Manga Review: Okusama ga Seito Kaichou

Rin Misumi and Ui Wakana, the two main girls of Okusama ga Seito Kaichou

Okusama ga Seito Kaichou
Original Manga by: Yumi Nakata
Japanese name: おくさまが生徒会長！
English Translation: My Wife is the Student Council President
13 Volumes (Not Licensed in North America)
Original Run 2012 – 2018 

What happens if one of the most beautiful and charismatic girls in the school turns out to be a childhood friend and fiancé? That equally improbable and impossible scenario is the basis for the long-running ecchi manga Okusama ga Seito Kaichou. The manga originally released in the monthly shonen anthology Monthly Comic Rex (REXコミックス), and it was such a racy series that it became the first manga in that long-running anthology to get censored magazine spreads. The manga would produce two seasons of anime and become the highest-selling manga ever for Yumi Nakata, the manga artist, and writer. This manga would have extraordinarily strong highs and strong lows. Depending on who you like among the two main girls, your feelings will change as one gets more prominence and the other fades into the background. We will explore the beautifully flawed ecchi romance comedy manga Okusama ga Seito Kaichou.

Most of the Main Cast

The story’s basic main premise hinges on the interactions between three main characters, Hayato Izumi (和泉 隼人), Ui Wakana (若菜 羽衣), and Rin Misumi (三隅 倫). They form a love triangle of sorts and follow many standard ideas that use love triangles to create conflict. Hayato Izumi runs for student council president and runs against Ui Wakana, who during an election speech talks about “liberalizing love” and throws condoms to the students. This act gets her elected in a landslide, making her the student council president, and Hayato becomes her vice president and right-hand. He gets shocked that he finds Ui in his home, proclaiming that she is his fiancé through a parental arrangement between her father and his (and that she is also his childhood friend from many years ago that he forgot about). Hayato also gets a double whammy, because the student council president pushing the high school to become more sexual is a complete novice herself. Hayato takes advantage of Ui's naïve view of love and he sexually harasses her constantly, and not knowing any wiser, she encourages his actions. Rin Misumi, the curvaceous and captivating chairwoman of the discipline committee is unhappy with Ui’s leadership and challenges her policies. Like Ui, Rin is also naïve when it comes to romance, sexuality, and love. Rin also gets constant exposure to Hayato because she is conflicted with Ui. Hayato's constantly being around Rin leads him to develop a fetish for huge breasts. In turn, Rin becomes a big target (no pun intended) of his sexual advances throughout the story. Constant sexual situations with Hayato and her perverted classmates also lead Rin to conflate the concept of romance, sexuality, and love. This leads to a principal theme of the story, which is the underlying differences between Ui and Rin’s ideas of love, how people express love, and what people do for love. Ui and Rin's beliefs for these differences provide multiple flashpoints of division in the story.

Hayato, Ui, and Rin have a dynamism that keeps the story interesting throughout all thirteen volumes. Ui pushes the idea of “liberalization of love” where people should express themselves sexually and use protection, so accidents do not happen, yet she is naïve when it comes to expressing her own love. Hayato is a weird character, he is often sensible, thinking and reacting like a normal person. Other times, he lets his libido overtake common sense, doing sexual actions that would get a normal person shunned by society or even get criminal charges. This leads to some of the most risqué and fanservice scenes in the manga. Rin is the most fascinating and complex character among the main cast, and she gets the most character development throughout the entire story. Her motivation for being extremely conservative and cautious is because she and her former friend liked the same guy, and then her former best friend, threatened by Rin, started spreading rumors that he used her big breasts to seduce a guy they had mutual feelings for. This led to Rin adopting a strict and cynical view of love, romance, and sexuality that borders on almost prudish and puritanical that she pushes to the school as the head of the discipline committee. At first, her conflict with Ui is a fundamental difference in ideology where Ui wants people to become more open sexually, while Rin despises that the moral foundation of the school is crumbling in front of her eyes. This conflict shifts when Rin starts to develop feelings for Hayato through her various interactions with him. Much of the series issues was also self-immolation by Ui, who lets Hayato cheat on her constantly. In a pivotal sequence where Rin realizes that she does not have a chance of a relationship with Hayato, Ui goads Rin to double down on trying to get him. There are side characters such as Akane Niikura, Karen Fujisaki, Kei Misumi, Matoko Sawatari, Honoka Saijou, and Kenta Ikoma, but they provide chapters of levity by changing the dynamic with Hayato and the two main girls. Unfortunately, Rin is the only developed character among the entire cast, the rest of the cast mostly stays the same and never changes.

The two main girls

The art for the manga characters is quite good and it is a strong point of the series. Hayato is quite the good-looking guy, and the manga artists draw him well consistently. The focus of the manga is, of course, the girls. Both Ui and Rin have very distinctive designs, and the manga reflects them growing and changing. Rin especially, she is already the girl with the biggest bust in the series, and her figure gets even more impressive as the series develops. The manga starts off with simple character designs, and it gets more complex as the series goes further. It shows refinement and skill that happens when a manga artist consistently draws characters for so long. You can also feel the emphasis of the manga is squarely on fanservice, because the female figures are exquisitely drawn, where they have a distinct weight to them that feels more realistic than not. There are even running jokes throughout the entire manga of Rin's parts that break through the panels of the manga, with surprising efficacy. There are some character oddities as part of the art style, like why does Rin always keep her hair tied up even when she goes into a bath? Why are Makoto and Karen in chibi mode more often than not? The backgrounds are a weak point of the manga (as seen in all the photos posted here), it is just there. The manga takes place in the school and Hayato’s apartment, so the backgrounds are secondary to everything, and it shows. There are some instances where the background is not even there, just a highly gorgeous drawing of one of the cast members with screentone or two. The manga’s strong point is the gorgeous character designs, but its weak point is everything that is not the main characters.

A story pieces the entire manga together, it gives a sense of continuity and develops the cast within their world. There are so many plot holes and continuity issues with the manga. For example, early in the series, the student council is planning for a pool event, it takes multiple chapters, then the following chapter in this event is complete with only photos and flashbacks about the event. The manga artist also aborted story arcs such as Rin being another childhood friend. They mention it several times, implied it with Rin being a little more lenient with Hayato’s sexual harassment, then it never goes further. We also never get canon birthdays for the characters, measurements, and other things to flesh them out beyond what we see in the manga. It makes sense on some level that the world happens, there is a lot of events that occur, and we the reader only see small glimpses of their regular life, particularly the sexual interactions between Hayato, Ui, and Rin. This leads the readers to not connect so much with the characters and the story but be voyeurs who seem to jump in when the main guy does morally questionable things to the two females vying for his affection. The story is unfortunately weak, the easiest way to compartmentalize everything is that it is a slice of life, but even then, there are too many aborted arcs and continuity issues. Skipping around the storyline with seemingly inexplicable jumps hurt the manga more than helped it.

Rin gets a LOT of fanservice

When it comes to fanservice, there isn't much to say except there is a lot of it. There is a reason why it was the first series to get censored in Monthly Comic Rex. Even censored, the series is definitely one of the raciest manga out there. The manga has moments where it is light or does not have nudity in a chapter, but even then, there are copious in-your-face panty shots and shots of various character's body parts, especially Rin. The big reason is that the too-tight clothes the female school students wear emphasize their chest curves, and the too-short skirts make it easy for gratuitous panty shots. It is definitely not in the realm of commonsense design and comfortable school uniforms. It is a pity the female cast rarely appear outside of their school uniforms in the manga because they are all eye-catching with normal clothes. The main character, Hayato also seems to use colorful language to describe when he is sexually harassing the female cast. An interesting thing to note, even if Rin and Ui are the designated fanservice characters, Rin does not have many nude scenes until near the end of the series.

There is no way to talk about a manga review of Okusama ga Seito Kaichou without talking about the 200-lb gorilla in the room, Rin Misumi. When the manga artist introduced her in the middle of volume 1 of the manga, it is quite clear that her role was strictly as the rival and one of the fanservice girls. Interestingly, while Rin had many fanservice scenes in the first four volumes, the number of fanservice and nude scenes was less than Ui. While she was a busty fanservice character, she surprisingly was not the fanservice focus at the beginning of the series. At the same time something interesting started to happen, Rin started getting increased focused chapters around her. We do not know what happened behind the scenes to cause this, whether it is editor intervention telling the manga artist to focus on the more popular character, or the manga artist realizing that Ui could not carry the manga on her own. Whatever happened, Rin moved from being a rival character and main character who appeared every once in a blue moon to becoming THE main character. From volume 5 onwards, Rin became the undisputed central character and was starring role in several story arcs. She dominated the manga so much that Ui disappeared from the manga pages, only reemerging every once in a blue moon to remind the audience that she exists. This is also prevalent when looking at the anime adaptation, where season 1 and especially season 2 dropped so many Rin parts in the adaptation and yet she completely dominated the anime adaptation. Pivoting to Rin as the main character made people like me who like her character and greatly prefer her over Ui very happy. For people with that perspective, we think that her becoming a central focus "greatly improved" or "enhanced" a flawed series. There is also a vocal group of people who were unhappy with the pivot and blame Rin for “ruining” the series.

In the end, I would hesitate to recommend the manga. It has not aged that well at all. The manga has some big strengths such as the gorgeous character designs and Rin Misumi’s character. There are some big weaknesses such as the lack of backgrounds, continuity issues, aborted story arcs, and the side characters who have way more screen time than they should have gotten. If a person likes Ui as a character, they will not be happy with how the story develops since Rin sidelines her hard and makes her a minor character. If a person likes Rin as a character, this manga is the best thing since sliced bread, until the last two chapters. I have to emphasize it if a person likes Rin as a character, the manga is amazing because it is rare that a character like her would take over a love triangle story. It really does boil down to which character you like, since that will determine whether you love this series, or you hate the series.

Links

Crunchyroll Site

Manga JPN Site

Official Anime Site

Official Anime Twitter

Official Manga Artist Twitter
Okusama Wikipedia Page
Okusama ANN Portal

Rin Misumi MAL Profile

Review of OSK Season 1 (Anime)

Why no North American License?

I will be honest, this kind of surprised me that the manga never got licensed for North America. Since it is guaranteed to be a huge seller since it had two anime seasons. This is purely speculation on my part, but I am assuming several things are holding back the manga from getting licensed. The first one is a high school setting, with students in high school being sexualized. That is a big no-no and will cause unnecessary controversy. Whatever Hayato does to Ui and Rin will get a lot of wrong attention for whoever licenses it. The second one is that since it got two seasons of anime, Ichijinsha, the publisher likely asked for quite a premium for licensing the manga. A manga company knows that anime productions get increased notice overseas, this means that they can command a premium on licenses. A third reason is that even for an ecchi series, this manga is very racy. It will definitely need to get shrink-wrapped to get in Barnes and Noble and there will definitely be lots of parents complaining when someone takes off the shrink wrap and a minor found the manga. Finally, this manga is old, the value of a manga, unfortunately, decreases greatly when it ends. There is less chance for another season of anime and there is no "new" material to sell. 

Of course, it could easily get licensed in the future and my speculation is moot, but as of review time, it is not licensed.

Manga Cast (In JPN Order)

Main Characters

Izumi Hayato 和泉 隼人

Wakana Ui  若菜 羽衣

Misumi Rin 三隅 倫

Secondary Cast

Niikura Akane 新倉 あやね

Fujisaki Karen 藤咲 可憐

Misumi Kei 三隅 慧

Sawatari Matoko 猿渡 真都

Saijou Honoka 西条ほのか

Ikoma Kenta