A review by little_sparrow3
Hitorijime My Hero, Vol. 1 by Memeco Arii

3.0

Like with a lot of the manga I've been picking up recently, I first got into this series through the anime. The anime was cute. While the main couple does involve a teacher and a student, the romance itself was pretty wholesome compared to other yaoi anime I've watched with a similar age gap and I liked the plot well enough. I thought I'd pick up the manga and check out where Masahiro's and Kousuke's relationship goes past the point that the anime stopped. Within a few pages of this volume, it became clear to me that that the anime made some major changes to the structure of the story and, in all honesty, I prefer the anime better. The first problem is that this series is a spin-off/continuation of a one volume story called Hitorijime My Boyfriend that shows Kousuke's brother Kensuke getting together with his boyfriend Asaya. If you haven't read this story before jumping into this one, then you're going to get really confused, really fast, because the author assumes that you know all of the characters and plot from there and dumps you face first into the middle of story with no explanation of how characters are related. The anime adapted My Boyfriend as part of My Hero, so I was able to follow along well enough, but I was still super confused to start with. The other thing that bothered me is that the manga is most definitely NOT PG or PG-13. Masahiro's and Kousuke's relationship is explicit pretty much right from the start and this makes the age gap and student/teacher part of their relationship really squicky. I had a really hard time getting behind it, especially since I could't understand why these two characters were together at all. I could understand what they saw in each other in the anime and loved them together, but here? Not so much.

For the sake of the anime and to sate my own curiosity, I may continue with this for a couple of volumes, just to see where it goes, but if it doesn't get any better, I'll just drop it.