Hayasaka and Kirishima appear to be an adoring couple. They walk home together, hold hands, and even secretly meet up for a more carnal kind of pleasure. But there's one thing off about this blissful relationship: they're both in love with other people. Hayasaka and Kirishima have agreed to satisfy their urges and find comfort in each other, and everything will end if their feelings are reciprocated by their first choices. But the more time they spend tangled up together—in and out of bed—the messier things get. Lust is easy. Feelings aren't.

I'm Fine With Being the Second Girlfriend has a story by Jōyō Nishi and art by Ninoko. Translation by Nomnom Namako and lettering by Ochie Caraan. Published by Seven Seas Entertainment (July 14, 2026). Rated OT.

Lucas DeRuyter
Rating:

I'm Fine With Being the Second Girlfriend, written by Jōyō Nishi with art by Ninoko and character designs by ReTake, is a difficult work for me to review. Recommended to me by ANN's immaculate Rebecca Silverman, it checks a lot of boxes for works that are usually in my wheelhouse. Featuring polyamorous themes, precocious teenagers, socially motivated introspection, and plenty of fun and flirty moments, this feels like a manga that might have helped me figure out my stuff faster as a teenager. However, I am very much not a teenager anymore, and reading this work as a thirty-year-old man stirs up quite a few more complicated feelings in me, largely around how annoyingly these precocious teenagers are written.

Focusing on the bookish Shirō Kirishima (who is a dead ringer for Joker from Persona 5 if he were less fashionable) and the model girl-next-door Akane Hayasaka, I'm Fine With Being the Second Girlfriend opens with the reveal that the each member of this picturesque couple are only together because the people they really want to date are already in relationships. Being teenagers desperate for companionship, personal validation, and the physical intimacy that a relationship can bring, the two agree to start dating with the understanding that each is the other's second choice and that this relationship will end if either gets a chance to be with their first choice. While this inspires a host of cute moments between the two and ruminations on how the idea of true love society's idea of what a relationship should look like are bogus, further complications arise when Kirishima starts getting close with his first crush Hikari Tachibana, and the readers learn that the cool beauty would likely be with Kirishima if not for an arranged marriage that's keeping her mother's business solvent.

First off, I'll start by saying that I'm a sucker for any work that uses the framing of these teenage romcoms to tell a story about teenage rebellion and kids growing into themselves. My Teen Romantic Comedy SNAFU was a formative work for me as a teenager, and Makeine: Too Many Losing Heroines! was, for my money, one of the best anime of 2024. I'm Fine With Being the Second Girlfriend does hit some of the high points that those similarly elevated series did. Kirishima being way too based, focused on justifying his actions and his relationship with Hayasaka, and extrapolating from that to realize that the kind of romance society pushes onto young people like him through media and social norms is both fantastical and incredibly limiting mirrors my own experiences when I started dating at his age. Similarly, Hayasaka has so much of her identity tied to her “good girl” public image and is conflicted over how her desire to explore her sexuality with Kirishima conflicts with this societal label that has done nothing but benefit her throughout her life.

Nothing here feels particularly new, but it can still be pretty affecting. In particular, I enjoyed the exchange in which Hayasaka revealed to her classmates that she wanted to pursue the STEM academic track, and they immediately assumed it was because she wanted to be a gendered stereotype of a nurse when she entered the workforce. Moments like this that reinforce reductive social categorizations while ostensibly being framed as compliments are devastating to anyone, but especially young people, and I'm Fine With Being the Second Girlfriend is really good at highlighting all the ways people are shoved into social boxes and the ways that can harm young people.

However, it gets a bit too wishcast-y for its own good and often ends up feeling like what a misanthropic teenager wishes their high school experience were, rather than a more honest exploration of that experience. Kirishima is a giant nerd who will respond to questions about how to make a crush like you by listing off trivia about “the exposure effect,” and this motivates no less than two women to throw themselves at him. This manga jumped the shark for me when, while he's begging to grow closer with Tachibana, the two have pseudo-make-out sessions while reciting the names of mystery authors and novels. While I think this scene was intended to show off how much they have in common and their mutual attraction, it instead felt like fan service for nerds who wish their wealth of trivia about their special interest could more directly translate into them getting laid.

Kirishima's hesitancy to be physically intimate with Hayasaka in almost any capacity feels more like a plot contrivance to reinforce a love triangle than something organic for the character. For a work that's largely about pushing back on social norms and expectations, the main character believing so firmly that you should have your first kiss with someone you truly love feels like a step back. Of course, Kirishima could realize this and grow out of that mentality as the series goes on, but this internal tension in the character still feels needless to me as someone who did the work to get out of that headspace a long, long time ago.

Between these frustrating character and narrative beats, as well as the more forgettable artistic direction, I'm not big on this first volume of I'm Fine With Being the Second Girlfriend, but I can definitely see this series turning into something worth checking out if future volumes get a bit punchier with their social commentary.

Erica Friedman
Rating:

If only this story had been set in an office, and everyone in the story had been 10 years older. If only this story were written for people who understood love and lust. If only manga artists understood the most basic premises of underwear.

Sadly, none of those conditions are met in I'm Fine With Being the Second Girlfriend, Volume 1, leaving us with a sloppy plot that makes little sense, endless scenes that grossly sexualize a teenager, and conversations about sex and love that would have had me scratching my head even in high school.

The premise is solid enough. But the execution is just a mess. I couldn't have cared less about any of the characters—I did try, honestly. I can't imagine caring whether Hayasaka and Kirishima have feelings for one another. They clearly do; they have just decided that their fictitious crushes are more “real” for them. For now.

If only this had been an interesting book about friends with benefits who have honest conversations about their crushes, I think it would have been readable. But between art that pretends bras don't have a function and a story that relies on a character literally talking about how she's not a “good girl” in a sexually provocative way and it going nowhere, I just gave up. This is not sexy; it's not really even titillating. It's just young people flailing in an uninteresting way to try and figure out what love and lust mean to them.

I really wanted to like this. If only.

Bolts
Rating:

Wow, this book was messy, but I'd be lying if I said I wanted to pull my eyes away from the page. Have you ever read one of those stories where you know stuff is unhealthy after just going through the first couple of pages? That's how I felt reading Second Girlfriend, a story where two teenagers are very open about the fact that they are dating each other as their second best choice because they have given up on the fact that the people that they actually like are out of reach. Does that sound complicated and like a great excuse to generate some juicy teenage angst? Congratulations, you know how to recognize a deliberate narrative setup. I almost respect the fact that the book is so clear that this is a very contrived basis for a story, but despite that, it is far from predictable.

Rather, there are elements of the story that are predictable, such as the two leads clearly having a strong love for each other and displaying a degree of possessiveness that conflicts with their agreed-upon relationship dynamic. But on the other hand, the specific way the narrative plays out isn't always clear, especially when the story seems to throw in curveballs about just how emotionally and physically intense Shirō and Akane end up getting with each other. I was actually surprised at just how close the two ended up getting to crossing a sexual line, and while I could cry foul on some of the fan service, it's clear that this sexual tension is also there to portray a rather unstable relationship codependency. Considering that Shiro's first-choice crush runs the risk of dampening this dynamic, or of forcing it to accelerate, is also really interesting.

There is this tension where it feels like everything is dangling by a thread, and I'm not really sure which threads will snap at any moment. Is it the most realistic romantic story that I think a lot of people can relate to? Probably not, because I feel like most people would not choose to engage in this type of romance in real life because it comes off as a tremendous red flag. But as a story, I am intrigued because I want to see what the car accident looks like. Am I screwed up? Yes, but maybe I like a little spice in my romantic stories from time to time, even if I might end up getting a little bit burned.