Earlier today I was reading the good o’ RSS feed and came across the news about Kayano Ai joining the cast of a new web anime-to-be, a story (or more like a concept) regarding tights/legging/pantyhose fetishes. The copywriting, as translated, describes the characters by the type of stocking each character prefers. It’s kind of wild:

The cast []stars Yōko Hikasa as Yua Nakabeni, who likes 30 denier tights (sheer); Haruka Tomatsu as Ren Aikawa, who likes 60 denier tights (opaque); and Aya Suzaki as Homi Moegi, who likes 110 denier tights (thick).

Wild, textile wild.

Well, naturally, Kayano Ai voiced a hard-to-forget character that also wore tights in a different show and I think you can’t really go wrong with that. In the comments to that article [insert a picture of shooting fish in a barrel here] there was one person who raised the obvious point–why these really specific sexy kinks for anime projects (albeit a web short)? You know, I have no idea for an answer off the top of my head, but later on I came across this article which I’ll quote here:

If we’ve learned anything from the internet in the past 20 years, it’s that sex is synonymous with diversity. 

It struck me as too uncanny to be untrue–in that there is definitely a correlation between amount of sexual content and the amount of diversity, but I’m not so sure if there are any causation. In the context of censorship and conservative, lower-friction take on corporate policies on user-generated content, that definitely is the case. And it makes sense–it’s easy to build for one use case, it’s hard to build for countless use cases. It’s easy to build your product for the most common denominator than to customize to the rest of the world.

Which is to say, maybe the reason why there is all these kink anime is because, well, it’s a fairly liberated and diverse medium. It’s relatively inexpensive, it carries a lot of cultural capital and demands a fair amount of attention from its consumers versus other formats (e.g., any Youtuber content). It is independently (by large publishers, but) published for the most part still. Japanese people are less hung up about kinks than westerners on average. There is a culture of “anything goes” to an extent with otaku escapism.

So to wrap this up, I’ll just put that blurb about OppaiP leaving Marvelous here. Video games is definitely not as free, at least for “gamer” video games.

This is an average-ish use case.

In February, I flew to Indonesia, then Taipei, then Japan, for a 2-week trip. I think I’ve seen more people reading scanlation sites in public in Japan in my 10-ish days there than I have all year in 2018. Probably because I spent some time in places where people do these kind of things (very long train rides, overnight in Haneda). And I’m pretty sure some of these people are 100% Nipponjin, plus the manga they were reading weren’t even scanlated, so I guess the topic isn’t even correct.

The blueprint for manga out of the ghettos of widespread digital piracy is unclear, but it’s definitely not the first nor the last IP category that has to deal with it. There may not be a blueprint but there are definitely a lot of good ideas and best practices. Well, it’s a problem afar from me since I barely read any manga these days–I’m too busy crying over dead idol groups to read anything. OK, maybe I am still reading some old-ass rant about some science fiction writer who thinks he is a hotshot. By most measures, in 2019, Clarke is about as insightful as the average Youtube commenter. The future will humble all of us, even major Japanese publishers. If that is not the relevant takeaway here then I don’t know what is.