Idol Pretender

Great… another gender bender manga… It’s almost like the authors of these mangas really hate men because it seems that almost all the men end up as women in these types. And then to top it off, we have a harem of boys and girls who like the character and each personality is pretty much infatuated by the main character. But anyway, I drew the short straw of the randomizer (I sometimes use that to figure out what I will be reading or watching next) so now I have to dive right in. I’m sorry to bring this up but isn’t it really bad when thereare guys really going for the centerfolds of a woman that used to be a man? That’s the type of manga this is, and its worse when there are a ton of times you see her naked, in sexy poses and such to. I feel like it’s another side of Yaoi that I’m not so sure about… or is it Yuri when there is a woman you like is a male who has turned into a female? The whole thing confuses me to no end. Not to mention that the story pretty much ran its course of Chinami starting to act more and more like a love sick girl to a point I was getting recaps of Kashimashi: Girl Meets Girl. Seriously, it was enough for me to want to bang my head against the ground when almost every single character kept chanting the same thing of it not mattering weather someone is a boy or girl, it only matters what’s on the inside. I mean, I go by that idea too in a sense but it really didn’t apply all that well with this type of story. Characters pretty much had only one thing on their mind the whole time, and their personalities only grew a little, if not at all. The only character that grew a lot and had anything going for them was Chinami and even then I felt they milked the feelings part a little too much. It was just too much for what they were trying to do. I could see it if there was a little more to get me interested but the character flip flopped way to much and again, I wanted to hit my head against the table in a fit of annoyance. The artwork is beautiful but very moe. Everything looks like it has a really strong shine to it like the characters are made from plastic. Characters have really childish faces, large glass-like eyes, and small faces. If you really want to think of what its like, think Lucky Star goes ecchi. With that, Chinami is actually supposed to be a really sexy women and everything but I can’t get past her looking like a little girl. Not to mention her breasts look a bit too big for the body she has. Her hourglass figure just feels like the proportions are off in some areas. Her hair is almost always a mess to and I don’t think that if she was going to be trying to be an idol, she would leave her hair like that. They look much more like clomps of tentacles going every which way then hair.

Okay, so. I'll start by saying that this was for the most part a very enjoyable manga to read. I'm a fan of gender-bender stories, and especially ones where the gender-bent character comes to realize that the way they end up isn't so bad after all. (Having that certainly ends up approximating closer to being transgender, which I'll take as close to as I can get, lmao.) This manga is really funny too. And it did have some actually pretty wholesome things to say, such as the occasionally repeated "gender doesn't matter" (initially "as long as you're beautiful", which really ends up saying something aboutthe speaking character's shallowness, but later mentioned again without that qualification in regards to love). But... the ending really soured a lot of that. Without getting too spoilery, I didn't like how they spent the whole story developing a relationship that I ended up getting really invested in only to yeet it out the window at the last second. If the ending had been handled better I could probably feel much less conflicted about Idol Pretender, but as it stands, welp.

The story began with the protagonist being macho and Uber manly. Then suddenly with a dose of girly drugs he became extremely sexy and lost all of his muscle mass. To make matters worse he had a huge crush on some chick. Yet he still tries to pursue her as a girl. It's been years since I read Idol Pretender. The logic in this manga blows me away. His pursuits worked out in his favor but the girl he had a crush on became creepier. As a job or a joke he became an idol, the opposite of an extremely masculine man and admitted something in theend that disappointed me greatly.

It's truly mind-boggling. Idol Pretender goes from 0 to 60 in 3.5 pages. It's short, it's fast, the love is furious, and there are more overlapping love triangles that go nowhere than you can shake a stick at. Okay, so, the decision to leave his life behind in order to live as a woman trying to become an idol for "easy" money is one thing...but when you add a new character and each new character is a new love rival but you're not going to flesh out the love that well...it's frustrating. I'm not too happy with the ending and I was disappointed to see the characters onlycaring about their love lives than being themselves. I wish there was more conflict with the main character and understanding what he is after his gender transition, but it always boils down to "Gah?! I'm supposed to be a guy!?!" Which gets old even after a short series such as this. There are genuinely good moments and interesting character turns that I wish were plotted out better. Part of the reason I didn't like the ending is that I didn't feel like the author put in the work to make the romance feel natural. It's weird. By all accounts, this is a very average gender bender story, and yet it's missing just enough parts and sense that it makes it frustrating and disappointing, but not bad. Sigh. It was a roller coaster of "?!?"