Written by Otaku Apologist
Having done hentai professionally for 10 years soon, I’ve had the privilege of meeting innumerable people and companies of unrealized potential. I cannot say you’re amazing, because the heights of achievement you’re all capable of far exceeds what your accomplishments are. Deep down you know this. Your true excellence is still slumbering. As is mine.
Conversations are transformative. Language is the magic of this world, it moves mountains. The same as when we connect sexually, we’re gods of life briefly. It’s only when seemingly opposite elements are combined harmoniously that we unlock this hidden potential that slumbers in each of us. To be the best we can be, we need each other.
Conversations I was having between 2015 and 2017 with the CEO of Lewdgamer return to mind. Many things we discussed are becoming manifest now in our industry. It’s a magical moment, having your own ignorance exposed to you almost a decade later. This epiphany is only made more complete by the realization that I was also correct in my own assessments about the industry. The structural problems are pervasive and not going away. We’re having to bargain with devils to make a living.
Our world is torn asunder by our incapacity to exercise an honest dialog with one another. We are divided by differences of opinion, culture, agenda. Relationships torn apart, wars raging, walls and borders. The unrealized human potential of this world is incalculable.
In pursuit of truth, it is no defeat to admit that you’ve been wrong. While I have been plenty wrong on many issues, I have also been on point many times. This is the level of conversation we need to be having. Both in the public and in private, in our relationships with our spouses, friends, bosses, co-workers. We should be disseminating the truth.
What is needed to solve entrenched problems is dissemination, a derivative from the word dissect. What is true, what is false, what is probable and improbable. Surgically accurate solutions to entrenched structural problems are the only kinds that work. This is only possible if we converse like rational human beings and experiment boldly on solutions. Imagine we managed this in public conversation and in our relationships, what wonderful things were possible.
While this work has brought me in contact with creative and savvy men and women from around the world, many wildly successful individuals, none of these encounters have come even close in importance to the conversations I had in 2019 with a certain someone. It was from that interaction that my aimless life gained a direction. I remain on that path.
What was so special about chats had years ago? This godless grind to achieve my maximum potential as man was validated. Why else would you go through burning hells to become the best you can be? For the shortest glimpse of a moment in an otherwise humiliating, disease-ridden life marked by continuous rejection and failure, the effort was validated.
Since that summer, I was no longer doing hentai for money. The mere promise of profit wouldn’t have sufficed as fuel when the storms came. COVID was not the only storm, when the structural problems of the industry are so many that livelihoods of creators are shaky. When my Paypal was suddenly locked for an audit in 2021, I did not sleep that night.
Doing hentai commercially, you subject yourself to abuse from third parties. Even popular people and larger companies are abused, their content savaged to meet standards of third parties. Overnight, your entire business can be upended.
I meet on a constant basis people who lose access to payment processing, or are denied service outright. One of my long-time freelancers was denied an e-wallet account, despite their paperwork checking out at another company. The decision was “permanent and irreversible”. These stories are innumerable in the industry. We all know by name victims of this abuse.
The cutthroat nature of the industry relates to this context. When progressing a career is full of hardships, hentai becomes Game of Thrones on steroids. Employers compartmentalize their companies to the extreme. Deny name credit from workers to slow down their career growth. Because those workers will otherwise use their association with you as a stepping stone, providing little value while extracting massive value. The problem is human nature, how we tend to use each other. And when social media portfolios are hard to grow and vulnerable to bans, anyone with a website can make tyrannical choices to pick winners and losers. And as reputations can be ravaged easily, everyone protects their reputations savagely.
There will be a time when being a profit-obsessed capitalist is viable. That time is not now. When the foundations we stand on are sturdier and there are more winners than there currently are, we can go back to being profit-focused. But right now, in the industry’s lifecycle, we need another motivation. Don’t let it sound corny, but we need love.
Love is the highest state of consciousness. It’s when your knowledge is deep and you see the big picture, the horror of the human condition laid bare in high-definition, that you need a hell lot of love to not want to destroy it all.
To fall in love truly, to perceive every aspect of them and their murky history with clarity, growing to accept that and interact with that respectfully, there is no greater personal achievement. No amount of money you’ll ever make comes even close.
