EROMANGA
HALL OF FAME

Ijirare stands in the hall for a redesign of the hypnosis story: from making someone obey to rewriting what that person takes for common sense.

It is an adult revenge-hypnosis work set in a school, in which a bullied boy stumbles onto a talent for hypnosis and uses it to turn the tables on the three girls who torment him. Under their rewritten common sense the three keep looking down on him and keep acting, as they see it, to bully him, and that very behavior becomes the path of his revenge.

The design works because the gap between their words of contempt and actions that run against their own intentions holds to the last page. Readers point again and again to that irony, native to the hypnosis story, as the core of the book. The three are drawn as thoroughly unpleasant, so the revenge feels earned, and readers also credit a structure that keeps one more turn in reserve after the hypnosis lifts. Aiue Oka's drawing tells the three hard-eyed girls apart through the acting of their faces. Many readers add, with some surprise, that it leaves none of the dark aftertaste the genre usually carries.

Aiue Oka is one name for two makers, who do not divide story from art but pass pages back and forth until they are done. Under the circle name 50on! they have drawn the doujin series Saimin Seishidou. This book ran in COMIC X-EROS from 2017 to 2018 and, with a newly drawn epilogue, became their second commercial volume.

In 2019 it finished first for the year in adult-comic sales at Toranoana's Akihabara store, and in the same year the Saimin Seishidou series took first place in Toranoana's annual doujin ranking. It was the year the same makers' hypnosis work stood at the top in commercial and doujin publishing alike. FAKKU published the English edition and Bishoujo Bunko the novelization, and official translations run past ten languages. Six works in the hall pass a score of 100, and this is one of them.