flemmings | (no subject)

mvrdrk's FL is having a picnic about fave BL manga. Somehow this takes me back to the late 90s, when AFAIK half the series mentioned hadn't begun. It also fills me with that undefinable sense of oppression that BL does fill me with, for reasons I was never quite clear on.

Partly it's the art style of the series I've met, that sketchy Racish thin-point nib and lack of toner one. I'm a fan of ink, which I tend to find more in shoujo fantasy than BL proper. Partly it's the complete lack of turn-on in those two main BL tropes, schoolboys and salarymen. Partly it's the deadly sameness of run of the mill BL, which has been deadly same practically since its inception. Oh yes, I remember the Gust days; there was energy there to start, but in short order we descended into the Biblos B-Boy 'hire them straight from Comiket' manga and got artists who hadn't learned to tell a proper story or draw a distinct style.

And partly there's just so freaking much of it. The spirit faints within, especially when the spirit's eyesight is no hot hell either.

I'm a fantasy fan. What I like is stuff like Ze and Kohri no Mamono. The first is certainly BL, but I could happily dispense with the sex scenes. The second is debatable: the emotion is homoerotic but there's no sex. Which is fine by me, but then why is Kohri BL and not shoujo?

Even back in the day I was more a fan of series-derived yaoi than BL. The first dealt with characters I know and loved, and did things unimaginable with them. The second, very much running to one-off stories, dealt with people I had no reason to care about, and its only novelty was portraying sex. Sex gets old fast, or does for me. And there's the ephemeral nature of manga itself. It's designed for a specific age group that the artists and publishers both assume will grow out of it. The best of it may appeal to a wider and older audience-- Ima Ichiko, Mushishi, the best of the 49ers-- but the bulk is meant for fifteen year olds, or twelve year olds, and it shows.

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Yeah, I think a lot of BL manga--and a lot of manga in general these days--is targeted to horny high-school kids. It gets kind of wearying when you've reached the age when sex is NOT the only thing on your mind.

It's even worse when sex isn't on your mind at all...

Kohri is BL because Racish was, when it first started out. Sometime after it was started, perhaps when it was merged with it's sister publication, it converted over to 'homoerotic but no kissing' and shoujo, so some of their early titles cross the boundary. I have a bunch of those early titles, I thought they were good because the emphasis was on the characters and the story, not the sex.

So there *was* sex in early Racish? I always thought it tame compared to, well, anything else in the mid-90s pretty much.

Oh yes, there was sex in them. Not very much, but if I recall correctly, the occasional glowing cone, even. Compared to everything else, very tame.