Review: YOU LIKE ME, NOT MY DAUGHTER?!

 It's time for another round of Bad Romance Month, where I look at some of the weirdest romances in manga.  We're starting off with an age-gap story, albeit one with a MILF-y twist.

YOU LIKE ME, NOT MY DAUGHTER?! (Musume Janakute, Mama ga Suki Nano?!), based on the light novels by Kota Nozomi and character designs by Giuniu, with art by Tesshin Azuma.  First published in 2020 and first published in North America in 2022.

PLOT:

For the last 10 years, Ayako Katsuragi has been happy serving as adoptive mother to her orphaned niece Miu.  The only thing that makes her happier is seeing how well Miu gets along with their college-aged neighbor Takumi, who is always hanging around.  She presumes that someday the two of them will get married...at least, until Takumi confesses that he's always loved Ayako and wants to marry her.  Takumi is completely serious, but Ayako's unsure if she's ready for romance at all at this point (much less dating a much younger man).

STORY:

You Like Me, Not My Daughter?! wants to have it cheesecake and eat it too.  It wants the reader to take the romantic drama going on between Ayako and Takumi seriously, yet it cannot stop fetishizing Ayako at every moment while pressuring her into a relationship that frankly neither of them are truly ready for.  

Ayako reminds me a lot of the mom from Do You Love Your Mom and Her Two-Hit Multi-Target Attacks?, in that she's less like an actual 30-something single mom and more of a MILF-y fantasy, a bubbly ingenue who still loves magical girl anime and is oblivious to her own desires until a man awakens them in her.  It all feels very insincere, something that's not helped by the supporting cast telling her over and over how OMG YOU'RE WASTING YOUR YOUTH, GET YOURSELF A MAN NOW, YOU'LL NEVER EVER FIND ONE IF YOU WAIT UNTIL YOU'RE 40, JUST FUCK THAT COLLEGE BOY NOW!  Even her own daughter is pushing her in that direction, stating how she thinks Takumi (who is only five years older than herself) would be "a cool dad."   I felt kind of frustrated on behalf of Ayako, who shouldn't feel pressured to be in a relationship if she doesn't need it, much less with someone she literally bathed with as a child (don't ask, long story).

Then there's Takumi, who is held up as this paragon of constancy and devotion but frankly doesn't know the first thing about romance.  By his own admission he's never had an actual relationship because he's invested everything into this crush he's been nurturing since he was a literal child.  He thinks he's ready for marriage and parenthood despite barely any life experience or education.  He might be just old enough that the age gap between him and Ayuko isn't illegal or even all that morally questionable, but with vast differences in their life perspectives and priorities between them it might as well be a 100 years difference between them.

ART:

I strongly suspect that Tesshim Azuma came from eromanga.  Their take on Giuniu's character designs is perfectly fine (even if Giuniu's versions are a little more angular and adult-looking) but Azuma insists on making his version horny at all times.  The only real indicators of Ayuko's age are her massive tits and ass, and Azuma never misses an opportunity to shove them into frame.  Some instances are more egregious than others (like the chapter where she tries to cosplay as a magical girl or the flashback to the time she bathed with a 10-year-old Takumi), but it's a constant distraction from everything else going on around the tits.  Like hentai tits, there's no sense of weight or dimension to them, so they just flop and squish all over.  It's a shame because they are a perfectly competent mangaka based on everything else going on in this book.  They just keep stumbling over this one thing constantly.

RATING:

You Like Me, Not My Daughter?! will be likable only to those who like big tits and don't mind if the method of delivery isn't up to par.  This manga is propped up entirely by its fetishes, as the romance at the heart of it falls apart if you think about it for more than a few minutes.  You might as well just read some actual MILF porn.

This manga is published by Seven Seas.  This series is ongoing in Japan with 6 volumes available.  3 volumes have been released and are currently in print.