This manga is from 2007, but it seriously feels like Kuwabara leapt forward in time and prompted ChatGPT to ‘write me a three-part BL story about high school boys that’s wholesome and cute’ and this is what it generated.
In other words – it’s not technically a bad manga, but it reaches new heights of generic. As if an all-boys dorm setting wasn’t already completely overused in BL, the stories are without an ounce of creativity and the characters are straight from the archetype handbook. I get that not all BL sets out to re-invent the wheel and the genre has a lot of common tropes, but this manga just feels uniquely…uninspired. I didn’t hate it, in fact I think it’s technically better than many of the recent old June fare I’ve rated, but it’s basically plain white bread in BL form.
At the all-boys Seika Academy, there’s a “prediction” that the chief R.A. of a certain dorm will end up romantically involved with his roommate. This year this R.A. is senior Kihara, and he rigs the lottery in order to get his crush Kyosuke Yoshimi assigned to his room in hopes of this “prediction” coming true. True to form, the former is warm and bubbly and the latter is icy and standoffish, so how it plays out is sort of predictable. This story is technically a shounen-ai, and though we see a few tender moments between them, there is no real hanky panky.
“But wait, isn’t this title rated M?” I thought. It is indeed. As if Kuwabara wanted to say “don’t worry I didn’t forget,” the second story opens with a sex scene between Kyosuke’s older brother Shunichi and the school nurse Hajime. Shunichi was a former chief R.A. and crushed on Hajime all through school, but waited until he was 20 before pretty much raping making a move Hajime.
I liked this story the most for 1) obvious reasons, plus 2) they had a little bit of angsty drama going on that they had to resolve, which is honestly more plot than anything else going on in this book. It’s pretty light on sex overall for an M rating, but I guess not everything can be Titan’s Bride.
There’s also another short shounen-ai with Kyosuke’s former roommate Suzuka and his new roommate Kuga, who hopelessly crushed on Kyosuke. This part was pretty unnecessary and both characters were about as interesting as a tub of butter; the culmination of their story is basically that they cuddle in bed.
The highlight of this book is probably the cute art style; just like the characters and stories it’s not at all unique and pretty standard and cliche for the genre but it makes what could have been a terribly boring read somewhat pleasing to look at. In glancing over other bits of Kuwabara’s work it seems she changes her art to match what’s popular, but I guess there’s nothing wrong with that. I would probably read more of her books if we had them in English but I believe we just have this one. Jaded cynics like myself who are balls deep in the genre have probably read some version of these sorts of manga many times, but I’ve read bad enough BL that this practically shines in comparison just by virtue of being competent.
Every now and then I come across a yaoi that I feel like is good for beginners, so I created a tag for it. My criteria for these are that there is nothing especially offensive in it (no rape, no weird fetishes, no incest, no huge age gaps, etc), it’s very easy to follow, has a story and isn’t just porn, is more on the upbeat side, short, and has pleasant art that is nice to look at – ie, easy reading. This is one of those that fits the bill. They aren’t always super generic like this one, but if they are, yaoi newbies will be much less aware of this because they don’t have much in their mental library yet to compare it to.
Actually, surprisingly few titles actually meet all my criteria for good beginner BL, I’m a bit picky in what I’d choose to recommend to a newb – far be it from me to gatekeep or anything like that, I guess it’s more stuff that I would have liked to read starting out instead of what I actually did read when starting out (I read a lot of crap, both then and now, if you can’t tell by this blog). Of course, maybe you’d prefer to go the baptism-by-fire route and read cursed incest rape shota for your first time, but in that case you’d be on your own, ya perv. Definitely don’t type in Shounen Ai no Bigaku into nhentai or anything.
TL;DR: If you asked some kind of manga AI from the near future to ‘write and draw me a cute three-part fluffy BL story set at an all-boys high school with two sex scenes’ this would be really close to what it would generate. Nothing about it is bad, it’s a cute read, it’s just exceptionally generic in every way – the art, characters, and story are all paint-by-numbers genre fare. New readers of the genre would likely enjoy it most since they won’t be as aware of this as jaded cynics like myself – however, the flip side of this is that when you’ve read a lot of shit BL, something just simply competent is elevated in comparison.