蒼井くんにはかなわない

AOI-KUN NI WA KANAWANAI

MANGA

STATUS
COMPLETE
VOLUMES
2
RELEASE
May 21, 2021
CHAPTERS
12

DESCRIPTION

High school freshman, Aoi Rio, has a secret that can't be told to anyone. He actually watches "Magical Girls" anime!
On his way back home after secretly buying anime merchandise as usual, he saves a girl named Sumire who fell from the sky.
Sumire is disheartened because she believes her powers are not good enough. After Aoi encourages her by explaining the value of Magical Girls, Sumire asks him to become her Magical Girl instructor!

CHAPTERS

REVIEWS

Makarin
84/100
Being a magical girl fan has its upsides when you meet a cute girl.
Aoi Rio is a high-school student who secretly likes "PreEri" (their version of pretty precure, I guess). One evening he saves a magical girl and from that point on, he teaches her how to be a proper magical girl, using all his anime knowledge and fanboyism in the process. I am 99% sure this is a self-insert manga for Magical Girl fans who have been marginalized by the industry and forced to watch new precure shows and sailor moon sequels while getting 1 "dark" magical girl show or "deconstruction of the magical girl genre" anime as sole content for the last 5 years. But that's something I do not want to get into, just keep in mind that this manga is especially attractive to magical girl fans because they can use Aoi as a self-insert. At the same time, Aoi stays the main focuse of the manga, in terms of what characters we explore the most and see the most (which is kinda surprising given that other self-insert works like a lot of isekais with blank sheet main characters and romcoms like Uzaki, dress-up darling or Nagatoro focus more on the girls because that's what we wanna see), which left us with Sumire (the magical girl) as more of a symbol character for Aoi to project his ideals of a magical girl onto.
What I mean by that, is that Sumire will mostly develop in terms of what Aoi wants because 1) Their relationship is mostly based around her being a magical girl and learning how to be a better magical girl and 2) By giving up the typical way of Magical Girl mangas (like Shugo Chara or Sailor Moon) and giving them a character who is emotionally troubled and then gets saved by Sumire, we don't see a lot of character development on her side (except Aoi saying "Wow, you're just like Eririn!" every time Sumire gets a bit better at fighting) AND we don't get any emotional or moral lesson out of the fights.
Now, you could argue that Lily was the one getting her emotional lesson and growing up in the process but that was just her learning that she can have friends and she isn't that bad. That is important and in no way a shame but because she's the one creating the monsters on her own (instead of like the moth guy in Miraculous or the guys in Sailor Moon, who used the emotions of normal people to create monsters) there was a lack of emotional learning throughout the first few fights and they were just a build-up until Sumire can fight her. The rest of the development of any character, was Aoi after the fight and that was just him realizing that he can at Sumire's AND Lily's side during the fights, instead of giving ghosting them and feeling all lonely because he's not a magical girl (even though I would be the same if magical girls were real)
In the end, this was more than a small comedy manga with a magical girl and a bit of feel-good elements to make sure that it really is a magical girl manga. It's pretty short so I think everyone who hasn't watched or read a lot of magical girl works and would like to know what it's all about should check it out. Long-time magical girl fans will probably like Aoi because he's a typical magical girl fan, while not being just an exaggerated caricature of an otaku. That's all I got to say and I'm not ashamed cause this manga only has 11 chapters + a short chapter that is just the christmas thing for the sake of cuteness (we did not get Sumire in a christmas dress...). I hope you'll enjoy this and thanks for reading.
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