This review sucks.

It claims Konoyama Kata is cisgender despite their gender being something they've kept secret.

It thinks otokonoko = crossdresser, ignoring nearly three decades of trans relationship to otokonoko culture. https://twitter.com/Anime/status/1278010422390644738

Konoyama Kata *did* learn about x-gender people through a google search, yes, but ... that's how many of us learn about being trans?

"The series does not care about the specific reasons why people are trans"

What fucking book did this person read? Not only does every single LGBT character get deep dives into who they are and how they found themselves over time, Mogumo is one of the first who get it.

"a love triangle"

There... There's no love triangle in the book.

"a cis dude who is, by the way, the ultimate arbiter of understanding for queer identities"

Uh, he fucks up A TON and that's called out.

"I need to see moments where the terrible binaries of the world come crashing down"

Well, you should try reading this manga series called "Love Me Fro What I Am" by Konoyama Kata, it really gets into that stuff after establishing the base cast.

There's an entire story arc in the series about how the closet lesbian wants to put Mogumo into a "girl" category because she liked them and how awful that is and that she must unlearn that binary.

Which she does and then she's able to come out.

Tetsu fucks up a lot, especially at school when he gets "awkward" about not referring to Mogumo as male. He's not some white knight perfect cis dude.

Like, I'm sorry this book doesn't perfectly reflect your experience as a non-binary trans woman.

It very much reflected my experience as a non-binary trans woman and many others I know too.

But it also is meant to reflect Japanese queer issues first and foremost.

"‘otokonoko’, meaning, broadly, a male crossdresser."

This part pisses me off the most.

This is so fucking inaccurate.

Otokonoko was originally a term used in the adult film industry. It involved both crossdressing cis men, transgender women and x-gender people.

The idea being to sell a sexually appealing idealized version of femininity despite them not being cis women.

The most famous otokonoko actor who was there since the start was Oshima Kaoru who himself have talked about how trans women were basically the most important part of otokonoko culture and how they taught him all he knew.

One of the partners he had for the longest time, also an otokonoko, was a trans woman.

Many otokonoko are, both during the time it was a porn term and now when it's a more general term.

This is because otokonoko is related to the josou subculture.

Again, a subculture that does and always has involves trans women and x-gender people.

Claiming that otokonoko is "broadly speaking" crossdressers is literally a lie.

Hell, the manga even acknowledges this. It's why THE OWNER OF THE OTOKONOKO CAFE IS A TRANS WOMAN.

Mogumo resists the otokonoko term because they don't want to say they're a boy or a girl, and the term is both (lit. male daughter) where as Mei, the trans girl, is used to the term and lashes out at the idea of dropping the use of it.

Like, I get it. The first volume is just 5 chapters.

But like... Yeah, the first volume is just 5 chapters, you only get to learn so much about the characters in that time and making broad claims about how the series handles them based on so little is ... irresponsible.

I'm assuming the love triangle claim is because the volume ends with *one frame* of the lesbian character, Kotone, being surprised learning Mogumo might have a boyfriend.

But, uh, that's not the direction it goes in.

Kotone, though she has some feelings for Mogumo, doesn't really want to date them.

That entire character arc is about Kotone having used Mogumo as a shield to NOT COME OUT AS A LESBIAN.

When it comes to Tetsu and Mogumo's relationship, Kotone's only real "issue" is that she worries Tetsu doesn't respect Mogumo.

This leads to Kotone saying some transphobic shit which she then comes to regret.

And it takes a whole two volumes, 12 chapters, after Kotone's single frame to get fully resolved when Kotone finally comes out as a lesbian.

At not point is it a love triangle.

Funnily enough, during that time we also learn when Mogumo started wearing dresses, when they started questioning their gender, how their family became an obstacle for this and more.

Mogumo, Mei and Kotone also goes to the Tokyo Pride Parade together and it's heavily implied that Mei and Kotone might become a couple.

Yeah, the implied next couple of the book is the trans girl and the cis lesbian who went to Pride together.

Find me a manga that does that.

Hell, Kotone has androphobia and one of the first things the book does with that is show that Mei and Mogumo don't trigger her androphobia because they're not men, they're a trans girl and a non-binary person.

And going back to Tetsu for a bit. The reason Testu initially does well is because Tetsu's big sister is a trans woman. He already has experience with accepting someone as a gender different from what they were assigned at birth.

We learn this in the first volume even. But he still fucks up because he's cis and mainly used to binary trans people. Mogumo being non-binary does lead to him fucking up a lot over the series because of course it does.

Also, if I'm going to be honest, Tetsu is barely a main character outside of the early chapters when he's introducing Mogumo to the rest of the cast.

He's always there as Mogumo's boyfriend, yes, but he's not who the story is ever about.

I'm just ... astounded at this review. Not liking the first volume of Love Me For What I Am is fine, but to expect 5 chapters of an ongoing series to somehow give you all the details on who each character in its queer ensemble cast is is just ... unrealistic.

"Mogumo's perspective is never centered."

It is the primary perspective across the current four volumes.

"We never see how their dysphoria manifests, internally, beyond them bucking against the cisnormative labels..."

So you already have an example in just 5 chapters.

Sorry, apparently Volume 1 is 6 chapters, not 5, my bad.

I fucking hate that this happens every time we get something queer.

"This isn't exactly how I wanted it to be or how I experience being queer and therefor it's terrible."

...and yet somehow Wandering Fucking Son is considered the most outstanding LGBT manga ever made.

Spoilers for Wandering Son. The most popular and recommended manga about trans people ... ends with one of the main characters detransitioning.

Yay.

Love Me For What I Am is certainly not perfect. But it's better than any ongoing serialized manga about the larger queer umbrella.

By miles.

Just the fact that every single main character of its fairly large cast is queer in some way is fucking amazing.

Like, not subtext or hints.

The main cast consist of a non-binary person, a pansexual boy, a trans girl, a gay male couple, a lesbian and their employer who's a trans woman.

And all of them get space and development across the series.

You might argue that the first volume should do enough to establish all its characters but...

Look, it's a serialized manga, the *collected volumes* is not how it was intended to be read. It's for collectors who already read it or those who heard about it late.

I realize that English localization means we have to read things in the collected volume chunks, but that's not the author and story's fault.

By the time that first volume was released in Japanese there were nearly double as many chapters as were in that volume.

In my opinion this is something a reviewer needs to keep in mind when reviewing individual volumes of a release.

You don't watch the first two episodes of an anime and go "wow, this show didn't care to get into the depth of these characters at all" because you *know* that comes over time as the series progresses.

Manga is no different.

An addendum.

You might wonder why I'm so frustrated with one single review of a manga.

So allow me to explain.

I have been following Love Me Fro What I Am since it began it serialization in 2018.

Me and other LGBTQIA+ people, both friends and strangers, instantly fell in love with it despite it being a very niche series with very little attention.

At the time, the series was only available in English through a scanlation from a group that specialized in crossdressing manga, but had also recently taken an interest in transgender manga.

It was a bumpy translation, for sure, but we still read it.

All of us spent every single month asking for the book to be licensed. Every time there was a survey or call for licensing from a western manga distributor we kept requesting it.

We did it before the first volume had been collected in Japan.

It took over a year but finally, in October 2019, Seven Seas announced they had acquired the license for the series.

LGBTQIA+ readers busted their asses off to get this licensed because we loved it that much.

So to have the biggest anime news website, one with major influence, drop a review that doesn't just dislike the book but actively misrepresents parts of it in an inaccurate and negative way while essentially claiming it's a "fake" queer book to not bother with?

Yeah, it sucks.

I don't actually care if someone dislikes the book or if they outright hate it. Opinions will differ and I don't give a fuck about that.

That review wasn't just an opinion piece on a piece of fiction though, which I hopefully made clear in my rant.

From the assumptions regarding the authors gender, the suggestion that learning about queer identities through google being somehow a lesser way of learning, the lie about what Otokonoko means, the misrepresentation of plot points and character depictions... It's a bad review.

It's funny, the review actually points out some of its own inaccuracies even.

It claims Tetsu is this super perfect cis dude who never does anything wrong and gets everything queer ... while also mentioning he misunderstood Mogumo's gender which is what set the story in motion.

Anyway, that's my addendum.

Read the manga, it's fantastic. Sadly only the first volume is out in English right now and it only barely scratches the surface but that's what a first volume does.

Here's another thread that breaks down that terrible review btw. https://twitter.com/BlissWallpaper/status/1278325526034354177

By the way, when contacted about the actual misinformation and lies provided in the review, unrelated to the *opinion* in the reivew, ANN simply said they had no interest in revising the review.

Now, I respect standing behind your writer. But correcting inaccurate information is the most basic thing a writer of any kind should be expected to do.

The review can be as negative as it wants when it doesn't fucking lie about both the content and the author.

When I ragged on The Last of Us Part II over killing a character that turned out to not actually be killed I deleted the tweet where I said they were and issued a correction.

Yet another addendum~

The thread I linked to a couple of hours ago was deleted following the person who wrote them being pushed to delete them. It's unfortunate because it was a really good thread. But I also can't blame them. Online discourse sucks.

That's all I had to add.