Two Fluffy Recs

[alias_sqbr]

Monthly Girl's Nozaki-kun: A very entertaining comedy anime about a group of highschool friends making shoujo romance manga. It has a lot of fun with romance tropes, and there's cute shippy moments between lots of characters, but there's no canon ships and the ultimate focus is on friendship. It's moderately heteronormative but doesn't aggressively avoid or no-homo the moments of same sex shippiness. It's on Netflix with subtitles and an English dub.

Guide on How to Fail at Online Dating: This very cute and funny Chinese m/m romantic comedy novel is now fully translated. It's about a male university student who decides to take revenge on the man who broke his cousin's heart by catfishing him in an online game as a Sexy Girl. Identity porn, misunderstandings, and a very cute romance ensue. Flamebyrd wrote a longer description with content notes. I'll add that the sex, while very vague, is enthusiastically consensual (not a given in the genre!) Also, while the story doesn't engage with trans identities, and involves "men pretending to be women", it didn't feel super transphobic, since the narrative treats all catfishers pretending to be hot girls similarly, regardless of the catfisher's actual gender (though that treatment isn't always great)

Comments

[skygiants]

I love Nozaki-kun so much and I'm very fond of every child ... though I went through a period of deep frustration because for whatever reason the only actual romance I really care about enough to read fanfiction for is Nozaki/Chiyo's eternal dance of trope-laden Schrodinger's oblivion, which is exactly the opposite of where the rest of the fandom's priorities lie.

[alias_sqbr]

I wanted poly relationships with omnidirectional mutual pining, which fandom generally isn't interested in at the best of times, but vaguely recall stumbling across some moderately cute Chiyo/Nozaki/Mikorin.

[skygiants]

Yeah I think part of my problem is that I'm aggressively uninterested in Hori and Kashima being straightforwardly het ....

I would like to read the manga far enough to get along to the part where (I have gathered, through fandom osmosis) Mikorin apparently has an all-texting relationship with Nozaki's younger brother that is ironically enough slightly similar to the one in Guide To How To Fail At Online Dating.

[alias_sqbr]

Yes, I tried reading the manga for the same reason, but sadly either the translation or the format didn't click for me.

[merit]

Monthly Girl's Nozaki-kun was such a cute anime! Definitely a great fluffy show to watch (or rewatch??) during these times.

[alias_sqbr]

Yes I am considering a rewatch myself!

[izzet_bedtime_yet]

Thanks for that second rec; I may have spent most of yesterday reading it.

[alias_sqbr]

Excellent :D

[flamebyrd]

Your post and skygiants's remind me that I didn't think to address trans identities in my post about Online Dating, probably because, as you both pointed out, the book doesn't seem to think about it at all, but I'd still like to apologise for the oversight!

I was just thinking about Nozaki-kun the other day, and finding my favourite gags from the anime as manga panels so I could send them to a friend. It's such an excellent genre parody!

[alias_sqbr]

It's cool, it's a lot easier to miss an absence of something than if it was like actively transphobic etc.