The BLacklist: Yaoi Reviews – Page 8 – Yaoi manga reviews and fujoshi ramblings

January 28, 2023August 13, 2024

SHINOBU KOKORO (Temari Matsumoto)

I need to start by mentioning that there is a hand job on page 2 of this book. Now THIS is my kind of yaoi! If only all books were like this. Think how much better Harry Potter would improve if Harry and Malfoy just whipped their “wands” out and got it over with in the first book. “That doesn’t make any sense, those characters weren’t gay,” you may be thinking. Well, a lot of fanfiction would disagree. See, you just have to read between the lines! Try it the next time you watch a Marvel movie, you’ll get all kinds of plot points…

So uh, this is basically gay softcore PWP ninja porn for girls. And call me a sucker but I might as well have a bullseye on my back in terms of the people who make up the target market for this sort of stuff, so naturally I loved it and was inclined to ignore some of its flaws (“some” being the keyword). What can I say, I am an easy customer when it comes to hot bishies porking each other in ninja garb despite what might be something like a 25+ year age gap in the first story with dubious consent. ✋ Ay-yai-yai…

January 26, 2023July 4, 2024

KISSING (Sasaki/Takaku)

‘Can you still call someone ‘just a friend’ after kissing?’ this book asks. Why yes, you can do exactly that – surely they know what friends with benefits are? Or, you can kiss someone and decide ‘yeah, no,’ which was the experience of my first kiss. I was 14 and he was 16 which I remember mattering (oh, he’s a ‘junior and you’re a freshman!’ my friends cooed). He invited me to the movies after class and we went to see the terrible sequel of an already-terrible romcom and then we sat there watching the credits roll kind of waiting in anticipation to see if the other was interested in this mouth touching thing people seemed to like. We were both shy naturally but finally the whole theater was empty so we went for it. I don’t think he knew it was my first kiss and for that I am very grateful. I remember hating it – eww, boy tongue – and watching a guy who worked there sweeping popcorn out of the corner of my eye and I felt weirded out that he was smiling at us and then it occurred to me that maybe I was supposed to close my eyes anyway. Don’t worry, the kissing in here is much hotter than that…

January 11, 2023April 23, 2024

BEYOND MY TOUCH (Tomo Maeda)

I have a tag on this blog for books that are “good for beginners,” and this is one of those that’s ideal for the innocent BL virgins among us looking to dip their toes into the genre. Although it’s an older title, the stories are cute and the art doesn’t feel too dated; I think even a Catholic priest would have a hard time being offended by a shounen-ai this wholesome. They may even ask to borrow it and leave it around for the altar boys to find…you know, to get a second opinion.

December 9, 2022April 23, 2024

LOVE TRAINING (Tatsumi Kaiya)

I’m in the middle of burning through everything I have by this mangaka because after Party and Hot Steamy Glasses were both very bleh, I expected this to also be bleh, and I really need the shelf space for other stuff. And it was very…well, bleh. This manga almost epitomizes mid 00s mediocre yaoi. Art was bleh. Stories were bleh. Sex was bleh. Everything was just…bleh? Bleh. Try not to be too impressed by my creative use of adjectives here…

December 6, 2022April 23, 2024

TITAN’S BRIDE VOL 1 (ITKZ)

So, my friend Shinami gave me this for Christmas, and I have to say, it is one of the most fun and enjoyable Christmas presents I’ve ever gotten, possibly *the* most fun and enjoyable one – and my sister and I got a trampoline once. This is uncensored BL to boot, so it’s like Santa came twice in a row. ~~He has a big sack after all.~~

And oh boy was this a treat. If the odd premise of a bishounen who we will pretend is 18 getting whisked away to another world and then pile-driven by a comically massive titan cock for 150+ pages doesn’t really appeal to you now, I have a suggestion: it just might not appeal to you yet. The protagonist had the same realization, you know.

Warning: Uncensored dick after the jump.

December 3, 2022July 12, 2024

PARTY (Tatsumi Kaiya)

This book is a ‘party,’ all right – the kind of house party in college where a bunch of people are invited but only four dudes show up, no one really talks or has much in common, and so all of you awkwardly sit there drinking PBRs and watching a bad movie while swiping on your phones looking for something better to do or an excuse to leave. That’s kind of like this book, except in this book the four of you are gay and two of you are dating and one starts giving the other a hand job but then they get in a fight with each other and one smacks and possibly rapes the other one, and the third and fourth show up, get introduced, make small talk, then fuck on the futon and then everyone leaves. We’ve all been to one of those, right?

December 3, 2022April 23, 2024

WORDS OF DEVOTION (Keiko Konno)

After reading ‘Star’ by Kanno and generally enjoying the story (we’ll talk about the art later), I decided to dip into the other licensed title we have from this mangaka. Starring two high school friends who become something more, the two-part ‘Words of Devotion’ starts out a bit slow and feels more formulaic than ‘Star,’ but she manages to make the characters feel like real people despite it being a standard school romance at heart, and had many scenarios I find hot in yaoi.

October 27, 2022August 13, 2024

STAR (Keiko Konno)

I have never dated anyone I’ve worked with, though most of my coworkers being women probably has something to do with that. I still don’t think I’d be able to do it though (unless I worked with Tom Hiddleston dressed as Loki, in which case I’ll come back and edit this) as it never seems to go as well as it does in fiction and having to work with an ex seems like it would suck. Either way I really love the workplace romance trope in yaoi, especially when it isn’t the standard “boss seme and secretary uke.” I liked that in this story, the two main characters don’t really a power imbalance, they just happen to be coworkers and feel like equals rather than one being tiny and whiny.

August 7, 2022October 30, 2023

DUETTO (Aoi Kujyou)

Sometimes reading these random older yaoi titles feels like a whats-behind-the-door game in terms of what you may get. Sometime you get eyeball licking. Sometimes Osama bin Laden appears. Sometimes a guy’s asshole gets used as a flowerpot. And let’s definitely not forget that sometimes you get a story where a guy pleasures himself with a corncob and suddenly it turns into a man that he has a magic orgy with in the clouds along with a goat boy who sticks a harp up his ass, followed by tentacle monster kemonomimi rape.

I guess every now and then you get like, a normal school romance or something. Or, if you’re reading Duetto, you get…biological son x father noncon. Yup. I mentioned all that other stuff to soften the blow.

August 1, 2022April 23, 2024

AS MANY AS THERE ARE STARS (Miecohouse Matsumoto)

Every time I unearth a weird, perverse title lurking in my collection within a sweet and innocent-looking cover like this, it’s a little bit bittersweet because that’s one less one waiting to be discovered – and even though I regularly do add new titles to my collection, they’re usually recently-published ones, and modern BL that gets a physical release usually nowdays isn’t quite as – er – ‘special’ as this one.

As Many As There are Stars is an obscure and somewhat recent June release that isn’t pricey-rare, but I never see it in anyone’s collection. This book is very…actually I don’t even know what to call this. It’s just…weird. The art is weird. The tone is weird. The sex scenes are weird. The dialogue is weird. There’s a scene where one guy who has a ‘body fluid fetish’ gets off by licking between his partner’s dirty toes while sexually fantasizing about the salt/fat/grease content of the latter’s body, followed by very serious themes regarding suicidal ideation and parental abandonment, followed by cousin incest.

Oh yeah, and it’s rated 16+.