A spectre floats over a niche online community, a lost work desired. Lost media is strange in this same way always, the very absence of the thing at the center of all discourse being the function of it, producing desire through a quest to search for it. Such often produces narratives of memory from it, spurning out its own niche of psychologically identified tales, such as shown in the Candle Cove fiction.
In particular, I’d like to make a case study of Go For a Punch or Saki Sanobashi, an either fictitious or so obscure as to practically fictitious eroguro anime from the pre-internet years of otakudom. Supposedly a lost short animated film that was found by a 4chan user on the Tor internet, it depicts schoolgirls trapped in a bathroom - nine of them, one with a white hime cut - killing themselves after some drama occurs which drives them to suicide by methods such as braining themselves on the plumbing fixtures.
Its eluded its searchers since it was rumored to exist, to the point of developing schisms as the conflicting desires of the search go in different directions. Fanart is produced, making the thing exist if not as a VHS tape from the 1980s, then as a product of a search for the absent.
Eroguro typically works from the premise of Saki Sanobashi. Girls are divorced from the usual purity associated - the main character identified as having the anti-subtle hairstyle of a white hime cut - and left to be brutally torn open in the raw desert. The bathroom is never found, the parents withheld from the girls, searching, hoping to find them. The bathroom now forms a pocket of the wilderness, knives and animalism taking hold of the girls as their bodies become primary once again.
Quite a bit of pornography works on this basic storyline, of the Id’s total triumph. Pornography first begins with an exaggerated performance - the acting of porn isn’t so much a fault as it is the purpose, a foundational act to what occurs, where armor is rendered into metal bikinis and plumbers into greasy dago studs, performance being raised to a hyperreal intensity of itself. The gendered performances are embodied more fully than normally possible, by constructing a hypergender above and beyond the typical performance. A man becomes Delaney’s Hogg, his usual affirmations of the raw and brutal nature of manhood raised to the extremes of the concept. A woman becomes a whore, her costumes remade into slutty recreations of the old mask, more vibrant, colorful, flashier, showing more skin. A third gender is constructed often as well, in the strange space where it’s always implied in normal life. What is simply a weak man normally becomes a sissy and a cuckold, a lesbian becomes one of the boys in her musculature and possible hermaphroditism.
Hypertrophy is of course never neutral. The particular line taken can vary wildly depending on what is seen as the particular components to be hypertrophied in this process known often as “corruption”. Some darken the skin, plumpen the lips, exaggerate the curves and muscles and genitals, add tattoos, destroy the body or mutate it beyond human form, colonize it with insects or wicked technology... all of these paths being taken depending on the interpretation of what the performance is before the corruption begins. The interpretation of the nurse, as an play of matronly love, or as a play of disciplinary control, or etc, will all set up different pieces to become hypertrophied in the making-sexual of the performance.
The process of making-sexual is always alien to the performance itself, as my language thus far has been implying. Yet its always done as a deeper seed of life than the performance itself, a warring triumph of the id over the superego. No wonder then, that defeat is so often eroticized, in the ancient storyline of the feral barbarians overtaking the virginal feminine of the superegoic interior.
And this giving-in process, forms the basis of becoming-sexual, wherein the Id is made to reign over the Superego, the Ego - imagine the drama stylized in the cuckold drama. The weak young man, dressed in the finest uniforms of his place in the world, is shown for what he is - nothing more than a paper tiger. The feminine he courts decides to abandon him and open the door for the feral unknowable, the Freudian correspondence speaking for itself.
The first Death Grips album is steeped in the 1960s. Aside from a few mentions of items like MDMA, samples from surf rock or the first Pink Floyd album underly lyrics regarding a primitivization of the self. The speaker becomes like the man running in the desert in the Beware video, the naked and ungroomed man posing for the cover art. No shock, as the drama of the decade was through the shattering of an illusion of a superegoic order. Without an underlying material reality, the pretending that God wasn’t dead in the barbiturate haze of the post-war era ended with dual attempts, to either continue up and up and ascend to a new plane of consciousness, or to descend, to become feral as Tiger Force in Vietnam, Charles Manson in the desert, the revelers at Altamont and Woodstock and the Summer of Love.
Eroguro provides an interesting confluence in bringing together libido into one act, both sex and violence unified to work upon the body in question. The young girls in Saki Sanobashi, performing purity in their serafuku and traditional hairstyles, have their being worked upon from within. All violence is self inflicted as part of the situation, where the bathroom acts as the greater mechanism of making them become-sexual, the self being hypertrophied in its expense of energy, the act of braining oneself on a faucet no different in function from ahegao’ing while psychotically riding an ugly bastard’s cock.
The question then of desire and its origin is one that’s lead into a maddeningly simple aphorism. Hypertrophy occurs by that within being awakened to overcome the carefully fragile systems above itself, like Agent Orange soaking into organic material and overdriving it to grow itself dead. The identification of desire with the wilderness, as something exogenous to the self constructed in early life, and yet unignorable as being infinitely more primal than it, dovetails - desire is nonconsensual and yet will always be a source of some of the truest embodiments of the self.
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