EROMANGA
HALL OF FAME

Can the monster be the one who falls in love? Unreal Syndrome stands in the hall as the turning point at which an artist known for tentacles gave that question a tender answer.

It is an adult collection of eleven stories built around romances between human men and non-human women, among them a scylla, a lamia, a mummy, a lizard girl and a slime girl, with tentacle stories and other cross-species pieces added alongside. Most close on consent and a happy ending, though the final story turns on domination through magic and is non-consensual.

A review written just after publication praised a plain, gentle line that would not have looked out of place in a boys' magazine, and welcomed the change of course that gave the non-human heroines feelings of their own. The earliest readers of the digital edition singled out the same move: a subject that had been shorthand for violation, rendered instead as pure romance. The two judgements arrived at the same point on their own. Many readers were also glad to see Shippo-chan, the lizard girl carried over from earlier work, return.

Horitomo made a professional debut in Comic Unreal in 2008, and this fourth collection follows two whose very titles announced tentacles. The phrase "unreal maidens" in its subtitle passed to the subtitle of Venus Garden in 2014, and in later years the artist went on drawing non-human girls in general-audience magazines as well.

The book ranks 133rd among the hall's commercial works, and Kininaru Ano Musume wa Monster Musume, published three years later, stands in the hall too.