Spoilers Below Dont Become an Otaku Shinozakisan Well thats it right there all in the title isnt it? Not really of course. Shinozaki is a yuricomedy manga very much on the light end of the genre penned by one Shou Hikawa a fellow whose qualifications include a small mountain of Touhou doujinshi. Its about the titular Akina Shinozaki and opens with her attending her first day of school. Not the first day as shes missed the entire first week due to illness. Arriving to find that most of her class has already carved itself neatly into social cliques. She has a minor panic wondering if that by simple virtue of having missed her first week of high school if shes been doomed to a high school career of social isolation and loneliness. She resolves to make friends with whoever she can starting with the girl she sits next to. That person is Kaede. 220https://i.ur.com/Ern11th.png Kaede is an otaku. To Akinas own chagrin she also finds Kaede unbelievably cute when she smiles and so the ball begins rolling on almost 50 chapters of what is at its core a culture clash comedy. Akina who begins as the normal person against Kaede their third friend Micchi and a quicklygrowing support cast who represent the otaku. Akinas stated mission throughout much of the manga is to turn Kaede into a normal person so her cuteness isnt wasted. This is less offputting than it might sound and indeed if the manga can be said to have a moral its that having different interests doesnt mean people cant love each other and a couple things quickly become apparent. The first is that Akina has fallen incredibly hard for Kaede. This isnt even remotely subtle 220https://i.ur.com/Q9eq1J1.png It really isnt. but she remains in denial until the mangas final pages something thats par for the course for this sort of thing but remains a touch frustrating nonetheless. The second is that shes also much more of a nerd than shed like to believe. Over the course of the mangas opening chapters Akina slowly gets into the Prepure series an ersatz of the very real and very popular Pretty Cure magical girl franchise first to have some common talking ground with Kaede but increasingly obviously also of her own volition. This is a pattern that the manga follows time and again Akina doing a nerdy thing to try to get on Kaedes good side and then ending up enjoying that thing for its own sake often while denying that shes doing so. Its a pretty simple jokeshes basically tsundere for her own hobbies and over the mangas run gets into everything from a Monster Hunter clone to cosplay of a Hong Kong Project character which it will not surprise is a play on the Touhou franchise that Hikawa made so many doujins for and even attends an ersatz Comiket twice. This might sound repetitive and truth be told it kind of is but the characters have enough personality that their antics are for the most part anyway funny instead of frustrating a balance that most comedy manga struggle to strikeafter all you dont want them to develop too fast or you lose your joke material but at the same time if you repeat the same gag too many times it stops being funny. Akina and Kaede are helped out by a fairly large cast consisting of Akinas brother the lovable but awkward Makoto who has the unfortunate luck to be the target of her frustrations when something otakurelated goes awry several other friends both Kaedes and some of Akinas from middle school and a few others to round out the gaps. Going over all of them is beyond the scope of this review but theyre all lovable in their own way much of the time. If Shinozaki has a real problem its that it kind of starts to run out of steam in its final third where jokes start getting recycled more and the manga starts leaning more heavily on several categories of pointandlaugh gag ha This person is fat Ha This person is a man in womans clothing Ha This person is being groped and so on. Thankfully before it can truly hit a brick wall theres a small lovely arc about Akina Kaede and Micchi making a Prepure doujin which immediately leads into the finale where Akina admits to herself and then her friends that shes an otaku and accidentally confesses to Kaede who then kisses her . All in all the main descriptor for the manga is probably cute with chuckleworthy being a close second and while that might not sound like a ringing endorsement its honestly pretty easy to recommend. There are some gross gags and Makotos friend a lolicon could easily have been chopped entirely and it runs a bit longer than it needs to but at its core Shinozaki is a very simple girl/girl love comedy and while it may not exactly be groundbreaking it hits all the notes oned expect from the genre splendidly.