Bokura no Hentai ("Our Perversion", "Our Abnormalities", or "Our Metamorphosis") is a seinen manga by Fumiko Fumi, based around three junior high school children who come across each other on a crossdressing community website and decide to meet up in real life. Marika Aoki (birth name, Yuuta) is transgender, Ryousuke "Yui" Kijima dresses up as his dead older sister, and Osamu "Parou" Tamura began crossdressing because the boy he liked was not into boys.
The series originally ran in Monthly Comic Ryu from 2012 to 2015, and is complete at 10 volumes. Fumi later put out two short spinoffs: Bokura no Hentai another, which was a comedic Yonkoma that shows an alternate take on the protagonists' first meeting, posted on Fumi's Pixiv account; and Boku Tabun Hentainote , an independent comic that explains what happens to Tamura after the end of the series.
Despite its title, it is not a Hentai (though it is Not Safe for Work either). It also has nothing to do with Bokurano, nor with the actual Hentai, Bokura no Sex.
Bokura No Hentai provides examples of:
- Aborted Arc: Akane has her own troubles with growing up and her gender, but these are dropped without a real resolution mid-way through.
- All Love Is Unrequited: The main love triangle: Parou likes Ryou, who likes Marika, who likes Parou. Also, Hacchi likes Ryou, Akane likes Parou, and Tomochi likes Marika. Only one of these is reciprocated, and even then they are not conclusively together in the end.
- Art Shift:
- Marika's Imagine Spots are drawn in an old-school shoujo style.
- Volumes 7, 8, and 9's inner covers are drawn in different demographic styles. Marika's cover (7) is drawn like a traditional shoujo manga, Ryou's (8) is drawn like a fighting shounen manga (with Marika as his exaggerated heroine), and Tamura's (9) is drawn like a Boys' Love work.
- Art-Style Dissonance: It has a very cute art style, but the content itself is quite dark and adult.
- Artistic License – Biology: The constitution of characters inexplicably becomes more feminine when they are dressed like girls, which is especially noticeable when it comes to the lower half (e.g. Ryou's legs when going as Yui).
- Attractive Bent-Gender: All the protagonists. Tomochi too, before he outgrew his sisters' clothes.
- Betty and Veronica: For Marika, we have Tamura as her distant Veronica and Satoshi as her closest male friend and Betty, Ryousuke acting as a Third-Option Love Interest. None of them end up with Marika.
- Bittersweet Ending: While it ends on an optimistic note, there are still some problems lurking about. Marika successfully undergoes the procedure for sex change and fully transitions, graduating from school with the full support of her friends and classmates, and it is implied that Ryosuke starts dating Hacchi again in the epilogue. Parou, while making a name for himself as a small time stage actor, is still in a depressed-melancholic state and single. His epilogue doesn't fare much better, as his family situation isn't improving and he still relies on sex to feel better about himself.
- Book Ends: The manga begins with our protagonists in full feminine attire, who are embarrassed to be meeting for the first time at the store. It ends on a similar scene, where they are young adults in varying types of dress meeting in that same place, already confident, free, and happy people.
- Coming of Age Story: Due to all of their troubled pasts, the protagonists are stuck in arrested development. Marika eventually comes to terms with her identity, Ryou learns to face his problems head on and stop living in the shadow of his sister, and Tamura is in the process of learning why he keeps relying on his promiscuity and cold shoulder to get through life, although he doesn't outgrow these coping mechanisms even after the story ends.
- Coming-Out Story: Marika's, as a transgender girl.
- Company Cross References: Chapter 37 features a small cameo of some of Comic Ryu's most popular characters for its 100th issue. A karaoke screen shows Monster Musume's Mia, Nurse Hitomi from Nurse Hitomi's Monster Infirmary, A Centaur's Life's Himeno Kimihara, the title character of Kinoko Inu, Kurona from Nekomusume Michikusa Nikki, and Suzu from Tori Kissa!.
- Cosplay Café: Parou's relationship with his upperclassman starts when he crossdresses for a School Festival cafe. He does this again in high school, and somehow ropes Marika and Ryou into signing up for the crossdressing competition.
- D-Cup Distress: Hacchi is shown to have this. When she was a kid, she was just One of the Boys until she started growing breasts early. All her male friends stopped hanging out with her now that they couldn't ignore she's of the opposite sex, and her breast size was fussed over by both horny boys and jealous girls.
- Dead Person Conversation: Ryou has these with his sister's ghost… Maybe?
- Death of a Child: The death of Ryousuke's middle schooler sister is what sent his mother into a Sanity Slippage and is why he crossdresses.
- Deconstruction: A fairly brutal one of the Otokonoko Genre of anime and manga, pointing out every single little flaw with it, such as its heavy transphobia and homophobia and sexualization of minors. It also plainly puts out that the appeal of a crossdressing guy is that the guy passes as a girl; for someone like Parou's senpai, the attraction is gone the instant that guy starts presenting more masculine or wants to love him as a man.
- Distant Finale: The final chapter leaps ahead five years from the previous chapters.
- Double Standard: Sort of. When Akane complains in front of Marika that she dislikes being a girl and wants to be a boy, Ryou calls her insensitive. That Akane herself might have gender issues is never considered.
- Dude Looks Like a Lady: Ryou has been stated to look identical to his sister in elementary, just with shorter hair, and he has long eyelashes. It helps that, until a certain point in time, his sister was quite a tomboy and looked the part.
- Dysfunction Junction: Literally everyone in the manga has varying degrees of this.
- Expy: Marika looks and acts quite a bit like a certain other trans girl character.
- Extreme Libido: Tamura is a teenage boy who is depicted as hypersexual. He claims that his nymphomania started out with erotic dreams of him as a similarly nyphomaniac woman. It turns out these dreams were caused by Repressed Memories of being being molested by an older neighbor boy while crossdressing. After Tamura broke off his sexual relationship with an abusive senpai, he began having casual sex with men and tries to bed with all the designated-male-at-birth characters. Even as an adult he's shown to still be this way but he isn't happy with it.
- Fan Disservice: Almost all of the sexual scenes are this to varying degrees due to the characters' ages and the situations themselves:
- The most sexual main character, Tamura, starts out in an abusive relationship with his crush and Their First Time has him passing out due to pain. When he puts the moves on others, it's portrayed as just as unsettling: his attempts on Ryou always make him uncomfortable, and when he tries to sleep with Marika, both times it comes off as invasive.
- Marika's sexual habits are usually coupled with shame and guilt due to her gender dysphoria.
- The closest thing to fanservice, Ryou sleeping with Hacchi, has a full spread of the latter topless and vulnerable for Their First Time, but it's less played for titillation and more of a Sex for Solace situation on the former's part. He even comes to think of the experience as a sour one.
- Girlish Pigtails: Ryou wears these when he crossdresses because his sister, Yui, used to wear them.
- Growing Up Sucks: Akane hates menstruation and Satoshi eventually cannot fit into his sister's clothes, forcing him to stop crossdressing. Ryou worries about growing taller since he can no longer pretend to be his sister, Marika gets dysphoria over puberty, and Parou's crush thinks he's disgusting since he's getting more masculine. Hacchi's breast development has caused her much trouble, too.
- Half-Identical Twins: Implied with Ryousuke and Yui. They were in the same elementary class so they're the same age, and they look the part.
- Hard Truth Aesop: "The real world is much more homophobic and intolerant than you think, whether you conform to gender roles or not". Parou's subplot also teaches the audience that love does not always connect you with decent people, even when they "accept" your peculiarities.
- Incompatible Orientation:
- Parou and his upperclassman. It doesn't stop said love interest from exploiting him for sex so long as he's crossdressing, but even so, he's quick to dump poor Parou as soon as he starts looking too masculine for his tastes.
- In a much more twisted case, this applies to Parou and Marika. Parou fell for Marika as a boy but due to Marika only being a boy on the outside there's no chance of anything happening.
- Important Haircut:
- Ryousuke's mother has long, Messy Hair at first but once she begins seeing a therapist she cuts it short.
- Ryousuke cuts his hair after he quits crossdressing.
- In-Series Nickname: Quite a few.
- Osamu Tamura is "Parou", and he later gets the additional nickname "Tamurin" from Akane.
- Ryousuke Kijima is "Yui", taking his dead sister's name, and he's often referred to as "Ryou-chin" by his classmates and also gets called "Kiji" by Satoshi.
- Satoshi Natsume has the nickname "Tomochi".
- Ryou's girlfriend Miki Hachiya is usually called Hacchi.
- Love Dodecahedron: One develops between the main protagonists. Marika likes Tamura even though she knows he doesn't feel the same, Parou grows to like Ryousuke but never shows it, and Ryousuke has feelings towards Marika that he can't really cope with. Then we have Hacchi running hot and cold with Ryou, Satoshi and Mai with their crushes on Marika, Akane with her own crush on Tamura for a while.
- Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: It's unclear if Ryou's sister was really a ghost, or if she was just his subconscious.
- Mood Whiplash: The first chapter is rather sickly sweet with the second mostly being bittersweet, though Ryou comes along and gives a harsh foreshadowing to the grimness of the next two chapters. After that there's a constant bouncing between depressingly dark and happy fluff.
- My Sibling Will Live Through Me: Ryousuke's reason for crossdressing is that he pretends to be his deceased sister for his mother's sake.
- The Nicknamer: Akane.
- No Romantic Resolution: Other than Maybe Ever After for Ryou with Hacchi, nobody is shown to end up with anyone.
- Parents as People: The authority figures aren't all well adjusted either. Ryou's mother knew he was dressing up as Yui, but she couldn't bring herself to acknowledge it and seriously regrets her behavior when she finally gets taken to the hospital and still has her problems afterwards; likewise his father wants the best for him but is estranged due to the mother situation. Tamura's mother is agreeable, but she willingly brushes off Tamura's confession to Takeshi molesting him to not cause a stink in her neighborhood. Only Marika's mom is unambiguously kind and supportive, but she still has some trouble coming to terms with Marika's identity.
- Rape as Backstory: Parou was sexually abused by an older boy when he was younger.
- Secret-Keeper: Tamura, Ryousuke, and Marika met on a site for crossdressers. Ryousuke is very adamant on keeping it a secret and even originally threatened Marika over it. Eventually Ryousuke's girlfriend learned about his crossdressing, learned his reasons, and got her parents involved because it was related to his mother's mental illness. Towards the end, Tamura and friends convince him to enter a cross-dressing contest at school.
- She Is Not My Girlfriend: Ryousuke about Marika, on several occasions.
- Shipper on Deck: From what we saw of her, Ryousuke's grandmother is this for Ryousuke and Marika.
- Shout-Out: In chapter 3 to Wandering Son. One of Ryou's friends has a crush on Marika and assumes she's a girl who crossdresses at school, similar to Chizuru from Wandering Son.
- Spotlight-Stealing Squad: Marika gets more focus than her two co-stars.
- There Are No Therapists:
- Ryou begins dressing up as his dead older sister and has delusions that she's a ghost speaking to him. His mother doesn't seem in very good shape either; their house is cluttered and she plays along with his dress up games. Parou and Marika aren't much better; the former is in an abusive relationship with a high schooler who only uses him for sex, and the latter has Gender Dysphoria and has suffered no end of transphobic bullying.
- Thankfully eventually averted as Marika goes to a doctor to start transition and Ryou's mother is sent to the hospital for the mental care she so desperately needed.
- Trans Relationship Troubles: Marika is stuck in a Betty and Veronica situation between the troubled Tamura and friendly Satoshi. Tamura was Marika's first crush and is mutually attracted to her, but he is gay and sees her as an effeminate boy. Satoshi becomes Marika's friend later in the manga and he is a bisexual boy who likes Marika either way. Marika doesn't end up with either but there's a heavy Maybe Ever After involving Satoshi.
- The Unfavorite: Ryou's mother never cared much for him. She focused her attention on his older sister, who was an up-and-coming model before she died. Even after her death she only pays attention to him when he's dressed as her.
- Wanted a Gender-Conforming Child:
- It's briefly shown in a flashback that Akane's mother was disappointed in her disliking skirts as a toddler.
- Subverted with Marika's mother. She takes to Marika coming out as trans without any disapproval.
- Wham Line:Ryou: "We're going to keep getting more masculine."
- Wholesome Crossdresser: Ryou and Parou. Volume 2 introduces Satoshi, who goes to school in the girls uniform.
- Wrong Genre Savvy: Marika seems to think she's in a classic Shoujo manga. She isn't.
