I read a lot of forums, and there’s this pattern I keep noticing. Women-dominated forums are mostly people dunking on scumbag boyfriends. Men-dominated forums, porn boards aside, are mostly people tearing each other apart and crying about getting cuckolded. Getting cuckolded is a weird phenomenon, yet apparently a really common one. Are that many people actually getting cheated on? Are that many people actually choosing to forgive him or her? Either way, several forums I frequent have picked up new nicknames that don’t even match anymore. Greenery Street. Thunder Bluff. Some people don’t even bother being subtle and just rename the whole forum “Cuckold Forum.” So lately my browsing is nothing but green everywhere. Halal green, betrayed green, green this way and green that way. At first I found it gross, then I got used to it. I can’t even get someone to take me on as a rebound, so what do I care about cuckolding? This “getting cuckolded” setup is common in Japanese eroge too. The Japanese call it 寝取る, NTR. Basically your wife gets slept with, which means you got cuckolded. NTR games have their fans, but most of them are the same: you get a girlfriend, she gets screwed behind your back, and in the end you either forgive her or leave her. But think about it, why is NTR always by convention the woman betraying the man? What about the man betraying the woman? We call that cheating too, but it still can’t compare to the whole green-this-green-that internet culture, can it.

I’m not an NTR fan and I honestly can’t wrap my head around how NTR fans think. Still, Japanese eroge are packed with NTR subject matter, for better or worse. NTR here doesn’t mean what grade-schoolers mean by “the girl you like doesn’t like you, she likes someone else.” It’s 寝取る — and the meaning is simple: your wife, your spouse, your lover, your girlfriend got slept with by someone else. Put plainly, you got cuckolded. Even if you’ve spent years lurking Reddit, ACFUN, the greening street, and the Thunder Bluff of 5ch, I’ve never once seen a guy discover he’s been cuckolded and feel happy about it. So yeah, the NTR fan mindset is hard to get. And yet NTR games keep coming out. Plenty of companies make them, some even set up a dedicated brand just for NTR titles to chase that specialist credibility. Like this one, Houkago ni Midareru Ane Kyoushi to Tonari no Heya de Aegu Imouto (放課後に乱れる姉教師と隣の部屋で喘ぐ妹 ～恋人になった女の子が、知り合いの嫌な男に寝取られる～), which bills itself as a standard NTR game.

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.