EROMANGA
HALL OF FAME

"Mesu ni Umareta Omae ga Warui!!" stands in the hall as the tenth book of Maeshima Ryo, an artist who kept to roughly a volume a year for a decade, and the one that has drawn the most ratings.

Published under the TENMA COMICS LO imprint, it is a collection of nine stories about young girls, in the genre known as lolicon. Its central subject is non-consensual assault, and it belongs to the "mesugaki" or "wakarase" lineage, in which an impudent girl is put in her place by an adult. Stories built on ignorance or on altered common sense also appear.

When it came out in 2020, readers noted "mesugaki" as a word that had only recently spread, and remarked on the choice of such a title at a time of rising criticism of the genre. The book can be read as a record of the period in which that label settled into use as the name of a subject.

What readers consistently point to is the art: pop, not pushed toward realism, and in contrast with the severity of the material. Others note its skill as manga and the sureness of its angles. The characters range from the cheeky to those simply caught up in events, and the plotting changes from story to story.

Maeshima Ryo came up through a manuscript brought in to COMIC LO and published a first book with Akaneshinsha in 2010; twelve of the artist's thirteen books have come from that publisher. It stands 35th among commercial works, the higher of the artist's two books in the hall.