A sweaty Hermione teases herself with her wand, looking saucily at Harry. Then she removes her robe and they start getting down to it. But wait—what’s that ghostly presence in the corner of the screen?
“Here, Hermione is cheating on Ron, and Moaning Myrtle catches them,” said BaDoinkVR porn producer, 29-year-old Dinorah Hernandez. “We called them different names of course, and it’s a setup for the next scene where we see Ron with Harry’s girlfriend—not the sister, the other one.”
Videos by VICE
That’s Harry Pudder In the Gryffin-Whore to be precise, one of the many virtual reality videos featured on VRCosplayX, a cosplay porn franchise launched by Hernandez in February 2017.
Other superhero and character porn titles include Super Mario Cum, Pokeballz, Cream of Legends, and Overcrotch, an X-rated version of Overwatch. “I’m a big gamer so I knew there was a market,” Hernandez says. “This was [a] passion project to celebrate geeks and nerds.”
But Barcelona-based Hernandez, a petite woman with a husky voice, didn’t just pay lip service to geekdom, as many parodies do—she went all in. Before porn actresses were hired, she interviewed them to see if they played the video game or knew the fandom. She also made sure that actresses that did not know the material received training before their performances, and placed an emphasis on finding the perfect set location, which often took weeks.
“One house we found had golden sequins all over the bedroom,” she told me when we met last month in Los Angeles. “It felt like if Mario had a house, this is where he would live—and now we can see behind closed doors with him and Princess Peach.”
According to Pornhub, searches for superhero porn have spiked in the last year, often tied to game and movie releases—searches for ‘Suicide Squad’ spiked 107 percent last August and Batman and Captain America are regular search terms. But Overwatch has been dramatically more successful, ranking number 11 out of all Pornhub search terms worldwide. That’s higher than searches for ‘anal’ and ‘threesome.’
Simultaneously, X-rated VR is gaining its own popularity, with a 385 percent search growth for adult VR content in America over the last year—and an 855 percent rise in Canada. While BaDoinkVR isn’t the first company to create cosplay porn, (there’s Brazzers Oversnatch and Star Whores to name a few) Hernandez has the distinction of being the first to dedicate full virtual reality resources to it.
To date, BaDoinkVR’s most complex video was their OverCrotch parody, giving a new meaning to ‘spawning room.’ Recreating the in-game spawn room involved wallpapering the ceiling, finding the perfect props and bodypainting pornstar Alexa Tomas head to toe in purple. “I wanted it so gamers would recognize it,” Hernandez said. “In Overwatch people get attached to the characters as they play them and the way they’re designed amplifies sexual attraction.”
She views fantasies about Mercy getting personal with her Caduceus staff as a compliment to Blizzard’s detailed history and backstory for the characters. Naturally, the $6 billion company’s not thrilled about players getting their rocks off to saucy versions of Tracer, Widowmaker, Mei et al., but they’ve had little success in stamping out the influx of Overwatch inspired porn. Which works for Hernandez, who’s planning to release a number of new Overwatch scenes this year.
“Nerd culture is very detail orientated, and that’s why I take time to put Easter eggs in all of the scenes,” Hernandez said. “It’s small details that create shots that people get excited about.”
Hernandez has been in the adult industry for six years, during which she’s produced over 400 adult films, 120 of them in virtual reality, and has helmed BaDoink’s VR division from conception. She’s had enough experience now to make sure shots are flawless.
“Take her leg in your hands, kiss it, look into the camera,” she commanded during a recent Los Angeles shoot, and the actor obliged, making sure to move as little as possible, as instructed.
VR porn has its own challenges. It is an intimate and exciting way to experience porn, but most people don’t have access to a headset. In 2015, Hernandez created a promotion where BaDoinkVR would send 10,000 free Google Cardboard headsets to anyone who requested one online; the website received 304,000 visits, and she ordered another 20,000.
Clinical psychologist and sex therapist Dr. Sandra Lindholm said there’s a reason more people are turning to what Hernandez offers. “Adults seem to take fancy in returning to activities they enjoyed in their youth and sexual cosplay allows for adult version[s] of their favorite characters,” she said.
“People may enact characters that imbue characteristic[s] they long for or struggle with — for example a timid man might choose to be Superman. He might want this fantasy to be true but it’s doubtful he wants to actually fly around in a blue suit.”
Hernandez’s in the fortunate position of being able to turn her favorite games into X-rated content, but she also takes wider trends into consideration. Growing up, her childhood go-to’s were Metal Gear Solid, Contra, Half Life and Crash Bandicoot, but we’re unlikely to see a Crash spinoff anytime soon as “that falls into the furry category!”
This convergence comes to a glorious head this July, when southern California teems with thousands of lycra-clad superheroes and villains turning up for San Diego’s 47th Comic Con. In skimpy bikinis and blue body paint, many visitors look like they’ve stepped straight out of Reddit’s CosplayGirls or NSFWcosplay subreddit (currently 192,000 and 156,000 respective subscribers) and Hernandez thinks this would be a good marketing opportunity, potentially bringing a bevy of porn stars to the show. That would mean appearances from the likes of Zoe Doll, who plays Tracer in Overcrotch, and Zenda Sexy from Cock In the Shell.
“If we can get people genuinely fascinated, we can make the leap from interesting to owning goggles and download the app — that’s the hump we need to get over,” said sex therapist Dr. Holly Richmond, who has been consulting with BaDoinkVR on its sex-edutainment franchise, Virtual Sexology.
Even porn stars find cosplay porn a turn on, though their reasons are surprising. “I know everyone in real porn so I like it when they do cartoons [and costumes] like Family Guy, it’s hot and imaginary,” says Katie Morgan, the high-pitched former host of HBO’s Porn101 and Zack and Miri make a Porno.
In the near future, BaDoinkVR is working on some saucy Star Wars action in addition to new Overwatch scenes, likely inspired by new game skins created for the games one year anniversary, as well as creating special effects sex and utilizing green screens in their work. There looks to be no shortage of VR porn content this year, but their brand of cosplay porn is niche enough that VRCosplayX hopes they’ll be the go-to for geek-gasms in years to come.
“As long as there has been porn, there has been porn parodies,” says Hernandez. “But the work I create isn’t about making fun of geek subcultures, it’s about celebrating them, and if you enjoy video games, you’ll probably love to see video game vixens—especially in virtual reality.”
