EROMANGA
HALL OF FAME

To meet a monster and tell it as a love story rather than a fright: Connect: A Girl Weaves Love with a Tentacle, Part One holds to that single aim on every page, and enters the hall on it.

In the study of a father lost in some obscure research, a young girl comes upon a creature with no language she can share. The cat she doted on has vanished; her father is sunk in rites that look like black magic. At first the thing unsettles her. Then, telling no one, she keeps it close. A story that opens with the scent of horror turns, quietly, into an account of two beings drawing nearer by living side by side. Setting aside the violation that was the tentacle genre's usual mode, it is a fantasy that tells the bond between a girl and a creature as pure love.

All forty-four pages are in full colour, and the hand never slackens, not even on the last. The creases in a dress, the work in the backgrounds, the way light and water are rendered — readers point to the same details every time. The creature is drawn as genuinely uncanny, and yet the page itself feels gentle. That balance is the book's invention. A reader of the simplified Chinese edition called it a true book of pure love; a reader of the traditional Chinese edition singled out the setting and the fineness of the images.

The breadth of its readership belongs in the record too. Review after review opens by explaining that an ad banner brought the writer to buy adult work for the first time, or that they do not normally read in this field at all. Connect is the only story KOMOTA has released on DLsite, completed by Part Two the following year. Official translations followed in English, simplified and traditional Chinese, and Spanish, along with a Korean edition, and an all-ages version now sits in ordinary ebook stores.

4th in the doujin hall; first in the pure-love category, and second in the loli category.