Yomeiro Choice is all about excuses.
Sakuraga finds excuses to ditch girls and avoid relationships. His female friends find excuses to spend time with him and/or avoid confronting their own feelings. His time-traveling future daughters (yes, that’s right) try to find excuses for him to get their mothers teen pregnant in the present. Mangaka Tenkla uses this improbable setup to justify a ream of fanservice and visual gags.
While we’ve seen time-traveling daughters before in manga such as Little Jumpers, there at least the father-daughter attraction was largely kept at bay as an uncomfortable possibility, a consummation devoutly to be avoided. In Yumeiro Choice, there is none of that: the daughters openly strip not only their mothers but themselves, pandering to Sakuraga in every conceivable way.
At first this seems explainable by their desperation – if sex doesn’t happen between the main character and their mothers, they will be retroactively wiped out of existence – but it quickly becomes painfully evident that this is only a paper-thin excuse for the exploitation to take place. There is no serious approach to incest, as might be found in works like Koi Kaze. Instead it’s all about putting a high school boy together with a harem of willing, underage lolis who happen to be his descendants.
I think “sick” is the word we’re looking for, and not in its vernacular sense of “excellent.” I can only describe Yomeiro Choice‘s target audience as, “those who think rape is somehow inherently funny.” When a manga devotes several panels to a daughter’s attempt to take advantage of her sleeping father after first inserting a contraceptive device in her anatomy, all so she can get a sperm sample and then implant it in her mother sleeping up the hall, we’ve clearly taken a sharp detour from reason and taste. Worst of all, it’s not clever or funny, merely tired and crass.
True, father-daughter incest rape is present at some of the oldest levels of literature – in the Bible, Lot’s daughters got him drunk and had their way with him – but there it is the direct result of twisted duty rather than desire. Yomeiro Choice goes far afield of its initial premise of survival, as the sex-obsessed daughters eclipse their mothers. Ultimately their obsession with their father is something out of wild, Freudian fantasy rather than any simple matter of self-preservation.
For all the ruthlessness of the women in Yomeiro Choice, the story never seriously addresses why they don’t simply go for the most obvious solution: Sakuraga could simply father all three future daughters out of wedlock. Monogamous love is presented as a barrier to this, but since his spawn can be coldly amoral about sex to the point of actively fomenting the rape of their own mothers, the asides about “love” seem at best lip service and at worst hollow jokes which consciously underscore the fact that love has little to do with any of this. Random visual gags that add nothing to the story occur with equal frequency, so perhaps the true point of it is to disillusion the reader about love, instead offering sex and desperation as the prime motivators in relationships between men and women.
Yomeiro Choice attempts to redeem its trashiness by presenting itself as a story about how choices have consequences. Take this lesson, and choose to not read it.