Perhaps depraved fiction is the only thing I will ever write about in these pages (not true; Cars review coming soon). Metamorphosis is a porn manga by Shindo L that turned into a meme some years ago (I think 2018?). It's one of those shitty Reddit anime fan memes where the joke is that it's a really fucked up hentai, "Japan is crazy for this o_O". I never read it when it was the talk of town and I never saw any of the discourse surrounding it. For a long time I genuinely thought it was about a girl turning into a freaky insect creature that has sex with people before eating them or something. And if the manga were actually about that, I guarantee it would have been a hundred times better than what the actual story as it is.
I decided to read it since it was praised by a YouTuber that I liked. I'm down for giving so-called depraved fiction a chance if beneath the grossness was actual insight and food for thought. So I tried reading Metamorphosis the porn manga. Tried.
As a quick rundown, basically it's about a nerdy girl who turns into a pretty girl (hence "metamorphosis") who then gets exploited and abused by people, shoving in her face how she does not have any worth both before and after her transformation. She gets pregnant from getting raped, and then I think she kills herself because she thinks she can't ever be a good mother anymore. Wow.
It's literally just porn. Stupid and ignorantly misogynistic like all porn, seriously. There were like 200 pages and I stopped at 30 and skimmed the rest until I reached the end—the most shit-eating ending (not in the fun way) to top off what a shit-fest this entire porno was. "Oh society is so cruel to girls! Prostitution and drugs, beauty standards and pedos and rapists and school bullies, repressed sexualities and misguided hate because puritans declare that sex is so taboo! Not even the unborn is safe!" It would be okay surface-level commentary if only it wasn't literal porn. Metamorphosis subverts the case of "a sexual media being misunderstood as shock for the sake of shock when it's actually 'deep insightful commentary on society'"; people think whatever half-assed message Metamorphosis has has value, when in reality it really is, in this case, just porn.
To write a genuinely impactful story, have to show your viewers that these characters are human. You can show sex scenes without making it porn. The difference between an actual story that has something to say and just straight up porn is the framing. The angles, characterizations and interactions in Metamorphosis maximize objectifying the girl, because this manga is meant to be jerked off to. It's difficult to relay such message when your story is quite literally designed to appeal to bodily drives—when it's material to get its viewers drunk on dopamine.
Real girls don't cartoonishly stick their tongue out and go cross-eyed during sex. Do you think that the author took time and care to illustrate the fetus in her womb crying because they wanted you to pity life? No, they drew that because they think it's sexy to fuck pregnant women, because current social taboos and misogyny declare sex is inherently dirty, and fucking pregnant women is so hot because you get to disturb a child by having your penis so close to it. There's an audience for these.
You could say it's trying to like, do a little gotcha moment. You just jerked off to a girl getting abused! You should feel bad! Sure that may work on some and their view on women and porn may change as a result, but to say as though it's clever writing is shit taste.
But that's not all. Let's top it off with something more in-your-face "I genuinely do not care about any of the social issues presented" with a lovely anti-victim pro-life ending. At the end, there's like a little flash forward where the girl is living life fine and normal as a mother.
It doesn't matter if this flash forward actually happened or if the girl killed herself and is in heaven. This is supposedly the "good ending". The light at the end of the tunnel. The girl realizes how much value she has regardless of the abuse done to her. And becomes a mother. To, I guess, her rape baby, and start a new life. (While still blaming herself for her trauma by the way.)
Okay. Look, it's not that I think victims who got pregnant from abuse should 100% abort their pregnancy and never have a happy moment in their life ever again. But this sick fucking contrast of how much effort and care was put into illustrating her fucking abuse and trauma. But all she ever gets for recovery is a fucking time skip. Because her recovery isn't worth anything anyway, to the author and the target audience. Nothing but an easy time skip right? Forget whatever incapabilities that would result from her abuse. Truthfully, what more could this scene be than a "what could have been" to juxtapose with her demise and make it sexier.
Metamorphosis is "loss of innocence" fetish porn. That's it. I'm not mad because the girl didn't say "I have PTSD now!" and wail at the camera, I'm mad because the entire manga sucks and people (in my niche) give it too much credit. My fault for listening to an opinion I guess.
I guess it's fine if you like porn. Or more specifically, use porn to get off. It's just so ass when the horny drive takes over any rational thought. It's consumption. Over consumption is bad, mindless consumption is worse. At least it's not me in this case. Metamorphosis isn't a good read.
back to library