Today I finally published the scat versions of Guardian Priestess Chapter 3 Part 1. If you haven't read it yet, stop reading this and go and do it now! I promise it's far more interesting than what I have to say here.
As the title suggests, I want to talk a bit about the censorship in Chapter 3 Part 1. There's a story here but - spoiler alert - the kicker is that the English translation is the least censored version of Chapter 3 Part 1 out there, less censored than anything on E-Hentai or available for purchase1.
I'll also be talking on a couple other topics, but that's the main thing.
I'll be talking about scat a lot in this post, so if that squicks you stop reading now. Links aren't safe either and might have images featuring scat in them.
I've been translating hentai for nearly five years now. From the very beginning my aim was to bring Guardian Priestess to an English-speaking audience. And also from the very beginning, I saw Chapter 3 Part 1 as this almost unatainable, beautiful goal. It had completely uncensored scat, amazing art, and (as my favourite comment on the E-Hentai galleries puts it) "2000 and 3 Parts of hardcore poopoo action".
Hold on, completely uncensored scat? That's going a bit far. Just look at this example image. The main bulk of the poo is uncensored, but there's still an ugly pixellated ring at the boundary of poo and asshole. Worse yet, a comment on the gallery reveals someone bought the set and got a version where the scat is completely censored! That wouldn't do at all.
Luckily I had a lot of free time and disposable income on my hands, and I was zealously dedicated to making the best possible translation of what, in my mind, was the best hentai ever made2. I read all of Gemuo's Pixiv posts, noting one particularly interesting image3, and bought Chapter 3 Part 1 three times, once from each site Gemuo sells it on, so that I could do some first-hand investigating.
I found that the DMM edition had fully censored scat (lining up with the E-Hentai comment above), the DLsite version had mostly uncensored scat except for around the asshole (making it the version uploaded to E-Hentai4), but the Digiket version was the holy grail: completely uncensored scat. I considered hiding this and only revealing it when I released my beautifully uncensored translation, but I decided the world needed to know as soon as possible. I shouted it from the rooftops5: "the Digiket version of Chapter 3 Part 1 has the least scat censorship! If you don't care about scat, any version is fine!"
That last bit is what we in the business call foreshadowing.
Gemuo made it pretty clear in an image on his Pixiv that variable censorship began with Chapter 3. There would be no difference between the different editions of chapters 1 and 2, so making "the best possible translation" of them was relatively straightforward. I kept putting the warning about censorship in Chapter 3 in my uploader comments, and over time it became rote. Knowing that the Digiket version of Chapter 3 had the least scat censorship was no longer something I had researched and concluded, it was a fact of the universe.
My translation of Chapter 1 caught the attention of Chaos-x, and he started doing the editing for the no scat versions once I completed a script for them. He also gave me a lot of tips for improving my own editing, some of which I followed. Since I had that line about scat censorship running through my head and I knew he didn't want to see any scat, I didn't talk to Chaos-x about censorship at all. I assumed he would use the version on E-Hentai, the DLsite version, which wouldn't be a problem for the no scat version of any chapter.
The years flew by and at last I had completed scripts for Chapter 3 Part 1 story mode. I shot the no scat one over to Chaos-x in November, and in a heroic turnaround (especially considering I sent it to him out of the blue and he was in the middle of another project) he sent me the finished edit in February6.
Real life got in the way and my own estimate of a month to produce both scat versions proved off by about a month7. In that time an interesting comment appeared on the no scat gallery. It simply read "Censored = Useless".
Now, this comment was interesting to me for several reasons. The first was that somebody would spend their time using a site dedicated to Japanese pornography, where depictions of genitalia must by law be censored, and complain that things are censored. Not just complain, call them useless! I can only speak for myself but the number of times I've jerked it to Gemuo's art means it's definitely not useless.
The second reason it was interesting was that it tickled a memory in the back of my mind, something about censorship. So I went back to look at what Gemuo said about censorship in Chapter 3 Part 1, and wouldn't you know that image I've already linked twice has two columns? The second column describes the level of scat censorship in each edition, and there are no surprises there. But the first column is strange. It says there's censorship in the Digiket and DLsite editions that isn't in the DMM one. Yet I'd checked a few images and couldn't see anything of the sort! I checked the picture once more and this time really paid close attention to the column heading8. It talked about fingers and other objects penetrating the asshole. Once again I took I compared my DMM edition with the others and... Oh. Whenever something that isn't a penis is penetrating an asshole, there's a mosaic. But only on DLsite and Digiket - in the DMM edition that mosaic isn't there.
I felt pretty dumb. But at least I was discovering this now, rather than years down the line. I looked throught all three versions of Chapter 3 Part 1 looking for these differences in censorship. When I found one, I copied that section of the DMM version and pasted it on top of the Digiket one. The DMM version has slightly lower jpeg quality so I didn't want to replace the images wholesale even for the no scat version. The fruits of my labour are most visible in the livestock experiment scene. Compare this censored image with this uncensored one.
Doing this for the extreme scat version was trickier than I expected. There's a scene when Nagomi has a tube connecting her ass and pussy so that she gives herself a manguso. This has the unfortunate dual properties of being something that isn't a penis penetrating an asshole (so the DMM edition has reduced censorship) and featuring scat (so the Digiket edition has reduced censorship). A bit of playing with masks and Photoshop's object selection tool later and I got the best of both worlds. The mosaic had a bit of an overlap between the two editions, but I think they're small enough that it mostly blends in. The casual observer shouldn't spot any censorship there at all.
I don't really have a conclusion. Thank you for reading this far. I would guess most people don't find the process of translation interesting enough to get through this whole post, but I love doing it and I love talking about it, so writing this was a lot of fun.
I guess if I do have one thing to say, it's that inspiration can come from the unlikeliest of places. If I hadn't seen that "Censorship = Useless" comment, I probably wouldn't have found out DMM's reduced censorship, and you would be reading a worse version of Chapter 3 Part 1. So thank you ross13015, your comment did in fact reduce censorship.
1I assume Gemuo has a completely uncensored version on his computer, but I don't know anyone with the hacking skills to acquire it.
2I still think this. Guardian Priestess is the only hentai I'm aware of with this level of depravity and high quality artwork. Some artists occasionally match it, but always in individual images rather than a full set. On the other hand, it's pretty embarrassing to go round telling people "this is the best hentai ever!" so I try not to.
3Initially I thought this image said completely the opposite of what it does. The first ever uploader comment for Chapter 1 is embarrassingly wrong because of that.
4I don't blame KupopoCrashing for uploading a less-than-perfect version. Digiket is notoriously difficult to use if you're outside Japan. I think in 2018 it wouldn't accept my credit card because it didn't have a Japanese billing address, so I had to buy some BitCash points (apparently there's a cryptocurrency called BitCash now? It's not that, it's a Japanese non-crypto internet money thing) from Playasia and use those.
5That is, the uploader comment in all my galleries. I assume most people don't read these, especially mine as they quickly become essays.
6Which I didn't notice for a few days, because I don't use Discord enough to have the app and was away from my computer for a while. Sorry dude.
7I have a bit of real life project management experience and one thing I'm proud of is my ability to estimate tasks. Back when I'd only done the extra scat story mode of Chapter 1 I predicted that doing everything up to the end of Chapter 3 Part 1 would take another 5 and a bit years, an estimate that I'm still on track for.
8Turns out if you want to understand some text, reading it helps. I'm really not sure how I missed this info for all these years.
