For some unknown reason, female animals all over the world have begun transforming into cute humanoid girls. One such girl is big-horned sheep Youko. For a time, she lives with her flock and master in relative peace, long enough to learn how to talk and wear clothes and help out on the farm. But, one day, Youko finds herself abducted by strange men, at her master's request, and taken away to a place where she can learn to be more human and eventually blend into society.
That place is the school Animalium.
Youko begins making friends at Animalium, such as the beautiful and airheaded Merino sheep Fuwako. Our girls set about learning how humans do things and how to control their new human bodies and so forth. But Youko, at least initially, while friendly enough, thinks mainly of learning how to be human quickly so she can go back to her master.
This series is basically, long story short, a very fanservice-y Japanese school slice-of-life thing.
Not only are all of the animal girls, or "Arcoids" (Animals Reformed and Cultured to be HumanOID) female, but they also run the risk of turning back into their animals forms during times of stress.
Anyone else remember Fruits Basket? This is sort of the inverse of that...No, wait: not really. They're animals turned human that turn back into animals; the Sohmas were humans that turn into new animal forms.
Oh, forget it.
The fanservice part comes not only from the tendency of Arcoids to burst or shrink out of their clothing when they become animals, but also from the quite frequent uses of all-girl Japanese bath scenes. Plus, since they're all girls, we may run into some more yuri-ish scenarios. (And you all know how much I love yuri. Sexy yuri, that is.) We've already seen something like that in Volume One, where we meet a wolf who wants to get close to a rabbit.
Needless to say, we have yet to see any real serious story or any enemy threats or anything, but this series isn't too bad for what it is.
And no, it is not just another T&A-fest like that Daily Life with Monster Girls one.
One gripe I do have with "DNA Doesn't Tell Us" is the names. "Fuwako" isn't so bad, if a tad on the nose, because it obviously has roots in "fuwa fuwa" or "fluffy" in Japanese. But some of the girls have much dumber names based solely on what they used to be. Examples include Rilla the gorilla, Roo the kangaroo and Harry the hedgehog. (Although the last one is a tad more forgivable than the others because it is based on "harinezumi" or "hedgehog.)
I will probably keep reading this series until I grow bored with its lack of action. The adventures they have are reasonable and down-to-earth and the characters are pretty standard for a slice-of-life manga such as this.
The last few pages show us the un-domesticated animal girls side of things, where we see several half-dressed half-animal girls crawling around on all fours with no sign of speech or sentience.
I doubt they'll be evil or like the hard-to-teach special needs kids, but with any luck they'll make things interesting moving forward.
