I My Me! Strawberry Eggs

The story is kind of interesting. A cross dressing teacher at a sexist school could maybe provide interesting commentary. But it doesn't bother and instead just has the most basic messages that could've been done. Even by 2001 standards it's downright primitive.

Also that stuff takes a backseat in the mess of a love square that eventually ties back into another message about true love or something. The romantic subplot also has hilariously little interesting things to say despite trying it's hardest to be inspirational.

The art was not very pleasant to look at. It almost gave a cursed feeling. I don't know how many ... songs in the ost there are because I was hearing the same song over and over again.

The characters are flat and Kuzuha's essentially a perfect angel. The mc has the level of personality of your average harem protagonist. It's not funny and very disorienting to watch. There's not even anything to make fun of, which would be a saving grace.

Also I reeeaaally wasn't into the whole teacher-student romantic relationship it was pirating so hard. It was more creepy and disturbing more than anything else. Surprised very little reviews mentioned it.

This show isn't a masterpiece. It's a strange, almost pretentious mess that wasted my time. I was disgusted, confused, annoyed, but I never smiled. How in the lord did I make it through this I don't even know.

Strong kombucha girl vibes on this. The series has certain foibles inherent in the premise. Ultimately, the character isn't ~*~actually~*~ trans, so a lot of what it has to say about trans people is oblique at best. It came off like they hadn't actually talked to a trans person before. Of course, ""this is a product of the time"" to a degree and perhaps that is to be expected. I got similar vibes from the yuri element, which plays second-fiddle to the straight romances for most of the run and goes in uncomfortable directions by the end. No, I am not going to root for ... the teacher and student to get together in a real world scenario, so please do not bother. Especially the premise requires a deferred anvil drop when she finds out the teacher is actually a man. I dreaded that day all the while I spent watching this and it was not great when it happened.

But, nevertheless, I found myself enjoying it in the middle there. As awkward as the queer representation is, there are some moments that are really cool. I like depictions of the liminal space where a girl hasn't realized she's a lesbian yet, and some of that was good. There was a great scene where the teacher realized he was performing the mannerisms of a woman off-the-clock and the old lady affirms that that's OK. A lot of the middle is about how he's realizing that he actually likes the experience of being a woman and, just barely short of the text, is wondering if he is a transwoman. I liked all of that. The show should have been building up to that.

But, unrelated to these matters, the "this was written by men" anvil drops. You see, another part of the premise is that the people who run the school are extreme parodies of radical feminists who hate all men. As a man who doesn't feel put out by people expressing their frustration at a horrific system like that, the vast majority of what they did with these characters were bad takes. They treat the boys at the school as if they are second class citizens, and if the joke is supposed to be that this is how girls are treated in real life, then it REALLY does not work. It comes off less tongue-in-cheek than it does as a straight-faced critique of "the world women really want" written by men where men are the victims. No. No, no, no. Start over. Cut it out. Please go back to the transwoman idea. ...And then the second half of the series deals with the boys' plight almost more than the trans teacher or the lesbian... Sigh.

Oh, and the series's running antagonist is a woman who suspects the teacher is secretly a man, and so she spends the whole show trying to out her co-worker. If this was a trans-positive commentary on why policing gender is bad, there are possibilities in a sideplot like this. But what it actually ended up being was naive representation for TERFs. And she succeeds. And the transwoman is exiled. The TERF doesn't face any comeuppance. The most balance to this that we get is the fact that she's just a bad person in general, but that's portrayed as a consequence of her man-hating nature and, therefore, her feminism.

Token reference to the fact that the art is from the early digital period and is shabby most of the time.

There are positives to it, but it just doesn't work. If you're pointed to this show by clips of the good trans scenes buried in this, enjoy those. Don't bother watching it.