Navel-gazing, the act of excessively and reflexively contemplating one’s own position, is a source of great tedium in media. Hollywood movies about the Hollywood film industry can be great, but they can also be impenetrably boring to people outside the industry. Likewise, there is no shortage of mangas about mangakas and light novels about light novelists that can be fantastic, or they can feel like you’re on the wrong side of an in-joke.
You’ll Be Crazy About Me! is a collection of hentai mangas by Akitsuki Itsuki, fully translated and uncensored by FAKKU. Several of the stories herein feel very much like a hentai mangaka engaging in his own brand of horny navel-gazing. Fortunately, this still makes for pretty good porn, but I admit to rolling my eyes every time a thirsty otaku girl praised a mangaka’s enormous wang and remarkable sexual prowess after the first few. To be fair, though, the wangs in these mangas are pretty impressive.
The lead story whose heroine we see on the cover is “The Stunning Cosplayer Booth Girl’s Creampie Negotiation,” wherein a hentai mangaka hires the titular stunning cosplayer to be his booth girl at a comic market, only for her to become extremely sexually aggressive and ultimately negotiate for that creampie Akitsuki-sensei told you about in the title. It definitely seems like the kind of thing a hentai mangaka might fantasize about actually happening.
Follow that up with “Complete Offline Photo Reference,” which tells the story of a hentai mangaka seeking out a real-life model to serve as a reference for his drawings only to be instantly contacted by the hottest possible girl completely obsessed with his eromangas and more than ready to go all the way to be the best possible reference for a manga about knockin’ boots. If this kind of thing really happens then please excuse me while I sign up for some community college art classes. But I suspect these scenarios are as fantastical as the colossal penises these mangakas are rocking.
“Easy on the Corrections” takes another angle on the theme and depicts a school manga club, where the hentai manga-drawing club president catches his cute female club member masturbating to one of his works and you can guess where that goes. I wonder how many times a young Akitsuki-sensei fantasized about just such a scenario. He was certainly able to bring it to life in great detail.
Aside from the last story, which is a sequel to the first and an original Akitsuki drew for this collection, the rest are all various forms of “dubious consent” stories, wherein girls find themselves having sex with boys they otherwise probably wouldn’t but for some contrivance. I’m sure you can imagine the contrivance in “Tipsy Dead Drunk Self-Intoxication,” for example, but “Achieving Your Dreams” has an adorable young aspiring idol having sex with a fan in exchange for substantial financial support, and “Show Me Your Transformation” depicts a famously sexy cosplayer being blackmailed into sex with her classmate when he finds out her real identity.
These stories of dubious consent fit with Akitsuki Itsuki’s brand, which his Twitter will tell you is all about hypnotism. Akitsuki-sensei loves drawing hot babes getting hypnotized into sex with dudes they otherwise wouldn’t give the time of day. And if you think about it, getting drunk or blackmailed is really just a kind of low-level hypnotism.
Prior to reading this manga and familiarizing myself with Akitsuki-sensei’s other works for this review, I wasn’t aware of the hypnotism brand and I have to admit I picked it up because I have an uncontrollable yandere fetish and You’ll Be Crazy About Me! has “crazy” in the title, but let me be clear: there’s no yandere to be found.
Nor, despite the dubious consent theme, is there anything here for a rape fetishist. The contrivances notwithstanding, it turns out all the ladies are ultimately very pleased to be having sex and good times were had by all. Akitsuki-sensei’s distinctive take on the ahegao demonstrates that quite effectively.
For other fetishes, there’s a really transparent incest story in here. It’s a little unexpected, but it’s all sufficiently contrived that I bought it. The original story “The Stunning Cosplayer Booth Girl’s Creampie Negotiation After” also leans really heavily into the titular cosplayer being a high school girl, indulging that JK fetish.
I’m finding myself just listing off fetishes and situations because that’s really all there is. I couldn’t tell you the name of a single character who appears in any of the stories (except Neko-san, the titular cosplayer, since it stood out to me that she’s not cosplaying a cat) or really anything about them besides their jobs and dick sizes (where appropriate). There aren’t any stories to speak of here, just setups for people to have sex with each other.
And that’s fine. Akitsuki-sensei is very good at drawing people having sex with each other. He has a very distinctive style that focuses on intensely expressive eyes and faces, to the point that a lot of the panels in the sex scenes have no visible penetration happening. The eroticism is all in the faces. That’s an impressive feat for a hentai mangaka to pull off.
As for FAKKU’s contribution, they aren’t offering any full color pages here as they do with many of their manga licenses and that’s a disappointment. I also picked out a few places where the translation was a little wonky and they could have phrased things to sound a little more natural, or a little more appropriate for the character they’re translating, but that’s all nitpicking.
What I’m most impressed with in this particular FAKKU work is the sound effects, particularly the lettering and font choices they’ve made. The way mangakas work sounds into their art is a unique aspect of the medium and one of the greatest challenges a manga translator faces. FAKKU did well this time.
On the whole, You’ll Be Crazy About Me!, while insufficiently crazy for my tastes, is a very sexy collection of scenarios where people have sex with each other for very silly reasons and make very hot faces while doing so. It also wants you to know that Akitsuki Itsuki has an extremely large penis.
