What’s it about? At 30, Adachi Kiyoshi is still a virgin, so you know what that means: he gets psychic powers! His power isn’t super impressive, though – he hears the thoughts of people he’s touching. The inside of most people’s heads isn’t very interesting, so it’s mostly a minor inconvenience… until he brushes up against his well-liked and handsome coworker Kurosawa Yuuichi. Turns out, Kurosawa has a thing for someone in the office: Adachi himself! What is a psychic virgin supposed to do with this knowledge?
Cherry Magic is an interesting series, to be sure. The basic conceit, that going 30 years without taking a trip to pound town automatically gives you powers, is pretty silly! Is this a world where people just have a lot more sex than in reality? Or are there low-key psychics running around everywhere? Do you lose your powers once you get your biscuit buttered? I’ve heard lots of jokes about asexuality being a superpower, but I guess that really does ring true in this setting! {Editor’s Note: The joke concept for this series seems to have been around online for a while, dating back to the early/mid 2000s]
If the story does explore this more, though, it’s going to be secondary to the primary relationship between Adachi and Kurosawa. Adachi’s realization that Kurosawa is into him makes their work relationship suddenly a lot more complicated. Considering Adachi doesn’t have much in the way of a romantic history, it’s hard to tell if it stems from homophobia or a general awkwardness with relationships. When he tries to push Kurosawa away, is it because he’s uncomfortable with the idea of a man being attracted to him, or because he’d be worried about leading anyone on?
The episode doesn’t offer much in the way of answers, but I have a suspicion it’s more the latter. I don’t want to start up the discourse about who BL is meant for or whether it’s fetishizing gay men for a straight female audience, but. This episode definitely comes across as being written from a cis female perspective. Speaking as a cis woman myself, this is not a bad thing! He worries about leading Kurosawa on when they go out for yakiniku together as an apology from their boss. When he ends up spending the night at Kurosawa’s apartment, he tries to figure out if Kurosawa is going to make a move, even though he’s been provided with pajamas and a separate futon in the living room. It all feels very similar to the times I’ve been in similar situations with boys I’ve known were attracted to me—not wanting to push them away or treat them differently, but always having the vague awareness in the back of my head that I could lose control of the situation quickly, no matter how much I trusted them. (Luckily, things never came to that.)
On the bright side (at least from my perspective), it’s fairly gentle as far as workplace BL goes, a far cry from something like the assault-heavy The World’s Greatest First Love. If Adachi and Kurosawa end up playing “bury the weasel,” I get the sense that it’s going to be on Adachi’s terms rather than Kurosawa forcing him to learn the steps of the mattress tango. It’s sweet to see a love interest who, as attracted as he is to Adachi, holds himself to an ironclad standard of appropriateness in their interactions. Which, once again from a cis female perspective, is almost reassuring, because the message that all men are wolves just barely holding themselves back from assaulting us is just so pervasive.
Cherry Magic is a sweet, low-key little BL romance that I’m interested in exploring more of. I just hope I get to find out more about this psychic thing!
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