Okay, so. I'll start by saying that this was for the most part a very enjoyable manga to read. I'm a fan of gender-bender stories, and especially ones where the gender-bent character comes to realize that the way they end up isn't so bad after all. (Having that certainly ends up approximating closer to being transgender, which I'll take as close to as I can get, lmao.) This manga is really funny too. And it did have some actually pretty wholesome things to say, such as the occasionally repeated "gender doesn't matter" (initially "as long as you're beautiful", which really ends up saying something about the speaking character's shallowness, but later mentioned again without that qualification in regards to love). But... the ending really soured a lot of that. Without getting too spoilery, I didn't like how they spent the whole story developing a relationship that I ended up getting really invested in only to yeet it out the window at the last second. If the ending had been handled better I could probably feel much less conflicted about Idol Pretender, but as it stands, welp.