mozaikmage

Unrelated personal update I POSTED A COMIC IT'S 48 PAGES OF ART SCHOOL TOXIC GIRL FRIENDSHIP GET THE PDF HERE ok anyway.

I don’t know how I read this many books in a month, especially the longer ones. Some of them are graphic novels, I was off work for a week and then when I did work it was insanely slow and thus conducive to reading time, and I did skim a lot. But a lot of these were really good!

Presented in the order I read them because:

Margo's Got Money Troubles by Rufi Thorpe REALLY started the year off on a good book. I loved Margo’s narrative voice and all the characters surrounding her, and I really wanted to see things work out. It was funny and sweet and yeah sad at times but I enjoyed it a lot. It’s a book about a college student who suddenly finds herself a single mom and so starts an OnlyFans and how both of those things affect her life and the people around her. It just… it just works so well.

The Whole of Humanity Has Gone Yuri Except for Me by Hiroki Haruse

Gift from my girlfriend <3 the premise is incredible, the attempts at a plot were not as incredible, but it was a cute quick read and overall fun enough.

The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton

Those 1870s rich people sure could pine. I mostly found myself feeling bad for the women in the story, and also for everyone else in how deeply restricted they were by such arbitrary social rules. Which I think was the point? Trying to read more Classics these days anyway.

Averee by Dave Johnson, Stephanie Phillips

Gift from a friend. Really disappointing because the premise sounded right up my alley and both author and artist seemed to be very experienced professionally, but the overall story was thin and shallow and the art was stiff and uninteresting. It felt like if it was twice or three times as long and also used the basic setup differently to explore the actual social impacts of its conceit it’d be more fun.

Camp Damascus by Chuck Tingle

It was fine. I think this would’ve hit harder if I was reading it as an exvangelical, but I have only ever experienced American Christianity from the outside, so. Probably my last Tingle book, I don’t think I really vibe with the writing style.

The Fury by Alex Michaelides

We get it you really liked The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. (Also maybe Lolita?) I feel like the author was desperately trying to pull off a specific kind of likeable-unlikeable narrator here that ultimately fell flat with me. He was just too obviously scheming. Sorry for the spoiler I guess.

I Think Our Son Is Gay, Vol. 04 by Okura

It was ready to borrow on Libby and I couldn’t remember which volume I’d read last so I impulse-grabbed it. Cute, short, sweet. I totally forgot everything about the supporting cast since the last time I checked in on the possibly-gay son. It’s cute though!

Edison by Pallavi Sharma Dixit

THIS RULED. EXTENDED REVIEW HERE. I LOVE IT, NO NOTES.

Blue Sisters by Coco Mellors

I was not expecting this book to be about the horrors of drug addiction and pain and obssessive personalities, but as an exploration of those things it was fine.
Taiwan Travelogue by 楊双子, Yáng Shuāng-zǐ

It's always nice to read sapphic historical fiction by a lesbian. The main character is annoying but in a kind of fun way, and the food descriptions made me put the book down and run out to the local Asian food market for wintermelon tea and braised pork over rice. I think people who think Babel is a nuanced and complex look at colonization and imperialism should read Taiwan Travelogue.
The Priory of the Orange Tree by Samantha Shannon

I was interested in checking this book out for a while because when I worked at the bookstore I could see its VAST LENGTH on the shelf and was frightened and intrigued by it. Then it was ready to borrow on libby and I was like great I don’t have to lug a brick around. Then I realized I had to read the brick. It felt like it took forever and at least two of the viewpoint characters felt superfluous as consistent throughlines, but I liked the lesbian subplot and the language and worldbuilding was interesting, which was mostly what I was reading it for. I liked how the fictional lands were both distinctly fantastical and clearly inspired by real-world equivalents.

Book Lovers by Emily Henry

I finished Priory and then immediately needed a palate cleanser so I reread my fave. Still good! Still fave. Despite the het.

Heart and Seoul by Jen Frederick

Absolutely deranged that this book says ON THE FRONT COVER that it's a romance and yet the main couple ends the book not together for reasons of family drama scandal situation. I don't think you're allowed to do that! Romances are supposed to be happy endings! Otherwise it was both more and less intrigue kdrama plot twisty than I expected. I liked the one roommate that got character development but I wish the other roomies did too.

Intermezzo by Sally Rooney

I disagree with her philosophically on the matter of quotation marks for dialogue. Otherwise I really did like the relationship between Ivan and Margaret a lot but Peter’s head was kind of annoying to be in. Too Joyce 4 Me. I like how his love triangle works out in the end that was a fun choice.

The September House by Carissa Orlando

This was fun and unsettling. What if you moved into a very haunted house but you were totally fine with it because you had a system and you were coping and then your daughter comes to visit and is like mom what the fuck? The way in which the narrator was unreliable here was really interesting. To me.

I Am Not Jessica Chen by Ann Liang

I am a known Ann Liang stan so when I say this is her best book so far I'm being very serious. Also I am never reading it again because it made me sob and brought me back to the worst parts of being the dumbest kid in the smart kid classes at my high school. It hit very hard. I enjoy reading her funny stuff more. But this is a very good book.

Cranford by Elizabeth Gaskell

I like this matriarchial kind of 1840s English village situation. I feel like I learned a lot about a very small and specific world. It didn't spark with me the same way it did with whoever I was reading on dreamwidth that mentioned it but it was nice.

The Shakespeare Requirement by Julie Schumacher

Not as good as Dear Committee Members sorry.
Into Thin Air: A Personal Account Of The Everest Disaster

HARROWING. I have developed new phobias of things I didn't know I needed to fear. Did not know oxygen deprivation did that to people! Also the back and forth with Boukreev as described in the post script was understandable but very sad.

Stop me if you've heard this one before.

So a guy--and it's always a guy, an everyman guy, a kind of pathetic but technically competent youngish average normal guy-- is trying really hard to succeed as a solo narrative storyteller, but his efforts are just not working out for him. But suddenly, the draft or outline or first chapter of a REALLY GREAT STORY falls into his lap. So... He takes that draft, finishes it, and passes it off as his own. And it's the greatest success the world has ever known! Except eventually his lie catches up to him and he faces the consequences of his actions. Woe is him. The end.

I've always found these premises kind of confusing, because I don't think the concept is always better than the execution. Maybe because I read so much fanfiction which is all riffing on the same few plots. Some coffeeshop meet cute AUs stand head and shoulders above other coffeeshop meet cutes (there's a reason no one ever shuts up about Jaywalkers, still, to this day.) And it's not because Le Petit Whatever is a more compelling cafe than a Starbucks, it's because AO3 user batman's writing style is polished and elegant and memorable in a way most prose, fanfic or otherwise, just isn't.

In Jean Hanff Korelitz's The Plot, the Plot our protagonist steals from a guy in a writing workshop is repeatedly described by everyone as the most brilliant and exciting and extreme plot twist the world has ever seen, which naturally ensured that whenever it was finally revealed it would be a disappointment. I guessed the book-within-a-book twist about fifty pages ahead of the reveal myself, which is saying something considering I'm usually more of a mystery enjoyer than a solver. What made The Plot really work for me overall, though, is that the final late game twist of the frame story around the fictional plagiarism actually did go in a direction I didn't fully expect, which was pretty dark and horrifying! And funny. A little awkwardly funny, but still funny. I also did feel like the main character's creative struggles and mindset were understandable and believable. I enjoyed it, overall.

This premise didn't work so well in the short-lived Shonen Jump manga Time Paradox Ghostwriter by Kenji Ichima and Tsunehiro Date. In TPG, Teppei is a young mangaka assistant dreaming of serialization, but editors are constantly slamming his stories down as derivative and creatively empty. Suddenly his microwave starts spitting out Shonen Jump magazines from ten years in the future. Believing this to be a weird dream, he copies the first chapter of a new story from the future Jump to the best of his ability and submits it. And it becomes a huge success! Except the girl who drew that future first chapter, Itsuki, sees Teppei's debut, and tracks him down... To tell him how thrilled she is that she's not the only one who could come up with that basic premise???

The central theme of TPG, counter to the repeated maxims of "everyone has a story to tell" deconstructed in The Plot and Andrew Lipstein's Last Resort, is that some people really are creatively empty and incapable of creating truly original stories. Which I fundamentally disagree with. If your work seems derivative you need to a) diversify your creative input b) figure out a message besides Have Fun and c) yeah, look inside yourself and your life experiences a little. Your manga looks too much like other manga? Go read some Asterix, or X-men, or Berlin by Jason Lutes. See a play. Take a knitting class. Read prose. It's not an unsolvable problem, and the reason it seems like it to these characters is because they're young and lacking in life experience and perspective. Which I guess I am too, but at least I'm aware of it. Just pair up with a writer like the creators of this comic did.

I think this frustrates me so much because I've never had a problem coming up with ideas for comics, I've just been struggling to execute them effectively for the past decade. I'm desperate to improve my drawing skills to a point where I can get published as a writer and artist, but it feels like nothing I do will get me there. But ideas are easy! It's the execution that's hard!

The Plot and Last Resort had one big thing in common TPG didn't: the protagonists didn't just plagiarize someone else's fictional story, they plagiarized real events that happened to someone else, and that had consequences for their lives. But the manga in TPG appears to be a standard shonen fighter fantasy story, not narratively groundbreaking in any way obvious to the readers of the manga outside the manga. Both Itsuki and Teppei only want to make popular manga everyone can enjoy, not tell a specific story or communicate something to the world, which makes me wonder what exactly makes their comic so super amazing anyway. Caleb in Last Resort wanted to be recognized for his skill as a novelist more than anything else. Jake in The Plot had been recognized as a novelist once already with a well-regarded if not bestselling first book and was desperate for a career reset. I feel like that kind of egoism is a little more honest and believable than the altruistic goal of entertaining everyone. Maybe because I'm an egoist myself. I wanna be the very best like no one ever was, etc.

Bringing it back around to the title of this post and fanfiction, there's a lot of people who write plot-first kinda fics of worldbuilding-heavy canons, who want to "fix" BNHA by making Deku a supersmart quirkless analyst instead of shipping stuff. And a lot of those kinds of fics have potentially interesting ideas! But a lot of them also have an execution that makes me not want to look at them twice, from too many SPAG errors to giving Present Mic a speaking style like a Homestuck typing quirk (a specific fic that haunts me). A really great plot can't hit without good execution. In Last Resort, Caleb's friend Avi sends him the short story version of the story that Caleb ends up stealing for his novel, and Caleb is unimpressed with Avi's actual writing. Caleb steals it almost unintentionally, just driving up the West Coast and thinking about how he could improve the story and make it stronger. The Plot asserts that the specific plot Jake steals would be impossible to execute so badly it wouldn't become a smash hit, but by a fortunate coincidence both Jake and the guy he stole it from were already pretty good writers.

A boring plot can be a hit if the execution is interesting somehow (people like Sally Rooney, after all). A plot that's been done a zillion times can be a hit if there's something, anything about it that's slightly new. These three versions of the same story are all still different from each other, right?

So does having a great premise/concept/plot really matter that much?

Current Location: airport check in line lmfao

So I binged all of Blue Lock in about three days, after turning my nose up at the very premise when it first dropped in 2018. And like... I like it. But not the way I like Haikyuu!!, which is also a sports manga that occupies a lot of my brainspace. Blue Lock doesn't make me want to draw fanart or write fanfiction. I don't even have a favorite character in it. I guess I like Bachira and Chigiri if I really had to pick, but I don't think about any of them often enough to do that. But it gets me fired up in a way Haikyuu!! rarely did, because its pace was a lot more...slow and steady?
Blue Lock is operating at 200% intensity, all the time. Every soccer game is accompanied by characters burning with symbolic fire, usually fire with skulls in it. Every single soccer player wants to be the bestest in the world at all costs, unlike Haikyuu!! where for most of the characters high school volleyball really was just a school club they didn't continue with after high school. They're all doing crazy soccer things at all times, and even though I know basically nothing about soccer and have no interest in it, seeing them doing their crazy soccer things illustrated with sharp, graphic visual metaphors like disintegrating puzzle pieces, fire, lions and tigers and snakes (oh my!) makes me feel excited.
But not about soccer. No, it makes me excited because my first thought is, "Oh, I can draw people fencing like this. I can make fencing look cool if I draw it like this. I want to draw my fencing comic again."

I've drawn at least 4 different comics about high school girls fencing, the quality slowly improving with each attempt. I've finally landed on a group of characters I think could really work for a longform story, but my art still has a ways to go before it's publication ready. So I'm practicing!

There's a lot of manga about baseball (obviously), and more than a few series about volleyball and soccer (Farewell, My Dear Cramer is honestly slept on even though it got cancelled before its time. The anime was a very sad excuse for an adaptation. Feral girl rights!), but as far as comics about fencing that are available in English in any capacity go, we've got the webtoon Infinity (genuinely slaps hard, art style's an acquired taste but the writing is smart, characters fun and they do make an effort to make fencing look cool while taking advantage of the vertical scroll format.) And the Boom! series Fence!, which I liked when it first dropped and then slowly realized it was in fact falling apart at the seams. And each new issue just makes the holes bigger. One of its biggest failings is, quite honestly, the art: the fact that it makes fencing look boring.

Fencing is not actually as visually interesting a sport as swashbuckling swordfights in movies make it seem: everyone wears white, faces are totally obscured by black wire mesh masks, and you can't even move from side to side in it, just back and forth! You have to use visual metaphors and, if working in color, emotionally expressive color to make fencing look interesting in a comic. But Fence! doesn't even differentiate the fencing uniforms from different schools realistically: it's impossible to keep track of who's from where when they're standing around. Infinity manages that and more. Like, okay, just look at this.

panel from fence rivals depicting characters standing and other characters yelling fencing terminology over them.

AAAAAAAAAAA.
Anyway, the other thing I realized is that the last few comics I've felt insane about, Blue Lock and Pyramid Game, have both been... unhinged. Lots of people behaving in ways normal people would never. Hand in unlovable hand toxic female friendships and singleminded homoerotic soccer obsession. But when I write original stories/make original comics, I tend towards things that people call "cute" and "sweet" and "nice." I don't think my work is cutesy or anything, and I'd like to believe I make things with at least some bite to them. At least a little darkness. But why am I so scared of writing the over-the-top intensity and character drama I love reading about so much? Why am I so afraid of writing failgirls, and totally unhinged girls? How do I channel the energy Blue Lock awakens in me, or the spite Fence! makes me feel?
Anyway, Blue Lock should've been a yuri manga.

Current Music: META album by Pinocchio-P <3

To 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!

Happy new year! I continue to be on my bullshit.

So I Hear The Sunspot (and the sequel series Limit) by Yuki Fumino are really interesting as BL comics. They're very thoughtful, multifaceted explorations of the difficulties of being hearing impaired in a world of hearing people, neither fully deaf nor fully hearing, and about the relationship between two boys, the hearing impaired, beautiful Kouhei and the kind of clueless but well-meaning Taichi. And the first volume had this afterword.

This explains why the first volume didn't really feel like a romance to me: the author hadn't been intending to write it as a romance, and was fairly unfamiliar with the genre in general. This is obviously a massive failure on the part of the editor (who hires someone to write for a magazine without telling them what the magazine is about?!) but it's also something I'd expect to see corrected, over time?

And yet the story continues for another 20 chapters after that first volume afterword, with the relationship developments feeling deeply unconvincing in a way that surprised me because in BL comics the other way around is a lot more common (see: the Amish BL I discussed recently.)

They Seem To Be Very Good Friends.

Taichi and Kouhei seem to remember they're Dating (and not just best friends) approximately once a volume, presumably when an editor reminds Fumino that they are in fact Dating. They're not very physically affectionate with each other most of the time, and while they think about each other a lot, they don't seem to be attracted to each other at all. When they do end up doing something physical together, Kouhei plays the seme role (probably because he's taller?) but it feels both out of character and out of obligation, and not like something he genuinely wants to do. Taichi does think about Kouhei, often. But he never spends any time thinking about his romantic feelings for Kouhei, or the nature of his love. He thinks a lot more about how he can help make life better for Kouhei and people like him, which is sweet and admirable but not romantic.

Their relationship progresses weirdly irregularly: Kouhei confesses first, and then Taichi says he doesn't hate it, and then eventually Taichi admits he reciprocates Kouhei's feelings but it feels like a lot of time passes while other developments unfold around them. They don't feel like they're each other's top priority, which makes sense because they both have so much other stuff going on. But I wish they felt more important to each other, sometimes.

They're keeping the nature of their relationship a secret from everyone around them but not for any specifically stated reason. I get the feeling Fumino knows queer relationships are frowned upon, but isn't clear on how exactly that manifests or why, and so just... glosses over it.

I think this is a shame because if Fumino remembered that gay people are also an oppressed minority that the world isn't designed to cater to, that could tie into the themes of disability advocacy and make the story stronger.

I've always thought that writing a good romantic relationship was like writing a solid friendship with kissing, but I Hear The Sunspot shows that there is a difference. The amount of physical affection needs to ratchet up slowly as their intimacy increases, the characters should be shown to be attracted to each other, they can't just be very good friends! They need to kiss about it!

Or, like. Okay Yuri On Ice they kiss on screen ONCE (and it's censored so some people can pretend it's just a hug actually), but you can tell Victor and Yuuri are deeply in love from every frame of animation and how they talk about each other, and how they talk with each other. So much of I Hear The Sunspot is about hearing impairment in general that not enough is about how special Taichi and Kouhei are to each other in specific.

I dunno. Obviously this is all highly subjective, your mileage may vary, I know a lot of people really like this comic and I like it too! I just think this aspect of it could be better.

Current Mood: calm
Current Music: scherbina had a birthday concert over fb live today so improvisation on a theme

I am haunted at times by memories of Rumspringa no Joukei by Azuma Kaya.

Today I am specifically being haunted by my dear friend retweeting a tweet I made about it when I read it almost two years ago no, but in general, I am haunted by Rumspringa no Joukei.

Once upon a time a friend of mine tweeted a recommendation for a BL comic about an Amish boy and a dancer they'd just finished reading. This friend grew up in Singapore. I grew up twenty minutes away from Amish country and have spent a not-insignificant amount of my life in Lancaster county, as well as driving through the rolling hills on various road trips and buying delicious pretzels from the Amish and Mennonite farmers at the nearby farmer's market. I don't know a whole lot about Amish people and culture, but I know enough and am geographically close enough to it for Rumspringa no Joukei to feel like looking at a stranger's vague impression of my backyard.
And it is a vague impression!
Rumspringa no Joukei (literally "the scene of my rumspringa") is a comic nominally set in Pennsylvania in the 1980s in which an Amish boy named Theo on his Rumspringa (a time when Amish adolescents leave the community and experience the outside world before deciding if they want to stay in the community or leave it) encounters a young rent boy named Oswald (nicknamed Oz) with dreams of making it big on Broadway, and then they Fall In Love and have lots of well-drawn sex. It takes place in the 80s because the author wanted to have Oz's dad die in Vietnam during the moon landing. AIDS is never mentioned, despite the story taking place within the gay community in the tristate area in the 1980s. There's also a recurring metaphor using rainbow trout, for some reason. A lot happens in this thread!
The author cites two entire books as sources for her research on this manga: a photobook of Amish life, and a Japanese book about Amish culture. But she apparently did not do any other research about America in general in this time period, and it shows.

The part that struck me immediately on my first read through and the tweet that my friend retweeted today was this sterile diner in the second chapter that looks nothing like any diner I've ever seen in the tristate area.

Though the landscapes of the settlement Theodore lives in are rendered in loving detail, probably from that photobook Azuma cited as reference, the environments of the urban location Theodore and Oswald lives in are generic and stale, making Theo's decision to run away with Oz in the name of True Love a bit harder to believe.

The characters in this comic are gorgeous to a fault. I mean that literally- don't most Amish men have beards?? Why don't Theo and Danny have beards?! Is it because beards aren't cool in BL? Yes, probably, but come on.

page from comic

This comic is very beautiful but the story is constructed out of tissue paper and dryer lint. The characters would be good if they were cut out and pasted into a completely different setting. I don't expect this comic to ever get licensed in English because, to anyone with even a passing familiarity of Amish culture and the tristate area in the 1980s, this comic will just feel wrong. Although it might sell well on the sheer novelty factor, because every time I tweet about it I get multiple replies saying "AMISH BL?!!? WHAT??"

But if you don't have that familiarity, check it out! It's pretty! I do admire Azuma's decision to boldly go where no BL has gone before, even if it's criminally underresearched as an excuse to shove all her favorite tropes into one comic.

And if you do know things about the Amish, may this haunt you like it haunts me.

Current Music: gunjo by yoh kamiyama is the song of the day fsr

I love looking at multiple works by the same creator as a collection, picking apart recurring themes, motifs, images, figuring out what a specific artist likes to draw or write or think about, but also looking at how creators evolve over time, becoming more thoughtful and sophisticated as they make more and more work. Today, I want to talk about how the mangaka KAITO depicts relationships in his medium-length lacrosse slice of life comic Cross Manage, and his next longform work Blue Flag.
I read most of Blue Flag as it was updating, catching up around chapter 28, and just read all of Cross Manage today because I felt like it and it's on the Jump app, and I think it's really interesting how Blue Flag deconstructs and responds to things that Cross Manage seems to depict without thinking.
First, the good: KAITO seems to enjoy specific, different character designs, giving all of his recurring characters different body types, clothing styles, and caricature forms so they're instantly recognizable in any panel. Cross Manage and Blue Flag are both visual delights. I love the little faces and character details he gives everyone. The world the characters exist in feels full and real, and I'm so into it.

His work is also expertly drawn. I was worried Cross Manage would be shakier, since it's an earlier work, but no. I think KAITO's one of the best draftsmen I've seen in manga recently. His thin, precise lines look almost like academic drawings sometimes, it's nuts. And he's great at gag reactions and visual comedy at the same time! What the heck!
Another thing I like about both works: supportive best friends! for the protagonist but also for other characters. In Blue Flag, Futaba and Taichi have separate friend circles that eventually overlap a bit, but they each have their own close, loyal, weird friends. And in Cross Manage, I really love how Seki and Wakamoto support the lacrosse team.
I actually found Cross Manage really interesting in terms of making me appreciate lacrosse a little. Where I grew up, lacrosse was the preppy WASP girl sport, but to see it protrayed as this weird niche underdog thing with our protagonist team full of unathletic amateurs made it more appealing.
Now for the less good: Cross Manage has a lot of... I've been calling it "Weird Shonen Het Shit", and that's honestly how I feel about it. It's uncomfortable, heterosexual, and in a way I've only really seen in shonen manga. Let me count the ways:
1) There's like three girls in love with our (admittedly very lovable) protagonist Sakurai, who is oblivious to their affections. This isn't actually a harem manga so it's not really about this, but it's still weird and not necessary, imo.
2) Ryu is a college student working at the LAX equipment store who is... weirdly protective of Misora, high school first year. He says he thinks of her as his "cute little sister" but like. It's Weird.
3) The fact that the whole reason Sakurai ends up managing the lacrosse team is because he accidentally touches Misora's chest and she blackmails him into it.
4) There's a lot less fanservice than you see in manga like, for example, My Hero Academia, which makes the moments when you do get an intentional cleavage shot all the more uncomfortably jarring. It's like the audience needs to be occasionally reminded that Sakurai is a Guy and the Girl's LAX team is Girls.
5) Pretty much any time a guy and a girl interact everyone around them is like "omg are you dating. omg do you have a crush. omg"
Which brings me to my next point: why Blue Flag is such an interesting follow-up to Cross Manage.
Blue Flag takes a lot of these tired shonen tropes and actually interrogates them. In Blue Flag, Mami is a pretty girl who likes being friends with guys, but everyone assumes she's dating the boys she hangs out with and she gets to express how annoying it is to have this assumption ruin friendships for her over and over again. She also gets to be frustrated with her guy friends who insist on "protecting" her by trying to control her life.

We also have Masumi and Touma, who people assume are dating because they're a boy and a girl who hang out. (Spoiler: they're gay.)
Actually wait let me expand on Masumi a bit. Spoilers for the finale of Blue Flag here, I guess.
The way Masumi's character is handled in the epilogue is incredibly frustrating, for a series that hit the mark so many times to just whiff it entirely like that. Her main arc in Blue Flag is coming to terms with her identity as a lesbian, navigating comphet and societal pressure to date men she's not attracted to. In chapter 38, she tells Akiko "The people I like... they aren't the same as normal people."
And then in the epilogue she's married to a dude. What. Where'd that come from.
Obviously bisexuality is valid and bi people exist and all that, but the fact that her whole arc in the story is learning it's ok to not be attracted to men, only to then somehow discover she can be attracted to men entirely off panel, is just... what? You couldn't have shown us that in the story? Without any exploration or elaboration on this idea it ends up reinforcing the Schoolgirl Lesbians trope, implying her feelings for Futaba were like practice for her eventual heterosexual marriage. Whack!
Okay Masumi tangent over.
Anyway, I think it's interesting that Cross Manage has characters who reinforce heteronormative ideas about friendships while Blue Flag unpacks them and digs deeper into potential friendship and relationship dynamics. That's it for now, I guess!

Current Music: Raison d'Etre by Eve my beloved

Pi using Dreamwidth has inspired me to start using Dreamwidth. So uh, hello world, and so on. Let's go.

So I have this group chat with 3 friends where we talk about topics such as queer animanga fandom trends, zine discourse, indie comics, and other fun things. One of the things that I made the groupchat to discuss and that we've continued to discuss because it's inherently hilarious is "girl yaoi", the idea that the strongly codified seme/uke dynamics, tropes and visual language of the late 90s/early 2000s yaoi manga subgenre can be applied to a relationship between two female characters. And as every action has an equal and opposite reaction, "girl yaoi" must have a counterpart in "boy yuri."

And I believe I have found examples of both of these things! Allow me to present my findings to the court.

Kase-san and Yamada by Hiromi Takashima (specifically the sequel manga to the original Kase-san, where the yaoi-like traits become more prominent) is an example of "Girl Yaoi" by depicting a tall, athletically gifted and posessive brunette courting a petite, submissive and passive blonde. This echoes the classical seme/uke dynamic common in old-fashioned yaoi manga. In the story, Kase is constantly jealous of Yamada interacting with new friends or random boys, and while her jealousy does negatively affect both of their lives, it's never presented as a flaw Kase needs to overcome.
Kase-san being jealous of some guy who was talking to Yamada.
But where Kase-san's yaoiesque nature truly shines is in its commitment to "no climax, no plot, no meaning".
The story drifts through Kase and Yamada's college days with little in the way of overarching plot tensions-- events happen, people feel things, but there's no urgency that keeps the reader engaged. It's a manga for people who like to see cute girls doing cute homoerotic things, which is valid. There's better comics for that out there, but I am not here to judge other people's tastes. I am here to argue that in replicating tropes and dynamics common in yaoi in this GL manga, Takashima has created the rare and elusive "girl yaoi".

Now for the "Boy Yuri."

Old-Fashioned Cupcake by Sagan Sagan is "boy yuri" because I read it and thought "Wow, this is exactly like every manga tagged with both 'OL' and 'yuri' I've read on dynasty-scans in the past month but with two dudes." As I am conscious other people do not compulsively check the front page of dynasty-scans on a near-daily basis, I shall elaborate on what I mean by this. Old-Fashioned Cupcake is a fairly obscure, short BL manga about two office workers who start going out to eat fancy sweet treats in cafes popular with young girls in an attempt to make one of them, who's approaching forty, feel young again. (The younger guy is 29). The things that make Cupcake "boy yuri" are its preoccupation with balance and reciprocity in a way that reminds me of working-woman-yuris like Still Sick or Donuts Under a Crescent Moon, the slow build of sexual and romantic tension, and the unexpected recurring thread of Gender that comes up in Nozue and Togawa's conversations with each other. Nozue doesn't just want to be young again, he wants to be a young girl, silly and frivolous, taking selfies and having girl talk.
page from old-fashioned cupcake depicting the scene I just described

It's a very unusual angle for a BL to take, which is why it feels more like yuri, and also, like yuri for lesbians.

This concludes my presentation for the day. Thank you for reading. I will be back with more takes too niche for professional media criticism sites and too long and weird for twitter threads... eventually.

Current Music: Reaganomics by Lemon Demon (it's yaoinomics, baby!)

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mozaikmage

May 2025

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What I read in JANUARY 2025
Are Ideas Really That Important? Some things I read recently
Blue lock and fencing and sports comics
Sasaki and Miyano is the most fictional BL and I love it
I Hear The Sunspot: they seem to be very good friends
I Have To Tell You All About The Amish BL
KAITO's romances: Cross Manage and Blue Flag
Girl Yaoi, Boy Yuri: Or, Things Too Convoluted to Explain in a Twitter Thread

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What I read in JANUARY 2025

Are Ideas Really That Important? Some things I read recently

Blue lock and fencing and sports comics

Sasaki and Miyano is the most fictional BL and I love it

I Hear The Sunspot: they seem to be very good friends

I Have To Tell You All About The Amish BL

KAITO's romances: Cross Manage and Blue Flag

Girl Yaoi, Boy Yuri: Or, Things Too Convoluted to Explain in a Twitter Thread