EROMANGA
HALL OF FAME

Softness can be rendered by taking lines away, and it can be rendered by adding them. Onibana Muzan stands in the hall as a collection that proves the second route, using girls who are not human.

Oni, beasts, fox spirits, elves. Across eleven pieces these non-human daughters are caught, worked over and brought down. The stage jumps from a village bound by its own customs to a battlefield, from a slave auction to a post-apocalyptic waste, but the shape is the same everywhere: a being who ought to rank above is pinned by those below. Readers notice at once that the title's characters sound out the word for the pitiless.

Mochi's drawing works by density. Shadow is laid in without stinting; hair, sweat and fluids are all rendered. That only the girl's skin still reads as soft is because the men's hands are drawn knotted and coarse — several critics point to the same place. The publisher's tag for this artist, a master of soft flesh, has outlived its advertising copy and passed into use as criticism. Between the brutal turns there is a rhythm of coined onomatopoeia played for laughs, and the book reads less bleakly than it looks.

The pieces span a wide range of first publication. Some were drawn as early as 2007, and the drift of the style is legible within one volume. The book is an edit of the artist's own history.

In 2022 the oni girl from the cover was made into a figure. Among the commercial works in the hall it stands eighteenth.