Episode Transcript
This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.
Morgan Sung: Hey, a quick heads up, this episode includes discussion of sexual topics. So listen with care.
Drea Ramirez: I really found myself in like high school, college, when I was very open about liking anime because I liked it in secret for so long.
Morgan Sung: Drea Ramirez struggled to fit in growing up, and she said other girls bullied her on the playground for liking anime. And then, as a teenager, she stumbled across an anime called Shoujo Sect. Shoujo Sect is a three-episode miniseries set in an all-girls school. It follows two childhood friends who fall in love, but face a few roadblocks in their relationship. And as they figure out their feelings for each other, their classmates have a lot of sex.
Drea Ramirez: And I was like, “Oh no way! I get to watch this crazy show that has all these very soap opera-y plot twists in it, but also they get to have lesbian sex in it. That’s crazy!” It was just a lot of lesbians getting together at this all-girls school.
Morgan Sung: And the sex scenes? Well, they definitely did not hold anything back.
Drea Ramirez: And I was Catholic, so I was like, this feels very sacrilegious. This feels very like, “Oh, I shouldn’t be watching this.”.
Morgan Sung: Drea watched all of it and then started exploring the genre.
Drea Ramirez: After that, I started identifying as queer. It just felt like there was more excitement in the idea of romance, whereas prior to that, I was dating a lot of men and I didn’t really understand what was fun about it. And seeing all the different stories and all of the connections that the characters had with each other, I was kind of like,”Well, I feel like there’s a lot more to look forward to than I thought.”
Morgan Sung: What Drea had discovered was some classic lesbian hentai, also known as yuri. Let’s do a little primer here. Hentai is a catchall term for sexually explicit anime, manga, or video games. Anime being Japanese animated shows or movies, and manga, Japanese comic books. Hentai is basically anime porn, and it’s rarely vanilla. The genre has been criticized for depicting violent and ethically questionable scenarios. Sometimes there are tentacles going into places you’d never expect tentacles to go. But Drea says what she appreciated were the experimental aspects of the genre that challenged traditional modes of culture and sexuality.
Drea Ramirez: There’s a lot of queerness too in hentai that helped me to find different parts of myself. Obviously it’s lewd and strange, but you know, when you’re just a little bit different than everybody else growing up, there’s a little bit of comfort in that.
Morgan Sung: Hentai anime occupies a weird space in the content ecosystem. There are subscription-based platforms that give users access to hentai manga, those erotic comics, but there are no legal streaming platforms for hentai anime. So fans either have to buy DVDs or Blu-rays directly from distributors or they pirate it on illegal streaming sites.
This actually echoes a trend in the larger industry of streaming. Think of the way that HBO Max has been gutting animation. The platform not only canceled dozens of original animated shows, but also removed them from streaming entirely. They did the same thing with the OG Looney Tunes and most Cartoon Network shows. Many artists didn’t find out that their work was on the chopping block until after the shows were removed.
The work that artists put into animation is constantly devalued. Meanwhile, the federal government continues to threaten free speech and any expression of non-traditional gender and sexuality norms. So what can we learn about the state of art and the internet by looking at hentai?
This is Close All Tabs. I’m Morgan Sung, tech journalist, and your chronically online friend, here to open as many browser tabs as it takes to help you understand how the digital world affects our real lives. Let’s get into it.
Okay, so I realized some of our audience might be familiar with hentai, but others of you might be hearing about it for the first time. So, you know how this goes.
We’re opening a new tab. Ready? Hentai explained.
Drea Ramirez, who we heard from earlier, well, after her anime awakening, she ended up pursuing a career in the field, working in anime and manga marketing and distribution. She’s worked at Crunchyroll, which is the leading anime streaming service in the West, and then at FAKKU, which is another subscription platform, but for hentai manga. She’s gonna walk us through her experience with the industry.
A lot of people have this perception of hentai as pervy anime for men with lots of tentacles involved. But how would you characterize hentai? How would you describe the community that’s interested in it and drawing it?
Drea Ramirez: Honestly, I think I’ve met more women who are interested in the genre working in hentai than I did in anime, weirdly. And with a lot of the creators, there are people who are working in mainstream anime under pseudonyms. They’re able to experiment in a way that they can’t really do when there’s big corporations backing everything that they’re working on.
Like they’re not allowed to make it openly homosexual. So they’re like, “Hmm, I want my main characters here to be in an openly homosexual relationship. Maybe I’ll just make a hentai on the side where I make two characters that mysteriously look a lot like my characters do that.”
There’s a lot of freedom in creating hentai that I think both the fans really like and also the creators themselves that are making it. They get to draw something weird. And I think that there is a lot of interest in just sort of exploring that experimental art and seeing how that relates to just like sexuality. Because I think right now in a time where we have access to so many types of porn, it’s like, you know, how do we find something that’s different, that’s not maybe just kind of the common, you know woman being treated a certain way. It’s more like, there’s a lot of women taking charge and hentai scenarios and sometimes you know it’s more about like a fantasy of power in either direction.
I think a lot of people… not just queer people identify with weirdly experimental queer storylines within hentai and they might not even see it as queer.
Morgan Sung: It’s like exploring your relationship with body.
Drea Ramirez: Yeah, it’s a lot about the relationship with the body and your relationship with how other people perceive your body because hentai is more than just, “Okay, this is a hot thing.” Like a lot of the time there’s a story. And sometimes there’s even like these huge world building epic storylines in hentai where you’re learning about a whole kingdom and their economy and how sex work is applied to that economy. And it’s like, it’s just a very in-depth exploration of the human psyche.
Morgan Sung: What is the difference between hentai and anime like where do you draw the line? Is is hentai considered porn?
Drea Ramirez: Yes. So hentai is hard because there’s a lot of anime that’s called ecchi that is like kind of borderline anime and hentai, but it’s more of a tease. So they’re sexy anime, but they’re not explicitly showing you sex scenes. So there is like a big stigma even amongst people who aren’t that familiar with anime that anime comes off as hentai because of the sexual situations. I don’t know. I’ve always wondered why that was such a bad thing. I thought that anime was kind of similar to hentai, like an experimental ground for trying things out. And that’s why I think it’s so popular is they weren’t telling your standard traditional stories that Americans are used to. They were experimenting with really big worlds and genres and more mature characters and storylines than we were used to, and that really resonated with a lot of people.
My unpopular opinion is that I don’t think hentai and anime are that different, but I think a lot of people see them as vastly different playing fields.
Morgan Sung: So before the internet, before the current state of streaming that we have now, how were people discovering and getting into and consuming hentai? Was it different from how they got into anime?
Drea Ramirez: Before, if you were going to buy hentai, you were probably going to buy a doujinshi, which is a fan-made comic, somewhere like Comiket, which has a Japanese convention that artists get together and they draw porn of their favorite characters, which a lot of American fans have done too, you know, with Star Trek being the big one, Star Wars as well. It was very similar to the fan convention.
Morgan Sung: Between these fan conventions and the advent of home video, anime porn started taking off in Japan in the 80s and eventually made its way into the US when regular anime did. Anime fans circulated pirated VHS tapes from Japan, which made their way into sex shops. Japanese studios tried to officially distribute hentai anime in the US, but they faced immense backlash from film critics and religious groups. Until the OG tentacle porn anime premiered in 1993.
Urotsukidoji Clip: [Speaking Japanese]
Morgan Sung: Urotsukidoji was an erotic horror anime that got around Japan’s censorship laws by depicting tentacles and other monstrous appendages in sex scenes, instead of male genitalia. It was super controversial, but a hit. Screenings across the world sold out. So companies that were already distributing non-pornographic anime in the U.S. started also distributing hentai anime, first through VHS tapes, and then DVDs. But as streaming took off in the 2000s, so did piracy.
That’s a new tab. Hentai tries to go legit.
In 2007, Netflix changed the game when it introduced on-demand video streaming. Streaming existed before that, just on pirate sites. A lot of anime was still only released in Japanese, so fans took it upon themselves to add subtitles in English and other languages and then upload them to pirate sites, and pirate platforms weren’t genre-specific, so they included both non-explicit anime and hentai anime.
Crunchyroll, the biggest anime platform, actually started out as a pirate site. When it first launched in 2006, it let users upload their own content, like those fan subs. But within a few years, the company removed all pirated content and instead offered licensed, subtitled anime episodes. Fans just had to pay a subscription fee to watch it. But Drea said that when she worked at Crunchyroll, the company made an effort to avoid being associated with hentai.
Drea Ramirez: It just seemed like the executives that were in power at the time were really afraid of that connection because they got into it and thought, “Oh, anime is so cute. My kids would like it.” A lot of them had kids. A lot them were very family forward.
Morgan Sung: One site did try to be the “Crunchyroll” of hentai. FAKKU, names for the Japanese pronunciation of the F word, had started out as a pirate site. But like Crunchyroll, the company went legit and started offering licensed hentai manga. Here’s FAKKU CEO, Jacob Grady.
Jacob Grady: We really put a lot of time and effort into communicating with our users and just the market in general that, “This thing that you have been reading or watching for free online your whole life, actually that’s like something that someone made and they’re counting on you to support them if you enjoy it.”
Morgan Sung: The company also launched a streaming service for hentai anime, too. And then they acquired a pirate site called Hentai Haven, which had a massive library of hentai titles uploaded by users. But FAKKU never offered licensed versions of Hentai Haven’s library, and ultimately shut down their anime streaming platform entirely. Even though FAKKU acquired one of their largest competitors, they just couldn’t compete with the sheer volume of pirate sites that replaced it.
Jacob Grady: If you go on Google and you type in a particular title, it’s going to be 20 pirate websites before you find anything even close to a legitimate source of it. So I think piracy is one of the real reasons that we’ve struggled to make that work. But I have no doubt that we’ll try again.
Morgan Sung: It’s not just competition from these pirate sites that makes platforming adult content an uphill battle. Pretty much every legal streaming service draws the line at hentai. Their programming might include some explicit sex scenes or the ecchi that Drea referred to, but they won’t go as far as platforming actual porn. This is usually to maintain mainstream appeal and to keep advertisers. And Drea said there’s another reason too.
Drea Ramirez: Oh, it’s payment processors. I wish that it was a more interesting reason, but it’s just that there’s these companies like your credit card, they decide what they will platform basically. Like there was a reason that FAKKU got removed from Shopify. They just decided one day like, “Oh, FAKKU is hentai. Hentai is nasty, sexual, whatever. Let’s not let people use their Shopify account.” And there was this big rush to go and get payment processed in another way. And it just really, it’s scary when you’re working in like a fringe industry that you can get banned at any moment.
Morgan Sung: This issue is not just about moral judgments. Some credit card companies now block payments for adult content to comply with a set of laws known as FOSTA and SESTA. These laws were passed in 2018 with the intention of stopping online sex trafficking. It makes online platforms liable for advertising sex work. Since the language of the law is so vague, any adult content could be perceived as enabling trafficking, even if it’s totally consensual sex work.
Online platforms responded by blocking all adult content in order to avoid liability, like when Tumblr banned porn. Most social media platforms even forbid artistic depictions of nudity. We’ll get back to that after this break. Okay, we’re back. FOSTA and SESTA affect more than what you can and can’t post online. Jacob, the CEO of FAKKU, said that after the laws passed, other companies stopped working with adult content platforms.
Jacob Grady: When we got the platform from Coinbase, I was like, “Isn’t the whole point of crypto to like allow for this type of stuff?” So it’s something that kind of like impacts us via other companies. And I think that they’re just doing that as a means of limiting their liability and their risk. We can’t have an app on your iPhone. We can’t have an app on your TV, which really hurts us and limits the type of business we can do.
Morgan Sung: So, given the legal ramifications, many streaming platforms don’t want to touch adult content. In 2022, after FOSTA and SESTA passed, Crunchyroll bought an online video store called Right Stuf Anime, and then phased out all of the store’s hentai content and products.
Drea Ramirez: There is a lot of stigma that comes with that. And a lot online sex workers, like women who are on Only Fans and even just content creators that are creating sexual content, they deal with very similar issues with payment processing, with shadow bans on social media. So I can see why Crunchyroll desperately doesn’t wanna be associated with these sex workers.
Morgan Sung: Hentai anime is still accessible, but only on pirate sites. It’s challenging to shut them down because most of them operate overseas outside of US jurisdiction. They can also avoid legal action by making users themselves upload this content. If they do get a copyright infringement notice, they can just take down that user’s video and inevitably someone else will upload it again. And like Jacob said, they can keep costs down by using shady practices that legitimate platforms could never get away with.
Jacob Grady: They’re doing things like hosting those hentai anime videos on YouTube and then they’ll like set them as private and they’ll find a way to embed this private video onto the website and then, they’re not even paying for bandwidth, it’s like indirectly being paid for by Google. And then this pirate website is serving this 1080p flawless video and when we go and try to build a service like that, you know, we have to actually build it from the ground up and obey all of the laws and all the rules with these companies and it’s way more expensive. And it really becomes difficult to compete with them.
Morgan Sung: With FOSTA and SESTA penalizing legal streaming platforms and anti-porn crackdowns and age verification laws in the works across the US, there’s not a lot of incentive for pirate sites to go legit. So users upload pirated videos, and then the site runs ads or offers subscriptions that users can only pay for using cryptocurrency. The sites are making money, and the viewers get to watch shows that they can’t find anywhere else. But the hentai artists that are producing anime aren’t getting anything out of these pirate sites.
Drea Ramirez: And it’s a shame because they’re the ones who pay the price often times like a fan will pay the price and that they can’t watch something, but an artist will pay the price and they’re not making the income that they should be making for the amount of effort and time that they put into their piece.
Morgan Sung: What kind of road blocks do you hentai artists face when it comes to monetizing their content if platforms aren’t willing to platform it?
Drea Ramirez: Right. I mean, that’s it. There’s a lot of platforms that aren’t willing to platform their stuff, and then they have very limited options of who to work with, or a lot the times they’ll resort to selling their stuff on Patreon.
Morgan Sung: Patreon allows nudity and sexually explicit content, but only if it’s behind a paywall. It’s one of many subscription platforms that allow artists to monetize adult content.
Drea Ramirez: A lot of artists do swear by how much they’re able to make monthly on Patreon, but a lot of them have to also work as marketers at that point. It’s really hard to come up with a story, draw that whole story, and then now you have to market yourself. That’s just like being an entire team of people.
Morgan Sung: Artists can also upload hentai content to porn sites, but it’s more challenging to monetize. Pornhub, for example, doesn’t include animation in its exclusivity program, which grants creators copyright protection and higher revenue. So paywall subscription platforms tend to be the more sustainable choice.
Drea Ramirez: Like a lot of artists are turning now to crowdfunding, not just in hentai, but just in general, because there’s such a lack of funding everywhere due to economic reasons. And just the state of the entertainment industry after the pandemic bubble, like streaming is not a giant in the way that it was in 2020 anymore.
Morgan Sung: What’s happening to hentai artists is an industry-wide issue. The streaming model is changing animation as a genre, and artists are the ones who are disadvantaged. Animation is often a place for experimentation and expression, but the business pressures of the streaming era are stifling the spirit.
That’s a new tab. Are streaming wars killing animation?
Anime has become very popular in the last decade, and for streaming platforms, it’s all about numbers. The current streaming model really prioritizes audience retention. Viewers who will watch content all the way through to the end, and then come back for more. But looking exclusively at data doesn’t always paint the full picture. Here’s Drea again.
Drea Ramirez: There was a second where Crunchyroll thought they could make an algorithm to determine whether anime was good or not because they were like, “Well we don’t want to keep wasting money on these huge titles that don’t move.” So obviously that didn’t work, um, there’s no way to tell — there’s too many factors. It might be like the world’s best director but maybe one of the voice actors has an annoying voice — this is a reference to Black Clover — and maybe you spent millions and millions of dollars on this anime, and no one wants to watch it, because this guy just screams in a way that no one likes.
Asta: [Screaming]
Drea Ramirez: And Crunchyroll’s like, “Okay, well, we have to get smart because Netflix is coming for us.” It was interesting to see all of the different executives kind of trying to figure out how to gamify, figuring out what would be the ideal anime. The business people were just always pushing to get more and more content squeezed out that they thought Americans would like, but there’s not an algorithm that can tell you if something is good.
Morgan Sung: So a lot of streaming platforms obviously see our attention as currency. It’s like with the data, how many viewers are coming back? How long are they watching the show for? How does that affect the kinds of genres that are prioritized when it comes to to anime?
Drea Ramirez: Well shonen is king. It’s the anime that’s made for boys. It literally means boy. It’s just a big popular genre. This is the big like cliffhanger genre where Goku from Dragon Ball Z, like, he has to defeat this guy but his power level isn’t high enough.
Dragon Ball Z Narrator: The only way to find out is to stay tuned to the next exciting episode of Dragon Ball Z!
Drea Ramirez: Then there’s Shoujo, which literally means girl.
Morgan Sung: A classic shoujo anime is Nana. It’s about these two young women who are both new to Tokyo and they immediately hit it off and become friends. Some would even say soulmates.
Nana: I don’t really know how to explain it, but when I was shaking Nana’s hand, I felt this warmth that went straight to my heart.
Morgan Sung: And while there is drama involved, the show is really about these girls navigating their 20s together. The episodes just don’t have the same intense cliffhanger endings as shonen in anime might.
Drea Ramirez: And the stakes are not ususally as high. Obviously, like, boy mainstream stuff has a higher budget anyway, just because of misogyny, but there’s also this element of dire stakes every week. A lot of shoujo watchers, they don’t have the same viewership style as shonen watchers, but it doesn’t mean no one’s watching it. It just means they might be watching it after it airs. Maybe they don’ want to wait every week, they just want to binge it with a bowl of ice cream or something. Even if it’s just data, if you start to see all of the things called girl being deprioritized and all the things called boy get prioritized, it does paint a very specific picture.
Morgan Sung: Beyond hentai and anime, it seems like animation now is just not a priority for a lot of these platforms. Like HBO and Netflix and Disney, anime may be very lucrative, but it’s so rare that an original animated show will get renewed for a second season. And at the same time, they’re always pumping out like new reality TV shows or live action reboots of like existing animation. Why do you think that is?
Drea Ramirez: Taste. I’m just kidding. Like live action is just easier in a lot of ways, depending on what type of live action you’re making. But if you’re doing a reality show, especially, you don’t have a team of people drawing a character, building a world. Animation just takes a really long time. There’s a lot effort that goes into it. And it’s just not seen as a positive medium because it’s associated with kids. It’s not seen as like a true art form.
Morgan Sung: A lot of this issue boils down to the fact that animation alone is seen as its own category, instead of a medium to tell stories across all genres.
Drea Ramirez: What makes animation more than just a style? What makes it a medium? Because a lot of those executives see it as a genre where they see a movie is animated and they go, oh, the genre of this movie is “animated movie.” But it’s not just, it’s, you know, it’s an action movie. It has a heart wrenching story about, I don’t know, World War II, something random. But they’ll see it just, “Well, it’s animated.” And I’ve never really understood that disconnect.
Morgan Sung: The streaming model might be throttling animation, but it hasn’t stopped people from engaging in art that’s provocative and strange. The fact that hentai anime has been excluded from the traditional animation industry is also what allows it to stay weird and to push boundaries.
Drea Ramirez: There is a level of using the word degenerate in a positive way where they’ll say, “Well, I’m just a degenerate. Of course, I want to see Lara Croft do weird stuff with a cave monster.” It’s funny because you’ll still see very different sides where someone will be like, “Ew, Lara Croft would never do that.” I don’t know if I’m answering your question. I’m talking about monster sex now.
But I do think that there is still a lot of homophobia in the community where people will engage with queer-coded art, but they may not know that it’s queer-coded. And they’re just experimenting with that art and how they feel with it, whether they know it or not. And it just feels like there is that element of experimentation that will never go away with hentai because there will always be a want to see things be different.
Morgan Sung: So don’t worry. No matter where it’s being platformed, the art of tentacle porn is alive and well. Okay, so normally at this part of the show, we would be closing all these tabs together, but this time we wanted to send you over to a new tab at the show Never Post. We’ve been collaborating with them to explore two different sides to this fascinating subject and they’ve made a piece with a slightly different angle. So here’s Mike Rugnetta from Neverpost to tell you about their episode. Hi Mike, thanks for joining us.
Mike Rugnetta: Hi Morgan, thanks for having me.
Morgan Sung: Mike, tell us about Never Post, tell us about yourself.
Mike Rugnetta: So NeverPost is a show that I host. It is a podcast about the internet that I make with some friends of mine. And we are working on a segment right now that is about the rise of the platform. So when you think about Facebook or X or Flickr or YouTube, these are certain kinds of internet infrastructure that we’ve come to call platforms. And so we’re asking both, how did they rise to prevalence? And also what is it like when they go away, maybe, eventually?
And so that has necessitated us looking at all different kinds of media types, including pornography and animated pornography, as it were. And Morgan, your research on hentai is one of the things that’s gonna help us answer that question.
Morgan Sung: Yeah, I am now a hentai expert.
Mike Rugnetta: For better or for worse, I’m hoping mostly for the better.
Morgan Sung: For better, I think. Yeah, I have better opinions for sure now.
Mike Rugnetta: Surely this comes up in casual conversation all the time, and now you can contribute very readily.
Morgan Sung: All the time. Thanks so much for joining us, Mike. Thanks Morgan. You can find Never Post on your podcast app of choice or look for the link in our show notes. Okay. Now, let’s close all these tabs.
Close All Tabs is a production of KQED Studios and is reported and hosted by me, Morgan Sung. Our Producer is Maya Cueva. Chris Egusa is our Senior Editor. Jen Chien is KQED’s Director of Podcasts and helps edit the show.
Original music and sound design by Chris Egusa. Additional music by APM. Mixing and mastering by Brendan Willard and Katherine Monahan. Audience engagement support from Maha Sanad and Alana Walker. Katie Sprenger is our Podcast Operations manager. And Holly Kernan is our chief content officer.
Support for this program comes from Birong Hu and supporters of the KQED Studios Fund. Some members of the KQED podcast team are represented by the Screen Actors Guild, American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, San Francisco, Northern California Local.
This episode’s keyboard sounds were submitted by Alex Tran and recorded on his white Epomaker Hi75 keyboard with Fogruaden Red Samurai keycaps and Gateron Milky Yellow Pro V2 switches.
If you have feedback or a topic you think we should cover, hit us up at CloseAllTabs@kqed.org. Follow us on Instagram @CloseAllTabsPod or drop it on Discord. We’re in the Close All tabs channel at discord.gg/kqed. And if you’re enjoying the show, give us a rating on Apple podcasts or whatever platform you use.
Thanks for listening!
