If you wanna race, I run like crazy / If you wanna ride, I drive ya daily (Stuck to You – Nikka Costa).
Heh more like that time I got tired of reading too many tender and meaningful gay love stories in a row and went out of my way to read absolute slop only to then realize that even the slop ended up being a tender and meaningful gay love story. Talk about a mouthful! Okay look, I enjoyed this manga, the art is great and the “roommates-to-lovers” thing is a classic that can’t be topped (har har “topped”), but I can’t lie that this is one of those times where my ability to get annoyed by literally anything started to get in my way, because I went into this expecting a manga purely full of dumb hijinks without the usual kind of yearning and pining that I’ve come to expect out of gay manga, and yet I still came out the other end of this thing feeling a bit irritated. Am I wrong for just wanting to read one gay story that’s simply gay without it being about the gay experience? Okay, I'm well aware of the fact that I'm starting to sound pretty whiny here, but I'm sure you know where I'm coming from. It reminds me of how when that movie Crazy Rich Asians came out, several of my Asian brethren were adamantly against and highly critical towards the movie because they thought that it promoted the wrong image of our community and that it didn’t properly capture the true “Asian experience.” And in portraying an excess of wealth and vapid superficiality, it gave people the idea that we all live like this, that it's problematic to tell an Asian centric story that's not reflective of the average Asian person's life. And as a fellow Asian myself (#asanAsian), that argument has never really held water because to me, not only would somebody have to be really dumb to base their entire opinion of a race on what they see in the movies (though I'm sure that happens a lot), but I’m of the mind that it can only ever be a good thing when movies go out of their way to show as vast an array of diverse backgrounds as possible, as it expands everyone's palate; whether that be in seeing exuberant wealth on the screen or experiencing our racial “struggle” through a universally beloved Oscar bait film that’d be out there winning all the accolades come award season. I'm just saying that everybody deserves a set of stories outside of The Struggle™, and adding every shade of the rainbow to the screen or on the page is always helpful in showcasing that there's more than enough room for all of our experiences. Basically, diversity = good. I guess this is my way of segueing to my other point in that I feel the same with queer stories, like… why does everything have to come back around to long-form yearning and a love that could move mountains? Because damn, I just wanted to read something completely brainless and fun for once, and if I can’t find that in something called That Time I Got Stuck to the Guy I Hate, then I honestly don’t know where else to look! But who knows, maybe I just figured this manga would be dumb enough that I wouldn't be forced to describe the romance in it as “transcendent” all over again! Oh well, there's nothing here a good ole thesaurus can’t solve!
Oh yeah, you don’t even know what That Time I Got Stuck to the Guy I Hate is about yet. Oopsie, my bad! Must have slipped my mind. Well, if you're so inclined, That Time I Got Stuck to the Guy I Hate is about that time a college student named Kuga gets magically stuck to the guy he hates, Igarashi, his roommate. Huh, that was pretty easy. I don't know why I was dreading talking about it. It’s a classic story convention and a daring reexamination of a trope that hasn’t been tried since the monumentally unique and trendsetting tent-pole of a film, Stuck on You, starring Matt Damon and some other guy came out many a year ago. Truly a masterclass of the genre! That was sarcasm, Stuck on You might possibly be the worst movie I’ve ever had the displeasure of watching, and that's coming from someone who's seen Dumb and Dumberer: When Harry Met Lloyd. Anyway, that's probably not the most flattering of comparisons, because this manga actually has more in common with Freaky Friday, where an outside magical element forces two people who don’t get along to consider each other more closely, and thus creating a stronger bond. With Freaky Friday, this is shown in a quasi-racist adventure where a mother and daughter learn how to put themselves in each other’s shoes (quite literally), and with That Time I Got Stuck to the Guy I Hate, it’s about two roommates who can’t see eye-to-eye getting stuck together (duh) with the only way to get unstuck is by zerking each other off and “arriving” at the same time, if you catch my drift. That's what they call a... sticky situation! Badum tsss. That’s really all there is to it, but like I already talked about, I noticed that around the half-way mark that the love-story between Kuga and Igarashi got a little more emotional than I was expecting when the manga explored each of their respective backstories in depth. We see it explained how Kuga is trying to break out from under his mother’s smothering nature and yet is crushed under the weight of immense guilt from the prospect of being ungrateful. Then there’s Igarashi who's baseball injury back in high school halted all his original plans to go through college on a scholarship, with his only continuing motivator being when Kuga unintentionally gave him a heartfelt pep-talk, and in that created a “childhood friend” link that a lot of manga like to fall back on. Look, I don’t want to sound ungrateful, because I always appreciate it when a story goes out of its way to elevate itself past its packaging, but sometimes it can feel like authors are trying to make gold out of coal, and a manga with such a silly premise could have easily been just as entertaining if it had decided to forego the “destined lovers” angle and simply been about wild ass things happening for six chapters and then ending. Don’t worry, I’m still totally cool with how this manga ended up, which is to say it was... yes, a transcendent love story. Or you know, as Thesaurus.com is telling me: it's "fantastic," "sublime," and/or of "ultimate" quality!