Please Put Them On, Takamine-san Vol. 1 Review – Not All Ecchi

Within the first few pages of Please Put Them On, Takamine-san Vol. 1, I can say that I wasn’t all too interested in the relationship between the two main characters. For starters, the main protagonist Koushi Shirota spends the first few pages putting himself down several times before ending up on top of a very naked school president. However, within this first volume, I ended up quite enjoying the underlining themes of an otherwise pure ecchi manga.

Shirota is nothing special, and no one really even likes him. His grades are dipping, and he regularly hangs out by himself. One day, he hid in a storage unit for lunch when the school president Takane Takamine appears and changes, exposing her breasts to a confused Shiota.

This is where things get interesting. Takamine is the perfect student. She excels in every subject, and she is the prettiest girl at the school to top it off. However, she has just scored a 98 on her test, which is not natural, but the confusion continues when Shirota witnesses her take off her underwear in class, which causes a deja vu effect, and the teacher reads her score as 100.

Now, Shirota approaches Takamine in the student council room about this, and we see a complete shift in her mood. She turns into an ego-filled princess who has commanded that Shirota now become her human closet. You see, she has the power to undo events that she has committed by removing a piece of her underwear. The underwear disappears after this, but she can correct her mistakes whenever she wants.

Shirota will have to carry around her underwear and put them on her every time she uses her power to do it whenever she wants. However, it is an enormous tease and almost manipulative to the point where you feel bad for Shirota but can’t help but follow how he will take on this challenge. Sure, he fights back, but she has some dirt on him that could ruin his life. Yes, the reason he’s helping is that he’s being blackmailed.

Please Put Them On, Takamine-san Vol. 1 could have been a simple ecchi manga. I mean, putting some boobs on a few panels is enough to hold my attention sometimes, but I won’t feel compelled to talk about it afterward. Instead, you want to talk about this story after the tension that Takamine brings to Shirota’s life and the weird symbiotic relationship that they potentially develop. It’s almost like you feel bad for Takamine more than Shirota, even though he’s the one being tortured.

The illustrations are amazing and not just because Takamine has what could be the most attractive naked body in manga to date. There is just a great sense of motion and placement in the panels that give you a great understanding of where these characters are at all times. They really capture the zaniness and haphazard nature of some of the more tense scenes.

Please Put Them On, Takamine-san Vol. 1 is not your typical ecchi manga. It definitely borderlines on it, though. If it weren’t for this weird dynamic between these characters, you could easily write this one-off. However, I enjoyed Takamine’s thought process while also following how Shirota will react to the terrible situations she puts him in. I hope they lean away from this idea that Shirota is just a self-deprecating nobody; it’s a trope that has become used too often.