Foreword

In the summer of 2018 I wrote my undergraduate dissertation on porn.

Not any porn, mind you. It was a linguistic study into the idea of pornography on a fundamental level, since several of the works I had read on the ‘history of porn’ decided to dodge the question instead of establishing any kind of definition for it. Is porn just artless sex in media? Art primarily designed to function as a masturbatory aid? I offered a more structural answer based on text typology – we know a newspaper when we see one, regardless of the language it’s written in, because of its various grammatical norms and nodal features, and as such we can recognise when we’re looking at pornography too.

I got a 2:1 – a ‘good job’ in UK undergraduate academic terms – for a rushed 8000 word paper on the subject, and after that I was burned out of academic work and stopped enjoying reading and writing pretty much altogether for several years.

It hasn’t surprised me, then, that the only thing that has since reignited those interests has been pornography; more specifically, Japanese cartoon pornography. H-manga, H-doujinshi, ecchi, hentai. I have named this blog Eromanga Review as that is exactly what I want to start doing in my spare time – reviewing erotic manga, from the foundation of my academic interest in ‘porn studies’ and the like. There are understandably very few people doing this, and there may be even fewer who have any interest in reading this. It is of no matter to me.

‘Porn studies’ is a niche and controversial area of academia, one which I am only orbiting around as a satellite, and even from beyond its stratosphere I can see how it struggles for validation in the current academic climate. Critics of cartoons have undergone similar trials. One of the first things Scott McCloud discusses in his 1993 work Understanding Comics is how cartoons have had a reputation of being a shoddy kind of art, which had historically prevented good artistic discussion around them. To this day eromanga still carries this baggage, on top of the burden it gets from being smut – foreign smut, to the anglosphere, which is even more condemnable. Even depictions of sex that aren’t intended primarily for titillation frequently get tossed aside by anime and manga ‘critics’ as being cheap, unnecessary and unworthy of any time spent in the practice of close reading. Like Scott, I believe this is somewhat to do with people having a definitions that are too narrow and crude – in this case, for eroticism and its purposes. There is a limitless expressive potential in the world of eromanga if you choose to explore it and unburden yourself from ideologies that oppose it.

I should note that while there are few people writing about pornography in the anglosphere, and there are even fewer writing specifically about cartoon porn. There are stark distinctions to be made between IRL hardcore Pornhub videos and the panels of h-doujinshi, but you will be hard-pressed to find them acknowledged anywhere. It is beneficial to anti-porn detractors if we do not try to establish them, if we ignore furthermore that there are people who are solely interested in two-dimensional characters. But I am one of those people, at least when it comes to pornography.

More than anything else, eromanga has helped open up my mind to the possibilities of sexual attractions and interests. It has helped me come to terms with my own identity as an asexual and genderqueer man by giving me spaces to explore sex in all manner of imaginative forms. But trying to share these explorations can be dangerous; the general state of social media is extremely hostile to any positivity around sex and porn. Both ends of the political spectrum are addicted to moral hand-wringing over any depictions of sexual satisfaction in media.

Most of the anglosphere animanga community – particuarly the segment that has developed a toolkit to analyze anime and manga for artistic merit – has sadly demonstrated itself to be largely anti-porn, which compromises their ability to see the value and potential in the pleasures and freedoms of the pornographic, and stops them from developing any genuine understanding of the creators and consumers of eromanga. Even people who are supportive of porn and sex work often find themselves afraid to reveal any engagement with it in public for fear of condemnation from prudish peers – these days, even admitting to playing a PEGI 12 gacha game with bouncy-breasted girls could get you labeled as a ‘porn addict’ by large swathes of your community. There is a modern Satanic Panic around smut.

Even where h-manga and h-anime are given proper close reading, without these reservations, they often become stuck as the subject of analyses about power struggles and how they can correlate to social commentary and political polemics, as though this is the only way to demonstrate ‘media literacy’ when it comes to discussing porn. Much of what we see in eromanga is however highly dissociative, designed to be enjoyed away from the concerns of the world at large; most critics lack the proper affinity for fictional contexts to appreciate this, and think they can only act as critics by comparing what they see in comics and cartoons to tensions around sex and the body in real life. These analyses may still have value, but 2D characters also need to be discussed on their own terms of consumption. 

Working with concepts and lenses derived from scholars familiar with the artistic depth and potential of eromanga, I hope that this blog can serve as a beacon for better discourse on erotic art overall. I do not aim to elevate pornographic material as a whole into a higher plane, or to argue through discussions of aesthetics or narrative or symbolism that we should place any doujins on the pedestals we reserve for Shakespeare and the like. Rather, the aim is to provide analyses of the artistry involved in eromanga so that the better works of its field may be better appreciated and better understood.

There are conscious creative decisions that go into making our favourite doujins; there are methods that elevate cartoon characters from mere fungible objects of arousal to engaging, enthralling actors upon stages of desires and dreams. We know that ‘sex sells’, but some doujinkas are more successful than others, and we can explore the reasons as to why the same way we can examine why famous authors and poets and sculptors have found their fame in their own oversaturated fields. Moreover, in the advent of the age of genAI, it is even more important to affirm human artistry wherever we see it, and that includes pornography in all its forms.

In lieu of finding any good blogs that review eromanga, I will make my own. This is Eromanga Review, for a better apprecation of ecchi media.