爆発寸前！！ 天使のカウントダウン / Ready to Explode!! Angel’s Countdown / Countdown to Delight

Time to slip impressions of a hentai in between two slightly more respected older anime, albeit possibly not much. From Green Bunny, the great minds behind Wordsworth, and apparently farmed out to be animated in Korea, comes a hilariously plotless pornographic comedic anime that can’t quite decide who its audience is. Like so many ecchi series, Countdown to Delight gets most of its laughs by having a main character who doesn’t want to do anything sexual getting aggressively pursued – only here, the sex actually happens. And it’s remarkable how much less erotically charged things are as a result.

The plot, such as it is, is divided into two parts. In the first, our hero Motoki cannot get his homework done because his sister insists on having loud lesbian sex in the next room. Poor Motoki – not only is he pretty and childlike, with an unbroken voice and almost no body hair despite being in junior high, but his best friend has decided they ought to be gay lovers. On top of that, his sister’s lesbian lover decides that she ought to seduce him. His best friend walks in on this and has a hilarious jealous reaction. The best friend's sister came along, too, wanting a threesome with the two girls, but they decide on a fivesome instead. Motoki doesn’t like this idea, so runs away. While in this state of distress, he is almost hit by a car. In the second, this situation leads to him getting tutored by a beautiful rich girl, who of course turns out to be dominatrix fond of sadism. Poor Motoki is tied up, whipped and otherwise abused, until the three girls come to the rescue in silly magical girl/sentai outfits and prepare to fight – only for the meta humour to kick in as they declare nobody wants to see action scenes in a comedic hentai, so they have an orgy instead. And the poor gay kid gets no action at all.

It’s actually quite refreshing to see a hentai that’s actually meant to be funny. Though the humour is derivative, it makes everything much more pleasant to watch and at least avoids being self-important. On the other hand, playing it for laughs makes me wonder what the point of the existence of this episode is. I’m not one for hentai in general, it never…doing it for me, but I can’t see how anyone finds this erotic.

Plus it seems odd to me to have Motoki at the centre of it all. I guess he’s supposed to be easy to identify with, and it’s the fantasy of having four aggressive girls actively pursuing you (even if one is your big sister) that’s supposed to appeal, but…in the end, because he’s at the centre and always getting subjugated, it ends up seeming like he’s the object of sexual desire, and the whole thing is actually straight shota rather than the intended fantasy for straight boys.

I don’t think it bears overanalysis, though. A hentai to watch for laughs – like just about every other hentai around.

ワーズ･ワース/ Words Worth

There are people who take animated porn seriously, it’s true. But even amongst them I doubt anybody genuinely thinks Words Worth anything but a joke. I can't even imagine most fans consider it erotic. Certainly the reason I saw it was as a joke between friends, and the horse-headed Stallion has become a bit of an internet meme with his memorable line ‘Your resistance only make my penis harder!’

While it mostly involves an idiotic central male character stumbling about and finding girls who are vulnerable, then having his way with them – often finding them in this state because someone else has just raped them – it is worth remarking that Words Worth at least attempts to elevate itself with an ambitious fantasy plot.

The story takes place in a high fantasy world where the Tribe of Light and the Tribe of Darkness are at war. The prince of the Tribe of Darkness, Astral, works hard to become a swordsman, and despite apparently being in a world where everyone is constantly raping everyone else, has never before had sex. Then in a few hours he has sexual encounters with two women – a prisoner who he rapes and his childhood friend. Going off to fight, he goes up against the king of the Tribe of Light, who is of course busy with some rape, but he is then hit by a spell from the woman he had previously raped. He is blasted away and loses his memory, returning twenty years later to the Tribe of Light, where they take him as one of their own. But what is his true lineage, and what will happen to his child, bourn by the childhood friend? And what of the Words Worth tablet, which when reassembled may reveal the words of God and put an end to centuries of conflict?

If this sounds like an epic tale, though, it’s really incidental. Because Words Worth is about putting fantasy elf-girls and cat-girls into positions where they can have sex. Mostly the girl is unwilling, which presumably for the sake of fantasies of dominance seems to be preferred in anime porn – because girls going ‘No, stop, I don’t want this!’ is apparently erotic. Ick. And if it sounds like Astral getting blasted away as revenge for the rape is supposed to be didactic and teach him a moral lesson – nope. He carries right on doing it, and the gaiden just has more of the same.

It’s all stupid masturbatory fantasy, and honestly extremely unpleasant to look at, with all sorts of nasty close-ups and a preference for making the women really subjugated by having them violated by increasingly disgusting men, so really, a viewer must either take it as hilarious or despair of it. Either way, this has become one of the most widely-known and widely-mocked pieces of animated porn, and for that has a cult following. It’s just definitely not my thing.