Kara Dennison
September 30, 2024 
September is drawing to a close, but there are still some new manga to grab before we move fully into spooky season! And if you like your stories with a little bit of romance, we’ve got a trio of first volumes for you to sample. From romantasy to rom-coms, these new romance manga are all available now. What did we think? Will you like them? Read on to find out!
Spoil Me Plzzz, Hinamori-san!
Lovers of yuri romance manga rejoice: there’s a new series for you to enjoy! Spoil Me Plzzz, Hinamori-san! Penned by tsuke (author of I’m in Love with the Villainess: Maid’s Kitchen), this series turns the classic senpai/kouhai crush structure on its head. Ichigo Hinamori adores Yaya Suo, her seemingly perfect princess of an upperclassman. But one day, Ichigo discovers Yaya’s dark secret: she’s actually a big baby who wants to be praised and coddled. Now Ichigo has Yaya’s undivided attention, but it’s a far cry from what she hoped for.
The first volume of Spoil Me Plzzz, Hinamori-san! both invokes and subverts a lot of classic yuri tropes. Yaya absolutely straightens Ichigo’s uniform bow, for example: beginner-level yuri-ese for an incoming romance. It’s fun to see the classic role of elegant senpai and childish kouhai inverted. This first handful of chapters stays relatively episodic and comedic. There’s no indication of where it will go from here, but it’s a fun read for yuri fans.
I Cross-Dressed for the IRL Meetup
This new offering from Kurano has romance manga elements, but I Cross-Dressed for the IRL Meetup covers a lot more ground than just relationships. The central character is “Cocoa,” a regular attendee of all-girl meetups at dessert cafés. But Cocoa has a secret: she’s a man—and an up-and-coming actor, at that! He adopts his Cocoa persona so he can escape from his public-facing professional side. As he contemplates telling the truth to “Opera,” a girl from the meet-up he has a crush on, he finds out that she’s also cross-dressing! From there, the group of four friends open up about their respective gender identities, confronting their complicated feelings for each other and how they wish to be viewed by the world around them.
As explained in the translator’s note, I Cross-Dressed for the IRL Meetup is not a bastion of perfection when it comes to discussions of gender identity. However, exploring these issues (or in fact any issue) in depth and honestly will not be tidy and academic. Cocoa, Opera, and their friends confront the messiness of who we are, who we love, and how we express ourselves, and sometimes that involves making mistakes and assumptions. The imperfections are a feature, not a bug, and make for a story that’s equally funny and thought-provoking.
The Boy I Loved Became the Jaded Emperor
Finally, here’s a romance manga for you fantasy lovers! Meet Lady Eleonora, the beautiful and taciturn daughter of Duke Purpleus. She has many admirers among her staff and beyond her household. But her reason for being so soft-spoken is a strange one: she has a very pronounced accent, a carry-over from her past life. Before she was Eleonora, she was a little green humanoid who lived alone in the forest. For a time, she lived with a young royal left to die. She and the noble, nicknamed “Pie” and “Ham” respectively, were separated when Pie was killed. Now she’s been reborn, and he’s become a standoffish emperor. But now they’re about to meet again!
The Boy I Loved Became the Jaded Emperor is a unique take on reincarnation fantasy, subtracting the isekai element from the equation. This first volume is almost entirely backstory, catching the reader up to Ham and Pie’s life proper to Eleonora’s current incarnation. To that end, it’s best suited for lovers of slow-burn storytelling. But with lovely art and an inventive concept, it feels poised to pay off.
