XJ – Page 11 – The BLacklist: Yaoi Reviews

September 18, 2017June 8, 2024

SAY PLEASE (Kano Miyamoto)

When I’m in the mood to read (loosely-used term here) something totally slutty, a Deux Press title is always my go-to. Their titles even sound trashy (Cigarette Kisses, Mister Mistress, FreshMen, Seduce Me After the Show, or, possibly my favorite title for any gay romance, Chocolate Surprise). The only real shame with this publisher is that they completed wasted a golden opportunity by not using the initials “DP” on their book spines. Why bother pumping out pulp fiction about male prostitution and gay Yakuza sex when sharing initials with ‘double penetration’ is too much? I’m just saying, relevant branding opportunity wasted.

August 23, 2017June 8, 2024

DEAR MYSELF (EikiEiki)

Note: The crying-to-sex ratio is about 20:1 in this book, which I just feel like should be stated upfront.

So, I usually don’t read a lot of shounen-ai – somehow I skipped over that stage and went straight to the smut, and find it hard to regress now. ‘What, no cupping invisible shafts? How will I get to the end?” (No pun intended) The lengths I go to on my quest to read every yaoi manga (Totally realistic goal, right?)

August 5, 2017June 8, 2024

MILLENIUM DARLING 2006 (Maki Naruto)

I really want to like June as a publishing company more than I do, considering the amount of money I give them. They have an enormous library of some really great titles (well, they did anyway, before they lost their contract with Libre). However, they 1) Can’t keep most of them in print without asking for money on Kickstarter, and 2) Do shit like only license/publish the third book of a series. What kind of shiitake are they smoking over there where they think this a good idea?

July 14, 2017June 8, 2024

THE COLOR OF LOVE (Kiyo Ueda)

(Note: This is an older short-form review, I might go back and edit it one day when I re-read this one. Which I will, because I loved this one)

This is a really, really nice collection of BL stories. I’m not always a fan of the 5-stories-in-one thing because you have to learn new sets of characters so quick that often look the same and there is so little room to establish them, but this book pulled it off.

June 27, 2017June 8, 2024

THE ART OF LOVING, “Part 1” (EikiEiki)

I never thought I’d say that masturbation scenes in a yaoi book is what would bump up the rating for me, yet here I am.

June 23, 2017June 8, 2024

HIS ARROGANCE (Takashi Kanzaki)

If you love sexy bishies and hot sex scenes (of course you do) and you’re willing to trade coherent dialogue and a decent plot for it (I mean, I usually am), this is a pretty good choice. That’s not really a knock, by the way. I personally could care less if the plot/dialogue makes sense if you’re replacing that page real estate with hot bishie sex scenes, and this book checks that box! It is a Kanzaki story, after all…

May 29, 2017June 8, 2024

SWEET REVOLUTION (Honami/Suzuki)

The story in Sweet Revolution was an odd one (not to mention the title itself and what it has in any way to do with the story, but that’s BL for you), it felt like the second part was a completely different story than the first but with the same two main characters…in the middle it very quickly switches from a stereotypical school setting to a mysterious otherworldly realm (if you read/watch a lot of manga/anime, one simply comes to accept isekai in any situation), and after that leap they do not mix again. Still, the pacing was good and the story fun to follow, and it unfolded in a really intriguing way.

May 9, 2017June 8, 2024

CUT (Toko Kawai)

The feeling I had while reading this manga was akin to hopping into a cold shower when you expected a hot one…it just *completely* threw me off guard. Not that I was expecting light cutesy BL fluff- to be honest I had no expectations and didn’t even read the summary on the back before starting it – but it sure wasn’t this.