Perhaps some of the only porn someone can consume ethically. I guess there’s an argument to be made about poorly paid animators drawing smut in animation workhouses, but it feels like most of the western world, when it comes to hentai, consumes rule 34 of franchise characters from media. Beat my brain up as I may, I can’t see anything wrong in that and would much rather a fictional character be debased than an actual human for money.
Doesn’t the existence of “the fisherman’s wife” kinda undermine your point here?
I’m not familiar with that term.
I was referring to a famous Japanese wood block printing of a similar name.
Point being, do artists really require “porn films” to create pornographic media?
I think someone could argue that the animators are still being exploited along with voice actors, they use a lot of the same distribution channels, and I’m definitely not going to defend the content of a lot of hentai, but it seems silly to say that hentai requires live action pornography in order to be created, when people have been drawing lewd pictures for millennia.
They don’t, but I wasn’t trying to claim that they do, that’s why I said “very commonly” and “probably” as opposed to “necessarily” and “definitely”. You yourself already understand that the fact that hentai doesn’t strictly need to exploit workers to exist, is secondary to the fact that hentai actually does exploit workers in practice, and I’d say the same applies to the use of reference material: live action porn as reference material isn’t strictly necessary, but it is cheap, quick, easy, and effective to the ends of most hentai artists, so its use remains widespread among them. And while maybe you might have some secret mystical technique to identify which hentai forwent this common practice, most “end consumers” really have zero way of knowing what reference was used under what circumstances and how.