Hentai in America
Reason for controversy: All manners of extreme and bizarre sexual deviancy.
The popularity of Eastern anime in the West has exploded in recent years and the trend has resulted in more than just endless reruns of Naruto and Full Metal Alchemist. Companies have also been importing Japan's large library of sexually explicit still-image, text-driven adventure games. They're as cheap to produce and easy to sell as regular pornography, so it's no wonder that about 50 (and counting) have already arrived on our shores.
The interactivity is minimal and the coitus can be blurry, but the content is pure and potent filth. While some of the games are relatively innocuous romances (meet girl, woo girl, make with the bow-chika-wow-wow), others feature pseudo-incest (Gibo, Hitomi: My Stepsister), abnormal fetishes (Water Closet), sexual servitude (Slave Pageant) and repulsive, sadistic predation (Tsuki: Possession). This is the kind of material that makes concerned citizens' faces melt off.
How did the media miss this one? Most parents and politicians don't seem to realize these "games" have invaded their homeland. Major North American retailers refuse to stock adults-only, pornographic titles, so the only place you can access hentai is through download services on the internet. Should a pundit ever stumble upon one of these websites, we expect all hell to break loose.
