This is twelfth of fourteen essays contained within the third issue of the Adult Analysis Anthology, a collection of longform writing that seeks to expand the breadth of critical discourse around adult games and adult game culture. If you’d like to support the creation of more high-quality writing about adult games the full anthology is available for purchase on Itch! Anthology logo by Pillow!
Written By: Leo G.
A few years back I was in a voice chat. The subject of cuckold porn was brought up. Someone said, “It’s fucking disgusting. What kind of loser would jerk off to the idea of his wife getting fucked by another man?” I responded innocently with, “Wait, you imagine yourself as the cuck?” The room went silent, and the topic was quickly changed. I think about that conversation often, not only because it was really funny, but also because it made me realize how many facets and angles there were to NTR and cuckold porn.
NTR (an abbreviation for the Japanese term “netorare”, which translates literally “to take off” and is used to describe pornography wherein a character’s love interest is seduced and stolen by a sexually-aggressive antagonist) has a reputation. If you’ve ever clicked on an NTR doujin and scrolled down to the comment section, there’s usually someone who took the time out of their day to let everyone know that if they’re masturbating to this, they’re sick. The way they’ll talk about NTR brings to mind the type of comment you’d see on an entomologist’s cool pictures of a tarantula or millipedes. “KILL IT WITH FIRE,” someone would yell into the post tagged “#thing you don’t like.”
But it goes deeper than not liking a genre. As we’ve seen online, people will get very possessive and disturbed when it comes to the concept of a woman they desire having a relationship with another man. And to a degree, why wouldn’t they be? A lot of the gacha and anime industry is predicated on creating a parasocial environment, where the idea is that these women exist just for you. They’ll never have a man in their life canonically, and might as well be wearing purity rings. What I find fascinating about this phenomenon is that cheating in erotica is a tale as old as time. The housewife that has sex with the milkman, the married duchess who hates her boring marriage, the examples are endless. Romance and pornography would have a much slimmer catalog if we removed all instances of extramarital sex.
For the vitriolic commenters that love their waifus, NTR is all about the nasty feelings associated with being the victim of cheating. But these days, NTR can mean anything from “two adults who consensually swing,” to “man sobbing in a closet while his wife pays off his debts with her pussy.” A content warning that’s too generic can lead to unwanted surprises, and for that reason I understand being uncomfortable with it. But then, why is it so popular?
