The Spring 2021 Manga Guide

Please Put Them On, Takamine-san!

What's It About? 

The student council president, Takane Takamine, is a beauty beyond compare, and she would normally never associate with a friendless nobody like Koushi Shirota. After seeing her undressed, however, he's forced to become her walking “closet” as she changes underwear throughout the day. But Takamine's stripping isn't merely to tease—it's the key to unleashing her time-bending powers!

Please Put Them On, Takamine-san! is drawn and scripted by Yūichi Hiiragi and Yen Press released its first volume both digitally and in print for $6.99 and $13.00 respectively

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Is It Worth Reading?

Rebecca Silverman

Rating:

Imagine that you had the power to redo a moment in time simply by taking off one of your undergarments. Now tell me – would you stick with the plain old bra-and-undies combo, giving yourself only two easy outs a day? Or would you go full Victorian with chemise, corset, corset cover, drawers, stockings, garters, and a number of petticoats? Seriously, series heroine Takamine is really approaching her power without an ounce of imagination. Of course, the purpose of her power isn't necessarily to show how smart or creative it is; it's to titillate the reader of the manga with scenes of her taking on and off her underwear, offering views of her bare breasts and near-misses of her vulva. Yes, this is less about a girl with a power and more about the astounding fact that underneath their clothes, girls are naked.

That premise leads us into the plot of the book: one day, hapless high school nonentity Shirota is hanging out in the gym storage room during lunch when student council president and all-around perfect girl Takamine comes in. He watches her remove her bra, getting an eyeful of her breasts, and is shocked and at least a little ashamed that he looked. Fast-forward to their next class when Takamine, who is famous for only getting perfect scores, gets back a test with a grade of 98. The next thing Shirota knows, she's pulling off her underwear and suddenly being called to pick up her test again – but now she's got a 100. It turns out that Shirota isn't affected by her power anymore because he's seen her bare breasts, and that means that Takamine wants him to serve her as her “closet,” carrying around her spare underwear (old ones vanish when “used up”) so that she can exercise her power at any time.

Oh, and he also has to put the new underwear on her. Because she says so.

That's where this book really lost me. There's definitely something at least a little funny about the whole stripping-leads-to-time-travel thing, and Shirota's initial confusion as Takamine assumes that he wants to ask her all sorts of relevant questions is entirely wrong (he's too busy freaking out), but it quickly morphs into Takamine feeling more like a sexual predator than anything else. Takamine's very uncomfortable with the entire situation, and her “teasing” him by insisting that he's a pervert and that he needs to put her underwear on for her feels more mean than amusing. The story tries to frame it as more of her being a tsundere than anything else – naturally she knew him when they were little and she appears to have been nursing a crush on him ever since – but their social statuses are too different for her to be comfortable admitting that. She also does know, at least on some level, that what she's doing isn't okay, and in two instances she redoes moments where she “teased” him a bit too hard (in her estimation).

On the whole, however, this is really too mean-spirited for me. I like the ludicrous factor, and the fanservice art is especially good with the almost-peeks beneath her skirt, but Takamine herself is vastly unpleasant. Humor is subjective, though, so if you like meaner, fanservice-based comedy, you'll probably enjoy this.

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Lynzee Loveridge

Rating: No thanks

I approached this story with an open mind for most of its opening chapter. Its purpose was pretty obvious once the silly contrivances were explained and I honestly found them amusing in a "this is so dumb" kind of way. It was window dressing for seeing Takamine's bare breasts after all. And I like some silliness in my fanservice, so we were off to a good start. Takamine is an egomaniac who has maintained her grip on the social hierarchy by stripping whenever she manages to make a minor mistake; basically, removing her bra and panties is her equivalent of a real life "Ctrl + Z" and in the mean time she's developed an ego that includes her lording over everyone else. Our protagonist is (surprise) a mediocre dude who eats lunch alone in the gym storage closet.

The idea here is to combine lots of perfectly-rendered boobs with a large heaping of dom flavor as Koushi is ordered around by a gorgeous girl who makes sure to remind him what a worm he is and makes him carry around her spare pairs of underwear. Apparently these undergarments get "eaten" by the powers that be every time Takamine uses her power, which I'd like to kindly remind the audience that, unless she's buying Fruit of the Loom five packs, is an incredibly expensive power to maintain. But whatever, this is silly and I probably wouldn't have minded reading this in the privacy of my own home until they had to throw out the false rape allegation to get Koushi to comply with Takamine. The boy isn't such a schlub that he's going to go along with Takamine's demeaning demands so we have to watch as she pulls out the fake assault allegation, undoes it when he agrees to comply, and then lord it over him to make sure he stays in line.

Pass. I can get sexy lady fanservice of all stripes without the loaded baggage of this shit. Yūichi Hiiragi is a fine enough artist and I appreciated his sense of comedy before this was rolled out on the page. As a side note, when I went to find the release date for this title while organizing the guide, I noticed that volume 1 isn't currently listed on Amazon. If you still want this book, you'll probably have to look elsewhere.