Actual Rating: 4.5
Aww, this was such a cute and funny start of a manga series! I love all the women in the Amar and seeing all their geeky passions. I've found it's difficult for me to find a nonfantasy manga that I enjoy but I'm sold on this one! The culture saturated throughout is completely fascinating and I'm looking forwards to reading more. ( )

I'm not sure if it's because the characters are so amazingly written or because I can relate so much to them, but I love them so much. I wish I could live at Amamizukan with these awesome ladies! This story is full of humor and relatable content, with a dash of drama for flavor. When I read this manga, I honestly can't stop smiling, it's easily my favorite manga. No matter how bad I'm feeling or how upset I am, when I read Princess Jellyfish it makes me so happy and I forget about everything that's bothering me.

Honestly, I feel like there's something magical about this series. I've always been a tomboy and never, NEVER, wanted to be a princess as a child, but seeing Tsukimi and the others slowly blooming... it kinda makes me re-think that. I kinda wanna be a princess now lol damn it Kuranosuke. No matter what genres you're into, even if you don't like/don't read manga, I highly HIGHLY encourage you to at least try this series, I don't think you'll regret it.

The women at Amamizukan are all otakus in their own right;
Tsukimi, the main character, is obsessed with Jellyfish.
Chieko, the manager of Amamizukan, is obsessed with traditional clothing and Japanese dolls.
Mayaya is obsessed with records of the Three Kingdoms.
Banba is obsessed with all kinds of trains.
And Jiji-sama is obsessed with mature/old men.
There's also Mejiro, but not much is known about her due to her extreme social anxiety.

All of these women are loners and stick to themselves, and each other, constantly going on about their obsessions. They don't work, instead recieving monthly payments from their parents. This is largely due to their anxiety and inability to even be near regular folk or, even worse, stylish folk. They live their lives in relative ease, struggling between blowing their money on their obsessions and saving it for food.

Things start to shift when Tsukimi meats an outgoing stylist known as Kuranosuke! The wheels of fate are turning, and they soon find their lives flipped upside down! The real question is - will these lovely ladies buckle under the pressure? Or will they fight their own demons and come out on top? ( )

If you watched the 11 episode anime and kept yearning for more, only to discover that you had to pick up the manga to get more of the story, then you won't regret it. Starting the manga is amazing. Though for those who have watched the anime, volume 1 will cover a lot of familiar ground. It's skippable if you've watched the anime, but I still recommend reading it. Alternatively, if you don't have access to the anime via streaming or don't own it on DVD, this is definitely a great way to relive the start of the show. ( )

The girls where cringy and took sometime getting use to, but I warmed up to them. I liked the different otaku types as well. Loved the male character as he tries his best to get them to stop being complete shut ins. ( )

There's a lot to like about Princess Jellyfish. Fictional portrayals (that aren't insulting) of groups of female nerds are rare, and groups that aren't so much united by a single nerdy interest as by the fact that they all have a slightly obsessive enthusiasm for something are rarer still. The portrayal of this type of community in volume 1 of Princess Jellyfish felt authentic to me, showing both the positives (having people who support and understand you when the rest of society doesn't; being able to love what you love unapologetically and not worry about whether you're putting people off) and the negatives (insularity; while sometimes "there's nothing wrong with the way you are and those mundanes just don't understand" is true, sometimes you're just enabling each other's flaws/bad habits/refusal to learn social skills). The characters are at this point still a bit thin, but they're really likeable and I'm interested in seeing where they go (and how they do at fighting gentrification, which is something I can always get behind).

But.... I really was not prepared for how homophobic/transphobic this manga was going to be. They throw "okama" (a slur used for feminine gay men and trans women) around a lot, and the translator, in their notes, implies that this is because it wasn't offensive at the time, but my experience, as a queer person who lived in Japan at around the time these chapters were being published, was that it very much was. (I am not myself Japanese or AMAB, and of course opinions on terminology are varied within pretty much any queer community, so I'm not trying to say no one ever IDs this way or uses it in a positive sense within the community, but even if they do, its use by cis straight people--which is who's using it in this manga--was definitely understood as offensive/insulting IME.) The crossdressing male character goes on to insist that "[he's] not an okama, [he's] normal," which, I don't think I have to explain why that one's hurtful. One character makes a comment about "men who identify as gay" wanting to live in their women-only shared house, which, I totally understand how frustrating it is when you create a women-only space and men go "I'm a man but your space should include me anyway because of reasons," but it came out sounding pretty snide about their being gay as much as about their being men--though that one may be on the English translator. Something that definitely is on the translator is that they provide an endnote stating that "homo," as an English loan word in Japanese, is a pretty neutral term while the same term in English is more offensive, but... they still render the word as "homo" in the English dialogue, rather than substituting something that will actually read as pretty neutral to the Anglophone audience, such as, I don't know, gay. (Then again, this translator definitely leaves things untranslated more than I would--it's not quite "keikaku means plan," but at one point one character says of another, "She has hieshou, so her hands and feet get cold at night" and we are informed that "hieshou" means "susceptibility to cold due to bad circulation." Why not just say "She has bad circulation, so..."?) Although, this detour into my translation preferences aside, the context of the use of "homo" is the main male character (the one who crossdresses) going "what are you, a homo?" when his uncle walks in on him in the bath, so different terminology wouldn't really save that joke. And that's the other thing--leaving aside the whole question of what terminology is or isn't offensive, the manga is sort of persistently convinced that it's funny if one cis straight person thinks another cis straight person is, or accuses them of being, gay or trans. That sort of underlying sense of queer identities being jokes rather than something that anyone actually is (thus far there aren't any queer characters, which I kept feeling would help a little bit) is really Princess Jellyfish's biggest issue.

I'm also not sure how I feel about the makeover/"all girls secretly want to be princesses" angle. It's true, as male lead Kuranosuke says, that dressing well can be an important tool for being taken seriously in business/political situations such as the one the characters find themselves in, so it's clear there is in fact value in them learning more about fashion and grooming. But I hope at least some of them continue to see it as a tool, something that they'll employ strategically but never actually love or do daily, and it doesn't become the "really every woman is crazy about makeup and high heels, deep down, no matter what she says!" kind of message.

All this sounds pretty negative, but I did enjoy a lot of it, and I probably will keep reading. I'm pretty capable of putting up with various kinds and degrees of bigotry in fiction, even when it's directed at groups I'm part of; it's something you kind of have to learn how to do in a world where works of fiction are frequently made by people who never give a thought to the fact that their audience might contain people like you. I was just totally blindsided by it--the relatively progressive nerd circles I run in were super enthusiastic about this series before it ended (there was then a drop-off of interest, but that's pretty standard when a series ends) and no one ever so much as mentioned these problems. Maybe it gets better later, I don't know. But my hope is that this review, if anyone actually sees it, helps someone else to make an informed decision/be prepared for what they're going into in a way that I couldn't/wasn't. ( )