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Against my better judgment-and the furious condemnations of all my friends and family-I picked up volume 1 and gave it a go, and ultimately found it to be remarkably unremarkable.

In hindsight, the secret sauce, what the French call a certain “I don’t know what” that made Rent-a-Girlfriend such a standout manga was its trope defying protagonists. In a normal romcom the heroine starts as an eye catching cutie with one or two notable quirks or character traits and she grows, or is revealed to the reader to be, a more well-rounded (but still ideal wife gf) person while the hero is typically an unremarkable if not wimpy teen who grows into a better man by the end, but In RaG the hero is a loser bum teen who slowly grows into an even bigger loser of an adult, while the heroine is vile and self centered and becomes even more self obsessed to the point of seeming psychopathic as the manga goes on. But again, it’s not presented like a mature psychological seinen about troubled people making bad decisions, it’s presented in romcom format. It’s a very unique train wreck of a manga that I couldn’t take for more than 10 volumes, but everyone has their own breaking point.

The Shiunji Family is much more by the numbers, the protagonist is an upright and moral young man who just wants to be a good junior patriarch, and his sisters just want to rape him. Standard stuff. Take out the fake incest angle and there’s nothing here you can’t get in any harem romcom where the protagonist has some kind of motivation to reject the sexual advances of the women. The way to have given this manga some teeth would have been to not do the fake bullshit and just have them be real siblings, it would make the rape sisters way crazier (read: hotter and more interesting) and the stakes of the conflict much higher. As it is it’s just boring.

RT: https://poa.st/objects/e73dc17f-e4a6-4ade-a3de-32e8c0fe6102

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