Prison School

I'm in no way new to the breadth of the world of kink. It's something I have quite a bit of knowledge in, to the point where outside of blogs, I give lectures, and teach classes on how to go about it safely. Like with all things though, there are trends that occur, and that counts doubly so in the age of the internet. When we have social media allowing people to turn kinks into memes, some of them are going to leak through into mainstream media, and subsequently become jokes.

Throughout communities that enjoy Japanese media, one of the frequent themes we find in fans is how people throw themselves at any strong, or domineering female character. Hearing the requests to be stepped on, spat on, or calling themselves trash as a means of showing attraction. It's increasingly common in other parts of the internet as things start to bleed together, but there's one anime that is an absolute embodiment of this trope.

Prison school is barely an anime. I'm fairly convinced that in order to give it a larger budget, they managed to get it mislabeled as one rather than being called hentai. It's entirely thinly veiled innuendo, and has more sexual kink going on than any other anime I've found (and yes, I've seen Redo, we'll get to that one another day). Whether vanilla, softer kinks, or much harder ones, this anime has things that will pertain to the majority of audiences, even if just for humor's sake.

The majority of character interactions though often fall into the theme of male submission and humiliation. We have our bimbofied dominatrix, Meiko, who is constantly trying to induce shame upon the male cast. Crops are commonly used as corporal punishment, as is verbal degradation, trampling, and even face-sitting. When they need to balance her out, we find her having her clothes caught on things like doorknobs, for more than the suggestive body exposure her outfits normally provide.

On the side of the male cast, we have characters who prey upon that treatment, even feeling upset when they aren't actively looked down upon for a few days. While this would in real life be seen as a sign of an abusive relationship, or even some forms of Stockholm Syndrome when the only exposure to others is of a negative influence, we very obviously see a fetishized form power imbalance. We see this without any positivity to balance it out, just the salivating desire to treated poorly. Given that lack, this can in many ways create the same issues that we see in people learning about sex and kink from porn alone, thinking that it's entirely how things work in the real world.

What we never do see though is the positive growth in characters that can come with strategic humiliation. Nothing to work on, or learn from, but rather just characters sexualizing the attempts of their officers to instill fear and obedience. It's unfortunate, because as a skeleton, this story could have some character development and still be just as funny. It feels like it should have a second season, but alas.

Don't get me wrong, Prison School is a hell of a ride. It's a fun watch, and almost becomes a parody of kink in porn with some of the situations that occur. It shows the ridiculousness of something that's now a trend amongst anime fans. Perhaps it's something that more people need to watch, for the first time or again, in order to see how silly they're being.