There’s nothing I love more than being wrong.
(Slight spoilers ahead by the way)
I found out about this manga because of ads for the mobile game of all things. I got the manga because I’m nothing if not a curious person but I was… wary, it gave me an impression of a very specific kind of indulgent manga that I will actually explain in detail as this post goes along because in case the intro didn’t make it evident, I was wrong in that impression.
In fact, not only was I wrong, the qualities of this manga put in relief things that I feel wrong with other stuff I’ve read. So yeah, I’m gonna be comparing this manga to a couple of others to illustrate my point. If you like the other manga that I’ll mention, more power to you, this isn’t an attack on you it’s just a matter of preference.
So this story is, in short about Masamune Okumura, the only member of the school’s manga club. He’s obsessed with Ririel, from his favorite manga, and one day a girl stumbles into the club wanting to join and gets transfixed by the character.
Hopefully you understand why this premise, on paper, made me wary. In fact the first thing that came to mind was Ichigo 100% and its plot of wanting to go to the same film school and… Ichigo 100% remains to this day one of a handful of things that made me feel like “give me all my time back” after I finished it.
But you see, that concern was alleviated when the first panel is this.
I’m not going to give you a play by play of the plot, I’m going to, in fact, jump straight to my point: Ririsa of the 2.5 Dimension is a manga about being passionate for a hobby and how that hobby connects everyone and makes your life all the richer.
In fact, look no further than when Masamune and Ririsa decide to participate on a local event and Ririsa gets cold feet. What’s the first thing that happens? Everyone in the changing room chimes in to help the newcomer.
Boy cosplaying as a girl? Boobs smaller than the other girls? Perhaps you gained a bit more weight and aren’t as slim as before? The manga takes opportunities to highlight that there’s no shame in any of it.
In fact, Masamune is one of the few main characters in this sort of story that I found myself enjoying a lot.
In these sort of stories the presence of the main guy tends to end up feeling contrived and hard to justify after a while, but Masamune is in many ways, the heart of the cast. The girls are attached to how earnest about his passion he is. He’s their hype man, the “expert” in the field that they’re getting into.
And this is where the first comparison comes into relief. This story works so well because in other similar manga the shared hobby is more of an equalizing field than a shared passion. For an old example you can look at Nogizaka Haruka no Himitsu (where the “secret” of said girl is that she’s a geek), and for a more contemporary example you can look at Gal Gamer ni Homeraretai.
In both examples it felt/feels to me like the presence of a hobby is just window dressing to facilitate having an inapproachable girl be with the main character and I’m as weak as anyone to indulgence but it feels so… uncreative sometimes. You can come up with so many contrivances and yet you choose the simplest “oh she likes geeky stuff?”.
But in Ririsa you can FEEL the passion. It’s not just a passion for cosplay, it’s a passion for a work of fiction, for the power that art can have and how it can connect people, for how fans can convey that passion to others.
It’s honestly so nostalgic. This is the sort of work that you only saw in the late 2000s, that era of Macademi Wasshoi or Genshiken. But here it’s been honed over years where anime and manga have become more and more mainstream. It’s not saying “being a geek is cool” it’s saying “getting into this thing made me meet lots of people and do things I wouldn’t have done otherwise”.
I love this panel so much, basically the girl that until a few chapters ago had trouble socializing to the point that Ririsa thought she was threatening her, realizes that the girl she just met is another cosplayer and immediately knows she’s a friend.
She gets so giddy every time someone joins the club because it means new friend.
And I guess that’s the underlying current of the story in the end: Love. It’s not the chase for a romantic partner but just… love as a whole.
Masamune comes from a broken household and Ririel was his escape in those trying times, but he ended up believing himself unworthy of love in the process. His chaste streak comes from a low sense of self-worth.
Like, how many manga nowadays can create the sort of context where you can have the main character in tears telling a topless girl how much he loves her, this after said girl implied to him how she had feelings for him which made him feel awful about not noticing and STILL not end up with a proper relationship afterwards?
How many manga can have a main character obsessed with a fictional character, have said main character punched in the gut when he tries to retreat back into “it’s fine, I have Ririel”, and not only not undo the whole premise of the story but not feel preachy in the process?
By the way, this is roughly volume 14, the latest one as of this writing is volume 21 and Masamune actually changes considerably in the process. Before he was a more traditional “does not notice” type of main character but afterwards he starts getting flustered, and you get the impression that it’s more him still coming to terms with loving and being loved and everything that it entails.
Mind you, I’m skipping straight to the point I want to make and in the process I’m neglecting to talk about the characters, the dynamic, the fact that the titular Ririsa is the sicko of the cast. My goal with this post is to give you the sort of advertising that the cover and ads for it clearly don’t do justice to.
I don’t know how this manga will end, I’ve been disappointed before, I’ve dropped other manga for seemingly petty reasons or regretted reaching the end… but funnily enough Ririsa does say the right thing for this situation.
“I don’t know if things will change later […] But they’re good for now.”