This Week in Anime

Chris

Alright, work email, let’s see what the boss has on the TWIA docket for tonight. Hm, OceanVeil? A hentai streaming service? Fair enough, I’ve looked at plenty of smut for the Manga Guide, but how could I handle this? Coop’s taking the week off, and I’m pretty sure Steve is still questioning me after the incest column. He and Lucas just rounded up both this season’s isekai and rom-coms. I can’t imagine how a guy settling in to look at this sort of stuff solo would come across to the readership…Wait, what’s this?

“PS: I’m sending in someone with a specific set of skills to help you with this assignment.” Huh, I wonder who that could be.

Jean-Karlo

—this goes here… and that…
… Aha! It worked! Chris! I came from This Week in Games to tell you, there’s something we must do!

Oh wow, you finally beat Xenoblade 3? End of a story arc there. Hold on, that can wait, because you’re right —we have an assignment. You must be the ringer the email mentioned, who’s supposed to help me uncover the secrets of this OceanVeil thing.

A mystery, to be sure, but something tells me it’s not one of the impenetrable variety.

How bad could this—Hold the phone, when the hell did Energy Kyouka get licensed?!
There’s a legal hentai streaming site now?!

I had a similar thought when I saw a listing for Lilitales. But it’s a bold new world, it seems, with this venture from the WWWave Corporation, purveyors of material from ComicFesta, AnimeFesta, and other institutions with unassuming names that are nevertheless “If you know, you know” material.

It’s easy (and fun) to make jokes, but this represents a significant step, given the uneven history of hentai up to this point, especially when released in the West! Worth covering from a purely academic standpoint, of course.

(Not gonna bring it up, not gonna bring it up…) So I’ve made no small bones that I’ve got more than a few Fakku Books on my shelves, plus This Week in Games has dabbled in covering some adult game releases in the U.S. like Kara no Shōjo or the Taimanin games. While ANN doesn’t normally cover hentai (it’s hard to go in-depth critiquing content that is, nevertheless, designed almost entirely around titillation), I still think there’s a lot of genuine validity in bringing it up as a discussion piece.

There’s a lot of history to ero-anime and ero-manga, and many big artists in the anime industry’s history have dabbled in it. Masami Ōbari, who recently helmed the amazing Brave Bang Bravern! series, also directed a few ero-OVAs, including Viper GTS and Marine a Go Go. Satoshi Urushihara, who’s been in all kinds of productions over the years (he even did some animation for the 1980s Transformers movie!) not only headlined the famous (and luxuriously-animated) Another Lady Innocent, but also does pin-ups for ero-manga magazines to this day. More than a few mangaka for mainstream stuff like Food Wars! or the Spice and Wolf manga have works of erotica to their names—and some don’t even hide it behind a pseudonym.
I won’t say Xenoblade Chronicles character designer Masatsugu Saitō is the same artist as Wanna Do It? artist saitom, I’m just saying I’ve never seen them in the same room together because one might accuse the other of copying their style.

No shame here. We’re already this deep in, and your review of Fakku‘s release of Nana & Kaoru is what got me to pick up those volumes in the first place.

Talking about Spice and Wolf in this context, people are wondering what else the studio behind the 2008 anime has been up to and continues to do. Art styles are recognizable.

I’ll do a Google search real quick…

(Not gonna say it, not gonna say it…) Ahem. So, anyway, as you said, the ero-anime/manga industry is… not doing so hot in the U.S.? And we can’t even blame it on the tariffs, the industry itself is hanging by a thread. God bless the folks at Fakku, J18, and irodori, because they’re putting in a great deal of effort to license and release ero-manga— and they go through a ton of hoops to get those physical copies printed! But ero-anime? Oof. That’s in a rougher space. About the only major studio that still handles the stuff is Media Blasters—and Yara Naika, bless their heart, can only do so much.

At least we can count on Discotek for a prestige release of Urotsukidoji. I’m sure they’ll be up to putting out Variable Geo any day now.

This leads into the broader subject of the current state of hentai anime overall, which, as you alluded to, is spotty. Production simply isn’t happening for lavishly animated multi-volume OVAs like the aforementioned Bible Black. You still sometimes see something like a new adaptation of genre icon Rance, but for the most part, glancing at the Japanese pre-order side, the releases are shorter, simpler affairs from a core few studios.

This isn’t to say that horny anime has dissipated completely. Instead, much of it has strategically evolved. So you’ll get full-length anime series like Redo of Healer, Interspecies Reviewers, and Immoral Guild that will air “covered up” versions of what’s barely not full-blown porn, then release the unedited versions on disc and premium cable channels.

A compromise, something of a necessary one, and even some capital-H Hentai have taken to utilizing!

This has been the way titles are handled through AnimeFesta and similar ilk for a while: Air the shorter, unsauced version effectively as an ad to get people to order the fully-loaded nachos. OceanVeil is just them working to finally bring the model of that material to English speakers, letting us unlock these secrets for the low, low price of nearly $13 a month.

If these episodes are as short as you say, there better at least be a lot of them.

I also need to bring up that the experience of actually diving into these secrets leaves a lot to be desired. OceanVeil‘s user interface is basic in terms of navigation. There isn’t even a search function if you’re trying to pull up a specific title! Browsing through the few categories they sort things into entails scrolling down to specific rows and clicking “See more” to view them.

If I were a cynic, I’d say they’re trying to obscure the fairly limited selection they’re giving you for that thirteen beans a month. But hey, they’ve got simulcasts! I wonder if Lynzee would accept any last-minute uncouth additions to the Preview Guide…

I didn’t want to dwell on the site’s shortcomings, but the lack of a search function is pretty dire. Also, not great—you can’t open videos in new tabs! Normally, you’d right-click on a link to open it in a new tab (or simply middle-click it with your mouse wheel). That doesn’t work here! The video player isn’t the best, either: it lacks resolution and subtitle options. Additionally, if you’re watching a dubbed version of an episode (hosted as a separate video, not even as an alternate audio track), the video won’t have any subtitles. I don’t want “perfect” to be the enemy of “good,” but those are a lot of features that are practically standard for a streaming site!

I get we’re starting from the basic beginning here for this team, but when the alternative you’re fighting against is material that’s pirated even more excessively than “normal” anime, you gotta bring your A-game. Good faith suggests that they might address these issues as they expand, as long as they don’t end up going the way of an X-rated Anime Strike.

Even Ascendent Animation at least did the service of putting out regular press releases about the series they licensed and dubbed, including Fire in his Fingertips, The Titan’s Bride, and Unexpectedly Naughty Fukami…many of which have netted streaming releases on OceanVeil here!

…which is to say that’s probably enough foreplay and it’s finally time to actually dive into why people are really here and talk about a few of these series. Look, we said they were short, we had to buffer things out somehow.

Speaking of “yaranaika”…!

A good bit of fandom insight from OceanVeil is that they had the infamous OVA adaptation of Kuso Miso Technique (the faces from which you’ve likely seen on memes from all over the Internet for decades by now). It’s like Fakku having gone out of their way to get Tiny Boobs, Giant Tits History (a.k.a., “the one with the “MEGA MILK” shirt”). You have to speak your audience’s language!

It’s the title most likely to be recognized even by non-aficionados of this kind of material, thanks to that aforementioned meme value.

It’s also one of the many short entries that make up this selection, meaning it’s not too hard for audiences to get a general idea of most offerings. “Basic conceptual preamble before characters just kinda hook up and hit it for a few minutes” describes a large swath of these choices.

So, on my end, one of the titles I chose to watch was Unexpectedly Naughty Fukami (which Chris was nice enough to share clips from). The set-up is simple: Kaji is a handsome man sought after by his female coworkers, but he’s strictly gay. Provided, he’s also filtered himself out of the dating pool by his impossibly high standards for partners. After going on a business trip with the homely Fukami, Kaji realizes Fukami actually cleans up quite nicely, so they have a tryst… only for Fukami to seemingly not be that interested in post-coital snuggles.

Normally, that kind of synopsis only really covers the overarching plot of a series—but I just covered the entirety of the first episode right there.

To say nothing of it being completely unrelatable. If Kaji can’t see the initial appeal in this disheveled, megane-adorned nerd, I can’t help him.

The time limitations put a damper on all elements of a series like this. The two episodes released so far have barely enough time to build chemistry between the two leads (a key feature of any media like this, especially BL), with the sex not lasting long enough to satisfy anyone.

Just kind of a basic boys-love shrug.

That’s the same situation with Game World Reincarnation; another villainess isekai, where a 30-something office lady gets isekai’d into the world of an otome game (she dies from “karoshi”—being overworked). Right from the get-go, she tries to hook the prince up with the heroine—but oh boy, the prince loves getting his mitts on her instead! In eight minutes, we barely get an explanation as to why the prince might care for her before he drags her away from a party for some heavy petting. Not everything can be My Next Life as a Villainess: All Routes Lead to Doom!, but give us something to care about with regards to these characters!

For what it’s worth, I could get a bit more out of Game World Reincarnation myself. It helps that there’s a whole series of eight bite-sized episodes to go through, so there’s a bit more of a sense of an arc. Plus, actual penetrative sex is built up over multiple episodes, so there’s a little more sex act variety overall, plus some whiffs of character and chemistry.

If this were a generally airing seasonal villainess isekai series, it would fall short of the mark, but as a show that held my attention between animated sex scenes, it functioned.

I think a case where the shallow characterization works is Adam’s Sweet Agony, which is basically “What if World’s End Harem wasn’t stupid?” After a plague strikes the world, Sonomiya is the only man alive capable of popping a boner—and there’s a harem of very desperate women who find themselves itching for a taste of the action. It’s a dumb, goofy story with hot girls and a reasonably inoffensive guy. I can dig it.

It’s funny, because Adam’s Sweet Agony missed for me largely because I couldn’t tune out the issues in its world-building. It takes place in a world where people have forgotten about any sex act that doesn’t involve a biological penis.

There oughta be lesbians cleaning up in this alternate universe! But of course this is the straightest of low-effort dude fantasies, so even the cool, confident sports girlfriend turns demure once the dick comes out.

To be fair, I might have been temporarily blinded by the jump scare that was this show’s ED, featuring a live-action cosplay dancer with a horrifying AI-esque face filter overlay.

Cool, I wasn’t planning on sleeping anyway.

(scream.mp3)

I wanna wash the taste of that horrid thing out of my mouth with another one I found rather cute: Show Time!. It has a rather novel approach, being an adult romance: a widower falls into a tryst with the hostess of his daughter’s favorite television show, while trying to avoid the tabloids’ scrutiny. It’s a cute set-up that stays refreshingly mundane throughout its runtime. I wish it were fleshed out more, or we could get more ero-manga/ero-anime along these lines!

Adult romances in these are always good: they save the localizers from having to try to pass high schools off as colleges, where everyone’s wearing uniforms for some reason. The concept in Show Time! is simple enough that its short runtime doesn’t hinder it.
Speaking of kids’ shows, Kamen Rider, transformations, and tortured segues let me bring up one of my picks from OceanVeil‘s funbag grab-bag.

That is, if you know me and my preferences in hot anime people, you know that the subtly titled Fucked by My Best Friend was already on my radar for, ahem, reasons.

Gender-bending hentai is something that’s been around forever (anyone remember X-Change?), but this one specifically plays with the idea of playboy best friends getting pushed together by magic HRT pills.

Unfortunately, despite its loftily ambitious premise, I wanted to like Best Friend more than I did. It’s got an odd mix of homoerotic misogyny even as it’s exploring the idea of dudes who have been waiting for an excuse to close the five-foot gap in the hot tub.

I do appreciate it being one of the vanishingly rare bisexuality embracing hentai, though.

That tracks, especially given how OceanVeil felt the need to categorize Best Friend in the “BL” section, even as it features vast amounts of straight-presenting hookups alongside the gay ones—because I know there are a lot of heterosexual hentai fans out there that will flip at anything even adjacent to yaoi. We call those people cowards.

Now, this also leads to a point I noticed about OceanVeil‘s selection: it has a variety of straight-guy-aimed material, otome fantasies, and plenty of BL, but there seems to be nothing on the yuri front. Granted, this is an issue with the broader hentai ecosystem we discussed. I can’t imagine the license for something like Shoujo Sect could have been that expensive.

With that in mind, I can see something like OceanVeil as a starting point , giving this material a more cohesive place to belong, even if it could use more discoverability to facilitate that. They’ve even collected semi-older titles like My Stubborn Sister-In-Law, which you mentioned, and smaller-studio releases like Kunoichi Botan (which, not for nothing, encompasses some harder material than the more vanilla entries we chose to look at here).

I don’t know if this can save hentai with a streaming service in an anime bubble that already feels ready to burst anytime soon, but even with my many caveats about OceanVeil, I find it hard to fault them for trying.

For all the issues that might be raised with ero-manga or ero-anime, it still needs to be said that there are a lot of very passionate people working on the material. One of my favorite artists, Miray Ozaki, has spent twenty years on her series, The Great Escape (think of it as a very Japanese take on Larry Welz’s Cherry comics). That’s longer than many currently-running Shonen Jump hits! Black Dog has been drawing naughty Sailor Moon doujin since the mid-90s—longer than many anime fans now have even been alive. And, of course, there’s the legendary Toshio Maeda, whom I got to chat with during Puerto Rico Comicon in 2012. All of these people are incredibly dedicated to what they do, embodying the spirit of “doing it for the love of the game,” as it were. And I wish it were not only easier to support these people, but easier for them to get their work out there.
There’s a lot to talk about when it comes to ero-manga or ero-anime besides the boning because the folks working on it come from all over and have all kinds of wild inspirations, like Butcha-U‘s love of Hooters or Chiba Toshiro and (according to what he’s told me on Twitter) his love of American superheroes and ’90s American supermodels. And part of what drew a lot of fans into hentai—or, at least, what drew people into hentai during the ’00s—was how in-depth the story could be. Even if a visual novel were condensed into three to five episodes.
Chris, help me out here, I’m this close to hijacking this column and going on a Moonlight Lady spiel—!

No worries, the email had instructions on how to send you back through to This Week in Games just in case. All it takes is a simple segue, thanks to your visual novel mention earlier! That is, on that front, I’ll always have time for MangaGamer and their dedication to getting hentai visual novels out in English through their endearingly 2005-ass site. Talk about love of the game(s).

Now that you’re done with Xenoblade 3, you might have time for any number of these that don’t have anything to do with Carnelian!

Ah, obviously that’s the real functionality OceanVeil is missing: a sharing option.

I think we, and all the kids at home, have learned so much from these secrets.

I was right to leave This Week in Anime to you guys. Now, time to head back to This Week in Games, I have a gaming column—