Memes, #8 - Lewd Anime Memes
The last of a series.
So, I’m absolutely stunned that my last meme post (#7, Politics) has done over 2K of views as of this writing. But a little disappointed that the fiction post after it has done less than 80. Nevertheless, the audience has spoken. And even though the previous Anime memes post is not one of the heaviest hitters, I did kind of leave it on a bit of a cliffhanger.
So what follows are some naughty memes. Actually, a whole lot of naughty memes. I may have let it get out of hand. Don’t get butthurt if you don’t like that kind of thing. You were warned. We’ll be back to normal (whatever that is) after this. Probably for a very long time.
(On the other hand, if you like that kind of thing, click the button.)
When we last left the thread, our protagonists from “Rascal Does Not Dream of Bunny-girl Senpai” (“Seishun Buta Yarou wa Bunny Girl Senpai no Yume wo Minai” in Japanese) (No, seriously, that’s the title. It’s very good, and the post season movie will grab you by the feels until you cry) were saying:
Although, I have to say, if you watch enough anime, that imagination runs either too low, or too high. At the most innocent level, you get characters who freak out over hand-holding, or what they call an “Indirect Kiss” - if they drink from the same can or bottle....
Although the comic memes tend to be more joking about this hangup than the real thing.
Why yes, those are both supposed to be succubi, the latter by Spanish cartoonist Kukuruyo (whom you may have heard of if you observed GamerGate).
Yeah, I don’t have any “indirect kiss” memes handy. And if I did, they wouldn’t be lewd enough for this post. Unless I were to delve into “Mysterious Girlfriend X” (“Nazo no Kanojo X”) which is one of the weirdest high school romances ever, and brings new meaning to the term “Swapping Spit”.
Last Chance to Bail Before it Gets Lewd
The west has an odd relationship with drawn, and especially animated erotica. People will occasionally watch something like Heavy Metal (the movie) and look at the full page comics in Playboy or Penthouse, and then turn around and say that cartoons and comics are for kids only and get bent out of shape – although this attitude is slowly changing (some would say aging out). That level of Puritanism is not common in the rest of the world. And oddly, we seem fine with the violence. The end credits of Jonny Quest has a two digit body count if you count the crew of the disguised sub that gets blown up with the laser, and then there are the three divers who get crushed under Race Bannon’s speedboat.
If you wanna get philosophical about it:
(Honestly, I don’t know where that came from, but it amuses me.)
That said, there is still a concept of being Age Appropriate. There was a Swimsuit Contest episode of the Pokemon cartoon that was never translated for the US audience, it’s nothing more than swimsuits, but there it was no big deal, while here it was a big no-no. I am in no way advocating that anyone underage should be looking at explicit material, but on the other hand, anyone saying that adults shouldn’t be able to see adult-oriented art and animation can take a look at this and try to figure out where they went wrong.
Yes, there are issues with the Canonical ages of Anime characters, but that’s not the point of this meme, it’s the hypocrisy.
Moving on.
Boobs
If there’s one thing you will see in Anime that you will never see in western animation, it’s boobs. Animators will put some incredible effort into having them move and sway naturally, or even unnaturally (A studio named Gainax had a reputation for make it seem like they had a will of their own, fans still refer to it as “Gainaxing” [guy-nak-zing]). The one thing you will NOT get from fans is agreement about size, with factions ranging from “Oppai is Truth”, to “Medium is Premium” to “Flat is Justice.” Seriously. I am not kidding. Google those terms yourself if you dare. I think the animators try to include a wide range to attract the most fans.
Now Anime detractors will somehow try to tie breast size to character age as if they grew like tree rings or something, and then contradict themselves over a young character with huge knockers, or a short one. I imagine that can be quite hurtful to the characters or it would be except that they’re not real!
She has a point.
Bet you looked back when you were done.
Seems comfortable.
Seems less comfortable....
Of course anything can be taken to extremes....
Ride him, Cow-girl!
But whatever floats your boat.
Butts and Pantsu
One of the odder aspects of Japanese culture is a fascination with women’s underwear, called “Pantsu”, where it sometimes holds even more interest than what it covers. (See also the legendary “Panty Vending Machines” in Akihabara.) And it extends throughout all ages and genres. The “Panty Shot” is a staple, even if it only appears in a single frame of animation. (Famously, there was one in “Who Framed Roger Rabbit?” that nobody caught until it was released on VHS and people could step through the frames. Disney edited it out in later releases.) Even anime from the 1960’s will have a scene where a girl’s skirt gets flipped or blown up.
So, you wanna see a cute anime butt?
Sorry, I had to slip that one in there somewhere.
Paging Sir Mix-a-Lot.
Make all the “driving” and “rabbit hole” puns you like....
Yeah, I’m not a butt guy, so I haven’t saved a lot of those either.
Fun little crossover between Frieren and the cast of KonoSuba (The Japanese titles are so long these days, they also have short titles for them). The joke is the guy in the green cape once learned a thievery spell and used it to take the panties off the thief who taught him, much to her embarrassment. Take note of the blonde next to him. She figures prominently in a number of memes for reasons I’ll get to.
The perils of getting dressed in the dark.
The anti-pantsu.
But enough with the Panties, you want to see Anime Pussy?
It depends on if you went to CrunchyRoll for your Anime....
... or if you buy the Blu-Ray.
Fetishes
Maids could be a category all their own, but this post is going to be huge enough as it is!
It is kind of refreshing to see that Anime and Manga characters are aging up. There are more and more shows featuring office and college romances. Although the art styles may not entirely reflect that, considering the demographics in Japan, it makes sense to be aiming at an older audience.
Hence, middle-aged office managers getting drunk and ending up in a Love Hotel with a co-worker:
Okay, this is actually a rescue.
I’m cheating, those are snow chains for a Honda Super Cub.
Nope, still cheating. Context is everything.
But I have NO idea what the context was for this one.
Elves
I kinda covered Frieren in the last post, but another popular target is Marcille from Delicious in Dungeon (“Danjon Meshi”) – an anime where a bunch of broke adventurers decide to eat the stuff they find/kill in the dungeon. “Food Porn” is a legit genre of Anime. In spite of all the lewd memes, the source material is perfectly tame. Which is probably why it’s a target.
Since some of these are based on the manga, read from ← right to left ←. However, they are not actual translations. They’re memes, after all.
The bottom is from “Interspecies Reviewers” (“Ishuzoku Rebyuāzu”) which would merit an entire post by itself, and I don’t have that kind of energy. It’s a show that is absolutely not for kids. Short summary, they go around to brothels staffed by various fantasy genre races and write reviews. Some of them are decidely not very good.
The elf on the bottom is from “How Not to Summon a Demon Lord” (“Isekai Maō to Shōkan Shōjo no Dorei Majutsu”).
This phrase has become a meme in itself.
Into Darkness
In KonoSuba (Short for “Kono Subarashii Sekai ni Bakuen wo!” or “God's Blessing on This Wonderful World!” – You can see why they shorten titles) you have a typical Isekai setup, where the protagonist gets killed in this world, and meets a god or goddess who gives him an opportunity to be reincarnated in a fantasy world. Our hero is a loser. Given the choice of anything to take with him into the world to help him with his assigned quest to take on the evil Demon Lord, he chooses the goddess, Aqua, who is totally useless in that world. He also adds Megumin to his party, a sorceress who has developed only one spell, “Explosion” to such a high degree that she can only cast it once a day and becomes too fatigued to walk afterward. And last, and least, “Darkness” who is really the princess Lalatina, who should be their fighter and tank, except while she excels at soaking up damage as a tank, she can’t even cut herself with her sword. That’s okay for her, because she is comically masochistic, and gets all hot and bothered thinking about whatever degradations she might face if she ever gets captured by the Demon Lord.
This is after being dragged behind a cart as monster bait. The girl has issues....
The girl in the purple is from one of the most controversial recent series, “Gushing over Magical Girls” (“Mahou Shoujo ni Akogarete”) where a young girl who is a total fan of her town’s magical girl protectors, Tres Magia, is given the chance to become a magical girl herself, the only problem is she has to become one of the villains, and in the process discovers she’s a sadist. It’s another show that is absolutely not for kids.
You pervert
Don’t stick it in crazy.
Wait, who’s the pervert here?
You have no idea....
Are you still with me? Have I gone too far?
Conclusions
In spite of some parallels, it’s really wrong to try to think of Japanese culture entirely in terms of our own. Part of the reason you end up with so many weird ideas about sex showing up in their media is based on their dating culture. While in America, guys ask girls out to get to know them, and maybe go out a few times and not continue. Sometimes we will overlap several partners until we make a choice to be exclusive. In Japan, agreeing to go out is a lot more serious, almost a step short of getting engaged. Agreeing to go out is more like officially declaring that you are boyfriend and girlfriend. There is very little intimacy before that. Also, the national age of consent is 16 (although various rural areas had it a much younger age before the national law was passed) which is why high school romances are such a common theme. It’s a serious, life-changing event that coincides with their hormonal peak.
But this leaves a void, women are an object of curiosity, but young men can’t really find out about them because there is no getting to first base without actually getting to the serious dating stage first, which is quite a hurdle. Indeed these days, fewer and fewer couples are clearing that hurdle, as reflected in the severely depressed birth rate. And that void gets filled with uninformed imagination1. And that ignorance can be exploited by the producers of media (some of whom are clearly just as ignorant of women as the boys they’re selling to). Sometimes this void is filled with vile and misogynistic media, reflective of their frustration, but given the extremely low levels of sexual crimes, it clearly functions as a release rather than an incitement. (That may not necessarily work in other cultures).
Japan is not particularly a Christian nation either, so they are not restrained necessarily by Christian morality. To be sure, Buddhism and Shinto impose their own religious restrictions, but they figure differently. But that’s another reason to understand that theirs is a different culture that does not match our own.
Alas, not everyone understands the differences in culture. Some on the left have taken it upon themselves to try to force wokeness on Japanese animation studios, citing a worldwide market (while really only wanting to push North American leftist standards as if they were worldwide). Some studios have bent, and discovered the truth of “Get woke, go broke”, while others have said that they make Japanese animation for Japanese people, and if anyone else likes it, that’s just a bonus.
Seriously. Which led to an Anime called Shimoneta (“Shimoneta to Iu Gainen ga Sonzai Shinai Taikutsu na Sekai”) where they posit a society where even dirty jokes are suppressed and the population is kept utterly ignorant about sexual matters, which leads to the main characters finding out in their own way, and it goes very unhinged very quickly. We can pretend we keep these matters private, but there IS a cultural context to how men and women relate that a society promulgates to its youth. We’re unconscious of it most of the time because we’re soaking in it. If you don’t believe it, consider the difference between how Western and Islamic societies treat women. Or how that culture has changed over the last few decades.
(Neither of these are actually from Shimoneta. But the sheer Ignorance....)
I just yesterday read "Common Sense Is My Superpower", which I have just learned here today is a novelization of KonoSuba. It's weird and full of kink, but hilarious.