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This is the first BL manga I ever completed, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. Nana is a seme crossdresser, Kei is uke. Both guys are gorgeous in their own unique ways, and the art is consistently good. The story is almost conflict-free, and when there is conflict it's mostly resolved in the chapter it appears in. But a couple of moments brought tears to my eyes because conflicts seemed to be resolved that existed before the story started, be they conflicts in the characters' lives or in the reader's.

This is a gay fantasy, the visual equivalent of a romance novel. It sells you the fantasy ... of being loved. It makes you feel the feels without doing things to the characters that they don't want deep down inside. Nobody dies, nobody breaks up, nobody unloads any trauma more serious than getting groped on a train (at least until Nana tells his story), but there is the implication of things that occurred before the manga.

Nana at one point acknowledges that Kei is "not gay" (by what standard?) and I get the feeling that it's less about social norms and more about Kei's comfort zone, his internal process of rationalizing the relationship. Kei wants to get fucked in the ass, he wants to get roughed up, he wants to serve Nana. At the same time, he wants to see Nana cross-dress, and crossdressing Nana gets more pages than "boy mode" Nana. Kei gives himself to Nana rather than someone else because, according to Kei, the crossdressing made it easier for him. He's avoiding toxic masculinity while embracing a dominant partner who simply happens to be a guy with a dick. It makes you think (and it's also good fap material)

Pretty standard stuff. Girls go in and don't come out. Amputation fetish. The guy from the most affluent bloodline in the area has suitors lined up because the other families want to marry into money. Such is the cold cynicism of the world.

This is true ero guro manga, not comedy like Hentai Shounen. The art is mediocre, but the storytelling is nice and dark. It's a refreshing break from the more conservative manga about death games and haunted houses. This one goes whole hog, with girls losing body parts and becoming permanent residents of the mansion. Give it a read.

Yes, I have a female wrestling fetish. That's why I watched this.

It would be good if it focused more on the wrestling and less on the techno-thriller aspects. There's a whole subplot of a mad scientist wrestling promoter with military contracts trying to create super-soldiers. It goes deep into sci-fi territory and mixes a lot of ideas together that distract from what I came for: a wrestling fetish OVA. This is 1/3 wrestling at most.

A shame there isn't a lot of anime like this. Perhaps this early work was a warning for anime producers to try more proven genres like mecha. I can dream of ... a wrestling Evangelion, but for what Wanna-Be's is, it's fine. It's watchable.

Do you know what hides behind those anime avatars? Narcissism. Such is the condition of many otaku. Our hero is a bona fide galge expert, to the exclusion of anything except his newfound demon friend he doesn't care about.

The hero spends his days slamming the buttons of a handheld called a PFP, styled after the PSP Go N1000, a system not known for eroge outside of the homebrew scene. That means our boy probably plays galge without even the enticement of anime tiddy.

When I was in high school, I played Doukyuusei 2 on ZSNES. I played dating sims without the tiddy. I was a narcissist. ... If I were a true connoisseur, I surely would have explored the genre's vast benippled history, from the landmark PC-98 games of Alice Soft to the early modern classics of Clockup, and maybe some Illusion titles. Instead I played what was easiest to get a copy of, and that laziness is held against otaku kind as if everything they do in life is half-assed.

Despite the hero's apparent laziness, he seems to be the world's foremost expert on all-ages moe galge (the only flavor of galge we see him playing). In that respect, the hero seems unprepared for the psychological inferno of real girls, yet somehow his interactions with them are on point. Are the girls in his life just that shallow? Is he just that shallow? Is the show just that shallow?

For the most part, the tone is pure satire. The last couple of episodes assume a more serious tone, and at that point it becomes clear that the animators would rather be working on something like Evangelion than a Dokuro-chan successor. The protagonist's total apathy and lack of depth make him unrelatable, and that's fine for a certain kind of anime. It's not bad, it just doesn't stand out either.

After watching all 12 episodes, my only question is: "Why is there more?" Why make more of this nonchalant, apathetic, inoffensive, and sometimes boring anime that tells the same couple of jokes repeatedly? I don't feel anything. It's good, but it's sexless and repetitive and ultimately not quite my thing.

I watched this anime because I enjoyed some gender bender eroge, so maybe this would be like that. It's not.

Onimai is an innocent anime that plays it safe. The uncensored cut is age-appropriate for middle schoolers. American middle schoolers, even. The characters are totemo kawaii to the point where the shonen art style borders on chibi. Onimai is a show about youthful friendship from the perspective of an introvert with a layer of sugar. Remove the sugar and you've got Watamote; add too much you've got Precure. Onimai sits right in the middle with a thousand other moe slice-of-life anime, the difference here being the ... protagonist's sex change. None of the girls are full lesbo (probably), especially the protag since he's nominally a guy.

The hero isn't horny enough, which might be an author's statement that obsession with video games reduces a man's sexual potency. The removal of a man's ochinpo can also have that effect. In the hero's shoes, I personally would seize the chance for ecchi with my manko, but only eroge touches our hero that way. It's a sorely missed opportunity.

The art style. Any time characters are in a bathhouse, they each have a single drop of sweat on their respective cheeks. I thought it was meant to convey a sense of awkwardness and mixed feelings, but then I realized that it's probably supposed to represent condensation. Also, the sky has a checker pattern, which I thought was some kind of futuristic dome ceiling before I realized the pattern was probably meant to imitate a screen used in the manga. Visually, the show is all over the place. Maybe that's common in comedy anime.

If you're looking for yuri, try Valkyrie Drive: Mermaid. That has some doki doki dameyo uwa~ moments. Onimai is as sterile as a bottle of bleach, and it almost feels like it's reprimanding the viewer for having ecchi thoughts about the characters and situations. You can tell the creators wanted to take it further. The nipple rub shots without visible nipples are a smoking gun.

Onimai is an anime about anime. It does nothing original, it pushes no boundaries, and it feels no pain. If you're the type to add whipped cream to everything you put in your mouth, this is the show for you.

The final episode is a bit sad, but the protagonist ruins the mood by plainly voicing his/her observations on the obvious visual symbolism. You don't need to tell me; I know he's conflicted about liking girlish things. The resolution doesn't even matter, and so it ends without anything significant happening. I can watch a good anime like Evangelion on a cell phone with dollar store earbuds and still have a good time, but I gave Onimai as much of my exclusive attention as I could and for me it didn't move the needle.

Onimai seems to be aimed at people struggling with gender identity, which is a subject I don't care about. I personally would use the unexpected circumstances as an opportunity to explore the slut life, but I guess I'm not as much of a NEET as the protagonist. Lean harder on the romantic elements and you've got an interesting story. Focus on slice-of-life with a single altered detail and your story is nothing.