Boy Meets Maria Who Is Actually a Dude Who Is Actually a Girl Who Is Actually a Dude
This is actually fine read, contrary to my expectations and initial impression. If there’s anything this manga excels at, it’s certainly going beyond the expectations if its genres. So, what were my expectations? At very first, I assumed this would be just another overrated generic BL story, just this time with some cross-dressing gimmick. This turned out to be incorrect, which is good. Then, the first few chapter made it clear that this is one of those manga that while being categorized as BL are actually aimed towards actual LGBT demographics rather than fujoshi. That of course isn’t by itself bad, but resemblance to Shimanami Tasogare immediately came to mind – manga that did something very similar but was disappointingly lacking in the actual story department. So I though that this would be another manga that just uses LGBT themes as sort of a marketing for a certain crowd without that much effort put to the actual content of it. This also turned out to be not entirely correct a bit later.
You see, there’s a dramatic shift in the tone in about half of the manga, and it’s what makes it stand out. The gender dysphoria turns out to be inducted from the outside. Due to abuse during childhood. Psychotic single mother that so much wished for a daughter. A sexual assault by one in position of trust. This gives the story an unexpectedly different kind of realism. Not the usual low hanging fruit realism of “We have non-hetero romance”, but a complex thought-provoking situation grounded in what could realistically be a real world problem. The whole story is not so grim of course, and the trauma part is well balanced by the rest of it.
Of course, that is one way to view this title, and it is unknown to me if the author actually intended to point out how such cases could stem from trauma and criticize grooming, but it is how I chose to interpret it. The Death of the Author and so on (the literary concept, not literally – though in this case unfortunately literally too, rest in peace).
So yeah, you might enjoy reading this even if you don’t care about BL works or LGBT community, feel free to try it out. I would even be okay with not calling it a BL in the first place, except for the last few pages.
