Council, I gather you here today so that the members of this fine website can probe ourselves to look deep into the heart of doujins in order to determine the optimal doujin length. I realized the other day that I’ve got a specific amount of pages in mind when I click on a doujin, and if it doesn’t fall into that range, I can become a sad boy pretty fast. Imagine this. It’s Sunday night. Dreading the inevitable return to work/school on Monday, you decide to fap one out. You head over to doujins.com and see we released a new doujin just in time, and get this: your favorite character is plastered on the cover. Overjoyed, you assemble your needed materials and start to relax. And then you see it. Fifteen pages.
Now don’t get me wrong, I get it. Art is hard. I know because I tried and let me tell you the abominations I came up with shouldn’t ever be released to the general public. By the same token though, a doujin that's around fifteen pages is immediately demoted to “warm-up material” in my book. Because think about it, while it may say fifteen, you got the cover page, the author dedication page, an afterword/translator’s note page, and then a final ending page. Therefore a lot of the time you’re down to around ten pages of actual content at that point. There’s simply no way I can get invested into any sort of story or scenario with such few opportunities to suck me in. Maybe if it’s a character I really like I’ll check it out, but even then if I’m done warming up and it’s go time I immediately exit out and search for something longer.
Perfect example. Although to be fair 19 pages wasn't that bad; the problem is that fucking Grape Boy was in it.
Things can go wrong the other way too though. Let’s say a doujin is made with 120 pages and has your favorite characters on the cover. Hallelujah, the day is saved. The problem comes in when, as is the case with most doujins, it’s not actually your favorite character on the cover. At that point, I check the tags. Does it have anything I like? Oh, it’s tagged with yuri? Hell yeah sign me up. And then the hunt begins. I scroll through the pages. Hit “load more images” a couple times. Where’s the yuri? Page 34? No. Page 99? No. Page 67? Ah yes, nice, but they’re already fucking, how did they get to this point? I can’t miss this key plot element. Page 50? Nope, that’s back to the BDSM arc. Page 65? FINALLY! Oh wait… there’s only three pages of yuri in this doujin.
What it feels like reading a 120 page monster.
So short doujins leave me hanging out to dry. Long doujins are great if you’re familiar with the series, but if not it can lead to a wild goose chase searching for the parts you enjoy. Ladies and gentlemen, may I present: the 30-40 page zone. Everytime I see a doujin in that ballpark a huge, disgusting smile forms on my Grinch-like face. Even with the additional non-content pages there’s still gonna be plenty of time to set up a premise, run through some hot ass dialogue, show me multiple panels of sexy art, and still have time leftover at the end to conclude the story and for the artist/translator to make some comments. The best part? Whatever is tagged within those pages should be pretty easy to find as well. In my experience, anything tagged in a 30-40 page wonder is displayed on the majority of pages, unlike the huge amount of tags that can be found on longer doujins. It’s simply the perfect doujin length for me.
How long are your favorite doujins? Do you have a perfect doujin length that you look out for? Leave a not too long, not too short comment below!
