Yaoi manga reviews and fujoshi ramblings
Sometimes you start a yaoi book and you just know you’re going to love it. The characters are hot, the art is great, the story has a strong start and hooks you right away, etc…all of this bodes well. Spell was one of those for me, a real page-turner that I loved instantly, and beautifully done in every aspect.
Continue reading “SPELL (Hyota Fujiyama)”
…Featuring a story in which the uke ponders whether getting his ass fingered on the school roof by some upperclassmen he just met that morning who later turns out to be his stepbrother is ‘good luck’ or ‘bad luck.’ Only in yaoi, folks!
Continue reading “LOVE POTION (Sakuya Fujii)”
Library sales are pretty unexpected places to find M-rated yaoi. If they have a manga section at all, much less one that has anything other than dog-eared copies of Naruto and Dragonball Z, they’d probably never (knowingly) put BL in it, because the last thing any parent wants is their 9-year-old finding a volume of Level C while were just innocently ogling the covers of Love Hina and running up to them loudly asking what a creampie is or why a man would want to stick his pee-pee in your butt. But lo and behold, I unearthed this puppy at a library sale one time, the only yaoi book I have found at one to date. It even still had the bonus postcard intact which was pretty cool. Made me wonder how it ended up there and who it used to belong to. I’ll bet it was a member of Congress. I like to think my state representative is secretly a fudanshi, it’s about time someone stood up for the most important issues of our time, like needless censoring.
L’Etoile Solitaire is the debut story of Yuno Ogami, a relatively unknown artist, but she has a couple more recent titles on her mangaupdates page. Her website/blog is still up but hasn’t been updated in years, and interestingly still has a post up from this book’s launch where she did a custom illustration of the main characters for her readers. This story was a ‘Japanese Original English Language’ manga, a term which makes zero sense to me but apparently just means it was commissioned.
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!
Continue reading “ALONE IN MY KING’S HAREM (Lily Hoshino)”
Umm, can we all agree that a gay sex scene being unintentionally interrupted by a toddler is incredibly awkward and unnecessary?
Continue reading “HOT STEAMY GLASSES (Tatsumi Kaiya)”
Much how I feel about most ‘classics’ in literature, this is a series that I wanted to have read, but didn’t actually want to read. When it comes to yaoi, I usually feel this way about early 00s-era multi-volume 16+ series, like Gravitation. Whether or not Fake and Gravitation would be regarded as ‘shounen-ai classics’ (at least in the US market) is debatable – actually I don’t think the subgenre has been around long enough here, much less with any real visibility, for people to start throwing around that word yet. Still, they’re perhaps among the most well-known of the shounen-ai books, if only because they didn’t have a lot of competition back in 2003. More pontification on that after the jump.
The reason I shy away from these older multi-volume 16+ series is largely because 1) pacing issues/too much filler, which affect a lot of multi-volume series tbf 2) a large time commitment 3) nothing explicit 4) the drawing style either feels outdated or just isn’t up my alley. 5) They’re often mostly geared towards a teenage audience and not an adult one. I also think context needs some consideration, these series are a product of their time. 2003 was a year before you could easily pull up free manga/scanlations/porn on the internet, or actually, really anything on the internet, because you probably still had dial-up and your mom had to hang up the phone for you to log onto AIM. June wasn’t even around yet and you couldn’t exactly go down to the bookstore and buy anything resembling a Sakira title, and the LGBT community was less visible than it is today. Yaoi was pretty underground stuff, difficult to acquire and definitely not in English.
I came across this title fairly recently and remember being surprised when I saw the author – first, I didn’t know Double Penetration Deux Press licensed any of Makoto Tateno’s work, and second, I thought I owned all of her English-licensed BL titles (that even includes Happy Boys) because I love her stuff – while not always draw-droppingly amazing, her work is consistent, and seems to be always to my taste. But somehow this one fell through the cracks on my list – her first BL title too! So of course I was curious how well she spread her wings when jumping from the safe warm nest of shojo into the vast, cloudy expanse of butt sex. And jump she did!
Continue reading “HATE TO LOVE YOU (Makoto Tateno)”
If I had to guess which yaoi books on my shelf be legitimatly tear-inducing, Othello would probably have been in the bottom half of that list. An R16 that looks kind of like a lame vampire story with that gothic cover font? Nah. Yet, as it turned out, to say Othello was moving, beautiful, and heartbreaking would be an understatement – this book absolutely came out of left field. I guess really I just wasn’t expecting it to be so touching, much less serious.
You’re probably wondering what the hell is so special about your standard oversize mid-2000s R16 June book, of which there are dozens. Trust me, I was surprised too.
Continue reading “OTHELLO (Toui Hasumi)”
Love Quest is the book that popped my Lily Hoshino virginity. I was starting to get self-conscious about it, so figured I better suck up the pain and get it over with. Despite countless ads in the back of June books touting her as the ‘queen of yaoi’ (a title which I can only assume was bestowed by someone who clearly has not read a lot of yaoi), her work does not generally appeal to me, because you honestly can’t tell who has a penis and who doesn’t in a lot of her stories. At least for one character in this one it turned out to be correct – though the two (three?) ukes all looked very, very feminine. Too feminine. I mean come on, that dude on the right looks like he’s about to shoot a Maybelline commercial.
Continue reading “LOVE QUEST (Lily Hoshino)”
Yaoi dialogue of the day: ‘I want you so much that I could jack off to you.’
Close second: ‘My dream is to start a porn convention featuring huge breasts, and here I am, going out with you, a guy.’
Continue reading “DINING BAR AKIRA (Tomoko Yamashita)”