That moment when the jokes suddenly turn serious
I agree with you,
senpai, I was just joking. Yes, I believe the best approach to sex is to be honest about it, and it tends to be part of most human relationships, so if you want to write about relationships, it's better to give the real thing than to beat around the bush, which ends up in weird stuff like the strange
ecchi niche in Japan where you have things like
Satanophany, with naked women without genitals, as if they were dolls. Once you remove the taboo, sex is just another one of human activities, with its own rituals and feelings, of course.
And obviously I agree that once you are honest about sex, you probably become able to approach your art more freely. Thus I totally believe that adult VNs are as you describe them - mature, complex, sophisticated. I don't bother to consume them, as I've told you in IRC, because my choice of medium for serious stuff are books, paper and ink stuff. Eliot, Mann, Lewis, Dostoevsky and so on.
I come to manga strictly for entertainment, which is not to say I like braindead fanservice stuff. It's just that my tolerance bar for those "sex substitutes" is higher than yours. I accept as a fact of life that mangaka will be under pressure to cater to their mainstream audience somehow, so I don't mind
ecchi and fanservice, so long as the story is good (and my bar is quite high for
that). I doubt I'll ever read a manga
because of fanservice/teasing/
ecchi, but I am perfectly fine with enjoying a good story that also happens to have these things.
This preference for entertaining material has resulted in my having a pretty pedestrian taste for manga. I avoid excessive sophistication and end up with series that can hardly be described as masterpieces of the genre. But they are all properly told and offer some food for thought.
(Of course,
Satanophany sucks, but at least we have a good laugh deriding it in the notes
)
