Azusa Asahina is a huge fan of the boy band Prince 4 U and her favorite member is the distant but dashing Chikashi “Chika” Chida. As a fan she’d love to get close to him and meet him in person, but what she didn’t have in mind was dying alongside him in an accident at a concert! As they stand before the pearly gates, god tells them that since this was an accident, and neither of them were supposed to die yet, he can give them a second chance at life and they both wake up but now in each other’s bodies!
(God seems to be rather bad at his job.)
Now both of them have to try and live their daily lives, even though they might end up switching places at any moment!
Star⇄Crossed is a fun, body-swap manga with a fun sense of humor and it knows exactly how seriously, or not seriously, to take every situation. Creator Junko’s previous work, Kiss Him Not Me, wasn’t up my alley so I was genuinely surprised by how much I enjoyed the humor here and might have to give KHNM a second look as a result. Junko definitely gets that one of the big draws for a good body-swap story isn’t just seeing two characters have to act as each other (which is easier for Azusa than it is for Chika, she can finally put her enormous amount of fangirl knowledge to use!) but also how it ends up revealing a lot about the character’s true selves. Both behind the scenes and in Azusa’s body we see that Chika really is a bit of a stoic guy. He honestly doesn’t seem like the kind of person to go into show business, and while Asuza puts on a polished look in front of the world, in Chika’s body her private fangirl emotions almost take over. I was pleased to see that the series avoided the “oh I’m in a girl/boy’s body now, I should see what they look like naked” cliche and thought that the hilarious extreme this idea got taken to was much funnier.
While I read Star⇄Crossed digitally, it’s getting an upcoming print release which, when it’s a Kodansha Comics manga, typically means an anime production is upcoming and I would certainly enjoy either reading more of this series or seeing it animated, or both! It’s a fun, fluffy series, and, most importantly for me, while Chika and Asuza are very different people, both of them seem to be tolerating the body-swapping right now without any bitterness towards each other (although they are both pretty ticked at god at the moment). I can certainly see Junko dragging out this story beyond the point of being funny but currently the series is only three volumes long so I think I’ll stick with it and worry about that later!