The BLacklist: Yaoi Reviews – Page 11 – Yaoi manga reviews and fujoshi ramblings

January 18, 2019April 25, 2024

SOLFEGE (Fumi Yoshinaga)

Surprisingly, this is my first Fumi Yoshinaga title. I never actively sought out Antique Bakery although I somehow still own it, and it’s among her most well-known works (you know you’ve written a hit when it gets made into a Korean live-action movie). Though not yaoi itself, she made a lengthy catalog of yaoi doujinshi to go with it that I am going to go out on a limb and guess is probably a bit different from Maki Murakami’s Gravitation dj, but one can dream.

November 15, 2018April 25, 2024

YOU & HARUJION (Keiko Kinoshita)

I don’t think I’ve ever bought a book for myself that I knew I wasn’t going to like before – until I started this blog, that is. The reason was twofold: 1) Bad yaoi is more fun to review. And rarely am I positive that a book is going to be terrible before I start it, thus I didn’t want to pass up this opportunity. 2) Altruism. That $2 was a sacrifice for you guys, to wander deep in the dark cave and bring back photo evidence of what that lies within, so that no one else has to risk their lives. If this is my last post and it’s three months after the datestamp, I probably didn’t make it out alive. Spread yabara on my grave, fam.

October 18, 2018December 9, 2022

BLurb: The Boku no Pico Controversey

Well, it happened. I approached the cliff, looked down into the yawning abyss of no return, and took a running jump.

That’s right, I finally watched Boku no Pico. In my defense I was looking for Boku no Hero Academia, but I just…uh…clicked the wrong thing. They look a bit similar, you know? They both have…blonde protagonists. Easy to mix up. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

July 11, 2018July 12, 2018

Yaoi Apparel: Need a Shirt for That Special Occassion?

It’s 4:00pm and you’re supposed to have dinner with your mom and her new boyfriend in an hour. You’re pawing through your dresser looking through something to wear, that special something that says “look mom, I’m totally normal and also go to church every Sunday, and your new boyfriend will think so too.” That green dress she gave your for your birthday one year? Hmm, not your color anymore since you just got those pastel purple highlights. How about that white romper that you got at TJ Maxx? Ugh, no – does *anyone* besides Beyonce look good in a white romper? You look at the clock, you have to leave in 10 minutes, your cat is staring at you with that you-better-not-forget-to-feed-me-before-you-leave look. Ugh, decision time. You’re at the bottom of the last drawer now. You lift up a blue striped cardigan you haven’t worn since college because it shrunk in the wash that time you accidentally did laundry while drunk, and then, suddenly, THERE IT IS –

Continue reading “Yaoi Apparel: Need a Shirt for That Special Occassion?”

June 15, 2018December 9, 2022

Man Discovers Library Has Yaoi Manga, Hilarity Ensues

Back when I worked at a clothing store in high school, this angry mother came in and yelled at me because her 15-year old daughter bought thong underwear from our store. The mother felt she was too young to wear them and that we shouldn’t have sold them to her. I coolly told her that we don’t ask for age verification to buy underwear, that it’s our obligation as a business to exchange money for goods, and a parent’s responsibility to oversee what their teens are buying. She acted like this had never occurred to her once in her life, seriously. The nerve of these evil corporations selling thongs to teenagers, we’re the real problem. Smh.

This is an old article, but it deserves to be remembered, not in the least because the cringe factor in this guy scanning sex scenes from a yaoi book and alerting the local news (seriously, that happened). Can you imagine scrolling through your newsfeed that morning? ‘North Korea launches another nuke, yawn. Some crooked politican is being crooked, yawn. What’s this, our local library has gay Japanese porn? Honey, do we still have a library card?’

June 8, 2018April 26, 2024

RED (Sanae Rokuya)

I think I speak for everyone when I say that the first thing that comes to mind when one thinks of feudal Japan is homoerotic tension. No? Ok, samurai first, but homoerotic tension is definitely second. Still no? Ugh, fine, samurai then Scientologist robot dinosaurs, jeez, making me say the obvious one. But thankfully we have unsung heroes like Rokuya here who take a period of history and add a dash of spice from their magic man love pouch to make a whole different recipe. Who can say for certain it didn’t originally taste this way, anyway? Ain’t historical fantasy great?

June 5, 2018April 25, 2024

KISS ALL THE BOYS (Shiuko Kano)

Even if you’re not a fan of Shiuko Kano’s work, it’s hard not to acknowledge her vast contributions to this wild and wonderful niche of ours – she debuted in the mid-90s and has been steadily churning out work ever since then, which surely merits some kind of lifetime achievement prize (a crystal penis statue?). Perhaps she will even join the likes of Ayano Yamane and Hinako Takanaga in the pantheon of BL goddesses one day for dedication to the art of porncraft, on a pedestal where dick-shaped vines gleefully snake up your winged sandals and a statue of a golden ass (!) stands at your side. If nothing else she’s staked her claim in the genre by sheer willpower and steady output of work, since she never really had a blockbuster series in English (Punch Up is stellar, but not on the level of, say, the Finder series). She is also fearless in what she commits to paper, for better or for worse, with a unique style that she has managed to tweak through the years to keep fresh. That’s the top cushion of the sandwich for what I’m about to say, which is that sometimes her stories are so trashy or ridiculous or her characters so unattractive with their weird short haircuts and prominent noses that I just can’t get into it (like Affair for example). BUT, here’s the bottom cushion – with a body of work as large as hers, there’s bound to be some duds mixed in, right? Thankfully, this isn’t one of them.

May 15, 2018January 6, 2025

LOVE BUS STOP (Ritsu Natsumizu)

I once came across this title when I first started collecting. Back in the day when naught but a few Makoto Tateno titles and random volumes of Junjou Romantica graced a single shelf above my bed, I flipped through it a used bookstore and didn’t see anything that grabbed me. I passed on it then, but this was before I developed a thing for handsome salarymen fantasizing about freeing each other from their expensive suits and ties and semblances of self-control to fucking each other in the learn-by-example way that working for The Man has taught them. With this new insight ripened and in season, I came across this title again, a year later – and now here we are. Harvest we shall.

May 9, 2018August 13, 2024

WHEN THE HEAVENS SMILE (Aki Senoo)

If you feel that the saying ‘variety is the spice of life’ also applies to shounen-ai school stories, here’s something that covers a few food groups on that particular plate. We’ve got strawberries, ghosts, horny librarians, alcoholism, poorly whistled renditions of ‘Scarborough Fair,’ depression brought on by cell phone novels, and of course – a proper staple of this kind of diet – a school roof blow job. Where else would you get the protein? (!)

April 26, 2018January 7, 2025

DOUBLE TROUBLE (Takashi Kanzaki)

I don’t think I’ve read an English-licensed yaoi yet title with a true threesome in it, unless BL brain fog 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.