Well, it happened. I approached the cliff, looked down into the yawning abyss of no return, and took a running jump.
That’s right, I finally watched Boku no Pico. In my defense I was looking for Boku no Hero Academia, but I just…uh…clicked the wrong thing. They look a bit similar, you know? They both have…blonde protagonists. Easy to mix up. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.
Some of you may be thinking, ‘Gaaawd what is this, amateur hour? Who HASN’T seen that?’ Which might be…..oddly true? I won’t argue with that. Sometimes I feel like the only one who hasn’t been punk’d as a teenager by weeb friends going “hey you should watch this anime it’s really good sends link / giggles intensely / cringe emoji wall.” And truthfully watching what many would consider anime child porn wasn’t really all that high on my priority list. For one, most people have seen it out of sheer curiosity or the ‘shock’ factor, not because they are turned on by the premise of an older man being sexually involved with a child (which for the record, neither the hell am I), and I simply staved off my curiosity longer than other people.
For the sweet innocent lambs in the reading audience, Boku no Pico is infamously among the most controversial 30 minutes of anime out there. Why? Well for starters, the first two minutes consist of a man inserting an ice cube into a child’s asshole for sexual pleasure. It bills itself as the ‘first shotacon anime,’ an accolade which the creator (a Japanese porn baron named Goldenboy) exclaimed so triumphantly in the promo run-up to its release now over a decade ago that you wonder if he might put it on his headstone. Anime is expensive to produce and it was commercially successful with nothing out there like it, to the extent it got two sequels.
In short, BnP depicts a sexual relationship between an older man named Mokkun and a very young boy named Pico, who works in his grandfather’s cafe dressed like a maid. In this case, there’d be no way around it by simply stating on the back that ‘all characters are 18’ even if they look like they just got tagged on the playground (a loophole that English-released shota/loli tends to exploit), Pico is supposed to be a child, and BnP’s creators may well consider the denial of this an affront…they’d likely do so even at the expense of a English release, in a parallel universe where Kevin Spacey is president and the possibility is on the table.
BnP gets lumped in with other yaoi a lot, which I feel is not a good thing. All or most shotacon might be yaoi, but the reverse is most definitely not true, and it gives the impression to those unfamiliar with the genre that these kinds of relationships are commonplace in yaoi and that fujoshi find pedophilia sexy. I don’t know about you all, but I think the grand majority of our community finds that perverse. The anime world is littered with sexualized teens and high school aged characters in relationships with older characters (especially in yaoi) and this is mostly accepted as ‘oh, those Japanese,’ but the loli line starts to loom once a girl can no longer pass the Breast Test. Anime characters always tend to look young with their big eyes and waif-like bodies, but there’s teens and then there’s children. Where do we draw the line in fiction? Should we draw a line?
The ethical murky waters surrounding BnP and other shota/loli anime is largely a result of these being works of fiction and not real children. There’s lots of ‘what ifs’ here. If Pico was a 1,000 year old wizard inhabiting the body of a little boy, does that make it any different? If we said at the beginning credits that Pico is a consenting adult even though he is clearly not, does that make it ok? If we said its purpose was to show the dysfunction and perversity of having sex with a child instead of serving the masturbatory fantasies of greying salarymen, is it ok now? Or really, we could just paint all of the with a broad brush labeled ‘does making it fictional make it ok,’ with a big question mark. For many, the jury is still out on that one. Me personally, I think ‘ok’ might be the wrong word. Fiction allows anything the mind can dream up to exist and freedom of expression is important, but some may describe this is a double-edged sword. Murky waters indeed.
BnP is also disturbing in that it does not show any real romance between the characters – not that that would make it better (though it may change the nature of the conversation), but it doesn’t dress up or idealize their relationship. To me there is no way around the fact that Mokkun is taking advantage of Pico for his own desires and does not truly care about him as a person – he is clearly only interested in him for sex. To say it’s dub- or non- con would probably be the wrong words – a child who looks about 12 (who knows his intended age) is not old enough to consent or understand the implications of their actions, which is why we even have an age of consent in the first place. BnP merely presents the exchanges between them, without judgment or implications. If anything that makes it even more perverse, as there is no emotion behind it for neither the characters nor the viewer. It’s hentai- it’s just about the sex, for both the creators and for Mokkun. There’s no story, no character development, no purpose other than to stimulate the sexual fantasies of shotacon lovers.
Either way, it most definitely made me extremely uncomfortable – a reaction I hope most people had for the sake of our survival as a species. Actually it may even be illegal in some countries. Am I glad I watched it? It’s good to be aware. Would I watch it again? Ahhhhhhhhh no.
Anyway – I think I need a palette cleanser after that. Anyone want some ice cream?