THIS REVIEW MAY CONTAIN SPOILERS. I will try to be as oblique as possible, but if you correctly guess who or what I am talking about, that's your own damn fault.

Hot Gimmick is all right. It's not a particularly good manga by any stretch of the imagination, but it's not an offensively horrible one either. The art isn't bad, it's actually pretty good, albeit uninspired. The story is rather standard Soap Opera fare, and I mean that in the most positive way possible. It is ostensibly about Hatsumi, our intrepid heroine, but throughout the series we see her will subverted by the male lead(s). However, my issue isn't that she isn't a strong or willful character, because I can still say, "Well, at least she isn't flat." And she really isn't. There is some small amount of depth to this character. She has internal conflicts and drama. It's everyone else I don't like.

All of the men in this make me feel incredibly uncomfortable. Like, reading this, I can't help but feel like the mangaka was sexually assaulted at a relatively young age, or perhaps knows someone who was. All of the guys in this are either so transparently evil you can practically see them twirling their moustaches, totally ineffectual, willfully ignorant of what Hatsumi really wants in favor of whatever the hell it is THEY want, obsessed with sex, on the autism spectrum, or some combination of these things.

For instance, let's take Ryoki, Hatsumi's "slave master." Aihara-sensei spends the entire series trying to convince us that he does have feelings for her. But I just don't buy it one bit. All he cares about his own gratification, he spends so much time actively trying to make her suffer. And when he isn't doing so intentionally, it's because he really doesn't understand anything about how Hatsumi thinks and feels, or any other human being for that matter. But what makes me even more frustrated with his character is that despite the fact that he's so easy to read, Hatsumi can't understand anything about him or his worldview either! Is assholishness really so foreign a concept that the average Japanese high school girl can't wrap her head around it?

Then there's Azusa. He's an okay character, I guess. You might actually enjoy reading about him. Y'know, if you're stupid. I don't want to give anything specific away--even though I'm very clearly recommending you not read this manga--but there's a part very early on in the series where he does something pretty awful, and the entire rest of the series we're led to believe he's an okay guy. No, he's not. He's a jerkass, and this "ends justify the means" bullshit isn't gonna fly here. "Oh, he had a really tortured past, he can't help but be bad." You know who else had a really tortured past? Adolf Hitler. There, I said it. Godwin's law can go to hell.

So, is Hot Gimmick good? No. Is it bad? ...No? I wanna say it's a horrible train wreck nobody should ever read, but the plotline, standard and predictable as it is, was fairly entertaining throughout most of it. There were some plot elements that seemed like they were shoehorned in ("WOW WHAT A TWIST! I CERTAINLY DIDN'T SEE THAT COMING" "Of course not, because it wasn't set up in any way shape or form and really just came out of nowhere"). So, while I can't say that I hated it, I also can't say that I'd recommend this to anyone. Maybe if you're thirteen years old. I mean, that's how old I was when I originally read it, and I really seemed to enjoy it back then. But as is true of a lot of things I liked back then, it cannot withstand the harsh light of day being shined upon it.