Superheroines Lose

Sometimes it worries me, the fantasy material that fascinates me most.  I'd like to think I'm nice and "normal" in real life, but when it comes to imagining and looking at make-believe stuff . . . well, you'll see.  Or maybe not.   Here's your warning: what follows is not for the faint-of-heart or able-to-be-offended.

Okay, so Sean T. Collins has this tumblr, Superheroes Lose.  Click over and you'll see it's a lot of superhero comics cover art with the good-guys all defeated on the ground, and the villains standing triumphantly over them.  Well, in my recent search for gruesome teen superhero deaths, I happened upon an extensive and astonishingly multifaceted genre of Japanese porn that's all about superheroines losing . . . and what happens to them afterward.  Yep, I said porn--most of it hardcore, though not always in the usual sense.  I couldn't resist a peek at this stuff, thanks to the same dark, dubious, and downright skeevy predilections that drove me to start collecting fumetti.  I shudder to think what this says about me, but I've been on a binge ever since.

Here's the thing to realize about it--in my admittedly limited sample, I haven't seen any yet that are spoofy or campy or light.  It used to be, if you saw a superhero porno at the video store, it would be a silly romp where Captain Schlongadong shoots Minxarella with some preposterous orgasmatronic ray-gun, and sexual hi-jinx would ensue.  By contrast, the general spirit of these seems to be, "Hey, if you've ever wanted to see a superheroine like this get beaten down, raped, tortured, and possibly snuffed, then here you go!"

A loooong, detailed, gory, and sexually-explicit tour of the genre after the jump.  Just remember--once you've seen this stuff, you can't unsee it.




The first-act fights where the superheroines lose can be startlingly brutal. Take, for example, the opening fight-scene of Heroine Cruel Story, vol. 1 (and it's not even the one she loses!):

The bulk of the movies are devoted to the aftermath, when the superheroine is in the villain's clutches, at his utter lack of mercy.  If her losing fight sets a grim tone, things just get darker from there.  If there's a goofball quality to any of it, that comes from the types of superheroines (see this menu of categories, for example) featured in these twisted fantasies, not because any of it gets played for yucks.  I mean, what the fuck is this?:

I haven't seen it, because seriously--bunny armor?!?  Notice, though, on the back cover, that purple dot toward the bottom.  It says, "BAD END," and where this kind of movie is concerned, those words are no joke.  That cute, spunky, Sailor-style heroine in the video clip above gets reduced over the course of the movie to this:

I have to admit, Heroine Cruel Story is an outlier among the movies I've seen.  If any movie ever deserved the epithet of "torture porn," here it is.  It's all about the torture and gore.  There's minimal sexual content in the usual sense, and what little there is, is strictly for the purposes of torture.  For example, there's one sequence where the villain jabs several thin steel tubes (like straws with sharp, pointy ends) into her torso, that cause her to bleed out; the last one, of course, goes in her crotch.  This superheroine's gruesome murder is (with one exception I'll get to later) far and away the most extreme I've encountered.  Rest assured, though, there's a vast range of BAD ENDs that don't have to go this far to still be quite disturbing. 

One example from the mild end is Superlady 2.  Superlady was depowered and defeated with kryptonite in the previous movie (the pics at the top of the post, btw, are from Superlady Zero), so she starts this one already a prisoner of the bad-guy.  Instead of seeing her lose, we open with a rape scene:

These Superlady movies are actually more conventionally pornographic than most, so she eventually starts to like it, and ends up riding him hard:

It so happens that Superlady has a young protege who tries to come to her rescue.  The problem is that the bad guy uses Superlady as a hostage, and threatens to zap her to death with a kryptonite ray-gun if Super Young Lady (?) doesn't have sex with him, too:

What's a Super Young Lady to do?  Well, what do you think?

Like her mentor, Super Young Lady can't help responding positively to the rape sex, and comes pretty hard despite her apparent efforts not to.  At least she gets that much of a "happy ending."  Unfortunately, she ultimately gets the dreaded BAD END.  When Superlady somehow breaks out of her kryptonite cage, beats the bad guy, and gets away, Super Young Lady doesn't make it off the spaceship in time before it explodes.  Her ghost appears to Superlady in the denouement, so yep, she really died.

Mask the Glamour takes us one increment further into the BAD END zone.  Our superheroine this time is modeled on manga maestro Go Nagai's Kekko Kamen, but played straighter.  Like the original, she wears only gloves, boots, and a mask.

I hate to put it this way, but this kind of superheroine's costume makes her a natural choice for this genre.  Once she's defeated, her bare body is immediately vulnerable to groping and rape, without the bad guys even needing to rip anything off her--except her mask, the removal of which is treated as a special kind of violation.  Once this one is subdued, the first thing the bad guys do is pull that mask off, which makes her that much more naked and defenseless when they drag her back to their lair, chain her up, and get down to the business of tag-team raping her to a BAD END:

What makes this "one increment" worse than the Superlady movies is that her rapists are still human, but the rape seems much more rapey.  When they make her come with a vibrator:

 . . . it's degrading in a way that it wasn't even for Super Young Lady, who came in spite of herself but never seemed to lose her agency in the encounter.

Sticking with the "naked mask" superheroines, but edging into nastier territory, we come to White Kamen. The heroine's capture is brutal and humiliating.  Here's a snippet, to give you an idea:

If it seems like that guy sure slugs her in the belly a bunch of times, apparently there's a whole niche subgenre unto itself devoted to nothing but stomach-punches!  After she has lost, she's subjected to torture:

. . . and a few human and nonhuman rapes, such as this scene with naughty living slime:

Nonhuman rape is actually the norm in this genre.  Here's a movie literally titled, Super Heroine Monster Rape:

Note how the top right corner of the back-cover promotes "MONSTER RAPE" as a feature--then note, lower down, that awful BAD END purple dot of doom!  Having seen this, I can vouch for that.  If this isn't a BAD END, I don't know what is:

I'd like to note a weird dissonance in this case, however, that doesn't seem to be unusual for the genre.  The ideas here are ghastly as can be.  A cute young superheroine getting simultaneously raped and devoured by horrible monsters?!?  And yet, not only don't we see the hardcore penetration of Superlady 2 or the pukeworthy gorn of Heroine Cruel Story. but we don't even see a hint of nudity or blood.  It's conceptually XXX but visually PG-13. It's weird, and I've seen this sort of thing a few times.

All this talk of "nonhuman rape" brings us where you knew it must.

Oh yes, there will be tentacles.

A lot of the movies above have a tentacle scene or two, but I haven't mentioned it because that's not their focus.  Naturally, there are lots of movies where it is the focus.  In fact, there's a whole series (up to 8 volumes, apparently) called Heroine Tentacle Insult.  I checked out a couple of them.  Vol. 4 is pretty weak.  Basically, this superheroine:

. . . loses early to this buggy bad-guy:

. . . and spends the whole rest of the movie tangled up in tentacles like this:

Seriously, if I made an animated gif of that image, it would be indistinguishable from 2/3 of the whole movie.  The monotony is sort of broken up once in a while by working in little moments of micro-fetish-service (by which I mean, stuff like the stomach punching in the White Kamen movie above).  For example, armpit tickling:

I'm sure there are videos out there of nothing but girls getting their armpits tickled for 90 minutes at a time.

The tentacles don't do a very good job of raping her, either.  Maybe they're only supposed to soften her up?  She doesn't even lose her panties until the very final minutes, when the bug-man rips them off so he can rape her himself:

BAD END.

Vol. 2 is slightly more interesting.  The superheroine faces not just one tentacled antagonist, but a whole invading team of them.  She actually wins her first fight against them:

These guys fight dirty and don't give up, however.  In violation of her secret identity, one sneaks into her bedroom and, well, violates her:

Despite getting raped, she ultimately fights off this one, too.   She hunts them back to the scene of the first fight, meaning to end their menace once and for all.  Things don't go so well for her this time, though:

Here are the final seconds of the movie, which fade out on the image of a tentacle monster gloating over a tearful, half-naked, utterly defeated superheroine:

Haha--there's one for the ol' tumblr, Sean!

And here's a review of Vol. 5 from another fan of the genre (see also his excellent post on Giga, the company that produces most of this fare).

The superheroine tentacle-rape title that intrigued me most (oof--did I really just type those words?) was Heroine Mimic Tentacle Insult: Superlady vs. Glamour Mask:

As my coverage above suggests, I'm pretty keen on both of these characters, and the packaging for this one made it look like a relatively high-end production.  I'm glad I saw it, but I'm sorry to say it wasn't everything I hoped for.  First, the two characters don't fight each other or team up or even meet.  Their stories are completely separate.  So we get a half-length Superlady movie, and a half-length Glamour Mask movie.  Second, both movies follow the formula of the superheroine getting wrapped up in tentacles very early and then writhing around in them for the whole rest of the duration.  As much as I wanted to see that, believe me, it gets tedious.

Third, adding to the tedium, both movies are padded by scenes where the heroines slip into soft-focus reveries where they imagine themselves to be dancing and masturbating (not at the same time, unfortunately).  Finally, the slight uptick in production values does more harm than good, because what it amounts to is crappy CGI.  I'm sure it seemed like a great idea at the time to throw more tentacles in there with computer effects, but it looks hokey as hell, and . . . there's no nice way to put this, but if you're watching this kind of movie, you want to see physical objects penetrating the actresses.  The pixelized mosaic censorship bullshit is frustrating enough (How deep is it in her?  Is it even in her?!?); when the "insulting" tentacles themselves are merely virtual visual effects, there goes most of the point of watching in the first place. 

One visual effect deserves mention, not because it's particularly good, but just because.  One ubiquitously recurring trope in tentacle hentai is the victim getting hoisted up and suspended by tentacles, the better for other tentacles to penetrate her.  Here's an example from the Final Fantasy X-inspired hentai flash-game GuriGuri Cute Yuna:

I've never seen this, though, in a live-action tentacle rape movie.  Promotional screenshots of the Glamour Mask portion of Heroine Mimic Tentacle Insult made it look like this movie at least tries to pull it off, so I was curious to see it.  Here's the scene:

How do they do it?  Check this shit out:

It looked to me like some kind of digital shenanigans was going on, but I never expected a gang of green-skinsuited guys lifting her up then getting digitally erased to be the way they did it.  You learn something new every day!

Although all the examples above take a more-or-less classical approach to tentacle rape, the subgenre has grown surprisingly complicated, kinked up with developments no sane person could imagine.  It's been crossbred, for example, with the "swallowing" fetish subgenre.  I can't even believe there's such a thing as "vorarephilia." Nevertheless, here's a sexy superheroine getting swallowed by a plant monster:

The tentacle around her arm, being used to drag her into the leafy maw, isn't what I mean by the crossbreeding.  Ooooh, no!  That's something much stranger.  You see, in this unholy spawn of two already-weird fetishes, the swallowing monster's stomach and guts are filled with rapey tentacles!!!  A product blurb at J-List puts it this way:

This version features a wild new venture that takes tentacle sex to a new level as innocent AV idols are captured and swallowed by the multitentacled beast into a cave of unlimited ecstasy bringing an otherworldy/ demonic feel.

You know, revolting as the idea sounds, I have to concur with this positive assessment.  When done well, this is really quite something to see.  Here are the money-shots (one for her and one for "him") from one such scene in Touch of Tentacle Orgasm 8:

If that didn't shut down or blow out the rational part of your brain, you might be wondering, "Wait a minute--what about stomach acid?"  Well, that also occurred to some of these filmmakers, and their response to the idea was, "Hey, that would be awesome!"  Thus we come to one of the most bizarre things I've ever seen (and I think you know how much that counts for): Heroine Tentacle Hell Digestion.  This superheroine:

 . . . fights this bad-guy:

. . . who pukes out his stomach--not its contents, but the whole actual organ:

He then magically sucks her into it:

. . . where she's raped by tentacles:

She escapes somehow, but then later gets sucked back in again, this time to be digested by a flood of stomach acid:

. . . to death:

Bleargh!  Talk about BAD END!  If there's a more appalling way for a superheroine to lose, I don't want to know about it.  There's apparently a whole superheroine digestion series, though I don't know how many installments.

The crazy thing is, I've barely scratched the surface of this stuff.  There are sub-subgenres I haven't sampled yet, or even discovered, I'm sure.  And many more yet to be created.  To Rules 34, 35, and 36, we may add Rule Thirty-or Forty-whatever: If something does not exist, someone in Japan will create it for the purpose of making porn about it.

So why does this stuff fascinate me so?  That will have to wait for a later post.  This one is long enough already.  And I'm a little afraid to look too closely at that question.  And that digestion movie sickened me so much I really need a break.  By the way, if you've read this far, you're going to hell with me.  I hope this post doesn't get me kicked off the internet.