Hentai's Effects

Before I start I just want to state that this thread is for dicussing hentai's effects on how anime and manga are precieved by the general public.

As anyone who has been paying attention to anime news recently will know, it's becoming more and more common that anime and manga are being instantly qualified as porn. Most of this stems from pedophiles having hentai that involves young girls. One can just look at the recent deal in Canada for proof. A pedophile was arrested and had alot of hentai and manga involving young girls in it and shortly after the Canadian goverment delcared that all anime and manga were porn. Granted that this didn't last long, a few months later they took it back, but it proves how hentai and have people thinking that all anime and manga are porn. There have also been instances where the hentai Bible Black was shown in a college class in some school in Europe to show the students the effects of "black magic".

It's also becoming a problem here in the US. Just a short while ago in my colleges newspaper there was an article about porn and in it it stated that anime was all porn. The statment was retracted and the paper apologized to our anime club for what was printed. We also had an instance of a member out the SciFi/Fantasy club telling everyone that all we did was watch hentai. That member was later kicked out by there club president who is also a member of the anime club.

You would think that with all that has been happening recently involving hentai that anime fans would try to not give off the image that people that all anime and manga are porn. But sadly such is not the case. Recently I went to AWA and everytime I went into the dealer's room there was always a large crowd around the booths that sold hentai.

Please feel free to discuss.

Heh, although not a big Anime fan I do enjoy many anime series but also I am a big hater of Hentai or anything that is "Cartoon porn". There is a MAJOR difference between the two, anime and hentai that is. I got a friend at work who is a big anime fan and told me that anime and hentai could be the same thing and he also admitted to watching hentai, to avoid co-worker conflicts I kept my opinions about him and his hentai to myself.

Anime has coolness, for instance Cowboy Bebop, Full Metal Alchemist, Gundam, etc. are fictional cartoons that are way better than american cartoon (in my opinion). In anime there is more action, better plots, and cool looking characters. Nowadays youngsters are turning there eyes to anime with all the WEAK cartoons they give in the US.

Hentai to me is how nasty a cartoon could be. One time, one of my best friends who was downloading real porn for a friend, somehow ended up downloading Hentai. Unfortunately I was there and I got to see how weird it is.... To make matters worse my friend's sister witnessed us watching it and stated that "it's bad enough but acceptable for guys to be watching regular porn but cartoon sex.... what the hell is wrong with you guys?"

I laughed my ass off as she did have a point. Hentai to me is for the deranged, the same could be said about regular porn but as anime is the extreme type of cartoon (japanese cartoon for the elitists), hentai is the extreme type of cartoon porn and most of the things that happen in it CAN'T even be in regular porn.... Trust me:

"Often, H[entai] artists try to portray situations in the most extreme manner possible, in order to break the boundaries of the viewer's comfort zone. This results in artists competing to show successively more excessive situations over time. An example would include bukkake and group sex, which demonstrates extreme sex that isn't usually performed by the average person. Other forms of demonstrating extreme sexual activity include bondage, tentacles, or other fetishes. Some artists may prefer to do the opposite, and focus on lighter titillation and nudity, or on character relationships and story."

Which makes my point...

But only the ignorant mistake Anime for Hentai. Not many adults watch anime so when they see hentai and see anime they become confused and make annoying assumations about the two. In the teenage world, the cool kids don't watch anime and if you do you're a loser, that was way back then but now big anime fans are the losers and need a life. As if going to the mall everydayand blowing all your money on clothes and shoes to impress people at school is a great achievement in life. Stereotyping is part of the problem when it comes to this. Anime is more than a cartoon but others don't realize that and claim that people (adults and teens) who watch it are childish or immature.

This is all fairly ironic. (Especially the "Cartoon Porn" comment)

A few months ago I logged onto ZU from school to check my messages. (This was back when I still had the FMA avatar) A student in my class saw my avatar and said, and I quote, "You watch anime? You know that's porn, right?"

He claimed that he knew that anime was nothing but cartoon porn, and that his proof came from the animes on Adult Swim. (How he got this "proof" I'll never know)

Fortunatly, not everybody at my school is like that. A great deal of people watch anime (Mostly FMA, Gundam, and Trinity Blood), and don't draw the annoying conclusions that quite a few others do.

This issue hasn't really come up here yet, but may at some point. The general feeling about it though from most Australian anime fans can be sumed up by the expression what the hell is wrong with japanese people. An expresion used in the monthly video games and anime magazine Hyper, most often in relation to tentecales and school girls. Its kind of a veberal shrug of the shoulders then getting on with it. Stopping to explain to the truely ignorant that hentai is not what is shown on television or can pick up from your local EB and that disney also has its fair share of fan created erotic/pornogrphic art out there.

I was just thinking, anime is now for fan service in shows aimed at teens and adults. For those leading a more sheltered life seeing a brief glimpse of underwear may make them uncomfortable and thus they leap to the wrong conclusion. In regards to Otaking's comments, I do wish politicians would do their research first.

Saying Hetai is like Anime is like saying Porn is like Reality. It shows you don't have a life!

My thoughts woudl pretty much echo Fireball's. At the moment it is a bit of a non-issue.

Most people, I think, on first viewing anime would categorize it as a) cartoons or b) porn. There is no middleground; there is no actual category for just plain 'anime'. It is either one or the other. That system of categorization is, of course, for the uninitiated. Most video game fans or other youth pop culture gurus know what anime is. The popularization of things like Spirited Away is starting to increase general awareness. On the other hand, the fact that 4Kids Entertainment (a cartoon distribution company) has fairly recently bought out Madman Entertainment (essentially Australia's sole anime distributor) makes it seem like anime is a bit cartoon-ish.

An expresion used in the monthly video games and anime magazine Hyper, most often in relation to tentecales and school girls

Ah, so true. I love some of the quotes from that magazine. "Going to E3 had me feeling like a little Japanese school girl. Not that I'm not always feeling like a bit of Japanese school girl action though."

Well, this is where you can see the ignorance and stupidity of some people in the world today. Classifying everything or generalizing everything under one single circumstance is pretty sad. Where's the intelligence that human race is claiming to have?

But Hentai, I don't see anything wrong with it. It's not that erotic and the actions are pretty much "bleh". Although I do see a trend between Hentai and normal anime and that is out of proportion "mega boobies" and "ultra thin thighs".

The costumes are pretty much the standard for all Japanese animations, so they are nothing too special.

Hentai does not...err..."turn me on" whatsoever. Actually, in japanese, hentai means "strange video" or "strange / funny movie", and has nothing to do with porn. In Japan, hentai is like an Adam Sandler movie.

My beliefs on hentai can be summed up in one of the shortest sentances ever:

Funniest thing ever.

Seriously. My friend wanted to buy hentai at a anime convention, so we got some. Later, he realized that he hadn't read the backs correctly and what he thought was lesbian porn was actually regular heterosexual stuff. We watched it, and laughed so hard it hurt, all the while going on about how unrealistic it was. We didn't take it seriously, so it was awesomely funny. Granted, my friends are perverts, and I have some degree of maturity, and even I thought it was funny.

That being said, anime and hentai are two very different things. And the next time someone says they're the same, I'm gonna accuse them of being perverts because they read trashy romance novels for the "unique plotlines."

people might think anime and manga is porn because thats the way they think, and if alot of people think like this it means the people who claimed it was porn, really thought it was porn, making them perverted for mistranslating that
[I probably just insulted alot of people, i dont know.]

Hentai can be anime or manga, as it's a genre of it...so it isn't seperate. Just as much as porn not being seperate as a genre of art, photography, and film. I kinda agree with Lone Wolf, people who classify a thing by one of it's genres is just ignorant. Why the hell would you care what a person who does that say anyway? It's obvious that they're ignorant about it, so let them be that way. Unless they were curious about anime, and wanting to get into it, then yes, maybe you should correct them. But other than that, they really don't care.

Originally Posted by Otaking

There have also been instances where the hentai Bible Black was shown in a college class in some school in Europe to show the students the effects of "black magic".

Holy ****, they showed Bible Black!? Wow. Now they think that black magic gives girls penises. Lawl.

Anime and hentai... I enjoy both. If given the choice between a rack of hentai DVDs or a rack of anime DVDs, I'd choose the anime. Once you've seen one hentai movie, you've seen them all.

Originally Posted by Earth

Once you've seen one hentai movie, you've seen them all.

Omg, that is so true. Most of Hentai episodes or movies are so similar to one another that you'll feel you've watched the same thing over and over again.

I remember a few years ago when I was really starting to get into anime, my mom didn't like it that much because she thought a lot of it was hentai. And I told her that a lot of it was, but there was just as much not-hentai anime and there is hentai anime, if not more.

Saying all anime is hentai is like saying all movies are porn.

Originally Posted by Moonlight

Hentai does not...err..."turn me on" whatsoever. Actually, in japanese, hentai means "strange video" or "strange / funny movie", and has nothing to do with porn. In Japan, hentai is like an Adam Sandler movie.

I thought "Hentai" means "Pervert", but you might be right too.
LONG LIVE SANDLER!!!!

I think it's not our problem but Japan's, they are the ones making the hentai, they are the ones making every single popular show into hentai, and they are the ones who make female charaters overly sexual attractive.