Is It Wrong To Sleep With My Best Friend’s Boyfriend…? Review

Errr… so I’m not a big fan of the cheating trope. But this manga has a lot of 5 star reviews on manga renta. It showed up in my “related” list all the time. So I finally bit the bullet to see what makes this title so revered.

Hmm… I have mixed feelings on it. This is like a manga where everyone is an asshole and gets their just desserts. Except for Natsuki. She’s the only non-guilty party, and I feel bad for her having such shitty people in her life.

But, to answer the question of the title, she actually doesn’t sleep with her best friend’s boyfriend.

Let’s draw a polygon~!

Hinata is the main character. She is in love with Tohru. Tohru is dating her best friend, Natsuki.

Tohru’s best friend is Shuuji. Shuuji is in love with Natsuki.

–what, it’s a square? Fiiineee.

Hinata likes Tohru because he was nice to her. That’s literally the only reason. She’s not confident, he compliments her a bit, she has a crush on him.

So Hinata has some time to blow before class one day. “I should go to the building over there to kill some time.”

What kind of building is it? Why do you like to kill time there?

It doesn’t matter, this existed entirely so she could see Tohru ramming his mini-Tohru into some girl in an empty lecture hall. She watches him and his “sex friend” for a bit and then runs away.

She runs into Shuuji. She’s surprisingly honest with him and tells him what happened and how she likes Tohru. “I thought, just for a moment… I thought I could get closer to him… if we had a relationship like that.”

Shuuji seems nonplussed about this, so he most likely already knew about Tohru’s wandering tendencies. He asks if she wants to be Tohru’s sex friend, and Hinata says she does. He tells her to steal him away from Natsuki. She tries to play the moral card about how she’s going to keep it in her heart, but he tells her that she shouldn’t let a chance like that just fall out of her lap and kisses her.

She’s like wtfff are you doing?! but he tells her that unless she listens he’s going to tell Natsuki and Tohru what she just told him. Yeeeaaap, blackmail. He learns she’s a virgin and doesn’t care (why is a virgin wanting to be a sex friend in the first place) and starts fingering her. She doesn’t resist at all, which kinda irks me, but whatever. While he’s fingering her she asks him why he’s doing this and he tells her he likes Natsuki and they should break them up together to get who they want.

And that’s the end of chapter one.

This is an odd mix of teacher/student and netorare-lite blackmail. In the next chapters, he basically escalates things in an odd sequence. Doesn’t take virginity yet, but sticks a remote-controlled vibe up her hoohah (while she’s alone with Tohru). Isn’t that — err– I mean, sure she’s probably used tampons, but it seems weird to me for them to do that first. When  with Tohru, he gropes her in his sleep (uhh what?!) and when he wakes up he’s like “Oh shit you’re not Natsuki” and she goes “But uhh I’m okay with that” and nothing happens? He just goes on with his business. Then Shuuji forces her to give him oral sex and when Tohru walks in on them, she runs away in embarrassment. Tohru makes a snide comment to which Shuuji responds in kind.

Aren’t they supposed to be best friends? Every time we see them alone they’re being assholes to each other. And why are they basically not acknowledging what’s going on?

Anyway, they go on a trip to a hot spring and Shuuji forces her to give him her virginity. Sometime after this he decides he actually loves her.

He gives her some sob story about Tohru stealing his girlfriend. But then in the same breath says he has no real proof.

So… what? Why is this even a topic? Tohru sleeps around on Natsuki with everyone except Hinata, apparently, so why are you trying to villainize him more?

But Shuuji continues to be an asshole. He calls Natsuki and tells her that Tohru is in the building where Hinata caught him doing that girl and Hinata steers her away from it because she doesn’t want her to see it. Then Hinata goes to check it out herself and finds Shuuji there.

He sexes her and during it she calls out Tohru’s name which is a complete boner-killer for him, and he declares that she’s more than ready to be his sex friend if she can call his name out while with another man. He’s also upset because he hoped she’d fallen in love with him.

You blackmailed her. Practically raped her multiple times, and actually raped her to take her virginity.

And you can’t figure out why she doesn’t love you?

And that’s it. It doesn’t have an ending. Will I ever learn if Natsuki finds out the truth and cuts those assholes out of her life? Nope. 😐

On a technical level, the panels aren’t laid out very well and some scenes need room to breathe. Or even plotted properly.

Yeah, Hinata is a horrible person for wanting to steal her best friend’s boyfriend, but she doesn’t deserve what happens.

I have no clue why people gave this five stars. The steamy scenes aren’t even good, tossing aside the actual premise of them, they’re not titillating. There’s better drawn and portrayed series out there. Are you wanting a bdsm-type relationship of clearly defined dominant and submissive characters? There’s a lot of those out there that do it without the raping cheating stuff. I just don’t know, I just don’t know.

 

Rating: For Natsuki’s sake, not for the series itself.

 

Here’s my ending:

No one knows what happened to Tohru because who gives a shit about that asshole. Maybe he gets the shit beat out of him after all the women he sleeps around with gang up together to give him justice.

Hinata and Shuuji end up together at the end because she’s been mind-scarred to the point she somehow believes Shuuji is actually Tohru and in her fragile mind she’s happy. Shuuji continues to believe someday she’ll actually realize he’s not Tohru but spends his life trying to imitate Tohru to keep the illusion up.

Natsuki meets Chiaki, a billionaire butler prince, and lives happily ever after, never talking to any of the others ever again.