Here we have Fudanshi Koukou Seikatsu, aka the show filling my anime short quota for the summer season. xD The short is about 5 minutes long, and centres around a high school student named Ryo Sakaguchi, aka “Gucchi”, who is a fudanshi. The term “fudanshi” is a play on the slang “fujoshi”, and is used for guys who like boys love (BL) stories.
Needless to say, it’s considered very unusual that a young man likes BL manga, and it often leads to speculation about his sexuality, much to Ryo’s frustration and the viewer’s as well. Obviously our interests are not indicative of our sexual orientation, but this ignorance is something Ryo must deal with.
The first half of the short centres on Ryo’s attempt to buy a fudanshi manga from a bookstore he doesn’t usually frequent. A young woman looks like she will be the person to check him out at the register, but at the last moment she is replaced by her male coworker, and so Ryo must suffer the stigma of being caught reading something that 
guys his age don’t usually publicly get caught reading. Ryo says that he reads BL stories because he’s admiring the happiness of the characters in the stories; he’s still very much straight.
The second half of the short is Sakaguchi relaying this incident to his friend Toshiaki Nakamura, who also thought that Ryo was interested in men. Toshiaki asks to see Ryo’s SNS account (something like Twitter), and is annoyed to find that Ryo tweeted something private Toshiaki had previously told him in confidance. Toshiaki grabs Ryo by his lapels and tells him not to spill his life online without his knowledge. Ryo tells Toshiaki that his dream is to have more fudanshi friends, but he has a hard time finding any on SNS because girls think he’s female and not a dude.
There’s no opening theme, although this is only the first episode so I don’t know if this will be a permanent feature or if it was just left off for the pilot. The ending theme is a cute but short song about “boy meets boy.”
In an industry where many, many shows are near carbon copies of each other, Fudanshi Koukou Seikatsu is something different in the sea of similarity. I’m really interested in seeing if this show will combat some of the stigmas hinted at in this first episode. Will people ever accept Ryo for reading BL stories? Will he finally just stop giving a shit about what others think of his hobby? Why is considered creepy that he likes BL manga? I look forward to psychoanalyzing this show, at least for the first three episodes.
Possibility of Watching: Moderate
Possibility of Blogging: Moderate