Yaoi manga reviews and fujoshi ramblings
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.
Continue reading “BLUE SKY (Yuko Kuwabara)”
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….
Continue reading “PARADISE ON THE HILL (Momoko Tenzen)”
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.
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.
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.
Continue reading “DUETTO (Aoi Kujyou)”
Is shounen-ai for kids a thing? If so, this might qualify. It’s so basic, so superficial, and so unoffensive, I feel like it’s almost a coloring book. It’s barely even a 16+ rating and might even be as fluffy as Almost Crying which is saying something. The dialogue is just so dumb and the two stories featured here are just so silly, you could probably read it while drunk and high and still understand it perfectly. Possibly better. It also occurred to me that reading it backwards might improve on the story because the confession inexplicably happens in chapter 1 with no lead-up and then nothing really develops after that, so if you read it the other way it’s almost like you get more plot development! #badyaoihacks
Continue reading “STOP BULLYING ME! (Natsuho Shino)”
This was one of the most boring yaoi I’ve read in recent memory; I may as well have been reading a school textbook. I was thinking about the most mundane shit during it, like that I need more granola when I go to the store tomorrow and if I should really cancel Funimation yet (I should have like 2 years ago probably, but they really are taking their sweetass time porting everything over to Crunchyroll). My eyes were glazing over even during the steamy bits. The story was so predictable and trite and the art was passable but not really to my liking. I’ve certainly read worse, but I just really struggled to get through this one. Maybe I’ve just read so much bad yaoi that mediocre yaoi is now dead on arrival, who knows.
Continue reading “CANDY (Satomi Sugiya)”
My manga friend told me today this was the worst yaoi she’d ever read, and gave it 1/10 – so naturally, and very excitedly, I had to pull it from my shelf and read it immediately. I mean damn, that’s harsh, I’ve never even rated anything that low (not even Kingdom of Selfish Love, which is unfit even for toilet paper). Although I keep in mind that ratings are totally subjective opinions, I should also remember that most people don’t deliberately do the equivalent of yaoi dumpster diving, looking for the smelliest piles in the darkest corners and I’ve seen some shit. I’m going to have that faraway stare of a war veteran one of these days.
‘Grandma, why are you missing a leg?’
‘Oh sonny, back in the war, they dropped Studio Kosen titles on us, so many that we were slaughtered like cattle under a black rain of death, followed by Poison Cherry Drive for good measure which ate away our limbs and our will to live…’
‘Wow, how did you escape?’
‘I saw a glowing beam in the sky. It was the Incredible Kintaro himself, swinging his giant penis around the sky like Wonder Woman’s lasso, striking down the enemy with his thousand-pound titanium balls while yelling ‘Tofu Ball Choke!’ and shooting lasers out of his urethra.’
‘Grandma, you’re full of shit.’
‘Hey, respect your elders you little fuckhead.’
If there was a such a thing as cheap, no-frills takeout in yaoi form, this would be it. Made from a standard recipe with no surprises, and maybe a little bland at spice level 2-3 , but it meets your expectations and satisfies your appetite. Plus you didn’t have to cook. No leftovers though, they didn’t give you any more sex extra rice than was required 🥡 sad panda…🐼
Last month I was at some comic book store and found one of those ‘guide to anime / manga’ books, this one by Dark Horse. Whenever I see one of these, I always flip to the yaoi section to see if they have some hot photos for educational purposes. In a brief note about shotacon, they mentioned that Almost Crying is one of the only shota licenses we have in English, albeit a non-erotic one (Wikipedia mentions this too by the way, but seeing it in a more official medium had more weight). I have had Almost Crying on my shelf for a while but didn’t realize it was a title worthy of any special mention among June’s numerous mid 2000s shounen-ai licenses, so I was a bit surprised. I mean, lots of yaoi has characters that could pass for shota boys, especially the ukes, and while the cover of this book is certainly indicative of how the characters look it didn’t strike me as ‘oh wow this is positively groundbreaking for the US yaoi market’ I guess. I’m also not really into shota either and am perfectly content that it’s largely located in the ‘you have to know where to look’ category, but the non-sexual nature of this title definitely broadens its appeal. And appealing it is, in exactly the way it wants to be.