These two books contain five stories put together, and I guess ‘variety’ is one way to describe them. ‘Full of rape’ is another way I guess. We’ve got…demon threesome rape, captor x captive rape, and hillbilly rapists in Idaho *which isn’t even also* the blood-brother rape pairing. I can’t think of any clever way to combine ‘rape’ and ‘anthology’ for a better name they could have called these, but if there is one out there somewhere floating in the English language – ah yes that’s what they should have called it, that exactly.
I crabbed about this in Kingdom of Selfish Love too, but if you’re going to draw OEL yaoi, why even bother if you’re either censoring or not showing any dick? Like actually though? I mean, there’s some uncomfortable sex scenes and pairings in here I guess that’s almost a positive for these particular titles, but in general, no censorship laws is the one thing OEL yaoi has going for it and not using it is just letting their free ice cream melt.
Vol 1 consists of three stories. The first is somewhat true to the YP formula of ok story, bad art, and as previously mentioned, an uncomfortable amount of rape and abuse. It’s a fantasy circus tale centering around a half-demon incubus uke who runs away from his captors with his childhood friend and then they fuck on a ship somewhere. The art is courtesy of Yishan Studios – they show up a lot in YP books in addition to Studio Kosen, and are at around the same level of amateur (S.K. do the next story, I guess they didn’t want to be outdone).
Story #2, ‘Gang Love,’ is about two juvenile delinquents who reunite after meeting in reform school. It’s by someone named Sean Michael Wilson and has been blessed with art by the one and only Studio Kosen/Kosaru (lucky him). It’s actually some of their better art I’ve seen although that’s not saying much – it doesn’t have any glaring anatomical disasters at least, so I guess it’s passable, although it is a short story so perhaps they had more time to spend on it and tighten it up. Virtually all of their work appears to rely heavily on source material and copies or possibly outright traces figures and expressions from actual manga, but it’s not *as* noticeable in this particular story, and that is perhaps the best compliment I can give them. Studio Kosen also attempts to further their delusional hope that people will think they’re actually Japanese manga artists (they’re Spanish) by choosing to collaborate on a story that is set in Japan (cringe…come on, people, you’re not fooling anyone) even though the setting has no bearing on the story. They have also evidently discovered flower stencils because they use them on Every. Single. Page.
I don’t want to say it was good, but it wasn’t awful. I’m also biased because it has one of my favorite scenarios in yaoi, which is: guys watching porn and masturbating together. If you tell me that straight guys don’t do this, I reject your reality and substitute my own.
Story #3 is called ‘Deliverance’ and next time I hope for ‘something original,’ I’m going to be careful what I wish for. The back of the book describes this one as ‘the tale of a boy who escapes his sadistic hillbilly captors, and recovers from their torture with the help of a romantically vulnerable cop.’ Waaahhhht? Well that’s uh…certainly something I’ve never fantasized about in any way shape or form.
I guess this one would be considered the highlight of the book just for pure originality alone, although I feel weird calling it that because the whole concept was a bit icky. The escaped boy is named Aden, and he and another boy have been chained up naked by a dog collar for five years in the house of two hillbillies somewhere in Idaho.
One day they forget to put the collar on and Aden makes a run for it, after which he finds himself in the care of an ex-cop who attempts to undo the trauma he has suffered. With his penis of course.
The premise might not be for everyone, but a story like this is definitely unique to OEL yaoi and that’s at least worth something in my book – you’d never find this in Japanese manga. Art-wise it’s about on par with the other two but had the potential to be the best. The artist (credited as Amelia Woo) has clearly allotted about 90% of her drawing practice on faces/expressions and anatomical drawing and lighting, and it shows. The neglected 10% is perspective and interior backgrounds, and the contrast between the mostly-good figures and mostly-bad backgrounds is somewhat distracting. It looks like she freehanded them from imagination and real manga artists don’t even do that half the time. But drawing people and faces well is a lot harder than drawing backgrounds well, so she’s already in the upper half of the pack of YP’s featured artists – she just needs a bit of practice and some good source material for interiors. Drawing backgrounds is a big part of drawing comics, possibly even half of drawing comics, so it needs practice too even though it’s not as fun.
Vol 2 (New and improved! 20% Less Carbs)
This volume was decidedly better than the first. That isn’t only because there were only two stories to get through instead of three, although that may be one reason (it was definitely a reason). But no the main reason is that the first story had legitimately good art and since there’s only two, that accounts for half the book, so already that’s a step up. Plus the second one had a rich feisty dilf uke which is one of my favorite flavors after cookies n’ cream.
Of all five in these anthologies put together, this first one – called ‘Divided’ – was definitely the best art-wise (drawn by Studio Xian Nu, whoever that is), and elevated the story itself which was mostly good but had a glaring ‘wtf’ sticking straight out of the plot that was hard to ignore – more on that below.
This fantasy tale set in a cold mountain village stars Raffe, leader of the Eurydis peoples, and his 19 year old younger brother Sunn. Raffe hates the neighboring Hirohyl people so much that whenever they come onto their tribal territory, he personally rapes them (talk about commitment to your hatred). He also rapes Sunn a lot, who in turn rapes a young Hirohyl captive named Ciclo who he feels an attachment to.
This story is longer and somewhat more complex than the others and is nice to look at if you can get past the fact that they toss out rapings like confetti on New Year’s, even between blood brothers.
Besides full-brother rape, it has a laughably dumb plot twist. So after raping him, Sunn is supposed to kill Ciclo on top of the mountain. On the way there, with Ciclo in handcuffs, they hole up in a cave due to bad weather and then suddenly Sunn is like, ‘oh wait, I know you! I remember that we used to be madly in love as childhood friends! So in love, in fact, that my brother got jealous and killed your parents which started the hatred between our peoples and then proceeded to violently rape me for the last decade! Let’s have consensual cave sex then run away together, even though I just raped you yesterday!’ and Ciclo is like ‘yeah great idea!’ Yo, wtf? How…why…what? Well I guess questioning the logic of BL stories is meaningless but like…that’s ridiculous. Good thing this one had nice art to frost the cake with because otherwise I think I would have tossed it across the room at that point.
We’re finally at the last one, ‘Servant’ – this is by Yamila Abraham herself (the founder of Yaoi Press), and she usually writes stories that are interesting if nothing else, occasionally good even. Objectively, this one is probably in the middle of the pack somewhere, but I liked it more than most people probably would because it has one of my favorite kind of ukes. The premise is that a gay country bumpkin named Jody gets work as a butler in the mansion of wealthy (also gay) Mr. Alatore, who employs the whole village in his factory. Jody is uneducated and rude and makes a terrible butler, but aggressively pursues his much older employer, who falls for him anyway against all logic. Eventually Jody fucks him over the dinner table using butter as lube like that scene from ‘Last Tango in Paris,’ and then they…cuddle I think?
Jody was the seme and he pursued Alatore in a kind of predatory way that began to have a whiff of elder abuse, and Alatore hits him with his cane (not a eupehmism) a few times but I guess Jody likes this because he masturbates thinking about it at one point. The art was serviceable but they seemed to spend an inordinate amount of time shading Jody’s hair in every panel, which had a distracting amount of contrast. He also talked in a super hillbilly accent the entire time which was annoying after about 2 panels.
As mentioned I liked this one more than most people probably would because there’s a rare-ish trope in here that I really like – i.e. older powerful semes who are uptight tsunderes but then submit to their desires, plus it gets the elusive dilf bonus – but it fell short of its potential due to some decisions about how to portray it, but I’m not sure if that lay with the writer or artist. For example, there is some backstory and hints about the homophobic villagers, Jody once working in Alatore’s factory, and Alatore’s murdered ex-lover Drake that seems to take up a lot of conversational room, but none of it is ever shown, I think the story only has like two scenes outside of the mansion. They could have done with some flashbacks or more variety in the visuals to help move the plot forward more organically; it feels artificially dragged to move along their relationship half the time. I also think I liked the concept itself more than anything because the characters themselves are not very convincing. The sole reason for their getting together seems to be that they’re the only two gay people around, they don’t have anything in common or seem to have a believable bond. To be honest I think I would have liked it better as a fanfiction, with more room to expand the story, and more room for my weird dilf-loving imagination to fill in the visual blanks.
I want to remind you again that neither of these two books show any no peen even though they’re OEL titles, which should be a fine-able offense. I was going to suggest that you stop reading this review and write your congressperson about this right now but then I remembered that these came out in 2007 and also your congressperson is likely more worried about sending dick pics to minors important congressional things so I guess instead maybe just be disappointed instead. I’m pretty sure YP just hawked these at cons and on their webstore too, it’s not like they were a shelf below Harry Potter at Barnes & Noble, so they have even less of an excuse for not giving us the cash & prizes.
I have one more Yaoi Press title in the pile to go, and oh boy, just wait until you see what I saved for last…
TL;DR The five stories contained in these two OEL anthologies swing wildly in terms of setting and characters, but one unfortunate thing they have in common is that they’re all censored – a downright egregious sin for an OEL title and thankfully one that they corrected in their next series of anthologies (Yaoi Hentai). True to the YP formula, the stories are all ‘ok’ or ‘good’ but the art fluctuates in quality, and the default setting for sex scenes seems to be rape, which doesn’t exclude blood brothers. Ick.