ハーフ・アンド・ハーフ

HALF AND HALF

Romance

MANGA

STATUS
COMPLETE
VOLUMES
2
RELEASE
March 24, 2009
CHAPTERS
9

DESCRIPTION

Our heroine is girl named Hina-chan. She is in her 20s. Hina has a handsome boyfriend now, but she will always remember her first love, a boy named Itsuki. When other kids would tease Hina, calling her ugly, Itsuki would defend her, and try to cheer her up and make her feel better. He and some of his family eventually moved away, leaving Hina heartbroken. But the memory of her first love will always make Hina feel nostalgic and happy inside. Itsuki’s grandmother still lives next door to Hina, so she still has a connection to him, somehow.

One day, Hina has a dream of Itsuki, and she is feeling especially nostalgic about him. She is just mentioning her dream to his grandmother, when they are interrupted by the arrival of a stranger. It is a tall, beautiful woman. Wait a minute… it’s Itsuki! Itsuki is not joking, either. He claims that he is really a woman on the inside, and now he is dressing that way on the outside.

And yes, even though Itsuki now lives as a woman, Hina finds herself falling in love all over again, regardless of how Itsuki dresses. But Itsuki sees herself as a woman, and she only loves men. Will Hina end up heartbroken all over again?

CHAPTERS

REVIEWS

Kippu
30/100
One of the few transgender manga, and it does not handle the topic well.
Half & Half is one of the very few manga that actually attempts to have an openly transgender character. I myself am a trans woman, so I was hoping this to be somewhat meaningful to me. Sadly, this manga, while expressing some good ideas is held back far too much by it's shortcomings.

The biggest downfall of this manga is it's dialogue and paneling as both of which are, to be quite frank, pretty awful. Let's start with the paneling. Often times while reading, I would have no clue what order to read the different panels. This isn't helped by there often times being a LOT of text on each page, making this feel like a complete slog to get through. The reason for this insane amount of text on each page is due to the fact that this manga is allergic to "show don't tell". EVERYTHING that happens in the story is said out loud, or in a characters head. Even if the manga decides to visually convey a plot point, it will usually just have a character repeat exactly what the reader just saw. This unnecessarily bloats the amount of text that must be read, all of which being in an incredibly confusing manner due to the poor paneling. Finally, the manga's dialogue (which as stated before it uses to describe everything) just flat out sucks. This might be due to a poor translation, as only one exists online, but it was almost unreadable. Nothing really makes much sense, and none of the characters ever seem like they are actually talking. The "conversations" jump around a ton without any flow, and even the internal thoughts of characters are stated at strange times, often not making much sense anyway. The art certainly does not help this, as the author has awful same face syndrome, making everything even more confusing, as some characters almost look alike. So, this manga is pretty bad on a technical level, but can it make it up with story and representation?

The story for Half/Half is... not the best... It is very short and doesn't fully explore all the themes it seemed to attempt to tackle. I really wish Maru's story was finished, but sadly we don't get to see where she ends up. There are some very stand out chapters, such as the marriage one, and the chapter where Itsuki helps out another trans girl. However, there are also some very bad chapters, such as the finale. The first half of the story is pretty alright, the way it establishes Hina and the other characters' support of Itsuki's Identity is very well done. What is not well done however is the way it handles Itsuki and Hina's relationship. Both Hina and Itsuki believe that they like men, but end up falling in love with each other. This is a very delicate subject matter, and could be a very interesting dive into sexuality, but it is not handled well. The finale handles Hina and Itsuki's very delicate relationship in a very... strange way. It doesn't really resolve the main issue (sexuality and gender) between them, and just kind of puts them together. As a trans lesbian, this just doesn't at all feel like a way to explore the relation of gender, being trans, and sexuality, especially involving a lesbian relationship. The author could be going for describing CompHet, but it doesn't really come off that way and instead chooses to be more like some shoujo bullshit of "I don't care about gender as long as its you teehee~". The end was also quite annoying to me personally, as I have never liked this kind of drama on top of it's already poor execution. Overall, It has some good moments, and some bad ones, but the story isn't all that terrible.

What is terrible, however is the representation. I will overlook the constant referral to Itsuki as "he" as it is likely due to the poor translation of the series rather than the writing itself. What I will not overlook, however is the actual constant misgendering of her as a "gay man". She herself, along with almost every other character constantly calls Itsuki a "gay man." Not transgender, or transsexual, or even transvestite, but a fucking gay man. The worst part is that she herself does not give any push back for this whatsoever, and even calls herself that. While you could say that this is a product of it's time, I think what is more likely is that a cis person wrote this without proper understanding of what a trans person would feel. What's also bad is that Itsuki plays into some harmful trans stereotypes, such as hitting on dudes a ton, and being overly sexual at times. Thankfully, these are few and far between, and really aren't as bad as other stuff from this manga's time. Despite these bad things, there are some things done right. Everything involving Itsuki's family and Maru was handled incredibly well compared to the rest of the manga. These were also some of the few times when the trans characters were actually referred to by their preferred gender. I also like the way that Itsuki doesn't back down on being a woman before adversary, and the only time she does she is picked right back up by those dear to her. The worst part of this rep is with Hina and Itsuki's relationship. We see Hina portrayed as a straight woman throughout the entire series, so her ending up with Itsuki without any exploring of her sexuality shows us exactly what this author sees trans women as: men. If this manga had gone a LITTLE bit in depth with the leads' sexuality this would have been avoided, but sadly that is not what we ended up getting.

Overall, I would not at all reccomend this series. You won't really get much out of it no matter what you're looking for. It's not even "entertaining bad," it's just... bleh.
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