Erohon o Sutete kara Ani no Yousu ga Okashii (エロ本を捨ててから兄の様子がおかしい) Review

What does it actually mean to love someone?

Everyone’s got a different answer, but from start to finish the word “love” is tangled up with “sexual desire.” Straight or gay, if seeing someone doesn’t get you hard, you probably don’t love them enough. Unless something’s wrong with you.

Plenty of philosophers have chewed over the question of emotion, and most of them either praised love or shit on it at length. Most took a loose, open attitude toward it, which is why we’ve inherited a pile of books that are more than a little debauched.

None of that is the point, though. What I’m getting at is that “love” always needs “sex” to express itself. So what do you do when there’s a massive wall that makes that impossible? Say, the taboo of blood relations?

Some people say, “If you love her, make her happy.”

But for a real brother and sister with no possible future together, does loving her mean handing her off to someone else?

To a normal person, that’s insanity.

And Erohon o Sutete kara Ani no Yousu ga Okashii (エロ本を捨ててから兄の様子がおかしい) is exactly that kind of insane game.

This game came out ages ago, and a Chinese patch has been out just as long, but I never touched it because the elementary schoolers on the forums treated it as a landmine for newbies. I knew the story involved netorare, I knew there was rape in it, and what got me to actually start playing was reading someone’s take on Toki o Tsumugu Yakusoku: “The characters are good. But that’s all.”

So I looked at the character designs, and yeah, they were good, and I got curious about who drew them…

Which is how I followed the name “Shiwasa Hori” and ended up finding this game.

The game isn’t long. Play it slow and it’s about five hours; play it fast and you’re done in under three. Skip the sex scenes and you’ll finish even quicker. When I was done, I didn’t end up “feeling terrible” the way other people claim — I just sank into thought, with a bit of regret mixed in.

The thinking part is because this game’s story is actually interesting. It starts out genuinely unhinged, but somewhere in the middle-to-late stretch there’s a hint of reflection and healing. Grab onto that, flesh out the emotional writing, and I wouldn’t call it a masterpiece, but at minimum it’d be a solid work.

And the regret is that the game doesn’t do any of that.

It’s positioned as a nukige, and your ass decides your head — the positioning decides the content. Working from the premise of “fucking your sister,” a premise that could have broken new ground just turns into a training/corruption piece.

This game reminds me of early web novels. Around 2002, I think. Web novels back then hadn’t gone crazy yet; they were still novels, just with a sprinkling of trendy internet slang and some things you’d never dare print in a physical book. You write whatever online, people read whatever, no publisher to get past, nobody policing what you write.

No censorship meant freedom. And the internet back then wasn’t as much of a cesspit as it is now — people online had some skill, and the ones bold enough to write fiction were among the best of them.

Ah, what I actually wanted to say is that web novel titles back then weren’t all that different from now. Super attention-grabbing, super lowbrow. The nicer ones were things like I Picked Up a Girl on the Subway via Bluetooth or The Days I Lived with a Flight Attendant. The cruder ones were things like That’s How I Got with the School Idol or The Story Between Me, Her, and Him (god, there’s an eroge with that same name, isn’t there). Most of these titles made your imagination run wild — you were sure you’d stumbled onto a dirty book. You get it in your hands and find out it’s all fake. No fanservice, no fucking, and while you’re disappointed you also find yourself getting hooked on the plot, because the writing is genuinely good and the story lands. By the end, after you’ve cried, laughed, and been moved, you look back at the title and feel something like a sigh.

A novel this well written deserves a more elegant name.

So with Erohon o Sutete kara Ani no Yousu ga Okashii, I feel a bit of the same thing, plus regret over the mismatch in positioning. Like I said: this story didn’t have to be a nukige.

The Chinese patch translated the title as Diudiao Huangshu Zhihou Xiongzhang Zhuangtai Youyi — whatever, do what makes you happy, the meaning’s right. Most people probably already know how the story unfolds: a brother and sister with a bad relationship, the sister throws out his porn, and to get back at her he secretly photographs her and gives the pictures to his best friend to jerk off to. Eventually he even holds her down and lets his friend take her virginity. Then he blackmails her with the photos into sleeping with his friend.

Broadly it’s a “pimp out your sister” story. Very nukige, very porn, very absurd — and also kind of interesting.

On the subject of sibling feelings, there’s a saying online: “If you actually have a little sister, you’re definitely not a siscon.”

I agree completely. A real “little sister” is a creature that, after living under the same roof with you long enough, can only piss you off. Maybe she gets you chewed out by your parents over school, maybe she gets you scolded over daily life, and on top of that you have to look after her, and the person being looked after has a sour face and doesn’t want anything to do with you. Even if she’s the opposite sex, it’s hard to work up interest. And as siblings your quality isn’t far apart — meaning if you’re ugly, your sister’s probably ugly too; if you’re a handsome guy, your sister’s probably a beauty. But then again, if you’re a handsome guy, why the hell are you looking at your sister? You’d already be out on the street chasing women, wouldn’t you?

So for most sibling relationships, not fighting is already good, occasionally cooperating is the limit, and mostly you both grow up and neither gives a shit about the other. And some sisters don’t just ignore their brother — they go off and get married without even inviting him, then mock him daily on social media for being single his whole life. Sisters like that are genuinely heinous. I’d want that thing to vanish from the world too. So I can more or less understand the protagonist’s hatred and resentment toward his sister.

As for letting his friend rape his own sister, that’s absurd, sure, but the game throws a curveball right before it happens. It focuses on how, when the sister catches her brother peeping and photographing her, she doesn’t resist — she gets a little aroused, even develops a bit of affection for him. Where that affection comes from is surely complicated, but even as siblings there’s the excitement of suddenly being laid bare to each other.

And that’s what makes this game “interesting.” The whole thing is absurd and insane, but in places where the absurd story and setting could be rationalized, it actually points them out. It’s only a few lines, but it gives the impression of “I know how to write this, but this is a nukige, so I’ll just toss out a line, you skim it and get back to jerking off.”

After the protagonist hands his sister over to his friend, the story runs on pure madness with a nukige flavor. The protagonist keeps watching his sister get fucked by someone else and doesn’t seem to say much — he just says he’s punishing her, and keeps emphasizing that he’s going to “break” (壊す) her. At this point the audience is probably convinced he’s a deranged变态. The turn comes when the friend decides he can’t keep fucking the protagonist’s sister for free. He liked her from the start, so he figures he might as well confess.

The protagonist falls into conflict. He wanted to punish his sister, so why does it feel wrong when she actually gets confessed to? The sister is torn too — she already had some feelings for her brother, but can’t understand why he keeps making her sleep with other people. This is where the sister confesses to the protagonist, and he (i.e. the player) faces a choice: give up on his sister, or sleep with her.

The reason he doesn’t want to sleep with her is that they’re really siblings, and that can never be acknowledged. Better to let her go with someone else. “If I can’t have you, I’ll break you” — that line weirdly explains his whole attitude up to this point.

On this branch, if you reject your sister, she turns yandere from the rejection. She dates the protagonist’s friend while copying her brother’s methods — she kidnaps her own female friend and delivers her to the protagonist to fuck, the exact same coercion playbook. In the end the protagonist gets a taste of his sister’s twisted love, just like his own twisted love for her.

If the branch has you sleep with your sister, the story gets less interesting. She dates the friend while sleeping with her brother behind his back, the friend finds out about the betrayal, brings a crowd, and they gang-rape her. She gets pregnant, and nobody knows whose kid it is. The protagonist and his sister lose their minds and keep fucking even with her belly swollen, praying the kid turns out to be his.

All in all, whether it’s the ending where “the protagonist feels his sister’s twisted love in her pimping out her friend for him” or the one where “his sister gets gang-raped, gets pregnant by god knows who, and runs off with her brother as both go insane,” neither is really a Bad End. The prevailing read on ErogameScape is “basically everyone in this game is insane.” What’s funny is that a game this crazy cleared an 80 rating, which I genuinely don’t get.

Frankly, Erohon o Sutete kara Ani no Yousu ga Okashii has decent music only in the sad tracks late on, and the art’s good, but nothing else stands out. The protagonist’s friend has no voice, the second heroine is flat-read, there’s too few CGs outside the sex scenes, the game’s too short, the story is simple and crude, and there’s a heavy NTR element. If you ask me I’d give it a 60, and more than half of that is for the art.

But like I said earlier, this game is “kind of interesting,” because even though the story is insane, in the key moments I can see the writer putting in a little explanation that “rationalizes the insane story.” It’s barely noticeable, but it’s there. If it were expanded, with more buildup, this crazy story might have become a genuinely compelling oddity. Don’t say the story’s too far-fetched — in a world where human traffickers get sold themselves, nothing’s impossible. A twisted brother who “sells his own sister to someone else to take her virginity” — I’d bet there are people like that in the real world, and plenty of them. What makes something thought-provoking is writing a crazy story and telling you it’s actually true, that people this crazy really exist — that’s what wakes you up and makes you look at the world more carefully.

Unfortunately, this is just a nukige.

Still, with a little imagination, maybe you can get something out of it.

Someone online reviewed the game like this:

“愛の中には、常に幾分かの狂気がある。しかし狂気の中には常にまた、幾分かの理性がある。”

Which translates into Chinese much more concisely:

“愛中有狂，狂亦有理。”

Since people on Goodreads give Lust, Caution full marks, giving this game an 80-something rating probably isn’t anything to be surprised about.