Boku Girl

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My personally, I loved this. The only thing that left me annoyed was the ending. At the end it felt a bit rushed, like they could have made a couple more chapters but forced it to end here. Sure they tied up some looses ends for the characters and helped them understand the situation but it feels like it could have been better. Would definitely recommend giving this a read, if you don't like it within the first 1-3 chapters then its probably not for you. Either way 9/10 from me, would love to have an anime adaptation one day.

Boku Girl is fine.

If you’ve seen any of my reviews before, you know that I am decidedly outside of the intended audience for a work like this; I am not crazy about male-gazey ecchi (especially involving non-adults) and a lot of the common shounen/seinen character archetypes present here tend to frustrate me. Nothing about this manga seems like the kind of thing I’d be compelled to read, much less finish.

Still, Boku Girl is simultaneously better than it should be and not as good as it had the potential to be.

It’s just, you know, fine.

(To avoid spoilers, I will be referring to the protagonist Mizuki ... with gender neutral pronouns throughout)

“Magical Sex Shift” exists both as a common anime/manga plot device – usually in the form of body swapping – and also as a rather niche stand-alone genre in its own right. Boku Girl commits fully to its premise on this front; this manga is about the sex shift and the antics that come from it, through and through. Mizuki and the turmoil they experience due to their sudden goddess-induced sex change is “the point” of the entire manga.

And it actually tells a decent story, though not without its fair share of drawbacks.

See, for everything Boku Girl does well, it also feels the inexplicable need to force a hamfisted, unfunny scene usually involving something tantamount to sexual assault against Mizuki as some kind of twisted balancing act. These scenes weren’t funny the first time they happened, they weren’t funny the 10th time they happened, and they certainly weren't funny when they were still happening toward the end of the 100+ chapter run. It’s as if the mangaka was terrified that the readers would be able to enjoy the story too much if they didn’t shoot the pacing and the characterization in the foot every few chapters or so. This nonsense was old the first time it happened and it only got worse.

Yet, somehow, the story and characters still manage to keep enough positive forward momentum to not be completely crippled by the mangaka desperately trying and failing to be funny. In spite of its faults, Boku Girl is surprisingly committed to exploring its themes of identity, sexuality, gender, and the need to insist upon your own truth. It was both refreshing and frankly surprising to see how tactfully an ecchi tackled a lot of these themes and all while mostly respecting its cast.

Mostly. It isn’t amazing, but it did a better job than I think anyone could have expected it to.

Where it fumbles the bag again is how it rarely goes all the way on these themes and the way that the final arc sort of undermines everything established so far. Boku Girl seems mostly oblivious to the notion that sex does not inherently equal gender or gender expression, all while trying to tackle the confusion arising from that very real topic. It’s baffling how a work can take feelings and emotions expressed by real people, make it fantastical, and then almost never connect the dots between them. It’s such a missed opportunity to really unpack the heart of the feelings that would even prompt someone to write this kind of story in the first place.

This is exacerbated dozens of times over with the terribly handled final arc of the manga. I won’t get into spoilers, but the way it ties Mizuki’s sexuality rigidly to their sex, ignoring ways it’s more complicated than that and also refusing to even entertain the possibility of Mizuki being bisexual is kind of mind boggling. I think they mostly managed to bring it back together at the very end with a passable explanation of things, but it should have handled the road to that point far better than it did.

The whole thing is just kind of fine. Boku Girl does a surprising number of things well and royally screws up a near equal amount. To be honest, this is one of those works that makes me wish MAL had a .5 element to their scores, as 5.5 just feels right. As it stands though, Boku Girl mostly just kind of nets even.

Which, to be honest, is an impressive feat for something so far outside of my usual spheres of interest and with so much baggage weighing it down; it just makes me wish even more that Boku Girl was better than it is. It had so much potential in spite of the things working against it, but it just couldn’t quite bring it home.

I started to read this manga out of curiosity without much further knowledge and finished it, because I learned that it is a significant piece for certain groups. I can see why some people see this as a significant part of representation for the minority groups of the LGBTQ community, but for me it is still not a good manga.

The concept is simple and nothing new, a God is bored and decides to prank a young Japanese androgynous boy by making him female. While the concept is nothing new in general, the focus on gender questions is more so.

Unfortunately the manga overplays the comedy to ... a hilarious degree, that makes it at times very hard to read. It is not just the comedy that is over the top, but at times it feels like the whole theme of gender swapping is just used as a vehicle for steamy ecchi scenes.
Somewhere around the half-way point the God is getting bored and mixes the mess up even more by introducing fluid gender swapping into the mix.
I'm not against the subject material, but let me show with this example why I think it is problematic how the manga handles the premise.
At some point Mizuki goes into a woman bath, because at this point she is a woman, but because of the fluidity Mizuki suddenly returns to being male and is now stuck in a woman bath as a man with women running all around him.
For me there is no deeper meaning in this, it is just a thing that is played for laughs to put the main character into compromising situations and put edge to some ecchi/erotic content. This clashes with the secondary and more serious aim, of touching on real world gender issues, and for the most part it fails completely handling those.
This especially hurts the moments, closer to the end, when it really tries to touch on those issues, but as a reader it gets very hard to take something so clownish serious at that point.

For me it fails the balancing act of comedy and seriousness. 95% of the time the situation is played for laughs and erotics and it comes of like a nervous person that makes excessive jokes to cover for this nervousness and forgets about the serious issue they really wanted to talk about.

The manga could be seen as positive, by shining a light on gender issues for a younger audience, but in the end it fails by overcompensating for the serious ideas with sad overdone comedy.

With that part out of the way let's briefly talk about the rest. Briefly, because there isn't much to talk about.
The characters are flat and cliché for the most part and most are just exaggerated comedy reliefs. From the eccentric male lingerie designer that runs around in his designed undergarments, to the senpai stalker with picture shrines in the bedroom, the manga has a good host of boring tropes.
The art is not much to write home about as well. The backgrounds are often simplistic and don't add much and the only good art are the characters themselves. With characters in focus they can look very good (often for the ecchi scenes), but the moment they are not the focus of a shot they are just mediocre.

Without the knowledge, that some people see some cultural significance in this work, I would have probably never fought through sludge and while the ending is decent, it is nothing to write home about. Even a manga like Kashimashi handled the subject better and was more enjoyable to read, because it put less obnoxious comedy/ecchi roadblocks in the way it handled the topic with more grace.

For me it was a shame to see something interesting handled so poorly and while I understand that some people are happy seeing this kind of conflict represented at all, I would hope that we get a better works about those themes.