Tag: high school

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OTHELLO (Toui Hasumi)

If I had to guess which yaoi books on my shelf be legitimatly tear-inducing, Othello would probably have been in the bottom half of that list. An R16 that looks kind of like a lame vampire story with that gothic cover font? Nah. Yet, as it turned out, to say Othello was moving, beautiful, and heartbreaking would be an understatement – this book absolutely came out of left field. I guess really I just wasn’t expecting it to be so touching, much less serious.

You’re probably wondering what the hell is so special about your standard oversize mid-2000s R16 June book, of which there are dozens. Trust me, I was surprised too.

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LOVE QUEST (Lily Hoshino)

Love Quest is the book that popped my Lily Hoshino virginity. I was starting to get self-conscious about it, so figured I better suck up the pain and get it over with. Despite countless ads in the back of June books touting her as the ‘queen of yaoi’ (a title which I can only assume was bestowed by someone who clearly has not read a lot of yaoi), her work does not generally appeal to me, because you honestly can’t tell who has a penis and who doesn’t in a lot of her stories. At least for one character in this one it turned out to be correct – though the two (three?) ukes all looked very, very feminine. Too feminine. I mean come on, that dude on the right looks like he’s about to shoot a Maybelline commercial.

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DASH! (Isaku Natsume)

Oh my God, this book. This freaking book. I never thought a shounen-ai could get my heart pounding like a schoolgirl talking to her crush. Yes a shounen-ai, as in no explicit sex – that’s a feat for someone who has spent enough time in the dark corners of the internet to have careful instructions to trusted people to destroy my hard drives upon death. And it takes a special kind of sexless BL story to get an 8+ out of me. Plus, it gets a bit hard to regress from M titles once you get far enough in the sin bin. Then again, there is lots of M-rated BL that simply slaps together a lame and unsatisfying sex scene just to reel in your eyeballs with that “explicit content” box, and they are the worst offenders in my opinion – if a book claims to be rated M, it better damn well better be. With 16+ stories, at least I know what I’m getting (or rather, not getting) – you can’t be upset about no sugar in your cornflakes if the box says there isn’t any.

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SWEET REVOLUTION (Honami/Suzuki)

The story in Sweet Revolution was an odd one (not to mention the title itself and what it has in any way to do with the story, but that’s BL for you), it felt like the second part was a completely different story than the first but with the same two main characters…in the middle it very quickly switches from a stereotypical school setting to a mysterious otherworldly realm (if you read/watch a lot of manga/anime, one simply comes to accept isekai in any situation), and after that leap they do not mix again. Still, the pacing was good and the story fun to follow, and it unfolded in a really intriguing way.

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CUT (Toko Kawai)

The feeling I had while reading this manga was akin to hopping into a cold shower when you expected a hot one…it just *completely* threw me off guard. Not that I was expecting light cutesy BL fluff- to be honest I had no expectations and didn’t even read the summary on the back before starting it – but it sure wasn’t this.

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