The Rise and Rise of Fetish Scenarios in Mainstream Manga

The past few years a friend of mine and I have been discussing the rise of the obvious fetish manga, where what is clearly and unambiguously an eromanga (erotic manga) premise is laundered into a fluffy, broadly acceptable mainstream manga with all of the H scenes taken out. There’s lots to choose from: My Girlfriend Is 8 Meters Tall, Monster Musume, My Wife Has No Emotions, Nagatoro-san, Plus Sized Elf, My Dress-Up Darling… Every time I bring this up with someone, they are able to add another handful I’d not heard of. I don’t think it is the most widespread, or even most notable, trend, being significantly overshadowed by others which are bigger and more popular. There is of course the continued popularity of isekai, and the rise of 2.5D theater productions to name just two. But as a lifelong anime and manga otaku with internet brain poisoning, the rise of whitewashed eromanga premises is a noticeable and persistent trend of the past perhaps 10-15 years, specifically. And that’s interesting! Part of the enjoyment of being an otaku, the thing that keeps people coming back all their lives, is the diversity of stories, and attendant variety of different perspectives and visual styles. But I’m curious as to what led us, as a culture, to this moment: what has allowed people to not only publish their obvious fetish material, with few (if any) adjustments or bowdlerization, but thrive doing it? 

First I’d like to acknowledge that there was never a period where people weren’t turning their weird sex thing into art — whether they were obviously and intentionally doing so, or didn’t even notice that they were putting that into their works. Plenty of all-time classic works contain things that you really don’t even need a particularly close reading to interpret as fetish material (to say nothing of their private correspondence. Hi, James Joyce). But most often, those instances are coded, or incidental, or even unintentional. I don’t think anyone would call Gulliver’s Travels an intentionally size-difference fetish work, in spite of that being one of the main plot points of the story. And as much as the 1973 animated adaptation of Robin Hood launched a sexual revolution with its anthropomorphic characters, the truth is animals are just easier to stylize than humans: even more simply than that, it’s just fun, giving your animated work an interesting aesthetic texture it wouldn’t otherwise have. Ranma ½ is a manga famous for being a lot of people’s first exposure to complicated gender feelings, a series where the main character can effortlessly switch genders. But the living primordial goddess of manga that is Rumiko Takahashi seems almost baffled that anyone would read anything into this. When questioned regarding Ranma’s gender change, she always responds that it’s not worth thinking about, seemingly surprised that anyone would project gender politics onto it, and a little annoyed that she keeps getting asked. (I do think there’s a little bit of willful ignorance on Takahashi’s part — if you invent an intriguing scenario you can’t be surprised when people are intrigued by it).  By contrast, there is no ambiguity about what the author, and audience, are there for if you read The Dangers in My Heart. 

Creators have always had their more risqué stuff either hidden from the general public or published under a pseudonym. But in the digital age that line between the work you want to hide, or were traditionally supposed to keep hidden, has become increasingly flexible. People form niche communities around all sorts of things that a few short decades earlier it was impossible to form a community around. We’re all able to have frank discussions about our sexuality and our niche fetishes, and more equipped with the verbiage to do so. On top of that there are two factors working in favor of manga specifically: Japan’s long history of self-published works, and its encouragement of pseudonymity. It really does feel as if the walls have come down a great deal, and that pseudonymity lets people more fully express themselves without running the risk of getting stopped in the grocery store and asked if you’re the armpit fetish manga artist.  And it can make the eternal task of building an audience and honing your craft online a little bit easier, in the same way people often are able to build on the popularity of drawing fan art for broadly popular series to having their own work published. 

There is an argument to be made that it’s less revelatory than that. After all, there was never a time where creating a work wasn’t all about laundering your personal paraphilia and turning it into success, whether you had the knowledge and vocabulary to know you were doing it or not. We’ve already discussed Robin Hood. Furries, a longtime undeserved subculture punching bag, found common cause in bright, colorful worlds that transcended limited notions of human bodies as immutable and absolute. Many of the creators of these works were largely indifferent or openly hostile, having made cartoon animals simply because it was what they believed you were supposed to make cartoons about. Osamu Tezuka’s work is filled with weird fetish art (which is to say nothing of the sheer volume of erotic artwork found in his estate after his death), something that belies his status as Japanese baby boomers’ benign, kid-friendly adopted father. As the old joke goes, “if you have a fetish, you have a genre fiction novel.”

But of course, even with outliers like Star Wars or A Song of Ice and Fire that even your Ted Lasso-watching coworkers have heard of, genre fiction is mostly a niche interest. Famously, the commercial and cultural dominance of the MCU has not created legions of comic book lovers or science fiction die-hards, and the audience for the television adaptation of A Song of Ice and Fire isn’t picking up Ursula Le Guin. By contrast, My Dress-Up Darling is published by pop culture juggernaut Square Enix under their manga imprint Gangan, and My Girlfriend Is 8 Meters Tall is published in fucking Shonen Jump — although it is exclusive to their Shonen Jump+ app, it shares that honor with bona fide hits like Spy x Family and Chainsaw Man (which is also not shy about being a sex manga for gross perverts). Those examples aren’t universal but even places outside of Japan have seen a massive growth in manga and anime fans in recent years, especially amongst young readers. I also think there is an intentionality to the recent crop of R18 manga turned non-R18 manga, and that intentionally differentiates it from all the times someone made a work where humans gets shrunk down. People know what they’re making and are happy to embrace it, and know their audience will as well.

Because it’s been such a gradual change, it’s hard to point to a patient zero, an inflection point where everything changed in an instant. Of course the ecchi manga of yesterday, titles like Harenchi Gakuen, have a way of seeming quaint and tame by modern standards. A work like Ichigo 100% blew my tiny mind as a teenager, in a way it simply can’t in 2026. Ghost in the Shell bent itself in knots to explain why only same-gender sex worked in its version of the internet, but the manga-ka Masamune Shirow was forced to sheepishly admit that he just didn’t want to draw a naked man (if only that had continued to be the case). Whereas in the horny VRMMO and isekai works of the modern day, being able to fuck in the digital world is a selling point. Perhaps the best example of time and tide changing for manga is the father-daughter manga-ka duo of Keisuke Itagaki, author of Baki the Grappler, and his daughter Paru Itagaki, most famous for Beastars. Whilst both the elder and younger Itagaki are famed for making unhinged and crazy works, Paru’s are a lot more focused and refined, with the touch that comes from finding a community of like-minded individuals. And it’s not a coincidence that Paru Itagaki is a digital native actively, clearly, and unabashedly influenced by internet culture and the universal language of being horny online.

So a lot of factors have brought us gradually to the point where giantess or vomit fetish manga is published in Shonen Jump. It’s building on the timeless tradition of artists making pornography intentionally, and all those many cases where they do so completely unintentionally. In our connected digital society, we’ve found community in niche interests, and we have the extant body of knowledge to identify and put it into words. Both creators and audiences, especially in Japan, are more familiar with and more accepting of laundered fetish premises, and the already existing Japanese culture of pen names and niche communities that has helped it grow. That’s the present, but I couldn’t guess as to the future. It’s possible that “laundered eromanga premise” will just be an identifiable story style going forward, or it may recede and become something for us to look back on fondly as an exemplar this moment in time. Perhaps with platforms increasingly and unfairly hostile to sexual expression it will fade in dominance, or perhaps that will only encourage people to take what was once a good old-fashioned porn premise and sand the edges down just a little. For now, it’s a fun trend and every example I see brings me joy at the limitless possibility of human expression.

I know there’s a lot, a lot, of examples I haven’t named, like Chinchin Devil wo Oe! or Super Weak Bladder Oshii-san, so feel free to mention me with your favorite examples.