(Note: Where are you reading this from? I keep getting a lot of hits on this article and can’t find the source.)

As an inhabitant of the Internet I’ve seen some weird stuff and I know you have too *points finger sternly*.

Hentai, for those who might not know, is the commonly used word to describe pornographic manga or anime that often feature busty ladies, well-endowed men, tentacled beasts, and ogres. Yeah, you heard me right.

The word also translates loosely to “pervert” or “perverted”, so you can imagine the public perception of people who read and/or watch Hentai. The problem is that the genre isn’t exactly defending itself from criticism with porn plots that often involve things like forced sex, cuckolding, incest, bestiality, voyeurism, etc.

That’s not to say that regular porn doesn’t often achieve the same amount of “why did I push play” from viewers, and with real people too. The way Hentai typically depicts sexual relationships isn’t healthy or realistic. They’re usually pretty messed up.

So here’s the five most common ways the characters get to doing the dirty.

Walk into a bathroom

Wouldn’t it be interesting if initiating sex was as easy as walking into the bathroom? Well if you’re in a Hentai you’d be swimming in sex if you can perfectly time when your roommate, best friend, or sibling… is taking a bath or shower.

You’d be surprised how often this ends up being the main reason why the emotions of the characters boil over into steamy, hot, inappropriately-timed love making. I guess it makes sense because you’d be clean, but I don’t think the surprise of being walked in on would necessarily translate into sexy times.

When was the last time you were sitting on the toilet and you heard someone outside walking near the door? Your automatic response is to either stomp your feet, sniff loudly, or pretty much announce to the world that you’re in the bathroom. And if that person actually walks in anyway, I think most people would end up not talking and/or nervously avoiding that person for about a week.

This is also part of that “close proximity” porn plot where people living in close quarters will almost always end up getting into a relationship. However, in Hentai this porn plot is usually less about two friends ending up together and more about a brother and sister incestually getting it on.

There’s also the trope of finding out that someone does sexual things that helps initiate sex. “Oh typical anime female character, I didn’t think you actually ever touched yourself. I always thought you were a perfect, porcelain doll without any kind of sexual desire in your life.” That’s usually how the guy character reacts to walking in on someone masturbating and it usually leads to sex where the guy teaches the girl everything she needs to know about intercourse.

First day at a new school

I don’t know about you, but my high school years were pretty uneventful. Wait, I mean… yeah I got laid every single day and often by sexy lady teachers who it turned out were harbouring feelings for me mostly due to them being sexually inactive.

That’s pretty much the set up for every Hentai that takes place in a school and features an older female teacher and younger male student. The teacher is sitting in class watching her male students assuming they’re all looking at her butt.

She then starts to imagine having sex with them in an orgy-like fantasy and realizes that there’s one student who isn’t looking at her. Suddenly he becomes the center of her attention and the next thing she knows he’s either living next door, finding her looking at pornographic DVDs, or he’s somehow been hurt by her requiring immediate sexual assistance.

Now this is the tricky part, what happens after they have sex? Well, sometimes the guy will confess his love and other times he’ll use it as a way to blackmail her into getting all of her friends to have fun too. Note: the male teacher scenario is way creepier.

Usually with the male teacher it turns out that two of the female students have been secretly trying to get Senpai’s attention for the past year. One of the girls will get sick of just trying and will initiate sexy times, which will then get the other girl fired up resulting in a threesome. How the male teacher doesn’t get fired for having sexual relationships with underage girls? Who the fuck knows.

Your childhood friend has grown up…

In Japan, your home prefecture is a pretty big deal, but it’s also a huge problem. Most of the time when seeking higher education and jobs, young Japanese people will venture outside of their hometown. There are few jobs, fewer young people, and the fewest number of reasons to stay at home compared to being in the big city. However, sometimes you’ve just gotta go home and it turns out your childhood friend has grown in more than one way.

You know what, this isn’t the plot from just a Hentai, but from a staggering majority of regular manga and anime. The idea of going back to your hometown plays a huge role in Japanese fiction and it’s all part of a huge conspiracy *waves hands spookily*.

Ahem, there are government initiatives in Japan designed specifically to get people to go home. Why? Well when the youth brain drain happens, you end up with towns like Gifu where the mayor is like 20ish and most of the citizens of the town have two to three feet in the grave.

Part of that trope of going back home is your childhood friend becoming your lover myth.

In most Hentai, it turns out that the friend has either been waiting for you for years knowing that you were their true love all along, or they’re already married with a child except their husband is constantly traveling or dead.

Either way, she went from being a tomboy to an obscenely-proportioned lady. And the most important part is that they’ve saved themselves, “Oh Senpai, I always wanted to give you my first time.”

NTR (Not That Realistic)

Now I don’t know about you, but if I was in a Hentai where I could turn into a Super Sentai, I wouldn’t stand for some random dude trying to take away my significant other. But hey, we’re apparently living in a world where cuckolding is apparently a huge turn on and totally not sexist.

The Hentai plot in this case surrounds a man’s wife being somehow put into the sexual servitude of another man, or a wife who is so desperate for sexy times that she’s willing to find another partner and immediately regrets it, but can’t stop.

However, it always assumes that it’s the woman who is the unfaithful one in a relationship as if they’re unable to escape the influence of the men in their life.

It also perpetuates the idea in Hentai that women are simply property being scooped up by men or traded as sexual partners whenever the man feels like it. This is a huge problem in Hentai where women are completely, utterly under the control of men. They have literally no say in whether or not they want to have sex when in real life everyone should have a choice.

These Hentai plots almost always end with the wife becoming a sex slave and the husband losing his mind with the knowledge that he’s sexually inadequate. It becomes this awful spiral of sad sexual activity mixed with a lot of physical, emotional, and sexual abuse.

And do you know what’s a complete turn off? Sadness.

“It’s not rape”

If I had $100,000 for every single time a female character in a Hentai just accepts rape as being normal sex, I’d be a very guilty millionaire.

Whether it happens in a bedroom, a train car, a bathroom, or on a beach, I just don’t have to tell you that unwanted sexual touching and rape is wrong. It’s kind of a fact of life for people with regular and working brains, but Hentai writers often make female characters completely accept what happens to them as normal sex.

Forced sex often becomes a plot point that brings the character together into a relationship rather than resulting in an immediate trip to the police. Sometimes it starts as a joke with the guy saying, “Ok today is the day I start to act like a man and make her mine”. Other times it starts out badly as a kind of revenge plot to use sex to take the girl down a few pegs, but eventually she starts to like what’s happening.

It doesn’t help that most female characters in Hentai seem to have an innocence streak that assumes they don’t know how to recognize, report, and resist rape. Also when there is a strong female character it usually turns out she has a specific “weakness” that allows her to be seduced.

Sometimes the female character will hatch a plan to get the guy to confess what he’s done to the cops or a sympathetic male character will try to help her. Do you know what, I’d rather read nothing than anything involving a plot like this.

The real problem is that there isn’t an afterward where the characters say, “Hey, we’re just actors and this isn’t real.”

Sometimes you see the same kind of domination-based sex in porn with a scene at the end that shows the actors safe and sound instilling that, yes, this was just a fantasy. Hentai is animated, sure, but it depicts a kind of reality where the characters are real and not just on a set.

***

I’ve read and watched my fair share of things on the Internet, but it’s rare when I find a Hentai that doesn’t cross one of worse porn plots on this list.

What’s worse is that Hentai with well-rounded and realistic characters are almost non-existent.They’re almost always stuck in anime archetypes where men and women have the sexual maturity of children, and an understanding of reproductive systems that would be out of place in the 16th century.

But hey, it’s not all bad. There are examples of Hentai out there that are actually quite good and they have some amazing art, but I’m not going to help you find it…