New favorite line from any manga, ever: ‘Don’t talk with cum in your mouth.’
I got this whole set from a mixed yaoi lot on eBay, otherwise I don’t think I would have bought it because based on the cover art I knew I wouldn’t like the drawing style (which I didn’t). I figured it would be like weird 90s male shojo with one sex scene at the end or something. Boy was I wrong! I mean, it’s a good thing to be wrong about, but my assumptions were in an entirely different zip code. Level C is a goddamn sex fest extrordinaire. About as much plot that exists in volume 1 is that two guys meet and live together, that’s about it – 75% of the panels are just sex. And, well, here’s the bulk of volume 2:
Evey time the mangakas seems to play with plot development, it’s like they get bored and are like, ‘nahh, fuck it, let’s just draw more sex.’ Which I wholeheartedly applaud by the way. Bread and circuses, guys, give the people what they want.
You can always tell when mangakas started off by drawing hardcore yaoi doujinshi (this series actually started off that way, and apparently two different versions were simultaneously being published, an official version and a doujin version) because they have zero qualms about shamelessly writing PWP with no fucks given, even when an editor gets added in the mix. Plus, I guess one doesn’t really regress from that, consciously or not. It’s not like You Higuri was selling her hardcore BDSM bara doujinshis at Comiket while drafting up Seimaden (fully expecting someone to whip out their leather-bound tomes of uncensored tentacle muscle bara by You Higuri now, just to prove to me that I don’t know shit).
I think the thing that really got me was that the drawing style is just not what you’d expect for this kind of story. It’s so 90s, still so Tezuka-inspired, so innocent and sanitized-looking at first glance. It’s like if someone drew the Kama Sutra in the style of a children’s book. But crack open that innocent-looking candy egg and there’s more delicious cream on the inside than you can handle. Heh. Hehehehe.
In full disclosure, I did not finish the entire series, I only got up to Vol. 3 out of the 6. This was not on purpose, I listed the set on eBay knowing I wasn’t going to re-read it and it sold way quicker than I thought it would, before I could actually finish the whole thing. I may try to finish it online just to have a more complete review at some point but we’ll see. Especially since the plot started to thicken (har) in Vol. 3, in which two pretty interesting characters were introduced. However, I thought they could have done more with the conflict here, which certainly had the potential to be way more intense and entwined, and made it a longer-lasting series plot point that could have resolved in at the very end instead of the series of Vol. 3 – it just felt rushed. I am aware however that manga is typically episodic and originally written for the magazine format, not for the tankouban volumes, which is sometimes easy to forget when reading them as we are used to here in the West. I don’t doubt that this (along with demanding editors) has some bearing on awkward plot transitions or resolutions. It seems that the serious storytelling ended with Vol. 3 though because they said Vol. 4 was going to be sexy and lighthearted, and, well, this is the back summary of Vol. 5:
…..soooo I imagine it goes straight back to the how-many-times-can-two-people-fuck-in-one-book plot line. Hey, like I said, bread and circuses. Let the smut hath rain upon our thirsty mouths, and ye thirst shall be quenched.
I was not familiar with these mangakas (not sure which one is the writer/artist or if they both do both or what, but they seem to work as a pair) so I looked them up because their names sounded really familiar so I was curious if I read anything else by them – turns out I had, they had one other English-licensed title I had actually just finished and reviewed, which I was shocked to find out was, what in the fuckfingers, My Only King?!?! One of the worst yaoi titles I’ve read so far?!? Did not see that one coming. There is literally nothing in the art style or story that would have made me guess that, although they are both pretty bad so they so have that in common at least…
…except now that I think about it the hands and gestures were similar – but that’s about it. Granted, they were written about a decade apart so it’s certainly possible their style evolved. Also, here’s a knowledge nugget for you, I also found out that Futaba worked on a manga adaptation for Fire Emblem (sadly I don’t think he wrote any yaoi doujinshi for it, which is a damn crying shame). I also didn’t know Futaba was a guy, which might explain the bara-esque amount of sex in this series.
Still, I just couldn’t get into it, as hot as this series technically is. It’s rare that I come across smut I’m not keen on, but the sex, as bountiful as it was, just didn’t do it for me – I just wasn’t a fan of the drawing style. I don’t think I even realized how much this mattered until now.
P.S., where was Kazuomi and his ‘secret math tutoring technique’ when I was failing Algebra?
(TL:DR): Don’t talk with cum in your mouth.