larry Mudd is correct that Kitty-chan has many fans among grown women, so I’m not surprised some would think it amusing to have their favorite character on a vibrator.
One could speculate that someone at Sanrio must have foreseen that some consumers might use the massager in “intimate” ways, but at the very least they clearly didn’t want this possibility to be actively promoted. Did you read the article I linked to? It comes from a site that mostly reviews Japanese porn, so I doubt they’d twist the facts to make the story seem less sexy than it really was.
I wasn’t trying to make that assertion. I’m cool with the fact that all of the execs at Sanrio didn’t knowingly authorize the Hello Kitty vibrator as a personal massager.
That said, you must know that for decades vibrators were marketed in America as general muscle relaxants, with no mention made of their more personal uses, despite the fact that they were invented in Victorian times specifically to speed up the process of giving relief to sexually “hysterical” women by giving them orgasms.
I cannot imagine any American executive failing to understand that any product which is described as a _______ massager has potential to be a genital massager and is probably being stealth marketed for that purpose as well as relieving ________ pain.
I did read your article, and I think the guys at Genyo, rather than Sanrio, might have had some idea that the massager might catch on as a novelty sex toy.
To put it in perspective, can you see the folks at Mattel giving anyone license to put out a Barbie shoulder massager of similar design? Not in a million years.
I wouldn’t have predicted that Mattel would ever design a “magical” vibrating toy designed to be held between the legs and against the crotch, but they did. I think sometimes companies focus so narrowly on their intended audience that they genuinely miss seeing alternative possibilities that would be obvious to those outside the target demographic.
