GLAM READS TRASH ISSUE #2 (KANOJO NI NARU HI)

#1
GRIMglamfire
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i may have sinned greviously. I would like to go on record that it is the first time I have done so. you could say the act of writing it down makes me the Scholar of the First Sin.
i promised to bring you trash but i may have actually found a semi decent if overly sweet love story romance manga that fills your mouth with cotton candy and giant ánime hearts.
i guess we gotta get this trainwreck a-roling though, so here we go:

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sorry this manga doesn't include maidplay i apologize[/hr]


Kanojo Ni Haru Ni (translated as "Becoming a Girl Day")
(editors note: there's no maid-play in this comic. sorry!)

Is another Gender-Bend manga, which is oddly a genre I see a lot of manga fans cling to despite their generally poor understanding of gender politics. Oddly enough, just like Boku Girl there's a lot of really good bits in Kanojo Ni Haru Ni but they don't come near the middle or the end.
Look - the art in this series is pretty sub par and in a lot of bits it almost reeks of the artist having done a bunch of hentai before. I wanna verify that later, but I didn't go into this series expecting anything at all.

Genderbending series have a really simple setup that's the same across the whole board - a character (so far almost always introduced as male) is turned into a woman either immediately or slowly transitions.
The general disclaimer on these series I give people is that you can't go into them expecting a fully progressive take on gender and gender roles in society and especially not in comparison to where the dialogue on gender is in most trans friendly circles now.

The general trash disclaimer applies: Is there something worthwhile in this series worth engaging with - is this a book you can take home to mom and dad!?

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Out of everything I've read, honestly you could probably get just about anyone to read Kanojo Ni Haru Ni. It is a soft romance story that is remarkably vanilla that will still get you to stop every once in awhile and worry about the fate of the relationship at the core of the story.

As these things usually go the premise of Kanojo Ni Haru Ni has less roots in any realistic sort of gender dysphoria but instead is about an alternate earth where there's only ever a set ratio of women and men - and if this ratio goes out of balance either way a young woman or young man is randomly chosen to "emerge" after a coma in a body transitioning to the opposite sex.Kanojo Ni Haru Ni is about the journey two high school friends go on when one of them emerges as a woman after going into a coma in their senior year in high school - and both characters realize they're in love with each other.

The "hook" at the beginning of the story is that the protagonist (in this case it's the dude whereas in boku girl it's the person transitioning) has gynephobia and can't touch or be around women and suddenly has to deal with his absolute best friend becoming one.

This is kind of more of a non-issue than you'd think. This must have started as a weekly serial with no clear direction, and I'll put that out there right now cuz the beginning of this manga makes it seem like it's gonna go in a completely weird direction.

The strongest suite of this comic is when it gives time to focus on the relationship between the two protagonists and of course - Nao Mamiya's transition process. It's maybe the only one of these gender comics I've also read that deals with people who are transgender not being accepted by society.

There's some pretty high concept stuff for an ecchi gender manga - Noe Mamiya actually gets to have elements of her character defined by her womanhood as time goes on. Whereas Boku Girl was still about the character being born one gender even near the climax, this manga definitely settles into being a romance and primarily around Noe settling into her womanhood.

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I gotta avoid spoiling comics like these cuz it's not a comedy so there's little payoff from individual gags or scenes like in Boku Girl. Definitely gotta make it through the first half of this - when it goes all Manga for a chapter its definitely its weakest but you should stick with it as these characters pass into adulthood.

I had the realization while reading this manga that in the absence of being fully horny like the last few ecchi series I read were - the plot beats of this story had more in common with yaoi manga than any hetero-bore-native romance comics that I remember.

Probably more similar to shoujo comics or yaoi comics in terms of art. its definitely got less cute art per panel than Boku Girl does - the art style reminds me a lot of the gal who did Princess Jellyfish but with cleaner lines and less young-looking characters.

Can you get hrony to this manga? probably you'll more likely find yourself falling deep in love with one of the two main characters and wanting to see things work out well for them. even though this is an ecchi series there's a lot less purposeless nudity than I'm used to seeing.

Most of the nudity only really comes in the bonin scenes between our two characters but a lot of noise is made constantly about how attractive Noe Mamiya is which is honestly kind of weird and fetish at first but then the series actually starts to make a big deal out of what a complete dreamboat her boyfriend is to basically everyone he meets. Wish we got to see more of his shirtless bod like the dude in boku girls but it's kind of enough that he's relatively beefy and still presented as competent emotionally in the relationship.

The author behind this has some ideas on being transgender that almost hit too close to home for a lot of reasons but it's still not perfect (it's never gonna be) about how Noe is represented.

There's a lot of stuff that will probably irritate most queer people about pronouns in this book, but I'm telling you to try and look passed it because there's a pretty neat (and very cotton-candy) love story here.also the only story with an accurate depiction of birthday sex.
I'll give it high marks for being so short and following through so much on the central romance, cuz that's some good shit to tell your friends you're reading.


now go read some comics about horny people.

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#2
Mario
nice review

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