At some point we've probably all done something inspired by the fiction we've read that was, in hindsight, not a brilliant plan. Whether it was testing the theory of gravity or cooking and eating periwinkles, antics brought on by a good book aren't all that unusual in the process of growing up. For Ichiro Yagi, a high school first year, his love of shoujo manga is central to forming his ideas of romance. He first got into reading it when his friend Tae slipped a volume into the other manga she was lending him back in middle school, and now several years later, it's shaped his notion of what love is supposed to be and how it ought to unfold. The main issue he's settled on is that, as Tae's best guy friend, he's obviously the one she's supposed to end up with, distracting flashy side guys like his pal Nagase notwithstanding.
If this sounds a little similar to Momoko Kōda's No Longer Heroine, that's really only on the surface. Both are shoujo rom-coms that take the idea of “childhood friend gets the pal they're crushing on” and twist it, but in Toaka's story, the difference is right there in the title: Tae is a fujoshi, which manages to change everything. Mostly that's because she's much more invested in fictional romance than in pursuing one of her own, but at first it gets in the way because she's kind of uncomfortable with her latest reading obsession. She's so on edge about it that she's mainly reading manga on her phone and her hypersensitivity is dialed up to eleven. Her paranoia is wedded to her desire to share her passion for BL, so when Ichiro tries his hand at confessing while they're hanging out reading together, she somehow gets the idea that he's “confessing” to being a fudanshi – a male fan of BL.
Thus is the story laid out for us: Ichiro's in love with Tae, who's in love with BL, and decides to just go with her misconception about him because, hey, at least it means that he gets to hang out with her more, and maybe that'll give him an opening to try confessing again. But along the way it's also making him incredibly uncomfortable, first as he realizes that Tae and other girls at school are not-so-secretly shipping his friend Nagase with their homeroom teacher, and later by his own attempts at whipping out shoujo romance moves, like the immortal wall-slam, in an attempt to make her understand what's really going on. The result is a comedy based mostly on Ichiro getting in his own way, and it works better than you might expect, largely avoiding coming off as mean, which could easily have happened.
Mostly this is the case because everyone is clearly just feeling their way forward with the whole romance thing. There's a real sense that everyone's just a little bit poisoned by romance fiction, still expecting that the way things work on the page is analogous to how they function in reality. Every so often Tae has a flash of recognition that maybe it's not awesome to be shipping real people, but then she gets distracted by her fantasies again and the moment passes. The general feeling is that everyone's just having so much fun being lost in their own little worlds that it doesn't really matter, although when Aya, another closet fujoshi who's also an Instagram artist Tae follows, gets into the mix and adds Ichiro to the Nagase x Mr. Satomi storyline as the third corner of the love triangle, we can see that this may need to be addressed at some point. That also goes for the possibility of Mr. Satomi figuring out what's going on; Nagase is generally oblivious to the whole thing, which adds another layer of humor when he notices that Aya has published a book with a character that looks awfully like him at the end of the volume.
Where this book succeeds is in the way that it depicts how everyone is ostensibly hanging out and communicating with each other while still dwelling firmly in their own heads. Momona, another girl in the friend group, seems to be the only one with half a clue about Ichiro's feelings for Tae, but she also doesn't really care and is basically just along for the ride. Much of the time Ichiro wavers between actually enjoying doing BL-related things with Tae and trying to act like a bad boy shoujo romance hero, and in some ways only Tae seems at all self-aware, mostly because she's still mildly embarrassed that she's into BL. The whole volume has a light touch with both plot and art, and if it isn't laugh-out-loud funny, it's absolutely the sort of humor that surprises a chuckle more often than not, especially with the two-fold gag of Tae and Aya being obsessed with the in-world game Magic Mic, a pun which has two potential references.
I Fell for a Fujoshi is, as of this writing, only available on Azuki's site and app, but it joins several other exclusive titles in making the subscription worth the cost. This story manages to be a lot of fun without any of the jokes (in this volume) overstaying their welcome, and while the whole “shipping real people” angle does bear keeping an eye on, things are off to a promising start.
