Tag: university/college

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PICNIC (Yugi Yamada)

Yugi Yamada usually has decent stories, but they tend to be very slow slice-of-lifes. This, however, was a book of one-shots, so it forced her to speed things up. I think her story ideas and characters are her strong suit, so having more of that helped overcome the things she doesn’t do well, namely…drawing. It’s no secret I’m not a big fan of Yamada’s art, but this mainly applies to her earlier work like this – her art definitely gets more polished later on while still bearing her stylistic signature, although we don’t really have her most recent stuff in English.

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DON’T BLAME ME (Yugi Yamada)

Yugi Yamada’s work echoes Fumi Yoshinaga’s – quiet and serious slice of life dramas and art that has a comfy vintage feel to it no matter when it was drawn – but her work never reached the same level as the great Yoshinaga, whose stories were usually more thought-provoking, unique, emotional, and mature. Still, Yamada was a prolific mangaka who was semi-popular in the late 90s and early 00s, has a lot of work in English, and carved out a niche of her own drawing realistic BL dramas. Don’t Blame Me definitely comes off as rough in places, but it’s mostly ok for being done in 2000 and I’ve read a lot worse.

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TRICKY PRINCE (Yukari Hashida)

This is one of those yaoi that’s not necessarily bad but it’s the sort of pairing/setting combination that I’m not personally into, so I didn’t enjoy it very much. For one, I dislike the ‘perfect in every way’ character type in yaoi. The one on the cover who would be Hitler’s wet dream except for the fact he’s gay is Prince Willis – rich, royalty, and impossibly good looking – and, to me anyway, incredibly boring as a fictional character. I know this is supposed to be like the ultimate female fantasy or whatever but it’s just so uncreative and overdone to me. You could probably throw a dart blindfolded in the 50 cent romance paperback section at Goodwill and hit a book that stars this exact character without even trying. He also looks too much like a woman for my tastes, but that is secondary to his other qualities. And who does Prince Willis chase after in this literary flight of fancy? A completely normal and even more boring ‘regular’ guy who is totally below his level – a type of pairing that I can’t stand. So, not off to a good start here.

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PARTY (Tatsumi Kaiya)

This book is a ‘party,’ all right – the kind of house party in college where a bunch of people are invited but only four dudes show up, no one really talks or has much in common, and so all of you awkwardly sit there drinking PBRs and watching a bad movie while swiping on your phones looking for something better to do or an excuse to leave. That’s kind of like this book, except in this book the four of you are gay and two of you are dating and one starts giving the other a hand job but then they get in a fight with each other and one smacks and possibly rapes the other one, and the third and fourth show up, get introduced, make small talk, then fuck on the futon and then everyone leaves. We’ve all been to one of those, right?

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AS MANY AS THERE ARE STARS (Miecohouse Matsumoto)

Every time I unearth a weird, perverse title lurking in my collection within a sweet and innocent-looking cover like this, it’s a little bit bittersweet because that’s one less one waiting to be discovered – and even though I regularly do add new titles to my collection, they’re usually recently-published ones, and modern BL that gets a physical release usually nowdays isn’t quite as – er – ‘special’ as this one.

As Many As There are Stars is an obscure and somewhat recent June release that isn’t pricey-rare, but I never see it in anyone’s collection. This book is very…actually I don’t even know what to call this. It’s just…weird. The art is weird. The tone is weird. The sex scenes are weird. The dialogue is weird. There’s a scene where one guy who has a ‘body fluid fetish’ gets off by licking between his partner’s dirty toes while sexually fantasizing about the salt/fat/grease content of the latter’s body, followed by very serious themes regarding suicidal ideation and parental abandonment, followed by cousin incest.

Oh yeah, and it’s rated 16+.

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DOUBLE TROUBLE (Takashi Kanzaki)

I don’t think I’ve read an English-licensed yaoi yet title with a true threesome in it, unless this glass of Cabernet is just affecting my memory at the moment. There are certainly a lot of titles that tease at it but never deliver, often just for fanservice and never intending to. But I can’t recall another book – besides this one – that basically writes a threesome into the plot as the resolution, mentions it multiple times as something all three characters want and plan to do, and then when it’s about to actually happen, the curtain closes and there’s no final act. It’s not that the ending is bad, it’s that there isn’t an ending at all. I couldn’t believe this story was complete, such was the abruptness of this. It’s so absurd, that I feel the need to warn people beforehand. The gleeful, malicious cackle of Lady Blue Balls echoes strongly with this one.

Thankfully, there’s a lot I liked in this sexy school comedy that somewhat made up for it, in the sense that you were promised a slice of cake but given a few stale Oreos instead but you just really want something sweet so whatever.

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LOVE LESSON (Hanae Sakazaki)

So, I don’t mind student-pursuing-teacher storylines, and I don’t mind younger semes with older ukes, but if those two things overlap on some kind of yaoi venn diagram it’s not really my cup of tea. Maybe I just haven’t read one I really liked yet, but I think when it gets down to it – college students are one thing, but when I think about the guys I knew at 16, and then pretend they were gay, the idea that any of them would be able to top someone older and more experienced than them, much less satisfy them, much less seduce them, much less have the confidence to try in the first place, much less put another comma in this sentence, is kind of laughable. Granted, I went to Catholic school, so that probably means diddly squat. Maybe in some public schools out there people were so used to this that when Johnny bent Mr. Smith over in the janitor’s closet after Algebra 2, they didn’t even have to shut the door – and that’s still *if* doing questionable things with the mop handle wasn’t completely off the table. You know those kids that were duller than a tan crayon yet somehow always got good test scores? You gotta wonder…

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A KING’S LESSON (Futaba/Mitsuba)

…in which I learned that apparently Japan isn’t really familiar with Christmas lights. I know they don’t really celebrate it like we do but I definitely saw them on the trees when I was in Japan around November, maybe they just don’t associate them with the holiday? Hmm. Oh, also, there’s a weird weiner in here. Like, not that I’m a professional, but I’m pretty sure they’re not supposed to look like a wet finger.

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