Originally Posted by
Five_X
I don't know if I'd say "Nasu was into fucked up manga" so much as "fucked up manga was the norm for boys" in Japan from the 70s-90s. It's very telling that Petri had to explain what Bastard!! is for a modern audience; it used to be huge. In Japan it was serialised in Shonen Jump, to give you an idea of how accessible it would've been. Meanwhile in the West, from my memory Bastard!! especially was popular in mid-00s anime club culture, it was cool and edgy and naturally popular with middle schoolers, back before school libraries wised up to manga content and started getting more selective with their acquisitions.
It's more an indication of how mainstream tastes have changed, if anything. Berserk is from the same era, and though it's older, Devilman was in a similar vein. I kind of wonder why exactly that era of ultra-violent, ultra-sexual manga came to an end.