Futaba-kun Change!

As a big fan of Yamda and the Seven Witches, it should be no surprise that I’m also a big fan of gender-bending stories in general and will happily check out nearly any manga with that aspect to it. In Futaba-kun Change! the gender-bending isn’t merely a gimmick, it’s the entire point of the story! Poor Futaba-kun has made it to high school (the translation says university and junior high at alternate points) but has an awkward moment in the bathroom when he turns into a she — not a regular part of puberty! A few hijinks later he finds out that his entire family shares his odd trait of switching genders when aroused; apparently it’s just something he’s going to have to live with! Since teenaged boys are turned on by literally everything. Futaba’s dad decides that the best thing to do is what they did for his older sister a few years earlier — double-enroll him in his school as a girl so no matter what he looks like he can continue with classes. With the number of oddballs in his school though, he might not be learning much either way.

In case you weren’t sure, this is a crass story. The manga is perfectly aware that the readers are there just for fanservice so boy howdy are there panties and nudes! The story is more concerned with zany thrills and awkward antics than anything else. You can tell it’s trying to make you care about the budding romance between Futaba and Misaki (the subject of many of his fantasies) but with all the raunchy comedy it’s really overshadowed. For me the jokes didn’t land, like the running gag about how Futaba’s wrestling team wants to kidnap his girl form (just to start a girl’s wrestling team, that’s it!) or how Futaba’s teacher really likes his wrestlers were just creepy, not funny. The style of the jokes feels dated; I feel like if the story was written today that the manga would have different tropes and situations, and that it hasn’t aged well in general. I doubt there’s more to the story than this one gag, so if you don’t like this one joke then there’s no reason to keep reading a few more volumes of it.