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In 2004, Japan was enraptured by the saga of "Train_Man," a shy otaku who posted on the megaforum 2chan about his efforts to date a woman he met on a train. The Train_Man posts, collected into a bestselling book and adapted into a movie, a TV series, and multiple manga, popularized the image of the lovable male geek.

But could the story be told with the genders reversed? Could an ordinary guy date a geeky girl?

More to the point, could he make bank by writing about it on the Internet? Apparently so, because we have My Girlfriend’s a Geek. Of course, it’s got a prettier geek than Train_Man.



Pros

• Appealing artwork
• Entertaining premise
• Knowing, witty look into the fujoshi subculture

Cons

• Does not contain any scenes of guys making out

Description

• Original Title:Fujyoshi Kanojo (Japan)
• Author: PENTABU
  Artist: Rize Shinba
• Publishers:
  • Yen Press (US)
  • Enterbrain, Inc. (Japan)
• ISBN: 978-0759531734
• ISBN: 978-0759531734
• Age Rating:OT – Older Teens, Age 16+ for references to sex, especially yaoi manga sex.
  More about content ratings.
• Manga Genres:
  • Seinen (Men's) Manga
  • Josei (Women's) Manga
  • Comedy
  • Otaku Culture
  • Romance
• US Publication Date: May 2010
  Japan Publication Date: December 2007
• Book Description: 192 pages, black and white illustrations

Guide Review - My Girlfriend's a Geek Volume 1

My Girlfriend's a Geek is a manga adaptation of a blog by a man calling himself Pentabu, who writes sardonically about his girlfriend's nerdy obsessions.

Artist Rize Shinba immortalizes Pentabu and his girlfriend as a sexy couple drawn in a full-lipped, blushing shojo style, with super-deformation and sparkles aplenty. With artwork this appealing, it's clear this will be a gentle, Genshiken¬-style take on otaku culture rather than an expose of its antisocial depravities. Oh well. Maybe another time.

As the manga opens, straightlaced teenager Taiga meets the cute, alluringly older Yuiko at a summer job. When he finally gets the nerve to ask her out, Yuiko warns him that she's a fujoshi. Taiga accepts her anyway, mainly because he has no idea what fujoshi means.

As Taiga quickly learns, fujoshi ("rotten girl") refers to female otaku with a passion for yaoi, a.k.a. boys love manga. Soon Yuiko is forcing Taiga to write slash fiction. She reads homosexual overtones into his relationships with his friends, debates whether he'd be a seme (top) or an uke (bottom), and gets disturbingly excited when he puts on his "tasty" glasses. In addition to being all over the Ho Yay, Yuiko is a general-purpose otaku who scores manga magazines a day early and peppers her conversation with vintage anime and video game references. For a male otaku, these might be the makings of a dream girl, but for Taiga, whose nerdiness is limited to enjoying the occasional sports manga, Yuiko is a minefield of weirdness he could never have imagined.

Obviously, this material is much funnier to readers familiar with the fujoshi subculture. When Yuiko imagines Taiga and his buddy as chibi-fied, glistening-eyed characters straight out of a shota manga (young boy / older man) like Almost Crying, it helps to have read Almost Crying.

Beneath the geeky references, however, My Girlfriend's a Geek is a universally relatable story about dating a crazy girl. It's easy to see why Taiga stays with Yuiko: she's cute, sweet, devoted, and up-front about her sexual fantasies in a way that's bound to spark the curiosity of a teenage boy. It's just that her fantasies are, well... to quote one example, "I was thinking about how you guys seem really close, and how stunning it would be if you both dressed up in butler cosplay, and how you might hold secret trysts in the kitchen away from the mistress's eyes..."

Okay, I admit it. I enjoy this manga because I've had conversations like this with my female friends, sometimes about our male friends. We have drawn cartoons of my husband making out with dudes. Rotten girls aren't really all that rotten, the manga admits, just dirty-minded enough to have fun. Who doesn't look good in a butler uniform, anyway?



Disclosure: A review copy was provided by the publisher. For more information, please see our Ethics Policy.