A short manga deserves a short review

There's 3 reasons I decided to read this manga:
1. I wanted to click on Yowamushi Pedal but my clumsy fingers misclicked.
2. People were saying it's a really sad story.
3. The girl on the cover looked disgusting for some reason, I don't know why.
and it was just a one-shot so even if it would have been bad it wouldn't have taken up my time.

I'm not the biggest fan of the shoujo genre, in fact I could probably count the ones I've read on one hand. But just because I'm a stranger to a genre doesn't mean that I have a negative bias towards shoujo manga. The ones I've read were mostly pretty intriguing and had a good story. Their stories however happened over the course of many many chapters, this one has only about 40 pages.

Yowamushi Meikyuu handled a one-shot romance story quite well. It doesn't waste much time with a slice of life angel and focuses on the feelings and actions of the characters. It talks about a (highschool?) girl who has trouble expressing her true emotions to the person he loves. She instead tries backhanded ways to get the boy to talk with her, the main one being asking about another boy from his class who she lies about having a crush on. However her actions cause her own defeat, as by the end of the manga she learns that if she had just been honest about her feelings from the very beginning things would have gone much better for her. The moral of the story is to be honest about your feelings, for if you hide them for too long you might lose the chance of ever obtaining them. And it does a damn good job of expressing that idea to the reader.

The two main characters, although being pretty standard romance characters, are believable and well done for the story to advance as quickly yet fulfillingly as possible. Although there is a side character that just exists to progress the story on and has close to no development, which doesn't ruin the story but is still a shame. The art looks okay, it does well in expressing what the characters are feeling visually.


In conclusion if you are looking for a good shounen manga that isn't too long or too heavy in a slice of life aspect I do recommend that you read Yowamushi Ped- I mean Meikyuu, Yowamushi Meikyuu. Yowamushi Pedal is just about sweaty men in tight clothing wanting to test each others limits, which has surprisingly nothing to do with romance.