Review: PETER GRILL AND THE PHILOSOPHER'S TIME

It's so hard (pun not intended) to find a good sex comedy manga, and crap like this isn't helping things.

PETER GRILL AND THE PHILOSOPHER'S TIME (Pita Guriru to Kenja no Jikan), by Daisuke Hiyama.  First published in 2017 and first published in North America in 2020.

PLOT:

Peter Grill has proven himself to be the strongest warrior in the land.  He hopes that this amazing feat will finally allow him to marry his beloved but deeply sheltered girlfriend Luvellia, but things get complicated when he's cornered by the ditzy but determined ogre sisters Mimi and Lisa.  They want him to impregnate them both with the strongest warriors, and they're not above using both blackmail and Peter's own weak will against him.

Now Peter is caught in the midst of his hardest battle yet, as he tries to hide his affairs from Luvellia (and her extremely strict father/guild master) all while fending off a growing harem of demi-human ladies demanding his seed in increasingly outrageous ways.

STORY:

Peter Grill is the sort of ecchi manga that mistakes audaciousness for humor.  We are meant to laugh at poor dumb Peter, forever caught between his love for Luvellia, his need for sex, and the cage of lies and guilt he built around himself.  We are meant to laugh at this as much as we are at the increasingly ludicrous nicknames for semen and sex used throughout this book, which is just one facet of the loose and bawdy work by translator Ben Trethaway and adaptor David Lumson.  Even the title is a sex joke, with "philosopher's time" being a reference to the refractory period right after ejaculation.

And yet I did not laugh.  Not even once, not even a little.  It's not because it's all about sex - I love a good sex joke as much as the next person, and there are times where this manga briefly manages a sort of manic, Looney Tunes-level of comic timing.  No, it's purely an attitude problem.

Peter Grill has a real "boys can't help it" attitude problem.  It treats Peter as a poor, blameless soul constantly undone by his own sexual desires.  His own fiancée is both horrified by the notion of sex (thanks to her paranoid, over-protective, and vaguely incestuous father) and dumber than a box of rocks when it comes to detecting Peter's duplicity.  Meanwhile, all of these hot ogre and elf girls are just throwing themselves at him!  What's he supposed to do, say 'no'?  Be faithful to a girl who won't put out?  What kind of man would do THAT, amirite? When all else fails, the scene just cuts to Peter in bed, as if he entered into some sort of horny blackout and thus cannot be culpable for his actions.

So if Peter cannot be the bad guy in this scenario because he's merely a slave to his dick, who is?  The answer seems to be the very women it ogles.  This is certainly true for Mimi, Lisa, and the ridiculously named elf girl/token loli Vegan Eldoriel.  When Peter refuses their sexual harassment demands, they go straight to threats of blackmail or boner curses, which means pretty much every sexual encounter in this book is an act of rape.  Women are also an object of ridicule here.  Luvellia's naiveté about all the sexual stuff going on around her is played entirely for laughs, and Vegan's flat chest earns her a bunch of jokes about her looking like a child.  It's just a very gross attitude

ART:

I wouldn't call the art of Peter Grill particularly remarkable either.  It's not janky in any sense, but for the most part it doesn't look that much different from any other fantasy series on the shelves.  That includes the fact that it's pretty cowardly with its demi-human designs, sticking primarily to the "give 'em some funny-looking ears and maybe a tail" and calling it a day.  It's also quite cowardly when it comes to nudity, as any woman who gets naked in this book is given all the detail of a Barbie doll.  It's presuming that You, The Reader will get it up just as easily as Peter does at the mere suggestion of boob.  The most I can give it is that Hiyama does put some effort towards giving Peter some over-the-top reactions (be it externally or internally) at his dilemmas.

RATING:

Peter Grill and the Philosopher's Time isn't worth anyone's time.  It's mean-spirited, cowardly, and misogynist, and no amount of goofy terms for jizz can counteract its noxious attitude.

This manga is published by Seven Seas.  This series is complete in Japan with 15 volumes available.  All 15 have been released and are currently in print.