Member Reviews

I must say this comic didn't go where I expected it to. I thought I was diving into a book about a lonely teen boy who crosses dresses as an excuse to meet girls. Instead, I got a charming, heartwarming story about a group of outcasts finding each other. It's a rather sweet story (no pun intended). Unfortunately, the story gets a bit confusing. The characters are hard to keep up with and it often feels like plotlines start yet go nowhere. Still, it was an enjoyable read. I would pick up another volume to see what adventures Coca, Lemon, and the rest of the gang get up to!

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I Cross-Dressed for the IRL Meetup was painful in many ways. It's not a bad manga per se, but cliched and the cuteness aspect felt mostly cringy. Th main character is Cocoa, who's actually a male actor that likes to crossdress. She ends up in a meeting where all the other participants are crossdressers too and they enjoy cake. Opera becomes the master for Cocoa as she is good at makeup and whatnot and the the two enjoy their girl lives. So, mostly it's about insecurities and enjoying being someone else, which I understand as I crossdress myself at times too. I'm just not into the superficial part about the series and how weirdly sweets are a girl thing, which I've never understood in manga.

The art looks OK, nothing special, but works with the somewhat bland story. We only see the characters take off their wigs, but it would be more interesting to see how they build their costumes and breasts for example. Also, I don't know why Cocoa suddenly has a female waist. This series does nothing for actual crossdressers as it's an excuse to look cute and eat cake, but hardly about anything else.

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This manga was a pleasant surprise, it was wholesome and packed with humor, with a great message about not assuming someone's gender. I especially enjoyed the background character Sacchan, who kept overhearing these beautiful women (not everyone in the online group is truly a woman) reveal they were actually men, and his reactions were downright hilarious!

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Please see my full review in Booklist for a full analysis of this work. Thank you! I appreciate the opportunity to review this manga professionally.

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This was a lovely, charming read that balanced humor and friendship with reflection and some depth on the topics. I really enjoyed it and am looking forward to future volumes.
*the English release for vol 1 combined vol 1-2 of the original Japanese manga, which was a great choice to allow us more time to get to know the characters and cultural elements in touching on topics like gender presentation and how different characters may have different reasons to enjoy trying on clothes typically perceived as for women, and that they don’t all identify the same way in terms of gender or sexuality.

Our main character and online friends that are all fans of sweets have presented or been assumed to be women from their online interactions, and all attend the meetup presenting as women. The MC and another member almost immediately discover that they are both men/assigned male at birth and agree to keep it a secret. Over the course of the volume we learn all of the characters were Assigned Male at Birth; one is a trans woman, one is a bisexual femboy that is openly a guy that enjoys women’s clothing, and our main character is in the process of exploring why he seeks out and enjoys trying on the clothes he does.
It ends up being a sweet and supportive club of friends exploring their likes and experiences around fashion and gender presentation, while ostensibly getting together to enjoy pastries that was the original purpose of the club.

I liked all the characters and appreciated the variety of personalities and experiences in it. I’m looking forward to reading the rest; the remaining volumes are set to come out in English in 2025!

A very belated ARC Review; I checked my NetGalley and saw I hadn’t submitted this yet, though I read it in September! Thank you to Kodansha and NetGalley for the ARC! I am sharing an honest review.

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I was given this book by the publisher in exchange for an honest review. I requested this book because it seemed like a goofy premise and like it would be a fun read and it definitely was! The art is really nice, but it is a little hard to tell the difference between some of the core group of friends in the sweets group because three out of the four have some variation of a blonde bob hairstyle. This was surprisingly wholesome and a fun read.

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This was a light, funny read with cute art. A group of "women" that met online get together in person once a month to indulge in sweets. But as the story goes on you discover the different characters genders and who they have crushes. At times it's a little confusing but generally cute and wholesome. It reminds me of Crossplay Love: Otaku x Punk. I think I'll read the second volume to see where it goes.
Thanks to Kodansha and Netgalley for my review copy.

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I loved it! One of the best mangas I've read this year. I wish Kurano much success, please write more mangas like this, you're doing the world a favor.
The best thing about it is the naturalness with which the topic of inclusion is treated, how easy and quick it is to read and how understandable the subject is, incredible.
100/100. I highly recommend it.

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Thank you so much for letting me read this manga. This is a really well done story. I enjoyed it a lot. I think I liked the first installment just a little better than the second one.

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I enjoyed this quite a bit! The back and forth 'gender reveals' were a bit off in my opinion, but nothing was really harmful about them. I'd like to warn fellow trans and gender-nonconforming readers that this is written from the perspective of another culture. The terms and language we use won't always line up. What's progressive in one culture may be regressive in another. There's nothing downright awful, just mild things we'd think were more acceptable to say 10+ years ago, but again, nothing is harmful.

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Summary:

Cocoa recently joined a group that meets up every month. This group lets the girls meet up and share treats, all while chatting about the things they love. There’s just one catch - Cocoa isn’t a girl. Her real name is Satoshi.

Fun fact! Satoshi isn’t the only one keeping secrets in this friend group. Nor is his secret all that different from at least one another. This begs the question - what secrets do the other two have?

Review:

I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect when I dove into I Cross-Dressed for the IRL Meetup 1. It had the potential to be really cute and sweet or go in the entirely opposite direction and get a bit too gross for my liking.

Thankfully, this manga stays wholly in the cute and sweet realm. Our characters are attached to one another and admittedly could have been better at communication, which is how they ended up in this situation.

There’s more to the story than I’ve described, but I don’t want to spoil everything. It delicately handles many of the elements teased in the title (such as shaving concerns, makeup, etc.), which was a pleasant surprise. Likewise, it was never the butt of a joke, or at least that’s how it felt to me.

Highlights:
Cute Romantic Story
LGBTQ+

Will I continue the series? Nah

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Sweets, crossdressing, and the revelation that the members of this group may not be what they seem, makes for a hilarious and engaging story. The inclusion of storylines of learning new techniques to dress and do makeup, of friendship and mystery and intrigue, of budding romance, all make this manga one to look out for, as it cements its place in the wonderful world of Slice of Life manga.

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Thank you letting read this 🙏🏾.

This was okay I was expecting little more from some other main characters but I did enjoy this alot.

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As a cis-gender woman, I don't always feel like the best person to talk about gender identity. But on the flip side, I have plenty of experience being told I'm insufficiently girly because I don't like to use makeup or shop, so it's clear that most if not all of us out there in the world have faced assumptions based on preconceived social ideas of gender and gender expression. This manga does its absolute best to give us a story about a group of people with varying gender identities and expressions, and that, I feel, is worth a lot.

The story follows a group of online sweets fans who decide to start meeting up IRL. Satoshi decides to come as Cocoa, a woman, for certain reasons, one of which seems to be the (patently ridiculous) idea that men don't like sweet foods. Cocoa has a crush on Opera, another girl in the group, but it turns out that Opera is Chiyoda, a young man who enjoys dressing as a woman and so is Lemon, a third group member. The fourth member, Kantentaro, is a woman, but AMAB, so there's some discussion of how that's different from the other three, who identify as male but enjoy presenting as female. In all honesty, I wish that had been delved into a little more, but seeing a trans woman unequivocally accepted as a woman more than makes up for it. And her being trans doesn't need to be a plot point; it's just who she is.

It was a good plan to publish this in a two-volume omnibus because it takes a bit to get into the meat of the story. It feels like the series starts with the idea of being a comedy before shifting over to a discussion of gender expression and identity with comedic elements. If this had been released in single volumes, readers might have gotten the wrong idea about the overall series, which settles down into an exploration of Opera and Cocoa and why they enjoy being those people. Cocoa's reasons feel much more tied to her self-esteem than Opera's; Opera appears comfortable no matter which gender is being presented. But Cocoa is far more comfortable than Satoshi; as Cocoa, she feels like she's got less to worry about in terms of public perception, and she feels less burdened by the gaze of others. A lot of this is tied up in what Satoshi does for work, and that's an interesting conversation about costumes making people feel like their real selves more than their “regular” everyday look.

This may not be the best LGBTQIA+ manga out there about the topic, but it's still a good one. It keeps the tone light without brushing the more serious elements under the rug. That allows room for the story beats to hit readers, giving everyone space to digest what the characters have to say on their own time.

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11/04/2024 || I Cross-Dressed for the IRL Meetup 1 by Kurano || #ICrossDressedfortheIRLMeetup #NetGalley


Thank you NetGalley, Kurano, and Kodansha Comics for making this e-ARC available!

Please note: This review may not be reproduced or quoted, in whole or in part, without explicit consent from the author and myself.
All of my thoughts are my own~

4.5 Stars

I want to start out by stating I am unsure if it was possibly a localization and/or translation issue, but some parts of this manga were very hard to follow and understand. I could follow the main bulk and enjoyed it very much, and even the parts I struggled with reading/comprehending were also really enjoyable. But the moments where the conversations in the main speech bubbles, the little "talking under their breath"/side comments, and thoughts didn't quite make sense really took me out of the reading experience unfortunately. Due to the amount of times this occurred I struggled to finish this manga in one sitting/in a normal amount of time I normally finish manga and at one point, near the middle, I put the manga down completely for a while.

Which is really unfortunate. I know that there are a lot of restrictions for the topics this manga covers, sexuality, gender, cross-dressing, trans identities, etc - I am just not sure what happened. The author, Kurano, has some lovely author's notes tucked away in this book talking about these topics, but with a lot more clarity than the story line of the manga itself had, so I wasn't understanding why the translation of the AN was clear but the story wasn't it?

Or was the story and dialogue supposed to be clunky and confusing because the characters are a bit clumsy and confused/learning themselves and their friends and their identities? If this was the case, I wish there was an A.N. at the start expressing this as I possibly could have had an easier time navigating those confusing moments. I really hope Kurano and the translating team could maybe get back together to better polish this manga up, or add additional notes to better explain some of the confusing bits.

Other that this above issue, I LOVED this manga. My favorite character was Cocoa, but all of her friends and nearly every character that showed up was so cute and interesting and very fleshed out. Not one single character suffered from being too similar to another- everyone was unique and had their own distinct voice, personality, and story. The story, while clunky in some parts, was really wholesome and heartfelt and I really loved the underlying message (and A.N.) that identities, sexuality, and gender are all fluid and one's own to do with as they like.

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"I Cross-Dressed for the IRL Meetup" is a manga series about a group of friends who meet up monthly for sweet treats... but they are not all women as at least one of them are men cross-dressing as women. The manga takes a wholesome turn as they all get to know each other and explore the concept of gender as well as learn about themselves. I've read manga about men crossdressing as women before (especially for romance), but this one takes the cake (haha, get it?) for going deeper into societal norms, gender-neutral restrooms, and more. I'm really looking forward to continuing this series!

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A fun and cute read 🫶.

It's my first reading something like this, and it's really a fresh breath of air.

I think the highlight of this story was the characters and the whole cross-dressing plot that is meticulously laid out, giving us an insightful take or perspective of the actions.

Other than that, I really like how it didn't shy in showing the main characters in their most vulnerable state— specifically on the identity part or where Cocoa-san is struggling on their identity and confidence.

The rest of the characters were also a delight, especially Opera-san, I really enjoyed their characters as well.

Overall, this was a good read. I really enjoyed the content of the manga 🫶

Thank you, Kodansha Comic, for the e-arc copy 🫶
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Date Released: September 17, 2024
Date Read and Reviewed: November 7, 2024
Ratings: 4⭐️

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I don’t know why I expected depth and feelings from this manga. It could have definitely been great, but it doesn’t have any plot. The characters have endless conversations about this and that, but nothing ever happens. We don’t learn why the characters crossdress or what their lives are like. What they do when they’re bored. I wasn’t invested in the story whatsoever. And keep in mind that this edition includes two volumes and not one.

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I love seeing what Japanese manga does with gender. I particularly liked the seamless inclusion of a trans girl alongside the cross-dressing boys, highlighting the differences and similarities among the two, and the lack of moral panic surrounding cross-dressing and gender in general. When their identities get revealed, it’s not seen as betrayal or deception, but a shared way to bond. Makes me realize how ingrained our expectation is for that betrayal part of the story—why? It’s not necessary. Imagine that, a world where gender isn’t so feared, policed, and politicized. How refreshing. It was great.

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I found this manga to be cute and funny. I liked how the characters bonded and formed friendships. Overall, it was an enjoyable read.

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