Is shounen-ai for kids a thing? If so, this might qualify. It’s so basic, so superficial, and so unoffensive, I feel like it’s almost a coloring book. It’s barely even a 16+ rating and might even be as fluffy as Almost Crying which is saying something. The dialogue is just so dumb and the two stories featured here are just so silly, you could probably read it while drunk and high and still understand it perfectly. Possibly better. It also occurred to me that reading it backwards might improve on the story because the confession inexplicably happens in chapter 1 with no lead-up and then nothing really develops after that, so if you read it the other way it’s almost like you get more plot development! #badyaoihacks
The title story features main character Tomo, the cute little uke on the cover, who worships his older brother Ei, student council president and all around model teenager. Ei’s best friend is the student council vice president, Izumi. Izumi teases Tomo a lot and calls him stupid, but Tomo suddenly and inexplicably falls in love with him. That is basically the whole plot and all of it happens in chapter 1 so it’s not exactly spoiling anything.
This was done for Gush comics and each chapter seems written as if you may not have read the previous one because they do a short character and plot summary before each one. This may also explain why chapter 1 feels WAY too rushed story-wise and inexplicably has Tomo fall madly in love with a bullying upperclassman he hates because he bandaged his knee once; maybe it was a sort of a test chapter to see if there was interest for her to continue the series or something. Either way it literally goes from ‘Izumi bullies me every day so much, what a meaniehead’ to ‘Izumi was nice to me today, I think I love him,’ there is literally zero lead-up or anything and this was a big part of why I had trouble getting into it after that.
The rest of the story is basically the three of them being jealous of who spends more time with who. Tomo worships his brother so much actually that I thought we were entering incest territory actually but thankfully there was a line drawn there, although fanservice doesn’t seem to be excluded.
The second story is your run-of-the-mill middle-school-friends-reunited-in-high-school-and-one-secretly-likes-the-other. This stars Kousuke and Yuri, who look like a hair-color-swap version of Izumi and Tomo.
If your primary reason for reading BL is fawning over cute ukes, this book will be right up your alley. The mangaka obviously likes drawing them and is great at this, but unfortunately had to come up with a story to put them in, which is where things go downhill. Shounen-ai has to have a good story for me. There’s no sex, so the dialogue and romance development is like…the whole idea, and the art here is certainly cute but it would take some god-tier art to able to carry a shounen-ai without a decent story. Actually, I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that she might enjoy doing one-off illustrations or artbooks or some other kind of art more than manga (that may well be exactly what she’s doing actually, judging by her scant manga credits), and she would definitely benefit from working with a writer as it seems like there’s nothing more she would want to do than just draw cute characters without worrying about a plot, and there’s definitely nothing wrong with that.
Tomo gets aaaaallllllll the love in this manga, and Shino dotes on his big expressive eyes. Literally it lowkey felt like she drew a bunch of Tomo pictures, separated them into panels, put in some other characters, bound them together in a book, and added some dialogue after the fact.
I was surprised to learn that this story has a part 2, which was not licensed. Either June didn’t even plan to license it since the title doesn’t indicate it’s a part 1 of 2, or it was done later on and not originally planned. It doesn’t really end on a cliffhanger or anything and there’s no real hint that there is more to the story, so not being able to read the part 2 shouldn’t hinder your enjoyment of it.
Shino is not a prolific mangaka with only 6 works listed on mangaupdates, but 4 of the 6 were licensed in English which is semi-impressive (including her earliest work Kurashina Sensei’s Passion, a 3-volume series also on the June imprint, and Oh My God! from Deux Press, unfinished at two volumes but re-licensed digitally by Sublime anyway for some reason). I will largely attribute this to her being in the right place at the right time when yaoi was hot here, but I mean, technically that’s more than half her work unless there is some not listed so that’s pretty pog. I am particularly interested in Oh My God which is her only work that has a supernatural element, someday I’ll get around to reading that.
TL;DR: This is basically a children’s book with dudes kissing. If you really like shounen-ai fluffcore or going ’aww!’ over cute ukes and don’t care about much else you’ll likely enjoy this one, but just be prepared for some really braindead dialogue and silly, superficial plot. A big reason I did not like it was a 0-to-60 “You bully me and I hate you but suddenly I love you” in the space of 2 panels in chapter 1 with no real context or any relationship development. It is coherent and pretty cute, but to me you just can’t have a good shounen-ai with such a nothing-ball of a plot.