Hey peeps, it’s a Lily Hoshino review, so you know what that means! Put on your diva makeup, tape your junk up between your crotch, strap on your platform heels and glittering body suit with a ‘natural’ platinum blonde wig on top and turn on Ru Paul – it’s girls-with-penises time!
I have a love/hate relationship with Lily Hoshino’s work. I aired most of my grievances about her work in my review of Love Quest, and those same grievances apply here so I’ll save us both the trouble of repeating them. The short version is basically that Hoshino is a superb artist and storyteller who draws very good shojo (and would likely kill it with tranime and cross-dressing stories), but pretty bad yaoi – why? Well, for those who are unaware, Hoshino doesn’t draw ukes, she draws ladyboys. I’m sure some people out there love this style, but I am not one of them. But she is a great mangaka (a great yaoi mangaka, maybe not so much), so I still read her work.
Anyway – so this book is made up of five stories, all of which are fantasy-based save for the last one and feel much like short fairy tales. Based on storytelling and technical skill alone, they were all predictably solid. This is Hoshino’s strong suit, and she never fails to dazzle in these two aspects – she constantly pushes boundaries in her work, which makes all of her stories interesting to read, even if they’re not always my thing.
The title story, ‘Alone in My King’s Harem,’ was a charming, simple-yet-effective love story. The uke Hibashi has really long hair which might throw some people (the hair thing gets more extreme if you’re not confused about character gender yet, don’t worry). Unfortunately we did not see more of the smexy seme king doing smexy seme things. I think her semes are always super hot, especially when they’re kings or princes.
The second story, ‘Night Circus,’ was very short and kind of abstract, but is notable for the very unique, symmetrical panel composition (probably a metaphor for being ‘caged,’ like the characters). In any other story it would be too boxy for my tastes but here it worked really well with the theme – creativity bonus points for sure.
‘The Sea Bed of Night’ was easily my favorite – it’s stories like this that make me keep reading Hoshino’s work even though I’m not a fan of her ukes – this tale was simply gorgeous. She has a really great way of submersing you in a whole fantasy world in just a few pages, without making it confusing or corny. The concept was kind of weird but I ended up liking it in the end. If you read enough manga or watch enough anime, you probably no longer give a second thought about kemonomimi and anthro-people. Speaking of which…
…next was ‘Adventure of a Canary,’ where we’ve now upgraded the uke to Dolly Parton hair and giant animal ears. I guess you either go with it or you don’t. This story was kind of like the first, but Canary’s look was just too over the top for me in this one. Was a cute tale though which was fast-paced and had some suspense for a change.
Unexpected alternate ending: When Juno is pushed off the tower he turns into a giant dragon and everyone dies. No but really, it doesn’t explain how he got up that tower in the first place so I thought for sure he was going to transform into some flying thing in that scene.
The last two stories, ‘Mature Flesh’ and ‘Moist Flesh,’ did a thematic 180 and were about a student council president named Okabe wanting to fuck some guy named Hidaka, who is evidently the school bicycle. It honestly felt like the editor was like, ‘hey Lily, do you have one more story laying around we can throw in to give it an M rating?’ because it just felt so random. I was surprised to see a uke that looked like an actual boy though!
It was a school story so, you know, yummy, but Okabe was too much of a crybaby for my taste – he was weeping in like every panel for no explicable reason.
The book may still have gotten an M without it by mid-2000s standards, but whether it was there for that purpose or just filler it was definitely the odd one out. Hoshino revealed this was the oldest story of the bunch so it is interesting to see how her uke style evolved.
Here’s the thing – not a single one of these stories (save for the last one) needed to be yaoi for them to work. All she would have had to do is swap out male bodies for female ones and the ‘he’s’ for ‘she’s’ and changed nothing else and these could all have easily been fantastic shojo/josei tales, appealing to a much wider audience. Her work is basically ‘boy love’ in name only, and I literally have no idea why she insisted on this niche market, because it’s a point of contention for many yaoi readers who want to boys to look like boys (shouldn’t be that wild of an assumption), which sucks because Hoshino is a very talented mangaka and it’s an easily avoidable issue and there aren’t a lot of problems in life that can be solved by drawing boobs on boys so for the sake of that alone she should get on board with it (she actually stopped doing BL a while back so I guess she eventually figured this out on her own).
So that’s that. Overall it’s very much in line with her other yaoi work I’ve read, but I’m more curious at this point to read her non-yaoi work. She’s a talented artist but if I read yaoi I want it to be boy love between – call me crazy – people who actually look like boys. I think the other thing is that there is never a plot point in her work or any character going, ‘wow, you’re not a girl?’ and playing off it for humor or something, because it would be so easy to leverage that. Her fantasy worlds are those in which boys actually do look like that and no one is surprised, so that makes it hard to take seriously at times.
(TL;DR) Assuming this isn’t your first Hoshino title, you can expect the same beautiful drawing and great storytelling she excels in if you can get past the ever-present girls-with-penises thing (if you can’t, this might as well be your last Hoshino title, at least for her yaoi work – check out her shojo instead). Her stuff is usually interesting, even though it doesn’t always fit well in the BL niche.