I Don’t Like You At All, Big Brother!!, Vol. 1-2

By Kouichi Kusano. Released in Japan as “Oniichan no Koto Nanka Zenzen Suki ja Nai n da kara ne!!” by Futabasha, serialization ongoing in the online magazine Web Comic High!. Released in North America by Seven Seas.

People follow trends. It’s just a way of life. When something is popular, the first instinct of a business looking for profit, or writer looking for a surefire seller, is ‘what did it do and how can I use that to replicate it?’ And this is fine sometimes. I’ve known many derivative works that have been very good and sometimes even surpassed the original. But too often someone goes too far. Either they miss the original point that was being made, or they deviate in an unacceptable manner, or they add too many other, equally trendy things to make a giant stew of trends that all cancel each other out.

And incest as a sexual thrill is, god help us, popular these days. Especially in Japan. Naturally, *genuine* incest seems to be saved for the actual porn magazines, but there’s no end of manga and (more importantly) anime that feature guys crushing on their sisters, and girls worshiping their brothers. Usually at some point they find out they aren’t related after all. Other popular trends in anime these days include the tsundere type who says mean things and hits the object of her affection as she’s too embarrassed. And let’s not forget the pretty, reserved princess type who secretly turns out to be a stalker and pervert.

If all this sounds like a lot of moe animes seen in the past five years, it’s by design. I’ll be honest, I had initially confused this title with ‘My Little Sister Can’t Be This Cute’, which comes out next month by Dark Horse, and has a somewhat better reputation. IDLYAA,BB!! features Nao, who loves her older brother a lot (the title may have given that away), despite his being a somewhat perverse non-entity in these two volumes. She goes to wake him up every day by hitting him (and giving him calculated panty flashes) and throws out anything in his porn doujinshi that it’s brother/sister incest. In fact, when told that she’s actually not related to him after all, this *depresses* her briefly, as it ruins the incest fantasy she’s been going for for so long.

This may seem rather hardcore for what’s meant to be a typical seinen title for horny guys, but rest assured there’s no actual sex, merely piles and piles of suggestion (though I note this is the author’s first ‘mainstream’ work after years of drawing adult titles). And to be fair, Nao’s obsession is treated in-story as immature and wrong. Then we meet our second heroine, Iroha, a long-lost childhood friend who meets Nao’s brother after all these years and proceeds to sexually assault him. This is actually one of the few interesting scenes in the book – it’s presented as incredibly disturbing (after all, we’re meant to root for Nao), and her brother’s horrified reaction to it, and realization that he may have led to her turning out this way, is a brief moment of soul searching that could be interesting… if it weren’t undone by Nao and Iroha’s determination to make sure that their man stays perverted and does not ‘turn over a new leaf’.

There’s a couple more things to like here – Nao’s two female friends are meant to function as a Greek chorus of sorts, and their reactions towards the end of the book at all the slapstick are well done – but to be honest, I have rarely seen a manga that seemed to calculated to hit as many fetishes as possible as this one. If you enjoy perverse moe harem comedies, well, I think you’ll get a big kick out of this, though even the most hardcore fan might finish the volume and say, “Erm, isn’t this a bit over the top?”