Audrey

As in the last volume, not much is going on yet. The pacing is not quite as tight as inside Mari's was. Kei is a cryptic character so far and we know nothing about her outside how she influences/affects others. I came away from this reading her as polyamorous and in love with MC. Gonna assume things will take off soon.

This series has a great pacing where tension is never really absent. It's constantly distressing and in this chapter it gets the worst it got so far. Nearly every chapter of this series evokes constant fear and each page lingers a lot. I often stop and stare at a page while thinking about what questions it raises, and thinking about what's gonna happen when I look at the direct next page. It's bleak. The series raises questions about identity for me as a new transgender woman who always had alot of hangups about the subject, but until about 2 years ago from an insecure male perspective feeling constrained. I disassociated almost completely for an hour after a certain scene where he talks about what he wanted to do with Mari. The series has mostly made me feel profoundly terrible but I haven't had a piece of media command such attention and emotion in me in a long time.

This series frequently makes me stop and think about it's themes and the extremely personal connections to the author that make me think what they could have been working through when they wrote it. Like having the mother as the one who fracture's Mari's identity when real life Oshimi had an abusive mother. Or how Oshimi depicts perversion as a rebellion and escape and then has his protagonist be a self loathing disgusting pervert that increasingly seems like a self insert. At one point I was like. Fuck this series sure revolves around jerking off a lot huh. The series oozes sexual shame and confusion. It also wasn't lost on me when he depicted his young happy self innocently getting into manga as a little girl. One of the most heartbreakingly honest mangas I have ever read, possibly the most profound and disturbing.

Oshimi is very good at drawing beautiful women, and expressive faces that capture incredibly specific emotions. This time we have a canon trans character although she doesn't have much going on yet besides kissing people nonconsensually and hinting at a multifaceted gender identity, similar to Oshimi's own that he's described before. Not that much goes on in this volume and I'd say it's carried a lot by the art, and my high expectations for Oshimi. Writing is well paced as always

So far I'd say I liked this volume. I have come to appreciate his frankness about sex. So far I have high hopes for this series although I don't expect it to reach how much I loved Inside Mari. When Oshimi laid out his thesis for what he's gonna do in the next volume I was like yeah baby let's go deconstruct masculinity

I've never seen a manga with such a thoughtful earnest exploration of gender before as this one. Isao comes to learn the pressures of being a high school girl intertwined in all these relationships directly from her shoes and unlike other gender bender mangas it's not a joke, escapist or some dumb sexist bullshit but an earnest and very depressing look. I would say it's like the opposite of escapism. This word is overused and I'm unsure about this sentence but it's almost like a deconstruction of gender bender mangas, most of which are vapid and do not even attempt to broach genuine questions about identity or the subject that would be naturally raised by the premise. I'm not sure if that sentence is right, you could also just say it's a serious gender bender that is actually done well.