I stumbled over a very interesting manga named Bitter Change. It's not flashy or action-packed, the art is kind of simplistic, there is no fan service, and I suspect it would bore a lot of people here, but the premise is so fresh that it makes me think about it during odd moments of the day.
What's the premise? A boy falls on top of a girl, they conk heads, and their personalities switch bodies.
Yeah, I know what you're thinking but I'm not being sarcastic. Let me phrase it another way: at the start of the manga, it's been two years since they've switched places. It jumps back in time to their last year of elementary school and tells how the incident occurred and their first steps to deal with it. It goes forward from there until it catches up to the present and picks up from that point.
Other than the initial change, there is nothing mystical here, no one is doing magic, and there are no strange mascot creatures showing up to spout exposition. It's simply two kids trying to manage a very difficult and confusing situation. As much as anything, it's probably slice-of-life.
Which is exactly why it's interesting.
Yui was a quiet, serious girl with a difficult family life. She had no friends and her parents paid her little attention. Yuuta was an outgoing boy with a large, caring family but sometimes he was too blunt and slacked off at school. They didn't like each other very much but suddenly they had to live each other's life without causing too much suspicion. Puberty, relationships with the opposite sex, and trying to respect the direction the other person wants to take their life are some of the issues they wrestle with.
More importantly, they have to deal with an intriguing question: how long can you live as someone else before that new body is more you and your old body? How long before you stop thinking about going back and just live this new life as your own? How long before you start thinking of your new family as your real family?
There are so many manga that are just rehashes of other manga that it kind of makes me happy when I run across something different.
