It’s time for the backed-up edition of HENTAI HUMP DAY!

One of these days, I’m going to find a higher-quality version of Jibril for that gif…

So anyway, today we’re going to cover something that can be a little confusing: NTR.  Technically, NTR is short for netorare, which, put simply, is cuckolding/cheating.  However, just because cheating of some form might be involved doesn’t necessarily make something NTR.  Also, NTR has been used casually as an umbrella term, and as a result, netorare and netori titles seem to get lumped together.  So let’s clear this up.

First off, we need to establish some things.  Whether it’s netorare or netori, you need to have at least three people: the cuckold, the cheater, and the thief.  The “cheater” role is usually a woman, and it may seem unfair to label her as the “cheater,” but it’s the most accurate label; there needs to be SOME willingness to participate, even if it’s only near the very end.  Believe it or not, if the woman is raped with absolutely no willingness to cheat, chances are it probably delves into blackmail rape territory more than anything, and I consider that its own genre.

Obviously, all three roles have to be filled.  If the cuckold is dead, then despite the widow maybe considering it cheating, no actual cheating is going on and the genre is probably housewife fetish.  If cheating is not a central theme, it’s not NTR; the cheating could be a setup for the real genre, like a cheating woman could be lured to a dungeon where bondage or S&M takes over, or it could be a train rape genre (yes, this is an entire genre) where one of the participants just happens to be a married woman, but that doesn’t make it NTR.  There has to be a dominant party.  If the cuckold and the thief are on equal terms, chances are it’s a love triangle that will probably end in a threesome.  It’s far more likely that the thief will have a dominating charisma that leads the cheater astray.

So, what’s the difference between netorare and netori?  Basically, netorare is when the protagonist  is the cuckold, and netori is when the protagonist is the thief.  That’s the strict definition, anyway.  One problem: most of the time, the protagonist is the cheater.

Hilariously, there’s also very little difference between netori and non-cheating rape-centric titles.  You have no idea how often I’ve looked through my files for examples of netori and went “oh wait, that’s just rape.”

Let’s take a look at a clear-cut example first.  In Nozoki Ana, the protagonist gets into a relationship pretty early on, even though anyone with a brain realizes he’s going to end up with the main heroine before the end of the series.  He eventually starts having some wild sex with his girlfriend, but she always makes him wear a condom, and she never hangs out with him on weekends because “her parents won’t let her.”  Turns out, during the weekends she’s having crazy raw sex with her REAL boyfriend, and our protagonist finds out.

Clear-cut netorare: the protagonist is the victim.  Of course, this is just a netorare arc within a non-NTR series, but it’s a solid example.

Now for something a little different.

In the anime Netorare (and yes, there IS an anime literally called Netorare), a housewife gets straight-up raped by a stranger.  Just out of the blue, someone rings her doorbell, she opens the door, and rape happens.  However, her husband hadn’t been around for a long time, so she hadn’t been getting any.  She decides she likes getting fucked, and the random rapist comes by again.  This time, she’s all too willing to participate.  I should note that the anime makes sure to never show the husband’s face clearly or state his name; he’s barely a character.  So this should be netori, right?  Nope.  We also don’t know the rapist’s name or face.  So neither the cuckold nor the thief are the protagonist, but we do know cheating is going on.  HOWEVER, it is revealed at the end that the husband secretly recorded the cheating and gets off on it.  That’s a netorare fetish, which is a special kind of netorare in that the victim doesn’t go through any of the despair normally associated with netorare.

Not confused yet?  It’s time to murk shit up.

Triangle Blue.  All three roles are filled by decently developed characters: Asato is the hard-working guy that lives with his long-time girlfriend Akane, and they’re about to finally consummate their relationship (before marriage) when Akane’s childhood friend Kyou shows up looking for a place to stay while he works on repaying his debts.

Kyou immediately shows how grateful he is by constantly tricking and manipulating Akane into doing sexual favors for him, eventually taking her virginity and regularly having sex while Asato is out.  Asato slowly comes to realize what’s been going on, and in dramatic fashion, he confronts Kyou to stop, only to find that Akane has gotten addicted to Kyou’s D.

Hmmm… Let’s see how that looks with my new alternate….

All three characters are rather fleshed out.  We grow to sympathize with Asato, who does participate in some narration, but Akane narrates just as much if not more, and it’s Akane and Kyou who drive most of the action.  Also, we never see Asato have ANY sex.  So, is this Kyou’s story and it’s Netori, or is it Asato’s despair play and it’s Netorare?

It’s netorare.  Kyou may be by far more important to the story, but the sheer fact that we witness Asato’s despair independently makes this a netorare; if it were a netori, our only insight to Asato’s despair would be from his physical reaction, and rather than hearing his thoughts, we would, at best, be hearing Akane’s thoughts about what he must be thinking.  Plus, at the end, Akane breaks free if Kyou’s manipulation after it’s revealed his intention was to sell her into prostitution… only for Akane to continue her cheating ways by having sex with one of her students.  Why?  Because Asato just can’t satisfy her body, and the cuckold being in some way incapable is a staple of netorare.

So, we’ve had all these examples of netorare… do I happen to have any actual netori to share?  Sure.  Kussetsu.

Kussetsu is pretty much built like your standard revenge story.

The main difference being most revenge stories involve a real reason to take revenge.  Our main protagonist Kimihiko just hates his friend Masashi (who he admits is the only guy to treat him like a normal person) because he’s so obliviously goody-goody.

He does seem to have a point when, after asking how he would resolve an ongoing love triangle with two girls, Masashi responds that he “likes both of them” and “doesn’t want to hurt either of them.”  Our hero responds by giving one of the girls a plan to hurt her friend and take Masashi for herself, essentially date raping the girl on the rebound, and finally blackmailing Masashi’s new girlfriend into sex.

Then in the next episode, he goes after Masashi’s half-sister and her classmate.

Masashi’s girlfriend Misato has grown to be calm around him and asks why he’s doing this to Masashi.  His answer just makes him sound even more like a douchebag: he has some terrible secrets, so it stands to reason that Masashi also has some terrible secrets that he’s not telling him, so because of the secrets he’s imagining, he can’t trust Masashi and wants to destroy every part of his life.  Totally sane, right?  He immediately gets topped by the girl, who agrees to play a part in putting Kimihiko’s revenge together.  Why?  Because if Masashi loses everyone around him, he’ll only have her left.

Naturally, with her help, he reaches his goal of raping every girl in Masashi’s life, including his step-mom and blood-related older sister.  Misato finally gets what she wants, but it turns out she falls under “girls in Masashi’s life,” and Kimihiko won’t be satisfied until he has her too.  I guess the previous blackmail rape wasn’t enough for him.

So, the final step of Kimihiko’s plan: send in Kana, the first girl he took away from Masashi (and is now Kimihiko’s sex slave, because that’s just how penises work), to force herself on him while Misato watches.  Then, while they’re all distracted, Kimihiko rapes Misato in front of Masashi.  The plan unexpectedly escalates when Misato recognizes how powerless Masashi is and willfully gives herself to Kimihiko.

Hilariously, Masashi admits that he may truly be as filthy as Kimihiko accuses him of being, so he becomes a monk and rids himself of all desires.  And so, Masashi becomes even purer than before, ironically leaving Kimihiko with an overbearing sense of defeat since there is no longer anything he can take away from Masashi.  But hey, at least he got laid.  Like… a lot.

Is it netori at its best?  I’m not convinced of that; most netori is intended to be the reverse of netorare for the viewer, in that the viewer wants to vicariously experience the feeling of complete superiority over another male, but Kussetsu not only has a protagonist that’s almost unsympathetically impossibly vindictive, it also has one that kinda loses in the end.  At any rate, it’s certainly netori at its most unique and most systematic.  That guy left no stone unturned.

Finally, I wanted to cover two more anime, but I decided that would take entirely too much time.  Let’s just say that I Can / Ai Can and Otome Dori are the two most soul-crushing and retarded NTR series out there… for entirely different reasons.

Otome Dori has our protagonist feel the full weight of his life crashing around him as he watches recordings of his girlfriend getting gangraped (producing probably one of the best reactions of all time when he THROWS A PORTABLE DVD PLAYER AT HIS MONITOR), then learns that his loli sister helped arrange the kidnapping as revenge because big brother wasn’t there to save her when she herself got gangraped.  Loli sister forces herself on big brother while he’s dazed.  Then he wakes up from his dream and finds out he married his girlfriend and has a daughter.  Then he watches a recording of his pregnant wife being gangbanged and enjoying it, and one of them saying the tests say he’s the real father.  Gotta say, it’d be depressing if the triple whammy wasn’t so absurdly hilarious.

I Can / Ai Can has our protagonist managing an idol girlfriend, but is forced to watch as a producer rapes her in the dressing room.  She’s manipulated into more sex and gets addicted to the D, partially excusing her behavior because her boyfriend didn’t get angry at her for being raped.  And keep in mind she KNOWS he got pissed and irritated at her rapist for what he did… but apparently that wasn’t enough for this bitch.  The third episode is some alternate path where the manager got involved with a different idol instead.  This time, the girl he’s with isn’t as fucking retarded and remains loyal to the end, but when the manager fails to rescue her from being raped, he gets a netorare fetish, and it becomes sort of a routine for him to watch her getting fucked by the producer so he can get aroused.

And this concludes my rundown of NTR.  I started out with the intention to argue that it gets an unnecessarily bad rep, and… well yeah, it’s pretty fucking stupid.  But… not disgustingly so.  Something about NTR seems to bring out the hate in a LOT of people, and I’m not entirely sure why.  Sure, netorare as a fetish is confounding, and netori as a fetish kinda makes you a horrible human being with issues, but… I don’t get the hate.  I REALLY don’t think it’s because people have a problem with torturous misery.  People kinda… really dig the misery of fictional characters.  Is it because they take protagonist projection seriously?  Like they find it personally demeaning that they have to project to the loser that gets cuckolded?  I don’t think that’s it either; otherwise, explain why Catcher in the Rye is generally liked (I know I can’t.  And while I’m at it, fuck Jack Kerouac and fuck James Joyce; I just don’t get the opportunity to say that enough).

So… yeah.  I guess all you can say is… NTR is… a thing.  It’s a fetish.  And fuck if you can explain fetishes.  I will say this though: at least I tried.  You know what I can’t even begin to try to explain?  Vore.  there’s just not much to it worth covering; if you’ve seen one pic of it, you’ve seen them all.  Guro I could cover if I wanted to.  Scat I could cover, and it would be a fucking hilarious day.  But vore?  It would just be a vore picture with the caption “this is vore.”

That’s it for today.  Join me tomorrow when I cover hentai in its laziest, saddest form.