Getting up in the morning, or going off to sleep at night, is always a better experience with an enjoyable Ahegao face thrown in, if you know what I mean. For anyone whose go-to source of pleasurable fap material is hentai, ahegao is not a stranger to you, yet it is unknown to others.
A long time standard of hentai, with a niche fandom to match, ahegao face, which is essentially a face overcome by pleasure, has grown in popularity, and awareness, as anime has become more standard in Western popular culture. Despite its origins, or perhaps because of them, ahegao face has become well known enough to even end up on hoodies, T-Shirts, and Grand Theft Auto 5 mods. Product art using ahegao is even a reality in Japan, at least on some personal items reviewed on this same blog (warning, very NSFW).
A lot of the common knowledge of ahegao is thanks to the internet, which has helped spread, and share, cultural ideas from all over the world. Ahegao face has its own hashtags, and is a bit of an Instagram phenomenon, and thanks to that, it has now spread to react videos, with “Elders React to Ahegao Face Videos”. Everyone’s favorite elderly react videos combine with everyone’s (well, every pervy ecchi manga fan’s) facial expression, to show us just how older folk interpret anime perversion.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=3&v=GjMS34DOTJA
That’s the setup, what’s the payoff? No, not THAT kind of payoff. There’s no stickiness here. It’s simple: watch the video if you want a laugh. Watching these people react to ahegao without knowing what it is can be pretty entertaining, making even this jaded heart laugh out loud over a few parts. Perhaps unsurprisingly the elderly men are a bit funnier, and find the faces, and videos, less strange, though that’s not to say the women don’t have their moments. What is a surprise, is how open-minded they all are, and how easygoing. Once they know what they’ve been watching, and discuss it openly, is when the video really gets going: it’s a good reminder that however suppressed our society might seem at times, and the people in it, when you open up a discussion of sex, and fetishes, people can treat the subject earnestly, and without letting that baggage drag them down.
The internet has a tendency to exaggerate the strangeness of a culture, and Japan’s no different, but there’s something to be said for ahegao. There are stranger fetishes out there than someone being overwhelmed by pleasure, and many of them are less family friendly. It doesn’t hurt that an ahegao face can be shown off, with all its fetish power active, without actually breaking any taboos against nudity or other bedroom activities. Though between real-world ahegao, and drawn, there’s just something in the artwork of hentai manga, and anime, that real-world versions of the expression can’t match. Isn’t that always the issue between 2D and 3D?
“Elders React to Ahegao Face Videos” is a good watch and a good reminder that while we don’t have to share each other’s fetishes, we can at least let each other enjoy them.
