Although it may seem like a truism, the Internet has a lot of art. This article started out as a discussion around sources of pornography (hence the apologetically NSFW tint to this resource list that will hopefully change in the future), but I believe that sexual arousal is merely another aspect of desire often interwoven into psychological works, hence why my classification recommends not to distinguish “extreme content”. (See also Neil Gaiman’s 2008 essay “Why defend freedom of icky speech?” in relation to United States v. Handley discussing the essentially nonexistent line between pornography and art.) In memory of Haioku Colonel, who drew Arknights rule34 while enduring stage 4 cancer.
The concept of piracy is complicated and I will not go into it here for a variety of reasons, including the fact that any discussion of the subject often dissolves into moral mudslinging from all sides; this site merely presents information and is not responsible for the reader’s decision etc. Anything under public domain—free to be reposted anywhere, without citation—will usually be posted in an archive run by a museum or organisation. Anything still under copyright generally cannot be reposted, so you must buy through a publisher, stores, or the artist’s official site (though for works that are no longer being printed or sold, or are only being sold in certain regions—which happens quite often with indie creators and certain political/NSFL works—you may have to dig around secondhand stores or pirate them). Luckily, the advent of the internet means this is less likely, and you may even get a higher-definition version online. Reposting freely available content is a grey area, and some creators outright ban reposting of their art—requiring you to view their content directly on their art page or social media site.
Content can be pirated on tertiary sources like image-hosting sites, forums, and torrent aggregation sites, which also provide fan translations, tagging, and comments. There are also bootleg versions of these sites ran by different people to generate ad revenue, usually with lower quality and even missing pages compared to mainstream tertiary sources (e.g., if you read Ringo Club’s “Ark x Erotic x Compilation Book 3” on comicporn.xxx, you would be missing twenty pages compared to the full exhentai version).
Many services (including YouTube, exhentai and Pixiv) will show you a compressed version (regardless of file format), so be careful and always download the highest-quality version. (Most sites have a “download original” link; Pixiv requires you to click to seemingly enlarge the image to view the original version.) Some artists will only publish the high-quality version behind a paywall, though you can find those pirated elsewhere. You can also use various softwares to upscale images and audio, but the result may not be great (or, depending on your perspective, inherently insincere).
You can often also support creators by subscribing (paying a set fee per month) or commissioning them, and they will generally link that on their art or social media. Depending on the artist and tier, subscribing may net you anywhere from a pretty Discord role to sketches, voting rights, and exclusive work. Always check the artist’s terms. Skeb claims to be a commission website but is more accurately called a “donation request” website: the artist is under no obligation to fulfill your wish, and you cannot ask them to change things. Meanwhile, Ko-Fi is a donation website as creators generally don’t reward people who donate. If you don’t have the money to financially support an artist, you can still support them by simply recommending their work to others and properly citing them. Artists appreciate upvotes and nice comments, too!
You usually can’t commission studios and professional hentai artists unless you have a significant budget (“if you have to ask, you can’t afford it”, as price is usually only available on request and is rumoured to cost over five figures). You can check forums for prices and reviews: an IRL fursuit, animations, and 3D models can cost thousands of dollars; while you’ve got amateur artists who’ll make a piece for twenty bucks (e.g., @ryonaten on Baraag; comm sheet.
You can pay or request a translation group to translate and typeset or caption a certain work (some of them will also buy foreign works for you if you can’t read foreign websites). Because of the popularity of Japanese media, there are a variety of translators for Japanese, Chinese, English, Spanish, and even European languages like French; they will often leave their credit page when posting pirated content online. Some of them are called scanlation groups because people used to have to scan physical copies because ebooks didn’t exist. Quality differs—compare, for example, TNK671 and TheSpinyBackTeam/Project Ryoko for Chapter 12 of Baki Gaiden: Gaia and Sikorsky (SFW, no spoilers). Redrawing is very time consuming, so expect to pay more for that, too; most groups won’t clean SFX.
Depending on the country, there are strict laws on pornography. Japanese law requires that all genitals be censored, hence the strange pixelation and black bars. (The reason is rather complicated as Japanese culture in general has a ton of conservative taboos, and some artists get around this using cloth, condoms, and glowstick penes.) You can redraw, use algorithms such as DeepCreamPy (guide), or wait for/commission someone to do it for you. Most Western stuff tends to be decensored unless it’s an advertisement for the artist’s paywalled work (or it’s a censorship fetish). Perhaps more importantly, some countries ban possession of pornography in general or depiction of minors.
As always, use a good content blocker like uBlock Origin, reputable sites where possible, and a free/libre torrenter like qBittorrent (as BitTorrent has lots of ads). uBlock Origin also allows you to easily turn off Javascript (click on the add-on menu and then the </> button)—tends to break the site but will sometimes allow you to bypass paywalls.
resolution (very_high_resolution is a nice
filter), score (e.g., score:>30 for upvotes
minus downvotes to be above 30), rating (e.g.,
-rating:safe) to exclude all safe works and only include
lewd or fanservice ones). Boorus often have community pools (e.g., Danbooru
sex pools) and some users also have extensive favourite lists that
you can browse.