Enzai

Since I wrote my opinion of the two-episode anime, somewhat shocked at the scenes of bloody rape of a 14-year-old boy and the graphic depictions of non-consensual sexual torture, Enzai surprisingly enough became the first yaoi game ever to be commercially released in the States. Only a handful of visual novels have ever officially made it over here, but I confess to being very surprised that about the only one ever expected to be bought by a (close to exclusively female) paying audience would be the one about prison rape.

But…well, I suppose I was, if anything, exaggerating my prudishness. I’ve read enough fanfictions and doujinshis to know that a lot of porn, for both genders, involves humiliation, subjugation, helplessness and horror, with of course the safety of knowing that it is all fantasy. With writing and drawing in particular, you know no-one is hurt in the making of what you’re watching. And we have to face it at some point, seeing the demand, the endless extremes of the internet, and the fact that I actually went back to Enzai and found that I actually found it kinda hot – call it empowerment, dominance or kink, but there’s something very appealing about non-con.

And thus I have been very surprised at the depth and sophistication of Enzai. It is not deep, nor sophisticated, but is far from the shameless porn I had expected. The first time I played it, I made all the wrong choices (there’s no actual skill to visual novels – you pick a choice and where it leads you will be totally random) and managed to get three ‘bad end’s in a row, which only served to make me think this was brainless smut even more than I already did, with poor Guys suffering really horrible things that definitely didn’t align with any fetishes I have. Also, while I was surprised to see that the mosaic censorship that is required by law in Japan had been removed, at times that only made me despair of some of the artists’ grip of anatomy. The penis cannot be inserted into the perineum!

It’s no more shameful than enjoying the sight of suffering and gore on the screen, which many years have shown us is almost universally approved of by our society. And as I say, I was surprised at the sophistication of the story, and the court case that resolves everything (even if some part of the evidence are daft, like a clever murderer just leaving weapons in a nearby abandoned house for months) is really quite smart.