Title: Love Me For Who I Am/Fukakai na Boku no Subete o

Creator: Kata Konayama/Tozaki Ei

Demographic: Seinen

Themes: LGBTQ+, romance, high school, drama, found family, comedy, slice of life

Status: Fully Translated/Completed

Published By: Seven Seas

LINK

Official Summary:

An LGBT+ manga about finding friendship and common ground at an untraditional maid café!

Mogumo is a cute but lonely high school student who just wants a few loving friends. Fellow student Iwaoka Tetsu invites Mogumo to work at his family’s café for “cross-dressing boys,” but he makes an incorrect assumption: Mogumo is non-binary and doesn’t identify as a boy or a girl. However, Mogumo soon finds out that the café is run by LGBT+ folks of all stripes, all with their own reasons for congregating there. This touching manga explores gender, gender presentation, and sexuality from many different angles, including the ways people are pushed to conform in a world that doesn’t understand them…until the world begins to learn, one person at a time.

Thinky Thoughts

I cried at the end of Love Me For Who I Am. I’m starting with that tidbit because it’s something so personal and important to me. Like the other title I’m posting about this week (Love So Pure for Webtoon Wednesday), Love Me For Who I Am is about a queer found family and healing from the trauma of being forced to fit yourself into a world that doesn’t seek to understand you. I didn’t cry because I was sad – I didn’t even cry at the actual sad parts – but I wept at the ending because I was just so stinking happy for the cast of characters and how the main character in particular had their story wrap up so well.

There is something so incredibly powerful about a story that begins with a character who wants to be loved and accepted for who they are.

From the beginning, Mogumo doesn’t hide that they are feeling adrift and lonely in a very binary world. they don’t really speak to anyone in their class because they’re afraid of how they’re perceived and whether people actually see them as they are. After Iwaoka Tetsu  seize them make a wish to be accepted by people that see them for them, he reaches out with an offer to work at his family’s cafe that is for “ cross-dressing boys”.  However, the actual dynamics and gender identities of the people who work in that small cafe are more dynamic and complex than expected. 

(I actually don’t remember seeing a manga like this with multiple transfemme characters and this series has three – two mains, one background – and unlike many portrayals of nonbinary identity in media, Mogumo is AMAB and their story explicitly but gently confronts the expectations of being a nonbinary AMAB in a patriarchal society.) 

Because of Mogumo’s presence in the cafe and their slow willingness to speak up about themselves, The other characters who work there also start to explore their own identities and talk more about who they are as people. It’s such a brave and bold comic that doesn’t feel like it’s preaching or pushing at any point. You feel like you’re eavesdropping on these incredibly personal conversations that these teenagers are having with each other and their loved ones. It’s so good, y’all. 

And the relationships are excellent. Teenagers, especially queer ones, are awkward and messy and stressed out and Love Me For Who I Am absolutely captures some of what it feels like to be a queer teenager dealing with crushes, romantic relationships, and pressures of reality. All in five well-paced volumes with incredibly cute art. 

Love Me For Who I Am  is one of the best mangas that I’ve read.Yes, there are rough spots especially as we get Mogumo’s backstory and see their relationship with their younger sister and parents and how it fractured (TW for gender dysphoria throughout the series but especially in the last two volumes), but it’s just… mostly this incredibly relatable story about what it means to be outside the binary expectations of modern society and be found worthy of love and adoration. Not only does our main character get a found family that helps them see themselves as they are and feel beloved for who they are, but their existence inspires that introspection and the people around them.