EROMANGA
HALL OF FAME

A Week-Long Relation Between a Gyaru and an Introvert stands in the hall for refusing to hurry the time it takes two people to fall for each other, and for turning that length into the book's strength.

Set in a high school, it is an adult work of the pure-love kind about Satsuki Risa, the tanned gyaru, and Arishima Touya, the classmate everyone files as an introvert. A relationship that begins with a forfeit confession turns into something Risa means, by way of study sessions for a retake exam and talk about films. Readers write that the first half of its fifty pages moves with the rhythm of an all-ages romantic comedy.

The book never lets the cruelty of its opening curdle. Touya accepted the confession knowing it was a forfeit, and the forfeit itself had been arranged by a friend of Risa's who had noticed his feelings for her. Neither stands anywhere that wounds them, so the two can close the distance at the same pace. Nor does the drawing erase the boy: in a field where the male side tends to thin out into a shape, he is given a face and a temperament. The final page, where the heroine appears with her hair cut short, is the moment readers return to again and again. That so many of them identify themselves as women says something about how far the book reached.

The pairing of a quiet boy and a gyaru belongs to the type known as the "gyaru who is kind to otaku," which spread through manga and social media from the mid-2010s. Critics have argued that the type suited passive male readers by supplying a forward heroine. This book first makes that forwardness a pretence through the forfeit, and one can read it as spending its pages instead on the process by which the feeling becomes real.

The circle Tamabian has released only this and one further title on DLsite, in 2023. In the hall it stands 12th among doujin works and second in the pure-love category.