Uncensored at last, uncensored at last, God Almighty it’s an uncensored one at last! Can I get an Amen?!?
This post has NSFW images, if anyone is brave enough to be reading this at work.
Continue reading “BOND(Z) (Toko Kawai)”BOND(Z) (Toko Kawai)
LOVE LESSON (Hanae Sakazaki)
So, I don’t mind student-pursuing-teacher storylines, and I don’t mind younger semes with older ukes, but if those two things overlap on some kind of yaoi venn diagram it’s not really my cup of tea. Maybe I just haven’t read one I really liked yet, but I think when it gets down to it – college students are one thing, but when I think about the guys I knew at 16, and then pretend they were gay, the idea that any of them would be able to top someone older and more experienced than them, much less satisfy them, much less seduce them, much less have the confidence to try in the first place, much less put another comma in this sentence, is kind of laughable. Granted, I went to Catholic school, so that probably means diddly squat. Maybe in some public schools out there people were so used to this that when Johnny bent Mr. Smith over in the janitor’s closet after Algebra 2, they didn’t even have to shut the door – and that’s still *if* doing questionable things with the mop handle wasn’t completely off the table. You know those kids that were duller than a tan crayon yet somehow always got good test scores? You gotta wonder…
Continue reading “LOVE LESSON (Hanae Sakazaki)”CAN’T WIN WITH YOU (Honami/Takaguchi)
That awkaward moment when you try to get a kid of questionable age to do something by tying him down and giving him a hand job while making out with your friend but it doesn’t convince him to do what you want so you get forced to blow the school director’s son while his brothers watch and then the same annoying kid starts going to your school and becomes resident advisor and makes rules against no gay stuff but starts to like gay stuff because you kiss him once but really you like your roommate Miku and you get pissed because you get forced to suck that same guys’s dick again while Miku and your other friend drug the annoying kid with spiked hot chocolate and dress him up like a slutty girl while he’s unconscious complete with shampoo dripping from his mouth for blackmail and then later everyone tries to rape him and you’re like wtf all I wanted was to get my asshole rammed in peace by my roommate without getting forced to blow people as punishment for shit I didn’t do. I think we can all relate.
Continue reading “CAN’T WIN WITH YOU (Honami/Takaguchi)”SPELL (Hyota Fujiyama)
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)”LOVE POTION (Sakuya Fujii)
…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)”L’ETOILE SOLITAIRE (Yuno Ogami)
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, and possibly her only published work unless she has a pseudonym – she’s somewhat of a ghost, and seems to have all but disappeared from the manga world. 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. Since we now know it was the only real story she ever did, we have nothing to really compare it to nor could witness an evolution in her style, sadly. I wish she hadn’t dropped off the map after this because she was talented, and I think she was would have become a really great mangaka.
ALONE IN MY KING’S HAREM (Lily Hoshino)
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)”HOT STEAMY GLASSES (Tatsumi Kaiya)
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)”FAKE (Sanami Matoh) + OVA
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.
HATE TO LOVE YOU (Makoto Tateno)
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)”