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Drea Ramirez, who we heard from earlier, well, after her anime awakening, she ended up pursuing a career in the field, working in anime and manga marketing and distribution. She’s worked at Crunchyroll, which is the leading anime streaming service in the West, and then at FAKKU, which is another subscription platform, but for hentai manga. She’s gonna walk us through her experience with the industry.
In this episode, Morgan talks with anime marketer Drea Ramirez about how discovering hentai helped her explore her own sexual identity — and how today’s streaming platforms are stifling weirder, more experimental forms of animation. We’ll also hear from Jacob Grady, CEO of the hentai manga site Fakku, about the challenges of running a licensed and legal business in the face of content piracy, and how anti-trafficking laws like SESTA and FOSTA can make it harder for hentai artists to make a living.
The Hentai Platform Streaming Wars
Hentai anime occupies a weird space in the content ecosystem. There are subscription-based platforms that give users access to hentai manga, those erotic comics, but there are no legal streaming platforms for hentai anime. So fans either have to buy DVDs or Blu-rays directly from distributors or they pirate it on illegal streaming sites.
Urotsukidoji was an erotic horror anime that got around Japan’s censorship laws by depicting tentacles and other monstrous appendages in sex scenes, instead of male genitalia. It was super controversial, but a hit. Screenings across the world sold out. So companies that were already distributing non-pornographic anime in the U.S. started also distributing hentai anime, first through VHS tapes, and then DVDs. But as streaming took off in the 2000s, so did piracy.
