JAV Magical Girls — The Final Critique

Published : September 28th, 2021 Written by vienna

Hello everyone! vienna here, and today I want to bring to your attention one of the topics related to JAV that I am most passionate about, both as a fan of Japanese pornography, and as a great lover of fantasy and otaku culture. Some time ago I wrote a very vague article about what I thought about JAVs starring magical girls (Why You Should Care About 'Magical Girls' JAVs), giving a quick and not very precise overview of the catalog that R18 offers in this regard. However, as some friends have also pointed out to me, I feel that I was far too cheesy and simplistic in defining and describing what I think could become and turn into one of the greatest achievements of JAVs as a medium. In Red JAV Redemption - Far West In The Far East and the Model of Pleasure series, I illustrate how innovation and originality can lead to great results both in purely economic terms and from a genuinely artistic standpoint - the way JAVs convey eroticism, whether through kinks, particular settings, or investigating certain facades of sex, is central to the viewer's perception of pleasure. Suffice it to say that, for some people - myself included! - sometimes all it takes is a stocking or a ponytail haircut to make me want to watch an entire two-hour JAV. This, while it may be blatant to most, only underscores how much attention to small details and macro-management of clothing, dynamics, interpretation, and so on, is essential to the making of a good JAV. The discourse is further amplified when you decide to focus an entire production around a specific concept; moreover, the more it is a niche dynamic, the more difficult it is to make a very good movie, especially because it is difficult to draw inspiration from more or less similar movies - actually, this is true for the vast majority of mediums, such as comics and cartoons, and is therefore not only restricted to mere pornography. The topic we are covering today, as you may have guessed especially from the title, is magical girls. This will be my second and final article on the subject, and I hope to be able to shed more light on my views on this beautiful subgenre of JAV, and all that it could offer us in the near future. Let's take a look!

A Tale of Blowjobs and Witchcraft

GHKP-61 is the closest we got to a JAV involving 'actual' magic. Although pretty... low-budget, the movie director definitely knows what he is doing. My face, when rewatching this masterpiece, was exactly like the one on the left picture. Yuna Yamakawa and Erika Saeki are such a mood!

In my last article on this subject I suggested that the magical girls in any JAV, which indeed pushes this label hard to sell itself to the audience, is a lie, or rather a pretext used to infuse the film with strange and ambiguous objects (and slyly use them in sex scenes, like the green magic crystal in the nearby images) and, in a way, legitimize not only some particularly seductive and unusual costumes that we might not otherwise see worn on our favorite actresses elsewhere, but also dynamics, contexts, and settings that push a certain narrative. Take, for example, the many samurai, feudal Japan or medieval themed films: there are plenty of them (we've covered some of them on the ZENRA blog as well, for example in my article on the Top 5 Craziest Settings JAVs) and they are renown commercial successes with every iteration. JAV aficionados are never strangers to this kind of movie, indeed they are used to that kind of context and the umpteenth release of a JAV set in the Sengoku era is simply "due", or at least expected. What I want to say is that, in the course of time, we have normalized the most bizarre and absurd forms of pornography, which - finding an economic feedback, completely functional to their reproduction, as well as reviews and positive opinions from blogs and fans - are realized without too many problems. The biggest production studios have now adopted this philosophy, normalizing the realization of JAVs with settings once considered exaggerated or unrelated to the sensual and erotic dimension that is proper to pornography. I would like to underline that this maturity has a purely Japanese signature: it is extremely rare and difficult to find western pornography, and I am referring to the U.S. and to a lesser extent to the European one, that has the courage to set and build a porn adapting it to themes and rhythms generally considered not very lucrative; well, although profit is central in any aspect of the realization of a JAV, creativity, innovation and originality find ample space where rewarded by the viewers.

In any case, these dynamics, ascertained and reconfirmed over the years (but not even by many, really - we're talking about recent phenomena, certainly born after the year 2000 and exploded with the evolution of the Internet and social media in general) have hardly succeeded in confirming themselves with JAVs starring the magical girls. If we can find galore of JAVs with samurai and ninja, the same thing cannot be said with witches and wizards. It's easier to find the sword than the staff, basically - and why is that? I think the culprit lies in the deep, intrinsic bond that binds the various forms of Japanese pornography. In addition to JAVs, which we use as a generic term for everything surrounding Japanese adult videos, hentai is equally prominent, albeit much more niche and completely unrelated to the capitalist dynamics described above. The authors of hentai, whether in the form of manga or anime, are often amateurs, who have neither capital nor the support of production studios behind them. These are simple works that, even if created out of simple passion and love for that specific art form, manage to involve millions of people. There are those who approached Japan and its culture thanks to manga or anime, those who approached it with JAVs, and those who approached it with hentai. I'm not one of these people, but I assure you that the influence of hentai in the West is really scary, mainly among youngsters and all those who recognize the validity and authorship of this type of pornography, putting it almost (if not more) at the same level of JAV. What do hentai have to do with this discussion anyway?

How To Cast a Love Spell

The picture on the right is from CRVR-221 by Studio CRYSTAL VR and performed by Rei Kuruki, the only new magical girl JAV on R18 since I wrote my first article on the matter. It's a pretty decent virtual reality movie but, aside from perhaps the costumes, there isn't much very 'magic' about this film. Sadly, this is one hell of a problem for this kind of movies: the mislabeling. CRVR-211 definitely shouldn't have this label attached to it, but this is actually something that many movies suffer, and not just these magical girls-themed JAVs.

Hentai don't exactly exert an influence on the JAV industry, precisely because money circulation is non-existent or otherwise too low for it to be considered a lucrative medium; however, it is interesting to note how the proliferation of certain hentais have undeniably hindered and undermined the making of JAVs starring magical girls. As mentioned, most of the magical girls JAVs on R18 don't deal with magical girls at all, except in a very tangential way, and indeed could be considered by some to be outright mislabeled - which is entirely fair, if you ask me. Most of those JAVs feature an actress dressed as a sorceress, usually reprising the cosplay of a popular anime character, or some middle ground well embedded in mass culture. Very few (literally counting on one hand) are the JAVs that actually perform real magic, and when they do, it's a matter of cheesy effects, nightmarish settings, and lackluster performances by casts not really sure what they're doing. Which, picking up on the point made earlier, is understandable. Look at it this way: it's much easier, from a technical standpoint, to create samurai-themed JAVs than magic-themed JAVs.

All that money and technical skill required to make something approaching decency is actually a dangerous gamble, deemed by the filmmakers to have simply failed. Hentai, on the other hand, as non-profit works do not pose this kind of problem and, above all, by the very nature of the medium, allow a more comfortable and convenient realization of anything that may concern magic and sorcery - obviously, drawing and representing everything related to magic on paper is easier than dynamically building the effects on computer, if it is a medium-length productions such as a classic JAV. This is the reason why hentai has overwhelmed JAVs as far as magical girls are concerned: it's too expensive, too tedious, too difficult, and too un-lucrative to create something much more easily achievable by a parallel and competing industry like hentai. So, it's only natural to find ourselves with so many swords and shurikens, and so few wands and pointy hats. Which is very sad, since I'm a big fan of the genre, and I love these fantasy depictions; however, I understand and realize why, except for a few, mediocre productions, I will (probably) never see a true triple-A JAV starring magical girls in my lifetime.

Still, I have hope that some production studio will bring forth the torch and start to experiment a bit with the genre - it has a lot of potential and could quite possibly be the next big thing, if we actually express our desire to the big guys. In the end, studios only produce what the audience really wants, and if more people coming from an anime and manga background start to express their wishes and opinions on what new JAVs should represent, I think we will be able to watch some decent magical girls JAV without experiencing nausea.

Well, that’s it for today, guys. As I am writing this article, it’s late July, meaning that I will be going on vacation pretty soon, coming back on September. I recently crowned my sixth month as an article writer here on ZENRA, and I'm very proud of the work I'm doing and the community we're creating. JAVs are truly a gathering place for all of us, and opinion articles like this one only solidify that bond. That said, I hope you enjoyed the article - I definitely won't be writing any more articles strictly about JAVs starring magical girls or the like, as this is the second one. Still, I hope my point of view was clear, and I invite you to let me know what you think. That said, I wish you an enjoyable summer and remember to stay safe! See you soon!