I Love You, as a Friend

[flyingjetpack]

This manga is basically "komi san can't communicate", but taken to a different extreme. Instead of the shyness and inability to speak up, its a girl that works 100% from instinct, and posess 0 tact. Both of them have no real friends in the beginning, until the main dude comes along to slap sense into them.
The first few episodes really didn't feel like they would lead to an wholesome manga, pretty surprising tbh, but i welcomed change

 

[Gin_Kurosu]

Wow, this was incredibly sweet and wholesome despite the beginning premise. It is not often that I get hit with a curveball quite like that.

 

[Phuocphuc46]

Someone sexually harasses someone else and it's considered a wholesome manga. But when I

This is an amazingly good gem, if you can only get past the LARGE hurdle that is the first chapter (it's actually not that serious, come on now). After it, all that's left is a tear-jerking and beautifully-written portryal of (hyper-sensitive) YOUTH. It's absolutely criminal that this got axed - I know the romance ultimately wasn't the main point but damnit I want more of it (and also the manga in general) SO BAD. For the short time I read this manga, I fell in love with everything about it - its artstyle, its attention to details, its characters, its developments, its well-written story arcs, its on-point comedy, etc. Please give this an unbiased read, you will DEFINITELY not regret it. Below is my rant about the first few chapters, please ignore it if you've seen this horse beaten to death and back by now

Spoiler

Like, okay, I kinda get why they needed to make her like that, it's to set her up as an aloof, kind-hearted girl that's unfortunately has never been given the chance to express her true feelings by the society that took advantage of her naivete - basically it's quite the best set-up for the manga's premise. But I don't like how it HAD to be inherently sexual, considering that first, she's a high schooler, second, it's clear she's ignorant about how the world works, both those points emphasize the fact that, third, this poor girl has been sexually manipulated at a young age for God knows how long and by how many people. It's especially more jarring when the school is later portrayed as this innocent and friendship-fueled place in the latter half of the manga. Now, a nornal and SANE person would be completely taken in by the amazingly written manga beyond the first chapter and just forget about the iffy part of the premise, but those three facts got stuck in the back of my mind throughout my read and diminished my enjoyment just a litttttle bit. People accused that Sanako's portrayal like that was maliciously deliberate, and I kinda get where they're coming from (even more so considering when it's just to set up for a ehhh punchline in the first two pages), but I really wished the premise wasn't explicitly sexual - it could definitely be turned down in a way that the premise still makes sense - so fewer people would be turned away from reading this manga and caused so much (stupid) controversies to form around it

 

[olegtz]

Should probably remove the romance tag, create a new 'friendship' tag, and replace it with it because that is what is between the MC and the FMC. Kind of disappointing :/

 

[XDXDwitherXDXD]

Read the full thing. At first I thought I was gonna hate because the two leading characters have statistically the most boring/unlikeable stereotypes, but the more they interacted with each other the more they grew as characters. Yui's relationship with his brother really hit close to home too.

TLDR; don't judge a book by it's cover and read it all. Honestly one of my favorite mangas.

 

[MisterMemeDaddy]

In another universe incels wouldn’t exist and this manga would get the praise it deserves… oh well.

 

[JairoZepperi]

it's like commie san but good