Thigh High: Reiwa Hanamaru Academy, (令和はなまる学園, "Reiwa Hanamura Gakuen") is a gag comedy manga with story and art by Kotobuki.
The manga follows a class in the Reiwa Hanamaru Academy, a typical setting for a story about cute girls doing cute things. The exception is that all the girls doing cute things this time are men.
The manga ran from 2019 to 2020, finishing with 3 volumes. It is licensed in English by Seven Seas Entertainment.
Tropes
- Central Theme: The power of cuteness.
- Class Representative: Kiritani serves as this for his class and fits the character type pretty well. Unfortunately, his strict and no-nonsense demeanor makes him unpopular with his classmates, who often ignore his attempts to keep things in line.
- Covers Always Lie: Looking only at the cover, one would be pressed to think that Yumekawa and Kitahara are the protagonists of the manga, but the protagonist is actually the Butt-Monkey Class Representative Kiritani.
- Dude, Where's My Respect?: Kiritani is often brushed aside and ignored by his classmates despite being the Class Representative, and often depends on Harumi, who is much more well-liked than him, to get their attention and give out information. He really wishes to be relied on and trusted by others, and the manga follows attempts at him doing his job with various other men in the school.
- Fanservice: If you're into men crossdressing, especially masculine men, this is the manga that will scratch that itch. This is especially true for things like Hot Springs Episode and Beach Episode in which the whole thing is played as straight as it would be in a manga about girls, but with guys dressed as girls.
- Genre Refugee: Amayama Ryuugi seems like he came out of a shounen action series.
- Mr. Fanservice: Yumekawa and Kitahara, both have an extremely well-developed physique and the story is not shy about showing them.
- One-Gender School: Reiwa Hanamaru Academy appears to be an all-boys school, with the twist being that everyone still wears skirts as part of the uniform.
- Schoolgirl Series: Parodied; the manga takes place in a school and follows many typical tropes of the genre, but the catch is that the "schoolgirls" are actually crossdressing men.
- Stylized for the Viewer: It's ambiguous whether the characters are actually women who are stylized as men in the manga or if the setting is a world with a very different set of gender roles and expectations (despite the characters' feminine clothing and mannerisms, they still have traditionally masculine given names). This isn't helped by the fact that there's not a single female character in the story.
