The new Hana-Kimi anime fails to live up to its iconic 30-year legacy

Hisaya Nakajo’s romance manga, Hana-Kimi, which ran between 1996 and 2004, sold over 17 million copies in Japan. This explosive popularity also extended to its North America debut, allowing Hana-Kimi to emerge as a classic entry in the shōjo category. Nakajo’s manga series is beloved for a plethora of reasons, but it primarily popularized a romance trope that can be traced back to William Shakespeare’s As You Like It and Twelfth Night: female-to-male gender swap via cross-dressing.