On her eighteenth birthday, Akao tells his daughter Kurone that they aren't actually related by blood, with her mother having an affair and abandoning them shortly after she was born. Looking nothing at all like her father, Kurone had suspected this and is not at all shocked by the news. However, this revelation leads to her becoming more sexually forward with her apparently adoptive father, causing Akao to confront his complicated feelings around his and Kurone's relationship as well as his undeniable attraction to her…

It's Not Like We're Related has story by and art by Zonebell Tsukiji. English translation is done by David Goldberg. Lettering is done by Joven Voon. Published by J18 (September 23, 2026). Rated M.

Lucas DeRuyter
Rating:

Because my life is ridiculous and I've decided to just steer into the skid at this point, I've had a lot of conversations about incest in personal and professional settings, and it bothers me how often the crux of the taboo is placed on two people or characters having the same genetic background. Like, two people hooking up after spending their entire lives being socialized to have a familiar relationship feels more wrong and uncomfortable to me than, say, two people who hook up and later discover they have an overlapping ancestry. Don't get me wrong, the latter couple should still have some difficult discussions about their relationship, especially if they have the ability to procreate, but the latter scenario feels more weird and unfortunate than it does taboo.

Zonebell Tsukiji's It's Not Like We're Related explores this social incongruity, as well as the Electra complex (the Father-Daughter version of the Oedipus complex), with the result feeling like a very hot hentai but also a work of psychosexual horror.

Beginning with forty-something-year-old Akao informing his newly eighteen-year-old daughter Kurone that he isn't her biological father via her absent mother's affair, the work quickly transitions into Kurone trying to hook up with her adoptive father at any and every opportunity. These hookups are VERY raunchy thanks in large part to Kurone's terrific design, some very steamy dialogue that's translated affectingly by David Goldberg, and how Joven Voon's lettering and even Tsukiji's original speech bubbles warp to drive home the passion of the moment. However, Akao is wracked with guilt during all of these steamy moments, both about the life he could have lived if he had not raised Kurone and about being physically intimate with the woman he raised as his daughter for the past two decades.

This is a very specific and heavy tension for a work that opens with an illustration of the female lead holding a condom between her teeth, and I'm not sure that it works for me. It would help if there were more resolution to Akao's guilt, but as it stands, the assurances that Kurone gives largely boil down to “I consent to having sex with you, and it's cool because we aren't blood relatives.” Furthermore, while I understand that all of the flashbacks to Kurone as an infant and young child were meant to reinforce the taboo of their intimacy and express Akao's processing of his feelings, this juxtaposition felt more discordant than anything else.

While It's Not Like We're Related is certainly a competent and affecting work, it left me feeling more uncomfortable than anything else, and I'm not sure if that was the author's intent.

Bolts
Rating:

This might be one of the most wholesome takes on this taboo that I think I've seen in a long time. What you see is what you get with a title like It's Not Like We're Related, telling the story of a single father getting it on with his eighteen-year-old daughter, who is not related to him by blood. After the initial setup, I thought the story was gonna go right into the obligatory sex scene, and that was it. Make no mistake, the sex in this story is incredibly titillating, with a lot of shouting and primal positions taking over. Everything is framed like a lid has finally been opened after years of suppression, but not only does that reflect how hot the sex scenes are, it actually serves a narrative purpose because this story goes to great lengths to emotionally root the relationship between this father and their daughter.

There are a few flashbacks here establishing why the father needed to take care of this girl all by himself, the complicated feelings that came with it, and the strength that it took to do what he did. Given the circumstances, I also do want to praise him, and, interestingly, the story frames him having sex with his daughter almost like a reward for how hard he worked. It doesn't make me think that the taboo should be legitimized outside of role-play or fantasy purposes, but I weirdly felt the emotional connection between these two as they were giving in to each other. This is still clearly a wish-fulfilling fantasy that is not supposed to be taken seriously, but I respect how seriously the characters treat the situation. It almost feels like the writer wanted to at least try to leave an impact on the reader with such a weird premise. If you have a daddy/little girl fetish or like exploring the classic porn trope of family members getting it on when they're not blood-related, then I think this might be one of the best examples of that setup that I have seen.