Don't Toy With Me, Miss Nagatoro! (2017)

Using this entry to review the whole manga. Don't Toy With Me, Miss Nagatoro! is another slice of life romantic comedy manga that I read in chunks last month until finishing it. This one is genuinely good thanks to an outrageous art style for faces and emotions. It also has the seemingly rare quality of being a manga that actually develops at a good pace instead of being absurdly drawn out.

The premise here is that we have Nagatoro, a freshman girl, who develops a fascination (she's just attracted to him) with a guy at her school that's a year or two ahead of her. Guy is a quiet and artistic wuss and Nagatoro is bizarrely emboldened to torment and be a nuisance to him in ways she never displays toward anybody else. The story is mostly centered on the guy's point of view, but it's pretty clear to his and Nagatoro's friends/classmates that there's a mutual crush forming between them, so part of the story's humor is that the main pair don't realize how painfully obvious it is to those close to them that this is some kind of awkward romance.

Some readers have big issues with how much of a bullying little shithead Nagatoro is in the early chapters. Our main guy certainly doesn't deserve to be pushed to tears, which happens once or twice. She knows she's being shitty and it seems like her initial behavior comes from more of a weird impulse control issue combined with struggling with certain emotions this guy awakens in her than any desire to actually hurt him. It's like she's determined to provoke him and routinely goes too far in the early chapters.

Teenagers lack fully developed brains and most will make some questionable if not poor decisions during those years, so that's how I understand Nagatoro's character. In real life, this type of behavior would rarely, if ever, lead to a decent outcome between two people. But in fiction, we can have two personalities that happen to click well enough with each other to deliver the 1 in 1 million scenario where things actually can work out. If it weren't for the fact that this is clearly a story of mutual socially awkward attraction that matures into something healthier, it'd be a weird and dysfunctional toxic relationship.

Nagatoro gets better and part of her character growth is channeling her feelings more into outward care and kindness and reducing her tormenting to teasing. Our guy's growth arc is about being less of a wuss and asserting himself more, both in chasing his personal goals and within his friendship with Nagatoro. I think it helps that the worst of their interactions is resolved after the first dozen chapters or so. Afterwards, things stabilize into something more charming where the two start going back and forth in having the upper hand over the other in terms of teasing. Seeing Nagatoro go from the teaser to the teased and having to scramble at times is amusing.

Nanashi, the author of the Nagatoro series, comes from a porn artist background, if I remember right. Unsurprisingly, a lot of the humor here is about sexually suggestive situations that ramp up in tension and then get defused in silly ways. There's still a sense of getting into a repeating pattern of episodic plotlines that's typical to manga, but again, this one develops at a better pace than most and the art is good and amusing enough to be entertaining when the pacing stalls a bit at times.