Manga Moments: Yaoi Explained

I felt tempted to call this post Why Yoshinaga Fumi rocks so much or One reason to go read Flower of Life NOW!, but I’m think yaoi explained pretty much covers the amazingly good concept this mangaka defined here. I’m sure there are tons of explanations around about why women like boy’s love and of course with detailed reasons for every existing rule in the genre. I think Matt Thorn covered all this very well in Girls And Women Getting Out Of Hand: The Pleasure And Politics Of Japan’s Amateur Comics Community. But a picture is worth a thousand words. Well, in this case, a few manga pages are worth a thousand words.

35 days of BL manga! – Day 25: A non-BL series that you wish was BL

What can I say? It had to be Banana Fish. There are a lot of implications in this story and some might say this is shounen-ai…but seriously, it is not. I wish it were, with all my heart. Most of the times I don’t feel like pairing random characters around if I’m not reading/watching BL. Sometimes it happens because…well, there are a lot of hints around (yes Saraiya Goyou, I’m talking about you).

I never wished more for a manga to become BL as I did with this one. There is a certain detail here that doesn’t let us imagine it could happen at all unless the story changed. Oh well, at least I can keep my IchixMasa fantasies alive…

Summary:

Nature made Ash Lynx beautiful; nurture made him a cold ruthless killer. A runaway brought up as the adopted heir and sex toy of “Papa” Dino Golzine, Ash, now at the rebellious age of seventeen, forsakes the kingdom held out by the devil who raised him. But the hideous secret that drove Ash’s older brother mad in Vietnam has suddenly fallen into Papa’s insatiably ambitious hands–and it’s exactly the wrong time for Eiji Okamura, a pure-hearted young photographer from Japan, to make Ash Lynx’s acquaintance… (Viz)