Love Me for Who I Am Vol. 1
August 12, 2020 11:14 AM - by Konayama, Kata - Subscribe
Iwaoka Tetsu invites fellow student Mogumo to work at his family’s café for “cross-dressing boys,” but he makes an incorrect assumption: Mogumo is non-binary and doesn’t identify as a boy or a girl. However, Mogumo soon finds out that the café is run by LGBT+ folks of all stripes, all with their own reasons for congregating there.
Comics Beat: "The cutesiness of the characters feels contemporary with moe series that sometimes feel exploitative, especially of young girls, but Love Me for Who I Am actually brings up legitimate issues around the loneliness and uncertainty surrounding questioning one’s gender identity and expression.... This is a must-read manga for anyone who has been searching for a thoughtful, positive representation of non-binarism in fiction."
Anime Herald: "Its scenario of an ‘Accepting Queer Family’ forming among the staff at Question! provides a relatable parallel what many real-life LGBT people find themselves doing out of sheer necessity. At the same time, relatable conflicts and challenges fill nearly every panel."
Anime News Network: "Love Me for Who I Am is not a book that understands or is even interested in depicting queer realities. Instead, it gives short-shrift to the fundamental humanity of LGBT community and erases the complexities of Mogumo's queer life in favor of making their identity solely about their attraction to the cisgender lead and centering the close-minded perspectives of others."
Manga Mavericks hour-long podcast discussion
Comics Beat: "The cutesiness of the characters feels contemporary with moe series that sometimes feel exploitative, especially of young girls, but Love Me for Who I Am actually brings up legitimate issues around the loneliness and uncertainty surrounding questioning one’s gender identity and expression.... This is a must-read manga for anyone who has been searching for a thoughtful, positive representation of non-binarism in fiction."
Anime Herald: "Its scenario of an ‘Accepting Queer Family’ forming among the staff at Question! provides a relatable parallel what many real-life LGBT people find themselves doing out of sheer necessity. At the same time, relatable conflicts and challenges fill nearly every panel."
Anime News Network: "Love Me for Who I Am is not a book that understands or is even interested in depicting queer realities. Instead, it gives short-shrift to the fundamental humanity of LGBT community and erases the complexities of Mogumo's queer life in favor of making their identity solely about their attraction to the cisgender lead and centering the close-minded perspectives of others."
Manga Mavericks hour-long podcast discussion
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Another main thing I can see as a point of contention is that everything keeps on working out for the best. Characters continually find acceptance from people who care about them. The few antagonistic characters all realize what they did wrong and tearfully apologize. (Maybe not in volume 4, but that won't be published for a good while.) Being honest with yourself and with others, and being willing to listen and understand, is a universal remedy. A lot of this is because the characters are mostly shown working in an intensely queer space as a found family, but it can also read as overly optimistic or even sugarcoating. Personally I dunno. There's room for fantasy sometimes, and the series doesn't need to be trauma porn, and it's not like there aren't a lot of conflicts and tears and harsh words sometimes on the way to those happy endings.
I'm not going to defend the cover. The "maid" setting in general, for that it may refer to a real phenomenon, does feel kinda fetishistic/exploitative, even if it's mostly dropped as a focus after the first chapter or two.
But what really works for me is the variety of identities and experiences here, especially when they were all predicated as being in the same otokonoko category before Mogumo's arrival gave them room to better articulate (and respect) their differences. Mei's experiences and perspective are so different from Suzu's, and so on. It's so easy for a book or series to have the solitary LGBTQ+ character who has to perfectly represent everyone and also can never have any flaws, and that's not at all what happens here. There's room for the reader's experience to be different from the characters', because the characters are different from each other too On the other side, there are older characters who drop in sometimes to act as mentors to the main cast, guiding them through what are more shared experiences. And as part of everything always working out, again and again these good, hardworking, somewhat fearful children are rewarded with these beautiful moments of intense happiness as things that had been denied to them (sometimes even by themselves) are finally made available.
And it's also fascinating seeing things that are hardly ever addressed in fiction at all, let alone in manga. A gender-neutral bathroom is shown and discussed almost on page 1. Some or all of this may be in later volumes, but characters mention voice training, padding, makeup, and body shapes. Characters go to a pride festival and sign a petition to legalize same-sex marriage. It's great just seeing these things right there on the page, not as subtext at all, in a published volume.
posted by one for the books at 11:14 AM on August 12, 2020