Kaede Komura, in simply three days, develops a crush on his new seat neighbor, Mie. With her glasses and quirky personality, he couldn’t help but fall for her and would love to get to know her better. But being shy, he just can’t work up the courage to even chat with Mie. But then, one fateful day, Mie arrives at school without her glasses. She can’t see anything unless she’s real close (like Aharen-san close) — which Komura ends up finding out since she strikes up a conversation revealing this fact.
And that’s how these two get to know each other: from someone forgetting their glasses and a need to be realllll close to see a textbook!
Romantic comedies are, well, extremely common, which means there’s gonna be have to be some sort of tweak or twist to the formula that gets you reading. The Girl I Like Forgot Her Glasses’ twist is Mie finding some way to lose her glasses throughout this first volume, and our male protagonist, who is your typical nice but shy boy, becoming flustered with almost every interaction with Mie. That’s the entire volume. And it’s boring.
Basically, if you want your romantic comedy to succeed, it’s gonna first have to start with the characters. In a vacuum, Mie and Komura are fine, but the only real unique trait that Mie displays is her penchant for saying things like a samurai at random points (so she must be a big fan of some historical samurai work); meanwhile Komura is just frequently getting embarrassed and turning red as his crush continues to talk to him. So early on, they’re just ok.
Then the second part of your romantic comedy that gives it a good chance to be fun is if the scenarios are hilarious. The best chapter for me was their “date” where Komura just could not believe he could be having this good of a time with Mie (or feeding her since she didn’t have her glasses) without getting approval from a future father-in-law. The rest of the chapters range from amusing to far too short to pretty forgettable. It basically comes up with unnecessary reasons for Mie to forget her glasses. But it’s part of the charm and humor, you say! Well, maybe we can do better than having her sleep in class but Komura convincing everyone that no, she needs to look real close at her textbook, so she’s not sleeping at all!
The art is fairly cute, and in general, these two are nice characters. Komura’s at the age to be acting the way he is for the most part while Mie does have some traits that are endearing (see: her attempts at measuring how much soup to serve her fellow classmates without her glasses). If these two get together it’ll probably be sweet. But the lead up to that point needs to have far sharper humor than what was in this first volume. And maybe additional characters to kind of assist these two? That might be helpful too! Until then, I think there are other romantic comedies on the manga market worth checking out instead.