By Tom Johnson and Liz Kaempf
Unlike Comic-Con, during which stars of current television shows appear and hotter chicks show up in cosplay, I-CON likes to forego most of that classy stuff and replace it with lots of porn. Panels that feature hentai, advice for furries and screenings of pornographic animes all took place after the sun went down and only admitted those mature enough to handle the content. Clearly, that means anyone who is legally allowed to buy cigarettes is allowed into these raucous and raunchy events. It also means that all the hooligans are in attendance. I-CON brings out all the freaks.
Disappointed that there were less than 20 furry panels this year, a select few ventured to the late screenings of anime pornos like Cosplay Sex Machine and Panty Flash Teacher. Even walking into the Sex Machine late meant you didn’t miss anything. All you needed to see was the “sexaroid” transform like a slutty Sailor Moon to have a good idea of what you were getting yourself into. But even then, you had no idea what you were getting yourself into.
Seri is a shape-changing sex robot that a young and hormonal boys finds himself in possession of, with which he goes on to have first-time sexual encounters with. The first thing Seri does is pull up the top of her schoolgirl uniform to show her “master” her shiny, perky breasts. He gropes her, sucks on her boobs and bites them. His hands travel south and finger the flesh inside her panties. The audience clapped each time our young hero tried something new.
Then things get more intense. Seri asks if her master would like to see more of her, and then slips off her panties and invites the boy to—um…well…he performs cunnilingus while she asks him if it’s “tasty.” Then she tells him to pull out his penis and put it inside of her. The audience is not clapping as much now. And after he penetrates her for less than two seconds and orgasms (which you, for some unknown reason, get an x-ray vision of so you can see him come inside of his sexaroid) the audience is thoroughly uncomfortable. It’s possible no one expected this amount of sexually explicit animation.
Things only get more upsetting from there as the majority of the hour in Javits 109 is spent watching a cartoon rape scene gangbang, complete with a girl-on-guy-on-girl-with-both-a-penis-and-vagina threesome. For those of you playing at home, it means that the sex robot decided it felt left out from the human sex and decided it would grow a penis out of its cyborg vagina and anally penetrate the unsuspecting girl involved.
But wait, there’s more! Cosplay Sex Machine sets out to cater to even more of your most depraved fantasies, no matter how weird or unrealistic. A notable scene combining a lactation fetish and male rape fantasy plays out when our intrepid young hero has his trusty sexaroid impersonate his store manager. Among the other oddities present were a scene wherein Seri shrinks down to doll-like proportions and latches on to the young master’s ever-growing phallace like a monkey on a tree and a giant-sized girl next door who felates and is fisted by the end of their rendezvous. And lest we forget, in anime porn, a female’s orgasm is indicated by a stream of urine shooting up like the Bellagio fountain in Las Vegas. Last time I checked, that’s not how a woman orgasms—at least not in the good ol’ U-S-of-A.
Those not satisfied with screenings alone were welcome to indulge in such panels as “Harry Potter and the Magical World of Hentai,” a look at some of the pornographic material made by fans who really, really want to see what it would look like if the Dark Lord, Ginny Weasley and Dobby the house elf had a hot, nasty threeway. If that weren’t enough, the panel also delved into what the panelists presented as “dramatic readings” of fanfiction found online or written by audience members in bad costumes.
Much to the chagrin of attendees, the Harry Potter hentai panel was lacking in intimate and theatrical magic. The desperately sex-deprived panelists spent the first 15 minutes passing around poorly printed, animated Harry Potter fanfic porn. Some images included lesbian foreplay between supporting characters, sex scenes enacted by good and evil wizards and a 13-year-old Hermione in most of her Hogwarts uniform–her skirt and underwear were mysteriously missing, making viewers feel like pedophiles.
If it were a gallery of porn allowing the attendees to interact with one another and enjoy the deviant experience together, it would have been much better off. Unfortunately, the panelists went on to orate “dramatic” readings of popular Harry Potter fanfiction, inevitably including explicit sex scenes between Harry and Draco. But the storytellers were clearly not leadership majors here at Stony Brook, and are in immense need of public speaking classes. How does a person enjoy dirty, steamy Hogwarts fantasies if the voice of the reader resembles that of a 12-year-old girl high on Pixy Stix? While the sexually curious abruptly left the room, surely they were left to ponder if there would be anything at this I-CON to stimulate the senses.
The 18+ programming appeared to be few and far between this year, which could be directly attributed to screenings and panels not being scheduled past 11:00 p.m., whereas previous years’ conventions had programming that ran until 3:00 a.m. This is an unfortunate change for I-CON, as the raunchier, more adult-oriented content has traditionally taken place in the wee hours of the night when all the children go home to snuggle in their racecar beds with their fuzzy teddy bears.
While it’s likely that next year’s festivities would operate under the same scheduling restrictions, one can only hope for the return of more deviant fare like the “Super Hero S&M” of year’s past and a greater number of 18+ screenings. The anime pornos certainly did not leave much to the imagination, but they shocked and disturbed more than they enticed and stimulated. Perhaps this is why furries stick to their own packs—everything else must seem tame in comparison.
