EROMANGA
HALL OF FAME

To draw the inhuman is to draw a creature that human reasoning never reaches. Makoto ni Zannen desu ga Bouken no Sho 1 wa Kiete Shimaimashita. stands in the hall for never once stepping back across that line, and for opening the door onto a series that would run to a tenth instalment.

At a village orphanage a rumour is going round that there is a succubus parlour out in the ruins. The son of the hero who felled the demon king is taken there by his friends. Set in a world of swords and sorcery, it is an adult work of the onee-shota and inhuman kinds, pairing succubi in the shape of grown women with young boys. Its genre labels also include reverse assault and "no reversal".

The succubi speak kindly, and all the while regard human beings as nothing but food. Separate readers reach for the same pair of words: sweetness and dread, held together. The gentleness of their manner does not soften the monster in them; it sharpens it. The title borrows the stock message a famous Japanese role-playing game shows when a save file has been lost, and the legend of the boy with the hero's blood is erased before it can begin.

The circle KAMINENDO.CORP has been run since 1999 by the artist Akazawa RED, who has also built up a long list of commercial collections; a short piece set in the same world had appeared in one of them the year before. After eighteen years of selling only at conventions, this was the first title the circle put up for download.

A work announces its character through genre labels, and readers choose by them. One can read this book's reception as a close fit between that way of selling and a story that draws its monsters as monsters to the very end. In the hall it is first among the inhuman works and sixth in the shota category.