EROMANGA
HALL OF FAME

Tsugou ga Yokute Kawaii Mesu. stands in the hall as a collection that gives each of its ten characters a temperament of her own without ever letting its approach to drawing waver.

It is an adult collection in the loli genre, gathering ten pieces from COMIC LO and from Towako, the supplement devoted to the loli-baba, the ageless woman who only looks young. The settings are schools and homes, and the relationships are between girls and adult men, a brother and a younger sister, a teacher and a pupil. As the title announces, the conceit is a girl shaped to suit the man, and many pieces follow the plot type known as ochi, the fall.

What readers name first is the range of characters: a cheeky girl who squares up to her teacher, a boyish one troubled about not being feminine, a long-lived woman who is young only in appearance, a sister who dotes on her brother. The temperaments change from piece to piece, yet the style and principles of character design hold to the end. Many readers take that consistency as the artist's own insistence.

Atage gathers change into the face and the dialogue. Speech is written in a colloquial register heavy with hiragana, and the way each girl talks becomes the means of telling her apart. The subject is heavy, but readers keep noting that the tone is bright and leaves nothing bleak behind, and they give that as the reason the book was read so widely.

This was the artist's first collection. Atage has gone on publishing one-shots in the same magazine almost every year, and the second collection arrived six years later. English-language databases carry an entry. Among the hall's commercial works it stands thirteenth.