blrecs

[blrecs]

08/50: bizarre love triangles ("secondo piatto," "close the last door")

I used to joke that every bl generation gets the "Banana Fish," and specifically the Yut Lung character, they deserve. Perhaps every generation also gets their own version of "Close the Last Door." It's an irresistible setup: the main character has an unrequited crush on his straight best friend, makes a mess of himself at the straight best friend's wedding, drunkenly hooks up with another (male) wedding guest who is in love with the bride, stuff happens, happy ending as the two leads learn to move on and love each other. In "Close the Last Door," it is Nagai who is in love with his younger, bubbly coworker Saitou. After the wedding, he finds himself ranting to Honda, who reveals that he was the bride's ex. They get drunk, sleep together, and begin a friends with benefits relationship that is complicated when the bride elopes with another man just one day into the honeymoon. In "Secondo Piatto," Hyunwook is forced to grapple with his childhood friend Heesun marrying his police academy classmate Minseok. At the wedding, he discovers that Minseok's childhood friend Wonyoung has been in love with Minseok this whole time, and, well, they get drunk, sleep together, and begin a friends with benefits relationship.

The similarities in premise (if not plot) between the two series makes it easy to pick out what could be genre (manga vs manhwa) or generational (early 2000s vs 2020) differences. "Close the Last Door" is guilty of many of the critiques one could lob against early 2000s bl as a genre. The characters deny being gay (or bisexual) and, if pressed, would likely describe themselves as only gay for each other (or, in the case of main character Nagai, gay for Saitou and a victim to a lethal combination of Honda and alcohol). The character designs are generic, the seme dark-haired and the uke blond (though not frail or weepy or feminine). Much sex happens while the two mains are intoxicated, and there is a sexual assault scene (but not between Nagai and Honda!). Nagai and Honda manage to bumble into pseudo-marriage and cohabitation without so much as a "what are we?" conversation, and even a year into their relationship are still unable to be honest about their feelings for each other to each other, much less to other people.  The two women in the series (Saitou's ex-wife Remi and Nagai's ex-girlfriend Ryoko) are reduced to catalysts for the main (gay) romance, and Ryoko in particular can come off like a harpy (though Yamada Yugi can't help but imbue her with a feisty charm, the curse of a good author). There is even a spin-off featuring an incestuous relationship (!) between Honda's two older brothers, who appear in "Close the Last Door" volume 2 as confusing side characters if you did not read their dedicated volume.

In contrast, "Secondo Piatto" is enlightened, woke even, at least by 2025 standards. Wonyoung is openly gay and identifies as such, even to Minseok. Hyunwook begins the story self-conceptualizing as straight, but tries hard to grapple with his sexuality when he begins sleeping with Wonyoung regularly. The pressures of homophobia feature in "Secondo Piatto"; it is a story that definitely believes gay people are real, as opposed to just a function of the plot requiring two men to fall in love. Where Ryoko cannot move on from Nagai and also has an interrupted tryst with Honda, Heesun is steadfastly into Minseok and is perfectly correct about why she never married Hyunwook. She is a blameless, charming character whom you could hold nothing against. Hyunwook and Wonyoung talk openly about their relationship and negotiate their boundaries, while Nagai and Honda are petty, scrappy, and constantly allowing Saitou to upturn the fragile balance of their relationship. Hyunwook gets the "fully smitten top who would do anything for his partner" treatment. His yearning is explicit, emotionally healthy, and mature, full of demonstrations of his commitment to Wonyoung and his explicit, emotionally healthy expectations for what a relationship with him would look like. Honda, on the other hand, tolerates Nagai's antics until they both reach a breaking point, after which he has a mental breakdown where he can barely express his feelings, gets embarrassed, and then gives Nagai a blowjob before sending Nagai back to deal with Saitou. I am not joking when I say this is how "Close the Last Door" volume one ends.

I grew up in a world where there weren't many bl dramas or movies and the biggest gay ships were largely noncanonical (even, as in the case of Supernatural, the noncanonical status became more and more strained). We called shipping two male characters in a noncanonical gay relationship "slash." This allowed us to differentiate it from yaoi or shounen-ai or boys' love/BL, where one could still ship a noncanonical relationship (the losing side of a love triangle, for example) but it would never be dismissed out of hand as impossible simply for being gay. Even after all these years, I am used to, even more comfortable, living in a space where I read canon against itself, where my pairing fights the story somehow, where every love story is by definition a struggle. I chafe at being handed an easy happy ending, even if I know that's the bargain I struck with the author when starting a story. I know, I know—I should probably be in therapy.

It is easy to see why Hyunwook and Wonyoung would fall for each other and end up together in "Secondo Piatto." Their romance is so very legible to the reader, the main takeaway of the story. Wonyoung yearns to be transformed into someone completely new who will fall in love with a completely new stranger, and together they will become two strangers who are in love with each other and have absolutely nothing to do with Wonyoung's past and Minseok. But love is honest, love is kind. Love means knowing and accepting the other for who they are, which is what Hyunwook offers. He sees Wonyoung, all of Wonyoung, and doesn't turn away. Minseok could never see Wonyoung as he really was—but then again, Wonyoung never let him. As for Hyunwook, he has to learn that love is something to fight for, instead of an inevitable reward you are given for standing silently by. You can learn lessons on healthy communication from "Secondo Piatto." It is a good manual for what to want in a relationship.

But what can we say about Honda and Nagai and "Close the Last Door?" They truly feel like two people who happened into a circumstance where they needed each other, who never dig themselves out of that hole. In a way, "Close the Last Door" has the air of the slash fanfic. You could easily see a world where there was some main canon featuring Saitou and his wife, and Yamada Yugi got it in her head to ship two side characters (Saitou's doting coworker and his wife's ex-boyfriend) and ended up writing a whole doujinshi about how they get together. They butt heads, they struggle, they seem to be fighting against the genre's expectation that they should end up together. Their happy ending is not the point, because it was never the plot. It is so besides the point that Yamada Yugi even keeps Saitou around for much, much longer than you would expect. After all, he has main character energy. By volume two, Saitou is fully a third wheel in the Nagai-Honda household, to the point where Yamada even pulls out the classic "if the two of us were dangling off a cliff, who would you save?" test. (The answer will delight you, if you're a sicko like me.)

Which is to say, I love "Close the Last Door." Don't get me wrong; I liked "Secondo Piatto" a lot too! The strength of Hyunwook and Wonyoung's interactions, their open communication with each other even in uncomfortable situations, made it a refreshing read, and there are some moments of such sharp writing about the weight of longing and codependency that I took many, many screenshots. But "Close the Last Door" is so messy, so human, so full of bad decisions and characters tolerating bad behavior from each other. Honda and Nagai argue and have sex and sometimes have sex while arguing and it makes me clap like a seal every time. If "Secondo Piatto" is about drawing boundaries, "Close the Last Door" is about greed and not having to confront your choices. Nagai wants everything. He wants to have his cake (be in a relationship with Honda) and to eat it too (love and pamper his idol Saitou). He does not want to put other people's feelings first.  He doesn't want to have to choose, and above all, he doesn't want to admit to Saitou or Honda that he's chosen Honda.

This has always been Yamada Yugi's sweet spot: vivid, human characters who are messy and bad with their words, who never quite say "I love you" but who find ways to make themselves understood. In the world of Yamada Yugi, it is better, sometimes, to let things go unsaid. In Bonus Track 3 of "Close the Last Door" volume 2, Honda has to tell Nagai about his brothers. (This is literally Honda fulfilling his destiny of being a side character in another canon!) But through it all, he is vague and elliptical. "So they're really like that?" Nagai asks. "Probably, but I haven't confirmed it," Honda replies. His brothers' relationship is something Honda has never asked about, will never ask about, but fully understands. He begs Nagai to keep it a secret and act like he doesn't know.

In the conversation that follows, Nagai and Honda manage to say "I love you" over and over again, without actually saying anything of substance. And this is how the main story of "Close the Last Door" ends, with Nagai and Honda bickering and getting suckered into little jealousy games by Saitou and still bad at having an honest conversation with each other and still being so, so in love. Maybe that's toxic and a red flag in 2025. But "Close the Last Door" works for the same reason slash fanfic works, because its creator wrote a story just because she wanted to see these two particular characters in love. As Mary Oliver might say, you do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles to show you're a green flag or a world class yearner. Sometimes, it is enough to let these two characters love what they love, and that is each other.

"Close the Last Door" (and the spinoff "Open the Door to Your heart") was once upon a time licensed by DMP's imprint June. Some places still offer a way to buy the print versions. "Secondo Piatto" is available through Manta. I read the explicit version here.

[blrecs]

07/50: same as it ever was (sagan sagan, "old-fashioned cupcake")

One of the hardest stories to write and be appreciated for is the ordinary love story between two ordinary characters. Summarized roughly, "Old-Fashioned Cupcake" is so nondescript and generic it feels like a blank template upon which other, more real stories might rest. A man who is nearing forty takes stock of his life and finds it lacking. His subordinate, who is ten years younger, is in love with him. For the thinnest of plot reasons, they begin hanging out. Eventually, they begin dating. Eventually, they are as good as married. Then, the story ends.

How do you even begin to describe Nozue and Togawa? They are barely characters, but not because they are poorly written. Rather, they are so well-written in their specific mundanity that talking about them feels like talking about boring coworkers or friends-of-friends you might know. Nozue in particular seems easy to describe at first, but becomes vaguer and less defined the more you examine him. He is not a traditional workaholic, who throws himself completely into his job and leaves no time for his personal life, or a traditional almost-40-year-old oyaji, who has allowed himself to become sloppy and pathetic. Instead, he takes care of himself, can cook and clean, but has no hobbies or passions. He is meticulous at work and about his own appearance but has allowed himself to be made complacent by the monotony of his day to day. You get the sense, perhaps unfairly, that Nozue has stopped trying and begun to coast. But he is so naturally good-natured and encouraging, so considerate and cheerful to his subordinates, and so allergic to taking on different and bigger responsibilities that he has remained steadfastly adored, though always at a distance, like the way one might treat a mascot or a neighbor's fluffy dog. 

In another story, a man like Nozue might face pressures (from work, from exes, from his friends and family) to do something more. He might, for instance, be encouraged to take on a hobby or visit a new café where he meets a younger, energetic lover who inspires him to change his life, and we would follow Nozue as he gets a brand-new lease on life, learns to appreciate what he has and is renewed by new experiences. And that does happen, in a way. In the opening chapter, Togawa invents a hobby called "taking Nozue on dates without actually calling them dates" so that he can bring Nozue to parfait parlors, souffle pancake restaurants, and the zoo. This brightens Nozue up considerably; by chapter 2, Nozue and Togawa are flirting in the work kitchenette while making coffee and someone pulls the classic "You look more cheerful lately, Nozue-san. Did you get a girlfriend?!" line.

But by chapter three, their teenage girl foodie roleplay ends. Nozue has settled down and come to the realization that his life isn't bad. "I've worked hard and it's earned me people's trust," he muses. "I should probably call on my own experiences and find more things to enjoy and share." He likes his life, even if it isn't exciting. He doesn't need new hobbies or dramatic anti-aging therapy. He just needs to ponder questions of happiness and life on his own time--and apparently, with Togawa by his side.

"Old-Fashioned Cupcake" is not a story about great change. Love does not necessitate Nozue reinventing himself to create a new life with Togawa. Instead, love is Nozue learning to let Togawa into the life he already has. The sequel, "Old-Fashioned Cupcake with Cappuccino," makes this even more obvious. When Nozue finally processes that he's dating his straight, male subordinate who is ten years younger than him and has a painful freakout about it, the stakes are simultaneously so big and yet so small. What is he asking Togawa to take back, exactly? House visits, dates near Nozue's house, making bento lunches, leaving two suits at Nozue's place, a spare key. That's all, and yet at the same time, this is indeed all their relationship consists of: the little things of Togawa's that have become a part of Nozue's life.

Nozue's crisis of faith, too, is solved not by a grand coming out gesture or any material changes in either his or Togawa's lives. Rather, it is through his friends and other coworkers reminding him that he's lived a good life, and that good life will come through for him. "Don't think you have to change who you are," Kirishima tells him. "You're a good person, a good man, and an occasional ass. Good thing you made yourself such a darling." It's because Nozue has always been teaching Togawa to find love in his work that Togawa decides it's his life that needs change, not Nozue's. "Life isn't like the movies," Togawa tells Nozue. "Problems don't end with one solution. And that's okay. If we fight over the same thing a dozen times, let's make up a dozen different ways." It's only because Nozue is so constant, so consistent a person, that Togawa is able to say this so confidently. It's because Nozue was part of Togawa, helped make Togawa into the man he is today, that Togawa is also able to give Nozue exactly the comfort Nozue needs.

Through Nozue, Sagan Sagan forgives us our complacency, our shying away from big consequential decisions, our need for comfort and the familiar. We -- the readers, the other employees on Nozue and Togawa's team, maybe even Sagan Sagan herself -- are drawn into Nozue's orbit, wanting nothing more for Nozue and Togawa than spending each day sleeping in, making apple pie, bickering about laundry, and having toothachingly sweet sex. But what more should life be? The reality is that the life Nozue had in the beginning of the series was fine. He had that revelation by chapter 3. The issue was simply that he needed to open it up for someone who appreciates it and him.

And by the end of "Old-Fashioned Cupcake with Cappuccino," Nozue does just that. He proposes, ring and all, to Togawa. Not while on onsen vacation, not in a romantic candlelit restaurant, but over an ordinary breakfast of natto and rice, in the ordinary apartment he now shares with Togawa, which is full of signs of their ordinary shared life. Togawa's name on a note taped under the nameplate. Moving boxes full of Togawa's camping stuff in one corner. And one detail that has totally slipped my attention, until just this week:

After the proposal, Nozue pours them coffee into cups labeled S and M. This is also the first time that Togawa (Minoru) calls Nozue by his first name.

Nozue's first name is Saki.

Those are couple cups…!

Addendum: I didn't know how to fit this into the essay, but I wanted to gush a little about how amazing the paneling and art is in "Old-Fashioned Cupcake" and its sequel. Sagan Sagan's art is so unique in her love of situating the characters in their space. More than any other bl mangaka I can think of, she loves to draw panels that look at the characters from great distance, on crosswalks or in subway stations or in an overhead shot while at the office. This is paired with loving closeups of insignificant things, like a pair of slippers or a box of tissues or Nozue's hands fiddling with pistachios while he confesses to Kakitani and Kirishima. These details all come together to make Nozue and Togawa's world feel tangibly real. These two approaches combine in a really masterful way by chapter 4. Nozue babysits a drunken Togawa at the train station after a mixer. As they wait for the last train, Sagan Sagan alternates between wider establishing shots of the station as Togawa lies prone on the bench and close-up shots of Nozue and Togawa's faces, then Nozue's hand as he reaches out but does not touch Togawa. The effect is to emphasize how close they are to each other, in the wide emptiness of the station, and yet how impossible it is for Nozue in his current state to close that last little distance with Togawa.

Then, in the remainder of the chapter, Togawa wakes up to find that Nozue has spent the night in his apartment (chastely!). Here, we see for the first time just how much of a slob Togawa is, when left to his own devices, and how he really must have hastily cleaned up everything before letting Nozue through the door in the previous chapter. Books and trash are scattered haphazardly across the apartment, a tie hangs out of a paper bag that is crammed full of clothes, the game controller that was previously shown tucked into a bookshelf now lies on the living room floor. This difference isn't even commented all -- it's just there, a detail of Togawa's characterization that Sagan Sagan took extra pains to establish.

At one point in volume one, Nozue bemoans that with Togawa, "I am getting caught up in the stupid details." But love, Sagan Sagan argues, is made up of these stupid details. Without these stupid details, there is no life together. The morning after Nozue and Togawa have sex for the first time, Nozue ponders what they should do with the rest of their day. He chatters about a dish he wants to eat, climbing equipment that Togawa wants to buy, baking equipment he is eyeing. These are little details that have never shown up onscreen before. It is the new life Nozue realizes he can have now, because he has Togawa. It is a life Nozue and Togawa have lived, are living, together and without us.

"Old-Fashioned Cupcake" and its sequel are available through SuBLime.

[blrecs]

Boys Love as a genre and how do we decide who gets to sit with us at the table

Nora is back by unpopular demand with yet another meta post on Boys Love! Will she ever shut her trap? We just have to wait and see!

I didn't want to come off as reactionary or start something on Tumblr so I'll just add the post's screenshot instead of RB'ing.

Huh... Just because a work from a certain genre defied your expectations, doesn’t mean that it doesn’t belong to the genre. And surely, saying it doesn’t belong to that genre is not a compliment. It feels like we're back to the "Not like other girls," era.

I’ve been reading BL for almost 15 years. As someone who's sh*t at remembering names/dates/specific details but excels at pattern recognition, I've unlocked the skill of foreseeing the plot points from the first chapter. Or even from the very first pages. I'm hardly ever genuinely surprised by a BL work anymore and this is not a flex by any means—just a byproduct of reading so much, for over a very long period of time.

And, sure. There have been extremely formulaic works where the execution was less than unsatisfactory. Or while the story was formulaic, the execution or the additional themes or structure was interesting enough to make it fresh and memorable. Sometimes, there's nostalgia attached to certain works or creators. There's also the inevitable outcome of the media library age where we consume cultural products based on moods, descriptive tags, and tropes. The creator as an individual melts into an intangible mess that is "Music to read a book to."

You'll feel this sentiment in your bones, especially if you've experienced the world before the internet. When you aren't constantly bombarded with things to read/listen/watch and can actually take your time to enjoy, and repeat them (because you have a cassette of that one Alicia Keys album and not much else, honestly) you tend to remember the work and its creator more vividly. What I wanted to highlight with this is that there's a lot at play behind what makes a work memorable beyond its artistic qualities and our connection with said work.

The more I think about genres and tropes, the more I'm certain that works in a genre are distributed according to the Gaussian distribution. This distribution occurs when the system as a whole is composed of many independent processes. Take ten same-sized coins, throw them and note down how many heads (or tails, your choice) you have. The more you throw, the more your graph converges to a Gaussian distribution. Or, the fallen leaves on the ground can form a similar distribution with enough number of leaves.

So when you look at the BL genre as a whole -and let's not forget that only a fraction of the titles make it into the English market- their plot structures follow a Gaussian distribution as well. This makes sense considering the definition, but what would be the distribution against the number of works? The amount of "formulaic" works in that specific genre.

This might read like I'm stating the obvious but as the trends shift and change, the industry will naturally produce much more of whatever's popular at that specific period. Or, if you don't stop picking up books on autopilot, you'll find yourself gravitating towards whatever social media is throwing your way most frequently. Or worse, you'll only read white, heterosexual men. Inevitably, the genre will feel "formulaic" if you don't personally curate and diversify your TBR list.

Because I'll be honest with you. The people I've seen complaining about how BL has become this or that, it's always the toxic characters or non/dub-con, or it's nothing but fwop and thwop anymore, base their notion of BL on only the most popular series—the series that fall on the average of the distribution.

They may be fewer in number, and people may be allergic to digital manga, but fringe works do exist. Take Cat Boys! from Masa Masaru, for example. It's about three friends who gather for food and drinks, and talk about their love/sex lives, or the lack of it while roasting each other at any given chance because that's how close friends are like. There's no romantic/sexual attraction between them, it's very comedic in tone and they just vibe, really. If I didn't know this work was from Home-sha, I'd say Cat Boys! was from Square Enix's line-up! It's very episodic and ridiculous, in the best possible way.

I can name so many works like Cat Boys! that would betray your expectations from a Boys Love manga. One Room Angel, Stigmata, Here and There and Us, Boss and Yasu, I Want You Back, Birds of Shangri-la, God is Probably Left Handed, and How to Kill a Heart just to name a few. If we're talking about Korean vertical-scrolling comics, I could direct you to Ouroboros, Love for Sale, Our Sunny Days, Swing Baby, My Way With You or Shape of Sympathy. These are the titles I come up with at the top of my head, partly because they're my all-time favorites. If I did some research to refresh my memory, I could easily find more.

I don't want to diminish the joy I get from high school/university BL, or from works that I may read and forget, let's say, 6 months down the line. As I've mentioned, what makes a work "memorable" depends on many factors, and sometimes, what matters is to have a pleasant time on a Sunday evening to wind down.

So I have a hard time following the arguments directed toward BL, or any other demographic under the romance genre. I see people complaining about how every BL is the same now, but when a series challenges the standard and delivers what these complainers want, that title is suddenly not a BL anymore. But I know how powerful and diverse BL is, and how capable of doing more than scratching the surface, as I have mentioned in my previous post.

I'm not only lost but frustrated and sometimes even angry at this "not like other girls" treatment. I understand that generally speaking, BL focuses more on romance and queer manga focuses more on identity. Still, as the LGBTQ+ movement becomes more and more prominent and the BL creators become more familiar, these identity discussions and politics seep into BL as a genre as well, intentionally or not. We encounter more characters who identify as gay before meeting the love interest, or the "gay for you" trope slowly leaves its place for "bisexual awakening". Or better yet, the love interest already identifies as bi, just like Yamashita from Can I Buy Your Love from a Vending Machine?. On that note, when are we getting the rest of the volumes in English??!!

Anyways. The long story short of all this is, I beg you to try to gravitate less towards whatever's popular and maybe do more digging before going on and on about how "mid" or "toxic" it is. Because I can attest, as an avid romance reader that the variety BL has is INSANE. Another useful tip would be to pay more attention to the Japanese publisher or the magazine the series is serialized in. Magazines like Shodensha's onBLue or Home-sha's .Bloom and Mellow Kiss, for example, publish plot or character-driven works. So it's no surprise that almost all of the manga I listed above are from these publishers.

And maybe... I don't know. No one gains anything from labeling a work being "above" its genre, whatever that even means. As if belonging to that genre is an insult or an indication of its inferiority.

Heesu in Class 2 IS a BL, and a touching one at that.

[blrecs]

06/50: love me at my most cringe ("punch drunk love," "my dearest patrolman," "happy crappy life")

In manga, love is often said to be a game, and the first one to fall, or at least to admit to falling, is "the loser." But what exactly being the loser in a game of love means only manifests in unhappy scenarios: the winner doesn't need to invest, can use the loser's feelings for their own advantage, is not hurt by endings, can remain aloof and pursue their own life. If you intend to write a story about two people happily and peacefully coexisting with each other in a relationship, these are useless.

In happy love stories, then, where two people carry on in just such bliss, love is not a game. Love is patient, love is kind, and above all, love is honest. The winner is in fact the character who first declares, "I'm in love with you." Being true to your own feelings is a weapon, disarming and potent. It puts the recipient of your feelings on the backfoot. Instead of having the upper hand, they are forced to respond to you, and because this is a happy love story, that response is to return your feelings.

At this point in the essay you are probably expecting me to devolve into heartfelt sentiment. I have asserted in previous weeks that boys' love is about the transformative power of love, after all. But this week I read three stories that take this theme and push it even further in an unexpected direction. Love may be patient, may be kind, but above all love is cringe. It is not only undesirable to be cool, but to be cool is to be false to yourself, and thus an impediment to achieving love. To be cringe is to be free, and true love is being loved at your most cringe, when you are freely being yourself.

Seonwoo, the main character of "Punch Drunk Love," is honest and direct to a fault. Though he presents outwardly as a mousey accountant, he is the most domineering character in the series—it's just that all that dictatorial energy is directed towards living exactly the life he wants. Since childhood he has always done exactly what he wanted to do and worn exactly the clothes he liked, and he is not about to start changing now, unless it's in service of getting dick from the object of his love and overwhelming lust, Jeong Taemoon.

As in so many Korean webtoons, one character's rich family (in this case, Taemoon's) becomes the plot device and main villain. But all the money and chaebol power in the world is no match for Seonwoo. Years of living like a slut in his fantasy sheets and an offputtingly dweeby virgin in the streets have given him the strongest mental of any character I've ever met in a bl romcom. Like a koala who will eat only eucalyptus leaves despite the fact the literal toxins in them prevent proper consumption, Seonwoo is sustained by a rich inner life only he can maintain, and he will only accept the parts of reality that add positively to it. It doesn't matter that the sadistic bdsm dungeon master sex god version of Jeong Taemoon only exists in his head and is a fantasy that embarrasses the hell out of the real Taemoon every time it comes out; it doesn't matter that his clothing choices are so disastrous they misled Taemoon into thinking Seonwoo was being abused by his family; it doesn't matter that no one in his office likes him and he might get sent to a rural office just so people can stop interacting with his (very correct) ideas about accounting. Seonwoo is who he is, and he lives that life proudly.

So where does that leave Taemoon? In the face of such unwavering devotion to cringe, he (and eventually his father) must admit defeat. He learns to give up the cool facade he puts up at work. He learns to see the world Seonwoo's way. He learns to be cringe, to be vulnerable, to ask for what he wants—which is love, of course. It is always love. Clothes in "Punch Drunk Love" are an outward manifestation of the bravery in being cringe, so of course when Taemoon is finally filmed confessing his devotion to Seonwoo (with the help of Seonwoo's sister), it is in an extremely cringe outfit consisting entirely of Seonwoo's tasteless clothes. By the end of the series, he regularly submits himself to wearing the flashy clothing Seonwoo picks for him. By borrowing the power of Seonwoo's cringe, Taemoon is at his best.

In "My Dearest Patrolman," cringe manifests in the realities of being in love with a man who is the human embodiment of a dad joke, despite having only a child of the cat variety. Seiji is almost 40 and made prematurely old by his profession, where he routinely deals with young kids and old men. Shin, no spring chicken himself at 30, is kept young by his relationship to Seiji. He is forever the delinquent high schooler smoking outside a convenience store, and Seiji is forever the cheerful uncle who went out of his way to get to know that young kid.

The dasai oyaji is, of course, a common type, and the pairing of the sloppy old man who is reluctantly, then enthusiastically, soulbonded to his young, uptight partner is why "Tiger and Bunny" remains an undying favorite among fujoshi. The charm of "My Dearest Policeman" is the way Seiji's character leans into the trope and doesn't give in to the temptation to make Seiji cool. There is no scene where, say, Seiji suddenly shaves and transforms into a handsome dashing zaddy in a suit or displays competency that makes him the object of a minor female character's affections, to Shin's dismay. Seiji remains, through all three volumes, a little out of shape with a belly threatening to sprout a spare tire. He scratches his butt, picks his ears and nose, and has to get a colorectal exam (he is at the age where prostate health is important). But Niyama never pushes it too far—he's never unloveable or disgusting, just so down to earth and realistic that you feel all 39 years of his age with him.

Where sex in "Punch Drunk Love" is still the stuff of fantasy, like when there is an unexpected callback to a fantasy involving Taemoon squirting (!!) while in Seonwoo (!!!), sex in "My Dearest Patrolman" is funny and tender and realistic. There are no acrobatic sex positions on the stairs, no attempt at being the domineering seme or seductive uke, no roleplaying or putting on sexy baby voices. Seiji and Shin jokingly complain about laundry while rubbing against each other, compare each other's bodies to daifuku buns, are kept from another round by hunger pangs. There's a surprising amount of explicit scenes in "My Dearest Patrolman," but the overall vibe is hardly sexy. The word I'd use instead is "domestic." The sex scenes feel individual, personal to who Seiji and Shin are, with interactions that are sexy to them and them only. If they embarrass the reader, it is of no consequence to Seiji and Shin, who enthusiastically get it on regardless. During one sex scene in volume one, Seiji makes a joke about "mommy's milk" that would have absolutely withered my erection if I were Shin—but it does nothing to deter Shin, who immediately starts to jerk Seiji off. Cringe is truly in the eye of the beholder, and for Shin and Seiji, there is nothing about the other that isn't loveable.

In the company of "Punch Drunk Love" and "My Dearest Patrolman," "Happy Crappy Life" may seem like an outlier. As of volume three, its characters are not exactly in a relationship one would describe as blissful married coexistence. Kasuya and Kuzuya are dancing around a relationship (despite Harada putting them through raising a tentacle monster, playing sudden death rock-paper-scissors over who gets the honor of getting plowed, and fighting over a pen shaped like a skewer of dango for, ahem, Reasons), and it is very much the kind of story that believes the first to fall in love is the loser. The only saving grace will be that Kasuya and Kuzuya have both fallen for each other, and fittingly, they are both the loser.

But if there is one thing Kasuya and Kuzuya represent, it is living loud and proud with your dick out. They like what they like, and what they like happens to be getting fucked. If commitment is usually about sharing burdens and being there for each other through sickness and through health, Kasuya and Kuzuya's commitment is to something weirder but no less serious: two fuck buddies who will always be there for each other('s anal play) no matter how shameful or ridiculous their desires.

"Punch Drunk Love" is about learning to love your partner's cringe. "My Dearest Patrolman" is about loving in the face of everyone else's cringe. "Happy Crappy Life," of course, is the most extreme: love that is only possible because of cringe. When Kasuya's ex-girlfriend Tsubasa comes to visit, she validates what we've all been suspecting, that the Kasuya she knew was cooler, smarter, more mature. If either Kasuya or Kuzuya could date someone else, they could probably become more responsible and respectable people. They'd leave behind this common law marriage of sexual convenience, where they spend their lives happily preoccupied with playground level antics, only with dildos involved. But Tsubasa, like everyone in the series with the exception of Kasuya and Kuzuya themselves, sees that the real Kasuya can only come out when he is with Kuzuya. The Kasuya she knew couldn't truly let his freak flag fly. The truth is that they find in each other, and only in each other, the freedom to be their true cringey selves.

And, well, that too is love!

Punch Drunk Love is available on Lezhin. My Dearest Policeman is available from SuBLime. Happy Crappy Life is available from Kuma.

[blrecs]

05/50: to say that i love you is more than the truth (in herin, "ennui")

There is so much I want to say about In Herin's "Ennui" that I hardly know where to start. So perhaps I will start with: this post will have spoilers. In one section, I will explicitly spoil the events of the last few chapters (there will be a warning before you get to that section, but it does not mean the rest of the post is spoiler-free). I personally do not think "Ennui" is diminished in any way by knowing the ending; there are not twists and it is not a plot-centric story. That said, my opinion on this matter is worth exactly one peanut (not even two!), as I've never cared about being spoiled. if you value being spoiler-free or experiencing things for the first time without being influenced by other people's interpretations, you should read "Ennui" first.

I highly recommend reading "Ennui" anyway! It is a deeply moving and thought-provoking and, to be frank, devastating piece of literature. But please also be mindful that the series and thus my post below feature descriptions of partner violence (both physical and sexual), codependency, homophobia (to the point of attempted murder), living with anxiety/panic attacks/disabilities/other medical needs, parental neglect, and many unhealthy patterns of thinking (which, I'll be frank, the characters never fully escape). If these things are not for you, I understand. We have many more weeks of bl posting ahead of us!

Now, on with the show.

 (i will give you my pain)

"Ennui" is, first and foremost, a testament to human endurance.

To begin with, it is your endurance In Herin is testing. You, the reader, are expected to have patience, to sit with the discomfort of not knowing the full story, to see the consequences first of an action you have not yet encountered. You are expected to appreciate complicated work hierarchies and character backstories through snippets of dialogue. You are never given straightforward chronology. The story is told through juxtaposed time skips, sometimes only for a panel or two, often through visual metaphor. One of the first such flashbacks shows you the climax to an argument that isn't fully depicted until 30 chapters later. When you encounter that chapter, it assumes you remember the flashback. It does not revisit the events of the flashback at all. Instead, it boldly shows you the lead-up, then cuts straight into the resolution, revealing that what you thought was one character's shock at the other's boldness was really one character's excitement at the other's acquiescence. It is masterful—it is confusing. It is the ultimate rereader's reward.

For In Herin has already told you everything you need to know about the series in the prologue, even though there is no way for the first-time reader to appreciate it. The main character, Dan Taeheun, is at a cardiology appointment. It is clear that he would benefit from additional medical attention, and that he will not pursue it. He is warned about needing rest, not overworking. He does not respond, except when the doctor asks, "are you listening?" He says yes, but he is not really listening. He is reading text messages from three separate men: his boss Han Yeonho asking Taeheun to wrap up his appointment (which he does), his subordinate Gwak Daegil asking Taeheun to save him (which he presumably does), and his lover Won Yeongeun asking Taeheun to contact him. Taeheun does not contact Yeongeun. For the rest of the series, this is how Taeheun will treat Yeongeun, as a presence and not a man. For the rest of the series, this is how Taeheun will treat his body, as an enemy he must keep close to accomplish his means. He gets into Director Han's car. They go to work. You have been dropped in media res to "Ennui," and this is the blueprint from which almost everything else in this series is derived.

The pitiable uke is the noble poor of bl characters. He must be a good person, kind to the people (or animals) around him and talented (cooking, art, intelligence, beauty) in some way that has been thwarted, and he must be made miserable for our entertainment. He is the result of our human desire to see good people rewarded and unfairness set right. To accomplish these ends, we place him in dire circumstances (he is an orphan, his grandmother is sick, he has been abused, he was a reluctant guarantor to a debt) so that he can work hard (at multiple jobs while also studying, or in dangerous situations that are bound to get him sexually exploited, or he is forced into bondage—capitalistic or otherwise—with a sadistic seme) for his happy ending. The pitiable uke struggles—bravely, often tearfully—against unfairness. If he is beaten down, he must over and over again struggle to stand. That struggle attracts the attention of the men around him, like moths to a flame. Once he runs through this gauntlet, only then do we grant him his happy ending, as a reward for his good character. He is the virtuous victim-hero that in old Hollywood films is so often a woman. Without this pillar of bl, the genre might collapse entirely.

But Dan Taeheun is more than just a pitiable uke. He is something special: he is the pathetic uke. His suffering is neither instrumental nor noble, but abject. He is not simply falling asleep at work, or romantically walking into an ocean, or crying beautiful tears in the arms of a muscular lover. When Taeheun's body betrays him, it is horrific. He claws at a couch until his fingertips are swollen and red. His face is covered in phlegm and saliva and tears. He spasms wildly, he vomits, he writhes. He is beaten and bruised and squeezed like a stress ball, by his work and Yeongeun and his own body, until what is extruded at the other end feels less than human. He is debased by his pain. And when Taeheun suffers, he is alone. All hurt, no comfort—a violation of the bl reader's social contract.

The pitiable uke struggles; his sacrifices are rewarded, and the reader walks away satisfied with the knowledge that good things happen to good people. The pathetic uke submits; he is the sacrifice and his sacrifice is the reader's reward. "Ennui" chews up Taeheun, grinds him up in the gears of his suffering, and leaves him, largely, in the same place he was at when the series began. His suffering does not create moral legibility. The world he occupies is cruel and unfair and remains that way. His body is a paroxysm of panic attacks and arrhythmia, and it never gets better. The work family he loved and who were kind to him are taken away from him; when they return, to the extent they return, he remains alienated from them. Perhaps most galling of all, even to the very end, his lover Yeongeun continues to beat him.

And yet, Taeheun endures. He survives his father trying to kill him, he survives his lover trying to kill him, he survives his body trying to kill him. I know neglecting oneself is a type of self-harm but it is also true that never once in "Ennui" does Taeheun try to kill himself. Because "Ennui" is, first and foremost, a testament to human endurance. It is teaching us the same lesson as Yoshinaga Fumi's "Ooku." We live, despite great pain. "Even in moments of unbearable suffering," Taeheun ponders in chapter 39, "as long as one is alive, one will find a way to keep living. As if everything is fine, they go on living again."

Survival is an amoral imperative, but it is the only real imperative. It is from survival that all other things are derived. You cannot love if you do not survive, and you cannot survive if you do not have something to love. And it is in extraordinary circumstances, when we are pushed to the edge of our ability to endure, that we discover ourselves at our most human. We love the most deeply then, because it is the only way we can prove we are alive.

We don't need to be brave. We don't need to be beautiful. It is okay to be wretched, to be sniveling, to be abject. To crawl on the ground because you cannot stand. To live gracelessly and in spite of great suffering. It's okay to go home and cry and vomit and shout the name of your abusive ex-boyfriend like a mantra. As long as you live, Taeheun. As long as you make it out alive. You can do whatever you want in the darkness of the night, as long as the next morning you can wake up and open your eyes. And you pick yourself up off the floor, and clean off your face, and put on your suit, and brush back your hair. And then, you go to work.

(my brother my child my lover my friend)

Because "Ennui" is also a drama about work.

Yes, yes, "Ennui" is a workplace drama. When summarized, the story beats (which, in the case of "Ennui," is not the same as the plot) are more "Misaeng" than "Cherry Magic." Taeheun is hired initially as what I think is a software engineer at a branch office of B&P. His supervisor, Senior Yang Wonbae, becomes a pawn in a larger game of corporate gamesmanship, as one of the directors tries to use him as a way to undercut the arrival of Han Yeonho, an up-and-comer transfer from headquarters. When the combination of Taeheun's health issues and Yeongeun's abuse comes to a head, as you know from the start it inevitably would, it offers B&P a chance to reorganize, leaving Development Team One and Taeheun vulnerable. Senior Yang volunteers himself to be the sacrificial lamb and is transferred to a remote office, while Taeheun is forced to offer himself to Han Yeonho, who promises to reward Taeheun's submission to the project management department by giving Taeheun's former colleagues a chance to come back. In the background, Han Yeonho conducts complicated orchestral maneuvers with the president of the B&P branch office which are never fully brought to light but nevertheless cast a shadow over everything else.

But that is not what I mean when I say it "Ennui" a drama about work. It is not just that the drama of "Ennui" is set at a workplace, but that work, itself, is a critical part of understanding the themes of "Ennui." "Ennui" is a drama about work the same way "Haikyuu" is a manga about volleyball. It is through work that all emotion is expressed. 

There is no world where Yeongeun and Taeheun's relationship would be perfectly healthy. Yeongeun has monopolistic tendencies with a penchant for working out his frustration through violence, which he projects on Taeheun, who himself is a piece of work. Between them, they have multiple dead or estranged parents, a near-death experience at a Christian conversion camp, tragic coming out stories, and years of unhealed trauma. But when they meet in college, these things bond them to each other because they need only focus on themselves. It's not until Yeongeun begins to work after graduating college that their relationship begins to warp.

Work is the family, and sometimes it is deeply toxic. Like a parent, maybe even Yeongeun's own bad parents, work teaches Yeongeun that he can depend on no one, that he is utterly alone, that no one will help him. Forced to accept unending physical and emotional abuse from his superiors, who slap him routinely and steal credit for his work, and a witness to a workplace fatality that is barely mourned, only discussed as an impediment to more work, Yeongeun's naturally kind personality (and his pathological tendency towards caretaking) is funneled entirely into Taeheun. He sees himself as suffering purely so that he can keep Taeheun alive, so it horrifies him when Taeheun also decides to work. What was once Yeongeun's only beacon of human affection and solace will become tainted, defiled through work. It is as if Taeheun suggested he be raped. Yeongeun cannot handle it.

On the other hand, for Taeheun, work is the lover. In Development Team One, Taeheun finally finds people who don't judge him, who marvel at his talents, who want to take care of him and protect him, who recognize him as precious not for his weaknesses but for his strengths. There is, nominally, a third man in the Yeongeun/Taeheun relationship, but the real betrayal, the real person that Taeheun cheats on Yeongeun with in "Ennui," is work itself. Work fulfills Taeheun, turns him into a real person. It is through working with Development Team One that Taeheun discovers real love.

What the story eventually punishes Taeheun for is not trying to free himself from Yeongeun. He would be right to do so; from the start, their relationship is unhealthy, and even during their college days, Taeheun realizes he feels free when he is able to push Yeongeun away. No, when his body fails him in chapter 40, Taeheun is being punished for choosing to devote himself to work, for loving the cruelest of all mistresses, who will never love him back.

And in this context, the perversion is not that Taeheun is gay or that Taeheun is in an abusive relationship (or, if we are to read things in the light most charitable towards Yeongeun, that Taeheun enjoys getting hit by his male lover). No, in fact by the end of the series Taeheun has come out to multiple coworkers and, in an ill-considered ploy to save Senior Yang, announced to his entire workplace that he gets hit during sex. His sexuality, with Team Leader Han's help, is hidden in plain sight. What makes him an outcast, a pervert, is that Taeheun has a disability. From the beginning of his time at B&P, he has had to hide the worst sin of all: that he is a person who, because of his body, may be incapable of work.

After the disbandment of Development Team One, Yeongeun is sent on a work trip. Still recovering physically from a sudden attack of arrythmia while at work and unsure of the future of his employment, trapped in the empty apartment they share, Taeheun lashes out at Yeongeun. You're working so hard, he says sarcastically. Must be so nice. Must be so much fun. But Yeongeun has never explained to Taeheun that for him, work is not nice, work is not fun. Yeongeun works only so he can sacrifice himself nobly, stupidly, in silence at the altar of his love for Taeheun. He can only survive his hell by saying it is for Taeheun's benefit. So he says, "I want to make sure you'll never have to work again.

For Yeongeun, this is a proposal. Look what I endure, for you. He once promised to Taeheun that he would take responsibility for him forever. There is nothing more romantic he could do.

But for Taeheun, this is a death sentence.

In chapter 26, the project management department celebrates Han Yeonho's promotion. During the festivities, someone brings up a contestant in a TV show who has come out as gay. A conversation about internalized homophobia and workplace discrimination commences, much to Taeheun's discomfort. One well-meaning person says, we should be more considerate of gay people, because they are already marginalized in our society. To which Han Yeonho answers, maybe that is also a kind of discrimination. Maybe they don't want us to take them lightly. "Among us, someone might have something they're hiding too. Like a medical condition that could lead to social stigma, a physical disability, trauma from violence." What they want, Han Yeonho argues, is to be treated like they are "normal." To pass as any other person, struggling for survival.

What Taeheun wants is to be told, simply, "good work." One of the first moments that endears Senior Yang to Taeheun is when Senior Yang is able to recognize, somehow, that Taeheun has walked a long path to get to him. "You must have had a hard time making it this far. You've been through so much. I’m proud of you for getting here. There's going to be more challenges ahead, but let's do our best together." How is that perfect strangers who have not known Taeheun are able to give him this recognition, but Yeongeun, the only person who loves Taeheun unconditionally, is not? It takes many chapters, many beatings, many arguments, before Yeongeun finally reciprocates, giving Taeheun a watch as a belated congratulations gift for getting a job. It is not lost on the careful reader of "Ennui" that Yeongeun does so on bended knee—romance, but through the lens of acknowledging hard work.

Is this a happy ending? Perhaps it is the happiest ending Taeheun could hope for. The pitiable uke in his position would get vindication. He would restore Senior Yang's position. He would be able to come out, proudly. He would be recognized at work for the talented, beautiful, resilient person that he is. He would be with his (reformed) lover. But Taeheun is the pathetic uke. Vindication is not his to take. Han Yeonho pretends that he is helping Taeheun take revenge, but in fact he is only hiding Taeheun, keeping him alive, through the guise of work. The finagling to bring back Senior Yang has been his plan from the beginning. Taeheun is just a fun diversion. And even in the end, when Senior Yang is brought back, Taeheun is still stuck in the PMO department. His natural gift at programming is forever denied to him; he is never, not even at the end, given an opportunity to return to development. And Yeongeun must go back to his business trip, which will not end until next year. Whatever changes he and Taeheun must make to their relationship will have to wait until then.

But at least Taeheun is working. At least his lover recognizes the importance of Taeheun's work. What other happy endings could there be?

(if we meet up in the next land)

[SPOILER WARNING: the section below will spoil, in detail, the final chapters of "Ennui."]

For "Ennui" is, at the end of the day, a boys' love story, and bl comes with its own conventions. And those conventions narrow the roads available to Dan Taeheun.

Say what you want about In Herin, but you cannot accuse her of not knowing what she likes. Many of the same themes from "Ennui" show up in her second work, "Missing Love." The main character Lee Geom is an orphan upon whom tragedy piles up. He is in turns submissive and feral, adorable and poisonous, seductress and virgin, resilient despite unending physical and emotional abuse. The childhood friend/main love interest Lim Wooyeon is the monopolistic nurturing type who naively tries to shoulder some of the main character's burden. And there is a third man, one who moves in the shadows, who is playing a game Lee Geom can only see the outlines of, who does not need Lee Geom but traps him anyway to make him part of that game, who makes his relationship with Lee Geom his only weakness. Events come to a head; the main character's body disintegrates into the gears of the plot. A love triangle is resolved quietly, without fanfare. A proposal is made, and accepted.

"Missing Love," despite the constant violence and human trafficking and sexual assault, is a fairytale romance. Lee Geom is the pitiable uke, not the pathetic one. He is able to bring down the monsters that have tormented him and give himself, fully, to Lim Wooyeon's love. There is catharsis, for the characters and the readers. You feel safe in knowing that Lee Geom is in the best hands he could possibly be, and those are his own and Lim Wooyeon's.

"Ennui," though, is bound in reality, and towards the last ten chapters, you can feel In Herin struggle with what that means for Taeheun. Won Yeongeun is no Lim Wooyeon, and Yeongeun and Taeheun are settling for each other because they have hurt each other too much to abandon the relationship. There are affirmations exchanged, an attempt at a new start, yet neither of them have changed, and certainly no tools have been offered to Yeongeun to change his behavior. If that is the only happy ending Taeheun can have, this beautiful, talented, resilient man she has written, then what is the point of making him survive? Does he live, just to suffer?

But she cannot make write about them breaking up, or at least not yet. This is a love story, not a memoir of a person leaving an abusive relationship. So she throws in the oldest trick in the book: she adds the other man.

Chapters and chapters she has spent building up Han Yeonho, always teasing something between him and Taeheun but never quite crossing the line. Finally, in chapter 53, it happens. Taeheun, having learned that Yeongeun has slept with another man while away on his work trip, has a breakdown in a bathroom stall. Han Yeonho goes to pick up the pieces, and in the process, finally kisses Taeheun. What follows (because "Ennui" is a work drama) is a long monologue about Yang Wonbae's upcoming reinstatement, as the new head of the IT planning team. Han Yeonho's lips say, "thank you for letting me use you." But what he actually means, as you learn in the final chapter, is, you were something unexpected in my life, something special that moved me in a way no one else could. I fell for you when I didn't mean to.

Well, you don't write a character like Han Yeonho into a bl story if you mean to keep his relationship with Taeheun platonic. But you also don't introduce a character like Han Yeonho as a love interest in the final act if you mean for Taeheun to actually leave Yeongeun for him. Trapped by genre conventions, and forced to give Taeheun someone at the end of the story, In Herin writes a pitiable uke story for Taeheun. In the final chapters, he recontextualizes his relationship with Yeongeun: suddenly he has loved Yeongeun the whole time! He has been doing all this (handwave at the trials and tribulations he has suffered) because he has been running away from this love! And Han Yeonho is firmly cast as a sociopath who can only see Taeheun as a burden, a broken thing, a toy—not like Yeongeun, who recognizes that Taeheun is the only real prize to be won! So naturally, Han Yeonho recognizes he has lost, and backs down. He plays good friend to Taeheun, calling Yeongeun home whenever Taeheun needs him, bringing Yeongeun to save Taeheun from getting drunk. Together they nurse Taeheun back to some kind of health. A love triangle is resolved quietly, without fanfare. A proposal is made with a watch, and accepted.

It is a neat little story, complicated by just one little thing: Taeheun ends up having sex with Han Yeonho anyway.

I am not saying that I find "Missing Love" erotic personally, but "Missing Love" is clearly meant to be sexy. Every sex scene with Lee Geom is charged with eroticism, even if that eroticism is disturbing or gory. Lee Geom uses his sexuality, and is often in control of it, even if he is not always in control of the circumstances under which he is forced to use it.

But Taeheun's sexuality in "Ennui" is, like him, a constant struggle, a thing always taken from him instead of given by him. Never once do you see Taeheun initiate sex. It is unclear if he even experiences sexual desire. The first time Han Yeonho and Taeheun try to have sex, Taeheun cries through it, calling out Yeongeun's name, which the reader knows is his mantra for getting through something painful. When Taeheun sleeps with Han Yeonho the second time, Han Yeonho teases him about all the times Taeheun gazed at him. "It was so hot, the sticky look in your eyes, like you were imagining using me as a side dish." (To masturbate, he means.) But alas, the real Taeheun is "a block of wood," a dead log in bed, for which Taeheun apologizes. "Sorry for being so unimpressive," he sulks. "I've always been the one crying and sulking under Yeongeun's thumb."

It is hard to read this small, inconsequential line and not feel revulsion. What kind of sexual partner would Taeheun be, if he hadn't been cared for by Yeongeun? Taeheun has been changed, irrevocably, by that sexual relationship. It is the only sexual relationship he can even recognize as sex. But that sex is so divorced from sexual desire that it is hard for us, the reader, to understand it as sex. When Taeheun talks about having penetrative sex with Yeongeun for the first time, the description is more alien invasion than sex scene. "His fingers had always been searching for a way inside me. The helplessness of having my body moved by someone else was familiar." When it happens, the panel is tight on Taeheun's eyes closing, as if he is falling asleep and relinquishing control of himself, utterly, to Yeongeun. Later, during their more turbulent adult years, Taeheun says of sex with Yeongeun, "each sense of ownership over my body was stripped away. I became filled with another's invasion."

There is something horrible in the way Yeongeun has affected Taeheun, and In Herin knows it. She has written a story that is too good, a character that is too real, to lie to us about this ending she has given to Taeheun. We cannot fully celebrate him remaining with Yeongeun, and in these scenes with Han Yeonho, In Herin brings out that uneasiness. Taeheun's musing that he is a "partner who harms," a "perpetrator" who is "infinitely parasitizing" Yeongeun's life, feel purposefully delusional. Yeongeun is the parasite, feeding on Taeheun's life. He has been doing it the whole time, to the point where Taeheun cannot even find his sexuality separate from Yeongeun's domination.

So in the end, In Herin climbs back up from the layers. She returns to first principles. "Ennui" is, just incidentally, a love story. Before that, "Ennui" is a story about work. And so the final panels are of Taeheun, now team leader himself, talking to Daegil about meetings and documents and returning back to the office. And first and foremost, "Ennui" is a testament to human endurance. So the final panels are of Taeheun standing alone. He does not read any text messages. No one comes to pick him up. In a mess of bodies, he vanishes.

Head proud, he walks out of our lives and into his own.

(section headers are from mj lenderman's "no mercy")

[blrecs]

04/50: couples' guilds ("virtual strangers", "turns out my online friend is my real-life boss")

When I am not being sickos.jpg about loving extremely toxic and unhappy love affairs, I am always on the hunt for the episodic ensemble cast story that has lots of hijinks. This is why I routinely reread "Monthly Girls' Nozaki-Kun" from beginning to most recent chapters. I started my manga-reading journey with Takahashi Rumiko, after all.

The mistaken/secret/double identity plot is a classic among low-stakes, slice-of-life type romcoms. In fact, GSNK begins, and maintains for quite a long time, just such a plot. The fun of GSNK is that no one is trying very hard to hide their identities, but that their other selves become secret identities/double lives simply because they're so outlandish. Nozaki's secret identity (being a shoujo mangaka) is so incongruent with his personality and large hulking body that no one believes him even when he starts passing around volumes of his manga to his classmates. Sakura's not-so-secret identity (having a huge honking crush on Nozaki) is so unbelievable, apparently, that even Nozaki can't believe it and assumes instead that she's figured out his not-so-secret identity of being a mangaka. Many such identityplay hijinks abound: the prince of the school is a girl, the flashy wannabe Casanova is a shy boy whose only experience with girls is through harem dating games, "trunks vs briefs?" and so on.

These stories are always at their best when multiple subplots converge, like in the alternate drafts of GSNK's chapter 45, where Wakamatsu's mistaken belief that Seo and Kashima are dating lead him to mistakenly believe that Hori is attracted to hot guys, Kashima to believe that Wakamatsu is fighting her for Hori's affection, and Seo to believe she is relaying messages between two halves of a love triangle when in fact she is being inadvertently wooed by Wakamatsu. It's a pity that Tsubaki Izumi decided the alternate drafts were too convoluted, because I think it's in those versions you see her true talent: being able to add increasing levels of mistaken identities without the characters becoming parodies of themselves. In my opinion the rejected versions of GSNK 45 become the basis of Miyako and Ryosuke's story (Ryousuke is under a misapprehension that Miyako is a cabaret dancer with a high school boyfriend, he overhears and is told things that should clue him into the fact that he's wrong about all the facts but his strong mental allows him instead to create an alternate universe where Nozaki is a bunny girl dancer), so really, in the end, Tsubaki couldn't help but be herself, and that's to our benefit. She loves an overly complicated imaginary love square. I wouldn't be surprised if she, too, loved Takahashi Rumiko.

Convolution like this, though, is only possible when a story is not focused only on the main couple, but on the variety of human relationships that could be the foundation for misunderstanding. This week I reread Nmura's "Turns Out My Online Friend is My Real-Life Boss!" and read for the first time the webtoon adaptation of HoneyTrap's "Virtual Strangers," which both begin in the same place: two people find friendship in a MMORPG while also knowing each other in another capacity entirely in real life. Despite having the same premise, there isn't even a superficial similarity to the two series, and it took revisiting GSNK for me to put my finger on why: there are barely any supporting characters in "Virtual Strangers," whereas in "Online Friend" the first gaming buddy Hashimoto truly meets in that capacity is not Shirase but rather Salted Salmon aka Kumada, a high schooler who becomes a third leg in a love triangle and eventually a confidante for Hashimoto and Shirase when they start dating.

That is not to say that one series is better than the other, even though my preference is for the ensemble hijinks in "Online Friend." "Virtual Strangers" is truly a comedy of context errors, and wholly focused on the relationship between Yeowoon and Jigu. Neither Yeowoon or Jigu's personalities offline or online are fake, but context means that in-game, Ji9star is always following Neuta like a bad but very loving penny, whereas in real life, Jigu thinks Yeowoon is a gay stalker who practices lifestyle BDSM. Their relationship online is so different from their relationship offline because offline Jigu feels like he cannot be wholly himself or honest with Yeowoon, and no matter how honest Ji9star is with Neuta, it cannot actually mirror the experience of hanging out in person. Yeowoon and Hashimoto are both oblivious, but in "Virtual Strangers" that obliviousness is the kind of strangely homophobic gay in-joke that's common in bl: isn't it funny that Yeowoon thinks Jigu is so handsome and tells him so to his face? Isn't it funny that Yeowoon is always acting sweet to guys and then being surprised that they like him? It's funny to be mistaken for a gay man, when you aren't a gay man!

On the other hand, the double lives of the characters in "Online Friend" are not split between online vs offline, but rather different facets of their personalities expressing themselves because of time, place, and occasion. Shirase is a demon boss, but also a doting boyfriend. Kumada is a typical rowdy high school boy; he feels so emotionally mature and well-behaved when with Hashimoto because he wants to be on his best behavior in front of his crush. The game functions as a way to keep the characters interacting, rather than as a masquerade ball for their personalities, which becomes increasingly obvious in volume 2, when Kumada's other brother is thrown into the mix as part of an imaginary love triangle.

And... I have nothing in particular to conclude! Some weeks I have no important bl thought scholarship to complete. Sometimes I just read stuff and kind of want to talk about them. "Virtual Strangers" is so clearly an adaptation of a bl novel. The "getting together" arc feels so drawn out and long because the tension between Yeowoon and Jigu and Ji9star and Neuta are clearly where the author excels. "Online Friends" zooms past the initial identity stuff so quickly that it's no wonder Kumada had to get brought in, and on an alt account too, to keep up pretenses that this was about misleading online identities. Premises are just that--a presumption of a plot, before the real plot kicks in.

You can read "Virtual Strangers" on Lezhin and "Turns Out My Online Friend is My Real-Life Boss" wherever Kodansha allows.

[blrecs]

"yoru no rakka," by asou mitsuaki

Reprinted from a now defunct newsletter previously hosted on TinyLetter. This was originally published on June 2020.

Two months ago I wanted to send a COVID-19 edition of this newsletter where I talked about the infamous "Ten Count," by Takarai Rihito.

Full disclosure: I have always disliked—nay, hated—"Ten Count." But the call of writing about a manga where the main character is afraid of touching anyone or anything on the outside, in a time of social distancing, was irresistible. And it's undeniably popular. Though its last volume was published in Japan in 2017, "Ten Count" has consistently remained in the top five to ten volumes of bl manga on Amazon's rankings, and from my limited vantage point, it's cited frequently among English-speaking bl manga fans, both positively and negatively. So I embarked upon reading the whole damn thing, from start to finish, with fresh eyes. I am not a bl manga snob, you see. Sure, I love and prefer the faux art house stuff, like Yamashita Tomoko's "Snip, Snail, & Dog Tails," which can only be described as "a boring love story told with pretentious but ambitious timeline fuckery," but when I was young, we used dial-up, downloaded our illegal scanlations from IRC barefoot in the snow uphill both ways, and consumed a lot of "Okane ga Nai," so I'm not exactly on my high horse. I even owned multiple physical volumes of "Junjou Romantica," a series I find increasingly tiring as the years go by.

But anyway, back to "Ten Count." I highly doubt those of you reading this don't have some idea of the plot, but here goes: Shirotani, who works as a tireless secretary to an executive in an unspecified industry (why is the industry so often unspecified in bl manga?), suffers from obsessive-compulsive disorder that manifests itself very similarly to mysophobia. He is unable to touch things with his bare hands or eat food or drink prepared by others and religiously disinfects himself and his belongings. When Shirotani's boss gets into an accident, he encounters Kurose, who works at a psychosomatic clinic as a therapist. Kurose believes that with exposure therapy will help Shirotani and suggests that Shirotani writes down an ever-escalating list of ten things (hence, ten count) he can't do without triggering his OCD. Shirotani is unable to think of a tenth, and Kurose promises that when Shirotani thinks of a tenth item for the list, he will tell Shirotani why he is helping.

In a post-Harada world, it's funny to lay out the things that bother me about "Ten Count." The transgressions, when said out loud, feel mechanical and pedantic. I don't like that no one questions Kurose doing therapy out of hours without any terms of engagement or supervision. (I was surprised to discover, however, that this kind of exposure therapy is in fact a recommended treatment for OCD, so I don't necessarily quibble with his methods.) I don't like the way the OCD gets wrapped into Kurose's BDSM kink that he entraps Shirotani, no matter how much Shirotani does or doesn't enjoy the sex. I don't like when the series yanks the rug out from me 2/3rds of the way through and reveals that no, Shirotani doesn't have mysophobia, he's just suffering from childhood trauma after a specific incident that is extremely unpleasant to me, but I will not spoil for you if you still intend to read "Ten Count" yourself. And I hated the grand reveal of Kurose's reason for helping Shirotani, which actually did feel like it was rescued from a rejected early draft of Harada's "Nii-chan."

Most annoyingly, but also poignantly for my purposes, "Ten Count" didn't even fit the theme I wanted, of not touching. Instead, perhaps unsurprisingly, it is a series very much about starvation for touch, the sensitivity we have to warmth and touch when we are denied it. Shirotani doesn't hate to be touched. Instead, he loves it. He is addicted to it, but specifically to Kurose's touch, even if it is cruel or overbearing or manipulative. We cannot function with a barrier between us and the world, between us and other people.

I Am Not An Academic and I do not specialize in the study or theory of sex, but sex and transgression have always been linked, by which I mean sex itself feels like a kind of transgression, and transgressions are very erotic. (Insert your choice Andrea Dworkin quote here.) "Ten Count" is full of transgressions. Shirotani puts up all sorts of boundaries that Kurose bulldozes over, not to mention navigating transgressions of a father/son relationship, adult/minor relationship, and of course a sexual relationship between two men. But perhaps what is most seductively transgressive in the series is therapy itself. Isn't there something invasively intimate about the relationship between a therapist and their patient, even under the best of circumstances? Kurose actually fucking Shirotani is no more invasive than Kurose entering Shirotani's room uninvited, or Kurose forcibly "curing" Shirotani of his mysophobia. The sex just makes the invasion dick-shaped and obvious.

Women are used to ill-conceived notions of sex as therapy. A man might claim that a grumpy or uptight woman just needs a good dicking. Men are always angry at women, violently and sometimes murderously so, because women withhold sex. If only someone would have sex with an incel; then, he might not erupt into a murderous rampage. A more adventurous person—not me—might try to match this together with the theory that bl as a category partially functions as a way for women creators to explore issues of gender and sexuality and objectification and come up with a coherent worldview of stories like Kodaka Kazuma's "A Sex Therapist," where a man who is maybe named Kain helps people navigate their interpersonal relationships by hypnotizing them (maybe drugging them with incense???), taking on the appearance of the person they love, and having sex with them. This is, understandably, not one of Kodaka Kazuma's better known stories, but there is certain air of meta to the setup of "Sex Therapist." Like Kain's bar, bl manga is a space of fantasy, where even the wildest and most transgressive of fantasies is tolerated and explored, a release valve from the real world. Like Kain, when we explore these fantasies, we take on many faces, all of which are not our own. But that too, is a type of pleasurable transgression.

Finally, 1000 words later, let's get to the series I wanted to talk about. In "Yoru no Rakka," we meet Tada Himuro, a university student who interns at a large company (again, industry unspecified) by day and part-times as an escort by night. By chance, he is assigned to K-san, who requests Himuro help him overcome his deep-seated and religiously-motivated fear of sex, all while K-san is blindfolded. There's just one catch: K-san is actually Kuki, Himuro's boss, a man who is known for being kind-hearted and friendly to the point of sainthood.

Here, we find the elements of "Ten Count" chopped and screwed. There is sex as therapy, and in fact that is the point. Probably Kuki, who cannot even bring himself to say the word "masturbation," much less do it, should have gone to a real therapist, but instead he comes to Himuro, who makes Kuki have a threesome with him and a sex doll. Himuro, like Kurose, is a burgeoning sadist, and Kuki's experiences as K-san are balanced on the edge of masochism and debauchery. Like the second half of "Ten Count," the second (and IMO more interesting and emotionally complex) chapter of "Yoru no Rakka" offers Kuki a way out of the relationship, an escape from Himuro if you will, which Kuki, like Shirotani, rejects even though it may not be in his best interest. The call of love—monstrous, dangerous, but transformative—calls to them both.

But what separates "Yoru no Rakka" from "Ten Count" is that "Yoru no Rakka" is not asking you to get off on the no-good-very-bad vibes of Kurose's therapeutic techniques, though of course there is no shame or judgment if that's what you read "Ten Count" for. My biggest problem with "Ten Count" is that if you don't find the specific transgressions sexy, then there's really not much for you in the story. Kurose is kind of a dick, but not even a particularly interesting one, and his backstory barely intersects with Shirotani's arc, except to give motivation for why Kurose does to Shirotani later in his life. I mean, not to be nitpicky, but despite all appearances, "Ten Count" really isn't even a story about OCD or mysophobia. It barely addresses either issue, except as window dressing for Shirotani's daddy issues.

On the other hand, the transgressions in "Yoru no Rakka" are the point, even if they're not sexy (and in fact, maybe, they are the opposite; off-putting because it seems hard for Kuki to even enjoy sexual pleasure without dissolving into a crying, apologetic mess). Separate from providing a backbone to Kuki and Himuro's sex play slash therapy, they shape who Kuki is, what he is afraid of losing, and why he approaches Himuro in the way he does. Kuki brings out Himuro's sadism; in fact, he is a willing (in the BDSM sense of the word) and demanding participant in his own cruelty. Like "Ten Count," there is a bit of a rug pull at the end of the first chapter, but it's one that knots together all the threads of the story (Kuki's religion, his two-sided act, Himuro's growing uneasiness). And while "Ten Count" was a story about sanding down the prickly, offputting layers of Shirotani and Kurose's characters until you find the junjou underneath, "Yoru no Rakka" is about disillusionment, the discovery that there is no great drama at the heart of most people. We all want to have our diva moments: our sins are special, our fetishes uniquely mortifying, our deviations the only one in the world.

But, at the end of the day, Kuki is an ordinary man, struggling with ordinary problems. There is nothing that makes him special, except that he found another ordinary person, to whom he meant everything.

There is no great fantasy, no great transgression, except that he fell in love.

[blrecs]

03/50: don't wanna be friends (bbobariee, "someone else's bl manhwa")

I've been thinking for a while about Nora Helmer's fantastic review of Hidaka Shoko's "Anti-Romance" where she bemoans the problems with the childhood-friends-to-lovers plot. "What I find lacking in the genre is the exploration of feelings that change," she points out. "Circumstances that change. People who change. And how that change shapes their relationships with others, both with ones who already exist in their lives and the ones they’ll connect with going forward."

I am, and have been all my bl-reading life, an incorrigible hater of the childhood-friends-to-lovers trope. To me, it's a trope that stifles. As Nora points out, childhood-friends-to-lovers plots are often stories about "never-ending, never-changing love," the desire to maintain, to reify what came before as opposed to creating a new relationship from their adult selves. Even if the adult characters no longer resemble their childhood selves, e.g. the bullied kid becoming the protector as an adult, there is usually a panel where the other character says, "he hasn't changed. He's still the boy I knew/loved/was my friend." The scary thing is always the idea of transformation, of a relationship that does not stem from the prior reference point of the shared childhood. It's like love is almost besides the point; the relationship was already formed before love, and now that they are older, love is merely there to gild the lily.

 In "GIRL YAOI," tshirt presents a thesis I have been pondering, that "yaoi is about power."

Yaoi presents a complication to the presumed lateral world of male homosociality by introducing an explicit hierarchy—its 1s and 0s, domination and subordination, and so on. Classic yaoi tropes involve relationships mediated by disparities in age, wealth, gender performance, and other such power-inflected qualities. In many ways, we can read yaoi as having undergone a “heterosexualizing” matrix.

But I think I fundamentally disagree with this, or perhaps I would say I do not think this is true of bl, to the extent that is separate from tshirt's conception of "yaoi." The appeal of bl, to me, has always been in transformation, the dynamic as opposed to the static, the ability of one character to suddenly occupy many or different roles for the other through love. Classic bl plots are about love's ability to transform: tormenter into lover, stranger into lover, brother(???) into lover. "Anti-Romance" has a very good main story about childhood friends navigating new feelings, but it really excels because Towada and Junichi show that transformation. Their dynamic has been shifting constantly throughout their lives, and though they both refer to that prior point in their lives where Junichi was in love with Towada, it is not a citadel they must return to. In fact, they cannot return to it. It is just one of many selves they have lived, parallel to one another, that they have now left behind.

And so we arrive at Bbobariee's "Someone Else's BL Manhwa," but not for the reasons you might think. Are Kyubin and Seungteuk childhood friends? Is middle school too late to embark on a journey of childhood friendom? Either way, there is a childhood friend quality to their relationship, which is Very Good! I have no complaints! They struggle with their burgeoning sexual desires, they are forced to grapple with changing friend groups at school, they make decisions about colleges, it is all Very Good!

No, I am here to complain about the adults, Yoo Jeonghoon and Go Woojin. When we meet Jeonghoon, it is on an online chatroom, where he spends his free time online chatting up high school boys. He strikes up a conversation with nominal main character Seunghee, who, friendless and desperately looking for validation about his own sexuality and caught in the middle of Kyubin and Seungteuk's antics, turns to Jeonghoon as a source of comfort and guidance. Jeonghoon's boss and sort of friend Woojin catches wind that Jeonghoon is lavising an inappropriate amount of care and time on a high school boy, apparently a bad habit ofJeonghoon's, and does what he can to warn Seunghee off. Unfortunately, all of his efforts activate Seunghee's contrarian nature, but a combination of seeing Jeonghoon send dick pics (!) to other high school boys on the internet and Seunghee's own budding (age-appropriate) romance with classmate Soohyuk finally cools Seunghee's affections.

A subtle theme threading through "Someone Else's BL Manhwa" is the idea that we have to take responsibility for our own feelings and actions. If we stay waiting for love to happen to us, we stagnate. Kyubin starts his relationship with Seungteuk doing whatever he can to make Seungteuk like him. But eventually he comes to realize it's not enough to wait on Seungteuk, to be by his side cheering him on. He has to accomplish things too. He has to have his own life. I think often of Kyubin deciding to move out of his family's old apartment to live with his uncle. "It'll be better than just staying here, and waiting until [Seungteuk] can come visit, for the rest of my life." You see this thread play out in the other characters too: Seunghee with his father who left because he wouldn't handle Seunghee coming out, the strange love triangle between Kyubin, Seungteuk, and Soohyuk's amnesiac cousin Inbeom. All the high schoolers learn to grow up and move on. To put away their childish things and embark on the bigger, better rest of their lives. Love as a vehicle, once again, for transformation.

Well, not so for Jeonghoon. Wrested one last time from trying to bond himself to Seunghee, he lashes out and rails against Woojin, finally laying bare their backstory. "Why did you have to change so much?" he bemoans. "Not even one remaining speck of the boy I used to love. I poured so much love into you that my heart can never be filled again. You ruin everything." What an insane proclamation, the likes of which I've never seen in another bl, and one that seems more fitting as the ravings of a serial killer, trying to explain why he goes after young men.

Jeonghoon is a character who has honed his inability to move on to such heights that it is a blunt force weapon, bludgeoning everyone around him. His failed first love is not just a citadel, but a prison of his own making; it has frozen him in time so that he can only love echoes of that first love, as if making a high school boy love him will finally heal his inner child. But of course, Woojin encourages him. After all, why isn't Woojin married? Why hasn't he fired Jeonghoon, moved cities, gotten new friends, let Jeonghoon get in trouble and possibly even arrested? Instead he's Jeonghoon's boss, he gives Jeonghoon a car and a company credit card and a place to live. He cleans up Jeonghoon's messes in his own clumsy, roughshod way.

Woojin doesn't owe Jeonghoon anything. His only crime was getting old, and doing so while straight. But one must imagine Sisyphus happy. Perhaps one must also imagine that Jeonghoon is Woojin's responsibility. Perhaps for Woojin it is easier to spin a story where he is forever responsible for this raving monster of a childhood friend, someone who loves him so much that that love has twisted into something unrecognizable. Perhaps in doing so there is one final transformation, one hinted at the end of Jeonghoon and Woojin's story, where Woojin leans in to kiss Jeonghoon. The most classic of all bl transformation plots -- that of a straight man into a gay one, into a lover.

"Someone Else's BL Manhwa" is available on Tappytoon.

[blrecs]

02/50: remains of the old bl days (shoko hidaka, “blue morning”)

Long-time readers (i.e. old friends of mine who been subjected to my rants and raves for years) will know that one of my frequently-repeated opinions is that "butlers were the original omegaverse," at least when it comes to original bl works.

I think this opinion is noncontroversial, just non-obvious, and that you'd come to the same conclusion if you thought about it. Omegaverse from its inception has always been deeply entrenched, if not interested, in questions of power as it is expressed through gender essentialism/discrimination, and to what extent love-as-sex/sex-as-love overcomes, or submits, or complicates those questions. Butler/master stories (when written well, at least) are fundamentally omegaverse, but with class and social status instead of gender.

Both take something that actually exists in our real world (gender/sex, butlering) and twists it to suit alternate universe needs. BL butler/master stories essentialize the profession/status of being a butler or servant, just as gender is essentialized in omegaverse. They are binaries that are imposed upon characters; one is born a master and often is born into a family status or lineage or situation that results in one being a servant or butlering, just as one is born into a secondary gender. Being a butler (or a master) maps on to certain qualities that allow us to categorize the character similar to other binaries: male/female, top/bottom. A character need not stay within the characteristic confines of their role, and deviations are exciting: the master might submit to the butler in some way or serve him sexually, the butler might be a disgraced rich man, just as a character from an alpha family may be born an omega, or the omega be the head of some powerful organization and refuse to submit to an alpha. However, just as in omegaverse, rarely does a character fully become another role/gender, even if they routinely perform another role/gender (so, a butler who is able to command the master is still just a butler who defies the conventions of his role). Just as one character may bite another to form a bond, a master may take on a butler involuntarily (indentured servitude for familial debts) or voluntarily (butlers refusing opportunities to work elsewhere to remain with their master, swearing loyalty to each other). That bond, or lack thereof, and the circumstances of its imposition are the axis around which the central love story rotates. And of course, a butler only serves one master, and a master only has one butler.

So what is my point? Really, nothing. It's an observation I've been sitting on for years, and I like thinking about where tropes come from and where they go. Many bl manga tropes are about creating a dyad with Type A and Type B that are codependent somehow, where the roles require some sort of performance or action that lie outside of the character's personalities: sentinel/guide, dom/sub, alpha/omega, master/butler. In butler/master stories, you see the influence and seeds of other genres where the dimorphism is less rigid, but includes similar themes of loyalty, protection, care-taking: bodyguard/heir, managers/idol, editor/writer (but not like tattooist/florist, or bartender/customer, or policeman/criminal! An essay for another time!). And in these tropes, there is an element of predestination, or the body knowing something before your heart does, love manifesting in a tangible way before your heart becomes aware of it. Your body was born the way it was because we were meant to be, or you discover that all the choices you made in your life were so you could go down this path of meeting this one person you were meant for.

Which is all to say, Sachimo understood the assignment when she wrote butlers in an omegaverse world with "Kashikomarimashita, Destiny," and Hidaka Shoko was lightyears ahead of her time when she wrote "Blue Morning."1

In 2025, there is no way to read Akihito as anything but an alpha from a storied alpha family that comes to look upon his alpha-dominated society with suspicion. After all, is his omega butler Katsuragi not a better man than all of them? It takes no stretch of the imagination to see Katsuragi as a potential alpha heir cast aside by Akinao when he manifests as an omega. Now Akihito's guardian and the interim head of the Kuze family, Katsuragi knows he controls the floor by spreading his pheromones among the other alpha heads of houses and resents himself for it. He wants to lead like an alpha, with power and not with sex, and it disgusts him to see Akihito throwing his birthright away. Finally, Ishizaki is a beta: the son of a nouveau rich merchant family, he alone lives like the rest of us normies, in a world where money (and not nobility dimorphism) is king. (As is Amamiya—his arc is very much Akihito saying, "why do you, a beta, submit yourself to these terrible sexual politics when it is none of your business and you are free to walk away?" But Amamiya is at heart a poet and cannot give up the chance to see a fated mate bond with his own eyes.)

Through this lens, "Blue Morning" becomes predictable, almost pedestrian, a victim to tropes that hadn't yet been invented when it first began serializing in 2009. Of course Akihito cannot install his uncle (born a Kuze, even if banished, and thus an alpha) as the head of house—it would violate his desire to end discrimination by secondary gender. Of course Katsuragi becomes a coward, silent and almost submissive to Akihito in the later arcs, when he allows himself to recognize their bond for what it is; his omega nature must reveal itself, and he cannot disobey the call of their fated bond. Of course Katsuragi could not become the head of the Kuze family. An uppity omega is, in the end, still an omega. But of course Katsuragi cannot marry Akihito as his mate (remain Akihito's butler) either—that would mean Katsuragi has lost to his fate as an omega. And so the happiest end available to him is to be bonded to his alpha lover but remain "free-range," as it were, unbeholden to his position and his secondary gender.

Which is not to say that "Blue Morning" feels pedestrian when you read it. In fact, far from it. It is a bl manga like none other to me. The closest analogue for me is not anything else in its genre (like "Kashikomarimashita Destiny" or Fumi Yoshinaga's French Revolution period stories "Lovers in the Night" / "Gerard and Jacques") but rather the megahit political c-drama "Nirvana in Fire," a story that also centers two very stubborn leads who care so much about each other that they end up tying themselves and everyone around them into catastrophically huge knots trying to do what's best for each other. Though the stakes at play are not as high, Katsuragi gives Mei Changsu a run for his money in the "strategist with a revenge plot years in the making" department, and Akihito is straight-up Prince Jing, yearning for a man he can't have, hesitant to put himself in the hands of the man he does have, stupid and brilliant in turns.

I was struck by this similarity most especially in Volume 5, where Akihito's rash plans for retirement lead to Katsuragi making an equally rash plan to bring Akihito's uncle Naotsugu out of obscurity and into the play for succession. To get Akihito to play along, Katsuragi does something heretofore inconceivable: he confesses to Akihito. Though he does eventually say the words I love you, his monologue leading up to that is the true pièce de résistance: "For the rest of my life, I must answer to you. Perhaps there is some other more understandable way of saying this. But I can find nothing other than these words."

A genre-perfect, character-perfect confession—and one that temporarily disarms both Akihito and the reader. For a moment we dare to believe that Akihito and Katsuragi are on the same page for once, that love has brought them together. Akihito knows there is a plot afoot, but he puts himself wholly in Katsuragi's hands. "I don't know what you're trying to do here, but I've given up on doubting you anymore. I trust you." It feels like a climax of some sort, an explosive movement towards love and a happy ending. But it is not. If it were that easy, Hidaka-sensei could not work her magic.

If Katsuragi was forced out of his dream of revenge in Volume 4, it is Akihito that shakes himself awake from a dream in Volume 5. "What am I doing?" he asks himself when he is finally faced with Naotsugu. "I was carried away by joy, simply delighted that Katsuragi's mood was different from before." He realizes that he trusts Katsuragi, but trust is not the same as blind obedience. Love, Hidaka argues, is not acquiescence, it is not surrendering yourself to someone, it is not allowing yourself to be wholly subsumed in the life or ambitions of another. (This, too, would fit very neatly into an omegaverse story.) Because Katsuragi never knew love himself, he thinks that love is working tirelessly for Akihito's future, to remain a servant and shadow to Akihito. But because Akihito loves Katsuragi, truly loves him as a person, he cannot just let Katsuragi get his way, because to do so would be to allow Katsuragi to neglect himself. Akihito must think many steps ahead, to build a future not just for himself but for the man Katsuragi won't allow himself to be.

This was also Nirvana in Fire at its best, scheming in the dark to give the man you love a future, even if it means scheming against him. At the core of both of these stories is the idea that love, alone, is not enough. It does not matter that Mei Changsu is Xiao Jingyan's beloved friend Lin Chen, if the crimes of the past are not reinvestigated and Prince Jing is not on the throne. It does not matter if Katsuragi returns Akihito's affections if he still cannot walk side-by-side with Akihito as his equal. It does not matter how many times your feelings may get hurt or hurt you in turn. You must get up every morning and work through those feelings, work hard for a better future, for the one you love if not for yourself. In the words of MJ Lenderman, we all got work to do.

Well, just like NIF, if there's a criticism I can lodge against "Blue Morning," it's that the tension completely falls apart by the last volume. But of course it would. Once you have dealt all your hands, there is nothing to do but to watch the chips fall. In volume 8, we finally get to see Akihito and Katsuragi be lovey-dovey, and there's a weak feint where, for two hot seconds, Katsuragi considers going with Akihito to England, which is I think only there to show you that yes, he really is head over heels for Akihito, even if he acts like a stone-cold bitch (positive). There is a very brief time skip into a reunion (I've written about my annoyances with that trick here), and then finally the other shoe from Volume 5's meeting with Naotsugu drops. And of course (spoiler!) it is Naotsugu's child, whom Akihito and Katsuragi will raise together.

Because that is the biological imperative of the omegaverse, to bring forth children through the bonded alpha/omega pair, even if the child is not biologically theirs.

Hidaka-sensei has truly thought of, and predicted, everything.

You can buy "Blue Morning" anywhere SuBLime sells their manga. Happy reading.

A while back I had a very infrequent newsletter, and one of the entries was about "Kashikomarimashita, Destiny" and the idea of the beta couple in long-running bl manga (not in the omegaverse sense but in the first vs second couple sense). If you're interested in reading it, I've reposted that entry here. ↩︎

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"kashikomarimashita, destiny," by sachimo

Reprinted from a now defunct newsletter previously hosted on TinyLetter.

Consider this newsletter #2.5, as it's a belated supplement to last time's discussion of "Shounen no Kyoukai." (Editor's note: this post is truly lost to the ephemera of the internet, as I don't even have an archived copy of it anymore.)

"Shounen no Kyoukai" had its beginning in the Be-Boy Omegaverse anthology, so it's only fitting that this time around I talk about "Kashikomarimashita, Destiny," an Omegaverse Project story. Remember how I mentioned that many of these bl a/b/o stories are about unfortunate omegas? Our main character in "Destiny" is another unfortunate omega. This time he is Toujou Aoi, the eldest son of the Toujou family, who have historically all been alphas. Reluctant to make trouble for his stepmother, Aoi renounces his place in the Toujou family and becomes (you guessed it from the title!) a butler-in-training with another rich and well-known alpha family, the Saijous. Aoi brings with him Miyauchi, a beta and himself a butler to Aoi. Their entry into the Saijou household is met with great consternation by both Jirou, the Saijou heir, and the head butler Kudou, who like the rest of the Saijou family are all alphas. Need I mention that as young children, Aoi and Jirou realized they were meant to be soul-bonded, only for Jirou to reject Aoi—and the whole concept of soul-bonding in general? You can imagine how the rest of this story goes.

(I should mention that this being an Omegaverse Project story, gender and biological sex have no bearing on the concept of "mother" and "father," as all humans are born with a uterus and the capability to produce sperm. Thus, whenever a character in "Destiny" talks about a "mother," they just mean "the person who bore the fetus," while the father is "the person who provided the sperm." This isn't an important plot point, just one that may save some of you the confusion I encountered when I realized certain characters were related by blood because one of the women was a mother to one character and a father to another.)

At the risk of spoiling Aoi and Jirou's story, I'll tl;dr a discussion about how it complements the thesis presented in "Shounen no Kyoukai." Aoi and Jirou do not run away from their fate, their destiny, their soul-bond—whatever you want to call it. Jirou's arc contains a lot of discussion about how and whether he can choose his own destiny, but I think the characters in "Kyoukai" would have some pithy things to say to him. Which is not to say that Aoi and Jirou aren't a fantastic couple; they're well-suited and earnest and there's no reason to believe from the story presented to us that they are not the best choice for each other. Both of them work hard to be better for each other, and in a romance, what more can you ask for than that?

Of greater interest to me today is how "Destiny" follows a very old bl manga trope, one that defined many of the earliest bl manga series I read. This is the trope of the "beta couple," which I recognize is doubly fitting in this context. "Destiny" is a four-volume story, but Aoi and Jirou's story only makes up the first volume. The remaining three volumes instead deal with the beta couple, Miyauchi and Kudou. This might be a rug-pull to some people who didn't begin their bl manga education reading Shimizu Yuki's "Love Mode" or Takaido Akemi's "Breakfast Club" or even Nasu Yukie's classic shoujo-but-actually-a-shounen-comedy-in-a-dormitory "Here is Greenwood." But it's a surprisingly frequent, and classic, bl manga move.

A classic bl manga that goes for more than one volume may begin with the alpha couple (e.g., Aoi and Jirou). They meet in the first chapter, have conflict in the second, resolve it in the third and maybe fourth. As their storyline develops, you meet the supporting characters that become your beta couple (Miyauchi and Kudou). The beta couple is usually made up of friends or family or, in spicier stories, a rival love interest or ex-boyfriend of someone in the alpha couple. The beta couple is not the other side in a love triangle; they must be two people in a relationship separate from the alpha couple. But the key to the true beta couple in bl manga, as opposed to the TV Tropes version, is that they overtake the story. The bl manga beta couple is not the one that you find in the extras of volume one who turn out to be dating. No, the bl manga beta couple subsumes the alpha couple into their storyline, to the point where the alpha couple becomes the setup for the meat of the beta couple's story.

So "Love Mode" begins improbably with a high school kid named Izumi who is set up on a blind date with a much older man, Katsura, but predominantly the series is about Katsura's friend, a host club owner named Aoe Reiji, who takes in the orphaned Naoya off the streets before romancing him (do not come for me about these age gaps, I didn't write it, Shimizu did, and she has a thing I won't talk about for really, really uncomfortable age gaps and dynamics). "Breakfast Club" also fakes you out by introducing second year Matsumoto who falls in love with his mysterious roommate Iizuka, before switching tacks entirely to focus on dorm head Miki and his equally enigmatic but charming roommate Inuyama, whom we follow all the way into college and beyond. And it's undeniable that "Breakfast Club" got its roots from "Here is Greenwood," which is mostly about Hasukawa Kazuya, a first year who moves into a dorm after his older brother gets married, but finds its most heartfelt emotional arc in its later volumes where (this is a pop quiz, are you paying attention?) it shows off the lasting friendship between dorm president Mitsuru and his co-conspirator and kindred spirit Shinobu.

The TV Trope beta couple is a source of comedy or is less conflict prone than the alpha couple. Not true of the bl manga beta couple. The bl manga beta couple has family who died in a traumatic accident, is estranged from their parents, get kidnapped, has long lost siblings, can't have sex because of something terrible that happened or maybe has too much sex because of something terrible that happened. The beta couple needs, by necessity, a happy or well-situated alpha couple to play off of. In this way, the bl manga beta couple is the flip side of the TV Trope beta couple. Because the alpha couple's story has ended, the beta couple must, structurally, continue to suffer. Their happy ending must be more: more dramatic, more hard-earned, more drawn out.

And so, too, with Miyauchi and Kudou. Miyauchi is complicated from the moment you meet him. He is too attached to Aoi, he gets himself too involved in Aoi's romance with Jirou, he is a beta and thus forever outside of this hierarchy/inferiority play of alphas and omegas. He will never go into heat, and he will never soul-bond. Not for him the happy ending of Aoi and Jirou, who at least have a destiny to deny. Miyauchi's destiny and happiness, it seems, will only ever be experienced through proxy. To this swirling vortex of twisted emotions, Sachimo adds a secret backstory, child abandonment, surrogate dads, a fated encounter—and Kudou, who comes bearing the gifts and burdens of being an alpha. The weakest part of "Destiny" is the third act Sachimo gives Miyauchi and Kudou through the introduction of Jirou's uncle, Hijiri, a research who specializes in heat suppressants and is maybe a little too interested in Kudou. The wrench Hijiri throws at Kudou could have been interesting if it were given any room to breathe, and Sachimo tries to give Miyauchi a twisted mirror by which, through reflection, he can straight himself out. But instead the whole thing, to me, fell flat on its face, like Sachimo wasn't ready to go the whole nine yards "Shounen no Kyoukai" presents.

Still, I can say with pleasure that "Kashikomarimashita, Destiny" is a fun, pulpy read; classic bl manga with beta couples always are. Aoi and Miyauchi's relationship is the ensemble dark horse, a steady pulsating beat that reminds you that love comes in all different forms, and not all of them have the same happy ending. Kudou is a very specific kind of good seme, necessary when he's paired up with Miyauchi, whose psyche has more knots than a macrame potholder. I wish we had gotten the chance to explore the world where gender is just a suggestion; query whether Sachimo's choice to create a society more stratified and buttoned-down, complete with a system of butlers and high society coming-out balls, is a reaction to it. But ultimately, "Destiny" is just a good love story for two couples who go through their personal hells to be together. That should be enough, at least for today.

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01/50: the original of love (tomo serizawa, "white liar")

A perennial theme in bl manga (and, perhaps, in any genre story about love) is the desire for two people to become one person through their love. The (now tired) callback is, of course, to Plato’s Symposium, where Aristophanes recounts the myth that would later be made famous in “Hedwig and the Angry Inch,” that humans were once one large being with two sets of arms, two sets of legs, two heads, and that Zeus split us apart. Love is the longing to return to wholeness, to find one other’s half and become one.

In White Liar, Taiga Jinnouchi is both less and more than a human being. He is able to be many human beings, by taking in each character through his scripts, but it feels somehow that he is, at the same time, incomplete. His mentor Ren warns him that a lack of self is the sign of a second-rate actor, that allowing himself to be possessed by other characters, other non-selves, will destroy him. Kasamatsu, the veteran stylist, describes him as a transparent vessel, capable of taking on anything poured into him. His director describes him as a doll. He projects the illusion of wholeness, but inside he is empty.

White Liar is, then, a happy story. Taiga is reunited with Kei, the person who inspired him to become the actor he is. Like other stories of predestination (soulmates, childhood friends to lovers, reincarnation), the appeal is that you are doing what you are supposed to, that some act of divine intervention (love, fate, God) put you on a path that you will see to its end, and that that end is good. Because Kei set Taiga out on this path (acting), and that path brought Taiga back to Kei, Taiga is complete because Kei is back in his life.

Despite Kei being the point of view character, White Liar is Taiga’s journey. We even return to his hometown. What Kei gets out of this is “love,” but in a nebulous sense — good sex, good feeling, the ability to invest in someone who values him. I am not poo-pooing this as an important element of love IRL, but simply as a fascinating narrative quirk. Kei doesn’t go on a journey of self-discovery to find himself. As an object of Taiga’s love and desire, he is already whole and perfect, at least to Taiga. Kei’s forte is hair and makeup — by definition, his role if done correctly renders him invisible to Taiga’s audience. As for us, Serizawa’s audience, he is subsumed into Taiga. Together he and Taiga combine to create one person, but that one person is the actor Taiga Jinnouchi.

Compare this to Ayako Noda’s Double, which is also a series about two people trying to make up one complete actor. But the creation of the actor Takara is an uneasy compromise that cannot be sustained out in “the real world.” It is a nebulous thing of competing and complementary visions, which once sent out to actually function as an actor begins to collapse. Of course, Noda — through her other name Arai Niboshiko — is frequently interested in the idea of a world created by two people alone, that can only be sustained when accessed by those two people alone. Many of her stories are about two people becoming so lost in a world of their own making that love becomes a survival tactic.

Serizawa, though, does not feel compelled to put Kei and Taiga through the same tortuous gauntlet. In chapter 5 of White Liar, Kasamatsu is trying to convince Kei to accept Taiga’s feelings. “Sometimes, when Taiga laughs, he looks just like you,” Kasamatsu says. I have no doubt Serizawa meant that as comforting, a callback to that age-old idea that a couple that has been together long enough even begin to resemble each other. But what an unsettling thought: that the wholeness envisioned by Taiga is to take in Kei as well, as if Kei too were a role, his first and most important role. There is no need for struggle in White Liar. It is a story about seamlessness. One lover is a vessel, transparent, and the other is invisible. If Zeus were to look down upon them, he would not need to tear asunder. He would see only one person, moving easily through the world.

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Bought an INKR membership to read “Elegant Yokai Apartment Life” and then spent last night crying over Gorou Kanbe’s “Don’t Call Me Daddy.” This is a spin-off/sequel to Kanbe’s “Don’t Call Me Dirty” (also available to read for free if you’re an INKR premium member), which stars earnest and naive Shouji, the only son of a single dad who befriends a local homeless man as he tries to recover from a failed relationship with another man. “Don’t Call Me Daddy” is, unsurprisingly, about Shouji’s dad Ryuuji--but more importantly about Ryuuji’s good friend Hanao, who turns out to have been Shouji’s other father more or less for the first few years of Shouji’s life. 

“Don’t Call Me Daddy” fools you with the first chapter into thinking it is about a slice of life “my two daddies” story, but there’s a 20 year (!!) time skip at the end of chapter one. Kanbe is much more interested in these two men in their 50+ year old forms which, yeah, me too. You know from “Don’t Call Me Dirty” that they don’t have wives, but they also don’t have each other, and not for the reasons you might think.Hanao is one of those wonderfully prickly bl oyajis who hides a fragile broken heart under layers and layers of high standards and self-denial -- catnip to both myself as a reader and a flamboyant younger doctor character in the manga named Dr. Haba who I’m surprised does not have his own spinoff. Ryuuji is a character type you’ve seen time and time again in bl, seemingly careless and carefree with a dog-like personality who turns out to see and feel a lot more than he’s letting on. Despite Hanao’s insistence that he’s not part of Ryuuji’s family, together in this short volume they navigate elder care, societal discrimination, raising a son, being sexually active in your later life, loneliness, and what it means to have and keep a family. I’m not claiming that this story is realistic, but it’s also interested in creating a fantastical romance out of ordinary, unromantic circumstances. I laughed, I cried, I went out on my patio hoping to see the moon. I thought about the weight of growing old. And I thought, well, it’s good that these two old men can share it together. 

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Zantei Koibito, by Akiba Touko

An oldie but a goodie, this is a collection of three stories with no particular theme and no particular message. My favorite is without a doubt the title story (which gets three chapters), where Kurahashi, favorite capable subordinate to over-competent section manager Sakamoto, finds himself in an awkward morning after with Sakamoto, who mistakes the night before as a product of Kurahashi’s completely non-existent crush on Sakamoto. Kurahashi goes along with the misunderstanding, though, and eventually finds himself genuinely longing to be Kurahashi’s companion.

“Zantei Koibito” the title story is a funny combination of Nishida Higashi’s salaryman setups and Natsume Isaku’s Doushiyoumo Nai Keredo. The subordinate/boss pair who are a battle couple at the office is a trope, but one of my favorites, and to Akiba’s credit, the twist with Sakamoto not realizing Kurahashi had no romantic interest in him originally makes this particular pair stick out. Kurahashi never asked to be in the position of wanting to monopolize Sakamoto’s scant free time, and watching him in the first chapter crack under the frustration of not being able to see his (unwanted!) boyfriend is irony at its best. Sakamoto inspires everyone around him to do their best, but watching him change himself completely in an erroneous attempt to appeal to Kurahashi’s type (after he finds out that Kurahashi never crushed on him in the first place) is romantic and human without coming off as creepy or unhealthy, the way bl manga often portrays romance. I wish this couple got the whole five chapters, or at least a second volume, because such even-keeled, steady couples are hard to find, but it’s a good bite of fun as it is.

The second and third stories (a foreigner becomes a Buddhist monk (?!) after questioning his love for a childhood friend and two high school classmates reunite in college after one of them had spurned the other’s post-graduation confession) are serviceable, with the former feeling positively Yamamoto Kotetsuko a la Omairi Desu Yo. Nothing to write home about, but at least they don’t detract.

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Super Lovers, by Abe Miyuki

This series leaves me very, very conflicted. On the one hand, it’s Abe Miyuki, so you know what to expect: complicit codependency, caretakers with inappropriate boundaries with their wards, implied child abuse (and I don’t mean in the sexual sense as some people describe Haru and Ren’s relationship, I mean in the very real “one of these children was physically abused by a parental figure” sense), purity as a weapon and a barrier, emotionally strong children, people having a hard time navigating their feelings towards their childhood heroes, icy hypercompetent women, a handful of naturally charismatic and beautiful men, and -- oh! the Kashiwagi family, of course, and Souryuu the school. I still plan to one day write up something about Komatta Toki, my favorite of her series, so for now suffice to say that Super Lovers is not a surprising addition to her oeuvre, nor is it a surprising addition to bl manga in general, and it’s basically Komatta Toki blended with the Mainichi Seiten series. I like both of those things. I generally like Abe Miyuki. I think I generally like Super Lovers. And yet.

“Older brother becomes father figure, has difficulties with one of the youngest in a romantic sense” pops up so often and so pervasively (just look at Yamamoto Kotetsuko’s latest, Bokura no Negai) that I am surprised “brought up by a stepbrother” isn’t a category on Baka-Updates, but something about the particular way this relationship is arranged in Super Lovers makes me fret. Outside of practical(?) concerns like genetic defects and its association with, yes, child sexual abuse and rape, one of the issues with incest is that it confuses interpersonal relationships. It makes the person you depend on to take care of you, clothe you, feed you, nurture you, etc. into your romantic partner, with all the issues of miscommunication, sexual negotiation, and emotional confusion that accompanies that. Blah blah relational trauma and traumatic bonding. 

My point isn’t that I think that’s necessarily happening with Haru and Ren, but rather if you look at their relationship critically and from a non-bl, totally third party perspective, I can’t help but see it. Maybe one of the most disturbing arcs is when Haru spurns Ren’s attempts to have sex with him, and Ren goes to their cousin Natsuo so he can “try it out.” Haru finds them and is furious, but Ren argues that if Haru isn’t going to have sex with him, then Ren might as well give up and have sex with anyone who’s willing -- which of course in Super Lovers would be his host-club-working (non-blood-related! but still totally) cousin instead of, say, his classmate. Fine, Haru tells Ren, you have sex with Natsuo, but if you do that, don’t expect to ever come home again. Ren sulkily comes home. He and Haru have words, and Haru says he doesn’t want to be sleeping in the same room with someone who claims to love him but would be willing to sleep with another man. “And of all people,” Haru complains, “why did you drag a relative like Natsuo into this?”

In the words of Daveed Diggs, whaaaaaaat. There are so many levels of crazy here that I can’t even parse. Abe Miyuki seems to treat Haru’s denial of his sexual desires towards Ren (which isn’t even that disciplined, he acts out on it all the time, and someone should tell Abe that the Lolita-esque narrative of “older man finds the unintentional advances of a younger, innocent lover irresistible” is nagl in this genre) as a joke or a bl trope setup (it’s funny because they’re always being interrupted by other people! OTHER PEOPLE LIKE HARU’S OWN BROTHERS), but it seems to me that Haru has a totally legitimate reason to not sex up a 16-year-old kid who imprinted on Haru when he was eight and is also financially and emotionally dependent. Haru can’t explain his feelings to Ren, because 1) it’d hurt Ren as a romantic partner, 2) it’d be awkward to explain that to Ren as a family member, and 3) Ren has no real understanding of how family dynamics work in the first place, so he has no context for Haru’s feelings (let’s not go into Haru’s own family emotional trauma). Haru’s hot-and-cold personality makes for an intense and intensely frustrating romantic partner, but his being Ren’s caretaker also means that when he threatens to turn Ren out of his home, it sounds far more ominous than a girlfriend turning her cheating boyfriend out of their shared apartment. Never mind that Haru would never abandon Ren like that -- the very act of saying it points to a very real power imbalance between these two. Meanwhile this makes two much older family figures that Ren has interacted with in a sexual context, one of whom (Haru) basically has the reluctant or implicit approval of the rest of Ren’s family to treat him like a tongyangxi. 

And again, I’m not saying that I think Haru and Ren’s relationship is unhealthy, or not any more unhealthy than any of the other super-all-encompassing and codependent relationships Abe Miyuki prefers. I like that Haru and Ren are grappling with exactly how a Hikaru Genji plot can go wrong, and in some ways that makes Super Lovers a better rendition of “raising your young lover” than other more shallow bl works which don’t even bother. But am I overthinking it? Does Abe Miyuki really want me to wonder about these issues, or are these just plot contrivances that have the good fortune of raising deeper questions about fake incest? My suspicion is that it’s, unfortunately, a mix of both, which is made more obvious by Aki and Shima, who sometimes have very insightful things to say about the Haru and Ren relationship and sometimes just act as the requisite “gently radiating kinkshaming” peanut gallery. 

(Speaking of Aki and Shima, that’s another tie between Super Lovers and Mainichi Seiten (is it a seasonal thing I’m not getting? Or is it just coincidence that this is a family of siblings and there’s an Aki and a Shima in both?) -- really makes you realize how niche and tropey bl manga is.)

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Prince Charming, by Takaido Akemi

Prince Charming is not going to be to everyone's taste, but if it's to your taste, like it is to mine, then whooo boy are you in for a treat. Start with a main character (Asahina) who loves sex and is indifferent about teaching but then is about to lose his job bc of his sex hobbies, add in a feisty student (Yuasa) who has a boy's curiosity for Asahina and a man's possessive interest in being with Asahina, throw in Takaido's trademark humor and characterization with Yuasa's meddling friends Nagai and Kagami, and then add a vigorous and delightful dose of two almost love triangles that collapses into a love square, and you have Prince Charming. What's wonderful about this series is that the plot climaxes never quite come where you think they will. Yes, all the characters in this series are less than sexually monogamous, and yes, Asahina and Yuasa's primary motivations are to have their cakes and eat them too, but refreshingly, sex in this manga is neither the focus nor the answer. Instead, it's more focused on the tangle of relationships: Yuasa's constantly evolving friendship with Nagai, Asahina and Kagami trading teacher and student roles as they navigate sexual attraction and looking after Yuasa, Asahina and Yuasa trying to work out exactly how much commitment and investment they need from each other to feel satisfied. Takaido's characters are filled with contradictory desires, but instead of picking between them, they often try to take all of them at the same time, and instead of rescuing them from their messes, Takaido lets them wallow. Asahina should know better than to sleep with Yuasa -- he doesn't. Yuasa should know his friends and articulate his desires better -- he doesn't. Kagami should just let things well enough alone when it doesn't involve him -- he doesn't. And Nagai should either be hands-off and cool or passionate, not both -- but of course he is both. Which makes for a story that feels like it's full of false starts and promiscuous, distasteful characters, but I find them incredibly realistic and, more importantly, charming. Because the other thing about the people in Prince Charming is that they're never cruel or vengeful. In the middle of an ever tangling love square in volume 2, Kagami and Yuasa put themselves in harm's way for friendship more than for love, and there's a sense in volume 3 that the collapsing of Kagami's leg in the love triangle is more because he can't stand to keep betraying Yuasa's friendship than because he doesn't love Asahina. Kagami's last line in the main story is pretty telling ("I have so many kind people to take care of me!") because the atmosphere of Prince Charming is a happy, caring one. Asahina isn't the best teacher, but he wants the best for all three of his students. No one wants to be the bad guy, even when they're sleeping around. It sounds crazy and against everything bl manga usually stands for. But it works, and miracles of miracles, all four characters make it through to the end of three volumes as, reluctant or otherwise, friends. Probably the only thing that doesn't work for me here is the way Nagai's storyline is bundled up, with a graduated senpai and a blackmailer. The epilogue tries to shed light on the relationship, but only serves to confuse the themes without actually connecting them to the main story. Still, he's a strong enough player in the first two volumes, and is the wry, cool-headed character that the quartet needs, so I can't complain too much.

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Caste Heaven, by Ogawa Chise

The obvious comparison is Motoni Modoru’s Rika the Breeder series, right down to the system of Kings, Queens, and Jacks. ‘Course, since only Motoni Modoru can be Motoni Modoru, Caste Heaven is far less twisted and sick and has sex scenes that are probably designed for you to feel sexy about them, instead of disgusted and morbidly intrigued. You know the drill: at a high school where social status is determined by finding the right playing card during a “caste game,” an array of characters find their fortunes reverse and reverse again as they negotiate the difficult lines between power and friendship. We start with Azusa, a former King who loses his rank and slips all the way to Joker, the class fool, but in typical Ogawa fashion, there are enough beta couples to fill their own series.

Just like Rika the Breeder, Ogawa’s high school is a parody of a parody, with social classes like “preps,” “nerds,” and “goths,” and the assumption of a role is complete – you lose your personality, your friends, and your position with each shift. Just like Rika the Breeder, the social pressure needed to sustain this kind of situation is assumed, and not explicit. But unlike Rika, the stakes always seem personal, never mythic. I’ve joked before that Rika is a shounen manga dressed up in bl manga clothes: it stars a plucky newcomer with a dead brother who may secretly be the ultimate big bad, only the superpower is sex and the damsel in distress is a dude they all call “mama” (Loveless follows this same formula, only softened for shounen-ai purposes, which is why Loveless got licensed and Rika the Breeder got canceled by Motoni Modoru herself). Caste Heaven is strictly bl. Karino’s motives for monopolizing Azusa are obvious and straightforward; Azusa has a backstory with his mom that explains him, for better or worse. Compared to the labyrinthe snarl of psychological trauma in Rika, Caste Heaven is a soap opera, just with a lot of violent rape.

Ogawa Chise has a thing for badly codependent relationships, with a “weaker” character hiding the fact that he’s manipulating his “stronger” companion into remaining with him for better or worse – and it’s always worse. Ogawa makes an argument in the latest chapters that this kind of manipulation is, in some ways, just a way to “protect” a love that would otherwise be crushed, but just like the caste game itself, Ogawa’s fondness for unhealthy possessive relationships is like the air itself to this story, and every twist is designed to dirty up an otherwise pure feeling. Unlike, say, Harada, who despite her deviance makes it quite clear when a relationship is trash and when it’s actually healthier than the characters’ other options, it’s hard to tell if Ogawa thinks these relationships are complete trash or secretly worth saving and that the creepy unhealthy dynamics that plague every single pairing is because of something entirely out of the characters’ control – the caste game, representing ruthless adult society and the expectations thereof.

In fact, it’s hard to tell what Ogawa is doing, period. I like the intersection of the Kuze-Atsumu couple with the trainwreck of Karino-Azusa circa chapter 8, because it shows two characters trying, and failing, to free themselves from the game, but chapter 9 went back to Ogawa’s thesis that the game gives a kind of freedom to the characters that society denies them. If that was true, then what about characters like Azusa and Atsumu, who are brutalized by the caste game but would be largely left alone by society at large? What about Yatori from chapter 10.5, who would fuck up Yukari with or without the help of the caste game? If only Ogawa would focus enough on seeing these storylines through instead of jumping to the next beta couple, we could get some answers, but that's what happens when you have Shimizu Yuki syndrome.

[blrecs]

Itoshi no Mirai-kun, by Yoshida Yuuko

Bizarrely innocent and twisted/kinky at the same time. Hibiya’s best friend Mirai wants desperately to reflect sincerity in all things and so begins a string of questionable relationships with men who push their feelings onto him. Hibiya tries hard to keep Mirai from getting hurt, but begins to suspect his own feelings are less than pure. I think Yoshida Yuuko thinks this story is a happy one, but I can’t help feeling like she wasted the set-up, especially past chapter 3. Mirai is too pure for this world, in a literal sense — he becomes an intense mirror of the feelings of the people around him, and it’s impossible for anyone to handle that kind of unadulterated sincerity. The decisions Mirai makes are laughable, because he seems to operate in a world where no one can have bad intentions.

Hibiya rightly recognizes that the only way to save Mirai from himself is to ruin the very thing that makes Mirai himself — teach him to lie, and teach him to see that others lie, and that you can’t just accept other’s feelings for you unconditionally. Hibiya is at cross-purposes with himself, too, because teaching Mirai to see past veneers will allow Mirai to see that Hibiya is possessive and lustful, and this all gets twisted into a weird bundle of poor decision making on everyone’s part in chapter 3 that is honestly suspenseful and exciting.

But then there’s this slow slide into predictability in the last chapter, where Mirai’s innocence isn’t treated like the bomb it’s been in the earlier chapters and reverts back into bl tropes of the uneducated, bashful uke who can’t understand his own desires. Interesting, but disappointing, which was my feeling about Yoshida’s other works as well. In some ways, this is the lighter Toujo Asami, who trafficks very much in the same kind of relationship dynamics and intense, unbelievable main characters.