Despite that though, I have to say this is a manga I've read the entirety of, and could never find myself enjoying.
So, what is it that makes this story so awful to me? It's the complete and flagrant disrespect and ignorance towards transgender people. (please note that I myself am not trans, but as someone of the lgbt community, this still bothers me)
Story: I'm a huge fan of shoujo, and I kept seeing this manga around, so I decided to finally read it. I'll be keeping this short, and trying to highlight the main problems I had with it.
So, we have our two main characters, one of which has just been turned biologically female. From the beginning, it miffed me how they started to immediently refer to Nao as weaker then before, and started using female pronouns. It's alright in the end because Nao herself was comfortable with it. I liked Nao's loose views on gender, and thought this story might be trying to say that people are the same, no matter what gender they are, biolgically or otherwise, but I could not have been more wrong.
When Nao started being viewed as nothing more then a character to project sexual advances onto, it was...disapointing to say the least. What plays out afterwards is your standard romance, accept for the fact that the female MC is almost always seen as nothing more than a doll. I enjoyed her personality, but even still, this story can't really be saved by just her.
Now, I'll be going into the two inccidents in the manga that bothered me the most. First is the only actual trans character. I don't remember much about her, except that she desperately wanted to undergo the emergence, and be able to biologically transition the female, and so, was doing research on Nao. Despite this though, other characters constantly refer to her as a man, and act as though Nao should be wary of her because "that's still a man afterall".
The second inccident is the bath house story. The son of a bathhouse owner the MCs went to has just undergone emergence, and had went into the mens bath, much to Miyoshi's horror. They procceed to treat this kid as a female, despite him being very much still male on the inside, and act as though he should just get over it already and accept that he's now a girl. I think I don't need to explain while this is a problem.
I'm not saying this manga is a crime against humanity, or that you're wrong for likeing and enjoying it!! These are all my opinion, and I know I'm focusing on the negatives....but when the negatives are this huge to me...it's hard to see anything else.
