This Week in Anime

Spice World

Chris
Sylvia, I know it seems today that all you see is violence in movies and sex on TV. So I'm glad this anime season has at least one show providing some good, old-fashioned values. I don't know where they found the artist behind Even the Student Council Has Its Holes!, but they're clearly a believer in nice, clean, family fun.

Hey, any artist this dedicated to their craft must consider it a beautiful, inspiring form.

Breaking our customary column-opening kayfabe, "ryona" is, for those not in the know, a fetish based around artful depictions of sexualized violence. Hence, Muchimaro's mascot character for Student Council Holes (who, not to put too fine a point on it, is named "Komaro") has the propensity for getting run over, bleeding, and generally getting messed up.

They do it to other characters like Tan too. They're equal-opportunity.

Same! And that tracks on multiple fronts—you and I are both on record as fans of the perverse and holders of the belief that you have to be at least a little perverted to make truly impressive, inspiring art. While Holes has mostly been great comedy so far, I believe it has the potential to reach those really inspiring places.

Still, a fetish artist creating a great series so saucy it has to run on OceanVeil might not be surprising to some. But the broader point of this topic launchpad is that a lot of hit anime out there come from artists who cut their teeth on risque material. Hell, it's practically a cliché to point out how virtually all manga-ka dabbled in the doujin scene at least a little to start. But then some are more well-known than others, to the point that, like Muchimaro with Komaro, they can straight port their creations over to mainstream anime in a slightly less salacious form.

Nagatoro was something of a memetic avatar for this kind of fetishy material before the bowdlerized version of her manga hit the stands. Depending on what anime/manga message boards you were on, you knew about her. Forget open secret; this was just open.

What made it even less of a stretch is that when the teen-friendly version of Nagatoro was made, it turned out that experience writing heavily emotionally invested bullying fetish material actually made Nanashi pretty well equipped to explore the relationship, its ins and outs, from a rather respectful angle. It's almost wholesome in its depiction of a couple of kids who quickly realize what they're into and work to navigate along with their romantic feelings.

Right, this is why you can't diminish the hardcore side of authors' output, because in those arenas, a lot of them are still doing it for pure love of the material. So the same sense of care and authenticity is honed there because that's how they create art that resonates the hardest. In one way or the other.

It also creates interesting opportunities when these artists are steeped in these kinds of environments and the broader reactions to them. That is to say, the first season of Don't Toy with Me, Miss Nagatoro climaxes with an interrogation of what actually constitutes "pornographic" art and how much audience expectations and reads play into that. It's genuinely compelling, and is entirely borne out of the experiences of an artist who came up in these spaces, now pivoting to this different one!

Can't believe I lived to see Don't Toy with Me, Miss Nagatoro stay relevant into 2026, but that just again makes me grateful this version of the series turned out so well.

Because it can be too easy, as you say, for the day-to-day discourse to get caught up in their own concerns and judgments when they find out where the author of their favorite series might have originated. I remember a lot of collar-tugging back when folks saw some of the more out-there works from Land of the Lustrous author Haruko Ichikawa.

Artists are people, and them being both people and artists means that their art is going to be a primary vector for their feelings and indulgences. That's why I like art and the people you can see through it, and it's why I'm compelled by the artists whose more unfiltered excursions are known to be out there for comparison with their other material. Muchimaro is someone with a powerful personal love for cute characters getting wrecked, and also has a spot-on voice for depicting the awkward stages of adolescent growth and attraction.

That's not shameful, that's interesting. Who is this person? I want to know more.

It's why there's so much to be frustrated about with that aforementioned legislation against different kinds of saucy content. It's not just clamping down on the kinds of dirty pictures people want to look at—it's restricting the kinds of art people can create. It's such a wrong-headed move, especially since, as Nagatoro demonstrated, it shouldn't be the business of any prying body if someone created something for the "wrong" or "right" reason. Cutting loose has always been part of the process. Even Hokusai did "Dream of the Fisherman's Wife."

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Do I have to censor this one? Editors, that's my art-history-relevant tentacle porn.

Given the sorts of topics we've volleyed back and forth here over the years, I would hope they'd be aware of how grown-up we are. No way there are any teens who're discussing Yosuga no Sora.

The saucy stories themselves can just be the appreciable art if the author wants. It's why I'm grateful to Ryuta Amazume for giving us earnest BDSM rom-com Nana & Kaoru, or the brilliant exploitation of Rui Takatō's Booty Royale (now there's a guy who would have opinions on all this government overreach!)

And I also like it when those kinds of pivots result in anime adaptations from those other angles. Azure Konno took on Koe de Oshigoto!, which is less a hentai series and more a series about the hentai industry, specifically the erotic voice-acting in adults-only visual novels. Still very much NSFW, but still slightly filtered—and allowing Konno to lift characters and scenarios from their really explicit manga for the new framing. It's a fun conversation!

Also, OceanVeil, if you're reading this: Koe de Oshigoto! would be a terrific fit for your platform.

They got Interspecies Reviewers back on streaming years after the now-defunct Funimation and even a couple of Japanese channels deemed it too saucy to carry! That's a power move in today's environment.

Also the likes of Eiken and Amazing Nurse Nanako, but uh...look, there's value in keeping even the less-good horny art available as well. Rising tides and all that.

Of course! Like we've said, so much of this, as part of the artistic element, is only normal and human. That's why I think it's valuable to have a discussion like this that normalizes the less-innocent indulgences that informed so many fan-favorite authors and resultant anime adaptations. Again, it's practically a meme to mention how many authors got their start in hentai, but it's still one of my favorite notes to bring up: Kiyohiko Azuma drawing characters who really look like Yukari from Azumanga Daioh (or vice versa, really) in compromising positions. Or discover that the guy apparently has a thing for rather pointy nipples.

These predilections aren't as on display in Azuma's comedies as the ones in Student Council Holes, but they're still there and part of informing the artists' work.

It's nice to know we can draw a straight line from Tezuka's craft to the defining artistry of Student Council Holes (probably with a pit stop at the furry debauchery of Paru Itagaki's BEASTARS).

There are a lot of other examples of faves in this space, from online tights pervert Yom getting multiple anime adaptations, to Hayato Sakamoto being an official Transformers manga artist who previously made his name doing...18+ Transformers doujins. But at this point, the proof of our point about perversion powering artistry is apparent, I hope.

I encourage all viewers with even a modicum of artistic curiosity to do the same. You never know when you'll find something to make you say, "This is my hole! It was made for me!"