HENSHIN

DESCRIPTION

CAST

CHAPTERS

REVIEWS

• 

  LittleBig

  0/100
  Henshin or: how people keep trying to find deep meanings in porn

  This series was in part my attempt at seeing how much of that I could destroy — which is why I started off with a romantic comedy trope, just to see how chaotic I could make it from there. – Inio Asano

  My first contact with Henshin was through those anime pages and groups on Facebook, where people would spend a considerable amount of time posting anime aesthetics, lo-fi hip hop, and displaying a rather unhealthy obssession with ahegao. That latter part alone should have made me wary enough, but hey, call me an idiot.
  I should have known better than to fall for the "hentai with a plot" deception, but after seeing this thing everywhere, I had to take a look for myself.

  The plot is very simple: a girl changes her appearances as a means to change her life. This one good decision led her to bad decision after another in order to get her into the most deviant and abhorrent sexual situations possible.
  ...that's it. That's the whole manga. To sum it up, it was the narrative equivalent of throwing a dead dog into the story so people would feel sorry for it. This may sound harsh, but it really has nothing going for it other than sheer shock value. It clearly worked, considering how popular it got, but it takes little retrospection to see how terrible it was.

  Somehow, I've seen this manga being labeled as a "coming of age" countless times, even on the tags here — only that, you know, coming of ages usually features growth, introspection and choices made by the main characters. The story wants you to believe it does that, but from the first page to the last, Saki never gets to be anything else than a vapid, empty character only meant for channeling sexual depravity, as if we didn't already have plenty of those around. The only kind of introspection she ever gets until the bitter end is things like oh no I don't know what I'm doing or I loooove sex, which tells a lot about the choices her character is ever given: either if her actions are influenced by other people, drugs, or her unnatural craving for sex (always external factors, not once her own resolve), in the end it doesn't really matter: all of them are just excuses for her to get into more sex, and even if she is for a moment shown to be conscious that something's wrong, it doesn't really matter: she does it anyway.

  Along the way, in those aforementioned facebook posts, somehow Saki started being called the "female Punpun" (as well comparisons with other characters, like Shinji and even Bojack Horseman). However, even Inio Asano was conscious enough that a whole story centred around a sad boy jacking off in his room wasn't enough for people to take it seriously. What made Punpun interesting was his sprawling cast of side characters, that introduced all kinds of nuances of morality and points of view into the story. Although Punpun ultimately kept his self-destructive and egocentric personality, he was never given a shortage of options and paths to take. Through all his life he was introduced to both evil and good, irresolute and more determined people, people that tried to help him and that only made him become worse. It was this diversity that made the story, the universe, and Punpun's character believable: nothing was ever only black or white, there was myriads of color that influenced its characters, and even though the story maintained a harsh look at reality which felt like punch after punch in the guts, it never subdued to shallow pessimism. This also reflects on the opinions people have about Punpun: some pity him, claiming he was a victim of odds, some consider him to be the absolute worst.
  Henshin, however, does not have that: every single character is depicted as despicable and egotistical, always leading Saki into a even more disgruntled spiral of helplessness even if it meant acting in completely unrealistic ways (like a mother who's so oblivious she immediately believes her husband's claims of being seduced by their own daughter without even considering listening to her side of things), which makes the story completely unbelievable and dumb. Even the one character who shows the least bit of kindness does so as just a way for the plot to spat harsh truths and making Saki even more miserable. It tries too hard to make us care about its main character by introducing her to gradually more and more screwed up situations, forcing the reader to evoke a sense of shallow pity, instead of making her an actually interesting character. It's even sadder to see people deeming her as a "strong" character, when she does nothing but be carried by the plot instead of carrying it, which is not a demonstration of strength, at all.

  At first, I thought at least the art could be reedemable: the artist did a good job of distilling eroticism out of it by making the H-scenes seem coarse and raw — only, it wasn't actually doing that. By taking a quick check at the artist's other works, it seems like this is his actual style: somewhat bloated bodies, exaggerated anatomy, and themes such as humiliation and borderline rape (coming to things like anthropomorphic sex roosters(?)). It even makes use of the ahegao face, which, as weird as it may be, has become a sprawling fetish as of late, so it's hard to defend that those scenes weren't intended for at least some kind of audience to enjoy. It's as if a well known lolicon H-artist suddenly decided to draw a very graphic manga to make a point about child abuse; for anyone aware of their background, it just sounds like plain and disgusting irony. It simply doesn't add up.

  On trying to see how chaotic he could get from the simple premise of self-improvement, different from Asano, the author forgot the most important: to write a good story, that wasn't just self-deprecating onanism.
  In the end, Henshin is just your average hentai doujinshi, only it's not really appealing unless you're into some really screwed up stuff, and it doesn't work as a story of any kind, so I got absolutely nothing out of it rather than disgust and a deep impression of lost time and that the people who revere it should find better, healthier hobbies.

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• 

  muskio

  10/100
  What is Metamorphosis?

  An hentai dōjinshi, nothing more, nothing less.
  Just porn.

  About the manga

  Basically the characters can be divided in: Saki and the others, where Saki has the function to get humiliated in sexual and every other way and the others to humiliate her.
  That's it, no characterization (unless you find deep meaning in: ''i really like it!!!'', the most common Saki's phrase).
  And the story basically was: Saki getting humiliated in every horrifying way, taking drugs, and humiliate herself until she regret everything she did at the very end and die in the bathroom scene.

  A ''well drawn'' (personal taste i guess) manga where every character has the mere function to stir up sexual interest in the reader.

  And that is all you could say about to describe it, i tried hard to write something more but it's kinda hard.

  About this manga was percieved

  As you can see from the tags this manga is labelled a ''coming of age'' and i truly think some people think this manga can be read in that way, finding deep meaning in Saki's story, unluckily it's not like that.
  Saki didn't grew up and didn't understood a single thing about what happened to her unfortunate life, she just took drugs, got raped, and prostitued herself just to say at one point: ''oh god i really like it'', that's just porn my friends.
  At the end she took the glasses, she wore them (to be like ''her oldself''), reflected herself in the mirror and started crying just to realize: ''what have i become'' and die soon after. Just a cheap way to close a dramatic porn dōjinshi.
  If you like to masturbate on that creepy and awful kind of porn it's your business but don't mistake this manga as a well written one where you can find deep meanings.
  There is a percentage (huge, i hope) like me that considers this just bad porn, and the other third that treat this manga like a meme and provoke the rest by giving this an high rating and invent deep meanings just to make people laugh or mad.

  Other stuff

  The first third of the audience of this manga that i have written of before, reminds me of the one from young movie directors that think about theirself like some sort of genius with a superior intellect, Stanley Kubrick wanna be like Eduardo Casanova in the movie Pieles (skin) (A really bad movie that tried to be serious and make the viewer think about stuff).
  Basically donkeys that can't think about a single thing with their own brain, judging something only for their aesthetics.

  Please, remove that coming of age tag from this manga. ;c

  Everyone wished that ending
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• 

  Pockeyramune919

  53/100
  Be careful what you wish for...

  This review contains spoilers for Metamorphosis and discusses material that may be highly upsetting and/or triggering. Reader discretion is advised

  Welcome to the next installment of the Pockey Reviews Hentai Show.

  

  Today, we have the tale of a foolish reviewer’s wish being granted via a monkey’s paw. For about a year, I’ve expressed a desire to read a hentai that blends sexual elements with strong character/plot focus. I didn’t want porn with a barebones excuse for a plot haphazardly thrown in. I didn’t want a work whose focus on sex constrained it.

  Metamorphosis features a strong plot; unlike, say, Ring x Mama, there is a clear narrative throughline. There's increasing of stakes that ties one chapter to the next. Unlike Ring x Mama or Maka-Maka, sex doesn’t feel tacked on to the detriment of other aspects of the work. Sex is the work and the other aspects are enhanced by it. Through Metamorphosis, I have gotten my wish.

  But holy fucking shit, I didn’t want it like this.

  Metamorphosis is among the three most upsetting works I’ve had the displeasure of reviewing. Metamorphosis might very well take the cake because School Days and Tropic of Capricorn angered me. Metamorphosis just makes me sad, really, really sad.

  Metamorphosis or Emergence or 177013 (its six-digit nhentai identification number) is memetic in its infamy. On Reddit, just typing the letters will net you a slew of memes about how messed up it is. In the same breath, you have many who speak of it being the best hentai ever written. That is how Metamorphosis landed on my radar.

  I generally try not to recap an entire work in my reviews, but this is so short and the progression of events plays so much into my feelings towards the manga that I feel it’s justified.

  Saki Yoshida is a first-year high school student. In middle school, she was quite shy and didn’t have any friends, so now she wants to remodel herself in hopes of being popular. She approaches her mother and asks for makeup tips.

  And it’s all downhill from there.

  Saki begins wearing makeup, gets a new hairdo, and ditches her glasses for contacts. Her father is the first to compliment her on her appearance, followed by her classmates at school, who express wanting to hang out. After school, at a convenience store, she runs into an older man who compliments her, saying she’s prettier than the women in the magazine she's reading. They go to a karaoke bar and he proceeds to kiss and fondle her before giving her some drug tablet which gets her high. He then has sex with her. The poor girl believes he’s in love with her, entering a relationship with a man who’s only into her for her body. Later, she wishes to be as stylish as her classmates, so she tries her hand at “compensated dating,” which is exactly what it says on the tin, going on a date with someone for the purpose of monetary gain. Her date is an old, ugly bastard (because of course he is) who isn’t satisfied simply dating Saki, so he pays her extra for the chance to touch her before quickly escalating into sex. While Saki enjoys the sensation, she regrets having sex with someone she doesn’t love. Here, I thought the manga was going to go down the somewhat relatable route of nymphomania robbing one of agency and the capacity of meaningful sex. But no, Metamorphosis eschews warm relatability for cold shock value. Next, some of Saki’s male classmates spot her exiting the hotel with the man, so they blackmail her into giving blowjobs in the bathroom, which they record, starting a perpetual blackmail cycle. At home, Saki’s father begins raping her. At school, she continues commanding the attention of the boys, making her female classmates jealous and leading them to deface her desk, making her feel unwelcome at school. Saki’s mother finds out about her husband’s incestous actions and beats Saki around like she’s in fucking Punch Out!!, claiming that she seduced her father. She subsequently kicks her rape-victim daughter out of her house. Saki begins living with her boyfriend, Hayato. Saki is soon used to pay off Hayato’s debt, resulting in her being pimped out. Around the same time, she’s introduced to cocaine, causing her drug addiction to further spiral. Hopped up on cocaine, they give her piercings to make her more appealing to customers. We fast-forward in time, seeing her being whored out to more and more people. Said people often don’t use condoms, which causes Saki to get pregnant. She undergoes an abortion as per Hayato’s request, sending her further in debt and emotional turmoil. She’s raped some more by associates of Hayato’s lender, who get Saki hooked on heroin. So addled with drugs is Saki that she now has sex for more drugs instead of money. This, in addition to her being robbed, is enough for Hayato to throw her out. In exchange for lodging, she’s fucked by disease-ridden homeless men. She soon discovers she’s pregnant and decides she’ll turn her life around for her child’s sake. This is where the manga takes a turn for the happier...if it were your standard story. No, Saki still is addicted to drugs and she can’t climb out the hole she’s fallen into, for no one will help her and she doesn’t have the capacity to help herself at this point. Upon her former classmates seeing the homeless, drugged out, visibly pregnant Saki, they mercilessly beat and rape her. The story ends with Saki overdosing, seeing a heroin-fueled fantasy of the future in which she’s gone clean and is a supportive mother for her daughter.

  This wall of text was an exercise in emulation to give you a sense of what it’s like to read this manga. It’s absolutely crushing, drowning in its bleakness. Everything bad that can happen does and each character will take every opportunity to be a horrible, disgusting person. Reading this manga left me feeling disgusted and drained. I stayed up far later than I intended after finishing this manga, simply trying to get settled. I know I sound dramatic, but I spent the entire day feeling sick and I couldn’t bring myself to do much of anything. I honestly attribute it to reading this manga.

  At this point, me saying that a hentai has decent art is meaningless; it’s rare for me to find a hentai that I don’t think has pleasing art. With this in mind, yes I did in fact find the manga tantalizing at first. But there’s a moment when a switch flips and the hentai becomes unquestionably sinister. A moment came, much later than I care to admit, where I no longer could gleam even the most base, shameless carnal enjoyment out of the hentai. All I could muster was sadness. The author, Eru Shindou or “ShindoL'' does a good job of hooking you in with things that are relatively vanilla before it gets to a point where most have pause in viewing it as a hentai. It’ll make most go from hard to soft; from wet to dry. I applaud this manga for making me honest-to-God feel something, even though that “something” is God-fucking-awful. When I saw Saki’s former classmates stomping out her pregnant belly, I screamed, I wanted to cry, I wanted to puke. Art should affect you, it should touch you. And by fucking Jove, I was affected. I am affected.

  I turn back to how this manga manages to answer all of my wants in a hentai whilst being the most uncomfortable reading experiences i have had.

  That glib desire to see Rintarou’s character-engulfing dysfunction analyzed? In Metamorphosis, the negative effects of nymphomania and drug abuse drive the plot.

  The undefined relationships of Maka-Maka? No relationship definitions, no problem! It’s not a bug, it’s a feature because absolutely no one in this story gives an iota of a shit about this girl and that shows in how no one forms a strong relationship with her.

  The sex largely hindering the plot of Ring x Mama and Maka Maka? Here, the sex is the plot and sex being in every chapter works because the story is expressly about Saki’s decadence and how sex and drugs take over her life due to the horrible people she finds herself surrounded by.

  Gross, problematic, and obnoxious characters bogging down my hentai/ecchi, making it hard to enjoy? Once again, that’s largely the point. This is a hentai that isn’t meant to make you feel good, it’s to show you what happens when people only have sex on the brain and see women as less than.

  You may now be guessing that I’m going to go on and say that the deconstructionist aspect is shallow, that, much like School Days, a disgusting, inflammatory, and ultimately shoddy work is being shielded from legitimate criticism with the flimsy argument that it’s “deconstructionist.”

  But no. For one, I think that, for the most part Metamorphosis is quite well made and two, it’s deconstructionist elements are both clear and enhance the work. At its core, this is a deconstruction of hentai, removing the fantasy element and showing what would realistically happen if these fetishes were applied to the real world. It shows the type of people necessary to make these fetishes possible. In showing the actual ramifications of these kinks, readers might feel ashamed of harboring them. While this isn’t necessary for all readers, it could be an effective reminder for those who conflate reality with fantasy. It shows us what happens when you see a woman as nothing more than a heated container for your dick. Beyond all of that, this is a story that chillingly shows how we often treat our bottom line. It shows us the extent of what a lack of empathy can cause. The most chilling thing about Saki’s classmates’ treatment of her isn’t the treatment in and of itself, but because I can see it happening in real life.

  The most sloppy thing about the manga would be the ending, as it’s a very abrupt happy ending...except it’s not. I was all too happy to accept the happy, yet ultimately flawed ending, but no, as I said before, it’s just an OD fantasy. It seems that ShindoL won’t even let me see one blissful mistake. The ending does feature the line about Saki not liking herself, which I found odd, because I found her descent less due to hating herself and more because she wanted to make friends; it legitimately felt like she was trying to grow out of her shell instead of be someone that she’s not; the motif for this the butterfly after all. This isn’t enough to make me find the writing bad, however.

  With the auteur bent I’ve been on recently, now’s a good time to mention something I didn’t find out until finishing Metamorphosis: its mangaka, ShindoL is none other than the author of TSF Monogatari. I wasn’t exactly shocked when I found this out. It makes sense that they share some elements. It makes sense that both of them are the most notable hentai for me. The similarities make the differences all the more striking.

  As I said before, TSF Monogatari is certainly weird, but it doesn’t really seem intentionally so. It’s certainly uncomfortable to me, but that could be chalked up as my preferences. ShindoL himself doesn’t acknowledge any problems with the fetish as presented; in the context of the story, TSF Monogotari seems happy enough.

  Here, ShindoL seems to have undergone the most menacing glow-up known to man as he weaponizes his fetishes. Here, mindbreak and bimbofication are used to show how those around Saki have failed her, and unlike Takumi, Saki never is allowed a positive outlet for her sexual desires. While I usually like pregnancy as a fetish, here, it’s used as a heartbreaking crutch and testament to Saki being unable to help herself or her baby, unlike in TSF where it’s only briefly horrifying before being made cute.

  In Metamorphosis all of your weird fetishes are on the chopping block as ShindoL uses his imaginative mind to create a hentai that seems to ask viewers how far they’re willing to go before they can’t take it anymore. If they can be aroused until the end, he seems to ask them if it was worth it at the end of the day.

  With how much I’ve praised ShindoL’s craft, surely I must love this manga, right? Surely I must be rushing to add it to my favorite’s list, right?

  ...right?

  While I immensely respect this manga for how much it pushes the envelope for hentai and meeting all of my desires, at the end of the day, I loathe Metamorphosis for the sole reason of it being much too depressing for me.

  While I think that it’s functionally sound with resonating themes, it’s just so damn unenjoyable that I dislike it on a personal level. Thinking about it and viewing images of it brings me genuine dread. Why else would I leave this review mostly pictureless? You think I want to comb through pictures of Metamorphosis?

  The ending depresses me so much that I prefer the ending where Josuke from JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure saves Saki (NSFW link)

  It feels strange to dislike this due to some of my past opinions. I dislike School Days for its bleakness because it came with gross ineptitude and explotiveness. I dislike End of Evangelion for its bleakness in part because I felt it hurt the story that preceded it. Metamorphosis’ bleakness is both artful and works for the product as a whole…

  ...yet it gives me goddamn hives just thinking about it.

  And my score ultimately comes down to my enjoyment. I can acknowledge its great craft whilst still hating it from an entertainment perspective. Who knows, perhaps if the thread about Saki hating herself was explored more, it would have given Metamorphosis the character element that would have made its themes rise above its bleakness. But it still would have been a very uncomfortable manga, just one that was more approachable for me.

  It feels really weird to have this be similar in score to its predecessor. There isn’t nearly as much to TSF Monogatari and its use of mindbreak is more weird due to how blasé ShindoL is about it there. Metamorphosis has a lot going for it, but dear Lord do I never want to read it again.

  I’d feel bad recommending this thing to even my worst enemy, but if said worst enemy wanted a chilling deconstructionist hentai that brings up legitimate issues and analyzes some more extreme kinks in ways other works in the medium often don’t, then I’d give them a fair warning and send them on their way. But to those who balk at works that feature such depravity and decadence, that show sex as oppressive instead of uplifting, that pits a flawed character against an uncaring world, I’d tell them to run from the hills and never let curiosity get the best of them in regards to the six-digit number of the beast. Metamorphosis might just be the best hentai I’ve ever read and that gives it a lot of points in my book.

  But I hate it.

  5.3/10

  F+

  
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