I really like this manga's J.C.Staff anime adaptation. I admire its message. It's about otaku cosplayers at the limits of what some people might accept, because they're girls who love deeply questionable costumes taken from manga. Is it okay for a girl to want to imitate highly sexualised content that was created for a leering male audience? This manga's answer to that is "yes". That's what Ririsa Amano's deeply into, while the befuddled Masamune Okumura only knows that he's vowed never to denigrate another otaku's passions.

I love Ririsa and Okumura. The latter's determined to be supportive even if it kills him. He has strong, admirable principles, alongside some utterly ridiculous ones that make him both believable and funny in a "male protagonist who's horrified by sexy girls" role that could easily have seemed hackneyed.

This manga was a hit. It ran from 2019-25 and is technically a web manga, but it's been collected in 25 print volumes with well over a million copies in circulation (including print and digital). Personally, though, I found this volume hard to embrace.

I dislike the cover. It shouts "SLEAZE", being the kind of not-technically-topless that's more distracting than actual nudity because all it would take for indecent exposure would be a gust of wind, a sneeze or indeed turning around if you weren't slow and careful. More importantly, though, the girls' eyes look dead. (They're both Ririsa, incidentally, once in her school uniform and once cosplaying as Ririeru.) In fairness, though, overall it's an accurate representation of the book's contents. We have all that good stuff I mentioned and some surprising character beats, but it's a lot sexier than I remembered from the anime. The volume sees that as its selling point and goes for it hard, including "ugh" ways that think we want extreme panty shots. Ririsa melts Okumura's brain. (There's definitely something strange about her idea of personal boundaries, although that's part of her charm. She can be mortified on realising that she was showing the camera her NON-COSPLAY knickers, for instance.)

It stands out on bookshop shelves, though. Even if you don't buy it, you'll notice it.

Then there's Mikarin. I like the dark edges to her introduction, with her classmates sharing nasty bitchy assumptions because she's a celebrity and model. They're calling her a slut because she's pretty, basically. I have no objection to her in the anime. Here, though, she made me reject the book. She's hot, she's famous and she's removing her bra for Okumura only four pages after meeting him again. (They were childhood friends.) What's more, that's in a volume that had already been overly focused on sexy otaku-friendly situations at the edge of plausibility. When that had just been Ririsa... okay, sure. When Mikarin got shoehorned in too, I stopped giving a damn and thereafter was only flicking through the pages.

If you can overlook all the horny (which in fairness is close to the story's theme), this manga is well written and even admirable. It won a web manga award. But I'll be sticking with the anime, even if in fairness that had been similarly looking like trash in its first few episodes.