Neko Chi posted:

Is there any way to contact the scanlation team to make sure?

You can try on scanlation group site I guess

Haha, this is me being really late to talk about Tamura's abuse and subsequent dealings with it ✌(◕‿-)✌ as a person who has suffered sexual abuse at a young age, i can relate well to Tamura and his after-effects, especially because he hasn't seen anyone to discuss these issues/got shot down by his mom about it! haha, too close to home... but i do think that he's improving, and even if he is going down a downward spiral, that it can't get better than that.
i don't think he's unhappy, or he's having a great life. but he's coping as well as he can w/o seeing a therapist, or without crying on a bathroom floor to illustr8 how fucked up he is for the viewers, thank god. he's just living life, he has constant reminders of what happened to him now that he fully remembers and he's still fucked up to all hell, but you can't escape being fucked up from that, you know?

So as unhappy as Tamura's life may seem... and also, how obvious it is that he is still overtaken by what happened... that's normal. In fact, it's healthy he's addressing it at all, especially with his mother. CSA doesn't go away. I spent two years of my life pretending it never happened, and then one little thing reminded me all over again. And now i live with it. It's made me bitter, and a sexual 'deviant' and has also made me hate sex sometimes.

i relate the most to tamura, obviously. i don't want to get into details, but i could see my life becoming what tamura's is. During the whole series, he restates the idea that he's 'darker' than they all are, and he thinks that he's broken and crazy and he's not right... And i don't know how much he actually likes thinking this way, but it's a way to cope with that. And sometimes it's nice to think that because of what happened, i am now fucked up and crazy, but that's okay? It's okay, because..... it's made me apathetic, and it's made me trust people less, and it's made me manipulative. but i don't know. i see these as good traits. kind of like how Tamura smiles through being a pervert because of what happened? i hate what happened, but what i've become because of it is fine. does that make sense?

ha, i don't even know what i was trying to say. and this was all probably very unhealthy (but how would i know ♒((⇀‸↼))♒) but this is like the first time i've been public about something like this.... so, enjoy.

edit: also, no big surprise, i didn't see his ending as 'depressing' it just felt normal. understandable. chapter 40's treatment of marika does suxx ass tho

last edited at Jun 27, 2016 1:08AM

Ok, I got the reply I wanted. It's better than I thought it'd be.

"Hi, sorry if there was any confusion. You are right in the order: first it's Marika, then Tamura, then Ryousuke. When Ryousuke says 'what he means...', he's referring to what Tamura said in the previous line to try to soften Tamura's bluntness. This is somewhat alluded to by Ryousuke's line on the next page when he tells Marika not to worry about the details (i.e. that Marika is trans) and just live her life how she wants."

https://hachimitsu-scans.blogspot.gr/2016/06/what-dreams-may-come.html?showComment=1467240853771#c5939223545732602705

Hello people. I've been reading this series for quite some while and I wanted to post a review of it here. I am curious to know whether people agree or not with it.

The following review will contain some very important spoilers. For disclosure purposes I should mention I am myself a transgender woman and that many things I will critique about the series have to do with identity issues.

---

When I first started reading "Bokura no Hentai" I found myself intrigued. A manga that deals respectfully with transgender and crossdressing characters, without mixing up the two categories? A story that doesn't focus on fanservice but on the actual, real-life problems queer youth faces? Count me in!

"Bokura no Hentai", for the most part, delivers amazingly well on its premise. The characters are very interesting and humane, each one of them with their own life issues. Even more importantly, the trio of protagonists (Marika, who is the trans girl of the group, Tamura, who is crossdressing for his lover, and Ryousuke who does so for his dead sister) are not the exclusive focus of the story. Secondary characters like Akane and Tomochi also get some of the spot light and the mangaka manages to handle their cases very well.

There is a great deal of diversity among the protagonists and their experiences, so the story doesn't get monotonous. Moreover, the "plot" gives plenty of room for character development. Honestly, one of the most enjoyable parts of "Bokura no Hentai" is watching the characters I've come to love grow and learn from their experiences. It made me feel as if I went to school with them, listened to their worries and shared their concerns. It made me care about them a whole lot.

The art is great, minimalistic yet not simplistic. I especially loved the colored introductions in each volume. I believe that they give a warmer feeling to the story and they work great as a way to further humanize the characters.

So far I've described 99% of what "Bokura no Hentai" is. Honestly, I wish I could stop here. I wish I could just give it a big shining 10/10 and tell you it has earned its place among the masterpieces of our time.

SPOILERS

But, unfortunately, there's chapter 40. The chapter where Marika is having second thoughts about her identity. The chapter where she misgenders herself so that a group of irrelevant, anonymous cosplaying male students won't feel bad for not being as cute as she is. The chapter where essentially none of her friends tries to confront her about this attitude, in a way telling the readers that they too thought of her as a cute guy who crosses or, as the series tells us, a boy with a perversion. The chapter where she enters a crossdressing contest, even though from the first chapter of "Bokura no Hentai" she clearly, unapologetically states that she is not a crossdresser but a woman. The chapter where the mangaka managed, in just a few panels, to completely ruin every good thing had been done since the beginning of the story.

There are plenty of reasonable approaches one could take to justify this chapter. One could say Marika is still a teen, one who faced plenty of bullying that forced her in the closet. Perhaps the mangaka wanted to show us another issue transgender people face in our everyday lives (and doubt is undeniably one of them). Perhaps her friends didn't want to push her out of her doubts, perhaps they felt it was not their place to do so.

You know what? None of these excuses stands to scrutiny. First of all, the doubt/misgendering part came out of nowhere and felt completely out of character. Speaking strictly on technical writing grounds, it was the dumbest thing the mangaka could do at this point of the story. It'd be like having Tom Hanks in Philadelphia say something along the lines of "hey, am I really gay after all?" just a few minutes before the movie's ending. Yeah, it is that dumb.

Secondly, we never see Marika get over her self-doubt. Instead, we just get a "who cares?" attitude from the rest of the crowd, which I find outrageous for a story that did its best to convince us that this is an accepting, loving environment for Marika. What am I to make of this? That the ultra-supporting people who surrounded her simply thought of her as delusional? That for them cosplaying and being trans belong in the perversion category? Again, this is not what "Bokura no Hentai" showed us up until chapter 40. It's like the writer forgot about her own work and decided to do a fantasy (more like nightmare) version of this story.

Last, but not least, and this a completely subjective thought, it was not a necessity for "Bokura no Hentai" to deal with the issue of doubt. I am not the sort of reader that demands social justice to be the centerpiece of a given story. I can deal with very triggering and disturbing material. For example, I wouldn't care that much if this was a fantasy story where a character is trans but simply decides that it's all just a perversion or that they like to be bullied, etc. I may still dislike it but it'd be more forgivable.

"Bokura no Hentai", however, presents itself as a story that cares about such things, about the pains of real life human beings. And as such, it'd be dishonest on my part to ignore how much it failed to deliver here. Transgender people face doubt on every front of our daily lives. There's plenty of room to talk about that. But Marika's life was a best case scenario situation, quite possibly the most well present of its kind I've come across in any form of storytelling. It's one of the few times we got to see an optimistic view of a transgender life, where acceptance by one's self and the world rule the day. It's exactly because "Bokura no Hentai" gave me hope and joy that I cannot forgive this slip. Perhaps I'd be more indifferent to this part if I were not transgender myself, but honestly, I find this chapter to be indefensible.

SPOILERS END HERE

Despite the miserable failure that chapter 40 is, Bokura no Hentai remains an amazing manga, one of the best to deal with gender issues. If one ignores that one chapter, it's almost a masterpiece. It's just sad to look at it when I know that it was just one step away from perfection. Do I recommend reading it? Yes, I do. Just try not to get overexcited until you complete it.

I completely 100% agree :)

I made a handy relationship chart.

isn't this technically yaoi?

isn't this technically yaoi?

Several times in fact. That's why it's tagged yaoi

Just checked my to read list and then... I had to be very sleepy if I added yaoi. Cause I hate yaoi.

This series is great. I really loved how they made cross dressing traps dark. The series itself is very psychological, it's really one of my favorite works when it comes to this sub genre. The way they handles the serious topic of cross dressing and transgender individuals really surprised me. They took the concept seriously, and it intrigued me to read the whole series.

last edited at Jul 12, 2017 11:01AM

To be honest I think the first page of the Boku no Hentai Another chapter basically sums up why i'm sometimes uncomfortable recommending this series as a manga with a trans girl in it: They constantly call her a Crossdresser and like... idk. It bugs me. I may be a little more sensitive to stuff like that then most trans women though.

Not to say i don't enjoy reading it but the way they handle her just feels off sometimes. Then again trans people are different in the way they relate to their transness and i have heard other trans women recommend the series and say they related to her. then again that person had a different view of almost all the relationships and stuff. Mainly she focusing on the idea that Marika is the least messed up member of the group and that a lot of her issues came from a mix of dysphoria and the fact that she is trying to relate to dark and edgy fiction stereotype crossdressers and not other trans people. i don't think that's well supported by the text itself though.

Edit: Holy fuck i didn't remember chapter 40. Jesus... Yeah most definitely has problems.

last edited at May 16, 2018 2:57AM

To be honest I think the first page of the Boku no Hentai Another chapter basically sums up why i'm sometimes uncomfortable recommending this series as a manga with a trans girl in it

Yeah... yeah. I'm not intimately familiar with the way trans girls/women in Japan view themselves as members of society, so I'm trying my best to be a little aloof about it, but I can't deny that it makes me uncomfortable. I wouldn't ever recommend this to another trans woman.

I think a lot of the issues stem from the fact that Fumi deliberately avoided actual research until midway through the series, so it led to an uncanny wrongness that never really ceased. I'm sure one can defend it by pointing out that hey, it's fiction and it's meant to be fantastical and entertaining and not necessarily an accurate portrayal of the actual lives of people, but... that doesn't stop me from feeling uncomfortable and, well, used in a way.

That's not to say I didn't get anything out of it. Hell, I read through the whole thing twice and enjoyed it. But that doesn't mean I don't feel uncomfortable with the way people like me we're handled.

Well, a lot of it was fine until Chapter 40.

Nice that still more content being made.

Hmm that girl what likes yuuta totally counts as yuri crush

After really hurt and dark story. Author decide to rerun it as comedy.
I died on last page.

Funny enough, the Another chapter is how I remember the story going.

Now this is a drama i want

.
Aww it finished before i even realized it..
The ending kinnda meh but overall the stories are great . 7.5/10 bc tomochi didn't hook up with marika smh

last edited at Oct 13, 2021 4:33PM

Not one of, but being the most f**k up and dark manga that I have ever read. What makes it scary is that the plot can be real life.

really amazed by this completely random find, i thoroughly enjoyed it. never read a manga that delves into these kinds of things and takes them so seriously.
(and then i got to chapter 40 and was very sad)

I feel so represented by Parou but im a cis woman. Weird