This is third of nine essays contained within the first issue of the Adult Analysis Anthology, an experimental collection of longform writing that seeks to expand the breadth of critical discourse around adult games and adult game culture. We will be posting a new essay every Wednesday from now until March, but if you would like to read all the essays early and support the creation of more high-quality writing about adult games the full anthology is available for purchase on Itch! Anthology logo by @pillowkisser!
CONTENT WARNING: This essay contains discussions and descriptions of acts of explicit sexual violence, particularly within hentai game The Scarlet Demonslayer. Please read with discretion.
By: @Unangbangkay
Rape is bad. This is not, as far as civilization is concerned, an uncontroversial statement. Though definitions and laws have varied across times and cultures, rape is by and large treated as a universally monstrous violation throughout human society. It’s a durable and widespread taboo, so there’s no surprise that the subject of rape - here defined somewhat broadly as “non-consensual sex” - proves fertile ground to till in fiction. Kink, knowing not logic or reason, demands indulgence. Fictional media - video games included - provides audiences and creators alike with a safe space to explore desires impossible to satisfy in the real world for ethical, legal, and even physical reasons. Rape fantasies have also spawned a number of genres and subgenres, one of which is the subject of this essay: Kukkoro.
Kukkoro is a subgenre of rape fantasy rooted in, essentially, fantasy rape. Its name is coined from a truncation of its most stereotypical scenario: That of a fantasy knight (usually female1), captured and held at the mercy of her foes. Gritting her teeth, she pleads “K-kill me!” (くっ殺せ!, transliterated as “Ku-korose!”). Her captors, of course, do not oblige, and instead have their way with her. What usually follows is the sort of material tagged in English-language databases as “Corruption”, or “Sex slavery”.
Kukkoro is an informal subgenre, and not very widely recognized outside of Japanese 2D porn enthusiast circles. In some ways, it’s akin to an obscure music subgenre that’s really only identifiable to the people that started coining the term. That said, Kukkoro is at least popular enough to have spawned its own monthly ero-manga publication, Kukkoro Heroines. The stories within its pages are paving the way toward having a more formalized definition of Kukkoro conventions, though at the moment its scope remains broad and fairly inclusive of many other common rape fantasy tropes.
Other popular hentai games like Lilith’s Taimanin Asagi and Makai Kishi Ingrid, and Liquid’s Kuroinu, all feature rape-heavy scenarios that align with Kukkoro’s most common tropes, but they aren’t tagged specifically as being “Kukkoro”.
Perhaps the best capsule summation of Kukkoro is to call it the misogynistic dark side of the meme “You are not immune to hot lady knight.”
Kukkoro’s appeal to its fans is a clear and present example of the fact that rape fantasies are as much about power and control as sex. The subject is invariably a character of personal or symbolic power, an unyielding figure of martial or spiritual might, laid low through the power of sex crimes committed upon their person. Kukkoro thrives when its subjects are seen as weakened, vulnerable, and broken. The most enduring Kukkoro tropes are themes of capture, sexual slavery, and coercion. Violence is common given the typical fantasy scenario of a broken heroine, though few Kukkoro-tagged games truly indulge violent kinks like ryona or guro. A Kukkoro story is much more likely to end with its heroine a willing submissive than a dead victim, cementing its appeal in a subject’s fall from grace.
Such an elemental trope, though, is a ripe one for subversion, bringing us to The Scarlet Demonslayer (aka Akagami no Kishin), an independent game developed by Nuko Majin and localized by Kagura Games.
The Scarlet Demonslayer appears at first to operate entirely in this traditional Kukkoro mode. The story stars Agnis the Annihilator, a super-powerful knight dressed in divine armor that defends her peaceful nation from regular demonic incursions. In the game’s frankly thin backmatter, Annihilators are weapons of mass destruction, the symbols and living foundations of their nations’ military might. Agnis is one of the strongest of all, single-handedly obliterating legions of invading monsters. This overwhelming power is represented in-game by an RPG-style character sheet with maxed-out parameters for every attribute.
The story begins when Hague, the sinister prime minister of the kingdom and a man who covets Agnis’ affection, captures her vast magical power and holds it hostage. With Agnis sapped of the means to summon her sacred armor, he delivers an ultimatum: Become mine, or be unable to do your duty as an Annihilator.
It’s a classical scenario of blackmail and corruption. In a different game, Agnis would inevitably bend to Hague’s demands, allowing the gravity of her duty to outweigh concerns about her bodily agency. She’d then be forced into performing one lewd act after another, gradually escalating in intensity, up to the limits of the audience’s (or the creator’s), and end the game fully “broken in”, her resolve a wreck dashed upon the rocks of male lust. In a typical Kukkoro story, Agnis’ story would end with her passively, perhaps even gleefully accepting her reduction to a sex object, used and abused for others’ pleasure.
Instead, Nuko Majin flips the figurative tea table in that moment using it to declare to its audience that this isn’t just any Kukkoro story. Rather than acquiesce to Hague’s perverse demands, Agnis rejects him wholeheartedly. Standing before him in his office, she pierces her own hymen with her fingers, then flicks the blood in his face before walking away. This is also the first time her facial expression changes, showing her character sprite sneering viciously as she displays her bloodied fingers.
Visual novels and adventure games are, of course no strangers, to narrative bait-and-switch, but The Scarlet Demonslayer’s open defiance of Kukkoro convention becomes easier to parse when one sees how Nuko Majin has opted to sell their own game. Though Kagura Games publishes The Scarlet Demonslayer on Steam and via its own storefront for international sale, Nuko Majin also sells the Japanese edition on DLSite, a popular indie storefront that mainly hosts Japanese titles. There, under its Japanese title of “Akagami no Kishin” (The Redheaded Demon God), Nuko Majin included in the sample screenshots a brief mission statement, disguised partially as a content warning.
Here’s the original Japanese text:
「屈さず殺す」（くっころ）
喘がず鳴かず
墜ちず負けず
何をしようとも、本作品に
バッドエンドはありません
ご注意ください
The message is headed by nothing less than alternative construction for the term “Kukkoro” itself. Rather than “Kukkoro” being short for “くっ、殺せ!” (“K-kill me!”), Nuko Majin’s take on “Kukkoro” is as a truncation of “Kussazu Korosu”, or “to kill, never yielding.”
The rest of the message translates in equally resolute terms.
She will not gasp, nor wail,
Nor fall, nor fail.
Try as you might, this work, has no ‘Bad Endings’ for you. Please be warned.
Rather than indulge the fantasy of breaking in a strong woman, Nuko Majin declares that The Scarlet Demonslayer, Agnis, will remain unbowed by her ordeal, and come out of it stronger than before.
It’s worth pointing out that even Kukkoro narratives show some diversity of outcomes. For every ending where the heroine ends up a squealing sex slave, there’s another where she rallies to reap bloody revenge on her foes in the epilogue, taking power like a kind of slutty phoenix.
And yet, The Scarlet Demonslayer is still distinct, thanks in part to its particular blending of three specific motivations.
The first is Nuko Majin’s statement of intent: Creating an alternative “no bad endings” approach to a Kukkoro story.
The second is a transformation/corruption arc. This one is pretty common in typical Kukkoro stories, as heroines go from whatever strong woman they were to sex object.
The third new element is Nuko Majin’s affection for the “deadpan” fetish.
The deadpan trope (otherwise known as the “emotionless” or “dead fish” trope) is a style of characterization that focuses on a character’s unchanging, expressionless manner (Nightingale from Fate/Grand Order is a ready example of this personality in more popular media). As mentioned earlier, Agnis changes her expression exactly twice in the story: Once at the outset, and once during the game’s “True” ending. Otherwise, she maintains an aloof, detached air, no matter what she does or has done to her.
Nuko Majin’s devotion to maintaining this aura of Agnis’ helps to twist and bend Kukkoro’s conventions in new and interesting ways. It even expresses itself in the game’s mechanics.
Created through the RPG Maker toolkit, The Scarlet Demonslayer carries most of the surface-level gameplay hooks of a very light console RPG. Agnis has a stats page, levels, and an equipment screen.
But one look at the stats page shows how none of this matters. All her attributes are fully maxed out. In the sections where she can even fight an enemy, all enemies die in a single hit. She almost never takes damage, even without her sacred armor.
In other words, even seemingly laid low by the Prime Minister’s machinations, Agnis is effectively invincible and omnipotent. Nuko Majin has come up with a “solution” to a genre where a strong woman is typically beaten, exploited, and made vulnerable. That solution: Have the story star a woman that is categorically impossible to coerce. Just at a glance one can only conclude that you could no more force Agnis the Annihilator into anything against her will than you could rape the sun.
Nothing in The Scarlet Demonslayer can happen to Agnis without tacit consent. Not even the porn. With the aid of a subordinate, Agnis obtains a magical ring that converts the ambient lust of the men around her into magical energy, with the bonus side effect of slowly converting her into a succubus able to absorb magic through sex. This is the convenient justification to have Agnis go on a sex tour of her kingdom, exploring various lewd situations, escalating in intensity, all for the sake of rebuilding her magic reserve so she can recall her sacred armor and resume her role as an Annihilator.
Yet, even with this ready-made vulnerability in mind, Nuko Majin remains dedicated to preserving Agnis’ essential dignity. Even a cursed succubus ring that would drive a normal person insane with lust feels just fine on her. The sex scenes themselves are written from a deliberately detached perspective, as if Agnis herself is a remote witness to the debauchery she engages in. She observes and narrates scenes with near-clinical remove, all while the art itself takes care to maintain her unfazed expression at all times.
Naturally, these twists to the Kukkoro formula aren’t done out of some sense of ideology. Agnis’ consistent deadpan serves a specific fetish, and the scenario’s twists exist to inject some variety into the fairly static Kukkoro dynamic. And yet, indulging this peculiar combination of kinks has resulted in a unique product - from a genre that revels in breaking women comes a game that stars someone who can’t be broken: A heroine whose agency is undenied, but undeniable.
If Kukkoro is the dark side of “You are not immune to hot lady knight,” The Scarlet Demonslayer embodies pulls a double reversal: “This hot lady knight is immune to you.”
This essay was originally published on Cohost.
Unangbangkay has written for game- and anime news publications since 2009, when he joined as a staff writer for anime blog Japanator.com. Since then he’s typed up news, reviews, guides, and features for sites like Destructoid, Siliconera, GameCritics, The California Literary Review, and most recently, RPG Site. He’s on Cohost, Twitter, Threads, and Mastodon under the “@unangbangkay” handle, and is open to freelance writing work wherever it can be found.
<- Previous Essay Next Essay ->
1. Though Kukkoro material featuring male subjects and/or same-sex dynamics can be found, the vast bulk of widely available Kukkoro fiction uses women subjects and is created for consumption by a presumed straight male audience.