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.
