Smut That Doesn't Suck: Hikari Ochi-Tekina

What is smut? It's a slang term for erotic works, yes, but what does that entail? When this series started, Megan and I stuck pretty closely to some of the more basic ideas of smut. Mainly, that there was sex or lewd stuff in there. But the thing about human sexuality is that it keeps finding new ways to make us aroused in the strangest ways possible, just for the fun of it. To prove this, I'll have to expose you to a work I found on Pixiv cal-hey! You get back here! I promise this isn't horrifying. Seriously. I'm up front when thing will be scarring pits of madness. This particular little story is titled “Hikari Ochi-Tekina”, or roughly translated to “Falling to Light.”

This particular series is a 3D Custom Girl made affair, a program made primarily for *ahem* private matters, but is commonly used by people on the internet to make weird comics. And I mean weird. Like, reality shattering weird. But some choose to take more sane, yet equally creative paths. Take Saihate no Majo (最果ての魔女), a Pixiv artist that deals almost entirely with corruption stories. Some of his later works have sex scenes in there, but most of his stuff are devoid of traditionally erotic subject matter besides some nudity here and there that ends up being covered up by cool costumes. This particular set has no nudity at all, or anything close to resembling sex, but it's very clearly smut.

There's no words or dialog, but the images move the story perfectly fine. It starts with two girls being lead to strange devices by a floating ball of light that turns them into magical girls. The two are controlled by the light whenever it deems them necessary to deal with an enemy, and then it starts ordering them to capture other girls and force them into their ranks as well, eventually turning the villain in charge of the monsters attacking the city and creating a magical girl so powerful that she can turn any girl in her immediate area.

A story like this doesn't need dialog to move. It doesn't need complex characters or conflicts, or even arcs. This story is focused on doing what all porn is meant to do, that being the filling of a hole, meeting some strange desire that brings and absurd amount of satisfaction to the reader. Fetishes come in all forms, and this particular story is for fetishists of brainwashing and corruption. For those uninitiated, these are a strange type of domination fetish where the subject has their very personality rewritten to better fit the desires of that which changes them. Corruption, in particular, is less about manipulating the mind and perception and more about manipulating morals and flipping characters on their head, like a hero becoming an evil version of themselves. This particular set goes further and subverts that, by making the evil corrupting force a greater good that's arguably just as evil in a new way.

Normally, Saihate does works where magical girls and turned into the minions of various evil forces (or get vored and rebirthed by bee-girls), but this series twists this around and creates a new mythology where magical girls aren't girls fighting of their own will, but being turned into sleeper agents for a living light. The uniforms are given less colorful and frilly looks, using mainly blacks, whites, grays, and a bit of gold to push the light theme. Those color choices rob the outfits of individual flair, resulting and ribbons and accessories not sticking out too much. Most transformed also have the same uniform gray soldier look, down to hair style.

Only the black, white, and blonde ones keep significant differences in their outfits, but to different degrees. You can make out rank and file by how expressive or unique every soldier is, with black and white acting as the middlemen between the blonde leader at the end, and the gray soldiers below them. It should also be noted the leader's uniform has a very different hair style and an almost pure white design, with additional dark colored bits here and there. Those pieces are the shadow on her shining, purity focused design, hinting at her true power and ruthlessness. She also gives the same uniforms as black, white, and the gray soldiers, but they have different colors for every girl, and their hair remains unchanged. They're effectively the same as black and white, her direct underlings because they were turned by her, the highest ranking member of the army.

There's so much told by just costume design, and it further pushes the idea that these magical girls are potentially dangerous, with a heavy bent towards authoritarianism and militarism. Their look screams that they are uniform, subjugated, and in possession of power, giving them right to assert themselves. There is no sex or nudity, because it's not necessary to show these fetishes on display in an effective manner. Anyone can easily make a story where a character becomes a sexual possession, but this series and most the work of Saihate shows that you can do something very interesting with fetish work without making sexuality explicit. The ideas at play here could potentially make a strong story alone, and there are many hentai manga out there that do. In particular, the Dinaranger series has lasted multiple volumes and has crafted a large web of character relationships and mythology with that initial corruption plot. There's a horror edge to corruption that rarely gets explored these days, and porn and fetish stuff are some of the few places that play with the idea well.

I mean, the last time I saw a corruption sequence in an anime was Daybreak Illusion, and it was one of the worst things I had ever seen. The last good example I know that really went into it was Madoka Magica, and that was years ago now. If porn and fetish stories, of all things, have to keep this stuff alive, then so be it.