When fappable girls came out of the TV.
This is going to be the start of a multi-part series of ecchi series that ran in the most popular manga magazine Weekly Shounen Jump. While there have been no shortage of ecchi that have appeared in the manga there have been only five that have been successful. I’m defining this as having over 100 chapters and nipples appearing in the manga on a consistent basis. Those five are Video Girl Ai, I”s, To Love Ru, Yuuna and the Haunted Hot Springs and Ayakashi Triangle. Some of these series have already been covered and made into compilations so I’ll ignore them.
Weekly Shounen Jump is the most popular manga magazine that runs in Japan. The most successful manga that tend to make piles of cash appear here. Unfortunately, it is also the primary choice for slack-jawed halfwits with no brains that spend inordinate amounts of time arguing over which fictional character’s dick is the biggest and thus can mushroom stamp other characters with 0 difficulty. However, there has been shown time and again that there is an appetite for nudity as well. The author of the manga also takes the opportunity to make fun of these people in his works.
Video Girl Ai has the privilege of being the first to rise to this success. It was written by the chad Masakazu Katsura. He would have two other manga that ran in Weekly Shounen Jump: DNA2 and I”s. I”s would go on to the same success while DNA2 would fall short.
The six episode OVA covers the first 20 chapters of the manga. It’s primarily a romance story that centers around the protagonist Youta and a girl that is created from a VHS tape. VHS is antiquated boomer tech. These VHS tapes are created by a cabal of guys that have magical powers…I think. This part of the story is never well defined, especially since the author is convinced that VHS can run for 3 months continuously. Also a glitch that occurs when Youta plays the tape causes Ai’s breasts to shrink, a point she is super angry about.
According to the statistics pulled from jajanken.com the series averaged a spot of 12.79 in the table of contents (not to be confused with popularity or ranking) but kept it safe from the axe. However, it did keep it safe from the back part of the magazine which is axe central. Video Girl Ai concluded it’s run in 1992 with chapter 116, but was followed up by a short serial of Video Girl Len which didn’t last too long at all. A one shot of Video Girl Ai was also published in 2018, but nothing more came from that.
