In a misty room bathed in red light, a hot brunette — porn star Talia Mint — swings a samurai sword to the tune of a tacky clink sound effect. Dressed in a cut-out black bathing suit, she glares menacingly at the camera. “I know you’re here again motherfucker,” she says, her lips curled into a snarl. Before long, her ass cheeks bounce rhythmically as she’s pinned to the ground by giant, swirling black tentacles. Mint’s face is contorted into a classic, controversial ahegao expression, her eyes rolled back and tongue poked out as she gets fucked and covered in goo by a very persistent, off-screen “alien monster.”
Viewed more than 50,000 times, this camp masterpiece epitomizes the seedy, lo-fi stylings of “real-life hentai,” a porn sub-genre that aims to turn the animated fantasies of hentai into human reality.
For the uninitiated, hentai is basically cartoon porn inspired by Japanese anime. It’s often brilliantly creative, imagining monsters, aliens and demonic squid as fantastical perverts desperate to jam their tentacles into sexed-up schoolgirls. It’s an outlet for anime fans to conjure up their wildest fantasies — the laws of physics and biology are moot in animation, meaning anything can happen — as well as a popular target for pearl-clutching politicians desperate to ban precariously nubile waifu (sexy animated girlfriends) at all costs.
Despite the limitations of human actors, the concepts of real-life hentai can be just as inventive. In one, a woman gets fucked by an off-screen monster before “giving birth” to a slimy, alien egg. In another, porn actress Veronika Leal plays a humanoid sex robot who almost drowns in her own squirt after fucking a glass-tentacle dildo. Though not every video features it, the vast majority of real-life hentai is characterized by vast pools of fake, otherworldly cum.
As a porn category, it’s still pretty niche (when I ask the anonymous creator of a hentai Discord server about it, he simply replies, “What the fuck is real-life hentai?”). Even so, the best examples can be found on the porn site Hentaied, which has 78,000 subscribers on XVideos alone. You can expect to see plenty of “alien impregnation” and “extreme bukkake” videos, but some clips really dial up the ingenuity — try an “ear fucking and peeing” video that sees a woman get boned in her dreams by, you guessed it, a tentacle monster.
To call these clips lo-fi would be an understatement. With their bad acting and shitty sci-fi scripts, buying into the fantasy of “real-life hentai” requires you to really suspend disbelief. It’s hard not to picture the bemused prop guys tasked with awkwardly maneuvering slimy tentacles into porn stars’ pussies without stepping into the shot, or the nervous production assistants mixing together gallons of fake cum that’ll later be spewed all over a waiting starlet’s face. But this is what really sets it apart. In nearly every other type of porn, the action happens in front of the camera, with the performers as the central focus, but in real-life hentai, it’s a bizarre dance between on-screen talent and off-screen prop people. This makes it particularly unique, but also particularly distracting — if you’re into hentai for the complete dismissal of human reality, real-life hentai will bring you right back down to earth.
Yet there’s something weirdly endearing about the tongue-in-cheek comedy of these clips, the subtle wink from the hot anime starlet before she gets pounded and covered in frothy, obviously fake goo by a faceless creature. To quote Susan Sontag, “The essence of camp is its love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration.” What could be more masterfully “artificial” than a space tentacle impregnating a 45-year-old pretending to be a schoolgirl?
There’s no sticky age debate at play here, either. Hentai often comes under fire for the ambiguous age of its cartoon protagonists, but in its live-action cousin, the performers are quite clearly of-age. Thus, if you’re in the mood for pregnancy-inducing monster sex but keen to see an obvious adult being fucked, real-life hentai could scratch your itch.
At the same time, it can also be disappointingly racist. In one video, a young, white porn star known as Sunny Lane takes “oriental cock” as she whimpers “oppa,” a Korean word for “daddy.” Not only is it weirdly fetishistic of the apparently “oriental” dude, it’s straight-up inaccurate, as hentai is Japanese. Then, there’s the ahegao face, which women of color have been asking white porn stars to stop making for years — in this in-depth Twitter thread, sex worker Roo Addams describes being called a “yellow princess” by a creepy dude who saw Asian women as the IRL embodiment of hentai schoolgirls, and ahegao as the go-to symbol of such fetishization.
This is one of many reasons why real-life hentai is at its best when it veers clear of using people as props and instead leans into the surrealistic, theatrical weirdness that makes it so great to begin with. In the oft-repetitive world of porn, there’s nary a more welcome sight than a bathtub alien or 50-gallon facial, so if we give real-life hentai nothing else, we can at least put our tentacles together for that.
Jake Hall
Jake Hall is a freelance journalist, fashion features editor and author. Their debut book 'The Art of Drag' is scheduled for release in May 2020.
