Holiday Review: TO SAVE THE WORLD, CAN YOU WAKE UP THE MORNING AFTER WITH A DEMI-HUMAN?

Fantasy manga continued to dominate 2020, the majority of it being isekai stories.  You'll still books about older trends like 'monster girl harems,' but to compete they seem to be pushing ever closer to straight-up erotica, good taste be damned.

TO SAVE THE WORLD, CAN YOU WAKE UP THE MORNING AFTER WITH A DEMI-HUMAN? (Sekai wo Sukuu Tame ni Ajin to Asa-chun Dekimasu ka?), by Rekomaru Otoi.  First published in 2018 and first published in North America in 2020.

PLOT:

In a fantasy world not all that different from our own, a chosen one once vanquished a wicked demon king.  This is ancient history to Hironori Tabata, who simply wants to be able to confess his feelings to the cute elf girl in class.  Those plans are thrown awry when beautiful, curvy representatives from all sorts of demi-human races start throwing themselves at him.  It turns out that Tabata has the potential to sire the champion needed to defeat the reborn demon king.  That means Tabata will be forced to spread his seed far and wide, even if he's not particularly willing...or even conscious.

STORY:

Why isn't this porn?  This was the question I couldn't stop asking myself while reading this.  This premise reads less like a smutty story pushing the edges of ecchi and more like a neutered ero-manga and that's only partially because of the censored dialogue.

This is not a manga that anyone can pretend they are reading for the story because there really isn't any story there.  There's just the bare bones of a premise fronted by the blandest of Potato-kuns.  He's only there to get nervous and ogle whatever variety of monster girl is thrown at him in any given chapter, feebly protesting about his love for an elf girl who never so much as speaks a word in the entire book, much less gives him the time of day.  Then we are meant to laugh as Tabata passes out from a boner yet again, waking up only as the latest girl wipes herself off.

That's right, the biggest punchline in this entire series is a rape joke, and they keep repeating every single chapter.

Then there's the matter of the girls.  None of them are particularly compelling, as they are little more than a stock personality type combined with a random monster girl type, there to shove various round bits of her anatomy towards the reader.  Many of them have a gimmick that does double-duty as fetish fodder: the dragon girl shoots lightning from her crotch, the mermaid serves as one long squirting joke, and the dwarf girl is a loli with some truly distasteful jokes about...*ugh*...not being able to stretch wide enough.

I can't imagine why anyone would read this.  Why bother reading a manga build entirely around teasing the reader with sex they will never see when one could just sign up for Fakku and find actual monster girl porn with a bit of character and doesn't revolve around non-consensual sex to boot?

ART:

Like most ecchi artists, everything that isn't T&A is pretty much an afterthought.  Otoi uses the "modernized fantasy world" concept to just draw yet another round of ordinary schoolrooms and interiors.  The monster girl designs themselves lean far more heavily towards the 'girl' than towards 'monster,' with only the odd tail, horn, etc, all clad in ridiculous costumes that are strained to the seams or vacuum-sealed into place.

No, Otoi's only priority are all the curves.  He draws the girls a little more plumply than normal, so the pages are filled to bursting with bountiful boobs, puffy nipples, bulging labial mounds, and butts and thighs that seemingly thrust themselves off the page.  He uses low, extreme angles to highlight their roundness, filling the panels with little but flesh.  The only time things loosen up visually is the one or two-page spread of the girls cleaning up after their encounters, as they tidy up their clothes and swab up the various fluids on them.

RATING:

Don't bother with To Save The World, blah blah blah.  If you want to jack it to monster girl manga, then I certainly can't stop you at this point.  All I would ask is that you skip this particular series and put that money towards something that's more honest in its intentions and doesn't lean upon rape as a gag.

This series is published by Yen Press.  This series is ongoing in Japan with 3 volumes available.  2 volumes have been released and are currently in print.

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