He clearly sees much untapped potential in the medium of eromanga: why tell the same pornographic story over and over when you can use those patterns and principles as a stage to say something much more provocative in your work? The music video for Teddyloid’s song ME!ME!ME! has this mindset: what starts as an innocent fantasy of sexy dancing anime girls turns into a plot for a perverted otaku fighting against the addiction to smut that cost him a chance at real love. ShindoL’s division of ‘hentai’ and ‘manga’ aligns with the previously discussed difference between traditional and pornographic narratives. “back in the 90s or the 80s there were a lot more story-driven hentai manga about it’s sort of shifted over to the… ‘utilitarian’ purposes for hentai use so you’re getting a lot more hentai and a lot less manga”. ShindoL goes on to explain that he wanted such a response: Joey’s first point of order is discussing Metamorphosis (originally published as Henshin/‘Emergence’), and he cuts right to the heart of what made the manga so memorable: “coming for the hentai but staying for the story”. Recently, TheAnimeMan had a chance to interview ShindoL and get answers to many of the questions hentai readers would love to ask their favourite artists. ShindoL’s Metamorphosis doesn’t play by the rules. These are the rules, the patterns we trust when we come to enjoy some ‘me time’ with this material. Everything is supposed to serve this end – any narrative matter is just foreplay, or something to encourage the viewer to seek out this kind of fictional fulfillment again. In porn, we know what will happen next – characters will fuck, or be fucked, to engage in some other activity to stimulate the voyeur and make them satisfied with their fantasy. In traditional narratives, every element combines to serve the audience’s immersion into what will happen next, and the possible greater meanings of what’s happening now.

Pornography occupies a space in media that rebels against the idea that a story needs narrative themes and fleshed-out characters. But in the maelstrom of stories and drawings and bits of film that seem to serve little other purpose than titillation, like needles in haystacks, we often come across works marked ‘porn’ that strike us as something else by the end. The former is sexually explicit in a way that conveys some kind of recognizable artistic merit the latter has no such merit to speak of.

People like to uphold a firm line between ‘art’ and ‘porn’ there is a difference, they will say, between ‘erotica’ and mere pornography. “In many ways, it was both a tragic and a preachy story, but I wanted ‘Metamorphosis’ to be about seeing the charm of a girl who is going through genuine misfortune” – ShindoL, ‘Afterword’ to Metamorphosis

Hentai metamorphosis