![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mozaikmageTo explain this, first I need to tell you about A Man Who Defies the World of BL.
A Man Who Defies the World of BL (Zettai BL ni naru sekai VS Zettai BL ni Naritakunai Otoko, I'm shortening it to Zettai BL) is a manga by Konkichi and the concept is that the main character is a self-aware background extra in a BL manga-- in every BL manga, somehow, as he is surrounded by couples on all sides and even his little brother managed to raise a flag with a classmate. Worst of all, plain-faced protagonists are becoming more popular these days, so this poor heterosexual trapped in a world where women have blurry and undefined faces has to be very careful to avoid ending up in a BL plot of his own. It's very funny and got a hilarious live action adaptation as well.
In the world this unnamed protagonist inhabits, BL plots and tropes are just constantly beseiging him. Karaoke, drinking parties, Valentine's Day with no girls present, fudanshi classmates. Not only that, but all of his friends are (not-so) secretly dating, and they take turns fighting in a way that makes protag wonder "are your books coming out one after each other?" Every chapter has the protagonist battle a different trope or cliche.
When I first picked up Sasaki and Miyano by Shou Harusono, I thought, "this reads like it takes place in the Zettai BL universe."
Protagonist Miyano is a fudanshi (check) at an all-boy's school (check) who attracts the attention of handsome delinquent(ish) upperclassman Sasaki (check) who calls him by the feminine nickname Myaa-chan (check) and whose classmate Hirano definitely has something going on with his roommate (check, check, check!). Sasaki and Miyano is practically bursting at the seams with BL tropes. It is the distilled essence of 2020s BL, the heart and soul of it, what you'd get if you fed every popular high-school-setting BL manga into a neural network AI and told it to generate a BL by itself.
And by god, does it work. I inhaled the main series and its spinoff within a couple of days, quickly getting sucked into the predictable, familiar beats of their extremely mundane love story. What makes Sasaki and Miyano work so well is that there is both a bare minimum of self-awareness of how tropey the setup is (thanks to Miyano's fudanshi genre-savviness), and a sincerity that makes me want to root for these kids. I love how despite talking about seme/uke dynamics in the BL they read in universe, Sasaki's never aggressive or violent towards Miyano, and rarely possessive. He treats Miyano with respect, and I can feel how much they genuinely both care for each other. I love that. I love love.
"Masha were you planning to post this on Valentine's Day" I had no plans to post anything at any point I just started typing in a fury at 11 pm one day and now you must all bear witness to it.
Anyway.
The spinoff Hirano and Kagiura somehow possessed me to the point I found myself hitting the next chapter button over and over wondering why there was nothing else and trying to get my hands on the untranslated Japanese chapters and seeing if I'd learned enough from Duolingo to figure out what was going on because I just needed more that badly. And it's still nothing new, nothing groundbreaking, nothing inventive or original. It's not brilliantly executed, it's just funny enough and weird enough and cute enough that I cannot stop.
Sasaki and Miyano got an anime adaptation that's airing on Funimation right now, and I wonder if anyone totally new to BL has picked it up. I wonder what it's like to read a comic like this without having read dozens of comics like it already. I love reading things that are just like other things I've read and loved, but what's it like to experience these classic scenarios for the first time?
Anyway, I like it and recommend it. It has approximately nothing in common with actual gay life (and unfortunately does do that annoying "I liked a girl in middle school so I can't possibly like boys" thing) but! It's cute! And enjoyable!
A Man Who Defies the World of BL (Zettai BL ni naru sekai VS Zettai BL ni Naritakunai Otoko, I'm shortening it to Zettai BL) is a manga by Konkichi and the concept is that the main character is a self-aware background extra in a BL manga-- in every BL manga, somehow, as he is surrounded by couples on all sides and even his little brother managed to raise a flag with a classmate. Worst of all, plain-faced protagonists are becoming more popular these days, so this poor heterosexual trapped in a world where women have blurry and undefined faces has to be very careful to avoid ending up in a BL plot of his own. It's very funny and got a hilarious live action adaptation as well.
In the world this unnamed protagonist inhabits, BL plots and tropes are just constantly beseiging him. Karaoke, drinking parties, Valentine's Day with no girls present, fudanshi classmates. Not only that, but all of his friends are (not-so) secretly dating, and they take turns fighting in a way that makes protag wonder "are your books coming out one after each other?" Every chapter has the protagonist battle a different trope or cliche.
When I first picked up Sasaki and Miyano by Shou Harusono, I thought, "this reads like it takes place in the Zettai BL universe."
Protagonist Miyano is a fudanshi (check) at an all-boy's school (check) who attracts the attention of handsome delinquent(ish) upperclassman Sasaki (check) who calls him by the feminine nickname Myaa-chan (check) and whose classmate Hirano definitely has something going on with his roommate (check, check, check!). Sasaki and Miyano is practically bursting at the seams with BL tropes. It is the distilled essence of 2020s BL, the heart and soul of it, what you'd get if you fed every popular high-school-setting BL manga into a neural network AI and told it to generate a BL by itself.
And by god, does it work. I inhaled the main series and its spinoff within a couple of days, quickly getting sucked into the predictable, familiar beats of their extremely mundane love story. What makes Sasaki and Miyano work so well is that there is both a bare minimum of self-awareness of how tropey the setup is (thanks to Miyano's fudanshi genre-savviness), and a sincerity that makes me want to root for these kids. I love how despite talking about seme/uke dynamics in the BL they read in universe, Sasaki's never aggressive or violent towards Miyano, and rarely possessive. He treats Miyano with respect, and I can feel how much they genuinely both care for each other. I love that. I love love.
"Masha were you planning to post this on Valentine's Day" I had no plans to post anything at any point I just started typing in a fury at 11 pm one day and now you must all bear witness to it.
Anyway.
The spinoff Hirano and Kagiura somehow possessed me to the point I found myself hitting the next chapter button over and over wondering why there was nothing else and trying to get my hands on the untranslated Japanese chapters and seeing if I'd learned enough from Duolingo to figure out what was going on because I just needed more that badly. And it's still nothing new, nothing groundbreaking, nothing inventive or original. It's not brilliantly executed, it's just funny enough and weird enough and cute enough that I cannot stop.
Sasaki and Miyano got an anime adaptation that's airing on Funimation right now, and I wonder if anyone totally new to BL has picked it up. I wonder what it's like to read a comic like this without having read dozens of comics like it already. I love reading things that are just like other things I've read and loved, but what's it like to experience these classic scenarios for the first time?
Anyway, I like it and recommend it. It has approximately nothing in common with actual gay life (and unfortunately does do that annoying "I liked a girl in middle school so I can't possibly like boys" thing) but! It's cute! And enjoyable!