“Don’t watch an anime labeled ‘Boku’”
It’s a joke as old as time itself. Year after year, people harmlessly stumble upon the INFINITE HORROR of some old animated gay porn and make tired fucking jokes about it. If you’ve spent five minutes on 4chan in the past six years, you’ve probably heard of/seen the legendary Boku no Pico. It’s pretty well-worn ground and between gay panic rants, lazy jokes about BEING TOTALLY STRAIGHT but still getting aroused by it and overblown thinkpieces, there’s really not much left to say about it.
Enter the Hardcore Kid.
In November of 2011, he took it upon himself to BRAVE THE TERROR of this piece of esoteric niche pornography from five years ago. The result? An agonizing half-hour of exploitative bullshit under the guise of criticism, grade-school homophobia and a general lack of understanding for the finer points of, y’know, actually being a critic.
To preface: The Hardcore Kid is an internet critic, referring to himself as “hardcore enough to review kid’s stuff”. As is typical of the format, he’s another bargain-basemenet zero production values dullard who sits in front of his webcam and grumbles inane observations about culturally irrelevant trash under the pretense of “informing” and “entertaining” his audience. His gimmick is that he is a STRAIGHT-EDGE PUNK ROCKER (ironically offset by his use of Motley Crue’s “Kickstart My Heart” for an theme song) and he DOESN’T TAKE ANY BULLSHIT. What this amounts to in his actual videos is basically just sits around in a pair of sunglasses and a cheap leather jacket and gets flustered at things most normal people would at best heave a disgusted sigh at and at worst ignore entirely, whilst occasionally namedropping The Ramones or calling out the youth of today for being indulgent, stupid and lazy (on top of being a big NO DRUGS/BOOZE/CIGARETTES/CASUAL SEX crusader, he extends his moronic fanaticism to criticize the internet culture he is willing a part of and profess this hilariously out of touch yearning for THE GOOD OL’ DAYS).
This isn’t my first encounter with ol’ HK. Back when this blog first started, I found him on another affiliate site our ol’ pal Megan Wessels used to hang out on. I watched some stupid “TEN YOUTUBE PEOPLE WHO SUCK” video he made or something and it was a tedious mess. At the time I was thinking about tossing up a little blurb about how he was a dumb cocksucker or whatever, but the moment passed and I kinda forgot all about him till The New Dwellers became a thing. Through Net Dwellers, I discovered Reviewers Unknown, and there I encountered HK once more.
He’s arguably become worse at what he does (shocking, I know) as time flies. He lowballs it like a motherfucker and pursues only the easiest targets (WATCH ME TALK ABOUT A MOVIE FROM THREE YEARS AGO AS IF IT’S BRAND NEW, WATCH ME SCREAM AT A VHS TAPE OF A CARTOON NOBODY’S EVER HEARD OF), like Boku no Pico is somehow not even his laziest choice. The way he goes about taking down this done-to-death target of mockery is impressive in how cavalier and moronic it is, though. It really doesn’t take a genius to point out the ethical conflict of interest involved in watching something like a grown man seducing and then banging some boy who’s by all appearances not older than 12, but the ethics of that seem entirely secondary to how much gay-bashing and sloppily censored fucking HK can shove into the video. Clearly much more satisfied with showing rather than telling, he plays more or less the entire thing during the video with attempts at censorship that do absolutely fuck all to obscure the action (certainly not helped by his insistence to loudly bark explicit narration of the scenes over them as they play). For someone taking such offense to a thing like this, he sure has absolutely no shame in forcing his audience to endure every second of the sex.
The sex is what he fixates on, like barely any of the video is spent on dealing with the ethical conflicts or thematic analysis or even commenting on it aesthetically short of making sure to point out that it “isn’t even hot” (a bizarre thing for an ostensibly heterosexual male to say about pornography marketed to fujoshis and pederasts). He seems disgusted with it less because it’s child abuse and more because IT’S FAG STUFF AND I’M NOT A FAG. He prefaces his review with the lazy insistence that he’d rather be looking at “hot, sexy brunettes, with big, full boobs, huge, round asses and shaved, tight pussies” (delivered with a sickening fucking snarl at the end that adds an icky sheen of misogyny to it all). Endless minutes are dedicated to bizarrely descriptive accounts of anal penetration and pretty much every second word is some kind of homophobic slur. About the closest he comes to a salient point in the entire video is a brief bit where he discusses the disclaimer at the beginning of the video (placed there by fansub group aarinfantasy), but even that ends up much for naught because he hilariously falsely attributes authorial intent of the work to the translators and then showcases absolutely no understanding of the concept that fiction is capable of crossing moral boundaries while still possessing artistic merit (boy howdy, somebody get this kid some Pasolini).
The only thing that serves as a criticism save for his base and disgusting homophobia is every now and again he’ll whine about how the story isn’t good (which is both radically overestimating the value of a story to pornography and also not quite interpreting the flexibility of the mechanics of storytelling, as what dialogue there is serves its purpose quite well and propels the simple narrative from beat to beat to beat more elegantly than not). Damn near the entire video is just a “set em up, knock em down” exercise in plastering the screen with homoerotic imagery and then condemning anyone who could possibly see the value in it whilst extoling the virtues of being a white, straight elitist (his whole perspective on the purpose and practical applications of being straight-edge and his general ethical stance on sexuality suggests he’s either a screamingly insane bigot or a closet case trying desperately to cling to heteronormative archetypes in order to feel good about himself).
In any event, fuck this guy.