Holiday Review: BREASTS ARE MY FAVORITE THINGS IN THE WORLD!

The market for yuri manga continues to grow with each year, and as it does we see a wider variety of yuri manga out there.  We have your classic tales about schoolgirls, more modern tales about office ladies, and now there's even room for rock-stupid gag series like this.

BREASTS ARE MY FAVORITE THINGS IN THE WORLD! (Sekai de Ichiban Oppai ga Suki!), by Wakame Konbu.  First published in 2017 and first published in North America in 2020.

PLOT:

Chiaki Ichihara is beloved by all the girls at her school for her charm and skill with a bow.  What they don't know is that she's obsessed with big, squishy boobs.  She gets her fix by feeling up Hana Harumi, whose chest is perfect for Chiaki's needs.  As time goes on, Hana wonders if Chiaki cares more about her breasts than her (and why such a thing would bother her in the first place).

PLOT:

Some comedy manga are based around high concepts and complex word play.  This is not one of them.  This is one of those series that tells you its entire premise in the title, and that premise is the only joke it has to offer.

Chiaki just doesn't like boobs.  She is obsessed with them.  Her childhood dream was to have big boobs of her own (and occasionally just to be a bra).  She's barely able to function if she goes more than a day or two without handling a titanic titty.  Virtually every waking thought she has is about ways to touch Hana's tatas: from the front, from behind, with a bra, without a bra, on top of her head...the list goes on and on.  She claims that her fixation isn't sexual, except that she keeps escalating things in more and more intimate ways. The only reason that Chiaki doesn't come off like a creeper is that she's too dumb to be malicious and because Hana tries her hardest to maintain something resembling physical boundaries.

Poor Hana.  Half of the time, Chiaki talks directly to Hana's boobs instead of Hana and she seems largely resigned to this fate.  We're meant to laugh while she sighs and lets Chiaki manhandle her yet again, and the longer this went on the more uncomfortable I felt reading this.  That was before this series started to imply that Hana was falling for Chiaki because she enjoyed being singled out for such attention.  At that point, this series lost me completely.  It's one thing to hammer the same questionable joke into the reader's head over and over.  It's quite another when you try to use that to justify a romance.

ART:

Not shockingly, breasts are the biggest priority for our seaweed-named mangaka.  A great deal of effort goes into their looks, their physics, their nipples, and the inordinately elaborate bras that tend to contain them.  Everything else around them kind of suffers as a result.  The backgrounds are blase, the characters are built for cuteness and little else and visual gags are nowhere to be found.  

RATING:

Breasts are My Favorite Things In the World! may be the dumbest manga I've read all year.  It's not the worst of them, mind you, just an immensely stupid one that gets more distasteful the more I think about it.  I'm all for the notion of a gag yuri series, but surely we can do better than this particular one.

This series is published by Yen Press.  This series is ongoing in Japan with 5 volumes available.  2 volumes have been published and are currently in print.

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