ホットギミック

HOT GIMMICK

MANGA

STATUS
COMPLETE
VOLUMES
12
RELEASE
Invalid Date
CHAPTERS
54

DESCRIPTION

In company-owned rabbit-hutch apartments live tenants who can't afford to live anywhere else, and the apartment complex in which high-school girl Hatsumi Narita lives is ruled over by the rumor mongering, self-righteous Mrs. Tachibana. Get on Tachibana's bad side, and life becomes hell. When Hatsumi has to buy a pregnancy test because her popular sister Akane is late, Mrs. Tachibana's son, Ryoki, who used to bully Hatsumi as a kid, promises not to tell the world about Hatsumi's secret, only if she becomes his slave. Suddenly Azusa, Hatsumi's protector in their youth, reappears to save her again! He's moving back into the neighborhood! Despite the budding romance between Hatsumi and Azusa, Ryoki has control over her through the secret that could ruin the lives of everyone in Hatsumi's family, and he hasn't forgotten who his slave is!

(Source: Viz Media)

CAST

Ryoki Tachibana
Shinogu Narita
Hatsumi Narita
Azusa Odagiri
Asahi Yagi
Akane Narita
Subaru Yagi
Tooru Narita
Natsue Tachibana

CHAPTERS

RELATED TO HOT GIMMICK

NOVEL DramaHot Gimmick S

REVIEWS

RoseFaerie
4/100
Hot Gimmick? More like Hot Trash. The love triangle where she chooses between two disgusting creeps and her brother.
Ahhh. It's been a while since I read something so horrible, on the same level as Zannen nagara Chigaimasu or On the Emperor's Lap, but I have found a worthy contender for the worst manga that I've ever read. While it's the same level of bad as those two, it's more comparable with the horrible reverse harem anime Brothers Conflict. In Hot Gimmick the female lead gets to choose between her brother and a pair of rapists, while in Brothers Conflict, the female lead gets to choose between her brothers, some of whom are rapists. I'm sure you're all shocked at what's going on in Hot Gimmick with the incest and the creepy guys, so I will first present you with the plot.

Hatsumi Narita and her large family live in corporate housing, in a building ruled by the Tachibana family, the highest-ranking family in their compound. When Hatsumi's popular 14-year-old sister has a pregnancy scare, she has Hatsumi go out and buy her a pregnancy test since it would cause more of a scandal if middle schooler Akane was caught by Mrs. Tachibana, who would surely make their lives miserable. But when Hatsumi returns home with the test, she's caught by the Tachibana's son, Ryoki. But in exchange for keeping Hatsumi and her sister's secret, he has decided that Hatsumi will be his slave, and he doesn't want her anywhere near her childhood friend Azusa who returned to the compound.

Yeah... Love Interest #1, Ryoki wants to make Hatsumi his slave. He's physically and verbally abusive, and he regularly sexually assaults her. He doesn't take "no" for an answer ever, and even goes so far as to stick his hands up her shirt when she's unconscious. To him, a slave is more like a sex slave instead of having her carry his stuff around or do his homework or something. Four chapters in and he attempts to rape her. That happens a few more times in the first 2-3 volumes, and no one seems to notice that it's non-consensual. Hatsumi will be screaming, "STOP! NO! NO!" and then her neighbors will see and be like, "Oh, you're dating? Have fun making out or whatever." Just assuming this is all consensual. At one point her dad sees this, and he gets mad at her for "being in a relationship" and having sex and all that, when it was pretty clear that he was assaulting her. It made me sick.

There's a panel (I should have saved it because I can't find it), where Ryoki and Hatsumi are kissing, and Ryoki's thinking, "She's not struggling like usual! Is this what a consensual kiss is like? Ahh, the beauty of consent." And I just wanted to throw him across the room.

Ryoki is also controlling and possessive, with his narcissism preventing him from letting Hatsumi have any relationships above him. She'd have family troubles, and then he'd get mad at her and slap her for not answering his calls. He'd get upset that she would be thinking of her sibling who ran away from home instead of thinking about him exclusively. He's just all around terrible, constantly calling Hatsumi stupid and all sorts of other insults. And he never got better.

Love Interest #2, Azusa, is not much better. He's not as bad as Ryoki, but Ryoki has dethroned Futo Asahina from Brothers Conflict as my least favorite character of all time, and if you're wondering how bad Futo is, he's one of the few love interests in Brothers Conflict who isn't a child predator, and yet he somehow is creepier and more disgusting than all of them. And I hate Ryoki more than this dude. So being better than Ryoki is not an accomplishment.

You see, Azusa's also a rapist, he just hired other guys to rape Hatsumi. He just wanted to record her being raped and send it to Hatsumi's dad, since her dad apparently had an affair with his mom, and his dad divorced his mom because of it, and then he had a hard life and his mom died. (Trust me, it's so convoluted, and it does not get dropped. What I'm telling you about is like the 4th volume, and this story is basically Azusa's entire motivation for the entire series.) He goes around acting like Hatsumi's dad killed his mom when she just got sick and died due to stress or something. Azusa led her on, gave her a date-rape drug, but her brother found her beforehand. A few days later he sends her to his modeling office or whatever for his friends to rape her. I guess he wanted Hatsumi's dad to know what it feels like to lose a loved one? He's basically horrible and evil, and then Hatsumi apologizes for not noticing his pain, and then his manager comes to apologize for his actions, but instead basically justifies and excuses his behavior... Then they brush his actions under the rug and he's just there with his mother's affair plot, trying to ruin everyone's lives.

Love interest #3, Shinogu, is... not a rapist, but Hatsumi's brother. You see, he was adopted and was in love with her from the very beginning, despite Hatsumi having been like three years old and him being like six, and Hatsumi not remembering that he was adopted and seeing him exclusively as her brother. It just feels creepy. He also lets his 19-year-old friend hit on his 14-year-old sister, so keep that in mind.

Shinogu, despite being the least creepy in terms of consent and being a decent human being, was still the last one I wanted to get with Hatsumi. I'm sorry, but I felt disgusted whenever he was on the page. There's even a point where you think he and Hatsumi slept together, which made me want to vomit, since Hatsumi literally thought they were biologically related until a few weeks earlier. (Fortunately, they did not sleep together, which helped to preserve my sanity a bit more because that was all that I could take.) And Shinogu was trying to un-adopt himself so that he could be free to pursue his sister, and everyone was encouraging the two of them to get together in the end... I just felt gross watching all that unfold.

Hatsumi made the wrong choice, but there was no right choice in this situation, since all the men who are interested in her suck. I'm not going to discuss Hatsumi herself in as much detail because, while she's not quite as bad as Ema Hinata (Brothers Conflict) or Yuki Cross (Vampire Knight), she's not a great character. She's a doormat who gets taken advantage of by every character in this manga and never changes, always remaining a victim of abuse. I did not hate her, but it was frustrating to watch. I just wish someone with an actual functioning brain would step in and help her.

I covered the characters before the plot because the characters are the plot. The whole story is just Hatsumi and her harem of trash men causing drama. There's some side stuff with an awkwardly written side couple featuring Hatsumi's sister and their neighbor, but as poorly written as that was, I'd rather have that than the Hatsumi-Ryoki-Shingou-Azusa stuff. We also get some love triangle stuff with a pointless love rival for Hatsumi, a groomer tutor, and the Azusa's mom affair drama.

I'd say that Hot Gimmick could have been interesting if it took another angle with the premise. It could have explored corporate housing and its effects on children in an in-depth way since the English translation has a little afterword by someone who lived in the women's dorms in corporate housing. It sounds like a strained environment to raise children in, and I think it could have been interesting to focus on the kids, their psyches, and what they've internalized after growing up like this. Hot Gimmick does touch on it a little bit, but more in the soap-opera way, where it's just to cause drama and obstacles for Hatsumi and her many love interests.

The art was acceptable. The colored pages ranged from okay to "I learned how to use photoshop yesterday!". It wasn't terrible art, and it could be nice, simple, and stylized with the big eyes. It can be nice to look at and the mangaka has a distinctive style. I can easily recognize her stuff, even if it's more of a curse than a blessing since I HATED Hot Gimmick.

This manga was honestly such a struggle to get through, and I regretted every second of it. It begins as a trashy, but addictive read in the very beginning, but I lost patience with it and could no longer view it as a pleasant but secretly enjoyable trash read. It became the bane of my existence. I want to warn you all not to read this manga because it is terrible, and I read this, so you don't have to. Consider yourself saved from the curse of Miki Aihara's terrible writing and even worse ideas of romantic relationships.

And as a special treat, you get to see what went through my head whenever I saw Ryoki’s name because that was the only thing keeping me going at one point.

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