GOU-DERE SORA NAGIHARA (Go Dere Bishojo Sora Nagihara), by Suu Minazuki. First published in 2008, and first published in North America in 2014.
PLOT:
Shouta Yamakawa is no good at getting girls, so he mostly sticks to 2D girls. His favorite is Sora Nagihara, the perpetually sweet, sickly, kitty-eared heroine of of his favorite manga Tama X Kiss. Imagine his surprise when one day, Tama pops right out of the latest issue acting nothing like the demure heroine of his dreams. Brash and perverted, Sora is convinced that Shouta should be king of the world. Thus she sets out to turn the girls of the school into Shouta's harem by any means necessary.
STORY:
Minazuki has managed to collect virtually everything I hate about shonen harems and ecchi books with Gou-Dere Sora Nagihara. I would almost be impressed if I didn't loathe it so much.
This premise is clearly meant to mock the sickly sweet and tragic moe heroines that were all the rage when this manga debuted, but it comes off more to me like "What if Video Girl Ai was a chaotic, sexually-harassing asshole?" Minazuki tries to give her moments of tenderness, but they don't add depth. They just feel random, tacked-on, shallow, and deeply insincere. That's not even getting into the fact that she's the one who is assaulting and harassing all of these girls, as if the notion that when a woman does it it's both funny and permissible instead of just plain awful.
As for Shouta, he's the blandest of Potato-kuns. He's a twerp content to whine about how he's lacking in skills, looks and charm but makes no effort whatsoever to change it. Instead he buries himself in a sentimental fantasy with a feeble, dopey heroine. In true harem fashion, the moment he offers the barest crumb of basic kindness to the girls around him, they fall for him. In the meantime, he's mostly there to be the butt of a joke. He's there to react to the nonsense around him and to be arrested at the end of virtually each chapter in the name of bad humor.
Speaking of the humor, the jokes here are not just cheap, but sleezy and demeaning. The punchlines (such as they are) always end up with one or more girls getting stripped, groped, assaulted, and coated in milky liquids that are applied in increasingly gross and ludicrous ways, all while Sora calls them things like "cum buckets." Their humiliation is literally a joke, and every new instance filled me with anger, frustration, and disgust. If Mizuhara thinks all of this is funny, then the joke is truly on him.
ART:
Mizuhara's art is perfectly okay, but any good qualities this series might possess visually are completely overshadowed by the overwhelming horniness. I don't think more than half a dozen pages pass without some instance of fanservice, and that's only because his editors forced him to make some sort of feeble attempt at setting up Sora and Shouta's latest victim. It all leads up to the ultimate fluid-based humiliation at the end of each chapter, rendered in lovingly detailed two-page spreads that skirt not only the line between ecchi and ero-manga but also the line between good taste and cowardly wank fodder.
RATING:
If I didn't make it perfectly clear by now, I despised Gou-Dere Sora Nagahara. It's unfunny, cowardly, gross, and hateful. It wouldn't know satire if it were splashed in the face with it in ludicriously suggestive ways. Either stick with older magical girlfriend fare or just buy some actual hentai manga like an adult.
This series is published by Yen Press. This series is complete in Japan with 4 volumes available. All 4 volumes have been published and are currently in print.
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