On the second day of Anime Expo, our true love (being CloverWorks) gave to me (the royal us), the first reveal trailer for its hotly anticipated yuri anime, The Guy She Was Interested in Wasn’t a Guy at All.
Aside from having a sentence-long title that’s more than a mouthful, TGSWIIWAGAA, mercifully shortened by its fandom to “Green Yuri,” created by Sumiko Arai, is a queer manga that folks who’ve followed its humble beginnings have been forming prayer circles for the day it gets picked up as an anime. That day is now. Debuting in 2021 on her X/Twitter account during the pandemic (and still updated there to this day), Green Yuri follows the love story between two high school girls. The first is a popular gyaru named Aya Oosawa, and the other is a punk girl named Mitsuki Koga, who start crushing on each other after the former visits the latter’s record shop and they connect over their mutual love of music.
But, as the long title gives away, Aya is unaware that the store clerk she’s head over heels for is her classmate. Meanwhile, Mitsuki is painfully aware of their predicament and attempts to keep up the ruse. For anime fans who know ball, Green Yuri is basically giving new-age Ai Yazawa’s Nana minus the comphet while also delivering the same blush or romance from Smoking Behind the Supermarket With You but for the high school girlies who think nobody’s listened to Radiohead but them. It’s very cute.
After months of fans rallying for the manga to get officially licensed, Green Yuri was finally picked up by Yen Press, which is quickly becoming the forerunner for queer manga after its announcement of the equally good queer romance in Inee’s Love Bullet. But for our purposes here, Green Yuri mania hit a new high when Kadokawa announced that the series would be receiving an anime adaptation alongside the release of the manga’s third volume.
The anime adaptation is being helmed by CloverWorks, whose past works include Wonder Egg Priority, Spy x Family (alongside WIT Studio), Bocchi the Rock!, and My Dress-Up Darling. While the primary concern amongst weekly manga readers was whether the anime would keep the manga’s titular green color tones, which Yen Press letterer Brandon Bovia works tirelessly to localize TGSWIIWAGAA for English fans’ reading pleasure, the anime seems to be keeping in line with that visual style in CloverWorks’ own unique way.
In tandem with today’s new trailer, which was teased a day in advance in a not-so-cryptic tweet, the anime appears to be taking a page out of the manga’s playbook by compiling a special Spotify playlist for fans to take “Mitsuaya’s” shared love of music on the go. If their playlist is anything like the Japanese playlist, whose eight-hour and 30-minute mixtape is filled with hits mentioned in the manga like Soundgarden’s “Black Hole Sun,” Franz Ferdinand’s “Take Me Out,” and WILLOW’s “<Coping Mechanism>,” fans are in for a bopping soundtrack. Hopefully, the anime finds a way to include these tunes without resorting to the JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure route of circumventing copyright for its musical name drops.
All in all, today’s announcement is slowly turning the tide for modern-day anime, embracing queer, women-led stories in a sea of shonen series that are getting adaptations more readily, and hopefully it’ll be the first of many to come.
The Guy She Was Interested In Wasn’t A Guy At All releases in January 2027 on Crunchyroll.
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