Much how I feel about most ‘classics’ in literature, this is a series that I wanted to have read, but didn’t actually want to read. When it comes to yaoi, I usually feel this way about early 00s-era multi-volume 16+ series, like Gravitation. Whether or not Fake and Gravitation would be regarded as ‘shounen-ai classics’ (at least in the US market) is debatable – actually I don’t think the subgenre has been around long enough here, much less with any real visibility, for people to start throwing around that word yet. Still, they’re perhaps among the most well-known of the shounen-ai books, if only because they didn’t have a lot of competition back in 2003. More pontification on that after the jump.
The reason I shy away from these older multi-volume 16+ series is largely because 1) pacing issues/too much filler, which affect a lot of multi-volume series tbf 2) a large time commitment 3) nothing explicit 4) the drawing style either feels outdated or just isn’t up my alley. 5) They’re often mostly geared towards a teenage audience and not an adult one. I also think context needs some consideration, these series are a product of their time. 2003 was a year before you could easily pull up free manga/scanlations/porn on the internet, or actually, really anything on the internet, because you probably still had dial-up and your mom had to hang up the phone for you to log onto AIM. June wasn’t even around yet and you couldn’t exactly go down to the bookstore and buy anything resembling a Sakira title, and the LGBT community was less visible than it is today. Yaoi was pretty underground stuff, difficult to acquire and definitely not in English.
