Norito Asaduki's Ren Arisugawa Is Actually a Girl is an interesting work. Not so much for anything it does within its text, but because of its place within fiction broadly today. It's a digitally published manga in a vertical format, which would suggest that it's a work published with a modern, mobile content focused audience in mind. However, there's nothing particularly innovative or even new about it, and it falls in line with a lot of the serialized smutty comics that used to be more commonplace. It's interesting for a work to embrace a new format while also just largely repeating the set ups and plot points that made past versions of this idea successful, but perhaps this kind of redux is actually the defining quality of this current moment in the webcomic medium.

If you've been reading manga for a while, chances are you're familiar with the basic set up of Ren Arisugawa Is Actually a Girl. The protagonist Kyouhei Arisugawa, is a nondescript college student whose only defining qualities are that he wants to get laid and that he's related to rising male idol Ren Arisugawa. This manga's title comes into full effect pretty quickly when, after inexplicably deciding to jerk off next to his cousin, Kyouhei inadvertently discovers that Ren is actually a girl. This kicks off some horny hijinks where Kyouhei now has to help his cousin keep her gender under wraps, and navigate new relationships with all the people in her orbit who unsurprisingly want to have sex with him, her, or the both of them.

Some of these supporting characters include: Ren's clearly Misato Evangelion-inspired bisexual and alcohol appreciating manager, Ren's femme and actually just overzealous stalker, and Ren's publicly a girl co-idol. This is a story that runs on pornoworld logic, and pretty much every encounter and situation is resolved with those involved having sex. The scenarios in which these characters have sex aren't novel, but they're working off of proven templates and executed well. A particularly memorable one involves a park date with Kyouhei and Ren where the former isn't wearing any form of underwear, which only bolsters her nervousness in wearing femme presenting clothes in public, which then leads into exhibitionist sex when her sweat begins to render her outfit transparent.

Even as these scenarios are a bit rote, Asaduki's art is of a quality and direction that makes these familiar scenes still feel fun and enticing. How characters are positioned and the expressions they make conveys a thorough understanding of what makes this kind of smut affect a reader. It also helps that, while archetypal, the character designs are all pretty cute and eye-catching in their own right. The titular Ren always manages to feel adorably smol and boyish in any panel featuring her, and her manager has a pretty peak “secret girl fail” design.

All the proficiency in the world can't make up for Ren Arisugawa Is Actually a Girl being fairly uninspired, though. I feel as though I've seen just about every plot point and sex scene in this work performed better elsewhere. All of the characters also feel rather one-dimensional, as though they're just vehicles to get from one sex scene to another. They have motivations in a general sense, but none of them have much interiority. Sure, feelings for Ren begin to bubble up in Kyouhei during their time together and through their repeated sexual encounters, but they only seem to be happening because the story calls for him catching feelings rather than them springing up organically inside of him. Similarly, Ren doesn't have much of a personality. She's earnest and wants to do well for the sake of all of the people supporting her, but I don't really have a sense of her likes and dislikes or why she's attracted to Kyouhei more than any other hypothetical partner.

Also, for a work that's grounded in a crossdressing premise and poised to be some kind of commentary on gender and gender norms, this is a pretty straightforward piece of cishet smut written with a stereotypical male audience in mind. This work does feature lesbian sex, but the male gaze is fairly pervasive, and in targeting a broad audience it feels less than authored. Asaduki obviously cares a lot about smut, having penned this and plenty of other adult works, but I don't really have a sense of what they're into after reading this work. It could just be that they're fairly vanilla and simply very well read on some of the most popular works in this space, but regardless the end result is Ren Arisugawa Is Actually a Girl feeling rather impersonal.

I imagine Ren Arisugawa Is Actually a Girl will be more impactful for folks who are less familiar with this space than I am, but it ultimately feels like tried and true ideas repurposed for a new format. This work isn't a poor one by any means, but also I can't think of anything that it does that isn't done better or in a more fun way than in other popular adult manga like Booty Royale: Never Go Down Without a Fight!, Monster Musume, or even the foundational Futari Ecchi.