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Gekkan Shoujo Nozaki-kun 24 October 2014

2014, 12 episodes: AniDB; also known as Monthly Girls' Nozaki-kun.

Parody series about young girls' (shōjo) manga. Chiyo has a crush on fellow high school student Nozaki, but through comical misunderstanding discovers he's a manga writer and artist – but this has to be kept a secret from the rest of the school.

The general premise here is the reflection of high school events in the format demanded by a girls' manga series, and particularly the way Nozaki draws inspiration for his strip from the people and things around him (casually gender-swapping roles and changing details to fit the stereotypes). But this feeds the other way too: all the principal cast are manga readers, and this influences the way they think about things in real life, especially Chiyo's ongoing crush on Nozaki.

It's not the most appealing of premises, but a distinctive cast and lively writing style manage to keep things going surprisingly well; as someone mostly unfamilar with the source genre, I wasn't expecting to enjoy this anything like as much as I did, and in fact I'd regard it as one of my favourites of the 2014 summer season. A particularly pleasing short sequence dealt with the stereotype of the hero going off into probably-fatal battle and his girlfriend promising to wait for him… which was done as a girl dumping her luggage on Nozaki so that she could run away from a teacher more effectively.

The first few episodes deal with introducing the cast, but after that there's little progression; it's mostly a series of one-shot jokes without much connectivity between them. If you can put up with that, and with the inevitable lack of conclusion to any of the storylines, I'd definitely recommend this as a light-hearted palate cleanser.

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