The Age of Ahegao

-“A person that is part of this bright, fun world. I want to become one.” Metamorphosis, Shindo L

-“This is Melody. She has trouble counting and lacks vital organs. People describe her as the most wholesome pervert they’ve ever met. Melody is friendly, considerate, and talks about [CENSORED]… a lot”. Projekt Melody Bio, Vshojo website

The following is a presentation discussing the socio-sexual and intercultural strata of the otaku subculture. To avoid any unnecessary confusion (likely inevitable, given the subject), it will be necessary to contextualize the lingua-franca of the subculture.

As a a clear and present content warning, the ideas and terms discussed in this presentation will include descriptions of sexual violence/hyperviolence. Please be advised.

Hentai- A subgenre of both anime/manga erotica. Can range from soft to hardcore pornography.

Doujinshi/Doujins- Fanmade hentai (though not always) comics, either original or based on official anime or manga. A popular sub-subgenre of hentai.

BL (Boy's Love)/Yaoi- A specific sub-subgenre of hentai, involving gay, male relationships.

Fujoshi- The popular term for female fans of BL and Yaoi.

Otaku- An obsessive fan or hobbyist. Although otaku is commonly used to describe anime fans, in Japan it can mean any dedicated hobbyist to a particular subject or topic.

 _{(Author's Note: CW- Sexual Content)} 

Ahegao- A common facial expression in hentai. Eyes up, tongue out. Though usually reserved for women, it is typically used to emphasize male strength and virility through female expression.

Mind break- A popular trope in hentai/doujinshi. Sex acting as a psychological assault intended to destroy or dominate the victim. Often ends with the victim proclaiming devotion and subservience to the assailant.

Public toilet- Another popular trope. Group-sex involving several men and women, with the women acting as passive (often physically trapped/restrained) receptacles for male assault.

Netorare/NTR- The last popular trope discussed. Sex involving forced cuckoldry and/or voyeurism.

The conversation will be broken into three, distinct sections. The first will be exploring the subversive, sexual potentialities encoded in the early cultural genetics of the fandom. The second will explore the corresponding reactionary potentialities on these spaces and the interplay between the former and the latter. Finally, the last will explore the shifting tides of power vis-à-vis the artists and performers working in those spaces. For the purposes of the argument, the term 'subversive' will act as an umbrella containing broad discussion of all identities and sexualities arrayed against, or erased under, the hetero-normative, patriarchal standard.

As a final note before we begin, it needs be addressed that your humble author, flawless as his analytical processes might seem, will be discussing identities, orientations and experiences that exist outside his, let's say, immediate sphere of being. As such, he will do his best to open the floor for the discussion of these experiences, to let the voices of the artists, fans and activists speak for themselves wherever and whenever they can. As the Virgil on this particular journey, he is here merely to guide the journey from its complicated beginnings to its even more complex conclusions, such as they are. If he can give even a small voice to the voiceless, than he (and hopefully the audience) will have considered it not only a victory for those who are still silenced, but a fist raised against the forces who conspire to silence them. -Kai Szulborski, author by choice, degenerate by birth.

Often called the 'Walt Disney' of Japan, Osamu Tezuka is one of the most influential (and often overlooked) artists of the 20th century. His iconic style and structure would influence multiple generations of new artists and codify the distinct genre-medium hybrid that would become synonymous with contemporary anime. For the purposes of this argument, and because of his unique position within the history of the fandom, he can be considered the 'zero-point' for initial discussion of otaku sexuality.

Tezuka is most famous for his character Astro-Boy, a small but stalwart robot hero. He also published a long-running manga series called Phoenix, which became famous for its exploration of heavy philosophical themes, such as life, death, meaning and the future. Tezuka often worked in fantastical and speculative spaces, but he also grounded his work in deep emotional exploration. Relationships and interpersonal meaning are often at the core of his stories.

In Levi, McHarry, and Pagliassotti’s exploration Boy’s Love Manga, they state that, even amongst the rise of latent homophobia imported from the west, Tezuka often engaged with questions of gender and identity in his broader films. (Levi, McHarry, Pagliassotti). Though these early explorations of gender and intimacy have been buried (at least in the West) under his more visible and commercial successes, they encoded a subversive attitude into the genetics of the genre/fandom.

His manga Ribbon no Kishi (Princess Knight), for instance, involves the homosocial/homosexual relationship between a princess with a ‘male soul’ and a male friend who is not aware of her birth sex (Levi, McHarry and Pagliassotti). Because of its willingness to question the relationship between gender and identity, Ribbon no Kishi created a new and necessary 'gap' in Japanese/global culture to discuss both the performance of gender and complexities of female/non-binary experiences.

Through the subversive 'gap' opened by works such as Ribbon no Kishi, new and mercurial genres began to emerge to facilitate further discussion on gender and sexuality. As per Levi, Mcharry,and Pagliassotti, Ribbon no Kishi acted as an enormous influence on female manga artist Hagio Moto, often considered to be the founder of the Boy’s Love (shonen-ai) genre. (Levi, McHarry, and Pagliassotti). In the subsequent decade, the BL genre would become a massive critical and commercial success for the manga market. By the late 70’s, the genre had grown popular enough to be the center of several, independent publications. In 1978, Comic Jun routinely sold 150,000 copies a month (Levi, McHarry, and Pagliassotti).

Though many Shonen-Ai publications existed for general audiences, many other Shonen-Ai adjacent publications were far more explicit. This mature genre was called 'Yaoi' and was quickly adopted by many female fans. These fan groups were then (ironically) dubbed 'Fujoshi' or 'sinful women'.

As the culture of 'Yaoi' and 'Fujoshi' exploded in popularity, the 'gap' continued to widen, now including explicitly sexual and erotic content. As per Levi, Mcharry,and Pagliassotti again- "United in the project of (re)imagining and reconstructing identity, yaoi is positioned as a fugitive text where the (hetero) normative is disrupted and where the quotidian codes that govern gender and sexuality are poached for "perverse" purposes and pleasures ((Levi, McHarry, Pagliassotti).

From its initial inception as a pop-culture product, anime has occupied a liminal territory between genre and medium, style and specific substance. Tezuka alone cannot be credited with the genesis of all modern, Japanese animation. His work merely acted as a collaborative flashpoint in tandem with the collective efforts of his fellow creative contemporaries. Together, they built the the foundations of a genre/medium that has become both necessarily localized (tethered to one, specific culture) and intensely universal (possessing, by far, the largest global, subculture). This cornerstone mercurial quality has also allowed it to build and encompass a wide range of sexual/emotional experiences often lacking in other areas of art/animation. Just as anime exists in the gap between cultural and global product, its conversations have always reflected the substance of intercultural conversations, gender and sexuality included.

By necessity, the cultural and social gaps widened by the nascent inception of anime's 'formal' structure functioned in a system opposed to their continued growth. As with the codifying of anime's artistic systems, these reactionary systems also had their roots in cultural developments occurring in early and mid-century Japan.

In Mark Driscoll's Absolutely Erotic, Absolutely Grotesque, he discusses the creation of the popular literary/artistic genre known as ero-guro in connection to the rising tide of Japanese militarism and fascism in the 1930's. As the name implies, ero-guro is a translingual port-manteau of the English words erotic and grotesque, which came to define the strange and horrific stories that comprised the genre.

As Driscoll states, "In Japanese cultural history, the period from 1926 to 1934 is often categorized as the "erotic-grotesque nonsense age" and is compared to Germany's Weimar cabaret culture or the flapper or jazz age in the United States" (Driscoll). Just as both Weimar and Jazz cultures are often remembered as impetuous, riotous and experimental, the 'ero-guro' age was categorized by stories of extreme sexual and sado-maschostic violence.

Often, these stories straddled the line between standard narrative and visceral pornography. In The Killing Kapitalist Konglomerate, for example, a young writer is pulled into a political and criminal underworld full of sexual slavery and indiscriminate blood-lust (Driscoll). As the novel progresses, the narrator constantly alludes to the vicarious sexual pleasure that the audience must be feeling through the descriptions of of the events (Driscoll). Near the end of the novel, the author visits a 'suicide' club where scores of named women dance on cakes before being publicly raped and murdered. The author is then so traumatized by these events that he requests to be murdered as well, although the owners of the club instead trick him into opium addiction (Driscoll).

Despite ero-guro's lurid and shocking content, Driscoll argues that it was intended by artists to be a statement against the hyper-commodification of culture via the growth of violent, fascistic capitalism. The artists believed that only such extreme content could galvanize a mass audience into understanding the extent of the corruption in business and government. For Driscoll, this analysis of ero-guro helps explain the sheer extent of atrocities committed by the Japanese military during the occupation of China before and during World War 2.

While the advent of the war seemingly precipitated the decline of ero-guro as a genre, its roots fed numerous influences in the decades to follow. As the forces of Western capitalism bore down even harder on a beaten, post-war Japan, explorations of this dangerous violence continued to permeate underground culture. Although many post-war ero-guro artists continued to comment on capitalist violence, an analysis of popular doujin tropes bears an uncomfortable fusion of ero-guro sexual violence coupled with imagery borne of Japan's wartime atrocities.

As Driscoll states in his exploration of sexual politics in wartime Japan, groups of the infamous ‘comfort women’ (sex slaves) were often called ‘public toilets’ by soldiers and bureaucrats (Driscoll). He also refers to the various euphemisms employed by the Japanese polity to cover military atrocities- “Japanese elites referred to comfort women as “toilets” (Benjo), while Chinese forced laborers were designated as “robots” or “logs” (Maruta). "This allowed them to be similarly transformed into what Marx called infrahuman,“instrumentalized means of domination and exploitation” (1977, 799), and what Mbembe calls “commodity bodies” (2005) (Driscoll)”. 

Many of these dehumanizing terms and ideas permeate popular doujins. For example, the (in)famous doujin Metamorphosis, features the repeated rape and assault of the main character. This continues until her eventual, complete breakdown, ending in abject poverty and addiction. Metamorphosis is infamous for its extensive use of the ‘mind break’ trope now common in doujinshi. This involves the complete psychological domination and destruction of the victim.

Another long-running series, Dolls, by artist Fan No Hitori, involves the creation of a government-mandated sexual slavery service. While Metamorphosis involves heavy use of the ‘mind break’ trope, Dolls makes heavy use of the ‘public toilet’ trope. While ‘mind break’ treats the female characters as objects to be controlled and manipulated, the ‘public toilet’ trope treats groups of women as objects for excretion, often literally.

Some doujins even feature specific narration strikingly similar to that of Killing Kapitalist Konglomerate. In artist Nyuu's doujin Sudden Invitation (full title-The Old School Building's Backstage Festival, Sudden Invitation), for example, the work is filled with meta-commentary discussing the audience's specific fetishes and desires. As with Killing Kapitalist Konglomerate, there is a 'gravity' of awareness aimed by the narrator towards the audience. As with many of the other doujins, however, these tropes have been adopted as pure pornography, losing the sense of social and political commentary they possessed in their original form.

Driscoll even comments on this process as per the initial decline of ero-guro. As the genre progressed into the early to mid 1930's, it became clear that the business potential of ero-guro had overtaken any social commentary it had once claimed to possess As he states of early ero-guro artist Umehara Hokumei- "In 1931, he {Umehara}, he claimed to be merely reflecting the capitalist reality around him, not transforming in any explicit way. The world, or at least "the world" bracketed by...advanced capitalism, had finally caught up with the revolutionary vanguard (Driscoll)."

As per Driscoll's analysis of late ero-guro, it becomes clear that this loss of commentary became de rigueur for the genre, substituting social/class awareness for titillation-as-capital. This reality is reflected in the genetic descendants of ero-guro, hentai included. Despite the genre's initial condemnation of reactionary violence, as Driscoll states, the capitalist and patriarchal status-quo found a ready foothold in the production potential of ero-guro pornography.

Even half a century onward, the results of this domination can be seen in the issues with otaku/hentai culture. The hentai fandom is still plagued with gate-keeping, abuse and exclusion of female, femme-presenting and LGTBQ fans, viewed, in many ways, as a space exclusively for intimate, male socialization. As they did in the initial decline of ero-guro, the domination of violent misogny in culture feeds capital potential through similar violence in narratives and imagery. The product sold reflects the needs of the system.

Just as Tezuka’s work led to the rise of 'gaps' through which subversive conversation could be had via Levi, McHarry, Pagliassotti's 'perverse' purposes, the popularity of these tropes has seemingly heralded a victory to the reactionary forces intent on destroying the progress made by the early ero-guro artists. As Driscoll so succinctly puts it, capital has won its long assault on the 'wetware' of the human psyche. But the rise of new media, and new media artists, have called this 'victory' into question. Within Tezuka's surviving gaps, new movement has arisen that might vindicate the memory of the ero-guro artists and their attack on the "invading agents" of human commodification.

Despite the undercurrent of misogyny undergirding the sexual aspects of the otaku subculture, the previous decade has seen several attempts to de-colonize those sexual spaces. Many of these attempts have been focused on the localized and discursive level, whether through fan-made media, convention panels, or online discussion. The rise of streaming and digital media have also played a part in these localized reclamation efforts. Otaku artists working in new media spaces have utilized their platforms to help combat the patriarchal colonization of subcultural and sexual spaces.

Vshojo is a collective of young, female otaku streamers and artists working on the streaming platform Twitch. Along with a broader, growing movement comprised of anonymous streamers known as 'Vtubers', the Vshojo girls work as variety entertainers and personalities, both together and on their separate channels.

In their numerous conversations, games and hangouts, they discuss such topics as body image, personal history, sexual preferences and fan culture.

Many of their discussions often involve direct breakdowns of the most notorious and divisive motifs in hentai. In this clip, for example, two of the performers, Projekt Melody and Ironmouse, discuss Melody’s enjoyment of the ‘mind break’ and 'Ahegao' tropes, among others. (Reverse Harem Applications). Though both tropes are commonly used to represent male virility through a sustained assault on the objectified female body, Melody expresses her enjoyment of the trope as tied directly to her own pleasure (Reverse Harem Applications).

Later in the same video, Melody also discusses enjoying other notorious tropes, such as forced cuckoldry or NTR (Netorare) (Reverse Harem Applications). For her, the ‘destruction’ of the victim's personhood is transformed instead to a consensual and constructive 'pleasure of submission'. Through this transformation, the graphic fantasies of rape, assault and torture become empowering forms of sexual expression.

In other videos, Melody also mentions enjoying the Fan no Hitori's Dropout specifically for its heavy use of bondage against the backdrop of its echoed wartime slavery imagery. Through these acts of this vicarious pleasure via the genetic descendants of ero-guro imagery, Melody is transforming the latent void of ero-guro commentary left by the destructive power of capital. In the virtual space built by her pleasure, the ero-guro ethos returns to its place as a means of disrupting entrenched systems of power. Aesthetics-as-oppression become aesthetics-as-freedom.

In their many other videos, the girls discuss numerous topics, ranging from silly (the hottest types of hentai monsters) to serious (dating among otaku). Projekt Melody herself is also an adult performer and camgirl. In her pre V-shojo career, she even made an entire video on the history of hentai (Is Hentai Art?). Within all these discursive spaces, the latent capitalist domination breaks down through freedom of communication and the discourse of pleasure. This willingness to both speak openly, and give space to speak openly, is tied directly to the explosive rise in popularity of the Vshojo collective. Power flows to the powerless, agency to the voiceless.

Despite the rapid and fluid growth of the internet in the past thirty years, its social and cultural roots run much deeper into the past. The cultural monolith of the modern internet arose from a complex and multilayered array of international collaborations. The otaku fandom is young compared to others of its kind, and its core demographics are still in nascent development. The young women of Vshojo are on the forefront of that development, bringing new ideas and means of power to their global network of fans. Through their discussions, they have acted in the tradition of all disruptive artists, restructuring narratives and unearthing new forms of history. The long arm of social injustice, invisible, seemingly impermeable, has once again been brought to new light.

Both sex and art become tools for the extension of human memory. In many ways, the subversive spaces being opened by Vshojo are retooled versions of the early BL/Yaoi fandom, discursive zones for those with identities and experiences hidden from the mainstream. In each iteration of these hidden zones, the evolution of new language and niche, cultural signaling become ways to reclaim agency under the guise of weaponized, overt reality.

While hentai might seem like a niche genre, it sits at an intersection between sex, subculture and agency. It bridges several divides, between erotica and subculture, art and history, new media and feminism. Situated between poles of power and silence, hentai culture speaks to a global system of experiences, from fear to love, hate to freedom. Just as otaku culture is the most popular and widespread subcultures worldwide, hentai culture operates as its global shadow, its sexual language forming a critical literacy for the id of the internet. Within this digital id-cave lie both the ruins of power and foundations for the future, for those willing and brave enough to explore. Just be sure to bring a bright, fun mind.

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