Literature Review: Last Gender - When We Are Nameless; This Is Screwed Up But I Was Reincarnated As A Girl In Another World

Last Gender is interesting. This Is Screwed Up But I Was Reincarnated As A Girl In Another World is boringly bad.

Content Warnings

Discussion of hardships of LGBTQ+ characters, mentions of sex.

Notice

I am primarily a white straight male identifying individual. I do not live the life of a trans individual, but I feel my thoughts on the manga and their relationship to LGBTQ+ have some value. If you are looking for perspective from LGBTQ+ on the subject matter, you are better off looking elsewhere.

Setting The Stage

I like to buy manga. I like the style, the art, the length and size of the books, and the stories that are told within. American comic books never resonated with me in the same way manga has. Superheroes didn’t interest me, and never found the diversity of stories I was looking for in comic books.

After reaching a level of personal financial stability, buying manga (which is around $10 to $12 each), became my choice retail therapy. Especially during the first two years of the Covid-19 pandemic. It was like receiving little gifts in the mail randomly to break up the bleak monotony of life.

Even after the pandemic started to move towards an endemic, I still love my little books I get in the mail. I liked the sporadic packets of art and story. They sustained my soul.

The latest of my treats to myself are two manga: Last Gender vol 1, and This Is Screwed Up But I Was Reincarnated As A Girl In Another World vol 1,2,3. I had a feeling going in that I might have a weird time with the former, and personal indulgence in garbage with the latter. I was only half right.

Spoilers ahead.

Story of Last Gender

In the first volume of Last Gender, there are five chapters involving patrons bar called a BAR California. The bar is a place where identity and personal status don’t matter, and you’re able to engage in “intimate play” (i.e., sex) with consenting individuals. Though it isn’t only a place for sex, some patrons come to the bar simply to as be the gender or sexuality that they feel is natural to them.

The first story is set to establish the setting and explain the breadth and depth of gender and sexuality. Minami, a woman who’s been cheated on by her husband since before they were married, comes to the bar to try to understand where he’s been sneaking off to. There she meets a trans woman, Ran, who seduces her. In their intimate exchange the reader learns that Minami has always felt boxed in by the expectations of society and Ran expresses her jealousy of those who fit in with cultural expectations. Ran drops a fact about Facebook allowing people to pick from among 58 genders and expresses her frustration with being treated less for being a minority. Despite that, being the BAR, they are allowed to be themselves for a little bit. Minami leaves the bar feeling liberated, both free of her empty marriage but also by the expectations pushed upon her. It seems Ran is left without a happy end, but in the next chapter, she gets her due.

Ran’s story details the hardship of not only being Bisexual but transitioned to female. Her inner monologue covers the social issues of transitioning such social expectations, also the medical and legal challenges of getting gender affirming care. During her internal frustrations, a cis pansexual man named Mao, is genuinely pursing Ran. She consistently brushes Mao away, thinking he’s another person trying to impose their own ideas on her as she’s caught in her inner thoughts. In a moment of clarity, Mao confessed that he wanted to know her as who she is. It’s then it clicks this maybe this man is the love she was looking for. Ran wants to jump his bones as a way of getting to know each other, but Mao adorably says he is too shy when other people are watching (in BAR California).

The next chapter we get Mao’s history and a lead into Marie (a gender fluid person). Mao’s family life is rough, his parents believe there is something wrong with him for being pansexual. He effectively disowns them, and they continuously try to take him to conversion therapy. Marie tells him that keeping somethings to yourself from your family is ok. Mao resolves to make his past-self proud, even if his parents don’t accept him.

This leads to Marie (my personal favorite story), someone who identifies mostly as male, but partly as female. They present themselves as a man outside of BAR California and heavily female within with cute dresses, wigs, and make-up. However, they hide their female identity from their family, fearing the wife and daughter they love will come to hate them should they reveal their bigender nature. It’s when Amiru, an aromantic woman that frequents the bar for sex, finds out about Marie’s double life. She comments how wonderful for it is for Marie to have this love in their life, to not let their deception ruin what they have. After getting new insight into what Marie has, they rush home and share their secret to their wife. Though their wife is shocked, but she wants to understand.

Amiru’s story is mostly a monologue on living a life where she doesn’t understand love and is shunned for not understanding. People accuse her of being a slut or broken in some way. After sex with a mysterious blindfolded man, he drops some advice for her. He says she should be the protagonist of her own life. From that she realizes that her life may not be a romantic story, but it is her story and that’s good enough. Amiru

This mysterious man, Yukihiro is set up to be the protagonist of the next chapter, but that is where the volume ends.

Story of Reincarnated As A Girl

Everything goes right for Ren.

Ren was a scientist of our world (of some unknown discipline), reborn in a world of fantasy and magic. He (or her, they don’t really their gender in any meaningful way) awakens in the wreckage of a caravan amidst a storm. She (I’ll use she/her pronouns for them going forward because that’s how they portray themselves in the world) uses “scientific knowledge” (i.e., basic survival training and grade school science) to build a shelter and start a fire using magic to dry wood and leaves and then fire to ignite it. It’s there she falls asleep until the next day.

She has a dream of being an overly enthusiastic sex slave to a wealthy man. Upon waking up she recalled in this world’s life; she was travelling to meet that man? This is where the story is unclear in the details, though it’s heavily implied that she was to become a concubine for this man in exchange for the continued existence of the orphanage. Upon Ren having this revelation bails on her meeting with the wealthy man and the orphanage.

It’s at this point I can only assume the consciousness of the scientist is in complete control, and the person who was Ren is gone. The reason for this due to the minimal, if not nonexistent, emotional ties or sense of obligation to the other children at the orphanage.

Later Ren is wandering further into the wilderness with no destination and runs into the obvious problems of thirst and hunger. She tries to eat some weeds but gets sick from eating random plants on the ground. Haphazardly, she wishes for water, and it magically appears to her. So surprised by this turn of events, she attempts to wish for a rice ball in the same way. Sure enough, a perfectly salted rice ball appears in her hands and solves her hunger problems.

She can literally wish any non-living material into existence, killing any stakes there were in trying to survive in a wilderness. Just because she’s special.

There is the constraint that manifesting objects from nothing takes a lot of MP (yes, she does have HP, MP, stats, and a status screen she can summon), but she can effectively create anything so long as she has some understanding of how it’s made.

From this point on, she spends time creating a net for fishing, a grill for cooking, stamina boosting potions for enough energy to make a house (I am unsure how she knows what a potion is and what goes into it; or how, in that world’s physics, stamina correlates to MP). She summons a McMansion of a house into existence using raw materials, then takes a sensuous bath.

The next conflict to arise is that she wants to eat meat. Which is weird considering she already had access to meat by fishing. I have no explanation, but this prompts an arc where she figures out how to throw a rock fast with magic to hunt animals. She kills some weird rabbits. Then she enters in a life-or-death battle with a boar, ending with her shearing off the upper half of the animal’s skull (which was awesome).

Ren then discovers how to pleasure herself with her newly acquired female parts. Notedly, this is really the first time Ren has engaged with the fact she has a female shell rather than male one. A signal in the noise.

Reviews

Last Gender is a well-structured flowing narrative about not being a cis gendered straight person. I like that each chapter has its struggling protagonist, an outside perspective secondary character, and long-standing character that enables the protagonist that is enabler to the pair.

All struggles in Last Gender are internal or social. The main character comes to BAR California to be able to express their gender and/or sexual preference, however, are haunted by the pressures of society against their desired state of being. The supporting character provide the main character perspective on their challenge, giving them a breakthrough to find comfort in who they are, or to be vulnerable to those who truly care about them.

What I find especially interesting is that the supporting character becomes the primary character in the next chapter. Each chapter flows to the next with an already familiar character. This structure offers continuity to an array of stories that are largely self-contained. Being a fan of planned continuity, this tickles me greatly.

The manga did a good job to communicate the different aspects of gender and sexual preference, and the challenges those people face socially, financially, and legally.

Reincarnated As A Girl on the other hand…

Is the latest in the Isekai craze. It feels like the creators of this put a bunch of word of popular manga subjects, put them into a bowl, and drew them at random. Except the Isekai card was three times the size of the others.

This manga can be broken down as thus:

Yes, this technically falls into food manga territory. It really didn’t need to do that. Like a lot of things. There’s nothing new here, not even the wasted potential. They could have told an interesting story about finding yourself in a body that isn’t yours, and not the gender you traditionally associated with.

The storyteller could have forced the main character to use real smarts (in her past life she was a scientist) rather than auto-win magic to overcome the dangers of being alone, exposed, and unprepared in the wilds. But they don’t. Consequently, nothing feels earned.

Let me reiterate the name of the manga: This Is Screwed Up But I Was Reincarnated As A Girl In Another World

The conflict, per the title, is that the main character is brought back as a woman in another world. In volume 1, the only hardships she had to face because of being a woman was she was sent as a sex slave to an evil merchant lord, which she ditched immediately with no consequence. In volumes 2 and 3, she still faces no consequences of abandoning her forced obligation to the merchant lord, or any emotional obligation to her fellow orphans. Is it messed up if there is no mess?

The consequences of being a girl, in the story that I have read so far, involves everyone lusting after her. For the most part, that seems a side inconvenience relative to the main action of the story, which even then seems low

I knew I was buying trashy literature when I ordered Reincarnated As A Girl, but some part of me wished they’d do something interesting with it.

The connection I’d draw between Last Gender, and This Is Screwed Up But I Was Reincarnated As A Girl In Another World is they operate in the space of gender, and gender roles. These manga are intended for different audiences, expecting them to achieve the same goals isn’t productive. It is a valuable contrast to show how story exceeds presenting gender changes and discovery, while the other wastes its opportunity.

Love,

OnlyFeatures