Meet Laito Sakamaki, a potential "love" interest for the player of the lady-catering visual novel game, Diabolik Lovers. Let's see what the wiki has to say about this strapping youth's winsome personality..

"Laito is extremely perverted. His perverted nature causes him to be suspended from school often. Laito is a Do-S (extreme sadist like all of his brothers). He is always cheerful and loves to joke and is similar to Ayato when teasing the heroine.

However, his personality suddenly changes when something goes against his wishes and when Yui is too defiant around him. He doesn't like it when the heroine disobeys his orders and he often punishes her because of that. Laito can also be shown to be good at interpreting peoples' motives.

Laito takes pleasures in making Yui do what she refuses to do and then to make her enjoy what she hates. He is an open pervert type of character and also a voyeur, which makes him wish to share his prey with others and enjoy seeing her get messed up by others, but then he becomes possessive and jealous and punishes her for it. It is shown he also doesn't mind if people observe when he is messing Yui."

Hum. Well. This is a game catering to women's fantasies, right?

After pushing myself through a few episodes of the anime adaptation of the game, I began to understand better - the harem of vampiric men do openly refer to the heroine as a masochist (among other flattering names), so perhaps this was supposed to cater to a select niche of ladies with particular tastes?

I would be happy if that were the case. Truly, I would be. There's nothing wrong with having particular tastes, exactly, when it comes to matters of more personal and intimate nature, but I'm kind of worried at the trend I'm observing with these highly successful and supposedly women-catering romance titles. I mean, looking at Twilight, 50 Shades of Grey, and this slew of japanese-made material.. have I possibly misunderstood something about women's fantasies? Is what I had called a "niche" actually much more widespread than I had previously thought? It is a sobering realisation, considering rape and domestic abuse statistics. It all reeks of the romanticising of frankly unhealthy and abusive relationships.

Erotic material catering to male fantasies is far more straightforward for me to understand. How could it not, when it plants itself firmly in front of the camera, drapes itself suggestively all over the furniture and contorts itself in (painfully) awkward, inviting poses? It is also, I sadly suspect, more healthy than the material for women mentioned above. A lady with exaggerated secondary sex characteristics trips over nothing and lands inappropriately on the male protagonist, fine. She's naive and air-headed and doesn't really contribute to the plot (if any) outside of being a rescue target, okay. She seems like an independent, self-sufficient character who turns out to have a softer, feminine side and just ends up serving her purpose as auxiliary to the male character after falling in love with him.. annoying, but not unbearable.

I mean, none of this is positively good by any means, but at least the worst it can do is brainwash people into a highly inaccurate belief of what women are like (people, just normal people, by the way). This already has terrible consequences all over the world, don't get me wrong, but what really gets me is thinking that the supposedly women-catering material is brainwashing them also into normalizing abuse and generally rather poor behaviour from their partners. It's one thing to have to deal with the world having unfair expectations of you, but quite another to realise you've been shackling yourself all along with some of them. It's like the instinctive reaction of disgust when comparing external abuse to self-harm.

Now, then. I've talked at length about the context of my chosen area, and I think my intentions are pretty clear - I will be "stealing" that charming gentleman's design up there, and repurpose it to make a piece more clearly representing the character. Here's the sketch I did on some foolscap paper prior to making use of digital tools: