Spice Up Your Life!
Joelle Decides to Be Horny On Main With Her Unsolicited Romance Manga Recommendations
Reading time: ~ 13 minutes
Content warning: this newsletter is NSFW. It features romance manga with mature themes, including sexually explicit scenes and dialogue. Actual panels of sexually explicit scenes are not included and are only referenced and discussed to a small degree. It also features the covers of the manga listed below, which have the main couples posing in compromising positions in partial nudity and/or states of undress.
Hello, friends and enemies of A Mermaid Who Can’t Swim (AMWCS for short)!
It’s been a hot minute since I sent out a newsletter! Life has been weird and I haven’t been able to finish any of the other newsletters I planned on sending out without withering away into the abyss.
So instead, I decided that I should make a list of romance manga I’ve been reading because they’re the sole thing getting me through this thing called life. (Also I’m truly sorry to everyone on my Twitter and my Instagram who voted between the other topics I was drafting).
So grab your beverage of choice, maybe a snack or two, and get ready to dive in!
My Love (News)Letter to Romance Comics
I have always loved love. Maybe because it’s romanticized and capitalized so much in society via books, TV shows, movies, music, etc.. Or maybe because I lacked any positive real-life examples of loving romantic relationships growing up. Either way, I gobble that shit up like it’s Megan’s WAP, cheering for some idiots to kiss and admit that they love each other.
The romance genre in particular comforts me because I know that no matter what happens, the couple will have their Happily Ever After (or they’re Happy For Now). Life can break them, but their hearts won’t be broken forever.
People will meet, get all blushy and tingly when they interact, and maybe share a smooch or two.
Maybe they’ll take things a bit further and get frisky in bed (or some other place, I’m not here to kinkshame).
Maybe someone will give a Grand Gesture to win the other back after the third act breakup.
Maybe they’ll get married and we’ll get a peek of them in domestic bliss in the epilogue.
Maybe they’ll communicate to each other exactly what they want and what they’re feeling for once goddammit.
Experiencing love can be hell, but watching it or reading it is a rollercoaster of a ride that I will repeatedly get on until someone kicks me out of the theme park.
I’ve been reading comics ever since I was in middle school. It started out with the tiny comic strips in the free daily copies of AMNY and Metro New York on the bus rides to middle school. Then to scanlations of Ouran High School Host Club, Fruits Basket, and Sailor Moon in my freshmen year of high school. And then finally to present-day me reading Webtoons (and still some scanlations like the ones below).
Comics are nice because I don’t have to work too hard on reading lines and lines of words and imagining a scene in my head. The artist and author (sometimes they’re the same person, sometimes they’re not) capture it fully, and much better than I can, in just a tiny panel or two.
So for me, romance manga and other comics are perfect for me, especially on my big burnout days where I’m very much “no thought, head empty” but still want the serotonin boost I get from witnessing love. It’s what I look forward to reading every night, what has me racing to my phone to check if the latest chapter has been uploaded yet.
The Manga Joelle Would Be Willing To Go To Horny Jail For
Props to you if you decide to read any of these in public with people close by ‘cause these recommendations are 🔥🔥🔥. I would need to go to confession and be slam-dunked into holy water after reading these. I would probably be disowned if my Filipino Catholic nanay found me reading these. The sex scenes make me blush louder than Tamaki Suoh in the first episode of Ouran Host Club, and the romance arcs got me banging my fists on the table and asking God when it’s my turn.
These four are the ones I hurl at people when they want recommendations with links to where to read them in their titles. If you read any of them or have read any of them already, please feel free to comment here or message me on the plethora of platforms I have so we can squeal together!
Osananajimi Bartender to Hajimeru Kaikan Lesson by Rami Takashino
Or as Joelle likes to call it, Childhood Friends-to-Lovers Supremacy ft. The Dick So Big It’s Named “Final Boss”
I am a childhood friends-to-lovers hoe. There’s the loaded history between them, the pent-up sexual tension, the angst when one of them has to watch the other be with someone else, and the all-too-good dilemma of “I don’t want to ruin the friendship we’ve had for years by dating and then breaking up”.
Kana has an unspecified condition that makes sex painful for her, which results in many of her boyfriends breaking up with her. She complains about her predicament a lot to Mamoru, her best friend of nineteen years who’s a bartender at the bar she frequents. And because this is a romance manga, of course Mamoru suggests she should practice having sex with him since he knows she would be upfront with him when she’s in pain. Kana agrees and, because this is a romance manga, the moment he touches her she’s drenched.
Childhood friends-to-lovers is always great because you don’t have to deal with the “getting to know you” phase with a couple. You can jump right into the banter and familiarity and 9/10 someone (usually the guy in m/f relationships) has secretly been head-over-heels in love with the other person for a long time.
That’s 1000000% the case with Kana and Mamoru, and poor Mamoru has to act like God’s strongest warrior every time Kana goes to him with relationship issues or tells someone that she sees him as just a friend. Regardless, Mamoru is a loving and supportive grumpy cat of a friend to his sunshine puppy of a friend, holding back his true feelings to avoid being cut out from her life completely.
But as with all childhood friends-to-lovers romances, the payoff is worth it when they finally confess their feelings and decide to take the next step forward in their relationship. Kana and Mamoru show us that you are worthy of being handled with more tenderness and care than people have shown you in life, that you are not broken just because people don’t take the time or the effort to know how to love you the way you need to be loved.
I also love how each chapter ends with a bonus scene at the bar where they make a drink relevant to the plot! Cocktail language is a bit like flower language where each drink has a special meaning, from the ingredients to the name itself to the process of making it. It’s a cute little thing that ties in Mamoru’s job with the rest of the story, making it stand out from the slush of childhood friends-to-lovers stories out there.
Shojo Kon ~Kohinata Fuufu wa Shite Mitai~ by Chuzi Aoi and art by Kiichi Kojima
Or as Joelle likes to call it, Spewing Scientific Facts About Animals During Sex Is Actually Kinda Hot or Yes, He Would Absolutely Still Love You If You Were A Worm
This arranged marriage romance follows Kurumi, the daughter of a botanist, and her husband Keiichirou, an associate professor of animal behavior research. Their parents, probably realizing their respective children are more comfortable with nature than with people, set them up on a matchmaking session and they’ve been happily married for a year now.
Well, except for the fact that they haven’t had sex yet!
With their anniversary approaching, these socially awkward, nature nerds fumble their way through figuring out how to tell the other they want to have sex, animal and flower analogies and all.
What’s nice about Kurumi and Keiichirou is that you get the domestic scenes in an established relationship combined with the warm, fuzzy feelings of first-time experiences in love! It has a very slice-of-life feel that I like, giving us a glimpse of their everyday lives and giving me comfort in knowing we don’t have to worry about their loyalty wavering since they’re just so frickin in love with each other.
The juicy part of this love story is that with them already being in a loving relationship, this makes their story less of a “will they or won’t they?” and more of a “when will they?” and “how many times will they?”
Their naïveté towards sex and romance (and human socialization in general) is sweet and endearing when paired with their loving and doting behavior, both trying to make the other person feel happy and loved in a way that comes naturally to them.
For example, Kurumi gets a part-time job as a florist in order to buy sexy lingerie that she thinks will give her the courage to ask her husband to have sex with her. Meanwhile, Keiichirou, being the animal behavior researcher that he is, enthusiastically buys a porn magazine with an accompanying DVD because it claims to show how to have sex that conveys your feelings (spoiler: after Kurumi finds the magazine and the DVD, they decide to read it and watch it together so they can learn how to use sex as a way to express their feelings together *sobs*).
These two teach us that communication is hard but extremely important in relationships, so express yourself in the ways you know how to because the people who love you will work to understand you and appreciate your effort.
Animal facts aside (and each chapter always includes at least one fact), these nerds are just so special to me, and I hope we all someday find someone who finds you more beautiful than animals protected by your national government.
Dekiai Zentei, Keiyakukon. ~Iwashiro Bengoshi wa Ai ga Deka Sugiru!?~ by Tsubomi Chikuwa
Or as Joelle likes to call it, Sometimes You Do End Up Marrying Your Bias
Okay, so my alternative title for this one is a slight spoiler, but it’s revealed in Chapter 2! It also got me thinking of every BTS ARMY out there making signs for concerts and commenting on V Lives and WeVerse Lives saying “Yoongi, marry me” ‘cause that’s basically what happened here.
In this marriage-of-convenience romance, Kunihiro Touko is a former idol-turned-influencer who is being stalked by her former manager. When he shows up at her apartment unexpectedly, she bumps into Iwashiro Yuuji, a lawyer who helps her file a police report and also brings her to his house since she doesn’t feel safe on her own. After Yuuji reveals that he actually went to middle school with Touko and even confessed his feelings to her back then, her memories (and buried feelings) from middle school come back all at once and they share an intimate night together.
Things get complicated when her former manager shows up at Yuuji’s place the next morning, demanding why Touko was at another man’s house. To chase her manager away, Yuuji lies and claims they’re in a serious relationship with the intention of getting married. But of course, the former manager believes this and starts posting on the Internet about Touko and Yuuji and that they’re getting married.
To which Yuuji goes, “Hold my beer.”
Kinda like in arranged married romances, marriage-of-convenience romances rearrange the order of events. Usually in romances, the couple meets, they get to know each other, they fall in love, they get married, the end. But for marriage-of-convenience, the couple meets they get married, then they get to know each other, they fall in love, the end.
These two are the sweetest (and dumbest) couple alive, it makes me want to throw up. They both think their love is unrequited and are scared that the other may not love their “true selves” (in Touko’s case, her everyday self, and in Yuuji’s case, his fanboy self). Given Touko’s status as an idol-turned-influencer, we also get the heightened stakes of them trying to convince not just their friends and family but Touko’s fans and the media that they’re in love and happily married.
Reading their sweet and spicy romance reminds us what it means to fall in love with someone’s past and present while promising to continue loving them in the future.
Tadano Renai Nanka de Kikkonai ~ Kojirase Joushi to Fechina Buka ~ by Mafuyu Fukita
Or as Joelle likes to call it @ God When Will I Get My Own Kiritani Tatsuki
I recommended this in my first newsletter and I’m still obsessed with it.
This office romance manga follows a hardworking office lady Yuino Sakura who has a certain smell fetish and her handsome but standoffish supervisor Kiritani Tatsuki who can’t talk to women without getting hard due to a traumatic incident in high school. Since she gets especially turned on by his scent and he gets turned on simply because she’s a woman, they make a pact to help “cure him”.
I think the sexiest part of this manga is that even though they keep talking about how Kiritani is “using” Yuino, you would think it’s the reverse considering how many times he makes her come. Seriously, you’d think a guy in his position would only fuck a woman until he’s orgasmed, not caring whether or not she came as well (which is a sad way of thinking tbh). But nope, he’s always going down on her, always fingering her, and the one time she takes the initiative to blow him, he initially refuses because he doesn’t want her to think she has to (sidenote: I’ve noticed in a lot of smutty m/f manga that there’s more eating out scenes than blowjob scenes, probably due to josei manga’s target audience).
Besides some of the hottest sex scenes out here on God’s green earth, their relationship makes me SQUEAL. They’ve learned to trust one another, which is a huge step for both of them since Yuino has been seen as an expressionless workaholic at their job and Kiritani has been avoiding almost every woman within a ten-mile radius of him for half his life. It’s a change noticed by everyone but Yuino and Kiritani, but once it’s brought to their attention, they can’t stop thinking about the other person.
I love Yuino and Kiritani so much because they show us that there’s someone out there who will help you grow even when it’s challenging and you’d rather not do all that work, who will embrace the weird things about you that everyone else runs away from, who will see the mess that you are and go, “I’ll help carry that baggage weighing you down.”
Thanks for stopping by! If you have any suggestions on what you would like to see next (writing updates and snippets, life updates, ramblings, etc.), feel free to leave a comment! I hope you stay around for a good time AND a long time.
Yours truly,
Joelle Thérèse, A Mermaid Who Can’t Swim
Me overwhelmed at the amount of manga I'll have to read now: 😵😵😵