A core pillar of the manga & doujinshi industry, and the most common point of conflict with Western readers’ moral sensitivities, is its stunningly brazen attitude towards smut. There's simply no room for shame in the marketplace, a truth likely apparent to anyone who’s set foot in a Melonbooks store or strolled through a Comiket hall “for men” before. There, you’ll find all sorts of book covers and vendor banners proudly advertising the specific obsessions - Hitomi J-cups, sadistic catgirls, futa childhood friends, you name it - that would otherwise typically be relegated to the darkest corners of the dampest basement stores, if not theabyssal depths of the Tumblr archives. “Who would WANT their horny fantasies out there for all to see?” an incredulous friend recently asked me, but be honest: if you could conquer your shame and eke out an honest living sustained by your horniest, most deluded flights of fancy, wouldn’t you be tempted?

Which brings us to Takane-san and Arashi-chan, the closest I have ever seen a nominally all-ages work veer into those late-night fanfiction discoveries from an adolescence I’d rather forget. Reading like crack fic of itself, its unabashed, single-minded pursuit of the teenage erotic is surely both its greatest strength and its crippling weakness, and what you get out of this series will depend entirely on how ready you are to switch off your brain and meet it on its level.

The series began life as a 30-odd-page one-shot, still readable on author Nauchi’s Pixiv, before continuing (and seemingly here gaining traction) as a Twitter/Pixiv comic, occasionally veering into short story arcs but with each page mostly self-contained. The original one-shot is, to my pleasant surprise, outstanding, and I can’t recommend it enough. Extremely sweet but grounded, with neat pacing, writing and art, it introduces us to two girls from separate worlds who slowly bridge the distance and discover a spark. It’s a simple distillation of all the things I love about yuri manga.

What the hell happened between then and now? The print edition of the subsequent series, which compiles re-coloured editions of the Twitter pages into a vague chronology, begins with a cursory overview of the original story that’s too abridged to make much sense of, before smash-cutting into the meat and potatoes of the series: a parade of the horniest moments in a relationship between a possessive sex pest and a terminal pillow princess. Any internal worlds hinted at in the one-shot are gone. Takane is a gallant Mary Sue, literally too cool for school (she’s so smart, she’s exempt from classes!), whose Achilles heel is her mind-numbing obsession with her girlfriend. Arashi is a genki-girl Mary Sue, adept at every practical skill there is, whose sex addiction must surely qualify her for disability support. Most pages depict some moment directly before, during, or after a tryst in one of their usual hang-out spots, and/or an unwarranted profession of undying love. These two can’t do anything without each other, and everything they do with each other leads, down the path of least resistance, to them getting handsy in the nearest available corner. The girls go on a school trip to Kyoto: they skip the sight-seeing to make out in the shadows. They star in a play for the school festival: what’s the play about? Couldn’t tell you, but they bang so hard backstage that Arashi loses consciousness. No, really.

My major, most recurring grievance here is the total lack of narrative, and maybe it’s my own fault for expecting or desiring it from a series that simply has no such plans. There are occasional glimmers of tension, mostly when new characters are introduced - such as Minamo, a junior infatuated with Takane, or Takane’s chaotic cousin Tsubaki - but the conflicts they bring with them are resolved faster than you can say “owo what’s this?,” and the newcomers take their place in the Greek chorus of friends who roll their eyes affectionately and venerate our couple’s co-dependency. There is clearly no long-term plan for any of these girls, just a Sisyphean cycle of sex dictated with decidedly limited vocabulary. Again, the overwhelming feeling is that Nauchi is scribbling these pages out with the furious focus of a teenage virgin up far later than their bedtime.

On which note, I might also point out the bizarre and punishing compulsion they feel to label every single thing that’s happening on the page. Some of this is excusable considering the series lives primarily on Twitter, and potential newcomers might need to be introduced to side characters on a moment’s notice. But this tendency extends beyond just characters, and into every environment, emotion and action, no matter how self-evident. A scene clearly taking place on the rooftop, where 90% of scenes are set, will always be labelled as such: if Takane kisses Arashi’s hand, there’ll be a small caption box telling you “a kiss on the hand” right next to the exact image of this exact action, and you can be sure Arashi’s emotional response will be broadcast with no room for inference or ambiguity. I still can’t figure out if this redundancy stems from a lack of trust in the reader’s intelligence, or that same libido-fueled tunnel vision.

If I wanted to be mean - and I do - I could take some pot shots at Takane’s somewhat coercive behaviour, which is constantly forgiven with an “oh, I just can’t say no” from Arashi: personally, not my favourite dynamic, but I won’t go throwing around labels like “problematic.” No, I’ll save that for the brief interludes in which Takane gets turned on by pictures of Arashi as a child. This caught me so off-guard that I actually overlooked it at first, sure I was misinterpreting something, only for it to crop up again in the undeniable nadir of the series: an extended dream sequence in volume 3 in which Takane and Arashi each lose their mind over kid versions of the other that will surely leave you reaching for the phone to alert the authorities.

As a small mercy, the series eventually expands its scope with the addition of a side couple, Yura and Shizuku, Arashi’s tsundere-adjacent friend and doting older sister respectively - they appear briefly in volumes 2 and 3, but take the lion’s share of pagetime in volume 4. Compared to the flatline of T&A’s “storyline,” the few pages of longing and hesitation before these girls start dating, however brief, are a breath of fresh air; and indeed, their bashfulness only serves to make the rowdy repetition of the main characters’ lives that much more exasperating in contrast. Still, it feels like it’s only a matter of time before they’re caught in the same loop, at which point a new couple will surely be inserted into the top of the spiral to begin the same slow, inane descent.

Your mileage may vary on the colouring work: it’s solid, but personally, I find it’s never detailed enough to actually boost the reality of the work, and I get more out of the simple, stylised colour profile of the original Pixiv pages. All in all, it really feels like Nauchi may have sustained some dreadful and significant psychic damage between the original one-shot and this series - even the art style comes off more moe (derogatory) than their earlier output. But for all my condescension, some part of me is happy for them. The world is a more beautiful place for artists committing to their vision, even if their vision is embarrassing as hell. In the dark, damp corner of the basement store of the heart, Nauchi sits at their table, pen dancing over the pages before them, and they are smiling, I know it, with the innocence of angels.