{"id":3546,"date":"2010-07-27T22:23:21","date_gmt":"2010-07-28T05:23:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/manga.jadedragononline.com\/village\/?p=3546"},"modified":"2014-02-03T22:30:02","modified_gmt":"2014-02-04T06:30:02","slug":"my-girlfriends-a-geek-volume-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/manga.jadedragononline.com\/village\/2010\/07\/27\/my-girlfriends-a-geek-volume-1\/","title":{"rendered":"My Girlfriend’s a Geek Volume 1"},"content":{"rendered":"

Publisher’s info: All penniless college student Taiga Mutou wants is a cool job and a cute older woman as a girlfriend. So when he spies a Help Wanted sign outside an office and a hot girl inside, he applies for the job, no questions asked. After a few bumps at the beginning, things start going Taiga’s way, prompting him to steel his courage and ask out Yuiko, that hot girl he spied through the window, on a date. And when she later asks him if it’s okay that she’s a fujoshi (a very, shall we say, distinct kind of comics\/animation geek), he tells her it’s fine out of sheer excitement. But poor Taiga has no idea how much trouble he’s just gotten himself into! <\/em><\/p>\n

\"My<\/a>By Rize Shinba
\nPublisher:<\/strong> Yen Press
\nAge Rating:<\/strong> Older Teen
\nGenre:<\/strong> Romance
\nPrice:<\/strong> $11.99<\/p>\n

Last week, I reviewed Peepo Choo<\/em>, by Felipe Smith, a manga that viciously, but hilariously rips into otaku culture (among other). It seems that getting geeks to laugh at themselves in manga is on the upswing, because this week\u2019s book, My Girlfriend\u2019s a Geek <\/em>Vol. 1, pokes fun at fujoshi, or the girl fan of boys love (bl) anime and manga. However, where Felipe Smith uses satire like an explosive force, in this series, Rize Shinba, uses a subtle, even gentle hand, turning the mocking lampoon into an affectionate jest. You might say the fujoshi and the boys who love them are more ribbed than ridiculed here.<\/p>\n

My Girlfriend\u2019s a Geek <\/em>is quite charming, a layered, frothy comedy of errors where our hapless hero, Taiga Mutou finds himself willingly falling down the rabbit hole as he follows his new girlfriend into her secret world of manga fantasies and predilections. What\u2019s exploited very well here is the triangulated distance between the girlfriend Yuiko\u2019s full-on, hardcore fandom, the reader\u2019s knowledge of that fandom, and Taiga\u2019s complete lack of awareness of everything he\u2019s getting into. We laugh because we know what Taiga does not: we know what Yuiko means when she tells Taiga that she finds his formal speech cute because, \u201cthe hints of younger man Seme really tugat my heart. Polite speech is so Moe!\u201d<\/p>\n

In this first volume, much of his reaction is to shrug off the strange and murky aspects of Yuiko\u2019s obsessions with a kind of \u201cwho cares, I\u2019ve got a hot older girlfriend\u201d attitude. It isn\u2019t until about three-quarters in that he begins to get a clue as to what kind of relationship he\u2019s in, or what kind of place he has in Yukio\u2019s fujoshi-colored-glasses view of the world. And, while I imagine this is even more funny if you are a gal like Yukio, I found an interesting perspective reading it as a former young geek who\u2019s only desire was a girlfriend. The way the geek roles are reversed, but not the typical gender roles (Taiga wants to get the girl, Yukio is the older, pretty object of his affections), mean I get a certain kind of laugh just seeing the frisson of desires that at times complement and at times confound one another. (It\u2019s also nice to see that it wasn\u2019t necessarily my own geek obsessions holding me back as a young man\u2026)<\/p>\n

Not only did I enjoy this volume, but I also wonder what\u2019s in store for our young couple\u2014where does this lead them? What conflicts lie ahead? And will Taiga ever be able to get ahead of the curve on Yukio\u2019s perverse imagination? It\u2019s definitely worth checking in so see where Rize Shinba takes things.<\/p>\n

Side note\u2014there\u2019s an excerpt from the book that this manga is based on, which evidently was developed from a blog. (Sort of like if they made a tv show based on S**t My Dad Says<\/em>\u2026oh, wait) That was terrible, I thought, and made me feel even better about this manga. Rize Shinba has crafted a fun bit of comedy and romance out of a bumbling, yapping unfunny mess.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Publisher’s info: All penniless college student Taiga Mutou wants is a cool job and a cute older woman as a girlfriend. So when he spies a Help Wanted sign outside an office and a hot girl inside, he applies for the job, no questions asked. After a few bumps at the beginning, things start going Taiga’s way, prompting him to steel his courage and ask out Yuiko, that hot girl he spied through the window, on a date. And when she later asks him if it’s okay that she’s a fujoshi (a very, shall we say, distinct kind of comics\/animation geek), he tells her it’s fine out of sheer excitement. But poor Taiga has no idea how much trouble he’s just gotten himself into! By Rize Shinba Publisher: Yen Press Age Rating: Older Teen Genre: Romance Price: $11.99 Last week, I reviewed Peepo Choo, by Felipe Smith, a manga that viciously, but hilariously rips into otaku culture (among other). It seems that getting geeks to laugh at themselves in manga is on the upswing, because this week\u2019s book, My Girlfriend\u2019s a Geek Vol. 1, pokes fun at fujoshi, or the girl fan of boys love (bl) anime and manga. However,…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"My Girlfriend's a Geek Volume 1 http:\/\/wp.me\/p2umma-Vc","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[15,20],"tags":[83,99,110,120],"class_list":["post-3546","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews-reviews","category-yen-press","tag-manga","tag-older-teen","tag-review","tag-shojo"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2umma-Vc","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/manga.jadedragononline.com\/village\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3546"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/manga.jadedragononline.com\/village\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/manga.jadedragononline.com\/village\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/manga.jadedragononline.com\/village\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/manga.jadedragononline.com\/village\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3546"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/manga.jadedragononline.com\/village\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3546\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4362,"href":"http:\/\/manga.jadedragononline.com\/village\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3546\/revisions\/4362"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/manga.jadedragononline.com\/village\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3546"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/manga.jadedragononline.com\/village\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3546"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/manga.jadedragononline.com\/village\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3546"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}