In this case, it’s not entirely that I wasn’t working on anything, I just wasn’t writing anything that could be published, okay? I was working on the map for my fantasy world!
Last time, I made a joke about the rarity of officially translated gender-bender series. This is something I’m intimately familiar with, since I’ve been pretty much constantly reading gender-bender series since I saw that one OVA of To Love-Ru (To LOVEる -とらぶる- [4/10]) back in high school. You know the one… or don’t if you’ve never watched the “what if we took the lucky pervert trope to the extreme” series. Anyway, there have been some fairly major gender-bender series, as major as they get in the genre anyway, of late… as in the past couple years.
Fantasy Bishoujo Juniku Ojisan to (異世界（ファンタジー）美少女受肉おじさんと) or Life with an Ordinary Guy who Reincarnated into a Total Fantasy Knockout is a gender-bender isekai rom-com manga adapted to an anime in 2022. Hinata Tachibana and his hot best friend Tsukasa Jinguuji are whisked away from their dreadful office work lives to a fantasy world by some goddess who also latches on to Tachibana’s drunken rambling by turning him into a beautiful girl. In typical isekai fashion, they’re each given cheat skills: Tachibana gains the ability to charm anyone that looks at her and Jinguuji gains Tachibana’s apartment as a sort of pocket dimension. They’re also given the typical task of defeating the demon lord to be able to return home to their normal lives. It’s rather good, if you’re looking for a straight gender-bender romance it’s a great choice. An 8/10 at ch. 157 of the manga and having finished the anime. If you want a faster-paced similar manga, Tensei Shitara Ore ga Heroine de Aitsu ga Yuusha Datta (転生したらオレがヒロインであいつが勇者だった [8/10]) is also very good, pushing the comedy of the isekai setup much further.
Oniichan wa Oshimai! (お兄ちゃんはおしまい!) is a fairly classic WUGOM gender-bender slice-of-life manga which was adapted to an anime in 2023. It follows Mahiro Oyama, a hikiNEET in his twenties who gets turned into a young-looking girl by his mad-scientist sister Mihari. It’s basically a flagship of the loli sub-genre, which often eschews the menstruation drama you find in a lot of the “magical sex-shift” (as MAL calls it) type series for drama centered on the main character’s misestimation of the capacity of their bladder. As much as I enjoy piss, I don’t really care for the loli transformation setup, especially considering its treatment as regression1 to the point where Mahiro ends up enrolling in elementary school. I started reading it back in 2019 and am up to ch. 82 at this point, I don’t really keep up with it so it’s a low 5/10. The anime is well done for what it is, with a very cute style and good animation, currently on hold at ep. 7 however.
Ayakashi Triangle (あやかしトライアングル [4/10]) a gender-bender romance ecchi manga, which I mentioned in the note about MANGA Plus, was adapted to an anime in 2023. Matsuri tries to save his childhood friend, Suzu, from being eaten by the King of Ayakashi, Shirogane, managing to seal its powers but not before it curses him to turn into a girl. It’s finished with 144 chapters, but I’ve only read up to ch. 97 before putting it on hold, just as I’ve only seen the first few episodes of the anime.
I must admit that I actually haven’t been keeping up with anime much the past couple years, so the even more recent ones I just haven’t touched. Mainly Ranma ½ (らんま 1/2) was remade in 2024, I never read the manga or watched the original which maybe always seemed out of character but I do always prefer contemporary works. Then there’s Akuyaku Reijou Tensei Ojisan (悪役令嬢転生おじさん) or From Bureaucrat to Villainess: Dad’s Been Reincarnated! adapted to an anime this year, which just doesn’t seem very interesting to me (it does have an English dub, so maybe I’ll put it on in the background at some point).
Fake Saint of the Year (理想の聖女？ 残念、偽聖女でした！ ～クソオブザイヤーと呼ばれた悪役に転生したんだが～) is a gender-bender isekai light novel series about a man who finds himself transported into the world of a visual novel which seemingly lacks any true “good end” for the saint, Eterna. He, now she, hopes to orchestrate such an end, only to find that rather than reincarnating as Eterna, she is Ellize, the one who was swapped at birth with Eterna and treated as if she were the saint (essentially the “villainess” in the original game). Ellize then sets out to fix the story from the perspective of the “fake saint” by simply not being a piece of shit, including not tarnishing the reputation of saints to the point that even Eterna would be hated when she took her rightful place as happened in the “original.” The afterword of the first volume describes how the author intended to write a story about a calculating, villainous protagonist who ends up instead being very well-liked. This is often shown through Ellize’s internal monologue of mocking those around her for believing the “acting” of such a “fake.” I’m not really vibing with the story so far, it’s one of those setups where the protagonist is overpowered per the standards of the setting (Ellize has 100k+ MP whereas the “last boss” has 2-3k) but not per the standards of their desired outcome (Ellize just wants to ensure Eterna has a happy ending). It’s also a shame that it isn’t yuri, Ellize doesn’t take her desire for Eterna’s happy ending into her own hands in that way, even after that weird misunderstanding where Eterna believed the saint was keeping an eye on her for “oh no am I the witch!?” reasons when Ellize was just perving out and staring at Eterna’s ass. I’ll give it a tentative 5/10, on hold at vol. 2 ch. 34. I might finish it eventually, since it is only four volumes.
Loner Life in Another World (ひとりぼっちの異世界攻略) is a comedy isekai web novel publishing since 2016, adapted to a light novel in 2018, a manga in 2019, and an anime in 2024. I started reading the manga forever ago, got up to ch. 191 before dropping it. It’s very sporadic, with gag comedy and short chapters. Honestly, following the manga is rather difficult so I give it a 4/10, this is also why I moved on to the web novel. I read up to ch. 313 in the web novel, it’s much easier to follow along with Haruka’s thought process when you get the full internal monologue, so a low 6/10. This is also the type of thing that gets you an “unreliable narrator” tag on NU, which just isn’t a correct use of the term. A lot of series with the tag simply have a narrator whose view of things is unconventional, the only unreliability being in the differences provided by other characters’ perspective, e.g. the narrator believes something to be a minor issue that’s easily solved while others see it as an impossible catastrophe. Another advantage the novels have is that they aren’t missing parts! You might try to claim a sex scene is unnecessary to the plot but when a series ends up with the “sexual cultivation” tag, then you cut out all the sex, suddenly people just have new skills out of fucking nowhere. There’s a reason the series has a separate R18 version!2 Anyway, the anime is completely dubbed in English now, so I watched it while working on world-building stuff. It’s a normal low-quality anime adaptation, 4/10.
Akuyaku Reijou Tensei Ojisan (悪役令嬢転生おじさん) or From Bureaucrat to Villainess: Dad’s Been Reincarnated! is a comedy gender-bender isekai anime about a middle-aged (ojisan) bureaucrat finding himself possessing the villainess in an otome game. I’d say that it’s giving a similar treatment to the otomege villainess sub-genre of isekai that Isekai Ojisan (異世界おじさん [6/10]) gave to the more mainstream isekai genre, but rather than Tondabayashi Kenzaburou narrating past events as Takafumi’s uncle did, Kenzaburou’s daughter, Hinako, observes the game where he plays Grace Auvergne in real-time. In that sense, it does remind me a bit of Fake Saint, where she can see the fanbase’s reactions to her “route” in her “dreams.”3 It’s got a lot of “shoujo sparkle” moments between Grace and the nominal protagonist of the game, Anna Doll, which is clearly yuri-bait, at least to me. So what if Anna is technically “played” by Hinako? Wouldn’t be the first father-daughter yuri I’ve seen… but it isn’t that. Between this and Fake Saint I’m getting yuri bait fatigue. 6/10, just because it’s kinda funny.
I Became an Idol Loved by My ‘Idol’ (최애에게 사랑받는 아이돌이 되었다) is a gender-bender yuri regression web novel about a man, hurt by a controversy about his favorite idol, Yoo Na’min, who suddenly finds himself waking up as a girl named Lee Seoyeon before said group even formed. Quick note on the title, 최애 (choiae) is sometimes translated as “ultimate bias” or “favorite,” similar to the Japanese term 推し (oshi) as it is used to refer to a favorite idol, VTuber, &c., so translating it as ‘my idol’ here actually works fairly well.4 Similar to Fake Saint, Yeoseon is overpowered in the world of idols, she has an attractive face, good singing voice and control, and dances well, while her real goal is just to support Na’min and ensure that what happened in her past life, five years from now, doesn’t happen this time. I just started reading this last night, wanting some actual yuri this time, so I’m only 24 chapters in. Tentatively giving this one a 5/10 as well.
Anyway, I’ve made a lot of good progress on that map. Going by the date stamps it’s been about a year since I started it, obviously not continuously working on it, so it feels good to see visible improvement. What’s that? It’s been two months since my last “weekly” etymology article? It’s actually been longer since my last “weekly” podcast, you know? Maybe you need to learn patience. I’m certainly not anxious about either of these things… not at all.
The regression genre seems significantly more popular in Korea, but you do see plenty of it in Japan. Typically, it isn’t just age-regression and is a full time-travel back to youth type thing. Notable Japanese examples include Tokyo Revengers (東京リベンジャーズ [2/10]) and Erased (僕だけがいない街 [2/10]), both of which I dropped partway through as I really don’t like regression stories. ↩︎
The reason it’s separate is probably actually just that Syosetu is notable for being great for promoting series up to R15, but the moment you get flagged as R18 you end up on the spinoff sites which are just a total mess. ↩︎
I’m only nearing the end of the first volume as I write this entry, so I’m not really sure what’s actually happening there, but it’d probably be spoilers anyway ↩︎
Perhaps I care about this sort of translation so much as the terrible translation of Watashi no Oshi wa Akuyaku Reijou (私の推しは悪役令嬢 。[8/10])’s title as I’m in Love with the Villainess is perhaps one factor in obnoxious misinterpretations of that series that posit Rei as being romantically attracted to Claire from the start rather than just admiring the fact that her favorite game character is alive right in front of her. ↩︎