Hanazono-kun to Kazoe-san no Fukakai na Houkago

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there's nothing i love more in media than a complicated relationship between two people. well, to say the friendship in this story is complicated would be a bit of an understatement.

kazoe and hanazono meet in very specific circumstances to discuss specific things and the only thing that connects them at first is kazoe's interest in sex-ed... if this story were written by a man or were even a bit less delicate with its two leads innocence, i wouldn't have even given this one a shot. however, i'm constantly surprised by the amount of stories that can be told about a boy and a girl ... in high school that are engaging, unique, and fresh.

this one is exceedingly simple in its premise and deceivingly so with its characters. i do think the story suffered from the edgy concept of high school students hyperfocusing on sex to the point of considering engaging in foreplay just to see what'll happen? it's kind of unclear what kazoe planned to do after seeing hanazono's "morning glory", as they put it, but i feel like that's part of her charm as a character. she desires to understand but she seems to get herself in trouble due to hyperfocusing on her own desire for knowledge to the point of ignoring her surroundings and, like... all reason.

also, i underestimated how much i'd love hanazono's character? it's so refreshing to see a male lead who isn't really even all that interested in sex, though usually women have a tendency to write their male characters as non-offensive and nonthreatening presences so, while it may not be REALISTIC, i have a feeling there are teenage boys out there who are like him who grow up in very open families who are really just tired of the whole concept since it has no mystique... and i'm sure he was written in good faith. that tense scene during the last day of their field trip? geez... the way hanazono figured out he wasn't ready for that kind of thing yet and the way kazoe immediately dropped it when she realized how uncomfortable he was??? that was beautiful and i love that they had an honest and open conversation about it and established boundaries...

i even like the other girl (i just read this and i can't remember her name lol) the one with the shaggy hair and the bad friends? i like her character, even though her arc is kinda overshadowed by that "third act breakup" thing that's super contrived but also totally understandable knowing that hanazono hates being seen how he is by his classmates and he definitely wouldn't want kazoe dragged into that and kazoe just goes along with it for his sake because she doesn't want to push him anymore... it makes sense but it's just like... y'know. it happens all the time. kinda boring.

BUT the end when kazoe has her breakdown about feeling immense guilt and shame for wanting to know so much about sex to the point of touching herself for the first time .... bro it was so heartfelt and real? their whole talk in the nurse's office was soooo sweet. i also love the callback to their little alphabetical list with the fireworks date <3

this is just such a good story... a bit too short but i like the open ending and the ambiguity even though it's pretty clear where it was heading... i'm glad they get to figure things out for themselves at their own pace.

This manga is one of those manga that really didn't deserve to be axed and the premature axing of it before it reached its conclusion makes me mildly upset.

In essence, this is sex-ed the manga but also is a deep romantic introspection into the characters, especially that of Hanazono-kun, a kid who grew up around sex-toys and was openly exposed to the perverse.

His character arc is fascinating and the way the manga depicted his realizations and such was absolutely brilliant and I loved every second of it. He's deeply relatable not quite in his personality or his surroundings but his reactions and it makes ... for a hell of a time. Along with that his character is shown to change with others perception of him and it's precious.

Minor spoilers (Chapter 1 only)

I think a large part of my liking towards it was that it didn't blow up events that it didn't need to. For example, the first chapter in which she basically see's his dick is super downplayed as if it actually was a real event. Nobody is going to scream out loud or hit someone if this situation played out, simply put walking out of the room is as far gone as I'd think it gets. It's this hyperrealistic focus as well as the introduction of a hard-to-imagine shojo esque romance that makes me really love these characters and wish that this manga could just go on and on till they end up married.

Heads up for all readers, this manga has 29 chapters but also two extra chapters that act as shorts or extras, make sure to read them if you enjoy the manga.

Ah, the desperate outcry for universal and comprehensive sex-ed has literary merit.

Sex gets a lot of its mystique from distance, it seems. You hear about it in rumors, you watch porn and jerk it in secret, and only once you have surmounted the roadblock that is your virginity do you find it within yourself to release the breath you've been holding about it throughout the duration of your ignorance. Rarely, so rarely it's almost criminal, do we see, in these drawings we laugh at and in life, sex talked about so forthrightly by virgins.

Then Hanazono and Kazoe start meeting each other in their Science ... Room. They have interesting conversations.

The virginal enthrallment with es-ee-batsu is certainly present in these characters. ‘Tis the whole premise of the manga, but the perceptions their classmates hold of them, which stem from the uniqueness of their respective lifestyles, have kept them from engaging with the subject like the rest of their peers. They've been withheld from it, for one - each has a certain reputation that invites a little distance - and for another, they are distinctly lacking the typical reservations one may have in exploring it.

It has been a pleasant time watching a friendship blossom between these two misfits as Kazoe attempts to learn. Her innocent fascination, and Hanazono's knowledgeable yet awkward attempts to reckon with it make for a funny character dynamic. And despite the differences in the breadths of their sexual knowledge (breadths, not depths, for their knowledge may be vast but inexperience leaves it shallow, how cute) it seems they have more in common than not: a strong sense of justice and bluntness - basically, they are both wholly unapologetic about who they are, even if they know it blends poorly with who everyone else is. Yet underlying that, they also share in their confinement within boxes society has put them: of purity and of the illicit. That’s the heart of why I can write about this as an endearing SOL manga with a unique premise, as opposed to an innocence-corruption kink-pandering seinen or a health class textbook. The real kicker of this show is, despite Hanazono's significant consciousness of how his school sees him, he's able to find the relief of having someone who can really see you, whether "you" is the dick attached to you or "you" is the person lying beneath the pervasive rumors that have kept you from a normal high school experience. When you see how easy the overly-rational banter comes between the two of them, and when you hear yourself laughing at it, it becomes clear that their friendship is less about easy-access condom intel or high IQ debates about the cultural sensitivity of boob discourse, and is more about the comfort each gets from a friend who cares more about facing them than they do about the upkeep of their image.

As that wholesome, unique friendship with unique complications continued its development into something complicated, I found myself intrigued, and exhaling out of my nostrils more in turn. The level of nuance the mangaka presented us with when they finally got down to it indicates a dash of self-awareness in the subject manner - how closely intertwined these intimate acts they describe are with romance, even with their naïve approach to it highlighting the distance. The academic detachment with which they speak on the subject only temporarily puts off the feelings something so personal is inevitably bound to evoke.

The romance does come in hard and fast at the end though (good Lord), with limited build-up in the beginning. The drama suffers for this, seeming shallower and more whimsical than it ought to. The series getting axed didn’t help that much, as that escalation had no point at which to culminate into something satisfying, and the post-mortem extras felt like consolation prizes for my troubles. Reading the series didn’t feel much like trouble at all though - after all, drama was never the selling part of it, and through that lens, the drama we got was the real consolation prize itself, and the series as a whole was still what it always was: just a short compilation of cute shit.

Hanazono's got a pretty trash hairstyle, but the art and character designs taken as a whole are unique and adequately screenshot-able. Notably, it's very consistent, which is something one wouldn't expect to find with subject matter as seemingly crude as this. (I'm thinking specifically about Virgin Extinction Island, if you're wondering.) The art doesn’t detract from the story, and there are certainly times when more effortfully drawn scenes make the emotions feel more poignant, and thus it adds. So that’s pretty swag.

This is a time killer, but it’s a fair one. It is indeed worth the minimal time you’d expect to allot to it. Now, whether that's enough justification to embark on this brief semi-deadpan high school sex-ed comic journey is up to you - my job was simply to tell you it was kinda fun.