Concept

Ka-ren the Barbarian was born as a spoof of Robert E. Howard’s Conan the Barbarian. Like the original, it is first and foremost a sword and sorcery story. In addition to that, it features many elements of dark comedy and eroticism (often crossing the line into plain hentai territory). Nanase Ohkawa described her creation in JIYUU’s documentary:

“Ka-ren is a parody of Conan and Red Sonja. Like any other satire, it features elements presents in the original, but magnified. This was a challenge. Howard’s Conan stories were not short of ****, nudity and sex. If Ka-ren’s world was meant to be an exaggeration of Conan’s, it would have to be a truly savage and lewd place.

The same works for Ka-ren as a character. She shares many personality traits with Conan, but amplified. She is a wandering barbarian with a tragic past, in constant search for adventures. She is also violent, reckless, arrogant, selfish and, of course, a womanizer!

As an added bonus, Ka-ren serves as a parody of the cinematic cliché of the “strong female protagonist”, that is 5 feet tall and has scarce muscular mass, but is somehow stronger and a better fighter than people a lot bigger than her. It seemed obvious that Ka-ren would have to be a Mary Sue (after all, Conan himself was quite a Gary Stu, and this is a spoof), so we made her a great warrior: strong, agile, skilled, experienced, and totally badass (not to mention gorgeous).

However, we didn’t want to follow the old cliché of a strong woman beating the hell out of men, while she never gets a single punch. I always thought that this is very sexist. If they are presented as strong enough to punch men, they should get exactly what they give. But, that being said, I was still uneasy about having her being hit by a man. That is how I came out with the idea of making this a world were soldiers and gladiators are traditionally females. This allowed me to avoid the sexist stereotype of men being victimized by female fighters like in Hollywood movies, but without having any scene with male characters hitting the females either. Much like men in ancient times would never fist-fight a woman, women in Howaru would never battle a man.

Besides the ethical motivations, this had an interesting side effect. Since “Ka-ren the Barbarian” is essentially a yuri manga, and most of our potential readers were lesbian women and straight men, we knew that they would prefer to see Ka-ren fighting other semi-naked ladies than facing men. So we killed two birds with one stone.

That takes me to the last recurring theme in the story: sex, and particularly lesbianism. Everybody in Howaru is bisexual. This means that our female protagonists often engage in sexual relations with both men and women. There is also a romantic subplot between Ka-ren and Ton-tah. In other words, this is definitely a yuri story, even if within the context of the sword and sorcery genre.

One of the defining characteristics of Conan is that he is a womanizer. In his stories, Conan has sexual intercourse with many women, including girlfriends, one-night stands and numerous prostitutes. At first, we thought of mirroring it by having Ka-ren sleep with many men, but then we realized that it would be more interesting if we let her be a womanizer, just like Conan”.