Manic Expression

The other day, while entertaining myself in a three-way Skype conversation with fellow Team Yume member Ross Faries (of Paradise and Fairies) and our newly acquired recruit/mascot/intern/plaything, MissEsme (she’s as actual girl), I came up with the lovable idea of daring ourselves to review stuff we wouldn’t usually do for a variety of reasons. As aresult, each one of us challenged the other two party members to tackle a visual product of his/her personal choice.

This is what Faries chose for me: Rusty Soul’s “Brandish”, a hardcore hentai fantasy manga starring a voluptuous succubus princess trying to have sex with a young hero, only to get usually raped, gangbanged, physically humiliated and/or blasted away in return.

It’s a comedy, laugh with me

Curiously enough, the first issue begins with the customary four-panel styled omake depicting chibi parodies of the major characters in a classic high school environment, with the heroine constantly trying to get into the new kid’s underwear - which isn’t all that different from the real story itself.

If this was a different manga I could have probably interpreted the admittedly weird decision of putting the extra segment at the start as a form of clever foreshadowing device, basically stating that the actual fantasy portion was going to be read as the metaphorical representation of the girl’s hyperactively perverted mind - which would make horrible sense, actually. However, since this is just your average “run-of-the-mill” sexually exploitative comic where every poor excuse for a plot serves as a bafflingly contrived means to have the main character banged by something at every turn, a more thorough analysis would prove to be a massive waste of time. It’s just an especially nasty porn, after all.

Our protagonist is a nymphomaniac demon gal by the name of Twiska that seems to have come out from “Monster Girl Quest.”

One day, friends, one day...

As mentioned before, she’s after a little hero - more specifically, his junk and manly fluid. After breaking through a local inn and disposing of the servitude with sexual harassing and lacing techniques, she dresses as a maid and tries to rape the ultra-generic main character-ish cherry boy.

Unfortunately for her, this particular brand of rejected “Dragon Quest” unnamed avatar (named Theo) happens to have a split personality that goes hay-ware every time he feels the presence of a demon, thus turning him into a women-hating, brutal rapist. Things go just as well as you might expect, at this point.

Sudden mood-shifting is a fairly typical staple in the hentai sub-genre, especially in the ones with a comedic setting. If a situation might feel light-hearted at first, it inevitably turns into purely uncomfortable or even downright despicable when the actual sex scenes occur. “Brandish” is a text-book example of such behaviour, as we get to enjoy our very unlikeable protagonist getting mercilessly raped by the even less likeable male lead for several pages. Of course, this being Japanese porn, she gets to like it after the umpteenth stomach-filling cumshot and soul-crushing insult.

It might be worth noticing a few inconsistencies here and there. For example, in one panel it is clearly shown the hero’s penis forcefully ripping through the succubus’ vagina as her pained expression of horror mixed with guilty pleasure would stare right into the reader’s very soul, but in the next one said reproductive organ is magically teleported right in between her large, exposed breasts. That would constitute a huge continuity failure.

Also, all the bodies throughout the entire manga seem to twist in bafflingly unnatural ways and the sheer amount of sperm is ludicrous to say the least.

God is quite irate at you, Japan

In other words, all the rabid sex scenes are about as realistic as a slow-motion action sequence from a John Woo’s movie, and so exaggerated in their execution (not to mention, just gratuitously mean-spirited and nasty) that pretty much fail at being arousing. I will, however, give credit to Rusty Soul for a few bold quirks he would occasionally throw into the molten mix, especially that hilarious panel showing an entire galaxy inside of Twiska’s vagina.

Wow...

The rest of the issue features other such situations: our “beloved” demon slut following the hero around, trying to possess his child-like form for which she has a lusty crush on, only to end up “Blasting Off Again!” at end of every chapter by his demon-slaying persona - with thirty-men groupings, rains of semen, overplayed misogyny, implied paedophilia and occasional rapes happening in the middle.

An origin story explaining how Twiska’s obsession towards Theo came to be, is included as well. Let’s just say it involves full-fledged village men assaults, boyfriend-stealing shenanigans, bafflingly-placed girl-on-demon girl action and, of course, attempted mass rape incited by our hero. Finally, the last two chapters available in this issue are about Theo founding a party with a couple of sexy ladies. He would end up having wild, animalistic sex with the loli-est of the two, while the other will experience a nasty “enlargement” of her clitoris thanks to Twiska’s magic - that would be a major red flag to me.

This could have been sexy...

It’s funny to notice how the supposed “good” side of the hero isn’t reallyall that different from his dark side: he still ends up having sex with any woman he comes across, thus completely invalidating the necessity of an evil, womanizing persona.

Anyway, in the end, “Brandish” is a dull and repetitive comic more than anything else. Once the basic formula for each and every story (with a few unnoticeable exceptions) is fully established, the constant display of hyper-realistic perversion gets old faster than you might think. Rusty Soul tries to keep things as nauseating as possible by adding d-girls and (from the second volume on) incest but, by the time those particularly disgusting gimmicks are introduced, the reader should be already too alienated to instil a stronger reaction from his naughty mind. To put it bluntly, should you ever decide  to give this piece a try, don’t expect a Shakespeare-level of story-telling.

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My score for “Nice Try, Faries” is:

“Just a flesh wound”: That darn painful (for being so un-arousing, that is).

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You know, folks, the whole point for this wage of ours was to give the other one something he/she would usually feel uncomfortable analyzing. Faries made his choice… and failed to impress me. In return, he will have to review something of my choosing.

I gave him episode 25 of “My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic.”

His reaction was, dare I say, amusing.

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Next time, I will review MissEsme’s choice. That shouldn’t be too problematic…

DARTH VADER'S YEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEELLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLL!!!