Manga / Booty Royale: Never Go Down Without a Fight!

Booty Royale: Never Go Down Without a Fight! (はぐれアイドル地獄変 Hagure Idol: Jigoku-hen), by Rui Takato, is the story of Misora Haebaru, an 18-year-old karate expert from Okinawa who went to Tokyo to enter the entertainment industry in hopes of supporting her family. She gets tricked into being a gravure idol who wears lewd clothing and is forced eventually to enter the AV world, but she won't go down without a fight.

The manga, best described as part Fighting Series, part Slice of Life Work Comedy about the Japanese adult entertainment industry (with all the ecchi content that entails and then some), began serialization in Bessatsu Manga Goraku in 2014, though it was moved to Manga Goraku Special in 2015 and ran there until its conclusion in 2022. It was licensed by Seven Seas Entertainment in December 2020, who chose to release them under their Ghost Ship label in omnibus collections of two volumes each, with the first one released in July 2021.

A live-action film adaptation directed by Tsuyoshi Shoji and starring Rina Hashimoto as Misora premiered in Japan on 12 September 2020.

---

General Tropes:

• Action Mom:
  • Goujima Sara, who is a capoeirista in addition to a porn star, is revealed to have an infant son in chapter 22.
  • Recurring boxer Laila Mendez has twin babies.
• All Men Are Perverts: Men cannot keep it in their pants when around Misora or any other model. Pretty much every male character is a pervert at best, or a rapist at worst.
• All Women Are Lustful: Just because men are perverts, it doesn't mean women aren't the same. Sara Goujima is a porn star and martial artist, and she certainly lives for both fighting and sex. Maria Luisa openly admits she banged at least 20 people after her fight. Misora also has a high sex drive that she attributes to her physically active lifestyle, and feels is very inappropriate of a lady.
• Amazonian Beauty:
  • Misora is tall, muscular, and utterly stacked. No wonder she's the Lust Object of both men and women. And she's not the only one. Exploited in the Tournament Arc: she goes onstage in various Stripperiffic outfits in keeping with the fact she's also a gravure model, and uses her superior height, strength, and mass to her advantage against her first two opponents: caught in a triangle choke by MMA fighter Airi, Misora throws the other woman over her, knocking her senseless.
  • Nosaka is 20 year old female Yokozuna, making her the youngest woman to ever attain to title and she has the physique to show for it. She has clearly defined abs, biceps, thigh and calf muscles; making her a borderline BBW and hot enough that she earned a spot as part of Japan's "Second Generation KGB".
  • Mao Mao is an even better example. Whereas Misora is somewhat muscular, Mao Mao is straight-up ripped.
• Arrogant Kung-Fu Guy: More than one participant of the tournament expresses a lot of confidence in their skills. It usually leads to a Break the Haughty moment.
• Ascended Fangirl: In chapter 52, women's Sumo Wrestler Nosaka Nagisa tries out for the cast's modeling agency to be the "G" in Japan KGB Second Generation in hopes of getting to one day have a sumo match with only a mawashi on like male rikishi, having wanted to be like them and get to show skin since she was a toddler. In a brief fourth-wall break, mangaka Rui Takato explicitly likens this to having joined his middle school's archery club due to enjoying Saint Seiya.
• Attempted Rape: It has happened to Misora (and other women too), more than once whenever a creep thinks they have her in her grasp. They regret it every time.
• B-Movie: In-Universe, Fist of the Tokyo She-Beast, a fanservice-laden martial arts action movie that Iba films with Misora and Chae Yun-Hui as respectively the lead and villainess. It reportedly gets mixed reviews: good action, lousy acting.
• Battle Strip: Inspired by Misora's exhibitionism and in order to keep the crowd wild, other fighters decide to fight in what would be generously called micro-bikinis.
• Beauty Is Never Tarnished: Misora and several other fighters get pretty beaten up, only to go back to normal in the span of barely a few weeks.
• Became Their Own Antithesis: Toro Samon started off as a sleazebag antagonist who used his family's power to sleep with any female entertainer he fancied. He fell in Love at First Sight with Eve, an African woman, and chose to win her genuine affection on his own merits, wanting to make love to her rather than seeing her as a conquest. He fights her in a Dambe match and manages to win when she strikes him with her left hand. After her match, he has been respectful enough that she respects him. Finally, his reaction to meeting Misora again has him genuinely thank her for sending him overseas, where he met the most amazing woman ever (Eve), whereas he was cursing her for it when he first left.
• The Bet: The first story arc puts Misora in a hundred-man kumite: i.e. she has to defeat 100 male fighters in succession. She wins, she gets to sing on camera and achieve her dream of being a pop singer. She loses, and the man who beat her (and likely several of the others) gets to have sex with her on camera. She wins after beating 50 men and Sara (the others run for it after that), but she's still stuck as a gravure model afterward because she turns out to be a comically bad singer.
• Beware the Nice Ones:
  • Misora is most of the time a friendly and even shy girl that's easily embarrassed, but get her truly angry and you'll see why she's a master of Okinawa Karate.
  • Same with Luna Khan. She's a very nice and friendly person with a love for women's bodies, but you don't want to fight her when truly serious.
• Bi-Wildered: Misora thought she was straight for most of her life, and when she ends up Friends with Benefits with Akira she initially doesn't think it really counts. Eventually, though, she realizes she's actively fallen in love with the other woman.
• Black Comedy Rape: Misora ends up molested by an anteater of all animals, who shoves its tongue into her... private place.
• Body Sushi: Played for laughs in chapter 15, the start of the Fist of the Tokyo She-Beast arc. A slightly tipsy Goujima Sara gets grumpy with Misora at the launch party and challenges her to a fight; loser has to be a nude sushi platter. Misora understandably refuses, Sara attacks her anyway and is taken down in nothing flat, and pays up.
• Bollywood Nerd: Luna Khan is an Indian woman who works for an IT company. She also happens to be a master of the ancient martial art Kalaripayattu.
• Boob-Based Gag:
  • Misora is officially a K-cup: her breasts have never actually stopped growing, so she's marketed as a K-cup but they've actually gone all the way up to M by the semifinals of the Tournament Arc. In one chapter she gets a gig to smash a watermelon with only her breasts for a variety show act, and succeeds—much to her relief, since she took the job to get an endorsement deal for a brand of imported sports bras that actually fit her.
  • Before their match in the round of 16 to decide B-bracket for the Tournament Arc, Maria Luisa Riviera and Veronica Lin trade some trash talk over their respective endowments.
    Maria: Wow, just what you'd expect from a pro wrestler. Store-bought boobs and steroid muscles! They look so hard!
    Veronica: Ha! I don't want to hear that from a brat with a bigger ass than tits.
    Maria: (shakes said ass at her) That's thanks to samba.
• Brains and Bondage: Goujima Sara is known for her work in extreme hardcore porn, mostly as a top. Off-camera, she's a high-achieving university sciences major, real name Kojima Akiko.
• Bullying a Dragon:
  • A Private Detective named Tachio hired by Dr. Ikezaki tries to blackmail agency president Sanada over some Hollywood Accounting he's apparently doing with some members of his former gang (one assumes he's looking for a way to compromise Misora, given Ikezaki's beef with her). Sanada takes him out back and beats the crap out of him, because as it turns out, trying to blackmail an ex-gangster is a very dumb idea.
  • Despite knowing her strength as a judo champion, Naomi Shapiro thought she could ambush Alevtina in the restroom, only for Tina to smash her against the floor in self-defense.
• Bust-Contrast Duo: Trio, actually. Somewhere along the line, the agency starts marketing Misora and two of her fellow models as a trio called "Japan KGB"—the "KGB" meaning their cup sizes: Misora is the K, her girlfriend Akira is the G, and professional loli Beruko is the B. In a side trip away from the Tournament Arc, they start doing auditions for a new trio, "Japan KGB Second Generation", and end up with trans woman Miya Nekomiya as the B, sumo wrestler Nosaka Nagisa as the G, and their longtime model Utako as the K.
• Buxom Beauty Standard: Discussed. Some middle school students in the Greek Chorus debate the relative merits of Utako versus Misora in Extra Chapter 2. The female class rep comes to Misora's defense: Misora being over 25 centimeters taller and having darker skin means that Utako looks bustier by comparison, but then notes that Misora's Amazonian Beauty means she scratches different itches compared to the girlier Utako.
• Camping a Crapper:
  • A yakuza hitman hired by Dr. Gensuke ambushes Misora in a public restroom.
  • Naomi Shapiro tries to be a Combat Pragmatist and scare Alevtina Guseva in the restroom before their match to give herself an easier time. Alevtina ambushes her and knocks her senseless.
• Charles Atlas Superpower: Misora is the daughter of a karate master, and he trained her from birth everything he knew. As such, she is a shockingly powerful fighter, able to knock out opponents twice her size, and endure physical punishment that would fold lesser mortals.
• Chivalrous Pervert: Iba is a recurring titty-flick director and Amazon Chaser who once spends a night in jail after filming Misora and Chae Yun-Hui sparring naked in an outdoor bath—but the only reason he was caught was that he rushed in to check if they were all right after the match ended in a Double Knockout. He also knows quite a lot about martial arts and starts giving Misora pointers about her potential opponents' fighting styles during the Tournament Arc.
• Closet Key: Misora develops a Friends with Benefits relationship with her fellow model, Akira, but the former insists that they're not having "sex," and she's therefore still a virgin. It takes some soul-searching, but eventually, Misora ultimately admits that Akira is her girlfriend and that she lost her virginity to her.
• Combat Pragmatist:
  • Mika Kujioka compensates the shortcomings of her martial art style and lack of body mass with sheer pragmatism. She tells Nasstaja Ibrahimov that she'll win with a single punch, and uses it to break one of Ibrahimov's ribs so that it skewers her kidney, which a couple chapters later forces her to withdraw.
  • The match between Russian samboist Olga Zelenskaya and Filipino silat user Michelle Batista is a case study in this, since both of them are hand-to-hand combat trainers for their respective countries' militaries. Batista flouts the tournament rules with strikes to Zelenskaya's groin and jamming her fingers into her nose during a grapple. Zelenskaya responds by deliberately breaking Batista's arm, figuring that if she maintained the grapple Batista would likely start biting chunks out of her arm.
  • This is a requirement of Maomao's primary art lethwei, an extreme form of muay thai where professional matches only end in a knockout. Examples:
    • In her round of 16 match, she fakes submission to get an opening against Nosaka Nagisa when the rikishi gets her in a grapple, tapping her body and whispering "I give", then delivering an uppercut to the chin when Nagisa releases her. The ref is on the wrong side of her and doesn't see it, and Maomao goes on to win by knockout, with Nagisa apparently taking too many blows to the head to remember Maomao cheating.
    • Dorothea von Schrier tries to have a rematch with her in the parking lot. Maomao's opening move is to throw her overnight bag into von Schrier's face to distract from her attack rush.
  • Chae Yun-Hui doesn't have a problem deliberately breaking human opponents' bones, and tries to even the odds in her Flesh Versus Steel match against Sigrun the robot by throwing her shirt over its head.
• Covered in Scars: Mao Mao has her body covered in scars due to her Dark and Troubled Past in Myanmar.
• Covert Pervert: Zig-zagged. Misora doesn’t like being naked around people and leered at, but deep down she has an exhibitionist fetish, which she feels ashamed of.
• Curb-Stomp Battle:
  • Veronica Lin utterly trounces Elena Silva during their match, with Silva comparing it to being hit by a truck.
  • Luna Karn easily beats both her first opponents, with the second one being unable to even touch her before being overwhelmed.
• David vs. Goliath:
  • Misora is tall and heavy for a woman: shee's nearly six feet tall, and according to chapter 41, she has 64 kilos of near-solid muscle, plus 7 kilos of boobs. In SAE units, she weighs 156 pounds, which means by UFC rules she's a welterweight and actually too heavy to compete in women's MMA, and this makes her a formidable opponent to other fighters in the Tournament Arc, few of whom can match her height. The one exception being the even larger Alevtina Guseva, her opponent in the final.
  • 168cm tall Maria Luisa Riviera vs 201cm tall Veronica Lin. Maria Luisa wins.
  • The 145cm tall Yin Xiao-Min faces the 187cm tall Alevtina Guseva, who probably triples her in weight during the World's Strongest Beautiful Women tournament. Alevtina barely wins.
• Dead All Along: In chapter 39, while doing custom-order private photoshoots in a rented apartment, Misora encounters a barely legal girl named Daidai Reon and starts exchanging text messages with her. It comes out that the manager of their agency (who has yakuza connections) doesn't let her out of the studio. The next morning, Misora goes to the manager in a rage... only for the baffled manager to explain that Reon hanged herself in that apartment a month ago after a porn shoot. Except it turns out to be a candid camera prank Misora's coworkers were playing on her for the TV station and the very-much-alive Reon was just a normal newbie they roped into it.
• Determinator: If you think Misora will just surrender after a beating, then you're in for a surprise when she shows her Heroic Willpower.
• Diabolus ex Machina: In the H-bracket qualifying round, police officer Kaneko Misao is scheduled to face Romanian boxer Diana Ionescu, when suddenly a friggin' robot drops out of the sky and punches out Ionescu. One of the tournament sponsors apparently built Sigrun with machine learning and leaned on the organizers to let them test it in the tournament; it goes on to easily beat both Kaneko and Chae Yun-Hui to become the quarterfinalist for H-bracket.
• Double Knockout: In chapter 18, while filming a B-grade action movie, Misora spars with Korean-American tae kwon do star Chae Yun-Hui in an outdoor bath because she's been having trouble figuring out how to handle the other woman's kick-centric fighting style. She ends up taking Yun-Hui's foot to the back of her head at the same time she lands a palm-strike to Yun-Hui's face, knocking the both of them senseless. On the plus side, once they regained consciousness they were able to finish do the fight scene properly. (Also the director secretly filmed them, ostensibly for a DVD extra.)
• Even Girls Want Her: Misora is apparently so sexually appealing, she has attracted the fancy of more than one girl, including Luna and Maria Luisa. Turns out to be mutual with Akira.
• Everybody Has Lots of Sex: It's not just Misora. Her fellow coworkers and even some fighters have been shown to have a pretty active sex life.
• Fan Disservice: Played for Drama with the Troubled Backstory Flashback to Yokuta Beruko's transition from being a "junior idol" (i.e. professional end-run around child pornography laws), to a teenage girl driven into eating disorders by desperation to keep her career, to the "forever loli" she is now. She's shown modeling as a preteen in a swimsuit so skimpy Misora would blush, followed by a shot of her full-frontal nude and so anorexic she looks like a skeleton with skin stretched over it.
• Fanservice Model: This series is almost entirely about the professional and personal lives of gravure idols, ranging from Akira, who mostly does swimsuit modeling, to Misora, who does "clothed porn" as the translator puts it.
• Forced Orgasm: Maria Luisa manages to choke Veronica Lin until she climaxes in defeat.
• Full-Frontal Assault: Misora has fought more than once barely dressed or even completely naked.
• Genre-Busting: Booty Royale is a Slice of Life/Work Com series at its core, except the protagonists are adult models and porn stars so it's also an ecchi Sex Comedy. It's also a Fighting Series, given that a significant chunk of the cast practice martial arts.
• Gentle Giant: Alevtina Guseva is huge, muscular, and an utter beast in a fight, but a pretty friendly person outside of it.
• The Glasses Come Off: Luna Khan and Alevtina Guseva take off their glasses when fighting.
• Hollywood Tone-Deaf: Misora hoped to use her idol career as a bridge to becoming a pop singer. Unfortunately for her, we learn the first time she does it that she can't carry a tune in a bucket.
• Incorruptible Pure Pureness: Utako Sarashin is so nice and pure, while in modeling sessions the photographers even try to cover her more, despite being a gravure idol.
• Instant Turn-Off: Sent by her agency to provide entertainment at a business party, Misora is rescued by a male counterpart, a young actor named Seno Kakeru, who brings her to an upstairs room at the hotel. They start making out, move to the bed, and she's pretty sure she's going to finally lose her virginity the way she wants... when he takes a pause to snort some cocaine. The moment ruined, she promptly punches his lights out in frustration and leaves. Then has to rub one out at home before she can get to sleep.
• It's Personal: For beating her friend Luna beyond what was necessary, Misora makes it her personal mission to beat Mika Kujiraoka.
• Killing Intent: Xiao-Min's teacher Cybele Rou gives one to Alevtina after merely shaking hands. Its so intense Alevtina thinks she's holding the hand of a giant grim reaper.
• Lineage Comes from the Father: Misora, Chae Yun-Hui, and Maria Riviera were all trained in martial arts by their fathers. Misora's late father Shunji taught traditional karate, Yun-Hui's taught taekwondo, while Maria's is a retired MMA fighter who runs a Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu dojo.
• Love at First Sight: Toro Samon sees Eve as the most beautiful woman in existence. He sees her as someone he wants to win over as opposed to his usual Lust Object.
• Make It Look Like an Accident: Possibly? Misora's father, who taught her karate, died after falling from an old fort battlement where he liked to practice kata. He insisted in the hospital that he just fell, and the police investigated and found no evidence of foul play. But then Misora runs into a man related to Laila Mendez who knocks her out, saying "Your father was tougher." Misora wakes up in bed, thinking it was All Just a Dream.
• Masturbation Means Sexual Frustration: Early in the series, whenever Misora can't be with anyone (which is often because her virginity is very important to her), she usually masturbates in the shower. At one point she has a one-night stand go awry because her would-be partner took a pause to snort some cocaine, ruining it for her. The end of the chapter has her furiously jilling off before she can get to sleep. Averted later in the series after she starts a relationship with Hara Akira: Misora still masturbates frequently despite the fact she's now getting plenty of sex.
• Meaningful Name: Eve Ogundipe is from Nigeria, the birthplace of the human race and home of the mitochondrial Eve, the common female ancestor of all humans.
• Megaton Punch:
  • Misora's fists are as hard as rocks and she can drop men twice her size with a straight jab, as she demonstrates abundantly in a hundred-man kumite in the first arc.
  • Veronica Lin's punches can blow people across the room with ease. Getting into a slugging match with her is likened to trying to fistfight a tractor trailer, as Elena Silva learns the hard way.
  • Nosaka Nagisa exchanges punches for slaps, since striking with a closed fist isn't allowed in her primary art of Sumo Wrestling. A slap to the face from her can knock a person unconscious on the spot, by which means she became the only person in the entire series so far to actually defeat Misora in a fair fight in chapter 52.
• Ms. Fanservice: As expected from a gravure model, Misora is more often than not dressed in skimpy outfits, either in casual clothes or at work.
• My Girl Is a Slut: Hatsumi Hime records Misora having sex with Akira on a hidden camera and uses it to extort sex from Misora as well. Misora tells Akira immediately after... who promptly jumps her bones, finding it a turn-on. It's shown later that Akira doesn't mind sharing Misora with other women in the slightest.
• Never Bring a Knife to a Fist Fight:
  • Reconstructed in chapter 25. Misora is attacked by a hitman with a sword in a public restroom. She wins by being a hair quicker because her opponent was sleep-deprived and counts herself lucky: her father told her to run if she ever fought someone with a blade, because according to him an unarmed fighter must be three times as skilled as their opponent to win against a swordsman.
  • In chapter 28, Private Detective Tachio tries to blackmail company president Sanada Hikaru and gets the crap beat out of him for his trouble. Sanada turns his back on him to let him go, Tachio pulls a knife, and gets kicked in the gut.
    Sanada: Don't fuck with me! Never underestimate a pimp.
• Not What It Looks Like:
  • Downplayed. While filming the B-Movie Fist of the Tokyo She-Beast, Iba gets caught Outdoor Bath Peeping on Misora and Yun-Hui—but only because he ran in to check if the two of them were all right after they had an impromptu sparring match that ended in a Double Knockout. That is to say: he was peeping (and filming them for a DVD bonus), but he had no intention of taking it further, which is what it looked like when another actress walked in on him worrying over two unconscious naked women. He still ends up spending a night in jail.
  • Hatsumi Hime gets annoyed with Misora and bugs her purse trying to get blackmail material to use on her. First Misora goes to a university, where Hime first thinks she's having an affair with a professor, then when another man shows up, that she's there for a devil's threesome. Nope: she's helping them with kinesthesiology research by performing karate moves while wearing sensors. Ditto when Misora visits the red-light district: she's neither selling nor buying, she's hosting self-defense classes for the workers.
• Odd Friendship: Between the Genki Girl Korean Chae Yoon-Hee and the brooding Mao Mao from Myanmar.
• Pint-Sized Powerhouse: Yin Xiao-Min might be tiny, but she has defeated opponents that are far taller due to her implacable use of the Baguazhang.
• Porn Creator Going Mainstream: In a Story Arc beginning in chapter 15, AV director Victor Iba tries to break into mainstream filmmaking with a martial arts action-schlock film titled Fist of the Tokyo She-Beast, using a bunch of martial arts-capable idols including main character Haebaru Misora (a gravure model trained in classical karate) to make up most of the cast. Goujima Sara, who directs and acts in extreme porn and practices capoeira, also performs in the film as a Stripperiffic Elite Mook, and at Misora's suggestion, Iba also hires some of her coworkers as Fanservice Extras.
• Porn with Plot: Between the lesbian sex scenes there are a lot of fight scenes with thorough explanations.
• Previously on…: Volume 10 of the tankoubon starts with a quick recap of the Tournament Arc's qualifying matches and the winners of each quarterfinal bracket, just to refresh the reader since the matches in question were spread across three volumes with a break in the middle.
• Prim and Proper Bun: Alevtina keeps her hair in a tight bun when fighting, and of the eight finalists of the World Tournament, the most modest and proper.
• Publicity Stunt Relationship: Haebaru Misora's agency Space Wolf partners up with Mizutani Yuki's Once Again agency to create the idol troupe Japan KGB. Mizutani has her model Hara Akira, who is gay, seduce the apparently straight Misora and covertly films the rendezvous through a window to leak it to the paparazzi, all to create a lesbianism mini-scandal to drum up publicity for the troupe. Misora and Akira become Friends with Benefits and eventually (after Misora finally admits to herself that she's bi) the Official Couple.
• Raging Stiffie: The assassin sent to kill Misora gets an erection that he says was due to exhaustion. Akira then pops in to explain several theories on why men can become erect under stress. According to the tankoubon notes, the author just needed a way to break the standoff between Misora and the assassin and couldn't think of anything else.
  Rui Takato: Since I'm drawing a karate manga, a scene with a fight against a weapons pro was unavoidable, but it was actually pretty tough. There really is no situation where it's advantageous to get in range if the weapon wielder doesn't make any clear mistakes... so what could I do but give him an exhaustion boner? Sometimes a lazy punchline works, though.
• Rape Is a Special Kind of Evil: This series pulls no punches on the systemic abuse that female models have to contend with to succeed and sustain their careers, and it's always presented as monstrous.
• Reluctant Fanservice Girl: Misora alternates between this and Shameless Fanservice Girl, since while she doesn't mind (anymore) wearing skimpy outfits for modeling and even fighting, she doesn't like being completely naked in front of a crowd.
• Run or Die: Misora's father instructed her to run if she ever fought someone with a blade. According to him, there is the "Kendo Triple Dan": an unarmed fighter must be three times as skilled as their opponent to overcome a swordsman. Unfortunately, when she does face a swordsman, he's between her and the door, so she's stuck fighting him.
• Shameful Strip: More than once has Misora been stripped of her clothes with the intent to humiliate, demoralize, or just straight-up rape her, but she usually pulls through and wins against all odds.
• Shout-Out:
  • During the launch party for Fist of the Tokyo She-Beast, Victor Iba strips seemingly naked while delivering a speech, then stands up while proclaiming, "Relax, I have 'em on!"—meaning his fundoshi. A footnote in the English version helpfully explains this is a gag swiped from Japanese comedian Yasumura Shougou.
  • Most of the later chapter titles come from the opening credits songs of various anime series.
  • Umezawa Mayu is a cosplayer in addition to an MMA fighter trained in Japanese kenpo. She turns up to her first match dressed as Mai from Fatal Fury.
  • Kazakh wrestler Nasstaja Ibrahimov is forced to withdraw from the tournament after winning against Kujiraoka Mika by knockout, because Mika punched one of Ibrahimov's ribs into her kidney as she was going down (she did say she'd win in a single punch). Somebody in the audience complains, "What is this, Fist of the North Star?"
  • One of the chapters is literally titled Dead or Alive.
  • The author, in a self-insert aside, explains that she and many others became interested in Aikido and Aikijujutdu thanks to Gouki Shibusawa.
• Shown Their Work: There is a lot more research put into the martial arts (even ones of different cultures), the idol industry, and crime than you'd expect from a simple hentai series, and every Charles Atlas Superpower moment is backed up by real-world examples.
• Single Mom Stripper: Sara, the extreme porn star, is revealed to be a single mom in chapter 22 when she brings her son to dinner with Misora.
• Sobriquet Sex Switch: A footnote in Chapter 53 helpfully explains that Miya Nekomiya's given name is an alternate pronunciation of the kanji for her deadname, Yoshinari.
• Sore Loser: Chompoo Shinlat throws a huge tantrum over losing to Misora in the Tournament Arc's round of 16, essentially saying the match wasn't fair because they're in significantly different weight classes.^note At 71 kilos (counting her breasts apparently), Misora is a welterweight, while Shinlat is a strawweight at 52 kilos. Misora is also a full head taller. The judges don't pay her complaints any mind: note that Maria Luisa overcame a significantly larger deficit in weight and height against Veronica Lin in the same round.
• Smug Smiler: Maria Luisa is almost always seen with a smug grin. Luna tends to smile in this manner while fighting.
• Spicy Latina: Maria Luisa Ribeira is a master of Brazilian Jiujitsu that loves having sex between matches.
• Stripperiffic: While Misora is the most common offender, several other girls have posed and even fought in what would be generously called a g-string bikini.
• A Threesome Is Hot: At the end of their respective fights, Luna decides to have a threesome with Misora and Akira.
• Time-Delayed Death: A nonlethal variation in the Tournament Arc. Kujioka Mika goes up against Nasstaja Ibrahimov, a Kazakh wrestler who's half-again as tall and probably at least twice her body mass. Mika tells Ibrahimov "I'll win with a single punch"—and goes down by a TKO in the first grapple. Then Ibrahimov ends up in the hospital with acute renal failure a couple chapters later because Mika punched one of her floating ribs into her left kidney as she was being thrown, forcing her to forfeit and allowing Mika to advance. Lampshaded by an unnamed audience member who complains, "What is this, Fist of the North Star?"
• Time Skip: It's rarely made clear how much time passes between any two given Story Arcs, but by chapter 50, three years have gone by In-Universe.
• Tournament Arc: The tournament to decide the World's Strongest Woman, which begins in volume 6. The organizers gather up female martial artists, MMA fighters, pro wrestlers, etc. (including Misora and several members of the recurring cast) from across the world and have them fight it out, with obligatory references to Dead or Alive and other fighting series.
• Trans Tribulations: Miya Nekomiya is a male-to-female trans woman who has started to take hormone treatment before going through gender reassignment surgery when she turns 21. Her father is prone to deadnaming her and seems to still think she's just going through a phase despite the fact he's been paying for her puberty blockers for the better part of a decade, and even the agency manager briefly calls her an "okama" (Japanese slang for a crossdressing gay man), though he's immediately called out for it by an office worker.
• "Truman Show" Plot: Misora meets a newbie model, Daidai Reon, during a shoot, who later lets slip by text that the agency doesn't let her leave that apartment. She goes to agency president Sanada Hikaru about it in a rage, only to be told that Reon hanged herself a month ago in that apartment after a porn shoot. In the next chapter, after Misora has been pestered with text messages from the "dead" Reon for several days, Misora's girlfriend and coworkers reveal it was all a candid camera prank for the TV station and the very-much-alive Reon is just a normal newbie they roped into it.
• Unexpected Virgin: Yep, believe it or not, despite being a porn star, Misora is a virgin (or at least she's never had penetrative sex with a male): several characters are surprised by this when they find out, Sara especially. She doesn't want her first time to be just a business transaction, and she has to go to some pretty extreme lengths to stay that way. However, she eventually starts a relationship with Akira and decides that the other woman took her virginity.
• Unproblematic Prostitution: Downplayed. The series is overall very sex-positive and treats sex work (adult modeling and porn included) as a legitimate occupation worthy of respect, but it doesn't turn a blind eye to the fact that it can be unpleasant and outright dangerous at times. Sexual violence is a recurring plot element, and Misora is once shown conducting self-defense classes for brothel workers. Let us not forget that her introduction to the adult entertainment world was her being tricked into a porno plot when she was trying to become a legitimate idol.
• Vile Villain, Saccharine Show: While the series doesn't shy away from the sketchier aspects of sex work, it is usually pretty light-hearted about it after the first volume, once Misora's agency stops trying to get her to go into hardcore porn. But then there's Dr. Ikezaki Gensuke, a surgeon who turns out to be a sexual sadist: he's introduced having savagely beaten Rea after hiring her to sleep with him on the side, then starts trying to take a bloody revenge on Misora after she breaks his hand for it. First he hires a yakuza assassin to kill her with a sword, then after that fails he kidnaps her and sets her up to play the starring role in a snuff film.
• Walking Shirtless Scene: Nagisa Nosaka is a sumo wrestler who always wanted to fight completely topless—in large part because men get to do it. Thanks to Misora and her friends she at least manages to do it with just pasties covering her breasts.
• Wardrobe Malfunction:
  • After Misora shows up to her first match of the Tournament Arc in a slingshot bikini, Akira and Sara get the idea to one-up that by dressing her for her second match in nothing but elastic bandages. The logical result happens when she finishes off Chompoo Shinlat with a flying kick: the bandages snap and leave her naked in front of the crowd and on live TV. She's mortified and probably would have suffered a Defeat by Modesty if she hadn't kayoed Shinlat already.
  • Space Wolf celebrates the establishment of the second generation of Japan KGB with a pay-per-view breast tug-of-war: suction cups attached to the first- and second-generation models' nipples, winner still has hers attached. When trans woman Miya goes up against Beruko, the movement causes enough friction and arousal that she has an erection that escapes her panties. She's mortified, but the other girls reassure her that it's no big deal and declare her penis to just be a really big clit.
• Wife-Basher Basher: After one of the agency's other girls is put in the hospital by a surgeon she was selling herself to on the side, Misora Honey Traps him as a "new girl" and breaks his hand against her skull. Though this sets off a subplot of him trying to get revenge on her for putting him out of work for several months...
• World of Action Girls: About two thirds of the named female characters practice martial arts of one sort or another. The Tournament Arc helps a lot but Misora was far from the only Action Girl in the cast even before that.
• X-Ray of Pain: Used several times during the Tournament Arc to show damage taken by the fighters, for instance during the infodump about Sumo Wrestling explaining how Nosaka Nagisa was able to knock out Haebaru Misora with a powerful slap, or when characters have suffered broken bones that aren't immediately obvious.
• You Are Already Dead: Xiao-Min is so skilled at targeting the most vulnerable points of her opponents, even entering her strike zone makes her opponent feel they're actually dying.

---