By: Anonymous | @TAVmedia

What can I say? Ai Ore! is a work that just stands out. Despite some of the elements that have not aged well, I found myself falling in love with it all over again in a recent re-reading after discovering it on VIZ Media. It’s a story about young love, identity, and self-discovery as two teens journey through the complexities of a new relationship while dealing with societal expectations.

Our two leads are Mizuki Sakurazaka and Akira Shiraishi. Mizuki is an androgynous, masculine-looking girl who is a high school student and the lead electric guitarist for the band, Blaue Rosen. Meanwhile, her love interest, Akira, is a high school boy with a feminine appearance who joins Blaue Rosen as their new vocalist.

Both lean into their appearances, with Mizuki using her good looks and tall stature to secure herself as a “cool” musician while Akira uses his looks to get away with joining the previously all-girl band so that he can get closer to the girl he has a crush on. At the same time, they experience moments where they want to be seen not as a “cool” man but as a “cute” girl and vice versa.

At the time I read this series, it was a thought-provoking work that challenged traditional gender roles and norms. When sticking out and becoming popular was all anyone wanted to do, it was a kind of conformity that felt pushed upon us by society, friendships, etc.

Reading Ai Ore! wherein the characters and story takes place in an unconventional high school setting where gender norms are flipped on their heads while watching Mizuki and Akira navigate their romance and conforming to a non-conforming identity that gets them support, really helped me learn to better understand defying traditional stereotypes and exploring the fluidity of personal identity.

Mizuki and Akira’s story, on its surface, makes it seem like they have already found self-acceptance with their identities, but you realize by the end that the side of them you see, while authentic, is only one side of who they are. You can be both boyish and girly as you grow into yourself and that’s okay to want to be both. I thought things were binary, growing up in a religious home with a private school background, but it opened me up to a more fluid expression of gender and self. 

Now that we are in the 2020s, that seems pretty obvious, but for a young girl like me who grew up in a relatively conservative household and went to church most Sundays, it was definitely eye-opening and became a series that I adored as a young teen. I even used it as a starting point of exploration into my own fashion and identity. As such, I can’t help wanting to recommend it despite some of the more questionable elements today that you might find inside as a result of how it explores what it means to be a boy, a girl, and, truly, yourself.

So, if interested, I definitely recommend checking it out! However, don’t be too surprised by some of the outdated ideas. Currently, the series is available on VIZ.com: https://www.viz.com/ai-ore.

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Line edits by: Krow Smith | @coffeewithkrow

Copyedited by: Katherine Cañeba | @kcserinlee