The Fall 2024 Manga Guide

After School Etude (18+)

What's It About? 

Love hits the right notes in this Boys Love manga about two unlikely dance partners who make the perfect pair.

When Minobe Chihiro is admitted to a private arts academy to study ballet, the last person he expects to train with is the surly second year Ichinomiya Shun. Yet by some stroke of luck, the two have been paired up for their school's mandatory pas de deux practice. While Minobe has fallen at first sight for Ichinomiya's superior dance sense, the second-year's attitude leaves a lot to be desired. For Ichinomiya, paired with Minobe as a dance partner is not how he'd like to be spending his time. The grumpy upperclassman has his walls up, but Minobe's puppy-like affection might be just what he needs!

After School Etude has a story and art by Hirune Cyan, with English translation by Jan Cash with adaptation by Carly Smith. This volume was lettered by Carolina Hernández Mendoza. Published by Seven Seas (September 17, 2024).

Content warning: This manga contains graphic material intended for 18+ audiences only. The story includes sexual abuse of a minor by a teacher.

Is It Worth Reading?

Before a catastrophic ankle injury, I used to be a dancer. Primarily modern dance rather than ballet, though I learned both, and that background makes After School Etude pretty hard to resist. That's not just because it's about two dancers – Minobe and Ichinomiya meet at a performing arts high school – but because of how it uses dance. Both characters have different issues with ballet: Minobe has the body for it, but lacks the charisma to be a lead, while Ichinomiya has the charisma and skill but lacks the build. Ballet can be cruel to those who don't meet the stringent physical requirements, and as someone remarks in the book, most of the time you just have to be born with them. And if you're not? Tough luck.

Although we don't really get the details on it, that's what happened with Ichinomiya, who has switched tracks to contemporary dance from ballet. There are some clear signs that he's got a lot of baggage associated with it, the primary one being that when he and Minobe are paired up by a partner lottery for practice, he wants nothing to do with it – not the dance, and not the boy. There's also a weird energy with Futami, a ballet instructor at the school, and at this point, I ought to mention that the book comes with a content warning for sexual abuse. Hirune Cyan deserves credit for treating the relationship between Futami and Ichinomiya as abuse; there's no attempt to paint it as romantic or as anything other than a creepy adult taking advantage of a child under his supervision. Although it isn't overtly stated, Ichinomiya's shift from ballet to modern is also implied to be due to Futami; it's an attempt to escape him.

Ichinomiya is the more interesting of the two characters, mostly because there's more to his back story. Minobe is loveable (except for when he forces a kiss on Ichinomiya early on; everything else they do is consensual), but his inability to stand out isn't quite as compelling as Ichinomiya's attempt to escape an abusive relationship and his own feelings about being deemed physically wrong for the career he's trained for his entire life. He needs someone like Minobe in his life, and the switch to his perspective in the second half of the book is where everything really comes together.

The art does a beautiful job of showing dance to the point where I could feel the movements I was looking at, particularly the focused stretch of the fingers, reaching for something they can't touch. It must be said that the art also really enjoys highlighting male groins, but let's face it, dance tights do a good job of that without being part of a BL manga. There's a decent amount of racy bits, and the tone of those is drastically different depending upon the feelings of those involved; the boys' first sexual encounter is much less sensual than their last when there are more emotions involved. It's not a light story, but it is a pretty good one and one that improves as the book goes on. I'm looking forward to volume two.

Poor Ichinomiya, the deuteragonist of After School Etude: nobody has asked this guy what he actually wants in his life. At first blush, this is the story of two dancers finding love at an elite ballet school. But beneath the surface, there's a disturbing lack of consent that makes it feel more like a BL comic from an earlier decade, and that's not a good thing.

Tall and muscular, Minobe has the perfect body for ballet. But when it comes to technical skills, he has a long way to go. He is instantly drawn to Ichinomiya, a shorter but objectively more talented classmate who unwittingly draws him in. When the pair are selected as practice partners at random, Minobe hounds Ichinomiya to dance with him at all hours of the day until Ichinomiya finally relents. During their first joint practice, Minobe is so moved by Ichinomiya's dancing that he races over to kiss him, and then some! No slow-burn romance here. A “Labrador retriever and black cat” relationship follows, but the lack of consent at the start makes it feel sinister. It's hard to tell if Ichinomiya has a tsundere personality when he never indicated he ever wanted it from the start. Amidst the uncensored action, Ichinomiya's shocked and pleading faces don't necessarily feel like they're brought on by desire. The pair continue to practice (and more) after school in between slice-of-life scenes and an in-depth depiction of what it might be like to be an aspiring ballet student (or so it seems, according to my sketchy understanding from the anime Dance Dance Danseur).

Later, when the story swaps to Ichinomiya's POV, we learn the boy actually does love Minobe, a confession that comes out (upsettingly) while he's being sexually assaulted by a teacher. Still, it appears more like a happy coincidence that the central romance of the book worked out. From Ichinomiya's ambitious ballet dancer mom to his lecherous teacher, and now to his new paramour, everyone applies their own desires to this boy without asking him first. I need to give points to this manga for its clear understanding and appreciation of the rigorous world of professional ballet, but its dubcon BL component is a relic from an earlier time.