Like many other anime fans, I appreciate a good doujin. Anime’s eternal prudishness when it comes to sexual relations makes it appealing to read these fan-made comics, where the characters just do it already. However, there are some horrific doujins out there. Stories that take characters we know and love, and put them through agonizing (sexual) experiences. And that’s… fascinating to me.
I wanted to understand what inspired people to write and illustrate stories like that. How does someone watch the same anime as me and walk away with inspiration to make them as miserable as possible. To find this out, I opted to delve into some of the most fucked up, horrific doujins I could find.
Digging deeper
In my experience, some of the best doujins are those that build on latent themes within their source material. An anime with female characters that are suspiciously close is just begging for a fan who’ll write the obvious yuri doujin, just to name an example. In that same sense, people have long explored what happens when you give an anime’s subtext a depressing twist.
NTR is a good example. NTR, or netorare, is basically the hentai tag for cuckoldry; characters losing their partners (and masculinity) to someone else. There are plenty of anime out there about hapless young men who fall in love and all of them are prime targets for NTR doujins. Meek, Japanese adolescents losing the love of their lives to ugly bastards or burly, foreign men many times their size.
Mushi Mezuru Himegim
However, we get into macabre territory once doujin artists begin digging even deeper for inspiration. This brought me to Mushi Mezuru Himegim; a doujin where Nausicaä from Hayao Miyazaki’s environmentalist masterpiece becomes an obscene host for parasitic life. Ghibli’s classic movie was all about living in harmony with nature and this doujin takes that very literally.
The story sees Nausicaä discover an ancient ritual in the valley, where women would sneak into the poisonous forests to mate with insects. The holiest of these rituals would see women implant a parasite in themselves, which would change their body such that it could act as a womb for any insect species out there. Nausicaä goes through with this, after which Mushi Mezuru Himegim chronicles her pregnancies and her body’s steady transformation.
Breasts become parasitic feeders, tumors and feelers form across her body, even her brain is manipulated by the parasite. The plot developments are equally disturbing, though written with remarkable sincerity. Each volume is long for doujin standards, much of which goes towards lore and world-building.
Does that make it anymore palatable to watch Nausicaä being ravaged by insects? Not for me.
Anime concentration camps
Two other examples would be Yukiyukite Senshadou and Negev x Kar98, respectively for Girls und Panzer and Girls’ Frontline. Both lighthearted military shows, which these doujins transform into “serious” war stories. Negev x Kar98 is set in a concentration camp, where anthropomorphized German guns operate as SS officers oppressing various other characters. Camp tyrant Kar98 one day takes an interest in Jewish prisoner Negev, who becomes her latest in a long line of short-lived sex slaves.
Yukiyukite Senshadou does something similar, but has more time to develop its setting on account of its 3 volumes. The story is an abridged take on Girls und Panzer, where the organizers cruelly decide to switch back to live rounds. Furthermore, each school is now actually a representative of their nation, which inherit the respective sins of those countries. Kuromorimine are actual Nazis, with concentration camps and SS officers. Pravda really is communist Russia. You get the gist.
Both these stories are dripping with edge, though that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Negev x Kar98 is a grim story full of atrocities, but it’s an absorbing read. As a yuri story, it’s certainly one-of-a-kind. Yukiyukite Senshadou also stuck with me for days after reading it. It understands Girls und Panzer— understands its characters, and leverages that to gut punch you over and over again.
It’s a miserable journey, as each battle thins out the cast more and more. Character die horribly, often with opportunities for them to shine cruelly robbed from them. It’s ceaseless, but done so well that I couldn’t help but feel invested as a fan of the series. I wanted to see who could make it through alive, who could be saved. And that’s exactly the mindset where Yukiyukite Senshadou will be most effective at ruining your evening. Don’t read this if you actually intend to also enjoy other doujins that day.
Bad end
Another popular angle for horrific doujins is to take the original stories and imagine a bad ending for them. Visual novels have long featured story branches that spiral into failure and tragedy, which you can now appreciate in manga format thanks to doujin artists.
It’s a simple and effective recipe, really. Take an epic finale where brave heroes stand up against an ultimate evil, then twist destiny so that they lose. All that hype, build-up, and camaraderie, cruelly subverted by a single roll of the dice. It’s powerful, exactly because we know how hard those characters fought for their victory. To imagine a scenario in which all that hard work is truly for naught subverts all understanding of narrative satisfaction. And that’s when the porn starts.
Series that fit bad ends well are those that always had steep odds or darker themes. For example, there is “Goblin Lord ga Katta Hi“, a doujin for the dark fantasy series Goblin Slayer. In it, the author turns the series’ fondness for tabletop roleplaying games against it. A bad roll of the dice sees the alliance of heroes lose the final battle; their men slain by the green tide, and the women captured. From there it turns into a cruel story of torture, rape, and disfigurement.
The female heroes are physically mutilated and raped until their psyche is warped beyond recognition. No salvation, no heroic second chances; just a mercilessly steady transformation into helpless, butchered breeding sows. Its exceptionally morbid and presented in extremely-detailed art. It makes you sick just reading it, and I don’t even care that much for the cast of Goblin Slayers.
Goblin Slayers is a popular series for these kinds of bad ends, but another example is Tanya the Humiliated. A story where Tanya Degurechaff is captured by The Allies and submitted to a fate worse then torture. The pint-sized villainess is literally beaten into submission, humiliated through abuse and rape. Her resistance soon breaks down, whereupon the soldiers begin mutilating her. They break her tiny body, inflict irrecoverable damage, all while still raping her at the same time. Even as her life fades away.
Bad endings are perhaps the most common direction for horrific doujins. Mainly because they are so flexible. Any romance could be NTR, any villain victorious. All with a little twist of fate. Personally, I don’t really care for rape in doujins. However, seeing the heroes lose for once is something I find fascinating. There are no shortage of examples, but Sailor Moon appears particularly popular among doujin artists. And for a particularly tragic tale, check out the 2-volume Gosick-chan series.
Plain weirdness
Finally, there are the doujins that go all in on being super weird. Stories that take familiar anime characters and just put them through stories that leave you wondering who’d even come up with this kind of total nonsense. It’s insanity in erotica format.
For example, there is Fellatiosaurus. A 3-part Madoka Magica doujin where the magical girls find themselves on a discount Jurassic Park island, trapped with a dicksucking T-rex and other penis-hungry beasts. An unfortunate situation, as Madoka and friends have just sprouted some additional genitalia.
Or, if you want something more grounded, how about Anal of the Dead? A zombie apocalypse story starring the cast of Anohana.
Obviously these doujins have very little to do with their source material. If you’re the kind of person that watches Anohana and really want to see its characters smash, then you’d probably expect to find doujins that adhere to the general story of the anime. It’s where the characters feel natural, after all. It feels authentic to see the characters in those settings, even if they do stuff together that would never make it into the official product.
Yet, by breaking away from those expected scenarios, these doujins become immediately memorable. There are dozens of Madoka Magica doujins for just about any major tags you can imagine. Only 1 of them has horny dinosaurs in it. Good or not, you’re absolutely going to remember reading it. None of the dozens of Madoka x Homura yuri doujins are likely to fare anywhere near that well, unless they themselves have something crazy going on.
You never quite know where you might run into one of these. Covers can sometimes help out, but some artists have already realized how to abuse this. For example, Pokemoso opens on a big picture of Pikachu eating a murdered Meowth. It’s eye-catching, it’s weird, and has you jump into it expecting some crazy Pokémon adventures. Then the entire rest of doujin is just normal and that initial bit of gore isn’t expanded upon at all.
For contrast, Faithful Tepig has a less eye-catching cover at a glance, but is much more dedicated to its weird story. It follows a female trainer that grows an appetite for Pokémon schlong, all while neglecting the care for her over-affectionate Tepig. Even as it tries its hardest to impress her, the trainer dials up her emotional abuse. Eventually leading the Tepig down a darker path.
Reluctant conclusions
Doujins are strange by their very nature. We take media that we enjoy, and twist them into sexy side-stories and what-if scenarios. Just like how it’s interesting to read non-canon, erotic stories, so too can it be fascinating to explore darker sides of our favorite franchises.
Some of these horrific doujins simply cater to a rape fetish and decide to go the extra mile. Bad endings and twists that leave the characters utterly miserable, if not outright dead or mutilated. I don’t dare to speculate on what makes people want to see familiar characters humiliated (or worse) like this. That would take an entire article on its own, I fear.
Others use the doujin format more as a way to explore their weird fanfiction. Sex becomes more of an obligation, when in reality the creator just tells their own original story. What if Nausicaä surrendered her humanity to the forest? What if the war in Girls und Panzer was real?
Then there are those that want to stand out. That offer such a ridiculous premise that any fan of the original is tempted to check it out, just to see what the fuck is going on. This can certainly overlap with either of the above, or be its own thing entirely. Even if you don’t typically care for doujins, chances are you’d be at least a little curious about a Madoka doujin called Fellatiosuarus. Or indeed a Girls’ Frontline story whose cover is the entrance to a concentration camp.
One thing is for certain though: I am definitely not reading any more doujins for the foreseeable future.
