Emura - W Juliet, vol. 01-02 (Eng. trans.)

[oyceter]

I read vol. 1 a pretty long time ago, so my memory may be a bit fuzzy.

Ito Miura is a tomboy in the drama club, where she frequently (?) plays male roles. I think several girls in the school have a crush on her, and the drama club prima donna definitely does. Enter Makoto Amano, who is feminine, gorgeous, refined and delicate.

Except Makoto's actually a boy.

He doesn't want to inherit the family dojo, as he loves acting, so he made a deal with his overbearing father. If he can successfully attend the rest of high school as a girl, he'll have proved his acting chops and can go into acting instead of martial arts (I am still amused that the choice isn't between acting and finance or acting and engineering, but instead acting and martial arts!).

Ito discovers Makoto's secret early on and vows to protect him and to help him fulfill his goal.

This isn't a great manga; a lot of the scenes are fairly typical high-school shoujo. There's the school play, there are dramatic moments in which they discover the drama club may be disbanded (the angst!), there's the school festival, and there's Valentine's Day and chocolate. But I am fond of the characteres, and I'm interested in the gender-bending.

So far, Emura's going the standard route, in which Ito is beginning to wish she were more girly and there are moments in which Makoto gets to be all manly. And there's the requisite dramatic tension in form of a love triangle and people trying to split them up.

But I like that they're coded somewhat as a lesbian relationship in the text, and that in front of the school, Ito's taking the traditionally masculine role and Makoto's the traditionally feminine one.

I probably won't buy this, but since my library is getting it, I'll keep reading.

Comments

[kyuuketsukirui.livejournal.com]

I enjoyed the series. It's not one of my favorite manga ever, but it was fun.

[oyceter]

It's cute, definitely.

[mystickeeper.livejournal.com]

Oooh, I just picked up the first volume of this from the library, and it sounds fun enough. Yay for good decisions!

[oyceter]

It's not great, but it's also not bad. Also, gender bending!

[fmanalyst.livejournal.com]

While I liked the series and I bought all the books, I'm not finding that it has a lot of reread value. I do like the way their relationship progresses.

[oyceter]

Oh good. I like series about relationships way more than series about if the two will ever confess their feelings to each other.

[fmanalyst.livejournal.com]

In that case you'll like W Juliet. After a certain point, the relationship is actually pretty stable, and it starts to be more about trying to maintain Makoto's secret.

[meganbmoore.livejournal.com]

You know...when I started reading this series, I was more reading along because...well, why not? it didn't annoy me like most But somewhere in there(I think around volume 5 or so) it suddenly became one of my favorites, and is my favorite straight-highschool romance shojo(the only other one for me to make it all the way through that wasn't really short was Mars.) I think part of it is that when it comes to be time to start with the "problems they must face and choices they must make" stuff, she ignores the standard endless dwelling on "to have sex or to not have sex" and actually remembers that teens have other problems.

[oyceter]

Hrm, I'll be interested to see how it goes! I like watching relationships develop.

[meganbmoore.livejournal.com]

I like how this one develops, and later on the wannabe-interferers and want to be girly/want to be manly stuff isn't as forced. IIRC, it was meant to just be a one shot(and the first chapter may have been her first published work, I'm not sure) but it was popular, which is why it has a rocky start.

[larryhammer]

I like the relationships, but it doesn't take long for the series to slip into a near-endless cycle of episodes with no advancement. I might think otherwise if I read the whole thing, though.

---L.

[oyceter]

Hrm, yeah, that was sort of my impression from vol. 2.