The very concept of Rule 34 is arguably one of the driving forces of the internet. At the very least, it’s a guiding principle that I see played out almost every day here at ThePornDude as I make my scholarly, masturbatory rounds around the web. As immortalized in a webcomic back in 2003 and reiterated on sources as respectable as Wikipedia, Rule 34 states “There is porn of it. No exceptions.” Sounds like good news for all us horny motherfuckers, huh?
When Rule34.dev slid into my DMs this morning, I was expecting another hentai parody library or imageboard full of X-rated Fortnite artwork. Turns out, it’s something a bit different and a lot rarer. The site is basically an aggregator of content from some of the more popular hentai imageboards out there. I liked the concept immediately, and I ain’t alone; their traffic has been growing rapidly over the last few months, and it looks like they’ll cross the million-visitor threshold this month. Let’s see what all these weebs and neckbeards are jerking off to, shall we?
Rule 34 from Around the Web
Over the years, I’ve reviewed maybe a dozen sites with Rule34 in the title. I knew Rule34.dev wasn’t going to be same kind of place the moment I pulled up the front page. It looks a hell of a lot nicer than the barebones presentation you find on most imageboards, for one thing. The design is polished, the interface slick, and the overall vibe more than a little nerdy, which I mean in the best way possible. If you’re a fan of this kind of content, you’ll probably feel right at home right away. Go ahead and pull your waifu pillow a little closer. Tell her I said hi.
It wasn’t the imageboard I’d expected, but I immediately spotted references to some of the more popular platforms in the genre. The front-page spread of material hypes “The best of” from joints like Rule34.xxx, Gelbooru, e-hentai, e621 and Yande. They’re collecting fap fodder from some of the best imageboards on the internet. If you’re into hentai, you’ve probably visited at least some of them before.
You don’t need to be a fucking super genius to understand the appeal here. The interface alone will make it more appealing to normies who don’t wear fedoras, the kind of casual masturbators who are turned off by the usual Booru design. There’s also the matter of convenience: instead of visiting all those imageboards on the daily and flipping through the stacks in search of gold, Rule34.dev is gathering all the best stuff in a one-stop shop of hentai perversion.
You’re probably thinking about the implications already. By drawing material from a range of sources, they’re ensuring a nice range of X-rated anime content, plus some more traditional porn. E621, for example, is known for its furry fetish fun, and e-hentai’s got the adult manga, while Gelbooru takes a broader approach to hentai. Sites like Realbooru come through with the nudie photos and cock smoking GIFs, which means you’ll find them in abundance on Rule34.dev, too.
Looking at the front page right now, I see sexed-up variations of already fapworthy characters like Chun Li and D.Va, My Little Ponies with big jiggly asses, futanari rabbits, and pixel art succubi with their tits out. There’s CG anime porn, big-eyed 18+ schoolgirls in plaid skirts, elf-eared bimbos and a handful of real photos of buxom goth girls, Asian nymphettes and MILFs in fishnets and lingerie. Goddamn, I’m already horny as hell and I haven’t even started digging in yet.
Browsing Imageboards without the Bullshit
While imageboards can be goldmines for masturbators who love anime, the format kind of sucks. It’s not half as intuitive as some incels seem to think, with a small learning curve as you figure out how to navigate those ugly, unwieldy menus and tags indexes. One thing I liked about Rule34.dev right away was the stellar, immediately accessible organization of content.
Each of the Boorus listed on the front page comes with its own little panel of rotating imagery from the source. The Gelbooru panel, for example, offered up thumbnails leading to Rule34’s Gelbooru stash of Popular, Furry, Mature and POV images. Hit the refresh button and you get a new set of images and a new set of categories; in this case, they switched to Popular, Chubby, Tomboy and Furry.
You can also peruse The Best Of from some of the listed Boorus. I like how they offer a breakdown of the Best stuff over the Last Hour, Day, Week or Month. If you’re even remotely familiar with any of these sites, you know just how fast the fresh material can come in. Some of them have a basically non-stop flow of hentai being uploaded, and this gives fappers a really fucking simple way to skip to the stuff that’s easiest to jack off to.
I clicked my way to Rule34.dev’s Monthly stash from e-hentai. That brought up an 11-page grab bag of image sets, manga, doujinshi, artist and game CG, and a whole lot more. There’s hardcore bondage anime, Western-style porn comics offering their adult spins on Little Red Riding Hood, and some kinky foot fetish pics generated by machine with the help of some geeky pervert.
Then I went back to Rule 34’s front page, where the Yande panel now offered a quick link to their stash of hentai tagged with Thigh Highs. This one actually turned out to be a dud, with “No results found” when I clicked on it. It looks like the front-page subgenres might be randomly selected off a list regardless of what’s currently available. No worries, though, because a couple clicks later I was surfing through Chubby hentai pics from Donmai. You know what they say: the bigger the cushion, the sweeter the pushin’!
Wanking Away the Afternoon to Hentai
After gawking at the Donmai fat chicks for a while, I cleared the search bar to get a more general overview of Rule34’s Donmai stash. I can’t stress enough how much better the interface is compared to the source Boorus. It’s not just nicer looking, but noticeably easier to use, too.
By default, Rule34 showed me Donmai’s Popular material, both 2D and 3D, with the 18+ box checked off so I’d have something to shake my dick at. With a click, I can whittle my selection down to the 2D pics. With another, I could narrow it to the Sensual or Safe pics, but why would a hardened masturbator like me do that? Give me the dirtiest stuff, please!
I switched the view from Popular to Recent. Rule34 instantly served up red-eyed devil girls, pink-haired lesbians, scanned doujinshi pages and Goku with a raging boner. Rule34 is dredging their sources constantly, so my whole first page selection was grabbed from Donmai within the last hour. The most recent pic, a Sailor Moon-looking babe with a bandage over her eye, was only added to Donmai a couple minutes ago.
One thing I’d like to see implemented on Rule 34 is a selection of the newest material across all the different Boorus, collected on one singular page. It’d be the kind of thing where you’d end up with a completely fresh set of pics every time you reloaded the page, but that’s a big part of the fun. If you’re the sort of compulsive masturbator who hits Refresh on the front page of any of these imageboards, I’m sure you understand the appeal immediately. The content comes in hard and fast, and sometimes we want to see it all.
Rule34 is still a young site, so I can’t imagine we’ve seen its final form yet. The concept is a definite winner, collecting material from a range of the most popular imageboards, and the polished, intuitive interface offers much easier access to the stuff than your typical Booru. I’m already a fan, and I’m looking forward to seeing how the platform continues to develop. What may be in store for us hentai enthusiasts? Well, besides all the furious masturbation, I mean.