Sticky Pages: Monster Girls With A Need For Seed Review
Good day everyone, and welcome to our highly infrequent print media review series Sticky Pages! Our last one of these was well over a year ago. Today, we’re going to be talking about the accessibility of hentai, print books and how the internet changed both. Let’s begin.
Mediums Managing Markets
So I snagged the first physical hentai I have ever owned a month ago.
Monster Girls With A Need For Seed was something that got a snort from me when I saw it suggested to me via the unseen hand of The Algorithm (™), a unseen hand that guides us across every platform now. One that’s incredibly easy to fuck up if you create any kind of content. Normally, I don’t add things like straight up hentai or porn on my wishlist. Like, I know people that make both and I’d way rather see their stuff. There’s also the omnipresent puritanical catholic guilt underpinning my morality even still. Sure, I can be a sex worker, a dedicated student of the occult, and have forty-two sex toys hidden in my home. But physical pornography? That’s taking it a step too far. I might make Jesus cry.
Yet I added the tome to my wishlist all the same. What the hell, I thought. It arrived on my doorstep a few months later, and after reading it I had a hell of a realization about why hentai doujinshis in particular are still incredibly niche in the west.
A lot has changed in the decades I’ve been alive in terms of cultural imports. Toonami isn’t the only game in town anymore for anime. Studio Ghibli is held in extremely high regards the world over for their animation. The market itself is a veritable seasonal buffet of whatever interests you might have, from slice of life to mecha to shonen/shoujo and more. Availability and accessibility is higher than it’s ever been simply by audience demand. Arguments on subs, dubs and translations be damned-you can get ahold of “japanese comics/cartoons” at a scale that would have been unheard as little as twenty years ago.
Literally none of this would have happened without piracy, fan dubs and scanlations.
I’m not going to argue the relative morality of such antics towards creators, this isn’t the place for that. But to pretend even for a second that the modern anime/manga scene would exist without the tireless efforts of people working for nothing save sharing the work with others is naive at best and disingenuous at worst. “Piracy didn’t help” is an industry wide lie swallowed to ignore the obvious truth.
However, support official releases when you can, blah blah blah.
While we’re largely past that point with mainstream anime and manga-the same can’t be said for Hentai and doujinshis, things which exist almost universally within the 1990’s style of “jolly rodger” importing. Without piracy I highly, highly doubt I’d even be writing this review at all. The necessity of piracy stems from the fact an overwhelming amount of the market can’t or won’t be imported due to international law. To spare you a very long, dry academic rant: What American publishers consider obscene and what Japanese publishers consider obscene are two radically different things. Pirates fill the gap between the two, often acting as “at will” translators for commission.
Which makes the fact Monster Girls With A Need For Seed arrived on my doorstep all the more intriguing. It means not only was there a market for this volume (so, guaranteed profit) but that it complied with international censorship via the publishers. Did something get cut from the volume for that to happen? I’ve absolutely no idea, but the fact it’s in my hands at all means that the market is starting to widen just a smidge towards making such things a bit more acceptable.
You can point to aheago hoodies with stolen art all you want to-hentai isn’t mainstream in the way anime or even other adult content is. You’re just terminally online. In the west at least, it’s a niche in an ocean that caters to niche interests. The rise of anime didn’t coincide with the rise of hentai, but rather the internet itself made both possible simply by connecting people.
But is the work any good?
Mangaka Circle Jerk Party
Published by Fakku (a company that itself started off strictly as a piracy platform), Monster Girls With A Need For Seed is an anthology style work featuring short entries from a variety of talent. Meaning, there can and will sometimes be jarring aesthetic transitions between each story.
The narratives themselves also vary, but tend not to stray far from the vanilla hetro path of missionary style sex between the characters. There also seems to be a central focus around the couple’s starting families, with at least a few of the works straight up ending with a pregnant house wife. Man, Shinzo Abe still hasn’t given up, eh? I suppose that should be obvious from the title, but still.
There’s a variety of fem fauna on display, from the classics (wolf girls, succubi, oh my) to some you’d not expect, like golems constructed from the clay of Aphrodite’s temple. The male protags are often anything but smooth, tending to be bumbling horny himbos wondering just how the heck they wound up inside such a cute girl. This isn’t to say the stories are bad, far from it. Rather, the anthology is vanilla and warm, focusing on the plush curves of the girls while having male protagonists those reading likely can project themselves onto. It’s a safe anthology, one that is comfortable with nudity but not showing actual penetration (this is entirely due to Japanese law but I digress). If there was a cock to be seen in the work, it was usually buried between some incredible mounds.
Yet, I enjoyed my time with the anthology. Much like the market itself, Monster Girls With A Need For Seed has something for mainstream audiences and ecchi eccentrics. It’s not as wild as some of it’s contemporaries, and shares more with Monster Monsume than something like Monster Girl Quest. Cheeky, unafraid to unveil its massive tiddies. Yet to venture farther might have risked its physical publication or profitability. With Fakku as the publisher, I’m unsurprised.
Conclusion:
Monster Girls With A Need For Seed is a wonderfully soft, vanilla anthology with plenty of cute girls and variety to satiate you. It’s not a hardcore title, but I don’t necessarily think it needs to be. For me personally, the novelty of owning it in of itself begets opening the cover and pursuing the lurid contents within. Hentai’s niche in pop culture might be growing, but it’s doing so with the most timid of foot falls.
-j