In which Taishi Zaou, who often finds drawing sex scenes to be a hassle, has found a new way to take a shortcut – just have one guy dry hump the other and cum in his pants! Genius!
This is a high school romance starring childhood friends and karate team members Tasuku and Ryouta. Tasuku teases Ryouta a lot and loves to kick the shit out of him during their karate practice, but secretly has developed feelings for him. Beating the shit out of someone is bound to make them fall for you of course, at least in Yaoi World.
The karate thing actually doesn’t play a big part in the story at all, plus sports is a too normal of a theme for Zaou who loves creating BL stories around gimmicks and it doesn’t take long before we see what the gimmick is here: Tasuku’s mom may have been an “ageman,” or woman who brings men good luck. The school finds this out and suddenly everyone (mainly guys) are all over Tasuku, thinking he may have inherited some of his mom’s luck-bringing powers, and Tasuku decides he now has an opening to convince Ryouta to date him. How does he do this? By inviting him over and dry humping his leg of course! What, doesn’t every non-dog person do that to announce they have a crush on someone?
So like, that’s ridiculous of course, but this was literally my favorite part of the manga because I love clothed sex and cumming in pants. I have no idea why, but I think it’s because I like sexual scenarios that have a loss of control element. It’s pretty rare to see a cum-in-pants scene in yaoi so when this popped up unexpectedly it was like when you got the jumbo candy bars from that one rich neighbor when trick-or-treating.
Going by what I know about Taishi Zaou so far, I’m going to say that the reason for this scene was simply because she tends to find drawing sex scenes to be a hassle – she either leaves them out, draws very short ones, or gets pushed by her editor – and so she found a way to draw something sexual without either of them actually being naked. Here’s an idea Zaou, draw a whole book of pants cumming and at least one reader will be overjoyed. Not naming names, of course. Would a book like that count as shounen-ai? Genuinely curious…
There are actually a couple (short) sex scenes in here though, which is good because it’s rated M and everyone wants to see the peen..although you’ll have to settle for the lightsaber treatment. Ryouta decided he sort of liked having his leg humped and decides to date Tasuku. You know, normal boy stuff.
This one above is the classic Taishi Zaou sex scene – no more than one or two pages, one single unrealistic sex position where you can’t even tell what’s going on, no dick, and then just giving up. Sometimes she just gives up to begin with and leads up to a sex scene that is cut completely (see: Mysterious Love). She prefers sex facial expressions and I really like those, probably more than most fujos, but like – there isn’t really a substitute for sex in an M-rated yaoi book. This is what most readers come for, no pun intended, but reading Zaou books will temper your expectations when it comes to M-ratings.
The story sort of resolves with Ryouta convincing he likes Tasuku not for his good luck powers but for him as a person and the happy endings all around except for the kind you probably really wanted to see. It was a cute story but like other Zaou stories I felt it was a bit on the boring side and like Electric Hands, the gimmick she chose would naturally have made a better comedy but she makes a serious story out of it instead.
As you can probably tell I tend to have some qualms with Zaou’s work, but her art isn’t one of them – I really like her art style and it’s definitely the best part of her books. She draws a lot of high school stories and is really good at drawing teen boys at that spot between cute and hot. I really liked Tasuku in particular in this story – as a character he wasn’t anything special and his design is literally like a cardboard cutout of a high schooler starring in a BL but when overlaid with “Zaou style” she tricks me into thinking otherwise, and Tasuku and Ryouta just become the most hot-cute boys ever at least while you’re reading this.
Taishi Zaou is the pen name of Mikiyo Tsuda, and she creates shojo and comedy under her real name. I think in general her work under that umbrella is a bit better because her story themes are suited to humor and I’m not sure why she does such serious BL works – I’d recommend Princess Princess for a fun crossdressing comedy, which DMP put out. That series also has a side-story of the same name on the same DokiDoki imprint as all of Zaou’s work, not sure if it’s a BL side story or what (if a review for it ever pops up on the blog, you’ll know for sure).
TL;DR Very typical Zaou work – a silly gimmick-based story that felt too serious, sort of boring, and very weak or lazy sex scenes…for this one she even found a way to draw a sexual scene without anyone being naked, where the MC dry humped his crush until he came in his pants (this was also my favorite scene so I’m not sure what this says about the few actual sex scenes much less about me). The characters were very much genre staples but her art style is always the highlight and she’s great at drawing high school BL boys with that “cute-hot” in-between.