My thoughts on yaoi (no really)

My thoughts on yaoi (no, really)

As I was toodling around in Lissa Pattillo’s post-birthday/station-identification post this morning, I found myself mulling (once I’d finished groaning about my own old age) over my many issues with boys’ love manga. I have a fairly long history in slash fanfiction, and while a lot of it is really not to my taste (I prefer thoughtful, characterization-rich stories that reveal something new about the characters, as opposed to gratuitous smut-fests or sugary wish-fulfillment romances, and I’ll admit that the last two of these make up at least 75% of all relationship-focused fanfiction), it is easy to find the stuff I do like, now that I know how. So when I started really getting into manga, I thought boys’ love was going to be a no-brainer for me. Delving into the genre, though, I’ve been disappointed again and again, to the point where I’ve pretty much given up on it. I’m hoping Lissa’s blog will help me discover some series I enjoy, but I’m not as optimistic as I’d like. After all, even Jason Thompson let me down here. But I’m hoping that, as with fanfiction, it might be easy for me to find what I’m looking for, once I know how.

My main problems with the boys’ love manga I’ve read have been as follows:

1. Romance. The romance seems rushed and *really* contrived. Boys who don’t even know each other at the beginning of the story are declaring everlasting love by the end of the first volume, and while this may, on the surface, reflect the nature of some young teen and pre-teen romance (remember in seventh grade, when couples would be formed almost entirely by way of messages relayed by each other’s friends? “I’m here to tell you that Stacy likes Matt and wants to be his girlfriend.” “Matt says ‘okay'”) the way these romances are presented, they feel like they’ve come straight from the mind of a 12-year-old watching from the sidelines. Just as the 12-year-old is too young and (necessarily) self-involved to really have any insight into the scene playing out before her, outside of how it affects her (admiration? envy?), these stories are told without looking any deeper than that. And maybe if that 12-year-old is the target audience for the story, that’s exactly as it should be. But as an adult reader, something that seems told from the perspective of a romantically inclined 12-year-old mind is not really sufficient to keep me engaged. Even the conflict in these stories seems idealized and rushed to resolution. In fanfiction, it’s true, the writer can get pretty quickly to the romance, or at least more quickly than otherwise, but this is only because it is assumed that the reader has already read/seen/whatever the original author’s work, so all that buildup of plot and characterization has been *done* already. It makes sense to me that yaoi, with its doujinshi roots, would have developed like this in the beginning. But when I’m reading an original story, this kind of shortcut just doesn’t work for me.

2. Plot. You know, when I think about it, this is really just an extension of my first item, but it’s big enough to warrant its own section here, I think. My husband once asked me, “Is Banana Fish yaoi?” and my immediate response was, “I wish .” And when I said that, it wasn’t because I wished that the romance in Banana Fish had been more explicit, because honestly, I didn’t need it to be. What I meant was that I wish I’d ever read a boys’ love manga as interesting and well-plotted as Banana Fish . and maybe what this means is that I don’t really want to read boys’ love manga at all . It’s possible that I just have to accept that the real audience for BL really does want to just get to the romance as quickly as possible, see the boys make out and work their way up to sex as quickly as possible, and is really not interested in having to read a real *story* in order to get there. Unfortunately for me, I am. I really want to read a story . and I wish very much that I could find some long, epic stories that just happen to contain queer romance as they go. Like, maybe if those three volumes of Rin! or Little Butterfly (both of which had positive write-ups in Manga: The Complete Guide ) had actually been ten volumes, and the romance was developed over the course of a much greater plot, I would have actually liked them, because honestly I did find the characters interesting, what I got to see of them. I just felt cheated by the way the “plot” and the relationships were rushed along to serve the romance.

3. Seme/uke. Okay. I’ll admit, I just don’t get it. Probably this makes me an ignorant westerner, but I really just don’t understand how/why this convention became standard in boys’ love manga, and I personally find it off-putting. I can’t decide what disturbs me more, that one of the male characters is being forced into the role of “female” or that this role is what is considered to be “female” to begin with. Again, maybe the problem here is that I’m not the proper target audience, but I really crave stories that value individual characterization over traditional gender roles, and I find this particular formula to be distracting at best (and offensive at worst). Also, I don’t care what the characters do in bed as much as what they do out of bed, so the many pages devoted to cementing the seme/uke roles by demonstrating their assigned top/bottom roles in bed are mostly just boring to me, especially since the sex scenes seem to always revolve around getting the uke over his fear of penetration, which… well, I could go on for a very long time about how unrealistic and heteronormative I think that is, but I’ll spare you here.

Reading this back, I sound so hostile to the genre, but honestly, I really want to like it, and I keep trying to find titles I’ll enjoy. Trouble is, I’ve found nothing. I’m sure I must just not be looking at the right things. I admit, I originally searched out stories that I thought would be less focused on explicit sex, because I thought those might have more of the things I’m really looking for in my fiction, but it’s possible the opposite is true. Perhaps the stories I’ve been reading are really intended for younger readers, and I’d be better off with the more adult titles. On the other hand, I’m really not interested in just reading porn. So I don’t really know where to turn. I’m hoping, as I said, to find some help in Lissa’s reviews, but I’d take any suggestions here too. I’d also be interested in reading yuri titles, but after my BL experiences, I’ve been too scared to check them out.