Dec 30, 2025
This may not be the mainstream view, but the essence of this work lies in how it teaches us that irony, more than anything else, can be gentle and compassionate. Anyone who loves something yet feels guilty about that love is precisely the kind of person who should read this.
As has been mentioned countless times, in “SZS” every subject becomes a target for criticism or sarcasm. A lot of the references won't click unless you're familiar with Japanese culture. As Kumeda mentions in the afterword of the final volume, he drew this work intending to satirize harem manga. The oddly love-struck female students surrounding Nozomu
...
are deliberately portrayed that way.
By the way, I'm a typical otaku who absolutely loves harem stories. So logically speaking, it wouldn't be weird if I was pissed off. But honestly, when I was reading this work, I felt way more comfortable than I usually do when reading “harem stories.”
That's because "SZS", every target is subjected to criticism and sarcasm, and even that criticism and sarcasm itself is parodied. The targets extend to the characters, the readers, and even the author. Within the world of “SZS” even my ‘ridiculous’ harem preferences and the criticism directed at them are encompassed within the parody. Since everything is parody, neither your existence nor mine, nor our tastes, matter at all.
Now, I wrote with a “surrealism is secondary” approach, but of course the quality is undeniably high. Let me give a concrete example.
Depicting Shinzo Abe as a dog-like figure is a parody of how he's often mocked as America's “lapdog” . Nozomu regretting his participation in student protests mocks the tendency among Japan's elite students to glorify hippie-like liberalism and Californian ideology during their university years.
Does this explanation convey to non-Japanese readers how the satire in this work targets every direction? The beauty of SZS is that by mocking everything, you can laugh freely at any ideology without reservation.
Reviewer’s Rating: 9
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