My Friend's Little Sister Has It In for Me! (Vol. 3)

Of the many things Akiteru doesn't want to deal with in life, a girlfriend tops that list. So when his dev team's illustrator, Sumire Kageishi, proposes that he pretend to be her fiancé, it causes him a major headache. That headache would worsen into a migraine if he doesn't play along, however, because her strict, traditional family will engage her to a man of her choosing, which means the end of her illustration career and her assistance in the Fifth Floor Alliance.

I wasn't too favorable to volume 2 of My Friend's Sister Wants It In Her because it dropped its comedic tone in favor of nothing, which had me worried going in that this volume would be my last dive into the series, because I find that once a series trips down a hill, it doesn't bother getting up. I'm more than pleased to announce that it clawed and struggled its way up for the good of a lark. It needs to take a couple of deep breaths before it gets back to shooting off zingers like it did for its debut, but the banter between the cast, if humor was a currency, exchanged at a rate of two chuckles per conversation. Common writing advice has it that every line has to mean something and progress the plot, which is generally advisable, but camaraderie is expressed better when you have friends arguing over who's fucking whom.

Matter of fact, that's something that catches me off guard about this series, how blatantly sexual it is. The industry tends to lean into sexuality, for better or for worse, but there're lines it draws and refuses to cross depending on how raunchy a series is feeling, and My Friend's Little Sister Is Begging For It In is feeling plenty raunchy. It's not three steps and a doorknob turn away from entering an occupied brothel room, but it does reference sexual acts that most series blush and avert their gaze from. It's doesn't cross any untapped extremes, as there are titles like Shimoneta that have a student council president who oozes a slug trail of her own pussy juice, but with My Friend's Little Sister Loves Being Filled Up's common romcom composition, with a mention here or there about breasts being the raciest it'll get, it wide-eyes me when Iroha looks at a soaked-to-the-bone Akiteru and remarks, “Your cousin squirt all over you?”

On the whole, My Friend's Little Sister Has It In for Me's handling of its sexual material is a mixed bag filled with decent items like the natural attribute of a character and questionable ones like scenes painfully wedged in for a spot of fan service. When Akiteru goes on a fake date so that Sumire can try on swimsuits, it's 10,000% obvious that some force of nature will force him into the dressing room, where his date's in the world's third skimpiest bikini, and has the 47th largest pair of breasts in the world to boot. Though with how anxious he gets at the mention, thought, or sight of breasts, I'm impressed at how nonchalant he is at Iroha's open thirst for him. At one point, when she's sleep-talking, she literally says, “Aki, please refrain from unloading your hot, sticky semen onto my backside,” and his response is to roll his eyes in annoyance.

Given Iroha's proclivity for sexual discourse, it's quick to categorize her as a fan service girl, which isn't untrue in some senses. She savors squishing her ginormous titties against Akiteru and says things like “Being aroused is a sign that you're a healthy teenage boy,” which are words written by male writers and put into female characters' mouths to justify the male characters' horniness. But it could also go that she's a genuinely lusty individual who's hot for Akiteru and wants to get hot and bothered with him.

In my review for The Sidekick Never Gets the Girl, Let Alone the Protag's Sister, I brought up how comedy can be a mask to hide pain and depression, and Iroha might be doing the same with her lust, rubbing herself on Akiteru and then laughing it off as simple teasing, when in reality she'd love nothing more than to strip him naked and ride him like a bucking bronco. Maybe I'm reading too much into it, but I prefer to think My Friend's Little Sister Wants It and More In Her is inclined enough to pull this off as a clever play of character writing rather than drooling for boobies.

It'd be lovely if that cleverness extended to Sumire. She's a twenty-something-year-old woman who lusts after elementary school boys. She's a pedophile. Like. Do I need to devote another three or four sentences to explaining how bad that is? It's terrible, but all the characters act like it's just another quirk of hers, not that different from dividing your M&M's by color before eating them.

I'm ecstatic (and a bit horrified how, when editing this, I only wrote about sex, like this series is a softcore hentai) My Friend's Little Sister Never Not Wants It learned the lesson that dropping its comedic edge was a horrid idea, though it's still got a number of cracks to fill in, and some of them are cracks sitting over some nasty stuff. The fixes don't need to be complicated, either. Last volume, Akiteru wouldn't shut the hell up about being efficient, and this volume mostly fixes that by stuffing a sock in his pie hole. Occasionally, he spits out enough of the sock to squeak out an “Efficiency!” but the lot of these instances, he could've replaced it with some other word and the context would've remained unchanged. Fingers crossed that quality of life improvements continue to be made for the next round, which this volume was nothing but foreplay for.