mozaikmage

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!

 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.

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.