A fierce gaze blurs with tears, the sharpness of speech crumbles into sweet panting. The run of process by which a character loses the words of protest and inwardly admits “I can no longer resist”. Subculture receivers have called this moment by a proper name.

Mesu-ochi is a doujinshi and adult-manga industry term for a narrative type in which a character, through submission to sexual pleasure, comes to redefine the self as “female (mesu)”. The katakana spelling is most current in media from the 2010s. With an initial character image that is active, intellectual, combative, masculine, or socially elevated, the central motif is the process by which sexual experience turns that figure passive and submissive, placing the reorganisation of self-identity at the final phase as the narrative’s point of settlement.

Overview

At the core of the type is a structure that maximises, as staging, the gap between the initial character image and that of the final phase. At the opening, a heroine displays “non-female” attributes (combative, intellectual, dominant, virginal, cold), and those very attributes are the object of the receiver’s attachment. In the middle, the figure is placed in a sexual situation and the initial attributes are stripped one by one. At the end, the figure declares “female” self-recognition aloud, or embodies it through expression and conduct, placed as the apex of the narrative.

For the type to hold, a strong-willed attribute is a precondition. Since an already passive figure cannot secure a “falling” width by becoming further passive, to maximise the heroine’s fall-width, high-position figures are preferred: the combat heroine, the woman knight, the woman mage, the woman teacher, the woman president, the woman detective. In secondary creation, characters who hold an independent strength in the original are readily chosen, a factor that accelerated the type’s secondary-creation proliferation.

As a word-sense, “mesu” (female animal) vividly stresses biological femaleness, implying an animality one rung below “woman”. The receiver runs the word as a metaphor for the process by which human social attributes are stripped and the figure is reduced to a biological pleasure-machine. “Ochi” (fall), a classical word for descent from high to low, inherits the resonance of religious “fall”. Their compound functions as a coinage plainly showing the type’s structural essence: a vertical descent from the social and intellectual heights to the animal depths.

Etymology and formation

The formation of the word “mesu-ochi” is found in the doujinshi and adult-manga field of the late 2000s and early 2010s. As prehistory there is the lineage of training-style works in eromanga from the 1990s, where developments of a heroine reaching submission were long established. After an era when these were called “training-mono” or “enslavement-mono”, “mesu-ochi” settled around 2010 as a new word covering these types and stressing more finely the process of “self-redefinition”.

Media that accelerated the word’s circulation include secondary-creation doujinshi at Comic Market from the late 2000s, and the adult-manga magazines that expanded in the same period. Run as a word in advertising copy, obi blurbs, and titles among authors, editors, and readers of the field, it gained the standing of an industry term. From the mid-2010s it spread horizontally into eroge, adult CG sets, adult games, and adult audio, and now settles as a general term for a cross-genre narrative type. No established Anglophone equivalent exists; in recent Anglophone secondary-creation communities, “broken”-style and “corruption”-style English expressions run in parallel. As a representative case of a Japanese subcultural type, recognition abroad is advancing.

Derived forms

The TS mesu-ochi places a figure, after sex-change or feminisation, in a “female” body and depicts submission to that body’s pleasure. A male protagonist turns into a female body by magic, science, or curse, and “falls” through the clash between the initial psychology (masculinity, misogyny, aversion to sexual experience) and the new bodily sensation; as a device for the male reader to experience a female body in the first person, it forms a distinct field, adjacent to the futanari and otokonoko fields.

The combat-heroine mesu-ochi has a heroine of combative attribute (magical girl, woman warrior, woman spy, woman superhero) fall into an enemy organisation’s hands, receive defilement and training, and finally “fall” to the organisation’s side; since the original symbolises public authority, justice, and social order, the toppling of its bearer functions as a taboo attack on social order itself.

The high-position-occupation mesu-ochi has a socially high-position woman (teacher, doctor, detective, president, politician) fall by the hand of a man socially below her (student, patient, subordinate, business partner). The strong-willed / virgin mesu-ochi has a heroine displaying virginity, sexual aversion, or misandry reverse those attributes through sexual experience, a structure maximising the meaning of “first experience”, overlapped with the theme of virginity loss. The self-initiated mesu-ochi has the heroine selectively acquire passivity by her own curiosity, libido, or longing, adjacent to the inran and chijo fields, distinguished from the coercive types in placing the subject of the “fall” on the party herself, a branch matured from the late 2010s as expression of an era in which the ethics of consent had permeated.

Position as representation

From subculture studies, two theoretical viewpoints discuss the type. The first is the fictional substitute-satisfaction of the male reader’s “conquest desire”, as an extension of traditional male-oriented adult expression: the structure of subjugating an initially strong-willed object inherits the classical structure of functioning as compensation for male self-esteem. The second is another identification mechanism shown by the type’s permeation into female and feminisation-genre readerships: in the feminisation mesu-ochi the reader often identifies not with “the one who makes her fall” but with “the one who falls”, where it functions as a metaphor of self-liberation into bodily pleasure.

Nagayama’s Nijigen Gender Hyougen Ron (2014) discusses the type as one line of “gender-transgressive representation”, noting a side that deviates from the conventional patriarchal conquest model while being male-oriented expression. The thematising of the pleasure of passivity shows that male-oriented expression does not necessarily premise active conquest, positioned as a case of the internal diversification of sexual representation in the subcultural field.

Ahegao is the standard visual expression of the apex phase of the type, and the two hold a close relation. As a means of visualising the heroine’s “fallen” state at the narrative’s end, expression-signs accompanied by tongue-out, eye-roll, tears, and drool are used, and the settlement scene of the mesu-ochi narrative is inseparably bound to ahegao staging.

The relation with BDSM and SM subculture requires care. Real SM practice is a mutual relational mode resting on Safe, Sane, Consensual, whereas the mesu-ochi type is a narrative device within fiction. Though they may overlap on the surface of expression, applying it to a real relation premises sufficient prior agreement between the parties. The recognition that representation within fiction cannot be transcribed directly onto a real relation is shared among responsible receivers of the field. Mesu-ochi as role-play, as a form of sexual role-acting, can be discussed as a derived form within the SM community if conducted by mutual agreement, though this is a separate theme from the mesu-ochi type as a created work.

See also

• Training
• Otokonoko
• M-Female
• Futanari
• Ahegao
• Role-play
• BDSM
• Inran
• Chijo