Kashimashi: Girl Meets Girl

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its better than the anime at least. still not that great, but the gender bender stuff going on is pretty funny, and i liked the alien characters. art is pretty decent and overall its a short, easy read. a certain characters "disability" (if thats what youd call it) is pretty absurd and stupid, but i cant really get into it without spoilers. p much seems like the author wanted some drama to toss in to make things more "interesting" or give some "depth" to the character, but man its just so silly i could never take it seriously. if you really like yuri series you ... might like this, but if youre someone who doesnt care either way ab it i cant honestly say youd find much to like ab this manga.

So I was happy to find a gender-bender which quite emphatically says no tricks or whatnot, the change is on, now deal with it.

And the end was actually pretty solid, if a little melodramatic.

So basically I was totally on board with this series until the plot development at the end of volume 3/beginning of volume 4 which drives the rest of the plot (drives it, I might add, off a cliff into overwrought melodrama). It just didn't work for me. I mean, don't get me wrong, I couldn't put it down, but I was kind of rolling my eyes for a lot of it.

Still, the ... art style is solid if not as exquisite as the last few manga I read--here solid for consistently using interesting and diverse clothing. I like when artists dress characters in new outfits regularly.

Speaking of the characters, we are and aren't trapped in cliche-land. Our main character, Hazumu, is actually not a type I'd seen much of before, though I admit this could be my ignorance. The "femme boy" who isn't being farmed for BL purposes or used as the butt of jokes is pretty original, and watching her adjust to and accept her new status as completely biologically female is the part of the story that works best. Beyond that, we have what appears to be a yamato nadeshiko (but it's actually weirder, in a frankly BS way), your friendly local tsundere childhood best friend, an unsubtly named Nagato Yuki expy, and the Dumb Best Guy Friend. None of the side characters are fleshed out with particular depth or finesse, but I do like the moments in the first 2 books when both--really all--parts of the love triangle come to grips with girls liking girls.

So let's talk about trans issues. I like that this is a story with the courage to take gender switching seriously, and shows the adjustment that characters have to make to someone expressing a new gender identity. Obviously it's way too easy, but oh well. We do actually see pronouns shift as characters accept reality, and it's frankly shocking in later volumes to see Hazumu misgendered--although I'm a little surprised why one character continues using "-Kun" for her right up to the end. All that said, while the work winks at the experience of gender expression, it doesn't really get into it too deeply. This is fair in one sense; Hazumu is never stated to actually be transgender; her gender gets switched outside her control in a way she never sought, and she just discovers that it's more comfortable than being a boy ever was. But it would be nice, given that the book is trying to take this seriously, to have a little more acknowledgement somehow? It's like the manga can't make up its mind.

Similarly with the issue of homosexuality. My reviews may suggest that I've been reading a lot of yuri lately. Some books are idealized and some are way more realistic takes, with characters having varying levels of difficulty accepting their sexuality and openmindedness toward dating other girls, and varying levels of acceptance from their peers. After the first volume it simply mostly isn't an issue here. This is, on the one hand, a logical extension of the setup--everybody knows that Hazumu was interested in girls before The Event, and the only potential love interests discussed were already in love with him (or approximating it) beforehand--but it's also a cop-out, which I'd overlook in a book where everybody was just cool with it, but I'm less inclined to do so in a book that tries to seriously address the complications and adjustments of this change. Much like the issue of Hazumu's gender identity, it gets raised and sort of addressed, and then it sort of goes away in favor of silliness with a Crazy Alien. Basically there's a big tone shift between volume 1 and 2, and across volume 2, that gets away from issues of identity and more into fairly conventional love-triangle business. I don't need 600 pages of gayngst, but if you're just going to brush it off why raise the issue at all?

Overall, though, this pretty much gave me what I wanted from it, even if I felt the quality slipped about midway through. I might consider revising downward.

Looking back on this series from when I first read it in high school, as a "boy" I gave it a then harsh score of five. I can't quite pin exactly what drew my ire. I think it mostly boiled down to feeling as though the "wrong" choice was made, or yet a deep seeded envy over how easily a trans girl was loved by her parents, and a lack of overt admission that even before, Hazuma was always a girl. It's left to subtext, which much like Class S of yore is a product of its time perhaps?? I'm not so sure, though, ... given how like nearly a decade and a half later we haven't had like a trans female lead in a serialized GL of this length like at all. In any case, my re-read was brought these to a head.

I definitely could feel the weight of an unspoken transness sort of suffocate and crowd out where this could have gone. There's a small glimmer of like, oh this major character finally stopped misgendering her, will everything else follow suit? Nope! Ok, will she assert herself? Nope! Does she have those happy moments of "holy shit im a girl now" Absolutely. but that's about it. On the flipside, everything about the narrative seemed to build towards a daring gamble, a divergent, third option, that even alien-san seemed to subtextually acknowledge. That being polyamory. The two interests were happy to form an alliance with one another, and the text, in my opinion at least indicated that their shared love of Hazuma could bring them close enough together. Just a sorely missed opportunity. Chapter after chapter of "I feel the same for each of them" and "If she's happy, that's what matters most" from Yasuna/Tomari. There wasn't really a rationalization of one person over another.

It was really disappointing. I hope the future brings us something better for the transbians out here. A not insignificant portion of us are polyam and/or find it hard to turn the envy off and sink into the fantasy it provides (an instant smooth transition that is socially accepted by all... minus egregious misgendering lol) to the point where I can't say too many will find what they're looking for here.