Holiday Review #17: MY SECRET AFFECTION

 Of course, I can't talk about bad romance manga from 2023 without talking about the one that became a meme onto itself when it was licensed.

MY SECRET AFFECTION (Kiminokotoga Sukideienai), by Fumi Mikami.  First published in 2021 and first published in North America in 2023.

PLOT:

30 years ago, a strange meteor fell to earth.  On that day, seemingly everyone became gay.  Kazusa is not, though.  She's desperately in love with her childhood best friend Ayumu, and he's already under enough scrutiny for being the descendant of the last heterosexual man on Earth.  Kazusa tries to keep her distance, but the two keep getting thrown together.  What will happen, though, when one of their classmates finally figures out her secret?

STORY:

There were people who were legitimately offended when My Secret Affection was licensed.  I can't entirely blame them, considering it's operating with a premise where straight people are an oppressed social group in defiance of all reality.  There have been other fictional works that have tried to employ similar ideas that went down very badly with the public, and in some cases it did turn out that the author had homophobic beliefs.

For what it's worth, I don't think Fumi Mikami was trying to be purposefully bigoted.  I don't think they believe that heterosexuals are somehow oppressed.  I do think they used this idea to try and dress up what was otherwise a very boring, weepy shojo romance plot in a rather thoughtless manner.

She's basically taken your typical "closeted queer teen struggles with romance" plot and swapped it out with a straight girl.  You've got the intense inner monologues as Kazusa wrestles with her feelings, her poor attempts to mask said feelings anytime she's around Ayumu, and the constant, creeping fear that someone will out her and that...something will happen.  One of the big problems with this story is that it's unclear what the stakes are to Kazusa's dilemma.  What happens in this world if someone is outed as straight?  Would they face any sort of punishment?  Would they be hospitalized or otherwise detained in some misguided attempt to "fix" them?  Would they become social pariahs?  As far as I can tell, the most Kazusa has to fear would be mild judgement from her peers.  That's not even getting into the fact that Mikami never stopped to ask how magic homosexual meteors would affect the bisexuals, trans folks, and asexuals of this world, but that's a common problem with these sorts of stories.

Even putting aside the clumsy parallels, Kazusa and Ayumu just aren't a particularly interesting pair.  Kazusa spends the book in a perpetual fret, often on the verge of tears from her frustration and fear.  Part of me wonders if she wasn't suffering from a perpetual concussion, considering how many times she falls down, hits her head, or suffers from a fever in this book.  It's hard to see what she sees in Ayumu.  He's blandly pleasant and handsome, and his only move is to physically whisk Kazusa away whenever she's about to cry, faint, or stumble into something.  I swear you could make a drinking game out of it, it's that frequent.  Their conversations are full of nothing but vague platitudes about love and friendship interspersed with memories of their youth, so my only conclusion as to why Kazusa loves him is that she imprinted on him as a child, as a baby duck imprints upon their mother.  Take away the magic meteor that makes people gay and you'd have nothing but the same old schoolroom romance you could get from dozens of other books.

ART:

Fumi Mikami is a fine artist, although there's a subtle, simpering quality to her characters that I find mildly off-putting.  Like Ayumu, the art is pleasantly pretty but unchallenging.  She also tends to abuse a very particular starry screentone whenever things are (supposedly) getting romantic between our leads.  I guess that's only fair, considering otherwise there's nothing to fill the panels with except for the same old boring classroom interiors and lots of close-ups for Kazusa.

RATING:

In its clumsy attempt to put a new spin on a well-worn story, My Secret Affection only serves to raise a lot of questions it's not equipped to answer nor particularly interested in answering.  Neither the characters nor the art are good enough to rise above the questionable premise.  The whole thing feels very amateur.  With so many better queer romance manga to choose from, why would you settle for a shojo manga masquerading as one?

This manga is published by Seven Seas.  This series is complete in Japan with 2 volumes.  Both volumes have been released and are currently in print.

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