English Dub Review: Hana-Kimi “Please Be My Friend!” “I Want to Be with You”

Overview:

Ashiya Mizuki is a girl, but she attends an all-boys school because high jumper Sano Izumi is there.

The school doctor, Umeda, and Sano figure out that Mizuki is a girl. Can she continue staying at the school?

Our Take(Spoilers):

Hana-Kimi was a manga that ran from 1996 to 2004 and is now getting an anime adaptation. The reason I looked up this information is that this anime seems very similar to Ouran High School Host Club. That manga ran from 2003 to 2010, though, so the fact that this hasn’t had an anime before is slightly boggling. It seems that this is similar to the Mushoku Tensei situation from a few years ago. Mushoku Tensei was one of the modern isekai, so while its tropes felt cliché by the time it came out, it was one of the first to do it when it was written, same as Hana-Kimi. 

Mizuki is a girl who decides to attend an all-boys school because she admires high jumper Izumi. You read that right, I was a little disappointed. It wasn’t a childhood friend or anything like that. Izumi is a guy she saw on TV once and admired so much that she started to run track too.

My question is, where are her parents? She decides to move to an all-boys school in Japan, and her parents have nothing to say about it. With the school doctor knowing she’s a girl and Izumi having his thoughts about her, this could get interesting, but it’s hard to tell so far with these two episodes.