Content Warning: fan service, sexualization of minors, false rape accusation; NSFW screenshots
What’s it about? Shirota Koushi is a complete nobody and worlds away from the school’s goddess, the untouchable Takamine Takana. That is, until he accidentally sees her changing and discovers her secret: whenever she takes off her underwear, Takamine is able to rewind time and erase any mistake she might make.
Yup, that’s a porno plot, I reckon. I’ve said before that I have a certain respect for shows that are bald-faced about their intention to serve primarily as masturbation material, putting their central kink or fantasy front-and-center rather than going through the motions of a plot that’s going to be continually undermined by the Author’s Extremely Specific Fetish. This is not at all to say that erotica can’t be thematically deep—there are some subjects you can only really tackle earnestly if you don’t shy away from depicting sex, and porn is not unlike horror in its ability to reflect unconscious social anxieties—but that a story where the primary goal is getting the audience off requires critical benchmarks to match.
It is generous, porn logic. An example: if I ask “how does this girl single-handedly keep Japan’s lingerie industry in business,” as I watch Takamine engage in the daily ritual of taking off (and thus blinking out of existence) a bra that would cost easily $70 at your local Victoria’s Secret, the answer would be “this is an easy way to cram in an astronomical number of underwear designs.” And, possibly, “the author has never seen the inside of a lingerie department.”
Does this mean that Takamine-san is good at being porn? Not really. The rising action is sound as far as building from “tease” moments to an extended climax centering on the actual central kink. But the art is what you might generously term, “fuckugly.” While I favor artists who have a good grasp of anatomy (I strongly believe anyone who draws sexy ladies should look at Shirahama’s Eniale & Dewiela and take notes), there’s room for stylized aesthetics that are trying to draw attention to certain characteristics. Takamine-san exists in the nethers between those two approaches, and Takamine herself ends up shifting proportions (and internal organ capacity) based on whatever reference pose was clearly needed from one scene to the next. This is a blessing, of a sort, because it helped distract me from the way characters’ eyes kept trying to slide off the sides of their faces.
Erotic fantasies might be the boiling id where we work out the weirder parts of our psyches, but it’s still worth asking how and why they function. I would leave this show to its devices—its sticky, sweaty devices—if it weren’t for two grenades that the script decided to lob in at the last minute. The first is that Takamine’s powers are explicitly linked to her virginity. Specifically, Takamine describes herself as “a maiden who has not been defiled.” Now, this is a fantasy about being shit-talked and made to do the bidding of a cruel domineering woman who is very hot. Making her virginity part of the fetish adds a “conquering” element to the story—there’s an implicit tension that she might have to chose between a sexual relationship and the powers that allow her to chase her goal of being “perfect”—and some good-old slut-shaming, since women in these stories are always losing some intrinsic part of themselves if they’re choosing to have sex.
The second sour note is the ending, wherein Takamine blackmails Koushi into serving as her paypig “closet” by falsely accusing him of rape. By now we’ve probably discussed this topic to death here on the site, but once more for the rafters. It isn’t that no one has ever falsely accused someone of sexual assault. It’s that these kinds of shows only seem to bring up the topic of sexual assault within the framework of false accusations. It’s insidious and misogynistic besides, throwing suspicion on any woman who talks about an experience with sexual assault as implicitly suspicious and scheming. This only seems to change when rape is shown onscreen to shock the audience or motivate the hero, with the graphic detail apparently making for sufficient validation.
There are plenty of ways you could do erotic bullying that didn’t lean on the favored trope of incelbait everywhere, but I suppose it makes for an interesting example of how a fantasy can be punctured. These worlds are so thoroughly constructed, so far from reality, that if an ugly part of life that’s not actually central to the kink at hand rears its head it’s about as effective as a bucket of cold water. It’s like being in the middle of a promising first date only for him to bring up his new Cybertruck. Sure, maybe you can convince him to test the trunk sensors with his hand, and that’s fun, but it’s not exactly what you’d started out imagining.
In conclusion, there is already a comic about a woman who can stop time when she orgasms, and she has the foresight to use it for bank robbing purposes. I’ll expect your essays about the changing landscape for televised erotica as both the direct-to-video and uncensored home video markets reach total collapse on my desk by Monday.
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