Recently, a certain anime adaptation called Does it Count if You Lose Your Virginity to an Android? finished airing its eighth and final episode. I’ve found myself thinking about this series an unusually high amount for the past week, though not for the reason you might think. It follows a rather similar pattern to several other properties that have cropped up over the past couple of years such as (but not limited to) Harem in the Labyrinth of Another World and Chuuhai Lips. Each of these properties flirts with the line of sexual content in anime without explicitly crossing the line into outright hentai, regardless of whether it comes in the form of airing on television or in the ONA format.
Now, before you start worrying that I’m about to get a little puritanical and say that this kind of stuff should not be made because “sex is icky,” I can nip that in the bud straight away. Like many aspects of human life, sex is not something that should necessarily be run away from in terms of depicting it in media. That includes its positive and its negative connotations, including how it may intersect with other taboos (see: Yosuga no Sora and its incest, Berserk with child rape, Revolutionary Girl Utena and…well, quite simply too much to list here). Some of my favorite anime involve touchy subjects, including sexuality and sexual behavior, by being so direct about the emotional and thematic depths that they may explore. Of course, how a piece of material goes about doing this is where personal aesthetic differences may come into play.
And it’s that last sentence in which I find myself in a slight tizzy. Anime such as Does it Count if You Lose Your Virginity to an Android? handle sexual content in a manner that is far closer to that of hentai than other series that use sexuality as a means of exploring other things. Especially given the anime’s short runtime of eight five-minute episodes, it makes sense that director-writer NekoB and whoever else helped on the planning committee would decide that focusing on its many boob shots is the way to go (assuming you can get through the poor visual-acoustics, though). I can’t exactly disagree with this approach. The source material is not exactly the most interesting thing under the sun. Perhaps it would be easier to simply lump the series into a giant pile of “diet / softcore hentai” that failed to arouse and have that be that. Then, we can all go on our merry way.
But it’s when I made the connection of “diet hentai” that I found myself asking a certain question that I had felt beforehand, but couldn’t quite crystallize until now – who exactly is this meant for when actual hentai already exists in its abundance?
It should be pointed out that in saying “diet hentai,” I am not talking about ecchi. One of the defining traits about ecchi as I understand it is that, while sex and innuendo is frequently featured in the course of the property, there is a certain ideological distance between what the material is doing—often for humorous purposes—against the intent to arouse the viewer or reader. To put it another way, ecchi may allude to fucking, but hentai actually involves it. When Go Nagai penned the infamous Harenchi Gakuen manga back in the late-1960s (see right), he more or less codified the modern ecchi genre. No matter how raunchy the manga may have gotten, it never actually crossed into material that was designed purely to arouse the reader. Characters never actually engage in sex despite whatever situation they find themselves in because the central running thread was everyone messing with each other or their disgusting teachers.
The critical difference lies in that “diet hentai” such as Virginity Android features sex being carried out between its characters as a prominent feature of the show. That’s fine. But when that’s the MO the material is operating under, what exactly would stop it from “going all the way,” as it were? Compared to many other anime that involve characters eventually having sex (KareKano certainly comes to mind, as does Horimiya or even Umetsu Yasuomi’s Megazone 23 Part II), sex is the primary attractor rather than it being the consequence of characters having isolated intimate moments. Even shows that are a little more visually explicit with their sexual content, or longer in runtime like Chuuhai Lips (barely edging out in length) and Harem in the Labyrinth of Another World (battle fantasy), always shy away from crossing that final barrier into full-blown hentai in all its pixelated glory(?) and genitalia. I find myself scratching my head at the idea of pouring all that time and resources into something that wants to plant its foot in the titillating camp, but can’t come anywhere close to being as brazenly unapologetic about how it does so. In a way, it feels like the content equivalent of a male anime character keeping porn magazines in his room during the Google Images era. It’s a vastly inferior form of trying to get the same general fix.
Virgin Android? thus feels like an ecchi that wants to move beyond ecchi, but can’t fully divorce itself from that label into calling itself something else. It wants to maintain the ideological distance away from onscreen sex that the ecchi genre embodies, but still contain a general “hot” sense of direction and plot because the characters ARE having sex onscreen. It’s something of an identity crisis, a middle ground in which there is little, if any, discernible identity.
And it’s not as though the series never could have had opportunities to make a more X-rated jump. Aside from current hentai studios like Bunnywalker or Nur that still manage to churn out hentai semi-regularly, several anime feature more sexual content beyond the initial conception. Yasuomi’s Kite is perhaps one of the most famous examples, as it was producer Green Bunny that was willing to help fund the project if Yasuomi would put more pornography into the animation. This is ultimately why there exists several versions of this OVA with the material either cut or uncut accordingly.
Is there something deeper that I’m missing? Is Virginity Android actually far more profound beyond its thin sexual veneer? I don’t think so. If Virginity Android wanted to claim that a part of the material was about the master-servant dynamic with “Master registration,” or about recognizing the inherent humanity of machines, otaku fiction and science-fiction in general have already long beaten it to the punch. Just to list one example with anime’s own canon, CLAMP’s Chobits used The Machine™ as a means of exploring not only the questions of sapience and sentience / the soul, but also about physicality as a genuine barrier to potentially romantic relationships. The fact that Chii’s “off switch” is located inside where her vagina would be located places a lot of emphasis on sexual activity as not just “a thing” that people do, but also a thing that carries powerful emotional and physical consequence. Especially when—depending on which version of the story you’re consuming—it’s clarified that Chii has no actual feelings or emotions regardless of the behavior that manifests, having sex with them would essentially delete or rewrite their entire programming. Naturally, how much stock you personally place in Chii (technically Freya possessing her) saying this outright will alter your interpretation of the ending.
And Chobits has no shortage of fanservice moments either, both within the original manga and beyond. Just look at the “Your Eyes Only” CLAMP artbook for it and how often they drew Chii in numerous outfits and poses.
A lot of my thoughts concerning Virginity Android and the “diet hentai” phenomenon also stem from the otaku community itself and its rather paradoxical relationship with sex and sexual behavior or fixation. In saying that though, I need to disclaim that I’m not seeking to deeply psychoanalyze so much as just comment on what I’ve observed over the past six years of being an otaku media fan. Plus, I’ve consumed more NSFW material than I’d ever want to publicly admit (only a fraction of it is catalogued on my AL profile). A casual look at most otaku spaces will show an inordinate number of idolatries for female characters, and either throwaway comments about how cute or hot they are, or fanart that people either playfully or unironically voice their arousal towards. The otaku community has no shortage of horny energy for these 2D creations of girls, yet there seems to be a resistance to the idea of experiencing outright otaku media pornography that involves them. There exists to them an uncross-able line of morality where the vagina and penis wait on the other side, forever unseen.
Extremely skimpy outfits and sexual poses? No problem there!
Show an areola or nipple? Ooo, spicy!
An actual vaginal lip, or an onscreen penetration? No, thank you!
So, what’s the separation, exactly? What is it about that magical bit of anatomy that can be danced around, but never actually experienced? Some of it is social conditioning, in that society can sometimes have contradictory messages concerning the body and sexuality. We have no problem objectifying men and women for selling products, a thing that has certainly made inroads to 2D characters. But actual intimacy or the lower genitals is somehow less than acceptable. I surmise that a part of it is also in-grown within otaku spaces. Otaku romance can sometimes be awful in showing people acting like reasonable human beings, where miscommunications abound and handholding is somehow gauche. As one example, what does it say that Clannad is hailed as one of otaku media’s best love stories and one of the only properties with the main couple living a married life, but there are no actual kisses onscreen? The Kyou OVA does have Tomoya and Kyou kiss, but the fact that it’s not Nagisa is low-key very funny. Fans cling onto manga or light novel runs where characters are put in all kinds of compromising positions, but never actually confess their affections.
Otaku media has fallen in love with romantic allusion, or trying so hard to make its romance so obscenely saccharine that actual romance or displays of sexuality are an afterthought. To put it another way, love as an idea positions itself as more pure or enticing than actual love or sexual physicality. This is why you can have a series like The Angel Next Door Spoils Me Rotten and have Mahiru say “I like it when you touch me,” despite the characters having essentially co-habitated for months at that point and still not being a couple yet, even though the narrative was clearly aiming for that trajectory by season’s end. And then there’s the whole sequence where Amane has a sexual dream about Mahiru, and she wants him to describe it for “notes” later. It is so focused on maintaining its metaphysical distance that any progress towards a romantic relationship, or any sexual life they may have afterward, is stained with this pristinity that borders on nauseating.
When a series like Virginity Android comes around that leans over the boundary to the dreaded X rating, it treats the lower genitals being seen as the final barrier between the pristine and the debauched. It allows its viewers to “go all the way” without having them “go all the way.” The problem though is that it’s still a form of character sexual objectification since there’s little else lying within. One magical bit of skin not being shown does not mean that there’s a sacrosanct purity cleansing the viewer or the media. You’re still watching porn, albeit a distilled form.
So, who is this “diet hentai” for, precisely? It’s probably for those who refuse to dip their toe into full hentai for whatever reason they hold so dear, but won’t think twice about sharing that ungodly beautiful Yuuki Nobuteru artwork of Deedlit from Record of Lodoss War that barely covers her ass. The joy likely comes from the flirtation with indecency rather than the actual indulgence of indecency itself, the teasing versus the doing. Perhaps then it might be accurate to say that anime like Virginity Android? is for people who really, really, really like edging but not actually fucking.
To be fair, I’ve been a bit cruel. After all, it could be said that such media and responses build a supposed “safe zone” of sexuality or sexual exploration, where the actions or timidness of the characters or visuals mirror that of the audience in their OWN burgeoning sexuality or sexual awakening. If we subscribe to the theory that media allows a place for viewers to understand or explore their own repressed unconscious feelings or fetishes, then maybe there is something to the idea of media that doesn’t fully commit to the barest displays of sexual / erotic activity. And yes, even with media that involves sex robots.
For a final aside, if you find the idea of a female android having sex with a female human intriguing, and want an experience that manages to evoke some sense of arousal even in softcore form, I can recommend the hentai Stainless Night (directed by Takahashi Naohito, the same person responsible for directing Berserk ’97 as well as ToHeart). That OVA features an android a retractable dick because, as she herself will say, she can be used by both men and women (it was the 90s – nonbinary awareness wasn’t really a thing yet). Compare any of its sexual scenes with Virginity Android and you’ll notice a marked difference in how they both handle the “don’t show the genitalia” problem.
