Hentai Author Is Criticized for Creating Sad Adult Manga Stories

This is an old case from 2018, but one that I found quite interesting to bring up here. There is an adult manga author named Betty, and I didn’t know her until I came across this story.

Betty often creates adult manga with sad stories, featuring depressive girls or characters who have gone through difficult situations. For example, in 2018, Betty released the hentai manga Kimi to Itami wo Wakachi “AI” tai.

The story is about a young man who reunites with a childhood friend. She asks to go to his place, and he agrees. At his apartment, she starts coming on to him as a way to “reward” him for letting her spend the night there.

Now I’ll tell you the sad part of this manga. The girl has stopped going to school, her body is covered in bruises, and she has started smoking “to die, because she no longer wants to exist in this world.”

It all began when her mother married a new man, who was violent and abused her. Unable to endure it any longer, she tried to take her own life and ran away from home, leaving her with nowhere to go.

After telling her story, she says he must be feeling disgusted by her and decides to leave. However, he tells her that he doesn’t feel disgusted and that none of it is her fault, and the two end up having sex. In the end, the young man says he will look for a place for himself to live, since he currently lives with his parents, and asks if she wants to live with him, giving the story a happy ending.

But it really is a sad manga, even though it is hentai. So what happened? Japanese readers complained about it, saying that the author’s manga is “not usable” (usable in the sense you are thinking).

Betty is an 18+ mangaka who tends to portray emotionally damaged female characters, moving away from the traditional narrative in which everything ends in pleasure or romance. In a series of posts on Twitter, the artist explained that she feels deeply uncomfortable when readers say her stories are bad simply because they don’t provide easy arousal.

For the author, this type of criticism ignores the existence of women who suffer and turns characters into mere sexual objects. She says that when someone claims a story is “too sad to use,” it sounds like a denial of the characters’ pain and of the reality many women face outside of fiction.

Betty also criticized the romanticization of crimes in adult manga. According to her, many works treat abuse and violence as acceptable when the female character “ends up liking it,” which normalizes this kind of behavior.

She stated that she hates stories in which a character suffers violence and then immediately starts to feel pleasure, as this erases her emotions and trivializes something serious. For Betty, even while working with adult manga, it is important to portray these situations as negative and painful, not desirable.

Many people criticized her heavily at the time. I haven’t read her other manga, but that’s the situation. What do you think?