Sometimes, it doesn't matter how detailed or long the title is; you shouldn't judge a book by its cover. A title like What Happened After My Place Got So Humid It Grew Magic Mushrooms And I Ate Them And Got Super Horny! prompts a lot of questions, and the answers are surprising. It sounds like one of those wacky sex manga that has a crazy premise just for the sake of some really intense sex scenes, and while there is some truth to that argument, there is a lot hidden beneath the surface that implies a darker story. It feels like Karasu Chan started to write a crazy porn setup but decided to make sure that it actually had a story with a proper beginning, middle, and end.

These two volumes follow an unnamed young woman desperate for friends, which only escalates as the story progresses. At first, it's presented as almost comically pathetic, but then it gets genuinely downright sad by the end. While the mushrooms are there to instill arousal, they're actually multipurpose. They are there to generate the initial sex scenes, and the first volume is pretty much all just one sex scene that leans into fetishes like furry and large insertion. The story skews the line a little bit about how ethical the sex is, considering that both people engaging, including our main character, are under the influence of the mushrooms, which are clearly hallucinogens. However, the story plays with how seriously you're supposed to take the narrative.

The mushrooms also cause people to hear the fungi as if they are real characters. The mushrooms aren't pushing our main character to do anything dangerous; if anything, they're her own Jiminy Cricket. This presents an ironic conundrum as the fungus arouses her, but the hallucinogenic manifestations try to warn her about how dangerous her actions actually are. She often goes against the mushrooms' wishes, thinking that she knows exactly what she's doing, only for it to backfire more often than not.

This is what I like about the story; our main character is not a good person as she uses the mushrooms arguably for underhanded means. She forces other people to eat them to get them aroused and then hopes that sex will be an easy way to generate friendship, but it all comes from a place of loneliness. The whole story acts like a metaphor for abusing substances or using your body in a transactional sense. Our main character wants friends and is willing to use her body to incentivize people to stick around. You never get the sense that she dislikes the sex, but she really just wants to chill out and play games with people. However, the people that she's enticing just use her for sex and then want to move on when they're done with her. It's depressing, and this causes her to spiral.

I love how twisted and demented the artwork gets during some scenes. While this seems to be a hyper-realized world where people and anthropomorphic animals coexist, how our main character is drawn during some of her darker moments is surprisingly very scary. I don't know if she's got some hidden strength of the result of her biology, if the mushrooms are causing her to act irrationally, or if it's just a visual representation of how twisted she feels. Again, this story is playing around with the reader's perception of reality. But the real world isn't really what matters; what matters is our character's emotions.

I can understand why this story is only two books long. Volume one ends on a cliffhanger and feels very much like a one-shot book, while volume two actually goes into a bit more of the nuances of the setup. If the story continued longer than that, it would've run the risk of our main character spiraling to the point where she wouldn't have been sympathetic anymore. Unfortunately, to wrap everything up, it needed to introduce a character that conveniently fully understands the situation and just happens to be the one to rescue her from her dark path. It works, but it also feels a bit unsatisfying. However, seeing our main character get a happy ending with the mushrooms was touching.

Honestly, I would like to see more stories in this world because many elements are implied in the background that aren't expanded upon because the focus is kept tight. The story has much more to offer than you would typically expect. If you want some good, rough, and intense sex with an exaggerated style, then I think you'll get more than enough here. But you might also walk away with a bit more of an appreciation for the people in your life who aren't just there because you have something to offer them. Maybe you'll relate to the main character's loneliness, or maybe you'll realize you know somebody going through similar emotions. I like good porn, but I also don't mind when a good porn has something more nuanced to say.