Why is Netorare so common and Netori so rare?

[Barenchi]

Hey folks ! I keep bumping into this tension in adult games: a flood of titles that center on losing your partner (NTR), but almost none that fully lean into stealing someone else's (Netori) as the main hook. I want to float a hypothesis + examples, and hear your pushback (or confirmations).

Hypothesis

1. Emotional immediacy & narrative ease
When you want shock, betrayal, anguish NTR gives you all that quickly. You don’t need much world-building, the conflict is clear.
Example: Many visual novels or eroge where the heroine is “seduced away” by a rival, and the rest of the story is about your pain, trying to win her back, or watching her succumb.
(Think: a route in which your partner becomes unwilling or you witness her being “taken” that’s standard NTR material.)

2. Market / branding effect
Because NTR is already a recognized tag, it’s easier to sell: buyer knows what emotional ride they’re signing up for.
Counter-example / partial netori: The indie game NeToRi Phone uses “netori” in its name and concept. It’s rare to see that tag front-and-center.

3. Moral friction and ambiguity
Netori demands that the player accept being “the taker” a morally riskier position. Some players may balk at that role (guilt, cognitive dissonance).
Thus, many games that do flirt with netori present it only as a sub-route or optional path, so you can “opt in” a buffer.

4. Netori hidden in plain sight
Some stories don’t label “netori,” but structurally use it. For instance:

Romance arcs where the MC courts someone who’s already engaged or in a relationship, slowly undermining the existing bond.

“Rescue” / “redemption” seduction: she’s trapped in bad marriage or neglected, MC shows attention, and you “win” her over.

These are netori in effect, but often framed as romance or character growth, not “stealing.”

Suggested questions + invites to discussion

What games have you played where netori is the main selling point (not just a side route)?

Which feels more intense to you the journey of losing someone, or the tension of gradually taking someone?

Do netori-leaning stories ever “flip” and feel more palatable if framed as “saving” rather than “stealing”?

Would a netori game gain traction if it used different marketing framing (emphasis on seduction, character arcs) instead of “cheating”?

 

[Death Panda]

Netorare and netori are both trash.

 

[eaudecologne]

Because stealing is for low iq people

 

[MissCougar]

I think netorare is not as common as you believe.

It's mostly swingers, hot wife type sharing, and voyeurism masquerading as netorare.

 

[obibobi]

The cheating fetish can much more easily blend in with others, you can put it in romance, incest, futa, and can even spice up more story focused games.

Other is more all or nothing, protagonist being a cuck will either appeal, or turn you away. Exception being limited optional, but that needs to be well separated.

There was one game that had a lot of promise, about a dad who had a bunch of married son's and daughters and it looked like it was being set up to sleep with his son's wives and his daughters but that ran into some dev trouble.

 

[eaudecologne]

I think netorare is not as common as you believe.

It's mostly swingers, hot wife type sharing, and voyeurism masquerading as netorare.

Oh you're quite the ntr connoisseur it seems. I wouldn't mind learning the finer details of the genre from an educated lady.

 

[Lunarius]

There's an angle you haven't addressed yet: what's the audience that consumes this kind of porn?

No, wait - lemme rephrase that;

Who do you think is a bigger audience for porn - confident guys who have no trouble getting sex, and who'd have no trouble seducing other people's partners? Or insecure mid- to low-tier guys who have a lot of trouble getting sex, and who are plagued by insecurities about losing their partner to a better man?

The answer is obvious: insecure guys who do not have a satisfying sex life and who have very real anxieties about being good enough for sex or a romantic partner are very clearly the biggest audience here.

This is not an audience that can relate to protagonists who can steal other dudes' wives and girlfriends and get away with it. But this *is* an audience that can relate to being the dude whose partner gets stolen.

4. Netori hidden in plain sight
Some stories don’t label “netori,” but structurally use it. For instance:

Romance arcs where the MC courts someone who’s already engaged or in a relationship, slowly undermining the existing bond.

“Rescue” / “redemption” seduction: she’s trapped in bad marriage or neglected, MC shows attention, and you “win” her over.

These are netori in effect, but often framed as romance or character growth, not “stealing.”

Suggested questions + invites to discussion

What games have you played where netori is the main selling point (not just a side route)?

Which feels more intense to you the journey of losing someone, or the tension of gradually taking someone?

Do netori-leaning stories ever “flip” and feel more palatable if framed as “saving” rather than “stealing”?

Would a netori game gain traction if it used different marketing framing (emphasis on seduction, character arcs) instead of “cheating”?

This is a really good point - I can think of more than a few titles where the protagonist takes someone else's woman (regardless of whether it's for a fling or something more enduring), yet none of them are advertised as 'netori'.

I mean, just look at the Rance series. The titular Rance will pursue any woman who's young and pretty enough, and he doesn't care in the slightest if she's already taken. He seizes other dudes' girlfriends and wives constantly. Even though taking other people's partners isn't the focus of the series, it technically would deserve 'netori' as a secondary tag.

But I don't think I've ever seen any of the Rance games be characterized as netori.

 

[woody554]

Or insecure mid- to low-tier guys who have a lot of trouble getting sex, and who are plagued by insecurities about losing their partner to a better man?

the kink is ENJOYING the bittersweet pain of losing your loved one. it doesn't connect to insecurity in any way. they're not afraid of the bully taking their woman, they ENJOY being subjected to that pain.

 

[MissCougar]

Oh you're quite the ntr connoisseur it seems. I wouldn't mind learning the finer details of the genre from an educated lady.

I have tried a bunch out, especially of the rare phone NTR variety with much loved AI CG.

Many of those, and others, turn into episodes of the dude egging the woman on, usually pretty fast, and then getting play by play fuck text episodes with pictures. Other genres are not further off from this. Usually there is like a line or two before or after about how the guy or girl is conflicted, but it vanishes super fast and there is no lasting consequence or results other than both of them hunting the next kinky hook up.

I get bored around the time it turns into an orgy of swinger fest, usually with the MC banging other girls while his girl is banging other guys and it just gets unhinged and corny.

But if that's your NTR concept, you've got swaths of content!

 

[Lunarius]

the kink is ENJOYING the bittersweet pain of losing your loved one. it doesn't connect to insecurity in any way. they're not afraid of the bully taking their woman, they ENJOY being subjected to that pain.

You're balls deep in denial.

People who don't have that kind insecurity *cannot* enjoy NTR, simply because they won't be able to relate to it.

In fact, the simple fact that they learned to enjoy it is a coping mechanism on their part. Learning to enjoy the pain of your partner being stolen is something that only makes sense to a person whose outlook is dominated by fear and feelings of inferiority.

It's really nothing but an emotional kind of masochism. Just because you enjoy the pain doesn't mean that it doesn't hurt - and you are in fact enjoying it because it hurts. It wouldn't get you off if it didn't hit you right in the metaphorical balls.

And mind you, I've enjoyed NTR a lot more than most people. I'm no stranger to this mindset.

That, and you're also ignoring my secondary observation that netori (id est, the protagonist stealing other peoples' partners) is not nearly as popular on its own, simply because the porn-consuming audience mainly consists of dudes who will never be able to relate to that. Because again, this audience chiefly consist of dudes who have very real trouble getting sex, and whose outlook is marked by fear and insecurity rather than confidence.

 

[eaudecologne]

There's an angle you haven't addressed yet: what's the audience that consumes this kind of porn?

No, wait - lemme rephrase that;

Who do you think is a bigger audience for porn - confident guys who have no trouble getting sex, and who'd have no trouble seducing other people's partners? Or insecure mid- to low-tier guys who have a lot of trouble getting sex, and who are plagued by insecurities about losing their partner to a better man?

The answer is obvious: insecure guys who do not have a satisfying sex life and who have very real anxieties about being good enough for sex or a romantic partner are very clearly the biggest audience here.

This is not an audience that can relate to protagonists who can steal other dudes' wives and girlfriends and get away with it. But this *is* an audience that can relate to being the dude whose partner gets stolen.



This is a really good point - I can think of more than a few titles where the protagonist takes someone else's woman (regardless of whether it's for a fling or something more enduring), yet none of them are advertised as 'netori'.

I mean, just look at the Rance series. The titular Rance will pursue any woman who's young and pretty enough, and he doesn't care in the slightest if she's already taken. He seizes other dudes' girlfriends and wives constantly. Even though taking other people's partners isn't the focus of the series, it technically would deserve 'netori' as a secondary tag.

But I don't think I've ever seen any of the Rance games be characterized as netori.

I haven't played the series you mention so I might be off but I think the answer is obvious - because it's just about fucking the women and netori would have to include humiliation of the husband for it to be netori. Do you see the difference? How I see it is for a story to be netori instead of just fucking a random chick, you have to get off on the humiliation of the man. What other point could there be? I don't play much netori but ive played hero party must fall and it's just as I expected, humiliation of the guy is a huge part of the game, so that's obviously how it works. Also your point about high tier and low tier guys doesn't make much sense either, it's probably more chad to want to fuck girls that haven't been fucked yet, if you catch my drift, instead of someone's wife you know women get off on stealing someone's husband or bf, should be a hint.
You should just be honest and say you get off on the humiliation of guys. What's the point of hiding behind this low tier high tier stuff...

 

[Barenchi]

I think netorare is not as common as you believe.

It's mostly swingers, hot wife type sharing, and voyeurism masquerading as netorare.

True, many of what we call NTR are actually swinger or “shared wife” stories. I guess part of the confusion comes from how the tag is used as marketing shorthand for any form of sexual displacement. That in itself probably feeds why netori can’t get a clear identity.

 

[Barenchi]

The cheating fetish can much more easily blend in with others, you can put it in romance, incest, futa, and can even spice up more story focused games.

Other is more all or nothing, protagonist being a cuck will either appeal, or turn you away. Exception being limited optional, but that needs to be well separated.

There was one game that had a lot of promise, about a dad who had a bunch of married son's and daughters and it looked like it was being set up to sleep with his son's wives and his daughters but that ran into some dev trouble.

That’s a solid point : cheating works as seasoning, netori demands to be the meal. Do you remember the name of that “dad” project? Sounds like a rare setup that actually leaned into full netori territory.

 

[Barenchi]

You're balls deep in denial.

People who don't have that kind insecurity *cannot* enjoy NTR, simply because they won't be able to relate to it.

In fact, the simple fact that they learned to enjoy it is a coping mechanism on their part. Learning to enjoy the pain of your partner being stolen is something that only makes sense to a person whose outlook is dominated by fear and feelings of inferiority.

It's really nothing but an emotional kind of masochism. Just because you enjoy the pain doesn't mean that it doesn't hurt - and you are in fact enjoying it because it hurts. It wouldn't get you off if it didn't hit you right in the metaphorical balls.

And mind you, I've enjoyed NTR a lot more than most people. I'm no stranger to this mindset.

That, and you're also ignoring my secondary observation that netori (id est, the protagonist stealing other peoples' partners) is not nearly as popular on its own, simply because the porn-consuming audience mainly consists of dudes who will never be able to relate to that. Because again, this audience chiefly consist of dudes who have very real trouble getting sex, and whose outlook is marked by fear and insecurity rather than confidence.

That’s a solid psychological breakdown. It’s interesting how both NTR and netori, in the end, play with powerlessness one embraces it, the other rejects it. Both appeal to opposite ends of the same anxiety.

 

[obibobi]

That’s a solid point : cheating works as seasoning, netori demands to be the meal. Do you remember the name of that “dad” project? Sounds like a rare setup that actually leaned into full netori territory.

I cannot unfortunately, I think it was a name that began with P, I'm not even sure its still on the site, which is odd because I don't recall it having any questionable content.

The dad was someone with a history of being a sex addict, his wife was murdered, you had to solve the murder, and all the love interests where married or in relationships, including your daughters and her lesbian wife, which is the only game I've ever played where that's the case.

 

[LfkCn]

I think most games fall into the netori category. they just aren't labelled as such.

 

[Saerwen]

I think netorare is not as common as you believe.

It's mostly swingers, hot wife type sharing, and voyeurism masquerading as netorare.

Finally someone said it!

 

[Iexist]

Another "Netorare vs Netori" popularity debate huh?

Honestly, I doubt that there's any clear answer to this one. This is partly because it's basically impossible to have a clear-cut study on the matter with any real sample-sizes. It's also partly because "Netorare", regardless of its sub-variants and whatnot, is a fetish that's very convoluted. It's what I like to call a "contextual" fetish, in the sense that what is and isn't Netorare depends on interpretation and context. Unlike say, tentacles, which is a self-contained fetish regardless of context.

One problem is that what falls under "Netorare" has been widened a lot in the past decade or so. Regardless of what anyone believes about where the fetish started from (its origins predate modern social media and even the Wayback machine, so it's basically impossible to know for sure its original form or source), the fact of the matter is that for a variety of reasons, it's applied to a wide-variety of content.

There's people like me that only consider Netorare applicable if several conditions are met, the main ones being:
- The one being stolen is stolen by being fucked.
- The stealing is complete and total. It can't be fixed by any normal means.
- The end result is either a total break of the relationship, or its transformation into something that is objectively horrible for the original partner.
- The one being stolen is corrupted because of lust and essentially makes the choice to be stolen, regardless of how the stealing originally started.
- There's some kind of real relationship between the one that's stolen and the original partner, a real tangible bond that's destroyed and/or twisted horribly by the act of stealing.

With all of the above, there's a lot of stuff these days that is tagged as NTR, but doesn't count as NTR for me. There's for examples some stories/games/etc that are marketed as NTR, or tagged as such, but are actually just Brainwashing/Hypnosis/Mind-Control stories, where the one being stolen doesn't really make a choice, and in some cases, doesn't even realize or understand that they're doing something wrong because of the mind alterations.

Likewise, if someone is in a relationship, and they get raped or some such, but otherwise return to their original relationship without any harm being done, I don't see it as NTR. It's rape. It's not even cheating.

However, that's me.

There's people out there that consider it NTR if a girl even looks at another guy. There's people out there that campaigned to have the Netorare tag added to a game who's focus female character was a prostitute who fucked around before even meeting the protagonist and who straight up told him to his face that the only way he was "dating" her was if he accepted that they couldn't be exclusive.

A lot of people don't understand, or care, that even in the original language, that is to say, Japanese, there's a distinction between "general infidelity" and "netorare", with the latter going a lot further than "just cheating". Or, at least, that used to be the case. Nowadays, everything and anything can be labeled as "netorare" as long as there's some form of sex happening outside of the primary relationship.

There's a reason why quite a few harem themed games and whatnot don't even have any other male characters existing in the game world....

Maybe there's some truth about what the user above said about insecure people being the ones into NTR... but in my experience, those insecure people are its most vocal haters and more likely to play various dating and harem fantasy games and the like where the possibility of infidelity doesn't even exist.

Moving on.

The point I'm trying to make is that "Netorare" is used a lot these days, even when it barely counts by any definition of the word. This is because it has quite the dedicate base of very vocal haters.

Netori, on the other hand, does not have this dedicate base of super vocal haters, so even if games/stories have Netori elements or Netori-like elements, people don't vocally argue for them to be tagged.

It's hard to gauge how popular it is tbh. NTRaholic for example had nearly 80k sales on dlsite alone, this is a ridiculous number that few products ever get too. NTR Legend, the game that inspired it, had ~74k sales on dlsite alone. Another absurd number.

To put things in perspective, these are the kinds of sales numbers that are normally only reached by established circles after years of of publishing. Yet in both of these cases, they were the 1st and in the case of NTR legend only release by the circle that published it.

From what I've seen, few straight up NTR games get those kinds of numbers in sales.

So it doesn't seem like the genre is unpopular. It's definitely not as controversial.

The problem, I suspect, why there aren't more Netori games, has less to do with the popularity of it, and likely more to do with the difficulty in making it in the first place. Much like Netorare is more than just having someone get fucked outside of their primary relationship, Netori is more than just fucking random bitches (or guys) belonging to other people. It has to have the whole work of fucking, corrupting and taking... and the problem here is that since it's Netori, and thus from the perspective of the one doing the stealing, you have to convincingly put everything "on screen".

Netorare, regardless of whether it's from the cuck's perspective or from the victim's perspective, can rely more on "shit happening off-screen" and just showing the highlights. Which makes story-writing and art production and whatnot easier. Netori, which is from the bull's perspective, is more limited in this aspect and thus harder to make. At least in game/VN format.

The distinction also doesn't really matter much, or really exists, for Manga and Anime. Netorare is Netorare there generally, because you can't really have a "perspective" in the same way you do in a game or VN. The reader/watcher is on the outside looking in. This muddles things even more. Sure, you can sympathize with characters and whatnot if you really want too, but you don't have too and it's not necessarily intended too either. (If you think all those SAO NTR doujins are intended to have people sympathize with Kirito, you're clearly delusional... and there's a lot of NTR like that in manga format where you're clearly not meant to sympathize with the cuck one bit, you're intended to enjoy the smut.)

Basically, I personally believe that there's a huge market there for Netori focused games. It's just that getting into it is hard and most would-be devs don't want to take the risk involved in making something of quality, when it's just easier to slap something simple together and slap on the "Netorare" label and then even haters are gonna help market the product for you due to the controversy.

At the end though, a lot of this is just opinion and speculation. As I mentioned at the start, it's basically impossible to make a real study around this, and it's impossible to really analyze the source of things that's been lost to time.

 

[tanstaafl]

Too many people focusing on black or white aspects. Examples.

the kink is ENJOYING the bittersweet pain of losing your loved one. it doesn't connect to insecurity in any way. they're not afraid of the bully taking their woman, they ENJOY being subjected to that pain.

You're balls deep in denial.

People who don't have that kind insecurity *cannot* enjoy NTR, simply because they won't be able to relate to it.

They're both right for themselves. The fact that they're contradicting each other just adds a little comedy to the whole conversation. The problem is that for every single individual the answer changes even more.

And Netori is more popular than you think it is. There are a LOT of netori games on this site, they just don't get classified as netori because the netorare haters don't raise their pitchforks and demand a tag be added to it because nothing happens in these games to hurt their fragile little sensibilities.

Every game where a guy seduces a girl that has a boyfriend or husband is netori. I'd say that less then 5% of them have a NTR related tag. They MIGHT have a cheating tag, but cheating ISN'T netori. Just remember this: All netori is cheating, but not all cheating is netori.

Edit: Though I will say, from a technical standpoint, there should be a little cucking involved...or the SO of the girl should at least know they're getting cheated on.

 

[gingerbreed-man]

???

There's like 10 good netorare games at most, while netori is everywhere.