Introduction

Let us begin by reconfirming that there are at least two perspectives or points of view when we confront creative works, including eromanga. The first perspective is that of the voyeur or god who sees all. As an observer outside the work, the reader knows things up to and encompassing what characters in the work have yet to notice. It is a privileged perspective. The second perspective is that of the characters, which the reader simulates through self-projection. Note that self-projection is not necessarily fixed or static. Given that self-projection can apply to characters beyond the protagonist, plural points of view are included in this second perspective. Importantly, the perspectives of voyeur god outside the text and self-projected as characters in the text exist simultaneously in the act of reading. One is not stuck in a perspective, and is not stuck with the point of view of one character; the reader's perspective wavers between characters, switches and occurs with multiple characters as the difference in concentration changes by the second. I state this here because critics of the lolicon manga we are about to discuss are typically stuck solely on “what is drawn on the page,” which completely overlooks “how is it read.”

What is Lolicon Manga?

Understood by the letter, lolicon manga is manga marked by the theme of the “Lolita complex.” “Lolita complex” is a phrase born from Vladimir Nabokov's novel Lolita (1955) and Stanley Kubrick's film adaptation by the same name (1962). Roughly speaking, in those works, it is a man's desire for a coquettish girl. In Japan, the general sense is probably something along the lines of, “Not pedophilia as such, but rather a (primarily) male desire that entails feeling love and lust more strongly for underage girls than mature women.” The term lolicon is also used to refer to people associated with this desire. Of course there probably exist pedophiles among the devoted readers of lolicon manga, but there is not a significant difference between this ratio and that of pedophiles in the total population. If anything, when one defines “pedophile” as someone who feels sexual arousal for children, then I suspect the ratio is lower among lolicon manga readers than the total population.