Darling

To preface, this is one of my first hentai's that I had ever watched. It's not very hot/sexy to me but it never fails to make me laugh my ass off. From stampeding elephants to the classic line of "I'm going to stick a recorder in your pussy!" this show makes me cackle even if everything else can be considered fair/subpar. Like Darling's hair is so ridiculous, no wonder they can only animate her at 2 fps. The sheer absurdity of constantly being in 'hyper erection mode' reminds me a lot of Drawing While Masturbating (girl can only draw while jacking it, comedy ensues) and ... critically it's a pretty bland middle of the road hentai that isn't worth it to jack it to. But hey if you have a couple hours to kill and you wanna laugh at some old hentai then go for it.

Darling was a show I only knew the elevator pitch of. The story of a hentai artist who has to maintain an erection for a month straight to get his work done under deadline feels like ripe fodder for any number of stories. It could have been a satirized, but ultimately serious look at the difficulties surrounding the manga industry and independent artistry. It was only when the show started throwing around the phrase "Hyper Erection Mode" that it became obvious that this mid-2000's hentai had no ambitions greater than being a mid-2000s hentai.

Darling is the story of Darling, and his newly married wife, Honey. ... Those are their actual names, as far as I'm aware. They're called upon to create a hentai anthology in an unreasonable timeframe, and to facilitate this, Honey provides visual and physical "inspiration" for Darling's stories, all of which star the two of them and various people in their lives, because character design is hard. Rather than Darling's need for constant tumescence being a problem for Darling, a source of physical and emotional stress to underscore the urgency of the job, babysitting Darling's erection is a plot point introduced solely for Honey to be constantly sexualized. Again, such things are par for the course for mid-2000s hentai, so it's not worth too much ink to complain about. Credit where it's due, I did find myself genuinely appreciating some of the dynamic between Darling and Honey, outside of their stories. At no point are we given any indication that Honey is anything other than a willing and enthusiastic participant in her modeling and fluffing duties. For a hentai series whose interludes occasionally delve into dubcon, that is frankly a refreshing change.

Speaking of interludes, the bulk of the show's sex scenes are contained in Darling's anthology. Darling covers standard settings and situations, at least as far as mid-2000s hentai is concerned. However, as it turns out, this unique, genius mangaka just so happens to be one of the worst kinds of porn writers one can encounter in the wild. Beyond the fact that his scenarios are stock cliches with no real changes, he's also, just... like, embarrassingly into total power conversion, and can't write anything else. Every other story reveals that the male lead (played by him, natch) also happens to keep women as sex slaves. Spy thriller? Bad guy keeps sex slaves as a side hustle. Alien Prince? Dresses up the space cadets in French maid outfits. Lesbian romantic confession? "Hey! I'm here too and your girlfriend is also my sex slave! Just so you know!" It makes me wonder what part of his body needs to be engorged with blood, so that he could sketch out an actual plot.

As for everything else, it's on the bad side of mediocre. The characters are serviceable anime designs for the time period, but things get uglier once their genitals are out. There's something about an anatomically precise vulva between the legs of a stylized anime woman that feels inherently uncanny, like putting a fleshlight between the legs of a pipe-cleaner doll. The sound design is forgettable, except for the sex scenes, which I always have to turn down, because the original Japanese audio of Honey making sex noises got old halfway through her first orgasm. The world outside the stories contains a million plot points that mean nothing, go nowhere, and are only remembered as bewildering happenstance after the fact.

Overall, in the pantheon of hentai, Darling reaches the vaunted heights of "another one." Light-hearted enough to be some amount of fun, and maybe worth a watch if you really like rapid fire BDSM, but ultimately nothing to write home about. You'll either think it's okay, or get bored and go do something better with your life. It's not worth any more emotional invesment than that. I give it a "French maids in space" out of ten.