But maybe the whole play thingy wasn’t such a bad idea, at least that’s what Yozora thinks and the following day she has decided that the problem was adapting a work. This time, she will create her own play, which she claims will be highly entertaining. And since I think that we already know what Yozora is like, I think it’s guaranteed that it will be highly amusing, but for different reasons.

The main character, Yozora explains, is a high school girl. She’s blond, rich and flashy, always surrounded by boys. But one day, she makes a female best friend. Somehow, I think she may be describing a certain person! However, the girl only pretended to be the main character’s friend. It turns out that the main character stole her boyfriend and all of this was a ploy. Having won her trust, she makes her go to a park at night where ten male friends of hers rape her, taking turns. She even got pregnant.

“Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaait!!! What the hell is amusing about that story!!!” says, of course, Sena, whom the main character of Yozora’s play resembles way too much.

“A horrible woman gets what she deserves. The audience will be happy and amused” nonchalantly replies Yozora. “The play would get a standing ovation”

“What kind of rotten people would be watching the play!?”

And if there were any doubts, it turns out that when the main character dies, she wishes that, in her next life, she isn’t a rude blonde with a large rack, but wishes to be born as a black-haired slender girl. However cruel, because it’s cruel let’s face it, somehow I’m always amused by Yozora’s antics.

As could be expected, the play is rejected, so Yozora asks for suggestions. Sena wants the main character to have lots of female friends, Yukimura wants it to be like some epic poem, while Kodaka wants to fight ghosts.

To make everyone happy, Yozora accepts everyone’s suggestions, so the main character becomes… Meat Zaemon, a delinquent who is always holding a Japanese sword and who has superpowers.

So let’s take a look at the plot. First draft. Meat Zaemon helps a girl who is being raped by ghosts.

“Why does a girl have to be raped by ghosts??”

“Isn’t the basis for entertainment that the heroine is raped?”

“What kind of niche are you targeting?”

Who knows, but now let’s take a look at how Yozora portrays the heroine…

“Long, black hair, bespectacled girl who has nekomimi. It turns out that she has angel blood. She’s the leader of a gang and looks after her underlings”

Oh, and we’ve changed the plot a little. Second draft:

“Meat Zaemon rapes the heroine, becomes friends with her and learns about her secret”

“Why does he have to rape her?!?!”

“Well” admits Yozora, “I didn’t know of any way of portraying how they might become friends, and I read on a website about story-writing that when in doubt, rape”

“The heroine starts liking him after he rapes her? Such a sick setting can’t… exist…”

Says Sena just just as she realizes that half of her eroge are actually like that!!

“Well, let’s continue” says Yozora, “the heroine sets a trap for him<, and her male friends rape him taking turns"

“Just how much do you like rape?!?!?!” cries Sena.

After many other crazy drafts, the following day Yozora says that she thought it at home and realizes it was just too crazy. Thus ends their second attempt at becoming Shakespeare. Of course, the sheer randomness of Yozora’s obsession with rape made this part really funny, although if you think about it it’s a little harrowing!

One day, Kodaka finds Sena playing a dating sim in the club room: Yozora and Yukimura have gone home already, so she can peacefully enjoy her games. I’m loving our cute game otaku here!

“Sena-kun swims so fast. And I was confident I would win~” says the heroine.

One thing, and especially in light of what happens later in this chapter, I’ve noticed is that Sena seems to be pretty comfortable with Kodaka, since, far from trying to hide the fact that she was playing a galge, she asks Kodaka if he can swim because… she can’t and the heroine in the VN wants her to swim. Don’t ask me what one thing has to do with the other, but before Kodaka knows it he has arranged to meet her next Sunday to go to the pool to teach her to swim. Call it what you want, but to me this seems like a date!!

And I do envy Kodaka, going on a date with such a cute girl. She’s wearing a flower-patterned bikini. The conversation turns random however when she explains that the pool is probably going bankrupt since it was intended to serve a housing development area that never came to fruition, which is apparently information she got from her dad.

“Oh speaking of your dad” says Kodaka, “I have yet to go and say hello to him”

“What?! Why do you have to say hello to my daddy? Could it be… could it be that you want to go out with me? You aren’t thinking that today is a… da… da… date, are you?!”

Since Sena is a lot of a tsundere, let me translate it for you: she may actually be wanting that. And yeah, if BokuTomo starts having romance elements too, then I can’t ask any more of it. It’s really funny, but this volume lacked romance, except for this last chapter. But let’s continue. Kodaka explains that that’s not it (aww poor Sena), but rather that his father was a friend of hers, so he wants to say thanks because it was thanks to her father that he and his sister were able to enroll in that school. We learn that Sena’s father actually has a lot of friends, but Sena seems to take after her mother.

Proving that Sena’s reputation as being good at sports is not unfounded, she masters swimming very quickly under Kodaka’s guidance, and of course that involves holding her hands when helping her to swim, so well, love is in the air today and Sena seems to be radiant. So cute!

Afterwards they go to eat some meat buns. Remember that in Japanese we don’t have articles such as “the”…

“Oh, [the] meat…” says Kodaka.

“Yes?” replies Sena before realizing what she’s said! She actually thought that Kodaka was calling her by the nickname that Yozora gave her rather than saying that the meat buns are tasty.

Again, this makes Sena incredibly cute, and she explains, blushing, that she’s actually a little happy about that nickname, because it’s the first time she’s been given one. But of course, he must not tell Yozora about it! As I already said, it’s ironic that while meeting to “practice” making friends, they are slowly become friends themselves, pretty much achieving more than they think.

They decide to head back and after Kodaka takes a shower, Sena is already waiting for him outside… but she’s surrounded by a few guys who don’t look very… respectable. They are trying to hit on her, and he hears how she starts insulting them. You know, the typical Sena way: she’s intelligent and pretty and superior to those worms.

However, as Kodaka remarks, this is not the club room, and instead of trying to get rid of them by just telling them that she’s waiting for her boyfriend, she keeps insulting them and they are getting angry. But at the same time, as she insults them, we notice that her legs are shaking. I cannot express very well just how cute I fond her in this scene.

Finally, Kodaka steps in and pretends to be her boyfriend, so they leave… but Sena keeps insulting them and they actually attack but to Sena’s and our surprise as well, Kodaka easily defeats them. There may be some truth to all those rumors about him being a delinquent!

Sena thanks him and as usual, she says that as a reward she’ll let him lick her foot, but somehow we can see that she’s actually moved, and probably falling in love with him. She wants to go with him to the pool another day.

Well, this is almost the end of the first volume of BokuTomo and I can say it’s been really funny. My favorite character is Sena, because honestly, I relate to her a lot. We can see that she’s very clumsy when it comes to social situations. For example, she doesn’t really know how to get rid of those thugs, it’s not about doing the wrong thing because she’s too proud. No, it’s obvious she just doesn’t know how to react in those situations, something that’s happened to me very often: not knowing how to react in a particular situation when dealing with people. Something that to others, even Kodaka here, may seem like common sense, it’s not like that for people like Sena… or me.

At first she struck me as the typical annoying ojousama, but I find her cute: she’s crying half of the time and her pride looks even childish and cute, and to some extent I think it also comes a a result of her lack of social skills. Somehow, she seems to feel more comfortable, although she probably knows it’s outlandish, thanking Kodaka by offering him the chance to lick her foot rather than just being honest and saying she’s very thankful for what he’s done for her.

We still have to learn more about Yozora, but I don’t like her as much as Sena. She’s a bully after all, although her antics are hilarious. But she’s always taunting Sena, not the other way around. Sena in fact strikes me as almost innocent and lacking the malice Yozora has, which must basically be the reason why she has no friends. However, I don’t want to jump the gun, so I’ll wait until we learn more about her.

Kodaka’s reasons for being an outcast is something I didn’t quite relate to either, and somehow the final part of the novel, where he tells us about his past when, being often bullied for his looks, he learned to fight back, is something too alien to me. I hate fighting and violence and all those things, and well, he seems to be socially apt, only that his looks make people distrust him. It may just be me and my weird tastes, but the last part where he talks about how he was bullied and how he made a friend, older than him, whose name he has even forgotten, who protected him and who taught them to stand up and fight well, I don’t like that kind of stories so I don’t know if I will ever sympathize with Kodaka, at least as much as I do with Sena. Because seriously Sena is love, she’s cute, innocent, childishly proud, hot and loves eroge. A perfect girl!

As for Yukimura, well he doesn’t have male friends because he looks like a girl and the boys feel uneasy around him so well, I can picture him as becoming a comedy relief character offering lots of dangerous, albeit delicious, trap fanservice.

Apart from Yukimura (and Kobato whom we already know), I guess the two others will join soon~