EROMANGA
HALL OF FAME

A title can issue a warning to the reader before the reader has bought the book. Mecha Eroi kedo Sasoi ni Nottara Hametsushisou na Ko stands in the hall as a volume that never makes good on its own warning.

Walking home from an indie band's show, the narrator is propositioned by a girl he has never met. Sticking plasters run along her neck, she says little, and her face barely moves. What ought to be a single night carries on instead, and the two of them start going out.

Face to face, she rarely smiles. Yet in the notes she leaves behind on her way out, in what she writes on a photograph, in her messages, she talks like someone else entirely. That gap is what readers return to. She does not come apart during sex either; astride him, the eyes looking down stay cold, which is exactly why the one smile late in the book lands. The reason for the plasters is given on the newly drawn side of the volume.

7zu7, the artist behind the circle Nazunaya Honpo, took eleven pages posted to social media and drew twenty more to make a book of them. It was the twelfth release since 2018, and on DLsite it sold more than four times what the best of the earlier ones had. A sequel, a side story and an omnibus followed, and in time a new run began under the title Mechakucha Jiraippoi kedo Ne wa Yasashisou na Ko. The threat has been taken out of the name.

It stands ninth in the pure-love division and thirty-eighth among doujin works in the hall, with an entry in the English-language reference databases.