I was just talking to my friends about furries the other day. This is old news but there’s a subset of furries that dress up like Nazis that made headlines in a Rolling Stones article some years back, and I still get a kick out of how ridiculous the idea of Nazi furries is (oh, and there’s Soviet furries too of course). This kind of thing makes me wish we had a time machine so we could send Nazi furries back to 1940s Germany and see Hitler’s reaction. Do you think the US presidential election will one day be the furries vs the bronies? If not, well, I guess that’s what AI is for…
Well that’s a weird segway into talking about this manga…”Ruff Love” is a somewhat uncommon Deux Press title with a dog kemonomini theme. Though the characters make jokes and references to being being furries or having a furry fetish, I don’t think kemonomini really falls under the furry label, I mean plenty of people can get into characters with animal ears without being into full anthro – and their dick and balls are still human ones for what it’s worth.
Taketora is a struggling author who moves into his dead grandfather Takeyuki’s vacant house, when one day his grandfather’s deceased dog Shiba who was buried in the backyard comes back to life as a human. Shiba is eager to please Taketora and acts like your typical dog, wanting to make his master happy. I find this sort of ‘servant uke’ archetype in yaoi annoying, but it makes more sense for a half-dog character at least.
Their relationship progression is literally Shiba trying to please Taketora and getting hurt when he’s ignored, until one day Taketora comes home and they start fucking in the span of about three pages. In my mind there’s a bit of a line between enjoying the company of a reanimated half-dog companion who crawled naked out of a hole in the ground and fucking him in the ass, and I would have liked to have been more convinced of their emotional connection first rather than just a sudden ‘Hey I love you, and this is crazy, but I’m sorta horny, so let’s fuck maybe.’ This is pretty common in yaoi but it would have been nice to have some more relationship development.
The art flits between rough and just plain bad. Shiba looks more like a creepy little gremlin rather than a cute dog, and his ears look goofy sticking out on the lower sides of his head. Taketora also has those weird over-drawn lips you see a lot in bad older yaoi titles. Was this ever sexy?
Eventually, a large aggressive black dog named Akatsuki wanders in the house to try to rape Shiba and even though Taketora stops him, Akatsuki ends up living there with them for some reason. Which they don’t really explain. Like, “hey I know you waltzed into my house and tried to rape my dog boyfriend and all and that’s not cool, but you can still stay here.” Is that supposed to make sense? The rest of the story is, well – let’s put it this way, don’t read this one for the story. It’s nothing special at its best and illogical and nonsensical at its worst.
Readers with a keen eye may have noticed that Taketora and Shiba are not on the cover of a manga that is literally 85% about them – this book has no side stories. Instead the cover features Akatsuki with…who is that character? You’d be fine for not knowing or caring since he only shows up in a couple panels – it’s Akatsuki’s previous owner and oh yeah he is technically dead yet and only in like 2% of the manga yet they thought he should definitely be on the cover for some reason. Without spoiling anything else, he does show up again in another way, but suffice it to say that this character is just barely of any importance to the story and not at all to the main couple. Did the editor look at Shiba and Taketora and go “yeah no, this might not sell books” to the extent that they had to replace the MCs on the cover with a side character and the side character’s side character?
Similar to the last DP title I read, they sort of try to keep the censoring really minimal, which was a plus. The sex scenes were ok and there was a fair amount of them, which is the only saving grace here. Uncensored dick and balls always gets some points from this ref – if nothing else, it’s a shiny object to distract from the dumbness of the story.
Overall, unless you really really can’t enjoy a yaoi unless someone has animal ears, you can probably give this one a pass. The story is just whatever, serviceable I guess, but the characters are brain dead and dubious art choices drag them down further. I’m curious if they licensed this simply to try to capitalize on the popularity of “Loveless.” There are a better English titles with kemo sex even from this same period (“Love Sickness,” “Three Wolves Mountain,” etc.) that you can check out instead.
TL;DR: A fairly lousy kemonomini manga with no real relationship development, questionable art, flat characters, and a dog uke that looks more like a gremlin. The MCs are so ugly they put two side characters on the cover, who have about 3 panels together. The one bright spot is that there is a decent amount of minimally censored sex, if you can get past the art. Even die hard fans of ukes with animal ears have much better options.