The BLacklist: Yaoi Reviews – Page 7 – Yaoi manga reviews and fujoshi ramblings

December 3, 2022July 12, 2024

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?

December 3, 2022April 23, 2024

WORDS OF DEVOTION (Keiko Konno)

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.

October 27, 2022August 13, 2024

STAR (Keiko Konno)

I have never dated anyone I’ve worked with, though most of my coworkers being women probably has something to do with that. I still don’t think I’d be able to do it though (unless I worked with Tom Hiddleston dressed as Loki, in which case I’ll come back and edit this) as it never seems to go as well as it does in fiction and having to work with an ex seems like it would suck. Either way I really love the workplace romance trope in yaoi, especially when it isn’t the standard “boss seme and secretary uke.” I liked that in this story, the two main characters don’t really a power imbalance, they just happen to be coworkers and feel like equals rather than one being tiny and whiny.

August 7, 2022October 30, 2023

DUETTO (Aoi Kujyou)

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.

August 1, 2022April 23, 2024

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+.

July 24, 2022April 23, 2024

BASEBALL HEAVEN (Ellie Mamahara)

My dad loved baseball, and though I happily went to countless games with him growing up I did not really know what was going on half the time and found the slow pace of the game to be frustrating. So dad, I just want to let you know that you can be proud of me right now, because I’m reading a baseball book. I’m lifting it up right now so that you can see it from heaven. Uhh, don’t look too closely at the summary though…what happens in it you ask? Hmmm…baseball. Baseball happens! That’s all you need to know!

There should really be more dedicated sports yaoi out there, I don’t get to use the sports tag enough. If the amount of yaoi doujins out there of Prince of Tennis, Haikyuu, Free!, and Kuroko’s Basketball are any indication, nothing gets a fujoshi’s imagination going like the all-you-can-eat shipping buffet of a bishounen-stacked male sports team roster. Who knows, perhaps it is the sheer amount of sports anime BL doujins out there – combined with having to actually know about the sport to be convincing, and having to draw a decent amount of action and a minimum of like 8 characters – that dissuades mangakas from doing too many original BL sports series, because why put in the effort for all that when you can just spin up some lewd Kagami x Kuroko stories for Comiket for some easier dough? That’s just my guess anyway. Ah, someone should make an ice skating yaoi! I bet no one has done that yet…

July 23, 2022April 25, 2024

LOVE SHARE (Aoi Kujyou)

Aoi Kujyou is something of an uncommon anomaly in the yaoi world – a male. You would never know this, as his art style and stories are very much the same as his female counterparts, but it’s interesting when a male artist chooses to make BL for a female audience. I think it’s safe to say his work is a collective ace in the pocket for wooing girls *or* gay guys, so this dude is really straddling the strait here and his friends are probably all jealous at the power he wields. He’s still an active mangaka now and has quite the back catalog too. As far as this early work of his goes though, it was a bit of a dud for me overall due to some missing context and no clear plot development. There’s some prrrrrretty dang hot kissing though. Gay kissing. Shh don’t tell my mom.

July 21, 2022April 25, 2024

STOP BULLYING ME! (Natsuho Shino)

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

July 18, 2022April 23, 2024

CANDY (Satomi Sugiya)

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.

April 20, 2022April 23, 2024

HAPPY YAOI YUM YUM (Yaoi Press)

We have (fucking finally) reached the end of the Yaoi Press pile, and I purposely saved the best for last – so if Yaoi Press titles are too offensive to your eyesight to finish more than one review, make it this one. And if you’ve read them all so far and are ready to tap out due to early onset degenerative eyesight damage , it’s too late to turn back now, my friend. We’re nearing the summit and that last avalanche blocked our descent path. Plus, do you have any idea how many Yaoi Press titles there are?! There’s like 60 of them, think how merciful I am! This isn’t Everest, this is a bunny slope! Don’t you want to see what’s at the top of the mounta…errr…large snowy hill? There’s a lot going on up there but just from this low vantage point, I can see we’ve got dudes getting fucked with corn, tentacle kemonomimi rape, and a trap porn parody of Goldilocks and Three Bears. Woo-wee! Tighten up your boots and let’s get a move on. Those people above us on the ski lift are just pussies . Oh, look, there’s a sign:

“This sounds like a great book for my 8-year-old, I just want to make sure it’s censored?”

Warning: Very NSFW images after the jump.