Manga 92042 Trans Star

It zips through the story at a fairly breakneck pace, but being a one-shot, this can't really be helped. Likewise, there's only the barest of characterization (though still a surprisingly decent amount, considering the length). The TS disease is basically just wibbly-wobbly biobabble that's incredibly unrealistic and is transparently just to excuse the circumstances of the plot, but given the "moral" of the story, and how we're basically only introduced to the character post-disease, I'm also willing to excuse this as it pretty much just seems to be a story meant to attempt to bring some light and acceptance to homosexuality in Japan. If you're ... willing to excuse these flaws, and a few other minor niggles, it's an adorable, heart-warming story whose only serious flaw is not having been given a serialized run.

It's not just that the pacing is bad. It's that it spends multiple pages right of the bat on establishing how the disease works in a story that could just as easily function if a fairy came down with a gender-swap stick. Not great for a one-shot.

From there, it goes through the motions of getting the characters together via one teaching the other about feminine life. However, it leans less on "gay panic" energy, which may have been fun in this case, and leans far more on gender essentialism. The conflict isn't that she's feeling weird about maybe being bisexual; it's that she doesn't recognize ... her crush as who she is now and wants to change her into a "real girl" out of a sense of societal obligation. Not my bag.

Art is alright, though.