Hime Sakuragaike has secretly been in love with her childhood friend Akira Yonezawa since they were kids, but Hime only recently found out that Akira identifies as female. Although surprised, Hime offers her full support, and this is initially kept secret between them for a few years, but Akira decides to start living as a girl full-time upon starting high school with Hime. However, since Akira garners a certain amount of attention, Hime takes it upon herself to aggressively stick up for Akira whenever necessary. Not wanting Akira to be singled out as an object of ridicule, Hime decides that her only option is to put herself in Akira's shoes.
...I am really not a fan of how Hamuro and others keep trying to talk Hime out of wanting to be seen as a boy. Hamuro even says “You can’t just wish you weren’t a girl! It’s a part of who you are!” Why does no one (including the author) want to consider that maybe Hime is transgender too? It’s really starving to give “transmascs transition just to escape misogyny” which is ughhhhhh. being female/a girl can suck physically and socially but “I want to not be a girl” is different from “I want being a girl not to suck” and totally exclusively cisgender people normally just stick with the latter because they’ve got nothing else going on to push them to the former! Ugh now that I think about it, since Akira says she "never once thought of myself as a boy" it really seems like that idea (idk if it has a name) that you can only trans if you've known from birth... would explain why Hime figuring out she's trans doesn't seem to even be considered as a possibility. 👎
Also the contrast between aro teacher reminding Akira being a girl is not the same thing as being someone’s girlfriend vs Hamuro asking Hime to be his girlfriend so she can “try it out until you know how you want to be a girl." sooooo which one is it? I don't think we're meant to take Hamuro as being manipulative... was it just necessary to put in fake dating trope at any cost?
Anyways I did think it was cool we have an aroace character who called himself just “aromantic” (I've heard through the grape vine he is canonically aroace?), nice balance to other aroace manga characters who just call themselves “asexual”. Tbh it would probably be 2 stars for the iffy stuff above if we didn't have Sasaki.
Oh also the split between volumes is kind of whack -- this one opened still in the last scene of volume 2.
There's eo many loveable characters in this series!!! Even Hasegawa is becoming likeable, I'm still not much of a fan of him, but he's getting better! Sasaki Sensei is an icon, I love a aromantic king and genuinely I feel like everything with him was so incredibly done! It took me a second to get used to Hime's new look, but I love it, she looks so much happier! I just want Hime and Akira to make up already 😭💔 these girls are breaking my heart! There's so much more I could say about this volume, I loved it so much!!
After finishing this series I can say that the exploration of different gender identities and sexualities is great for a manga since that kind of representation is limited. It was definitely a fun read but my biggest complaint was gender identity based on feelings towards others.
Hime, her entire gender experimentations were just because of Akira. We never got to really understand how she felt about her own presentation of her gender other than when she cut her hair.
Hamuro, love the idea of him being some kind of drag queen but again it was just for his sister and not his own desire to express a side of himself.
Sexuality in this was also quite shallow and over complicated at the same time. There were some good representations such as Ishimiya or The teacher but other than that it was either not explored enough or overly complex in Hime which had a stereotypical ending.
She ended up presenting as a woman and ending up being with a man, it felt like all of her character development didn’t matter. She could’ve had more to her but I feel like that ending washed away the complexity the author attempted to give her.
Once again, it was a fun read but very inconsistent, either too simplified or complex with the representations.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
There's still a fracture between Hime and Akira as this third book in the series continues their story, which in essence is one of identity. The idea of what it means to be a girl or be seen as more than a girl or as a person as well as concepts of femineity permeate the plot. It will be interesting to see how the author wraps all this up. As a sidenote, like other reviewers, I was pleased to see the inclusion and development of Sasaki-sensei, someone who is aromatic and perfectly comfortable as he is, caring for and loving his students. Perhaps he will have his own series at some point.