Danica Davidson
February 16, 2016 
Serinuma Kae doesn’t like stories with a prince and a princess—she likes stories with two princes. The unabashed fujoshi regularly spends her time imagining how she’d pair up boys in her school, even if they’re not gay, and then she’ll squeal about the pairings with her best friend. Beyond her obsession with BL, she’s a major anime fan. So when her favorite anime character dies in the show, she goes into mourning.
After staying in bed and not eating because she’s so upset, Serinuma loses a ton of weight seemingly overnight, taking her from overweight to thin. The period of grief even gives her big, dewy eyes. When she returns to school, boys start checking her out. Soon four cute boys—Nanashima, Igarashi, Mutsumi and Shinomiya—ask her out.
And she goes out with all four of them, setting us up for a reverse harem manga. At first she tries really hard to keep them from knowing that she’s an otaku. This leads to some pretty funny scenes, like when she has to hide everything in her room before the boys come over to study with her. The boys’ personalities start to come out, and so far Mutsumi seems like the nicest one. He’s the only one to make a point that Serinuma is the same person no matter what she looks like. Nanashima, on the other hand, comes off as pretty shallow, because he only becomes obsessed with Serinuma after she loses weight. Mutsumi is right when he says that stuff shouldn’t matter, and it does feel a little awkward that this whole weight loss thing is treated as so significant in the beginning.
Though Serinuma is a fujoshi and thinks having four boyfriends is like an otome game, once she gets the boys around she doesn’t spend as much time fangirling over their pairings. Instead of trying to get them to kiss each other (as hinted at in the title), it’s more about the amusing shenanigans the characters get into as they interact and get to know one another.
The mangaka Junko originally wrote BL, and she takes her knowledge of the field to throw in plenty of otaku and fujoshi jokes. Because of this, the manga’s main appeal will probably be with female readers who like quirky fujoshi and bishonen titles. Junko also includes an amusing afterword talking about how the otaku stories are based on her own experiences and that of her friends. One example she gives is when she was a teenager and her mom found her BL. Whoops. Obviously, this is someone who knows what it’s like to be a fangirl and she’s ready to poke some fun at it.
Publisher: Kodansha
Story & Art: Junko
For Minecraft fans, the young-at-heart and people who know young Minecraft fans, Danica Davidson’s middle grade Minecraft novels Escape from the Overworld and its sequel, Attack on the Overworld are now available. You can also listen to the audio book, which is narrated by anime voice actor Dan Woren of Robotech and Bleach.
