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1. Serf (serfnusa@poa.st)'s status on Thursday, 13-Apr-2023 23:15:36 JST Serf
   Serf’s Weekly Manga Recommendations Week 15:
   
   Mysterious Girlfriend X
   
   “The new transfer student Mikoto Urabe is weird. She falls asleep at the drop of a hat and bursts out laughing unexpectedly, and it's no surprise that fellow classmates like Akira avoid her like the plague. So when the boy comes across the girl after class, fast asleep and drooling all over her desk, he does what any typical teenager would do… and tastes it?! What's more, there's something special about Mikoto's saliva: it's addictive, and thanks to Akira's poor decision, he must now receive a daily dose to avoid withdrawal. As Akira adjusts to this new and unexpected bond, he discovers that he's not only addicted to Mikoto's spit, but to her as well, much to his confusion!”
   
   mangadex.org/title/f8fed9b2-546f-446f-bd3f-3c7192019774?page=3
   
   Mysterious Girlfriend X is the best manga about teenage romantic nostalgia. In terms of plot it’s a strange (in the best way) mix of “nothing ever happens” and intense sexual encounters. They start dating at the start of the series, but they never do any normal couple things. She takes him to an abandoned building at twilight, blindfolds him, and strips naked, but they never have sex. They exchange saliva every chapter, but they never kiss.
   
   There is a powerful, dreamlike feeling to the whole series, not just in the very memorable dream sequences the protagonist regularly has about the heroine. They are very often seemingly the only people in the world; the seasons constantly change yet time never passes. The main characters are delightful, and the stories are all very charming and well written, but it’s the atmosphere that makes the manga such a triumph. It not only really captures what it felt like to be a teenage boy, the angst, the constant thinking about sex but never having it, the push and pull of sexual desire and the desire for chastity between you and the object of your love, and above all the innocence and purity of your love despite all the lust, but it also captures the experience of being nostalgic for those times, how the time runs together in your memory, and how you know you’re fonder of those times than they were actually good, yet the rose tinted version is somehow truer than reality. “Maybe one’s adolescence seems so dazzling because nothing happened, because those days were boring.” the mangaka opines in the afterward of the final volume. With that in mind you, too, can avoid becoming a “nothing ever happens” fag and enjoy what it is this series is going for.
   
   The anime adaptation is terrific as well, so give it a watch if you’re too low IQ to read.