M.J. Lyons's Blog, page 6

NBLog: Love Me For Who I Am Vol. 1

NBLog                    enby love, gender-diverse smut (◔◡◔)

BLog reviews recent boys love, yaoi and LGBTQ+ English translation manga.

[image error]Love Me For Who I Am Vol. 1

Story and art: Kata Konayama

Translation: Amber Tamosaitis

Publisher: Seven Seas Entertainment

Release Date: June 30, 2020

(｡ó﹏ò) Content Warning: references to fictional transphobia, homophobia, misgendering (ó﹏ò｡)

High schooler Iwaoka Tetsu notices one of his classmates, Mogumo Ryuunosuke, pinning a wish to a tree during Tanabata. Tetsu’s been trying to work up the courage to talk to Mogumo, who he believes to be a cross-dressing boy from his class. When Tetsu reads Mogumo’s wish for more friends who understand them, he finally takes the initiative to invite Mogumo to work at Question, a maid café where all of the maids are otokonoko, (a complex cultural identity, but simply) a girl’s soul in the body of a boy.

Mogumo loves wearing a maid outfit, but they don’t want to be a girl, and they also know they aren’t a boy.  Can they find some way to fit in at the maid café? Will they finally meet people who can understand the way they feel? Or is this yet another place they don’t belong?

Humans have an obsession with putting everything in boxes. We’re assigned a gender at birth based on assumptions of sexual and gonadal characteristics, and even if that gender is uncomfortable we do our best to ingrain it into children with obsessive, single-minded dedication. Sure, there’s practically no society in the world that hasn’t had myriad forms of gender diversity, but even as non-binary identity has emerged as a social and legal concept, our minds aren’t prepared to recognize gender as a spectrum–instead we get three sex categories, male, female or X… to me, gender ambivalent individual that I am, that’s always felt kind of like saying, “Yeah, we’ve got the two serious sexes and then…” *waves hand vaguely at everything else*

Love Me For Who I Am is an exploration of the fumbling, sometimes uncomfortable ways we discover our gender identity within and outside of the gender binary.

For starters, there’s Mogumo who is invited into the maid café with promises that they’ll meet people who are just like them. But the café uses the term “otokonoko” to describe their maids–maids are expected to introduce themselves to patrons: “Just to let you know I’m an otokonoko. Is that alright?”—and Mogumo feels they’d be lying to people if they identified as a boy, or a cross-dresser, or a girl in a boy’s body.

This causes some initial friction with Mei, who wishes she’d been born a girl, so she uses otokonoko as a convenient way to affirm her gender around other people. There’s lovey dovey Suzu, a boy who’s head over his heels for his boyfriend and wishes he could proclaim their love to the world, but has to pretend they’re just close friends in public. He doesn’t have to hide his relationship with the other maids, which he finds freeing. Then there’s perfect little Ten-chan, a super kawaii cosplayer who loves to lose himself in characters. He sees gender more as the roles he plays in different parts of his life, the super dedicated, high-achieving high school boy, Ten-chan the adorable maid, and all of the characters he cosplays as.

Tetsu’s older sibling, Sacchan, was assigned male at birth but seems to live as a woman full-time, running Question as a place other gender-diverse maids can be themselves, mother figure to all the maids. Tetsu himself plays the beleaguered shoujo romantic lead, trying to help Moguma find a place for themself, while trying to learn about gender identity and support the people around him, while grappling with his feelings for Mogumo–will people discriminate against the two of them like he’s seen happen to Sacchan all his life?

I’d gladly put this in the hands of any young person, especially those exploring their own gender identity. As opposed to arguing people are either male, female or *waves hand vaguely at everything else*, Love Me For Who I Am is about gender as one aspect of our own multi-faceted, evolving identities. I wasn’t expecting romance, either, but Tetsu and Mogumo’s developing relationship also shows how gender and sexuality are separate but informing aspects of our identities. If Tetsu dates Mogumo, someone assigned male at birth but living outside the gender binary, what does that make him?

I was expecting there to be a lot of similarities with My Androgynous Boyfriend, but the two manga are very much different beasts, tackling gender identity in different ways. My Androgynous Boyfriend is about external assumptions and judgements; Love Me For Who I Am is about learning to not need to ask permission to be yourself. Mogumo knows who they are, but struggles explaining their identity to people and feels no one will understand them, with Mei as their foil, who has no problem explaining her identity to people, but struggles with who she really is–is otokonoko the right word for her, or is it just convenient, culturally palatable shorthand? Both, to some extent, have to learn not to ask permission to be who they are.

Level of Problematic: Otokonoko maid café; like any self-respecting weeb who is confronted with a Japanese term I don’t know, I ran to Wikipedia as soon as Mei described “otokonoko“. I adore the idea of “otokonoko”, but I hesitate around the whole “trap” context of the term. Love Me For Who I Am isn’t a super horny manga, but there’s definitely a bit of titillation. Nothing wrong with that, trans and non-binary people can be hot, sexy and desirable! With all this in mind, I’m cautiously optimistic to see how romance and maybe even S-E-X plays out in future volumes.[image error]

Level of Adorable: Magical Girl Twinkle Pine; so I’m going to level with you, I’m just going to use this space to talk about my precious little baby boy Ten-chan and how much I love him. He is the living embodiment of the “precious little cinnamon bun, too good for this world, too pure”. He is literal uwu on the pages of this glorious manga. I try not to throw around my super kawaiis and my moe, but in this case, this small, beautiful, nerdy fictional otaku crossdresser captured my heart. If you need a reason to love Ten-chan more, he says in the story that, when he grows up, he wants to open a clothing store for people who don’t fit into traditionally feminine clothes. Love this boy, protect him. Anyways, thanks for coming to my TED Talk.

[image error]Love him, protect him.

Level of Spiciness: “I do like to change into something comfortable as soon as I get home. Don’t mind me.”; I wasn’t expecting the slightly titillating romance aspect of this manga. For manga diehards it hit all the milestones: the protagonist tripping and falling onto their love interest, furtive, flushed glances, trying not to peak while your crush changes. Aside from My Androgynous Boyfriend I haven’t really seen a non-binary person represented in a romantic context in manga. I’m here for it.

BLog: Pain Killer

BLog reviews recent boys love, yaoi and LGBTQ+ English translation manga.

+ occasionally non-Japanese media too (◔◡◔)

[image error]Pain Killer

Story and art: HamletMachine

Publisher: Nightmare Land Press

Release Date: March 2020

(｡ó﹏ò) Content Warning: discussion of sexual assault and various kinks, including mindbreak, noncon, dubcon, monster sex, insects, gangbangs, etc. (ó﹏ò｡)

“This world… is overrun by beasts.”

Juan is a part of an elite team of all-male, skanky, sexy, slutty space warriors that travel to the surface of their barren world to do battle with the violent monstrosities that roam freely.

Juan and his fellow warriors are there to kill. And sometimes they get killed.

And sometimes they get fucked every which way ’til Tuesday.

Pain Killer comes from the deliciously twisted mind of HamletMachine, behind Starfighter, the archetypal kinky boys in space webcomic. (Aside: Some day I want to fund a study examining how much Starfighter influenced a certain segment of the Internet’s sexuality, it seems like such a reference point for so many people on porny fandom Twitter.) Hammy’s latest is a tour de force of kink and fetish, in fact they’re listed on the back like a nutritional label, and with good reason. Pain Killer is not for the faint of heart, but for long-time HamletMachine fans it will not disappoint.

The story itself is short and extremely graphic. Juan is ambushed while out killing monsters, first attacked and violated by small face hugger-type insectoids that seem to break his mind, then thoroughly used by large, creepy, masked, shiny, big-dicked humanoids that seem to be the main enemy of the humans. A later section sees Juan back in his subterranean human base, dealing with the after effects of being assaulted by the monsters, and how they might have changed him. HamletMachine writes in the back that “Pain Killer was created exclusively on Patreon from August ’18 – Feb ’20”, and the format of the collected comic follows that. Half of the book is the story itself, the rest is an art section, a gallery of perversion exploring different kinky configurations centred around Juan.

Pain Killer is like a marriage between yaoi manga and the pulpy, pin-up, old-style sexploitation comics–I’ve seen a lot on all sides of the sexual spectrum, but it especially reminds me of gay comic creators like Gengoroh Tagame, Zack or Tom of Finland, not to mention the universe of yaoi manga and fanart. Exaggerated, muscular, masculine himbos meant to be wanked over. It’s sort of like if the marines in Starship Troopers wore spandex thonged onesies and thigh-high pleather boots into battle. I would be the first in line to see Casper Van Dien fighting bugs in a thong; “Would you like to know more?” Yes, Federal Network. Yes, I would like to know more.

Whether being used and abused by alien monsters, creepy crawlies or his fellow humans, HamletMachine does not go easy on poor Juan. In true S&M fashion, though, the artist tackles the subject matter with the love and affection we’ve come to expect from HamletMachine for her characters. Violation is drawn lovingly, indulgently onto the page, you get the sense that Hammy’s enjoying drawing Juan getting spit-roasted by an enormous alien cock and the collared monster’s human overlord as much as we enjoy seeing it. I’ve spent a great deal of time exploring ideas around sexual assault, noncon and dubcon in BL/yaoi media… since it comes up time and time again. That’s one of the joys of going into a HamletMachine work, this is an unapologetic piece of kink and fetish art, that’s what we expect–nay, demand! Instead of weird, problematic, possibly accidental sexual politics creeping into the work the kink warning is upfront. With that in mind you can loose yourself in this poor boy getting just absolutely destroyed, instead of noncon and dubcon cropping up without warning and being upsetting, or causing narrative or thematic dissonance.

There is an argument about monstrosity, otherness and race that I’ll touch on only because it fascinates me–I also have the racial privilege of being a white settler-descendent engaging with these ideas. This will be nothing new to consumers of science fiction and fantasy. I think of the drow in Dungeons & Dragons, or the orcs of the Lord of the Rings film franchise–it’s still so fucking wild to me that the only speaking person of colour actor in that entire fucking series was a heavily-made up as Lurtz the Uruk-hai villain who gets violently decapitated at the end of Fellowship.

Pain Killer‘s menacing, drooling, big-dicked monsters are, save their masks, a shiny, rubbery black, like walking, feral gimp suits. I don’t read the creatures as stand-ins for black men by any means, nor do I believe that’s the artist’s intention, but I think it’s fair to point out the signifiers in an argument about racial otherness. Black men’s bodies being seen as “other”, monstrous, predatory and hyper-sexualized is absolutely a real thing, and this all occurred to me even as I was reading Pain Killer and getting turned on by it. With that in mind, the story also has that age-old subversion of who, exactly, is the villain in the story–Juan doesn’t get it any easier from the humans. Who, in the end… are the real monsters… with sexy results!

The only other note for Pain Killer and as my own personal public service announcement to porny fandom Twitter, the only thing about this entire project that gave me pause, is a single acronym on the back cover, in the section outlining the kink/fetish themes: “ftm”

I am a vaguely cisgender guy so I don’t claim to speak for the trans community, I simply ask for alternatives. There are a couple of just delicious images of trans!Juan (I believe that’s how we’d format that caption on porny fandom Twitter), beautiful, sexy bits a’gaping and leaking with various fluids. I have just so much time for porny art that includes trans men, women and non-binary people (I can give you some recommendations if you’re at all interested) and reinterpreting beloved characters (I’m especially a big fan of trans!Spider-Man… FOR REASONS). That said, I am fundamentally opposed to trans identity getting lumped in as a kink or fetish. This is more of a semantic issue than anything, and I fully intend to put this book into the hands of at least three trans and nonbinary guys I know and love (maybe more, just try and stop me).

It is absolutely fair to give a content warning. Seeing depictions of certain bodies can be triggering to people who deal with gender dysphoria or body dysmorphia, I just don’t think “ftm” is the right term to do it–my understanding is that it’s an outdated term in the trans community as language in gender discourse evolves. That gives the sense that trans men are kinks, which they are not. Maybe an alternative like “depiction of trans-masculine bodies” or just “trans!Juan” would be better. Wordier, but it doesn’t hurt anyone.

I bring these criticisms up out of love, because I adore the weird space Pain Killer occupies, and I love living in that space with like-minded creators and consumers. Sex, sexuality, porn and art (and all their intersections) are messy, imperfect, hot, exploitative, loving, objectifying, liberating. What HamletMachine offers up in Pain Killer says a lot about why we, as sexual beings, love the idea of getting fucked to death by the monstrous. I see fucking the monstrous as liberating in the same way that dom-sub relationships or rape fantasies are; it’s about power and control, and giving up that control to be fulfilled in ways outside of restrictive norms. HamletMachine will have me as a devotee because I trust her to take me there, and in Pain Killer she does not disappoint.

Level of Problematic: Juan gets fucked by theories of otherness and outdated gender terminology; see paragraphs 10-12.

Level of Adorable: Juan gets fucked by adorable, mind-breaking face huggers; like, good God, I cannot even begin to describe how sexy-cute Juan is. If you’re a pervy freak like me, you might even find something in the art section that may surprise you with its titillation.

Level of Spiciness: Juan gets fucked by literally everything; Pain Killer is not only spicy, it’s like being force-fed a ghost pepper while being hung upside down strapped to a Saint Andrew’s Cross with Casper Van Dien in a spandex thonged onesie and thigh-high pleather boots face fucking you to Starship Troopers being projected onto a darkroom gangbang. The final frontier.

BLog: Teach Me, Tutor

BLog reviews recent boys love, yaoi and LGBTQ+ English translation manga.

[image error]Teach Me, Tutor

Story and art: Sakira

Translation: Valeria Paolini

Publisher: Juné Manga

Release Date: June 19, 2020

High school himbo Mitsuhashi Minami comes home one day to the news that his mother has hired a tutor, former neighbour and cunning university student Arakawa Uta… but is schoolwork the only kind of teaching Uta has in mind?!

Twentysomething (ostensibly heterosexual) beautician Asari Soushi finds himself with a new roommate when his elderly landlady moves him and kindly, beefy, divorced Momoi Atsumu into the same apartment. Soushi wants to save up money so he can buy a nice house for his future (but as yet fantasy) wife. Is a candidate for his heart closer than he realizes?!

Two childhood best friends/rivals, black-haired, mildly hirsute Shou and blond-haired smooth twunk Tatsuo, realize they have feelings for each other, share a romantic first kiss, and then beat the shit out of each other over who loves who more. They compete for the right to top the first time they have sex, who will take the honour?!

Teach Me, Tutor is three yaoi short stories, with the titular tutor story being the longest. While the stories are unconnected, there is a central thread: the biggest, thiccest, beefiest man tiddies and the puffiest, pinkest, most glistening man nips you can imagine.

Imagine them.

Now imagine them bigger, thiccer, beefier, puffier, pinker and more glistening.

That’s basecamp.

So we’ve established manga artist Sakira’s yaoi kink, although stir in sexy, horny, big beefy boys with sometimes dubious sexual politics and you’ve got Teach Me, Tutor.

We’ll start with dubious sexual politics. The most egregious is first story about Minami’s tutor. They hook up, if that wasn’t obvious, and far from being the intelligent, caring tutor he appears to be, Uta is controlling, manipulative and obsessive–like with my review of The Cornered Mouth Dreams of Cheese, I can get on board with obsession, to an extent if it serves the story, but jealousy doesn’t do it for me. Maybe Uta’s “If you found someone else I would kill him and then kill myself” intensity is supposed to be funny or romantic, but this is fluffy, smutty, sexy yaoi, not a psychological horror, so it doesn’t mesh well. Uta also doesn’t take “slow” or “no” for an answer, and an entire chapter of the five part “Teach Me, Tutor” is about a university friend of grown-up Minami drugging and sexually assaulting him. Sigh.

Strangely, despite being taken advantage of by an objectively abusive boyfriend and a creep from school, the story gives him agency. He confronts Uta about his stalking and obsession (unsuccessfully), and tells him what he wants in terms of sex. He frees himself from his eventual sexual assault, even though Uta tries to intervene. He’s not a damsel in distress that needs saving. Beyond that, it’s unfortunate because “Teach Me, Tutor” has some extremely smutty (consensual) sex, including rope work, blindfolds, vibrators, nipple play (see above), and Sakira’s art is gorgeous and filthy. Too bad it occasionally gets dragged down by noncon, dubcon and weird emotional beats.

The following two stories fair better, and are much more consistent in terms of smutty, hilarious stories, as absurd as they both are. “My Dear Teddy Bear” is domestic romance that becomes hardcore twunk-on-bear action after dark. There’s just something glorious about the reversal of the big, beefy guy getting topped by the slim young twunk. My personal favourite of the three and, tragically, the shortest, “Our Cowgirl/Riding Situation”, pits two romantically entwined best friends against each other, literally competing for the top. The last story helped me discover a new kink; lovers who are lifelong rivals, who will fight each other to prove who loves who more. This one was a smutty joy to read from start to finish. I would read an entire series about Shou and Tatsuo’s hilarious, competitive, adorable relationship.

This is the first title I’ve read by Juné Manga, as far as I can recall. There were a few little editing errors here and there, noticeable enough to mention, but other than that a beautiful little manga package. It’s too bad their backlist isn’t more widely available. Like Melting Lover, it’s nice to be able to sample a manga artist’s range with a series of shorts to see if they can… tweak your interest… get it? Tweak? Like nipples?

Level of Problematic: Nipple torture; I was having a conversation with my roommate about the use of sexual assault in BL narratives, as one does. Like I said in Caste Heaven, I think depictions of sexual assault have their place in media, however with Teach Me, Tutor I was thinking about how the characters justify rape. There’s plenty of the “Rape To Love” trope I considered in my Caste Heaven review, the “I’m doing this because I love you and I have to own and control you,” that’s how Uta justifies it. The second egregious instance uses the “your body feels so good when I do this so it must mean you want it”. It’s like there’s a separation between act and intent, if the character can justify it to themselves it makes it okay to put on the page. Again, this ends up feeling exploitative and gratuitous, as opposed to sexy or key to the story. “Teach Me, Tutor” could have been told just as easily without sexual assault. ANYWAYS, I spend way too much time thinking about rape in BL/yaoi, THIS IS WHY WE CAN’T HAVE NICE THINGS, MANGAKA!

Level of Adorable: “Even if he’s a man, his chest is soft and it smells nice”; the latter two stories are as cute as they are sexy. Honestly, “Our Cowgirl/Riding Situation” was such an inspiration I want to write my own.

Level of Spiciness: Teasing your best friend/rival/lover’s nipples; even with the aforementioned dubious sexual politics… I kept having to put Teach Me, Tutor down for… reasons…

BLog: Secret XXX

BLog reviews recent boys love, yaoi and LGBTQ+ English translation manga.

[image error]Secret XXX

Story and art: Meguru Hinohara

Translation: Adrienne Beck

Publisher: SuBLime Manga

Release Date: April 14, 2020

Like so many epics of romance before his, Shohei’s love could kill him. Every day that the 21-year-old college student steps foot in Trois Lapin, a rabbit speciality store run by handsome, long-haired bunny breeder Mito, could be his last. While he adores rabbits more than almost anything in the world–rivalled only by his crush on Mito–he guards his deadly secret closely for fear of being banned from the store for his own safety.

Shohei is allergic to what he loves most in the world: bunnies.

Or is he? Everyone in Secret XXX has their secrets, and things aren’t always as they seem.

From Shohei’s allergy, to Mito’s mysterious after-hours work, to Shohei’s relationship to his domineering mother, each section explores the secrets we keep from each other. And then is topped by Shohei getting topped.

For Hinohara Meguru’s debut, both in Japanese in English, Secret XXX is a fantastic little entry into yaoi manga–and boy, is this ever yaoi, some of the more hardcore, uncensored smut I’ve seen in a cutesy manga. On top of being one of the smuttier stories published recently, Secret XXX is also one of the more lovely depictions of gay people, including a full on drag queen-filled gay bar. The queens, especially, while hilarious and over the top aren’t grotesque or stereotypical as they’ve been portrayed in other Japanese media. Madam, the kimono-wearing, fan-wielding matron and mama of the queens, is especially delightful interacting with Shohei, Mito and the shit-disturbing Minato–who seems bent on interfering in Mito’s love-life. I’m cheering for a spin-off manga about the drag bar.

Shohei is the adorable, innocent, trusting formerly straight college student paired with Mito’s suave, quiet, mysterious long-haired babe. Secret XXX could be generic BL fare, but against the backdrop of a burgeoning romance in a bunny shop Shohei’s personality, especially, stands out. He’s young and expressive, and we follow his point of view closely. We have an easy sympathetic in to his character; “This is the thing I love most, but it could hurt or even kill me.” (His allergy, not his love interest.) Each of the main chapters deals with the characters confronting a secret of one kind or another, nothing Earth-shattering but each step of the way we learn a little more about their characters and backgrounds, Mito’s mysterious past, Shohei’s relationship to his family. As opposed to just two boys in love, the level of detail to character development raises Secret XXX above BL one-shots of its ilk–instead of putting the manga down and moving on to the next I found myself wanting to spend more time with the characters.

The only questionable choices in the manga are twofold, without giving too much away. The first, the brief exploration of Mito’s family is a bit trope-y, significant enough to be a bit jarring in the mostly fluffy pastel hilarity. The second is a couple of “no means yes” approaches to consent; there’s two instances where Shohei says stop, which gets that old BL line, “I’m sorry but I can’t stop now” that’s maybe supposed to be romantic? We learn later on that Shohei maybe likes it a little rough, which excuses Mito’s “assertiveness”, but being submissive or kinky doesn’t excuse dubious consent. It’s not a deal breaker but could have used a little finessing in the language to make it hot and not creepy–though obviously you want to stay true to the original language and not alter the writer’s intent.

All that being said, the art is an absolute delight, and the smut is next level compared to whited-out dicks and barely concealed genitalia in other titles. Beyond the smut, Hinohara’s debut is one of those rare cases where art, story and characters come together in an adorable, romantic, sexy little manga. Plus bunnies.

Level of Problematic: Horse and rabbit stew – “Death by homosexual husband” and “no means yes”, that’s all I’m gonna say…

Level of Adorable: Pull a rabbit out of a hat – Shohei is a precious little cinnamon bun, and his large personality and love for the people in his life (and all the bunnies) are the driving force behind Secret XXX. Plus drag queens. Plus there’s a bunny hair clip. Plus there’s a Flemish Giant rabbit named Georgia.

Level of Spiciness: Breed like rabbits – Let’s just say if Shohei and Mito never have any babies it wouldn’t be for lack of trying.

BLog: BL Metamorphosis

BLog reviews recent boys love, yaoi and LGBTQ+ English translation manga.

[image error]BL Metamorphosis Vol. 1

Story and art: Kaori Tsurutani

Translation: Jocelyne Allen

Publisher: Seven Seas Entertainment

Release Date: April 28, 2020

Reviewing BL Metamorphosis, like My Androgynous Boyfriend, is less about reviewing a boys love manga than it is about exploring our relationship with the media we love and, by doing so, exploring human relationships.

But in this case that media is BL.

Ichinoi Yuki is a 75-year-old widow who lives alone. After finding out her local coffee shop has closed down she takes refuge from the heat in a bookstore where she ends up unwittingly buying a BL manga from Sayama Urara, a high school student and secret fujoshi. Urara is lonely living with her single mother, few friends at school other than her handsome childhood friend Tsumucchi, indulging her love of BL in secret. She feels set apart, wishing she could fangirl out with her peers but feels inadequate to others her age.

When Ichinoi returns for the second (and then third) volumes of (the fictional) You’re the Only One I Want to See by Komeda Yu, Urara recognizes a fellow fujoshi. She summons up the courage to have tea with Ichinoi, which develops into a BL sharing friendship.

You may be wondering, why BL?

It’s my unqualified white boy opinion that the genre is a unique cultural artifact of Japan that couldn’t be replaced in BL Metamorphosis (the title may be a hint). Japan has a complicated history of fascination and titillation with gender-play and same-sex love. The male-dominated, assumed male readership of the manga industry fostered the creation of BL and yaoi, usually by and for women fans and artists–if there are so few female characters where else will one turn for romance but the girl-pretty leading man and his girl-pretty rival? Smutty parodies and romantic fanworks blossomed into a full blown genre in the 90s that has only grown since.

Enter BL Metamorphosis. Ichinoi enters Books Naka, Urara’s bookstore, recently widowed and ignorant of the fantastic leaps in boys’ love culture since she last read manga early on in her marriage. Enjoying the art of You’re the Only One I Want to See, she discovers the same fascination and titillation generations of fujanshi (and fudanshi) have enjoyed before her that makes her ravenous for more; there’s an absolutely adorable scene when she realizes that her beloved artist Komeda Yu only puts out about one volume of You’re the Only One I Want to See every year or so, and Ichinoi does the calculations in her head, “If I live to about eighty-five… that’s about six more volumes. So that’s that, hm? … I’ll try to live to ninety.”

For Ichinoi, it’s only natural that she’d foster a polite friendship with Urara. She teaches calligraphy, mostly to older folks and children, so she similarly assumes a grandmotherly role to Urara while getting to talk with someone about her favourite series. Urara, shy and lacking confidence in herself, has more trouble, wanting friends to talk to about BL with but always feeling distant from people her age, and also just finding the situation of discussing sweaty, rutting pretty anime boys with an adorable old lady reasonably strange. BL Metamorphosis may not be a BL romance, but it’s still about the dance of an unlikely relationship worthy of a BL plot.

BL Metamorphosis is easy to compare to an emerging genre of modern video games like the Life is Strange series, Gone Home, or the Telltale Games oeuvre; “empathy games,” where you’re placed in the shoes of someone in different or more difficult (or fantastical) circumstances from your own, but giving you an opportunity to learn and grow from their experiences. The human condition being something of a preoccupation with the history of literature, video games as a visual and interactive medium offer a new way to experience and learn empathy.

You know what else is a visual medium? COMICS! While western comics are stereotypically all about action–superhero comics typifying this–perhaps that’s why manga can feel so refreshing to western readers. Titles like BL Metamorphosis, My Androgynous Boyfriend, Our Dining Table and BL as a whole can be an antidote to toxic media and give us glimpses into lives to show that you can explore loneliness, loss, longing and love without the universe needing to end. In BL Metamorphosis we get a glimpse into the life of an aged Japanese woman, productive and independent, but sometimes lonely and fraught with small but significant difficulties. We watch as Ichinoi cooks alone, eats alone, bathes alone, goes to bed alone, goes to the doctor’s office alone. The subtle tragedy of elderly loneliness laid bare on the page, juxtaposed with the feeling of being an outsider of youthful Urara.

So why BL?

A genre that explores heightened emotions, a romance pure of heterosexism, or one that challenges toxic masculinity. A genre created largely by women for women, where women can project themselves into a fantasy relationship with a pretty, sensitive, idealized man. Sure, Ichinoi could accidentally discover she enjoys shōjo manga, or mecha manga, or isekai or any number of genres, but it wouldn’t be the same as two fujoshi fangirling over pretty anime boys in love.

Level of Problematic: “Respect our customers’ privacy, remember?”; BL Metamorphosis is smart and subtle, challenging cultural norms and social control we are all subject to.

Level of Adorable: “Is this sort of thing popular?”; imagine a kindly grandma blushing over two boys kissing. That’s how frickin’ cute this manga is. It’d be interesting to see how Ichinoi and Urara react to real-life gay boys. Perhaps in a later volume?

Level of Spiciness: “One of the books I brought is… well, it’s a little… um… intense.”; obviously BL Metamorphosis is not meant to be a smutfest, but we get glimpses of some of the pervier sides of BL/yaoi. I’m dying to find out more of what Ichinoi thinks of the genre, especially when it gets lewd.

BLog: Given Vol. 2

BLog reviews recent boys love, yaoi and LGBTQ+ English translation manga.

[image error]Given Vol. 2

Story and art: Natsuki Kizu

Translation: Sheldon Drzka

Publisher: SuBLime Manga

Release Date: May 12, 2020

(☞ﾟヮﾟ)☞ Spoilers for Given Vol. 1 ☜(ﾟヮﾟ☜)

A week before their first concert with quiet, sleepy-eyed, enigmatic Mafuyu Sato as frontman, the band Given finds tensions running high. Drummer Haruki Nakayama and bassist Akihiko Kaji have never played better since Mafuyu’s addition, but guitarist (and Mafuyu’s high school classmate) Ritsuka Uenoyama are both in a rut.

Mafuyu was supposed to come up with lyrics for his song the band has crafted from a melody in his head, but he hasn’t come up with a word. Hot-headed Uenoyama is struggling with his own playing and lashes out at his bandmates, and Akihiko thinks its because he’s distracted by Mafuyu.

But… what kind of distracted? Is it really about the fact that Mafuyu hasn’t written lyrics, or could it be something else entirely?

I mentioned in my review of Given Vol. 1 that when I tried the first episode of the anime I got BL vibes without knowing much about it. Clearly given the things Vol. 2 explores I should have stuck with it and these feelings would have been validated.

After losing his temper with Mafuyu in the rehearsal studio, Haruki pulls Uenoyama aside and confronts him about his feelings for the vocalist. The drummer points out Uenoyama’s obvious crush, apparent whenever the guitarist looks at their new frontman. “Am I weird?!” Uenoyama asks, suddenly confronted with the truth.

No, why? Haruki asks, because Mafuyu’s a guy and guys are supposed to like women? That’s what Haruki used to think…

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If Vol. 1 was about Uenoyama’s discovery of this strange little sad boy in his favourite napping stairwell and exploring his connection to music, Vol. 2 is Mafuyu’s chance to step to the front of the stage. As we get closer to their concert we get closer to the truth of Mafuyu’s relationship with Yuki, his childhood best friend turned boyfriend turned lost love; raised in broken homes, as children they became closer than close, so it didn’t surprise their friend Hiragi when he caught them kissing.

We already knew through rumours that Yuki died and Mafuyu was somehow involved, but I was dubious how they’d handle the death–you never know with media, it could be handled sensitively or it could be, “I’M GAY I DON’T DESERVE TO LIVE.” Fortunately, as we delve into Mafuyu’s memories of Yuki, moments of tenderness and tragedy, we learn why he is the sad little space case he is, and why it would be so hard to put his love for Yuki into words.

Given, the manga, is full of surprises; on top of being quality BL with cute boys and all the feels, it’s also a story that’s handled artfully, both narratively and the actual art on the page. The story explores pain, loss and loneliness alongside moments of levity and outright hilarity. As we get to the end of the volume, Given taking the stage melds with Mafuyu’s most painful memories sung wordlessly for an audience for the first time, and the manga about a band manages to musically capture, without music, his raw pain.

This series may be building into one of my favourites. Looking at all of the themes coming together: beautiful boy with big eyes and a tragic backstory and the hot-headed guitarist boy not realizing he’s falling in love with him, pain and heartbreak that doesn’t feel overwrought or unearned, loveable secondary characters you want to follow just as much as the main characters. Especially for BL it always manages to find harmony and hit all the right notes.

Level of Problematic: Very sad, very gay boy singing about his dead boyfriend; Yuki’s death was the only thing that I was worried about and it’s handled exquisitely, summoning up a pain and loss that can be understood without being put into words. Bonus points for Akihiko and Uenoyama’s conversation about liking guys at the beginning, which was delightful.

Level of Adorable: A bunch of cute boys in a band who are all gay for each other; Given is like a BL two-for-one sale: you thought you were just getting one set of gay boys, but oh boy were you wrong. Mafuyu’s flashbacks to him and Yuki as kids were also ADORABLE. MORE!!

Level of Spiciness: Sad gay tears stream as sad gay lips meet; again, this is more pure BL as opposed to smut (both have their place in the universe), but I was worried this would be one of those stories that just skirts around how gay these boys are for each other. BOY WAS I WRONG.

BLog: Yarichin Bitch Club Vol. 3

BLog reviews recent boys love, yaoi and LGBTQ+ English translation manga.

[image error]Yarichin Bitch Club Vol. 3

Story and art: Ogeretsu Tanaka

Translation: Daniel Komen

Publisher: SuBLime Manga

Release Date: May 12, 2020

(☞ﾟヮﾟ)☞ Spoilers for Yarichin Bitch Club Vol. 1 & Vol. 2 ☜(ﾟヮﾟ☜)

We return to the Bitch Club immediately following the end of volume 2. Tono (sweet innocent baby) and Yacchan (secret trash boy) are lost in the woods, taking refuge in an old building just after protagonist Tono learned his crush’s secret: Yacchan is actually a secret trash boy.

Upper years Itome (silent babe) and Shikatani (germaphobic crossdressing fetishist) return to the campsite and tell the others that they lost Tono and Yacchan in the woods and while the latter’s cousin–and the former’s pretend boyfriend–Yu wants to rush into the woods with bad boy Tamu to look for them, Bitch Club president Kei (possibly evil mixed-race cutesy boy) cautions them to wait for the rain to let up.

No longer needing to hide himself, Yacchan explains how he took to copying Yu’s kindness so he could be popular, but we figure out through Tono there might be more to Yacchan’s emulations. However, Tono says that Yacchan’s revelation doesn’t change anything, and that he’ll keep his crush’s secret.

The A plot ramps up once Tono and Yacchan end up back at the campground. Yu whisks his beloved away to the school nurse’s office and tends to him, admitting that he actually wants to date Tono for real. Thus continues the Bitch Club love triangle; Tono crushing on Yacchan while trying not to admit its physical, Yacchan crushing on Yu while trying to convince himself its not about his cousin, Yu genuinely in love with Tono. The B plot is that the Bitch Club is forced to move club rooms and so Tono gets the chance to learn a little more about the club and its president, Kei. The C and D plots are horny stupid sluts gettin’ off with each other.

Yarichin Bitch Club is such a strange series a ridiculous, hot (sometimes uncomfortable) sex romp side-by-side with a tender romance, with off-the-wall characters thrown in for good measure. If you’re coming to volume 3 for the wild high school orgies found in volume 1 you’re going to be disappointed. There’s a couple of hot scenes, including Tamu-Shikatani and (resident screw loose slut) Yuri and his stalker/boyfriend Jimmy. One character gets a solo scene in the bonus chapter that’s actually the hottest, given its circumstances and who ends up shaking the devil’s hand–I’m a sucker for titillating voyeurism and masturbation.

Sex aside, which again seems a weird statement given the Bitch Club premise, the developing love triangle works and is satisfying. Seeing their new reality as Yacchan is finally able to be himself with Tono is genuinely enjoyable, all the more surprising because not much changes between the two of them, other than Yacchan’s teasing and pestering. Tono feels guilty about leading Yu along, but also doesn’t put up much of an effort pushing him away. As the Bitch Club moves to a new club room we learn a little more about it’s past, including Kei and their advisor, a teacher at Mori Mori Academy–who is very much aware of what goes on in the “photography club”. Like with volume 2, all of these glimpses at character and development seem like a strange thing to be cheering on in a madcap yaoi manga, but here we are.

The character I struggled with most in volume 1 and 2, Yuri, the Bitch Club’s gibbering, nympho, perverted, possibly autistic genius even gets redeemed a little in volume 3. I had assumed his stalker/lover Jimmy was a throwaway character, but Jimmy’s back and their relationship is growing, and they even get some lovely tender moments–and a crazy hot sex scene as Yuri takes his virginity, whoopsie.

Yarichin Bitch Club is a strange series, but one that keeps me reading for both the ridiculous, perverse sex and the tender, silly boys in love.

Level of Problematic: Forcefully stripped by the club president; this one’s actually relatively tame for the series, although ol’ Rapey McGee is back after Tono, giving Yacchan the chance to step in.

Level of Adorable: Tenderly bandaging your injured fake boyfriend; the love triangle is delicious, and the slew of slutty, adorable anime boys keeps me coming back.

Level of Spiciness: Whackin’ it to your forcefully stripped fake boyfriend; more sex and more perversion, please.

BLog: Liquor & Cigarettes

BLog reviews recent boys love, yaoi and LGBTQ+ English translation manga.

[image error]Liquor & Cigarettes

Story and art: Ranmaru Zariya

Translation: Adrienne Beck

Publisher: SuBLime Manga

Release Date: January 14, 2020

Two bisexuals, both alike in dignity, in fair rustic European town where we lay our scene.

Although, of course, at the beginning of Liquor & Cigarettes only long-haired, handsome tobacconist Camilo identifies as bi. Cute little, tanned, blond liquor store owner Theo is straight… mostly… he thinks. Although as their town’s wine festival draws near, including the punishing wine tasting contest, he’s struggling with how he really feels about his childhood best friend, alongside his identity as a liquor store owner who can’t hold his liquor.

Camilo suggests that, while they train Theo’s alcohol tolerance so he won’t make a fool of himself the day of the contest, they also test a romantic relationship. From that, they develop a system to test Theo’s tolerance for man-on-man action: if he drinks himself under the table and Camilo has to take him home and clean him up, his friend can kiss him, then go a little further, then a little further…

Liquor & Cigarettes reminds me of Our Dining Table in the sense that it’s a boys love story that sneaks a deeper theme into the adorable romance in a really simple way. As Theo and Camilo test the boundaries of their relationship, Theo has to grapple with homophobia, both internal and external. On top of trying to figure out his feelings for Camilo, he tries to figure out if he could ever have sex with a guy–especially bottoming, Camilo insists he’s a top and Theo is a bottom. Then he has to deal with the external, nothing serious or melodramatic, but as they’re shopping together in a market one day Camilo takes his hand. Theo notices stares.

This demonstrates how, instead of the story being entirely about the boys’ self-contained relationship, where the only world that matters is one they make together, Liquor & Cigarettes deals with the world around Theo and Camilo. Instead of them just falling into bed together like it’s the easiest thing in the world, Theo actually researches, and agonizes over, the thought of anal sex–although that doesn’t stop him from receiving passive, drunken blowjobs. There’s also a cast of adorable supporting characters, arrogant rival liquor store Diego, cute grocer Eland, handsome, smouldering, openly gay restauranteur Marino. There’s a fantastic scene where Diego comes into Marino’s restaurant from the rain, and his friend wraps his arm around him affectionately to appreciate his body. Camilo questions it, since Diego’s straight–Diego doesn’t mind the compliment since Marino doesn’t force anything on him, and for Marino its appreciative stress relief. Camilo and Theo openly discuss gender and sexuality with the other characters, they’re not simply trapped in their own obsessive, insular BL world, which makes it a stronger, more interesting, more dynamic story overall.

What the entire story of Liquor & Cigarettes is dancing around is concepts of shame. Whether its Theo’s shame that he’s a lightweight and his assumption that everyone would laugh him out of town if they knew it, or his shame of any burgeoning feelings for Camilo, his shame that he may be stringing Camilo along, or the external shame of people judging their relationship. However, even more so than Our Dining Table dealing with grief and loneliness, Liquor & Cigarettes isn’t bogged down by moralizing or melodrama. It’s cute, light-hearted, often laugh-out-loud hilarious. Also sexy, good lord, with a fantastic build as Camilo, scene by scene, strips away Theo’s clothes along with his inhibitions. Theo’s excuses that he’s only doing it because he’s drunk become more and more ridiculous as they test boundaries and go further.

Liquor & Cigarettes is subject to that manga sex style where the most explicit parts are conveniently covered, but tackles it in ingenious ways, where a leg, an arm, a text bubble just barely covers things, but just barely. The final scene, with Theo in a Andrew Christian-style “almost naked” jockstrap, leaves literally nothing to the imagination and is a hot and imaginative way to tackle restrictions on depictions of sex. To me, it’s more titillating than if everything was on display. I’ll be re-reading Liquor & Cigarettes again, returning to these sexy, bisexual shopkeepers to indulge my vices.

Level of Problematic: A smooth glass of red; kind of like the censorship, Liquor & Cigarettes dallies on the edge of noncon, with Camilo taking advantage of Theo when he’s drunk. However, in a way that feels true to a lot of real life experiences, this is curious Theo’s way into experimenting with another man, it’s the parameter he sets with his lover, “You can go this far if I get sloppy drunk.” It makes what could be creepy actually really hot, with drunken, slutty, whiny, bottom-boy Theo writhing under Camilo’s expert administrations. I’ll have another glass, please.

Level of Adorable: Sex on the Beach; like a fruity, colourful drink with a slice of orange and a little umbrella, Liquor & Cigarettes balances fucking adorable with fucking sexy. No actual sex on the beach.

Level of Spiciness: Afternoon Delight; “Now that you’re dating a guy you’ll need this. Here.”

“What is it?”

“JOCKSTRAP!!”

Cue cum leaking through fabric.

Mana Dork: Tales of Edgewall Keep

I don’t claim to be an expert or a longtime fan. I don’t claim to build decks that are always going to win or formulated to frustrate opponents into conceding–although I’ve done that by accident from time to time.

What I am is a person who loves a good story. As a longtime tabletop gaming fan, when I started playing Magic: the Gathering a few years ago, I was enchanted by the idea of narrative through trading cards. On top of playing MTG for the game, I adore the things that make MTG so dynamic and fun; the lore, the art, the card quotes, the ability to weave together a story that plays out every time you sit down at the table.

Most people build decks that are guaranteed to win, I build theme decks that tell an interesting story. Obviously I want to maximize the strengths of a deck, but I’m more interested in building a deck that’s balanced, unique, fun to play with a bit of chance thrown in, as opposed to something airtight and contrived that is designed entirely to win. I wanted to start an occasional blog feature where I can pop in a theme deck I’m working on and write about why it’s so fun to make and play.

TALES OF EDGEWALL KEEP

Theme Set: Throne of Eldraine

Cards: 64

Colours: Green-White

Central Mechanics: Adventure, growth, counters, tokens, non-human, card draw

Favourite Card: Lovestruck Beast

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A weary traveler has spent the day trudging through the verdant woods and fertile fields of Eldraine; the land of courtly knights and dark, epic tales. All she wants is to put her feet up by a hearth and get a mug of ale into her belly, maybe with a bit of decent company to take her mind off the exhausting journey still left.

In the dying light of the day she sees a column of smoke just off of the farmland road, not too far into the forest. She nears the cozy stone and wood homestead consisting of a well, a set of stables, an ancient, crumbling stone wall and an inn with a sign above the door depicting a knight astride an elk holding a shining mace: EDGEWALL KEEP

She steps inside and a cheery, corpulent, red-faced man greets her from behind the bar. “Welcome, welcome! Pull up a chair, you look like you could use a pint.” She graciously takes the coveted seat by the fire, glancing around at the odd assortment of patrons in the busy tavern. A nervous looking squire takes counsel with an elven ranger, a child boasts of his facing down a giant to a beautiful young woman who seems more interested in the book in her lap. There’s a knock on a window near the bar and the traveler goggles at a towering treefolk who leans down to trade a bushel of berries to the innkeeper for a sack of horse manure that awaits him near the stables before lumbering off back into the forest. The walls of Edgewall Keep are decorated with old, faded murals of tales long forgotten.

The innkeeper totters over with a big pint of ale and a huge drumstick beside some baked potatoes. She thanks the man generously and makes arrangements for a room. In the course of their conversation it comes out that he’s kept Edgewall Keep for decades, perhaps longer, he seems to have memories of knights and rulers long past. Curious.

“You must’ve seen a great deal in all that time,” the traveler says, tucking into her meal.

“Much and more!” he admits. “Why I have a tale or three that not even the great loremasters of Vantress could tell you! Have you ever heard the story of the beautiful youngest daughter of the widower merchant who fell in love with a great beast in a castle? Or the valiant elven ranger’s rescue of two children lost deep in the wilds? Brought them to this very inn, she did!”

The traveler smiles, there’s a power in stories and she has a feeling this innkeeper is not all that he appears to be, here on the edge of wilds. She has a feeling very little is as it appears to be at Edgewall Keep, but she’s ready for a tale or two.

DECK LIST:

2 x Giant Killer

2 x Outflank

2 x Edgewall Innkeeper

2 x Trapped in the Tower

2 x Glass Casket

2 x Garenbrig Squire

1 x Wildborn Preserver

2 x Lovestruck Beast

2 x Wandermare

2 x Ardenvale Tactician

2 x Mace of the Valiant

3 x Rally for the Throne

2 x Oakhame Ranger

2 x True Love’s Kiss

2 x Outmuscle

2 x Oakhame Adversary

2 x Archon of Absolution

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2 x Keeper of Fables

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1 x Tuinvale Treefolk

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2 x Beanstalk Giant

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1 x The Great Henge

4 x Idyllic Grange

4 x Gingerbread Cabin

1 x Fabled Passage

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STORY: Tales of Edgewell Keep is a theme deck of adventure, stories that build on one another to tell an epic tale, of strange alliances coming together in a common purpose, of disparate races of Eldraine working together to overwhelm the enemy.

STRATEGY: The ideal opening hand for Tales of Edgewell Keep has a Lovestruck Beast, a Garenbrig Squire and a Mace of the Valiant, although barring that there’s plenty of room for surprises. The fact that, with the right mana, I can have a 5/5 creature out on turn 3 and attacking on turn 4 is wild, and since I’m tossing out creatures as quickly as I can, even if the Mace is just sitting there it can still rack up counters until I can toss it to a summon.

Eldraine’s white cards have some of the best, most strategic removal cards I’ve used since I started playing. 1 mana Outflank coupled with getting 3-4 creatures out early on is a perfect way to surprise your opponent’s attacks or blocks without worrying about small creatures taking damage or having to chump block. Glass Casket, at 2 mana, feels evil, a great way to frustrate an opponent’s momentum early game–there’s nothing more satisfying than tossing an Ajani’s Pridemate into a box after notching up a couple of counters. Bye kitty.

Even though the deck’s curve clearly favours 3 and 4 mana summons, the adventure spells are what really give it early game balance. Giant Killer picks off big summons and then once he’s out on the board can work to control, sort of like an Elite Arrester or Law-Rune Enforcer. Ardenvale Tactician’s a great stall before getting a cheap, defensible flyer out on the field.

Finally, we’ve got Edgewall Innkeeper, Oakhame Adversary and Keeper of Fables for card draw, which keeps things flexible.

WEAKNESSES: A lot of these cards are conditional on some setup, especially Mace of the Valiant, where it doesn’t actually become viable to equip until turn 4-5. Oakhame Ranger, too, can feel ridiculous to pay 4 mana for two 1/1 tokens if needed, but when you get her onto the board and tapping to give all the other creates +1/+1 until end of turn that can be game changing. Always makes me laugh when opponents try to pick off my poor little 1/1s only to have me flip the Ranger and turn them into 2/2s. Tuinvale Treefolk, since I only have one in the deck at the moment, might be a little on the pointless side, but is powerful if I can get it out after tossing two +1/+1s on something.

WIN CONDITIONS: A good Mace of the Valiant continually growing in power can be attached to most things to pound away at opponents, with strategic removals to pick away at their defences. Pair that with all of the cards that give out token creatures, especially adamant-cast Rally for the Throne. If I’ve taken a beating early game, but cast Rally for the Throne with Adamant and suddenly have 7 creatures on the field, that’s a nice little bump in health. Archon of Absolution is a fantastic way to slow down an opponent’s momentum later game, and good lord is it satisfying to fight a white deck with a “protection from white” flyer (with Vigilance and a bunch of +1/+1s, if it has the Mace). Then we’ve got our big tough boys like Lovestruck Beast, Keeper of Fables and Beanstalk Giant, and it’s not uncommon to have a couple of those out since everyone but Beanstalk Giant’s mana threshold is pretty low.

CONCLUSION: I love playing green-white decks, but even more so than a decent Selesnya token deck, I adore Tales of Edgewall Keep because of the synergy between Adventure cards, card draw and non-human creatures. This deck is constantly surprising me with some weird little combination that crops up by chance of the draw, like giving a Garenbrig Squire a Mace of the Valiant, throwing an Adventure creature out and watching a 2/2 creature suddenly become a 7/7. I win more often than I would think, with combinations that can feel like a tall tale, but we’re all about tall tales at Edgewall Keep.

BLog: The Circumstances of Two Twins’ Love

BLog reviews recent boys love, yaoi and LGBTQ+ English translation manga.

ʕ•́ᴥ•̀ʔ For a limited time Kuma and FAKKU are offering a handful of free yaoi manga, no account needed, including The Circumstances of Two Twins’ Love, so feel free to read along at home! ʕ•́ᴥ•̀ʔ

[image error]The Circumstances of Two Twins’ Love

Story and art: Ichiei

Translation: ?????

Publisher: Kuma

Release Date: July 2017

Ah, twincest. From Die Walküre to Jaime and Cersei; from Luke and Leia to the Ouran host club’s Hitachiin twins. While incest is generally frowned upon in society, fictional twincest captures something in our horny collective psyche. Reactions to twincest run from disgust to a taboo romanticization–I still haven’t reconciled how the Lannister twins got one of the most romantic, redemptive deaths in Game of Thrones. The comprehensive TV Tropes page on twincest claims that an “old Japanese myth says that if two star-crossed lovers commit dual suicide, they get reincarnated as twins. This may be one of the factors in the frequency of Twincest stories in anime.”

Of course, TV Tropes also makes the argument that twincest is different from “Twin Threesome Fantasy”, and if that’s the case than The Circumstances of Two Twins’ Love is the latter. Twins Shouta and Yuuta both pester their beleaguered teacher, Kimura, to date them, fighting over their handsome, cool, bangable teacher. Kimura points out they’re his students, there’s just too many obstacles, although the twins are thrilled to learn that, unlike most people, their hot teacher can tell them apart.

When Kimura is invited to their house to meet with their mother–who’s conveniently away–the teacher finds himself between two twins and a hard… something. Kimura admits he’s flattered at the twins’ interest and persistence, but he’s their teacher, they can’t be lovers.

But that doesn’t mean he can’t prepare them for when they come for him after graduation… Prepare them with SEX CLASSES that is!

A teacher consenting to go bottom up for his twin students is a porn-worthy premise, as is him grading the twins on their dirty talk as they go; he likes older twin Shouta’s promise to make them both feel good over younger twin Yuuta’s cliché “sensei, you’re so sexy…” (Listen dude, some of us don’t even have a single twin to compliment us, quit being so picky.)

The Circumstances of Two Twins’ Love is a sexy, quick one-shot, and while the premise is only possible in a medium that can uphold this flavour of campy taboo, the “teaching them about sex for when we date later” plays out well on the page. As they strip their teacher down and loosen him up, the twins take turns topping Kimura while the other one gets to prop him up and make out with him. The kissing, the fucking, the nipple play, it’s sexy and depicted well, if a bit straightforward and not the most sexually imaginative porny manga I’ve read.

Now, here’s where the distinction between twincest and twin threesome fantasy comes in. I readily admit that I’ve had a twin fantasy, especially where porny art is involved, since I stumbled on ponderosa121‘s fanart of the Weasley twins as a teenager–I just went on a trip down memory lane finding ponderosa121’s stuff again, they’re still active and fantastic posting horny fandom art. To this pervert, part of the turn-on in a twins fantasy is the taboo aspect of getting it on with two identical brothers in a threeway. In The Circumstances of Two Twins’ Love the focus is on Kimura as the sexy, drooling, slutty, literal centrepiece, taking it every which way, dripping cum. The twins are both there but only as involved as the other is passive–incest by proximity, rather than any involvement with each other. Beyond the sex on the page about all we know about the twins is older Shouta is a bit of a space case, younger Yuuta wears too much hair product and they’re both flagrantly horny for teacher.

I guess the twincest perv in me is sort of sorry that’s the extent of the twins fantasy in this yaoi manga. I’m not asking for Chekhov in yaoi manga, but I would have loved a little more of them as characters, and the twin thing coming into it a little more than just a feature. Instead of the twins being central to the fantasy the manga is spinning if you took all of the text out they could be stand-ins for two similar looking pretty anime boys; two roommates, two random guys Kimura found on the street, two clones, two homicidal androids who think you kill humans by dicking them down. These are quibbles, this horny manga gets the job done, but if I’m walking through that dark, forbidden twincest door I want some twin-on-twin action, damnit! Is it twincest if the twins don’t touch?

Level of Problematic: Teacher teaching his twin students to bone; that about sums it up, but if you’ve gotten past the title/premise of potentially incestuous yaoi twins you’re already a few miles down that dark path and lost to the light.

Level of Adorable: Two blushing twin cuties; the twins are really fucking cute, and I can 100% fuck with the art.

Level of Spiciness: Slutty senpai; this manga does not skimp on the gushing, drooling, dripping explicit filth we all show up for.