At New York Comic Con, there are a number of booths on the showroom floor selling anime, manga, and hentai. For those of you who aren't familiar, hentai is like anime and manga, only deeply pornographic. It's apparently pretty popular.
If you're ready to dabble in the world of hentai, but you're not quite sure what exactly you're into, the anime and manga booths at NYCC have made it easy by bundling a random selection of items together in a brown paper bag. I've always been curious about what could possibly be inside the nondescript bags. Not being totally up-to-speed with either the anime or hentai worlds, I had no idea what to expect when I bought my very own bag of smut.
I chose my bag carefully. There were more expensive bags, but I wasn't totally sure that I could justify writing this off as a work expense, and I didn't want to drop $60 on cartoon porn if I was going to end up eating the cost. Feeling embarrassed, I buzzed by the booth several times and slyly peeked at the grab bags out of the corner of my eye.
Eventually I built up the nerve, selected the $30 bag marked "ADULT ONLY" and brought it to the cashier. I smiled broadly, and spoke very politely in an attempt to convey that I was a normal person who was buying pornography for reasons other than masturbation. I think it probably just made me look more like a creep who was a little too comfortable buying unmarked bags of hentai. I quickly stuffed the parcel into my backpack and headed home.
When I got home and opened up the bag, I was surprised to see that it contained a hentai magazine called "Ag Super Erotic Manga Anthology" from 2008, and three DVDs. The magazine featured a topless character on the cover, and I suddenly felt relieved that I didn't open the bag on the subway ride home.
I'm not sure what else I was expecting. Maybe a figurine? There were plenty on display at the booth. Anime characters with little or no clothing on, bending over in suggestive, impossible poses. Or maybe a love pillow case featuring a popular character that could be slipped on to a large pillow to simulate the experience of snuggling up with Goku or Sailor Moon. No such luck though.
The magazine was very pornographic, and featured five short stories, each one raunchier and more upsetting than the last. It wasn't just vanilla, run-of-the-mill porn either. One of the comics was about an incestuous family, another was about a submissive woman who is used as a sex slave, and yet another was about a couple of BDSM enthusiasts engaging in intercourse in a public restroom. The stories were all translated into English, for anyone who actually wants to follow along with the paper-thin plots.
The bag also came with three DVDs. There was a six-episode season of a show called Countdown Akira, a fantasy-inspired, tentacle-themed hentai called La Girl Blue, and then just a standard live-action porn called Stripped 2.
The latter actually made me feel a little ripped off. From all appearances, this is just boring old pornography that anybody could find on the Internet. I fired up my DVD player and settled in the for evening.
The first DVD I watched was Countdown Akira. The format wasn't really familiar to me, but it felt equivalent to a three-episode season of television, each episode with two parts. I skimmed through the first episode and tried to pick up the plot.
The series follows a ponytailed young man named Akira as he tries to find the love of his life by having sex with anything that moves. I skipped to the last episode to see if Akira's story had a happy ending. He ends up falling in love with (then having loads of intercourse) with his own sister, so I guess we'll say it did.
The animation itself was actually pretty interesting. All the genitals in the program were obscured during the sex scenes, and they interposed these abstract, colorful vignettes to give you a sense of what's happening. They were pretty much the only interesting thing about Countdown Akira.
The next DVD was a feature length hentai called La Blue Girl, which takes place in a universe in which an all-female clan of warriors battle evil demons using something called "sexcraft," which looked an awful lot like sex. Also they need to have sex with the demons in order to travel to the demons' world? Also they have a lot of sex with tentacles. Like a lot of tentacle sex.
I couldn't watch the whole thing. It was pretty grotesque, and I'm not sure I totally understand the appeal of monster/tentacle sex. I had heard that tentacle hentai was popular because decency laws made it impossible to show male genitals in hentai and tentacles were a convenient work-around, but there were plenty of male genitals in La Blue Girl, so I guess that theory is shot.
Again, I fast-forwarded to the end to see how things work out. The main protagonist ends up taking on (in multiple senses of the word) the leader of the demons, who is also her father. I'm starting to sense a theme.
The last DVD was a standard American porn movie. Even though I don't have any attachment to hentai, I still felt a little ripped off. There were five scenes – four everyday p-in-v scenes, and one lesbian scene just to break up the pacing a little, I guess.
I would go back to the booth to complain, but I'm not sure I need any more hentai in my life right now. Maybe next year.
