Did you wake up this morning craving a bad shounen-ai to read? No? Hmm, I can’t be the only one that wants to read bad BL from the 00s. There must be others out there somewhere, right? ….Right?
Well, if nothing else, if you’ve ever seen the BL parody anime Gakuen Handsome and were confused about the triangle chin jokes, this manga is a textbook example of the infamous Dorito chin in old BL they were making fun of. Now, serious question, do you prefer the red bag or the blue bag when it comes to Doritos? I will judge you on your answer….
This is a shounen-ai about two high school teachers who fall in love and go on a date. Yes, that’s the entire plot of this whole manga. June printed this one with the nice white pages and my theory is that they do that to make shorter books look thicker, because it didn’t feel like that long of a read (thankfully). The taller blonde one on the cover and below is PE teacher Ono, who crushes on his shorter, older senpai Kijima.
There’s stunningly little to say about the plot here. It’s a shounen-ai story that probably even casual BL fans have read before and the lackluster, badly-proportioned art doesn’t exactly help engage interest. How badly proportioned are we talking here? Well, this is the title page:
The two teachers are coworkers at an all-girls high school where Ono pursues his older teacher. They’re shown slowly falling for each other, but you never really actually learn anything about the characters, making the story come off very hollow even though it has some touching moments between them. The “paradise on the hill” refers to a view from a room in the school that Kijima gives Ono the key to.
Honestly, it feels more like a drawn-out one-shot than a fully realized story and even though it’s a serviceable, coherent yaoi plot it’s exceptionally boring and definitely missing the sort of spark that makes good shounen-ai engaging. Kijima and Ono couldn’t be flatter characters if they were rolling-pinned with an asphalt paver, and their pointy Dorito chins were super distracting to me. You see this every now and then in old yaoi, mainly from the 90s, but Momoko Tenzen evidently has a strong zeal for the tri-chin and in 2002 – when this was originally drawn – apparently was not going to let the trend die without a fight.
Since you can’t look forward to sex in shounen-ai, you can at least look forward to that sensual first kiss right? If it was a good kiss I wouldn’t spoil it but since it is decidedly not, here you go. I get that he’s lifting up his glasses but in this situation I think you’d either take them off or push them all the way up on his head instead of just holding them up like this, which looks awkward and made even more so but the giant yaoi hand getting Dorito dust on his thumb.
After the ending there’s a short unrelated one-shot called Summer Rain with two lookalike characters that I had to re-read in order to understand the ending, and even now I’m not totally sure I get it…the meaning of the story hinges on an old letter but the key dialogue reveal is sort of vague so I was unsure if I really got it or not. Either way it’s not at all memorable and if it *did* go how I think it did – one character having had a relationship with his lover’s dad when he was a teen – it’s a little bit yucky anyway. My friend Shinami read this one too and told me she interpreted it differently and I can’t remember exactly what she said but it made more sense, so it’s likely that I’m just stupid.
So, who would like this manga? If you’re like 16 and are curious about BL and your mom has parental controls on the internet and you can only get titles with non-porny names that will fly under the radar as innocent, this is a good candidate. Or, if you want to see a shining example of the infamous yaoi Dorito chin, this is one of the more extreme ones I’ve seen in English. For everyone else, just save yourself an hour or two of your life.
TL;DR: A snoozy story about two Dorito-chinned high school teachers who fall in love and go on a date. You just read the whole thing, without reading it.