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I've always been puzzled by the notion that pornography is something to masturbate to seemingly as its own end and (by extension) the people who claim to do this. While I understand that PornHub's analytics is censored, I'm willing to believe that its logs for time spent per visit are accurate, which is (experimentally) about the time it takes for the anecdotally-average man to find something then jack it to orgasm.
(I wonder how long the average AO3/Wattpad visit is?)
Comiket (and assuming it's representative of the (both ero and not) manga industry, the industry itself) is also majority female, and Japan is sufficiently outside the woke orbit that this is probably a natural equilibrium. For reference, this festival is a celebration of fan work, but quite a bit more commercial than any other Western country would tolerate (their rights-holders either can't or won't take action against it, as they also know full well that that's where its future talent comes from; you don't get 50 Shades of Gray if Twilight fanfiction is sufficiently criminal).
I would argue that hentai (mostly manga, though some anime can count as well) and VNs are a much better balance between the visual and the emotional; being hyper-real makes it possible to engineer specific facial expressions and scenes in a way you can't do as well with real actors (the ones who can are Hollywood A-listers and a bit too expensive for even the well-heeled porn studios... well, other than Stallone anyway).
You can hit both needs at once provided you're competent enough at drawing and take at least some time to establish characterization, or at least that's how I've observed it to work for me. It's not like you can't just "borrow" characters from another franchise and get all that characterization for free if you don't want to do it yourself, which is partially the reason why slashfic is so successful- and because it's drawn, you not only get something to see, but it's superstimulus at the same time since you can make sure your characters look good (they don't even have to be human) and properly expressive from every angle, and the stuff you have them do doesn't even need to be anatomically possible.
I'm not going to argue that H-manga is the pinnacle of storytelling by any means (though there are a few that most certainly are; Katawa Shoujo is probably the best example but there are many others) but what little there usually is still beats "lemon-stealing whores".
I'm confused by what you mean here, can you elaborate?
It's not, but works like Subahibi are really interesting. More interesting than a lot of what gets published today.
This is "I masturbate while watching porn". Even though I'm told this is generally how most men use pornography, I find this incredibly strange.
Yeah, I agree; I think the VN as "novel, but a bunch of other stuff happens too outside of the specific text" really goes a long way to improving on raw text. It also happens to be something that AI image generation (and a suitably uncensored LLM) is already capable of, which likely hasn't gone unnoticed by some of the more niche startups and hopefully they get big before they get targeted by the usual suspects.
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