This manga is by Ryo Takagi of Kirepapa ‘fame,’ and judging by how that one went I expected this one to be trashy, dumb, and hot…like those Girls Gone Wild DVDs they used to sell on late night infomercials except BL. Instead it was decidedly not hot and only a little trashy, but definitely aced the ‘dumb’ part with flying colors.
Let’s take a drive, shall we? We’ll start at 801 Poopoo Pass and turn left onto Shit Street…
This book features a main story couched between two shorter stories, mainly featuring high school characters. Should we do the good or bad first? Well there’s nothing good actually so how about the mediocre first. The first story is a short little ditty about a photographer and model who live together and have unspoken feelings for each other.
This is a pretty common BL pairing and the story went exactly as you’d expect. Like literally you can probably imagine the whole plot in your head with at least 80% accuracy knowing knothing except what kind of pairing it is.
The fact that this boring story is better than the main one might give you a hint at the kind of poo poo pile we have in the headlights. Briefly though I’ll pull over at a sketchy rest stop and cover the other short story first…get some gas, get a coke, witness the results of horrible crimes against toilets in the gas station bathroom, etc, before we journey further.
The last story is an attempt at a sort of self-aware comedy about a cute young teen named Chihiro going off to an all-boys boarding school. He must read BL, because he knows what this means:
Turns out Chihiro’s roommate, Ren, is the school heartthrob – hot and effortlessly cool, and practically has to beat off (!) his admirers with a stick. He’s so hot, in fact, Chihiro almost instantly becomes entranced by him, putting him on the path to becoming the very stereotype he was afraid of being on the receiving end (!) of. Neither of those puns were intended, I think my subconscious is just like a constantly running slot machine of sex jokes and every now and then it lines up a few cherries. 🍒
They slowly grow closer together and then one night Chihiro saves Ren from being raped in his sleep by hitting the perpetrator with a taser, and Ren is all like “my hero!” and they fuck and live happily ever after (no but really).
This couple was ok and I liked that Chihiro had more agency than the typical cutesy uke but I didn’t think the humor attempts were all that funny. If you were a teen reading this in 2009 though you might have disagreed, idk. It just felt like it didn’t want to fully commit to being either serious romance or being a comedy, and I didn’t think it blended the two particularly well. Takagi gets a lot better at doing this though in her later work.
So I guess we have to just step on the gas, roll up the windows, and get on the Excrement Expressway for the next 69 miles. I mean, I’ve driven on more poo-plastered roads in my time than this, there’s no Jurassic-Park-sized turds that will give us some air thankfully, but like…this main story is just uniquely atrocious.
Saezaki and Nogami are high school friends and playful rivals, thanks to – I already don’t feel like typing out their names anymore – N’s feisty personality. One day N acts completely differently and straight up asks S to have sex with him. S is confused as hell thinks it must be N’s identical twin. S goes to N’s house to have the promised sex anyway though and it turns out it isnt his twin, N has a split personality. S still wants to have sex though so he just rapes him. LOL, nice plot. And what a standup guy!
I hate the split/multiple personality trope in BL and fiction and general, but I think it works best when it’s a comedy (example: Romantic Illusions). Here though, it is a 100% serious story and it’s just cringe. It’s also pretty confusing, because N and his other self look the same. She should have given them different facial expressions or hairstyles or something, because you don’t know which personality S is talking to half the time.
If you look to your left, you’ll see we’re passing Manure Mountains! Everything that happens in this story is just so obnoxious and dumb and I feel like my IQ is a bit lower having read it. It was Takagi’s first book which makes the suck factor a little more understandable but it’s literally not even funny-bad or outrageous enough to be a good hate read, it’s just..actually bad. It was shockingly bad even compared to her most famous work Kirepapa, which isn’t even really all that great but this one makes it look positively Shakesperean in comparison.
I sort of waffle back and forth on whether I like Takagi’s early art (she is still an active mangaka, God bless her, and her more recent stuff is more in line with current BL art trends). It’s a sharp-looking style and I’d consider it good for its time, but it has like a slutty vibe that sometimes clashes with the tone of the stories (none of which have much sex, for the record…not that that would have improved it). I don’t know why this is, her characters just always look horny to me or something. A lot of them also look the exact same but that can also be said for many mangaka so not fair to single her out. If anything the art saves it from being a much bigger shit pile, so like instead it’s just a…small shit pile.
Thanks for joining me in the passenger seat on this nice little Sunday drive, not it’s time to get off the Number Two exit onto Doodoo Drive and find a carwash…
TL;DR Ugh…this book is trash, lol. It features two shorter very mediocre stories sandwiching a long main story, which is a very scenic 69 mile drive down the excrement expressway. Split personality trope AND rape? What could go wrong? It was Takagi’s first work so maybe it’s excusable for a debut but it’s just…bad. Also confusing, also dumb, and also bad. Did I mention bad? Takagi is still active and has a lot of stuff scanlated, so if you want to check out her stuff I’d suggest..anything but this (she is most well known for Kirepapa which had on OVA, but it has a really big age gap pairing that won’t be for everyone)