Genshijin Kareshi
Primitive Boyfriend

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TL;DR: Primitive Boyfriend was... weirdly good. Should you read it? Depends how you feel about monkeys.

L;DR:
I thought I'd seen everything in the shoujo manga world after that one about the girl falling in love with a lizard (Tokage Ouji)... but Primitive Boyfriend just had to strut in and blow that out of the water. The concept? Bizarre. Wild. Weird. The execution? Cringe-inducing. But... damn, it kind of works?

Protagonist Mito returns to monkey, quite literally, as she is sent a few million years in the past by a delusional goddess to a time where humans were big buff monkey-dudes. And one of them is her soulmate, ... apparently. Of course Miss-Not-Like-Other-Girls falls head over heels for him. It's quite frankly weird, but hell, this monkey is a lot nicer than her other options, so maybe I don't blame her.

What follows is a series of weirdly educational isekai-ing back and forth through time periods. There were some sweet parts, some cute parts, and some what-the-actual-hell-am-I-reading parts. For only 13 chapters, it crams a LOT of substance in that made me honestly enjoy my time. And the ending... yeah, that was pretty cute.

Art is nice enough and the manga becomes weirdly atmospheric at times. The characters aren't really fleshed out that much, but I didn't expect too much from a 3-volume manga. I also thought that the explored theme of soulmates was interesting. And that's probably the most I can say about it.

Should you read it? That's a tough question. I honestly think you should just dive in blind. Laugh at it, don't take it too seriously, and enjoy it brainlessly.

And if you end up seeing the physical volumes on my manga shelf, mind ya own business.

At least unusual, Genshijin Kareshii (or Primitive Boyfriend) is a shoujo manga published between 2017 and 2018, written by first-time mangaka Yoshineko Kitafuku who dedicated herself to several researches in books, museums and other materials, before and during the composition of her constructions. The manga has only 14 chapters, but it brings us a story beyond unique: through time travel, the protagonist goes after her soulmate, going back about 2 million years and coming across nothing less than a primitive version of the homo sapien and her future husband.

The first impression one has of this manga is a mixture of curiosity and strangeness, but ... soon we start to hope that things work out. It's a very cute and different love story, using a common Japanese cultural element within shoujo manga which is reincarnation. At the end of the work I wished the author had had the opportunity to develop more what she created, because it was an interesting journey through history.

September 04, 2022

An incredibly silly premise played surprisingly seriously. Mito looks like your usual gorgeous shoujo female lead but grew up doing farm work and is the most hardy person around. So all the pretty boys around her seem real weak in comparison so she has zero interest. A fun difference form the usual reverse harem series with the lead having possible romantic paths with all the boys. She wants to find someone who will make her heart pound and boy does she find that. Of course there are silly reactions but there's a believable connection between Mita and the primitive man she runs into and that's ... where the series really shines.