Brandish #1: Dissection of a Bad Hentai

Rusty Soul’s “Brandish” is a low-bar hardcore hentai fantasy manga starring a voluptuous succubus princess trying to have sex with a young hero, only to get usually raped, gang-banged, physically humiliated and/or blasted away in return. It’s a comedy, laugh with me.

Interestingly enough, the first morally compromised issue begins with a traditional four-panel styled omake depicting chibi parodies of the major characters in a classic high school environment, with the heroine constantly trying to get into the new kid’s underwear - which isn’t all that different from the real story itself, to be honest. If this was a different manga I could have probably interpreted the admittedly weird decision of putting the extra segment at the start instead of the end as a form of clever metatextual device, basically hinting that the actual fantasy portion is to be read as the metaphorical representation of the girl’s hyper-actively perverted mind. That would make horrible sense, actually. However, since this is just an average “run-of-the-mill” sexually exploitative comic where every poor excuse for a plot serves as a bafflingly contrived means to have the main character intercoursed by someone (or something) for several pages, a more thorough analysis would prove to be a massive waste of time.

Our protagonist is a nymphomaniac demon gal by the name of Twiska and she looks like a rejected character from “Monster Girl Quest” - a game I would strongly suggest not to look up. As mentioned before, she’s after a little hero... more specifically, his nether regions and manly fluid. After breaking through a local inn and disposing of the servitude with sexual harassment and lacing techniques, she dresses up as a maid and tries to force herself to the ultra-generic cherry boy. Unfortunately for her, this particular brand of rejected “Dragon Quest” avatar (named Theo) happens to have a split personality that goes hay-ware every time he feels the presence of a demon, thus turning him into a women-hating, brutal rapist. Things go just as well as you might expect, at that point.

Sudden mood-shifting is a fairly typical staple in the hentai sub-genre, especially in one with a *cough* comedic setting. If a situation might feel light-hearted at first, it inevitably turns into purely uncomfortable or even downright despicable when the actual sex scenes are shoehorned in it. “Brandish” is a text-book example of such behaviour, as we get to not-enjoy our very unlikeable protagonist getting mercilessly raped by the even less likeable male lead for many, many panels. Of course, this being Japanese porn, she gets to like it after the umpteenth stomach-filling shot and soul-crushing insult.

It might be worth stopping for a moment to point out a few inconsistencies here and there. For example, in one panel it is clearly shown the hero’s penis forcefully ripping through the succubus’ vagina as her pained expression of horror mixed with guilty pleasure stares right into the reader’s own soul, but in the next one said reproductive organ is magically teleported right in between her large, exposed breasts. Also, all the bodies throughout the entire manga seem to twist in bafflingly unnatural ways and the sheer amount of sperm is ludicrous to say the least. In other words, all rabid sex scenes are about as realistic as a slow-motion action sequence from a John Woo’s action film, and so exaggerated in their execution (not to mention, just gratuitously mean-spirited and nasty) that they pretty much fail at being arousing. However, I will give credit to Rusty Soul for a few bold quirks he would occasionally throw into the molten mix, especially that hilarious panel showing an entire galaxy inside of Twiska’s vagina. I wish I was kidding you but, alas, this is the world we all are forced to share.

The rest of the issue features other such situations: our “beloved” demon worker stalking the hero around, trying to possess his childlike form for which she has a lusty crush, only to end up “BLASTING OFF AGAIN!!!” at the end of every chapter by his demon-slaying persona – with thirty-men groupings, rains of semen, overplayed misogyny, explicit paedophilia and the occasional rape all happening in-between. An origin story explaining how Twiska’s obsession towards Theo came to be is included as well. Let’s just say it involves full-fledged village men assaults, boyfriend-stealing shenanigans, bewilderingly placed girl-on-demon-girl action and, of course, attempted mass rape incited by “Our Hero.” The final two chapters available in this first issue are about Theo forming a party with a couple of sexy ladies. He would end up having wild, animal sex with the obligatory Lolita character while the other would experience the token “enlargement” of her clitoris thanks to Twiska’s magic.

You know, it’s funny to notice how the supposed “good” side of the hero isn’t really all that different from his dark side: he still ends up scoring with any woman he comes across, thus completely invalidating the necessity of a non-childlike persona. He should just change his name to Dick Saucer and call it a night.

In the end “Brandish” is a dull and repetitive comic more than anything else. Once the basic formula for each and every story (with a few unnoticeable exceptions) is fully established, the constant display of hyper-realistic perversion gets old faster than you might think. Rusty Soul tries to keep things as nauseatingly fresh as possible by adding magically grown female members and some *cough* father-on-daughter action *cough* but by the time those particularly disgusting gimmicks are introduced, the reader will most likely feel too exhausted to be impressed. To put it bluntly, should you ever decide to give this piece of work a try, don’t expect Shakespeare’s own Dick Saucer whether to come or not to come inside your mouth... I lost that metaphor somewhere along the line.

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