Last month I was at some comic book store and found one of those ‘guide to anime / manga’ books, this one by Dark Horse. Whenever I see one of these, I always flip to the yaoi section to see if they have some hot photos for educational purposes. In a brief note about shotacon, they mentioned that Almost Crying is one of the only shota licenses we have in English, albeit a non-erotic one (Wikipedia mentions this too by the way, but seeing it in a more official medium had more weight). I have had Almost Crying on my shelf for a while but didn’t realize it was a title worthy of any special mention among June’s numerous mid 2000s shounen-ai licenses, so I was a bit surprised. I mean, lots of yaoi has characters that could pass for shota boys, especially the ukes, and while the cover of this book is certainly indicative of how the characters look it didn’t strike me as ‘oh wow this is positively groundbreaking for the US yaoi market’ I guess. I’m also not really into shota either and am perfectly content that it’s largely located in the ‘you have to know where to look’ category, but the non-sexual nature of this title definitely broadens its appeal. And appealing it is, in exactly the way it wants to be.
So yeah, it has the minor distinction of being one of the first, if not *the* first English shota license – and probably still one of the only ones, although I’m sure that is largely due to a relatively small pool of manga titles falling between “marketable in the US,” “shota,” and “no sex, obviously lol” on a venn diagram. Ben and Jerry’s would be jealous of how vanilla, sugary, and cavity-inducing this book is, and in some ways it’s even safer than I was expecting. Sugar, no spice, and everything nice? Not that I expected it to be an issue of Shonen Ai no Bigaku or anything (uh, open incognito mode if you wanna google that) but even most of the kissing is ambiguous. Still, there was just no way a shotacon shounen-ai released by June in 2006 was going to come out on anything but training wheels. BL was still pretty underground stuff in the US, much less BL featuring boys that looked like children, no matter how innocent (not to mention this was a time when ‘that gay cowboy movie’ Brokeback Mountain was the crushing vanguard of traditional family values with its single eight-second gay sex scene in the dark, followed by triple the amount of straight sex that showed boob).
This book is made up of 8 one shots that are basically just vehicles to show off shota boys, and they vary in quality and coherence – they’re somewhat bland, sometimes nonsensical or difficult to follow, and most of the characters look the exact same due to Takahashi’s simplistic style that is light on detail. But really, that didn’t bother me much because going ‘awwww!’ over cute shota boys falling in love with each other is the whole point of this book, and how and why they get there is fairly superfluous. We have pretty slim pickings in the English-licensed shounen-ai shotacon department, so I guess beggars can’t be choosers.
Case in point:
The boys in these stories are ridiculously cute but just…too young for me. This realization was a bit of a relief, actually, as I know now that you’ll never see me on the 9 o clock news as one of those female teachers going to jail for molesting a prepubescent male student (don’t worry, all of society, I’m not actually a teacher). I kind of wanted to mother them, to be honest, and I don’t really have much of a mothering instinct.
Almost Crying is one of Mako Takahashi’s earliest works and one of only a handful of shota titles she did. After that she dabbled in just about every genre there is including shojo/josei, shounen/seinen, sci-fi, loli, psychological, drama, slice of life – you name it, she probably has a listing for it on Mangaupdates – most recently it seems she has been doing a lot of yuri. I read a more recent shounen-ai short story of hers called “Kotori wa Tottemo Uta ga Suki (The Small Bird Likes the Song Very Much)” was done for a ‘dark yaoi’ anthology called Yami BL. In my opinion it was the most out of place one in the book, and definitely wasn’t helped by her soft and cutsey style, which is largely unchanged from what you see here. Even the teens in that story still looked pretty shota-ish…in fact they were very similar-looking to the ones in ‘Words to Send,’ the story in this book with the oldest-looking boys.
So, yeah – if you aren’t really into shota, nothing in here will offend you. The boys were a little young for me, but it was cute. If you’re into shounen-ai and art style appeals to you, it is worth a look. Just have a Snickers bar handy in case it sends you into diabetic shock.
TL;DR All sugar; no spice, and for anything licensed by DMP being billed as shotacon I’d expect nothing less. This is shounen-ai shotacon in cotton candy form, that has been sanitized, sweetened, and fluffed in equal measure. They opted for the ‘characters are just older than they look’ rule but it doesn’t really matter because ambiguous kissing is the hottest this tamale gets. The characters are adorable of course but very same-y, and the stories are basically just containers to showcase shota boys. Still, it’s so freaking cute I think it might be impossible to read without smiling, and that has to be worth something. I might even be able to forgive it for this.
