Ryo Watari is a transgender bisexual character from Boys Run the Riot.
Biography
Ryo is in his second year of high school. He is a quiet boy who feels distant from his female childhood friends. After befriending a cisgender boy in his class, Jin, they both decide to start a street fashion brand. Jin is the first person Ryo comes out to.
Appearance
Ryo has a small body and short, dark hair. Although he initially wears the girls’ school uniform, he switches to the boys’ halfway through the manga. Outside of school he wears tracksuits and hoodies.
Personality
Ryo appears shy at first but has an assertive, impulsive side. He gets into trouble for making graffiti and sometimes fights with his friends. Ryo likes to design clothing, and shows a more confident side when he markets his clothes.
Gender
Ryo is a transgender boy. He expresses his identity from the very beginning of the manga. In the 17th chapter, the genderfluid fashion influencer Wing features Ryo’s clothing designs in one of their YouTube videos and explains, “Ryo-kun, the designer, is transgender, and worries about the disconnect between how he identifies and his physical sex. In other words, his body is female, but in his heart he’s male.”
Reaction
The manga’s author, Keito Gaku, is also transgender, and explains in the afterword of the manga’s first volume that he desired to write a story about a trans boy partly based on his own experience as a trans man. His previous manga one-shot, Light, also featured a transgender protagonist.
Relationships
Chika
Chika is Ryo’s classmate and childhood friend. Ryo has a crush on her, but is afraid of coming out to her.
Shimada
After Shimada, an older boy, grabs Ryo’s hand and tries to flirt with him, Ryo has a crisis of identity because he is afraid of being in a relationship with another boy.
Tropes
See Also
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