#world cup#football#fifa#soccer#fifa world cup#world cup 2026#england nt
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⚠️Vote for whomever YOU DO NOT KNOW⚠️‼️
Round 2
Hinata Akatsuki (Omega Labyrinth Life)
Hinata Saotome (Usotsuki Lily)
I know Both/Neither.
hey guys i actually managed to read at least the first volume of usotsuki lily before the end of the year :DDD i didn't post before because i've been very lazy from the 25th to here, but this manga is special and deserves it! plus my little anon friend deserves to see my thoughts (as always, spoilers ahead).
and anon, you were SO right about our main cross-dressing character shinohara en being done in a way that at once may seem like classic cross-dressing boy, but it's actually really refreshing. one thing to understand about en is that he is a man hater and that is the principle used as to why he cross-dresses.
yipiee!!! yay!!!!!! i'm not a particularly man hater girlie but i support them 🫶🫶
but as you can see from the panels, what actually ultimately made me like en so much is that he is not just a man-hater, he absolutely LOVES girls and i couldn't help but really identify with that hahaha
🐐🥳🤝
also: first time i have ever seen a guy in a shoujo manga be all for feminine body hair
king! no wait. queen..? monarch? anyway, he truly loves everything about girls and seeing a manga from this time period, i was preparing myself to be disappointed because pretty much every male character who cross-dresses has that thing with makeup where they totally look down on girls who "don't make an effort" ("if you're a girl you should do at least this much" blablabla). but en loves girls as themselves. fat girls, boyish girls, he loves them all!
but what becomes the cherry on top is how that transfers to the internal feelings of the character. because it becomes pretty hard not to read en as someone who, if not a whole trans girl, is at least transfeminine.
it becomes clear that en really really likes hinata and for her, he is willing to do a lot, including going out dressed as a guy once in a while. but he still feels completely incapable of giving up cross-dressing, even if it would cost him the girl he likes. even while he does say he is "actually a guy" and is "still a guy on the inside", those statements are never defensive in the way we see some other cross-dressing boy characters utter them and it's more like a "it is the way it is", in my opinion. and when you look at the things he feels and the things he goes through, they pretty much scream trans experience.
i didn't grab a screenshot, but he loves the thought of being recognized as lesbians with his girlfriend in a couple's cafe they were planning to go. he also has that old universal problem of what to do when going to the pool or the beach. he knows people see this "habit" of his as something "perverted" and he has to be ok with sitting out from doing something fun because sometimes you both can't take having to display your body in a gender conforming way but also don't want to be seen as weird for doing something more to your tastes. i have been there before and like. which trans person hasn't...
join that with the fact that every single time he comes out dressed as a guy is explicitly just to make his girlfriend happy (he still absolutely loathes seeing himself in the mirror) and you can see why i think the way i do.
and by the way, even when he says this ⬇️ about his male friend, you can clearly see that what he means is that he likes that he doesn't hit on him.
remember, he is pretty much a lesbian in the body of a boy.
but you know, at the same time that i want to shout out transbian icon 🫶 i'm also fine with being on that undefined in-between state, hoping that this character will continue to be portrayed being true to himself and these feelings.
yeah so. we pretty much established that i absolutely love en but what about hinata? short answer is that i like her too! long answer must include an explanation why i think you shouldn't give up on her just because we start on this ⬇️
and because the recurring "joke" so to speak is that she gets all excited about doing something with her boyfriend and then pans to her boyfriend and it's a cute girl. but i think what people need to take from these "comedic moments" is that they are designed to be unserious. i believe you even have the freedom of tweaking this vision and seeing hinata as overreacting for the sake of the "joke" at hand. here's the thing: almost everyone around en acts like what he's doing is not only normal but something that elevates him (guys are in love with him and girls always come to him for advice). but hinata is in the unique position of being his girlfriend and still figuring things out and the author uses the humor of that to keep things light*.
by the time the volume ends, you can see a clear difference from the hinata of the beginning and the one we end up on in only 6 chapters. right off the bat in the first chapter, she already likes him enough just as he is to want him to fight for her (instead of giving up because he is a cross-dresser and she had an initial problem with that) and tell her "to accept him as the cross-dressing guy he is" after her initial wobble about actually accepting his confession and dating him.
she still finds him cute as a girl:
and you can see little by little how hinata's problem is more like a performative thing or "what a normal girl should think".
she might be very conflicted about kissing him as a girl, but what the author portrays as romantic is that she still does it because she likes him.
and what manga from the 2000s era would ever put such a blatant yuri moment like that??? only komura ayumi!!!
and can we talk about the most romantic moment ever of the volume for a sec???? as mentioned before, en and hinata were planning on going to a couple's café but they can't pass as a couple as two girls* and en just couldn't bring himself to go as a guy because the windows are too mirrored and he would have to look at himself. ultimately, he decides to make a greater effort to make his girlfriend happy, but then
hinata cross-dresses too just so they can go together!!!! my heart fr did a little dance when i got to this page because i wasn't expecting it. this was a real special moment to show that it's not just en that is making efforts in this relationship, but hinata, in her own way is making some too. and while i understand it might discourage some people that the effort has to be made in the first place, please remember that not only is this a story that needs its points of conflict so growth can happen, but also.. this is a late 2000s, early 10s title.
to call back both of those *'s i put, unfortunately to enjoy this you kinda have to roll with the state of things. at this time period the west might have started a few important conversations in a more mainstream manner, but the world of manga and its cousins still needed a moment to think about it until at least the late 10s and now 20s (and definitely not in any overt way aside from some things here and there). the thing is that while i mentioned how his struggles are similar to real-life trans people and that you could read him that way, the manga still has to clarify that he sees himself as a boy. that he wears boxers under his girl clothes because "he is not a pervert". that he might be like us but he doesn't Actually want to "be a girl" or be one of "those people" who do it as a fetish (whom i also support wholeheartedly). they are "like yuri" just like the title implies, but they still can't go to the couples café as "lesbians". so you know, it's still a shoujo manga of its time.
but honestly, if you already know how things work in manga, discouragement is the last thing you should feel. i hope i managed to include enough panels and explanations to showcase how different this manga is from a lot of others who deal with the same subject. how refreshing it is that it doesn't shy away from doing romance in an unconventional way because these are unconventional characters (instead of trying to balance things out by putting unconventional characters in the most conventional mold possible as to not alienate audiences). like, look at this. hinata might have started to cross-dress to fit with en better, but then she actually LIKES IT!
that was another time i was like in near disbelief because what other author would do that???
and honestly from this author, who knows, maybe the characters will get to a place where they're fine with being seen as lesbians because honestly that seems like something this author could do. maybe even include a queer character at some point. i love when an author with a taste for the unconventional realizes that from the security of making it a bit they can include almost anything in a straight romance manga ahahha
all hail!
really excited to keep reading this!!!
⚠️Vote for whomever YOU DO NOT KNOW⚠️‼️
Round 1
Hinata Saotome (Usotsuki Lily)
Hinoe (Natsume's Book of Friends)
I know Both/Neither.
i'm not much of a fan of her writing and art style but i have to respect ayumi komura dedication to doing every type of shoujosei imaginable. herr body of work includes but is not limited to:
transphobic crossdresser shoujo romance
chubby boy absurdist shoujo romcom
femdom x old man josei smut
tomboy yuri shoujo oneshot
bisexual supernatural genderbender shoujo
patisserie x sushi chef shoujo gastronomic romance
BDSM kingdom with sadistic princess shoujo comedy
and the list goes on...
You’re not cis but you don’t know it yet: Starter Pack
You’re 13yo and you search “gender bender” online (most often on MangaFox) and proceed to obsess over what you find
In order: Fujioka Haruhi from OHSHC, 1/2 Prince, Ranma 1/2, Hana no Kishi, Samurai High School, Fabulous Boys (原来是美男), Power!!, Usotsuki Lily, Kashima and Hori from GSNK , I am J by Cris Beam, Leviathan trilogy
Today’s Maid of the Day: Shinohara En from Usotsuki Lily
I just love couples who both think the other is completely out of their league and are huge fans of each other
I'm checking the usotsuki lily summary and it sounds very cool and sweet!!! but I've been burned before by manga that abandoned their cool concepts five chapters into the story so I just want to check if this is one of them or not
Usotsuki Lily is a bit of a complicated situation, I’m not gonna lie to you.
The main love interest very much reads like a trans girl to me, though I’m pretty sure they aren’t meant to be one. Their cross-dressing is explained as they love girls so much that when they look in the mirror they get so angry it causes them to break the mirror but i look at it and i’m like...babe...that’s just gender dysphoria
Anyways, the main character is a cis girl who gets confessed to by En, and she spends the first several chapters trying to get them to be a “normal boyfriend”, asking them to “please dress up as a guy for our date” and etc, and getting angry whenever she sees them dressed up as a girl, and i know that can be very upsetting to some people, so i want to give anyone a heads up ahead of time.
since this isn’t meant to be an explicitly queer series, the topic isn’t handled with as much tact as one would hope, but seeing the development of the main character’s relationship with her partner is actually really heartwarming, but over time she slowly comes to accept and even support her partner’s “eccentricities”.
like there’s this really cute scene from the very first chapter where she realizes that dressing up like a guy would make her partner really unhappy on their date, so she decides to crossdress as well in order to make them feel more comfortable
and don’t even get me started on how sweet the birthday chapter is.
all in all, i definitely recommend the series because it’s pretty sweet, but i want you guys to go in knowing full well that there are some parts that come off transphobic, so if that’s something that would make you uncomfortable, please practice self care!
if you want something a little more modern and with less problematic elements but that still has the queer relationship dynamics in an m/f couple, i highly recommend “The Way of the Househusband” (gnc straight couple where the husband is the stay at home spouse), “My Androgynous Boyfriend” (cute m/f couple where the boyfriend is gnc), and “The Bride Was a Boy” (a story written by a trans woman about a trans woman and her relationship with her cis husband).
