Mostly, there isn’t much to say about The Girl I Like Forgot Her Glasses because it very much is “what you see is what you get.” The story is a series of cute and sometimes comedic moments between two classmates, where one helps the other make it through the day due to their incredibly severe short-sightedness. The premise for these gags and story beats is predicated on an incredibly flimsy premise. I’m not going to mince words here and say that it’s incredibly dumb to write a character who forgets their glasses frequently while also making them comedically blind to the point where they need to get up close to their love interest for the sake of facilitating specific moments. I don’t know why Mie doesn’t realize that she’s forgotten her glasses until she’s already at school because even if you go with the story’s excuse that she lives incredibly close by, I don’t see why she wouldn’t realize she forgot her glasses the minute she walks out of her front door.
So, that is an incredibly bitter and large pill to swallow, but is there anything worth it once you do? Not really, sincere there isn’t a lot here that you couldn’t find more naturally or organically in other romantic comedies. The chapters are very basic, if not inconsistent in pacing and execution. Each volume has roughly ten chapters, and their lengths are severely inconsistent with little buildup. There have been times when a chapter would end seemingly abruptly and jump immediately to the next one without a solid sense of flow. This series is episodic outside of one example towards the end of volume four, which I’ll get into later because it is one of the only moments of actual character progression we see in these books. The character’s designs are cute, and there is an attempt to expand upon the character’s expressions outside of what was seen in volumes one and two. There are more exaggerated facial features and even one or two moments of sudden panel framing to punctuate a specific narrative beat. There does seem to be a bit more of a rhyme and reason to the presentation than before. Not a massive step up, but a step up nonetheless.
This is also a good way to describe the narrative and comedy. There were one or two moments that genuinely got me to laugh at their execution, and when the story wants to sit down and progress things, it does so in a surprisingly genuine way. We don’t get to these moments until the final quarter of volume four. The circumstances that facilitate those moments are some of the most contrived of the entire series thus far. At this point, I’ll kindly take what I can get. There is an underlying idea of being a burden to another person versus that person enjoying being there as a pillar of support. Mei gradually starts feeling more insecure about how much she has to rely on Komura, while Komura finally realizes that he enjoys looking after her. It’s become so commonplace that their classmates assume that the two of them will be paired up together, which is funny.
I like this direction, and it would be enough for me to forgive many of the story’s other contrivances if it wasn’t for the fact that it comes so late. I’ll be honest; if I weren’t reviewing this manga, I wouldn’t have gotten this far to get to those more heartfelt moments because there isn’t a lot here to chew on before we get to that point. The series is far from bad, and the best way to describe it is that it’s relatively inoffensive, but that makes it harder to talk about or recommend to people. Sometimes, even with a bad series, you could recommend it based on the virtue of the curiosity that comes with wanting to see something fall apart or look into art as a learning experience that can be deconstructed. But for The Girl I Like Forgot Her Glasses, there is nothing to break down or put a lot of thought into. It’s just a simple story with a simple premise, and while there isn’t necessarily anything wrong with that, there isn’t much amazing about it either.
