Close All Tabs - Why Can’t Hentai Go Legit?

Episode Date: May 21, 2025

Hentai, sexually explicit Japanese animation (anime) and comics (manga), is a genre that’s been criticized for depicting violent or ethically questionable scenarios. But some fans also see it as a space for expanding the boundaries of art, culture, and sexuality in a way that reverberates beyond its status as a niche subculture. In this episode, Morgan talks with anime marketer Drea Ramirez about how discovering hentai helped her explore her own sexual identity — and how today’s streaming platforms are stifling weirder, more experimental forms of animation. We’ll also hear from Jacob Grady, CEO of the hentai manga site Fakku, about the challenges of running a licensed and legal business in the face of content piracy, and how anti-trafficking laws like SESTA and FOSTA can make it harder forhentai artists to make a living. This episode is part of a collaboration with our friends at the podcast Never Post. While we’re digging into the culture and industry behind hentai, they’re coming at it from a completely different angle. Give it a listen wherever you get your podcasts. Guests: Drea Ramirez, social media marketing manager at Azuki Jacob Grady, founder and CEO of FAKKU Mike Rugnetta, host of Never Post Further reading: The Hentai Platform Streaming Wars — Aurélie Petit, Porn Studies  Why "The Crunchyroll of Hentai" Failed to Take Off — Jay Allen, Unseen Japan Hentai Sites Go To War, Leaving Animated Porn's Future In Doubt — Cecilia D’Anastasio, Kotaku  FOSTA-SESTA was supposed to thwart sex trafficking. Instead, it’s sparked a movement — Liz Tung, WHYY Read the transcript here Want to give us feedback on the series? Shoot us an email at [e-mail] You can also follow us on Instagram Credits: This episode was reported and hosted by Morgan Sung. Our Producer is Maya Cueva. Chris Egusa is our Senior Editor. Additional editing by Jen Chien. Original music and sound design by Chris Egusa, with additional music from APM. Mixing and mastering by Brendan Willard. Audience engagement support from Maha Sanad and Alana Walker. Katie Sprenger is our Podcast Operations Manager. Holly Kernan is our Chief Content Officer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support for KQED podcasts comes from Star One Credit Union. Give your savings account the love it deserves. When you keep your money with Star 1, you keep more of your money. Star 1 Credit Union in your best interest. So good, so good, so good. Everything you want for summer is at Nordstrom rack stores now and up to 60% off. Stock up and save on the brands you love like Vince, Sam Edelman, Frame and Free People. Join the Nordy Club to unlock exclusive.

discounts, shop new arrivals first, and more. Plus, buy online and pick up at your favorite rack store for free. Great brands, great prices. That's why you rack. From KQED. Hey, a quick heads up. This episode includes discussion of sexual topics. So listen with care. I really found myself in high school college when I was very open about liking anime because I liked it in secret for so long. Drea Ramirez struggled to fit in growing up, and she said other girls bullied her on the playground for liking anime. And then, as a teenager, she stumbled across an anime called Shojo sect. Shobu Sact is a three-episode miniseries set in an all-girls school.

It follows two childhood friends who fall in love, but face a few roadblocks in their relationship. And as they figure out their feelings for each other, their classmates have a lot of sex. I was like, oh, no way. I get to watch this crazy show that has all these, like, very soap opera-y plot twist in it, but also they get to, like, have lesbian sex in it. That's crazy. It was like just a lot of lesbians getting together at this all-girls school. And the sex scenes? Well, they definitely did not hold anything back. And I was Catholic, so I was like, this feels very like sacrilegious. This feels very like, oh, I shouldn't be watching this. Dreya watched all of it, and then started exploring the genre. After that, I started identifying as queer. It just felt like there was more, like, there was more excitement in the idea of romance, whereas, like, prior to that, I was dating a lot of men, and I didn't really understand what was fun about it,

and seeing all of the different stories and all of the connections that the characters had with each other, I was kind of like, well, I feel like, a lot more to look forward to than I thought. What Drea had discovered was some classic lesbian hentai, also known as Udi. Let's do a little primer here. Hentai is a catch-all term for sexually explicit anime, manga, or video games, anime being Japanese animated shows or movies, and manga, Japanese comic books. Hentai is basically anime porn, and it's rarely vanilla.

The genre has been criticized for depicting violent and ethically questionable scenarios. Sometimes there are tentacles going into places you'd never expect tentacles to go. But Drey says what she appreciated were the experimental aspects of the genre that challenge traditional modes of culture and sexuality. There's a lot of queerness too. And hentai that helped me to find different parts of myself. Obviously, it's lewd and strange. But, you know, when you're just a little bit different than everybody else growing up,

there's a little bit of comfort in that. Hentai anime occupies a weird space in the content ecosystem. There are subscription-based platforms that give users access to hentai manga, those erotic comics, but there are no legal streaming platforms for hentai anime. So fans either have to buy DVDs or Blu-rays directly from distributors, or they pirate it on illegal streaming sites. This actually echoes a trend in the larger industry of streaming. Think of the way that HBO Max has been gutting animation.

The platform not only canceled dozens of original animated shows, but also remove them from streaming entirely. They did the same thing with the OG Looney Tunes and most Cartoon Network shows. Many artists didn't find out that their work was on the chopping block until after the shows were removed. The work that artists put into animation is constantly devalued. Meanwhile, the federal government continues to threaten free speech and any expression of non-traditional gender and sexuality norms. So what can we learn about the state? of art and the internet by looking at hentai. This is close all tabs.

I'm Morgan Sung, tech journalist, and your chronically online friend, here to open as many browser tabs as it takes to help you understand how the digital world affects our real lives. Let's get into it. Okay, so I realize some of our audience might be familiar with hentai, but others of you might be hearing about it for the first time. So, you know how this goes. We're opening a new tab.

Ready? Hentai explained. Dreia Ramirez, who we heard from earlier. Well, after her anime, awakening, she ended up pursuing a career in the field, working in anime and manga, marketing, and distribution. She's worked at Crunchyroll, which is the leading anime streaming service in the West,

and then at Faku, which is another subscription platform, but for hentai manga. She's going to walk us through her experience with the industry. A lot of people have this perception of hentai as pervy anime for men with lots of tentacles involved. But how would you characterize Hentai?

How would you describe the community that's interested in it and drawing it? Honestly, I think I met more women who are interested in the genre working in Hentai than I did in anime weirdly. And with a lot of the creators, there are people who are working in mainstream anime under pseudonyms.

They're able to experiment in a way that they can't really do when there's big corporations backing everything that, you know, they're working on. Like they're not allowed to make it openly homosexual. So they're like, hmm, I want my main characters here to be in an openly homosexual relationship. Maybe I'll just make a hentai on the side where I make two characters that mysteriously look a lot like my characters do that. There's a lot of freedom in creating hentai that I think both the fans really

like and also the creators that themselves that are making it. They get to draw something weird. And I think that there is a lot of interest in just sort of exploring that experimental art and seeing how that relates to just like sexuality. Because I think right now in a time where we have access to so many types of porn, it's like, you know, how do we find something that's different that's not maybe just kind of the common, you know, woman being treated a certain way? it's more like there's a lot of women taking charge and hentai scenarios and sometimes you know it's more about like a fantasy of power in either direction i think a lot of people not just queer people identify with weirdly experimental queer storylines within hentai and they might not even see it as queer it's like exploring your relationship with body yeah it's a lot about the relationship with the body and your relationship with how other people perceive your body because hentai is more than just just, okay, this is a hot thing. Like, a lot of the time there's a story.

And sometimes there's even, like, these huge world-building, epic storylines in hentai, where you're learning about a whole kingdom and their economy and how sex work is applied to that economy. And it's, like, it's just a very in-depth exploration of the human psyche. What is the difference between hentai and anime? Like, where do you draw the line? Is hentai considered porn?

Yes. So hentai is hard because there's a lot of anime that's called Echi that is like kind of borderline anime and hentai, but it's more like it's more of a tease. So they're sexy anime, but they're not explicitly showing you sex scenes. So there is like a big stigma even amongst people who aren't that familiar with anime that anime comes off as hentai because of the sexual situations. But I don't know. My, I've always wondered why that was such a bad thing. I thought that anime was kind of similar to Hente, like an experimental ground for trying things out. And that's why I think it's so popular, is they weren't telling your standard traditional stories that Americans are used to. They were experimenting with really big worlds and genres

and more mature characters and storylines than we were used to, and it really resonated with a lot of people. So my unpopular opinion is that I don't think hentai had animated that different, but I think a lot of people see them as vastly different playing fields. So before the internet, before the current state of streaming that we have now, how are people discovering and getting into and consuming hentai? Was it different from how they got into anime?

Before, if you were going to buy hentai, you were probably going to buy a dogen, sheet, which is a fan-made comic, somewhere like comiket, which is, a Japanese convention that artists get together and they draw porn of their favorite characters, which a lot of American fans have done too, with Star Trek being the big one, Star Wars as well. It was very similar to the fan convention. Between these fan conventions and the advent of home video, anime porn started taking off in Japan in the 80s and eventually made its way into the U.S. when regular anime did. Anime fans circulated pirated VHS tapes from Japan,

which made their way into sex shops. Japanese studios tried to officially distribute hentai anime in the U.S., but they faced immense backlash from film critics and religious groups. Until, the OG Tentacle Porn anime premiered in 1993. Udozky Doji was an erotic horror anime that got around Japan's censorship laws by depicting tentacles and other monstrous appendages in sex scenes, instead of male genitalia.

It was super controversial, but a hit. Screenings across the world sold out. So companies that were already distributing non-pornographic anime in the U.S. started also distributing hentai anime, first through VHS tapes and then DVDs. But as streaming took off in the 2000s, so did piracy. That's a new tab. Hentai tries to go legit. In 2007, Netflix changed the game when it introduced on-demand video streaming.

Streaming existed before that, just on pirate sites. A lot of anime was still only released in Japanese, so fans took it upon themselves to add subtitles in English and other languages and then upload them to pirate sites. And pirate platforms weren't genre-specific, so they included both non-explicit anime and hentai anime. Crunchyroll, the biggest anime platform, actually started out as a pirate site.

When it first launched in 2006, it let users upload their own content, like those fan subs. But within a few years, the company removed all pirated content and instead offered licensed, subtitled anime episodes. Fans just had to pay a subscription fee to watch it. But Dreia said that when she worked at Crunchyroll,

the company made an effort to avoid being associated with hentai. It just seemed like the executives that were in power at the time, were really afraid of that connection because they got into it and thought, oh, anime's so cute, my kids would like it. A lot of them had kids. A lot of them were very family-forward. One site did try to be the crunchy role of hentai. Faku, named for the Japanese pronunciation of the F-word, had started out as a pirate site. But like Crunchyroll, the company went legit and started offering licensed hentai manga. Here's Faku's CEO, Jacob Grady. We really put a lot of time and effort into communicating with our users and just the market in general that, you know, this thing that you have been, you know, reading or watching for free online, you know, your whole life.

Actually, that's like something that someone made and they're counting on you to support them if you enjoy it. The company also launched a streaming service for Hentai Anime too. And then they acquired a pirate site called Hentai Haven, which had a massive library of hentai titles uploaded by users. But FACU never offered licensed versions of Hentai Haven's library, and ultimately shut down their anime streaming platform entirely. Even though FACU acquired one of their largest competitors, they just couldn't compete with the sheer volume of pirate sites that replaced it. If you go on Google and you type in a particular title, it's going to be 20 pirate websites before you find any. anything even close to the legitimate source of it. So I think piracy is one of the real reasons that we've struggled to make that work.

But I have no doubt that we'll try again. It's not just competition from these pirate sites that makes platforming adult content an uphill battle. Pretty much every legal streaming service draws a line at Hentai. Their programming might include some explicit sex scenes, or the etchy that Drea referred to, but they won't go as far as platforming actual porn. This is usually to maintain mainstream appeal and keep advertisers. And Drea said there's another reason, too. Oh, it's payment processors.

I wish that it was a more interesting reason, but it's just that there's these companies like your credit card. They decide what they will platform, basically. Like there was a reason that Faku got removed from Shopify. They just decided one day like, oh, Falku is hentai. Hentai is nasty sexual, whatever. Let's not let people use their Shopify account. And there was this big rush to go and get

payment processed in another way. And it just really, it's scary when you're working in like a fringe industry that you can get banned at any moment. This issue is not just about moral judgments. Some credit card companies now block payments for adult content to comply with a set of laws known as Basta and Sesta. These laws were passed in 2018 with the intention of stopping online sex trafficking. It makes online platforms liable for advertising sex work. Since the language of the law is so vague, any adult content could be perceived as enabling trafficking, even if it's totally consensual sex work. Online platforms responded by blocking all adult content in order to avoid liability, like when Tumblr banned porn. Most social media platforms even forbid artistic depictions of nudity.

We'll get back to that after this break. Key QBD podcast comes from Xfinity. Thanks to the Xfinity five-year price guarantee, your guaranteed five years of reliable Wi-Fi with our best equipment, no annual contracts, and no fees. Plus, get online in minutes with same-day Wi-Fi. Lock in your price and unlock the possibilities. Xfinity, imagine that.

Restrictions apply. Select plans only. Girl, winter is so last season. And now Springs got you looking at pictures of tank tops with hungry eyes. Your algorithm is feeding you cutoffs. You're thirsty for the sun on your shoulders. That perfect hang on the patio sundress. Those sandals you can wear all day and all night. And you've had enough of shopping from your couch. Done hoping it looks anything like the picture when you tear up on that envelope. It's time for a little in-person spring treat. It's time for a trip to Ross. Work your magic. Okay, we're back. Foster and Sesta affect more than what you can and can't post online.

Jacob, the CEO of FACU, said that after the laws passed, other companies stopped working with adult content platforms. When we got D-platform from Coinbase, I was like, isn't the whole point of crypto to like allow for this type of stuff? So it's something that kind of like impacts us via other companies. And I think that they're just doing that as a means of limiting their liability and their risk. We can't have an app on your iPhone. We can't have an app on your TV, which really hurts us and limits the type of business we can do. So given the legal ramifications, many streaming platforms don't want to touch adult content. In 2022, after Foster and Sesta passed, Crunchyroll bought an online video store called Right Stuff Anime,

and then phased out all of the store's hentai content and products. There is a lot of stigma that comes with that. And a lot of online sex workers, like women who are only fans and even just content creators that are creating sexual content, they deal with very similar issues with payment processing, with shadow bands on social media. So I can see why Crunchyroll desperately doesn't want to be associated with these sex workers. Hentai anime is still accessible, but only on pirate sites. It's challenging to shut them down because most of them operate overseas outside of U.S. jurisdiction. They can also avoid legal action by making users themselves upload this content. If they do get a copyright infringement notice, they can just take down that user's video,

and inevitably, someone else will upload it again. And like Jacob said, they can keep costs down by using shady practices that legitimate platforms could never get away with. They're doing things like hosting those hentai anime videos on YouTube, and then they'll like set them as private and they'll find a way to embed this private video onto the website. And then they're not even paying for bandwidth. It's like indirectly being paid for it by Google. And then this power website is serving this 1080P flawless video. And when we go and try to build a service like that, you know, we have to actually build it from the ground up and obey all the laws and all the rules with these companies. And it's way more expensive. And it really becomes,

becomes difficult to compete with them. With Fasta and Sesta penalizing legal streaming platforms and anti-porn crackdowns and age verification laws in the works across the U.S., there's not a lot of incentive for pirate sites to go legit. So users upload pirated videos, and then the site runs ads or offers subscriptions that users can only pay for using cryptocurrency.

The sites are making money, and the viewers get to watch shows that they can't find anywhere else. But the hentai artists that are producing anime aren't getting anything out of these pirate sites. It's a shame because they're the ones who pay the price oftentimes. A fan will pay the price in that they can't watch something, but an artist will pay the price in that they're not making the income that they should be making for the amount of effort and time that they put into their piece.

What kind of Roblox do hentai artists face when it comes to monetizing their content if platforms aren't willing to platform it? Right. I mean, that's it. There's a lot of platforms that aren't willing to platform their stuff, and then they have very limited options of who to work with, or a lot of the times they'll resort to selling their stuff on Patreon. Patreon allows nudity and sexually explicit content, but only if it's behind a paywall.

It's one of many subscription platforms that allow artists to monetize adult content. A lot of artists, you swear, by how much they're able to make monthly on Patreon, but a lot of them have to also work as marketers at that point. It's really hard to come up with a story. draw that whole story and then now you have to market yourself. That's just like being an entire team of people. Artists can also upload hentai content to porn sites, but it's more challenging

to monetize. Pornhub, for example, doesn't include animation in its exclusivity program, which grants creators copyright protection and higher revenue. So paywall subscription platforms tend to be the more sustainable choice. Like a lot of artists are turning now to crowdfunding, not just in hentai, but just in general, because there's such a lack of funding everywhere due to economic reasons and just the state of the entertainment industry after the pandemic bubble. Streaming is not a giant in the way that it was in 2020 anymore. What's happening to hentai artists is an industry-wide issue. The streaming model is changing animation as a genre, and artists are the ones who are disadvantaged.

Animation is often a place for experimentation and expression, but the business pressures of the streaming era are stifling the spirit. That's a new tab. Are streaming wars killing animation? Anime has become very popular in the last decade, and for streaming platforms, it's all about numbers. The current streaming model really prioritizes audience retention, viewers who will watch content all the way through to the end, and then come back for more.

But looking exclusively at data doesn't always paint the full picture. Here's Dreia again. there was a second where Crunchyroll thought they could make an algorithm to determine whether anime was good or not because they were like, well, we don't want to keep wasting money on these huge titles that don't move. So obviously that didn't work. There's no way to tell. There's too many factors. It might be like the world's best director, but maybe one of the voice actors has an annoying voice.

This is a reference to Black Glover. And maybe you spent millions and millions of dollars on this anime and no one wants to watch it because this guy just, screams in a way that no one liked. And Crunchyroll's like, okay, well, we have to get smart because Netflix is coming for us. It was interesting to see all of the different executives kind of trying to figure out how to gamify, figuring out what would be the ideal anime. The business people were just always pushing to get more and more content squeezed out that they thought Americans would like.

But there's not an algorithm that can tell you if something is good. So a lot of streaming platforms obviously see our attention as currency. It's like with the data, how many viewers are coming back? How long are they watching the show for? How does that affect the kinds of genres that are prioritized when it comes to anime? Well, Shonen is king. It's the anime that's made for boys. It literally means boy.

It's just a big popular genre. This is the big cliffhanger genre where Goku from Dragon Ball Z, like, he has to defeat this guy, but his power level isn't high enough. The only way to find out is to stay tuned to the next exciting episode of Dragon Ball Z. Then there's shojo, which literally means girl. A classic shojo anime is Nana. It's about these two young women who are both new to Tokyo, and they immediately hit it off and become friends. Some would even say soulmates.

I don't really know how to explain it, but when I was shaking Nana's hand, I felt this warmth that went straight to my heart. And while there is drama involved, the show is really about these girls navigating their 20s together. The episodes just don't have the same intense cliffhanger endings as Shonen anime might. And the stakes are not usually as high. Obviously, like, boy mainstream stuff has a higher budget anyway just because of misogyny. But there's also this element of dire stakes every week. A lot of Shodja watchers, they don't have the same viewership style as Shonen Watchers,

but it doesn't mean no one's watching it. It just means they might be watching it after it airs. Maybe they don't want to wait every week. They just want to binge it with a bowl of ice cream or something. Even if it's just data, if you start to see all of the things called girl being deprioritized and all the things called boy get prioritized, it does paint a very specific picture. Beyond Hentai and anime, it seems like animation now is just not a priority for, a lot of these platforms.

Like HBO and Netflix and Disney, anime may be very lucrative, but it's so rare that an original animated show will get renewed for a second season. And at the same time, they're always pumping out like new reality TV shows or live action reboots of like existing animation. Why do you think that is? Taste. I'm just kidding. Like live action is just easier in a lot of ways, depending on what type of live action

you're making. But if you're doing a reality show especially, you don't have a team of people. drawing a character, building a world. Animation just takes a really long time. There's a lot of effort that goes into it, and it's just not seen as a positive medium because it's associated with kids. It's not seen as like a true art form. A lot of this issue boils down to the fact that animation alone is seen as its own category, instead of a medium to tell stories across all genres. What makes animation more than just a style? What makes it a medium? Because a lot of those executives see it as a genre where they see a movie is animated and they go, oh, the genre of this movie

is animated movie. But it's not just, it's, you know, it's an action movie. It has, you know, heart-wrenching story about, I don't know, World War II, something random. But they'll see it as just, well, it's animated. And I've never really understood that disconnect. The streaming model might be throttling animation, but it hasn't stopped people from engaging in art that's provocative and strange. The fact that hentai anime has been excluded from the traditional animation industry is also what allows it to stay weird and to push boundaries. There is like a level of using the word like degenerate in a positive way where they'll say like, well, I'm just a degenerate. Of course, I want to see Lara Croft do weird stuff with a cave monster. It's funny because

you'll still see like very different sides where someone would be like, ew, Lara Croft would never do that. I don't know if I'm answering your question. I'm just talking about Monsters X now, but I do think that there is like, there is still a lot of homophobia in the community where people will engage with queer-coded art, but they may not know that it's queer-coded. And they're just experimenting with that art and how they feel with it, whether they know it or not.

And it just feels like, you know, there is that element of experimentation that will never go away with hentai because there will always be a want to see things be different. So don't worry. No matter where it's being platformed, the art of tentacle porn is alive and well. Okay, so normally at this part of the show,

we would be closing all these tabs together. But this time, we wanted to send you over to a new tab at the show Never Post. We've been collaborating with them to explore two different sides to this fascinating subject. And they've made a piece with a slightly different angle. So here's Mike Rignetta, from NeverPost to tell you about their episode.

Hi, Mike. Thanks for joining us. Hi, Morgan. Thanks for having me. Mike, tell us about NeverPost. Tell us about yourself. So NeverPost is a show that I host. It is a podcast about the internet that I make with some friends of mine. And we are working on a segment right now that is about the rise of the platform. So, you know, when you think about Facebook or X or Flickr or YouTube, you know, like these are certain kinds of internet infrastructure that we've come to call platforms. And so we're asking both how did they rise to prevalence and also what is it like when they go away, maybe, eventually?

And so that has necessitated us looking at all different kinds of media types, including pornography and animated pornography, as it were. And Morgan, your research on hentai is one of the things that's going to help us answer that question. Yeah, I'm now a hentai expert. For better, for better, of course. I'm hoping mostly for the better. For better, I think. Yeah, I have better opinions for sure now. Surely this comes up in casual conversation all the time, and now you can contribute very readily.

All the time, exactly. Thanks so much for joining us, Mike. Thanks, Morgan. You can find Never Post on your podcast app of choice, or look for the link in our show notes. Okay. Now, let's close all these tabs. All-Tabs is a production of KQED Studios and is reported and hosted by me, Morgan Sumb. Our producer is Maya Kueva.

Chris Aguza is our senior editor. Jen Cheen is KQED's Director of Podcasts and helps edit the show. Original music and sound design by Chris Agusa. Additional music by APM. Mixing and mastering by Brendan Willard. Audience engagement support from Mahasanad and Alana Walker. Katie Springer is our podcast operations manager, and Holly Kernan is our podcast operations manager.

and Holly Kernan is our chief content officer. Support for this program comes from Be Wrong Who and supporters of the KQED Studios Fund. Some members of the KQED podcast team are represented by the Screen Actors Guild, American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, San Francisco, Northern California Local. This episode's keyboard sounds were submitted by Alex Tran and recorded on his white, Epo Maker, High 75 keyboard with Fogredin Red Samurai keycaps, and Gatoron Milky Yellow ProV2 switches. If you have feedback or a topic you think we should cover,

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