Lately, I have been reading manga containing LGTB+ themes, because of that I have found many satisfying and touching stories. Sadly, this was not the case with Shimanami Tasogare. I came to know this series due to the many thread recommendations and positive reviews on anilist.

If I were to describe this manga with one word that would be: Amateurish. Often when one finds a good series, it achieves to put into words and images the feelings a person has tried to express for many years. The difference in this manga is that its content is the same any person suffering these problems has ever thought or said. What I mean is that most of the story consist of characters screaming at the top of their lungs and being edgy.

What I described early also affects the pacing of the story. If the characters aren’t screaming their insecurities, then they are in a dream-like state with the panels decorated with flowers and glow, there is no middle ground to breathe. The problem here is that this doesn’t mean anything at all, there is no real depth to the emotions expressed by the characters. There is this character who gets an interesting development but instead of delving furthermore into their issues the manga removes them entirely from the story. They make a comeback in the last chapter of the manga but magically all the issues they had with the rest of the characters disappear.

I have no doubt the author had good intentions while making this manga, but they failed monumentally. There is no delicacy when it comes to treating the characters, everybody says extremely mean words. The story wants you to understand that even if some people are gay, lesbian, transsexual, asexual, their whole personality is not based on that fact alone, however the execution of the story says otherwise since the only reason these characters exist is because of their sexual orientation or gender identity, the reader doesn’t get to know more about them except from that.

There is a huge lack of empathy in this manga and what makes it worst is that this lack of empathy comes from the same characters who belong to the LGBT+ community, there are many instances in which the characters exchange words full of hatred between each other but none of them reflect on these words. One quick example is when the protagonist tells his friend that just got sexually assaulted that they probably became the target just because they looked cute. I could understand if this came from a sexist person in the story, but the fact that it comes from the protagonist himself it makes me think that the characters are not actually characters but tools for the author to babble any words necessary to create conflict disregarding the context or the characters themselves.

If I had to choose a favorite character, they would be the crossdresser and the worst would be Anonymous, there is no humanity to her and instead of looking at her as somebody mysterious and fluid it only caused me to feel repulsion towards her.

This was a very disappointing reading. I was hoping for more, but the manga never got to explore in depth any of the issues that were presented. It felt like the author was trying to tell the reader how to treat real people facing these issues instead of telling a proper story about the characters finding solutions to their issues and overcoming them.

I don’t like making this kind of comparison but if you want to experience something that treats all of the characters with the delicacy that they deserve I recommend watching Wandering Son. Alternatively, if you want to get deeply hurt I recommend reading Bokura no Hentai.