It was inevitable that I would have to grapple with the series that gave us the go-to user icon/Favorite Anime Girl of online chuds everywhere.
DON'T TOY WITH ME, MISS NAGATORO (Ijiranaide, Nagatoro-san), by Nanashi. First published in 2017 and first published in North America in 2019.
PLOT:
It began in the library, when Naoto accidentally dropped the manga he had been drawing in his spare time in front of a bunch of gyarus. They all mocked it for a bit and then left...except for Hayase Nagatoro.
Despite being a year younger than him, she knows weakness when she sees it. She needles him for ages, until he's on the verge of tears. After that, it seems like she goes out of her way every day to tease him as he blushes and freezes. Is it mere bullying, or something more complicated between them? Naoto isn't sure, but neither can he quite gather up enough courage to make her stop.
STORY:
There's something to be said for a bit of teasing in a relationship. If you know someone long enough, you'll learn some of the things that bother them and may occasionally have a little fun at their expense. That said, good friends and partners know their limits and know when and where to stop.
This is not a story about good friends, though. This is more of a twisted courtship between two teens who only have some idea of what they're doing.
Let me be blunt: Nagatoro is a shitty little teen. She's not a monster, but she is absolutely being a bully. She is purposefully seeking out her Senpai just so she can upset him and she is absolutely power tripping on her ability to troll him. She does this over and over, in each chapter, to the point that it honestly gets tedious. It's only rarely that she goes too far and freaks out herself, reminding the audience that at the end of the day she's also just a dumb horny teen who doesn't know entirely what she's doing.
It's easy to feel bad for Naoto, but it seems that his instincts are neither 'fight' nor 'flight' but instead 'freeze.' It's frustrating to see him just sit there and take all of Nagatoro's teasing when you know he could make it stop (or at least decrease its frequency) if he just let himself get angry and assert himself or remove himself from the room entirely. That said, the story implies that part of the reason he endures it is that he kind of likes the attention. Nagatoro might be a shitty teen girl, but she's still an attractive teen girl and Naoto might feel that even bad attention from a girl is better than no attention at all.
ART:
I've seen others, including mutuals whose taste I generally trust, defend this series. If I were going solely by the story, I could almost see where they were coming from...not so much with the art.
It's not because Nanashi's art is bad on any technical level. The character designs are an interesting mix of naturalistic bodies and poses with these very simplified faces made to stretch into the biggest, most wide-eyed shit-eating grins or crumple into flustered, sweaty embarrassment. They even go so far as to give Nagatoro a little fleshy fang in her grin, a design detail seldom seen in manga after the turn of the millennium. The backgrounds are nothing special (if simply because most of the volume is set at school), but they get the job done.
No, my issue is with the framing. When Nagatoro's teasing is at its most intense or suggestive, the panels shift to a first-person perspective. Some might say this is to enhance the emotional intensity of these moments, but those people are lying to you. This is the same perspective I've seen employed in fanservice manga, so it's more about allowing you, The Reader, to insert yourself in Naoto's place as this teen girl puts herself in suggestive positions. It makes the manga's real intentions plain and it paints the whole book in a very skeevy light.
RATING:
This manga is published by Kodansha Comics under their Vertical imprint. This series is complete in Japan with 20 volumes available. 18 volumes have been released and are currently in print.
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