>That actually doesn't surprise me either, although it does surprise me
>slightly that (if I read your implication correctly) they are
>all official products.

"Official" with air quotes might be a better word. A lot of the filthier stuff made for shows like this is ostensibly not affiliated with the actual media conglomerates producing the base show... until you trace the chain of corporate ownership backwards far enough. This is compounded by the fact that there is in fact a lot of completely unofficial stuff as well, of course; but usually you can tell the difference based on the production values.

> Those characters deserve better treatment,

I can one-up you on this. I've seen the doujin you describe, or at least I think I have; they all blur together after awhile. It was fairly tame as these things go.

The one that stuck with me is the one where after graduation Mio becomes a camwhore in order to make money and pay the rent. It's like "Okay, sure, whatever, Mister Doujin Artist sir, as excuses to draw Mio in varying states of deshabille I've heard worse ones."

Then it takes an odd turn where she gets incredibly depressed because of what she's doing and becomes a shut-in, which leads to her having to do progressively pervier stuff on-camera to pay the bills, but because she never leaves the apartment anymore her figure goes to hell, she loses her audience, and then she's kicked out onto the street and it ends with Yui finding her under a bridge.

That may not be the weirdest left turn I've ever seen porn take, but it was still really really weird. Especially since usually these things are just "characters violated by faceless men." I couldn't help but wonder if it was some sort of sly indictment of the genre, if the artist was trying to make the usual crop of people who would fork over money for what is, let's be honest here, a deeply misogynist genre of fan-product feel bad about what they'd done.

>>How dependent, you ask? When they produced a series about
>>the girls going off to college, the manga artists were forced to
>>continue to draw them as short, barely pubescent girls.
>
>I'm not sure I buy that the "forced" part was literally true,

Yeah, I may have stepped overly hard on that. Kakifly was forced in the sense that it was dictated by his editors. I have no idea if where on the continuum between "whatever, I'm still getting paid" and "men in suits patiently explained the nature of his contract and precisely what sort of living hell being in breach of it would bring on him" it lies. But from what I've heard, making them look their ages was considered and the decision to not do so came from corporate, not from creative.

-Merc
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