Interspecies Reviewers

Monster girls: the shocking answers to every question you were afraid to ask.

Reviews are such an important thing for me to write. Not because I think what I have to say matters in the slightest - it's all opinion, after all - but because sharing my experiences with a piece of media is the only way I can convince other people (the precious yet beloved few of you who stop by this site) to watch it as well. That's why above all else, I strive to deliver accurate information, log some personal thoughts, and be earnest in my opinions. I reject the idea that my Reviews should tell you whether or not the show in question is "good" - you can't form that opinion until you've seen it for yourself! If nothing else, my goal is to be informative, temper your expectations, and help you discover new things to try for yourself.

Anyway, this is an anime about writing just such Reviews, but for sexual encounters with monster girls.

Yeah, this is about how I feel when staring down the mountain of porny anime titles on my list that I have yet to write Reviews for.

Interspecies Reviewers is a fantasy series that follows the escapades of a small adventuring party in their unyielding quest to discover and document their experiences at various fantasy creature-themed brothels. Willing to try fucking just about anything that moves, our band of faux heroes seek to write accurate, detailed, honest, and personal Reviews for each type of monster girl, sharing them far and wide across the land for interested parties to read and discuss. And while they're all seasoned adventurers who could make good money doing something more reasonable like mercenary work, selling and distributing their Review publications brings them hefty sums of gold, which in turn are immediately spent on looking for new brothels in which to help perpetuate the cycle.

Luckily for them, this world is rather explosively populated by sex dens of all niches, an apparent side-effect of living in a world in which succubi are a race that exist. The show offers a cheeky hand-waved explanation that as long as nature works its course, everyone is bound to have a little succubus blood in their veins - possibly a reference to the (likely mythical) real-world adage about one in every few hundred people having Mongol DNA due to the aggressive sexual pursuits of one Genghis Khan. In a world full of people carrying potential sex demon genes, it tracks that brothels would be a completely normal - and massively successful - line of work. If only, am I right?

...I was going to describe this show as "dripping with character", but that's a little too on the nose.

Running for a mere 12 episodes, the show has no desire to formulate any kind of plot or story, and instead offers a smorgasbord of kinky monster*-fucking shenanigans and delicious, light-hearted sexual comedy. To be honest, I think a plot would have ruined the main draw of the series anyway, and each episode is enough of its own adventure to make up for that. Besides, there's a fair bit of behind-the-scenes intrigue as well - discussing how a negative sexual image of demons is affecting their PR during election season, or the implications of a fallen angel having sex with mortals, or the archmage discussing how hard birth control and safe sex would be in a world that didn't have mana and magic circles to prevent pregnancies from happening - so it's not hard to still enjoy this anime even if episodic shows aren't your cup of tea.

*One major caveat is, unfortunately, this show relies mostly on standard anime monster-girls, not actual monsters. I know, I was disappointed too.

Now, you might think a show like this would quickly wear out its premise, simply following a group of randy dudes from one Vegas-esque gimmicky brothel to the next, but it genuinely remained interesting for me, because it kept finding new ways of making me laugh. Every variety of monster has their own special characteristics and nuances as to how sexual encounters with them work, so even though our "heroes" are mostly just there to stick their dicks inside, the details of each encounter vary greatly, and provide a ton of goofy hijinks to boot.

Before anyone can get it on at the fairy brothel, their dicks must be measured at full erection to ensure there will be a fairy of appropriate size for them to fuck. Damn, what a fun job this receptionist has.

The other reason it never runs out of gas is because the gang themselves are comprised of more than just ho-hum humans. The three core members are a human (Stunk), an elf (Zel), and an angel (Crim), and a rotating fourth member usually joins as well, always of a different fantasy race (e.g. halfling, kobold, lamia, etc). Each one gets to contribute their review for each brothel they visit, highlighting their own experiences, and what other readers of their race might find appealing (or not). For example, what Stunk finds appealing in a 300-year-old elf (who still looks twenty-something in human years), Zel finds absolutely gross (at that age, her mana has gone quite stale and it makes her smell like mulch), and so on.

The inherent comedy of hitting on these niche sexual details is what really powered the show for me. After all, a healthy curiosity about the inherent weirdness of sex is normal, and this show capitalizes on that weirdness to great comedic effect. For example, among the party, Crim the angel is the only one with enough of a natural fire resistance to get it on with the salamander-girl, and is the first to note that her pussy juice tastes like barbecue sauce. Likewise, Brooz the kobold was a bit perturbed at first over fucking a skeleton girl since she had no actual body parts, but as a beastman, he didn't mind licking and gnawing on her bones for a while (she clearly didn't mind either!). The gag about cyclops girls' "cup sizes" was also great - a number which measures not the size of their bras, but rather, their contact lenses.

Meanwhile, Zel prides himself on having excellent taste in gorgeous human gmilfs, much to everyone else's chagrin.

You've probably noticed if you've been paying attention, but yeah, the show is definitely written for an intended male audience. That isn't to say women won't enjoy it - speaking as a genderqueer bitch, I sure did - but it doesn't leave itself much room for exploring sexuality outside of "the male experience" (if that even really means anything). Don't mistake my tone as negative here, like it's inherently "bad" to write sexuality from a man's perspective, it's just that - overwhelmingly sometimes - we ALWAYS get media that depicts things from a male perspective. The field is oversaturated, and it would just be nice to have a wider variety of angles to help balance that out.

Funnily enough, that's where Crim comes in. As an angel, Crim is listed as an intersex being with a fully-functional double-decker set of sexual tools, and - in a bid to hide among their comrades as a sheep in wolf's clothing - plays the part of the femboy of the trio. Hilariously accurate, when Crim starts writing Reviews with the boys, their female readerbase immediately increases in size, as Crim's reviews sound much more "traditionally feminine" on the surface. By that measure, there is at least a minor modicum of kink and queerness present in the writing, even if the show tries to deny it.

I bet you anything it would only take one night of pleasure with a hyena girl and her massive dick to completely rock any so-called straight dude's world.

Digging even deeper into this, one episode has the party try drinking gender-swap potions so they can experience a taste of what the girls they're always fucking might be feeling in the process. Stunk and Zel become women for a day so they can try out a lesbian experience as feminine bottoms instead of masculine tops, and while they decidely aren't into it, they both agree that it was at least worth giving a try, which is a lesson I think everyone could stand to learn from.

But in that same episode, they also discuss how gender-swap potions could work going the other way. Women might drink it to try being "the man" in bed, or even hook up with an incubus (male sex demon equivalent of succubus) to try some steamy gay sex. The guys make it clear they don't swing that way, but do sort of respect guys who drink the potion to become women and then subsequently sleep with incubi in a decidedly somehow "not-gay" way.

If you're having trouble keeping up, don't worry. King Missile wrote a song about this very phenomenon to help you figure it out.

If you think this is hot, just wait until you try transbian sex.

Another point of contention I want to call to attention for a second is the whole femboy thing. I want to give this show some due praise for at least attempting to engage in queerness, but its characters are still hung up on one of the most egregious tropes in all of fiction: The Trap. In the episode, the gender-swap potion comes with an additional stipulation: while under its effects, clients are not allowed to leave the brothel's premises, mostly because it would give men-turned-women an excuse to peep on womens' baths, but also - "worse", they claim - use it to "deceive" an unsuspecting normal man into a date, lay, or even marriage (?), only to later revert after the effects are over. The assumption that the average queer person is so down bad they'd resort to "trapping" a straight person into sex is completely absurd and rooted in raw homophobia.

Now, with that in mind, if you've been around any anime community for longer than ten minutes, you've probably heard someone refer to a femboy as a "trap" at least once. This is usually done in reference to the long-standing memetic phrase "It's a trap!", which has several interconnected origins. In this case, it's meant as a shorthand for "that 'girl' you just called cute is actually a guy, and you fell for their trap". The phrase itself usually links back to a dead horse of a Star Wars quote and accompanying gif, which was proliferated heavily on forums across the entire internet in the early 00s. Even though most modern anime communities use "trap" in a mostly positive, affectionate way (because the communities are so insular that "trap" is just the vocabulary word they learned for "femboys" without any knowledge of its origins), doing so still radiates that negative stigma of its underlying meaning for a lot of us actual queers. So yeah, cut that shit out if you do it.

Don't tell an anime community that if you value your sanity, though. Most of them get REAL pissy when you dare to question any aspect of their precious little inter-community language.

Okay, but I'm seriously going to start incorporating "Dudette, why are you so hot?" into my daily lexicon.

There is at least one other unsavory episode concept in which the gang stop by a golem brothel, which functions as a DIY custom body shop (the subtitled version I watched lovingly referred to this as Build-A-Bitch Workshop). With access to a full array of completely customizable puppets, automatons and androids, the group decides in their infinite wisdom to build deepfakes of the prudish birdmaid girl who runs their favorite tavern.

Thankfully, when she inevitably finds out what they did upon reading their Review of the place, she gets a whole scene dedicated to beating the shit out of them for it, so at least there's that.

Absolutely riveting stage rendition of The Lusty Argonian Maid.

On the flip side though, Stunk and Zel may be a couple of dirty perverts, but they are actually five-star patrons with a surprising sense of honor when it comes to their line of business. True, their goal is to brazenly fuck one of every species they can get their horny little hands on, but they always pay their fees in full up front, respect the rules of the establishment, and use their reviews to advertise or even bring good PR and/or future clients to each brothel they visit.

In one particular standout scene, when Crim is low on coin and stuck bussing tables at the tavern to build up some reserves before their next outing, an eager Stunk offers them an out-of-pocket advance on their next review's wages so they can sneak out and join the night's hunt. Crim gratefully accepts, intending to spend it on food for the week, but Stunk and Zel both reprimand them for even thinking it, reminding them that this money was made off the backs of the hard-working prostitutes they fucked and reviewed. They insist that Crim pay that money forward right back into the brothel system, to ensure that the whore economy are also getting a slice of that sweet revenue.

It's a convenient excuse to get Crim to ditch work in favor of more fuckin', but it's also somewhat noble and respectable to the whore profession, and I really liked that little moment.

Part of me is disappointed that the best they could come up with for "minotaur" was "cow girl with obscenely oversized knockers", but eh...big tiddy is big tiddy, and big tiddy still good.

Anyway, there are plenty of other great gags and freaky fetishes to discover along the way, but rather than simply list them off here, I'll leave them for you to discover. As far as I'm concerned, this show provides a much-needed dose of lewd comedy in a world constantly at war with sexuality and censorship. It's a total riot with some genuinely saucy action layered on top, and although it's got a few skeevy moments here and there, I felt like the over-the-top humor and interesting ways of exploring kink far outweighed them and left me with plenty more laughs than frowns. If I had to dock stars for anything, it would be that aside from the 0.5 seconds during the opening song (which a lot of you heathens will probably skip anyway), the show has a strict no-genitals rule. You'll see boobs and butts of all sizes, but all potential cock and puss moments are cartoonishly censored behind visuals of elephants and clams. Which, I get it, but still.

If you're looking for more lewd monster-girl action, Monster Musume is an easy follow-up recommendation (for years I've actually been mentally confusing Interspecies Reviewers with this one, and genuinely thought they were the same show for god knows how long). If you just like goofy bawdy comedy with lots of tits and ass, you can get that in any bog standard jiggle anime. I like Girls Bravo and Green Green in particular. If you were hoping for more monster-y monsters and/or something with more explicit sex, Beast City might be up your alley, or tentacular classics like Urotsukidoji.

Hey, my eye is up here.

Bottom line, Interspecies Reviewers was an absolute blast for me. This one is going on the all-time favorites list for the 18+ section. I haven't stopped laughing about the salamander-girl's barbecue sauce pussy, and may or may not have made a few too many gifs of Crim getting nailed by that hyena hottie. Much like Stunk and company, I can only hope the next 18+ title I Review is even half as good as this one was.

Hope to see you then!

Someone get Sweet Baby Ray on the line. He'll want to hear about this.