7-kakan Gentei Kanojo
7 Days Limited Girlfriend

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At first glance, 7-kakan Gentei Kanojo seems exactly like any other in its genre: a low-brow romcom that hinges on a single idea (a seven day girlfriend) that inevitably serves as a vehicle for the true star of the show - the horny chapters. Luckily, the author rapidly dispels this initial impression with characters that have distinct personalities, a sense of inner conflict, and an understanding that their actions have meaningful weight and consequence. By the time the second volume really starting expanding the story's lore and character backgrounds, I was sold!

The Yuri genre has yet to truly break into the mainstream, which is a ... disappointment considering the authors of such works are far less pressured to cater to an audience of brain-dead male teens who just want an exciting, male-dominated action story that features a side cast of cool (but rarely critically important) pretty women. And frankly, part of me hopes the Yuri sub-section stays out of the spotlight, lest it falls prey to the same tropes.

What really makes 7-kakan Gentei Kanojo worth reading is its unadulterated, impassioned-and-yet-shockingly-innocent depiction of young love and sexuality. It strikes a fantastic balance between humor and emotion (the artwork is the real hero here), and the pacing is also a breath of fresh air compared to so many "slowburn" romance stories, which has more or less become a code word for "nothing ever happens in this #&%(@! manga."

TLDR: A cute, well-written and surprisingly perceptive manga that (so far) maintains a nice pace and features fantastic artwork, humor, and emotion. 8/10

I'm caught somewhere between calling this a fairly derivative but smart and focused coming-of-age romantic drama and writing it off altogether as under-aged smut.

I did finish it, which is more than i can say for most of the yuri I pick up, and I think i could have read this with a much clearer conscience if i wasn't myself way older than these girls. As it was, i felt it occasionally veered from tasteful into voyeuristic or erotic, and i had the sense multiple times that maybe i should put it down. Still, it never felt totally offensive and if anything the main character was ... frequently played off to be a lot more perverse than the work ever really was. With that said I really don't think we needed to see these girls naked as often as we did. Some kind of physically titillating action happened in just about every or every other chapter. But hey, if you're looking for that, points for 7-kakan Gentei Konojo, right? It was all fairly well done IMO and maintained a fair bit of relatable humor even in the racy scenes.

Nagi's backstory was lowkey a bit horrifying to me but very compelling. The storyboarding was fairly good i thought. The character designs were fairly tropey, particularly in the case of the background characters, but managed to feel distinct and just lifelike enough to avert the usual disaster. There wasn't a whole lot of development or focus on characters outside the main pair, and this felt appropriate given the limited length of the thing and the weakness of those characters. The humor landed more than it missed and was surprisingly crude, the romance mostly landed but stuck pretty close to industry tropes.

Ultimately, i'm tempted to give this somewhere between a 6 and a 7, and part of me is leaning toward that 7. Its short length bumps it up quite a lot in the sense that it delivered everything it was trying to do without meandering or wasting my time and then wrapped itself up and let me go to read something else. I'm gonna keep it at a 6 because the ending did feel a bit abrupt and the work as a whole was a bit tropey. I'd recommend this easily to anyone who reads a lot of GL and isn't very discerning about it; it's probably better than most of what you're used to reading. To anyone else, I'd say probably give it a pass.