EROMANGA
HALL OF FAME

Dropout enters the hall on a design that places the reason for harm not in any character but in the system of the world itself.

The title story is an adult dystopia set in a school where marks decide a person's worth, a world in which the system strips those who fall behind of their dignity. The finest student in the school steps down into the ranks of the fallen of her own accord, and the reason is never put into words. The other stories are fantasies of interspecies sex involving things that are not human and parasitic creatures, ranging from a western to a near future, another world and espionage.

Because the system has already decided, nobody has to justify any malice. Several readers point alike to this structure, in which the setting itself carries the harm, and to the rarity of a heroine who walks down rather than being brought down. One reading takes the title story as a love story between a heroine who wants her own ruin and a protagonist who wants to be with her in whatever form that takes. Readers also return again and again to the nerve of binding nine such unlike pieces into one volume.

It is Fan no Hitori's first collection, gathered from Comic Unreal and from anthologies, and the publisher launched it as the work of a new hand in hard fantasy. The artist's earliest short is in here too, and some readers find later worlds already anticipated in it. Books followed, Parasite Queen among them.

Published in 2014. Two years later it became a two-episode adult animation, and readers who came back to the book from the anime have left their record. Official translations run past ten languages, English, simplified Chinese and Korean among them. 5th in the commercial hall.