Hope You're Happy Lemon Review | Enjoy

Written on August 25, 2024


The first time that I read the manga, I was already cringing at how familiar this was to the many rom-com stories that I've read. It is hard to sit down and pretend that such stories are enjoyable much. However, I did end up finding the characters easy to root for and enjoy, and it did not matter who. All the characters, including the strange character whose name I will not mention, ended up making the story feel fresh and personal rather than formulaic and blended. Though I would say that it did follow the formula of rom-coms, but it did take an interesting approach that I have not read before, specifically the particular combination of switching bodies, working together between the two, and the lack of an immediate romantic reciprocation.

When it came to particular characters, the friend that he had in film club, Natsumi Kogahara, was also a nice character, and the idea that she liked the main protagonist when it was actually the former girlfriend that was controlling the body was interesting. I thought it would veer into a complex relationship where the former girlfriend ended up gaining the bodily and mental feelings of the protagonist's body, which would result in a complex story where the former girlfriend likes Natsumi Kogahara only when she is in the protagonist's male body. However, that did not end up happening, but either path would have been interesting. This sets up the character arc for the protagonist to work together with his former girlfriend as they swap bodies in order to achieve best their goals and maximize each other's skills and knowledge. Ultimately, both characters eventually find value in the swap, but it remains the case that they are trying to fix the problem, which establishes the overarching narrative conflict.

As for how I feel about the story, I enjoyed it enough to read it to the latest chapter at the time, chapter 34, but for context, I was hoping to test myself and read a manga again after so long. I have been focusing much upon writing and other skills, having minimized the time and attention that I give activities such as reading manga and web novels and playing video games. This means that the story could have very well been another typical engaging story, and it might have made little difference.

When it comes to a scene-by-scene or a narrative thread-by-thread perspective, I can go into much depth here.

We can go into the first chapters, starting off with the inaugural scene that secures a hook by forcing a reader to confront the prevailing subject of cheating, roping the reader in with a sense of relatedness as broader Internet culture becomes more established toward the shared attitude of open hatred toward the idea of infidelity, even in and especially so in the context of more casual teenage relationships. In other words, this bonds the reader with the protagonist in the recognition of its limitations in fostering stronger bonds and its intersubjectively accepted expense in the form of broken trust. Now, this goes for any other story with such a premise, but in the case of the focal manga, what we have is the false premise of infidelity, as the former girlfriend is revealed narratively later to have lied about it to the protagonist. This complexifies the dynamics between the reader and the two firstly introduced primary characters (PA) and the additional PAs who contribute to this ever-evolving matrix, which undergoes a period of stabilization in the first 30 chapters: in the first chapters of which the concept of body swapping is set as an inciting incident alongside the convergence of the former girlfriend and the protagonist. Ultimately, the story is groundbreaking by the mere juxtaposition of themes and approaches that have been traditionally separate due to the challenge of maintaining a smooth, engaging interweave; illustrating the growth of the complexity of storytelling as active manga readers and their attendant communities grow in population and becomes more accustomed to stranger narrative combinations.

One of my favorite parts is when the protagonist has to deal with the realization that it would not matter even if he stayed up, because that reinforced the overarching conflict and ensure that the characters were stuck in this imposed bubble no matter what, because it was where all the interest and excitement occurred. As regards how the author accomplishes this, he creates various situations such as the protagonist's interest in dating Natsumi Kogahara and the former girlfriend's need to study a foreign language. All of these are the building blocks that secure the believability and "buying power" of the foregoing overarching conflict. As intimated earlier, the awkward, complicated yet intriguing situations advanced by the PAs break the potential narrative repetitiveness of the overarching conflict as has been observed traditionally through protagonist's attitudes. His unique combination of external and internal responses to such situations are emphasized, from which the reader can glean the confirmed commitment to the endurance of the evolution of the premise and thesis of the matrix and, by extension, the story as an idea around which a community springs up.