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a lot of multi-volume series tbf 2) a large time commitment 3) nothing explicit 4) the drawing style either feels outdated or just isn’t up my alley. 5) They’re often mostly geared towards a teenage audience and not an adult one.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.
Enter Tokyopop in its prime, who published Fake and Gravitation in the same year. For the majority of girls, this would have been the first shounen-ai/yaoi they’d ever read. They didn’t even know if they liked two guys kissing, much less anything more. Had Fake been my first shounen-ai and I’d also been 16, I would have viewed it in a much different context. But that’s not a knock, nor am I saying that’s the only reason it was so well-received – I am just noting that I am aware of the fledgling status of the Western yaoi community when the series was published, which certainly formed a symbiotic relationship of sorts with these early big-publisher English yaoi(ish) releases (which is definitely also a sentence that sounds like it was pulled straight from a bullshit college paper). Plus, the fact that Fake has withstood the test of time speaks for itself. If it had been crap, it would have disappeared in the early 00s much like Lindsey Lohan’s career, and wouldn’t have been licensed in the first place (even though Fake was published in 2003, it is about 10 years older than that, which you can tell by the characters’ fashion and size of their cellphones).
Yet to this day it holds up an 8 on MAL, and at least some of those ratings must be recent, right? I was curious what all the fuss was about.
Still, this series took me like a hundred years to finish – I wasn’t really sure about it when I started it, and up until I got to the middle I still wasn’t sure if I would finish it, especially after volume 3, which had a particularly confusing and ridiculous side story with the secondary teenage characters, Bikky and Carol, who I found much more annoying than comedic. And also – spoiler alerts heading your way, not that anyone needs one for series that’s now over a decade old that I am probably the last person here to have read – I really need to vent about something:
Why the FUCK do fucking Bikky and Carol get to fuck each other BEFORE Dee and Randy?!?! How is it that those two little assclowns spend the entire story stopping THEM from fucking until vol 7, but THEY get to play hide the hotdog in book 4?!? Can someone fucking explain that to me?!?? This a fucking yaoi book, no?! I NEED SOME MORE WINE. WAIT THAT WASN’T A SPOILER. WHERE IS MY CAPS LOCK KEY
Ah, that’s better. Moving on. So, I think the art was mostly good for its time, but not always to my liking, and it feels very dated. Dee and Randy have strange looking chins, Randy for some reason had a ‘Japanese name’ which everyone for some reason insisted on calling him by, and Bikky and Carol’s special talent of ruining every good potential sex scene was second only to Matoh’s insistence on including them so much on the annoyance scale. But I still liked it enough at the start to keep reading, and even though they took until the last volume to get it on, Matoh knew this and sprinkled enough teasy and kissy scenes throughout to keep the reader from giving up on this story altogether – even though I really wanted to at times. To her credit, those are really sensual kissing scenes though.
The plot in each book was different, centering around a different case that Dee and Randy were working, but there was a bit of common thread and background characters between them. The crime stories were mostly good (though predictable, especially when Frick and Frack a.k.a. Bikky and Carol were involved), fast paced, and easy to follow, with a couple confusing or lackluster ones thrown in that had to do with the aforementioned background characters – this was mostly because they never had a big enough role for you to truly care about, and they drifted in and out of each book or were replaced with new ones. Because of this, this manga felt episodic in nature, with each story geting resolved in the same volume and no real cliffhangers. This was fine, and it kept each book fresh and interesting, but I wasn’t dying to start each new volume.
The humor/banter was hit or miss, it was sometimes funny but most often meh. Also, apparently to be an authentic American you just need to say ‘dude!’ a lot, use a lot of exclamation points when you talk, and swear like a sailor. There was a lot of language, including much use of the word ‘fuck,’ which I guess still falls under an OT rating, but sometimes it was unnecessary.
There were definitely parts in the story that let you know it was not originally written by a Westerner for a Western audience (besides the mangaka evidently feeling that her Japanese audience would dislike the name Randy) – mostly small things, but they were noticeable to me and bugged me, probably more than they should have. An example from the 2nd volume – if you wanted a short and secluded holiday in the mountains and you lived in NYC, you would most definitely just drive upstate a few hours. No American would fly to Europe – much less England – for this purpose, no more than they’d fly to Spain just to go to a beach (plus ‘hur durr passport what’s that’ – half this country) Americans go to Europe to see castles and sightsee in the big cities, and if perchance they go to Europe for mountains they go to the Alps – provided this didn’t mean they’d have to point them out on a map. For the first half of this volume I actually thought they meant New England, such was the ridiculousness of this plot point to me. And certainly most of all – even though this story is pre-9/11 – I highly doubt anyone would let two preteen street urchins hop on an international flight by themselves. But as if that whole episode isn’t ridiculous enough, guess what? From this entire fucking 7-volume series, this is the one chapter they decided to make an OVA out of. I think I actually laughed out loud when I realized that.
I mean, to be fair, I know why they chose that part – it has a flashback to how Dee and Randy first met to give unfamiliar viewers some background, encapsulates a good selection of comedy/kissing/crime-solving parts, and introduces important secondary characters JJ and Berkely. And to their credit, some of the kissing scenes they did are pretty hot.
Because they try to cram a lot of shounen-ai in a single hour, it feels like there’s more in here than in some entire volumes of the manga, which dragged it out much more. Bikky and Carol also turned out to be better in animated form, at least for me. I’m not sure why that is; I think their antics just became more enjoyable as opposed to annoying with animation. As a sidenote, I also watched the sub instead of the dub, which made the English name pronunciation equal parts painful and hilarious (especially a part where they meet in a hotel and four characters with English names all introduce themselves in Japanese). The dated quality of the art style was also highlighted in the animation (and god, the music), but Dee and Randy looked pretty hot overall.
The OVA unfortunately did not lead to a full anime, which was too bad, because I think it would have translated well to the screen. I think they missed capturing the heart of the series by failing to choose a chapter that’s based in New York City, the setting for 90% of the entire story and something which makes Fake what it is – not to mention what is probably a main selling point for the Japanese audience (this goes both ways – why would they try to sell a Western-made Tokyo-based yakuza crime thriller with one filler episode based in, like, Serbia? Actually, who would want to watch a Western-made yakuza crime thriller in the first place?). This makes it hard for people who haven’t read the manga to really get an overall feel of what the series is really like. It would be like making an OVA out of the first arc of Sword Art Online from one of the parts that happens outside of Aincrad, the main story setting: like sure it’s technically a part of the story and might conveniently keep some loose ends from becoming untied in the first place for new viewers, but you’d be leaving out – oh, just the entire core of the series. Not that SAO and Fake have much in common besides having a frustrating-ass love story (though imho for much different reasons), but it’s also like 1 a.m. and I still have a glass of wine to finish so we’re going with that analogy.
So overall Fake’s OVA was definitely kind of average in comparison to the manga (never mind that they didn’t pick a better chapter to base it off of, so it was largely a missed opportunity), but it’s always nice to see characters come to life in color. And also kissing. Mostly that, actually.
So anyway back to the manga – as this long, tiresome trek came to a close, I picked up the final volume, a tinge of sadness but also relief to finally be done with this long series WHEN TO WHAT DID MY WONDERING EYES SHOULD APPEAR?
And lo, though she hath crawled through the desert for 50 days and 80 nights, there appeared an oasis before her, with a pool of fresh water to slake her thirst for even-early-2000s-era-so-probably-less-explicit-than-your-mom’s-harlequins-buttsecks, because beggars can’t be choosers and will you guys just fuck each other already?!
So anyway, I started the last volume on this high note, with serious reservations that there is anything between those pages worthy of That Letter. And there wasn’t really, so glad I set my expectations low (but possibly even better, this volume features the line, ‘He’s harder to get into than an Avril Lavigne concert.) But ‘the’ sex scenes were a perfect fit for the series, they was tasteful, romantic, and all-around well done, even though they were both super short. I won’t include a pic of either because no one wants to slog through seven volumes for that part to be spoiled, on the off chance I’m not the only one who didn’t read this series 10 years ago, but I didn’t think either were close to being M-rated. I think back then they rated this stuff more conservatively (‘two GUYS having sex? Oh my GOD!’)
And thus, she did crawl to the edge of the glimmering pool and scooped the water in her mouth, but she hath tasted only sand, for it was a mirage. The false ‘M,’ she thought, I should have known, I shall never trust you again! *shakes fists to heaven and turns, dejected, to head to the Grand Outpost of Tumblr Porn**, which holdeth many a forbidden treasure as far as the eye can behold, if ye is courageous enough*….’
**Tumblr must have heard me and went and purged all their damn goodies
I’m not sure what I’m talking about anymore so let’s assume I’m drunk or possibly asleep.
(TL;DR): Fake is a classic shounen-ai series that’s part buddy-cop story and part romance, and the combination is well executed. Dee and Randy are well-developed, likable characters, though their relationship is not at the forefront of every story – this was fine because that part was definitely a slow burn, and I liked the action sequences and how they helped form the relationship between our two heroes. The two teenaged side characters Bikky and Carol might be the Jar Jar Binks of shounen-ai and easily brought the rating down by a whole integer for me. Though it is decidedly average in comparison to modern offerings, Fake has aged pretty well for what it is (as long as you can get past the dated art style), and I’m glad I bit the bullet and finally read it. The OVA felt like a missed opportunity because they chose a weird chapter to base it off of that wasn’t even in New York, but it was nice to see Dee and Randy come to life in color.