But what are your thoughts on yaoi? The exciting sequel!

I've been reading a lot of yaoi/boys' love/BL manga lately (licensed when I can find them, otherwise scanlated) and while the genre is still swamped with clichés, it seems to me that the past few years has seen a broadening of horizons. The last time I took a look at the genre, I gave it up in disgust at the lazy writing, toxic attitudes, and constantly reiterated storylines, but the more recent stuff is...

...well, to be honest there are still more clichés than you can shake a stick at -- here's a fun exercise: pick a random page on the June website and see how long it takes before you come across a story set in a high school or dealing with characters who have known each other since high school or before. I came up with nine on the first page alone. (Really, you could get the impression from some yaoi creators' output that if you haven't met your True Love by the age of 15, you're doomed to lifelong celibacy.) But while the outpouring of hackneyed old standards continues, there's also an encouraging trend of yaoi/BL creators moving in different directions, subverting or sidestepping the typical rules that make yaoi even more predictable than its genre definition demands.

Naturally the works licensed in English lag behind scanlations, which lag behind Japanese language publication, so that critical overviews of the genre as represented in the West tend to focus on the pixilated and rule-bound examples that infuriated me so much before; I read Chris Butcher's piece on yaoi for Xtra magazine and found myself flailing my hands and going "Butbutbut! There's more to it than that! And that bit's not even true any more!" except the piece actually is a fair assessment of the yaoi that's officially available in English; the genre-subversive stuff is mostly floating around the net rather than on the shelves of comics stores. But we're catching up!

I'm particularly delighted to see that one of Naono Bohra's collections has been licensed by DramaQueen -- Naono Bohra has a unique art style unlike anything I've seen elsewhere, and her stories manage the difficult feat of being informed by yaoi genre conventions without being bound by them. A typical romance character, extremely common in yaoi, is the shy, quiet, unremarkable heroineuke who doesn't understand what anyone could see in herhim because she has all the self-esteem of a pile of wet newspaper. Naono Bohra tends to put a twist on this by giving her protagonists a reason for being shy and self-effacing: they're often disabled, or scarred, or middle-aged, or divorced, or abandoned by their parents, or they've got some supernatural curse cutting them off from society. The prevailing mood is one of wistful yearning; her protagonists are resigned to loneliness, and when the beloved appears to break them out of it, it often takes more than one attempt before they can finally accept that the bad times are over.

Visually, her work is instantly recognisable. Her use of cross-hatch shading, in particular, is like nothing else I've seen in comics, Japanese or otherwise, and as a result of it her character designs are soft and attractive without resorting to the lazy shorthands for "cuteness" so many mangaka use, and without the typical limited repertoire of faces. To digress slightly: One BL manga I read confused me because the two lovers looked completely identical except for their hair colours -- and the thing is, with BL manga you never know. Them being long-lost identical twins would not be outside the range of possibilities. It took about ten pages before I figured out that no, it wasn't deliberate, it was just that the artist could only draw one male face. (And that was one of the stories I liked! Fujiyama Hyouta: great storyteller, nice figure work, needs to get some new faces.) This is never a problem with Naono Bohra.

It doesn't hurt that she ignores the so-called "height rule" and doesn't stick rigidly to the seme/uke (top/bottom, dominator/dominated) division -- and even when there is a clear seme and uke, you can't always tell which is which just by looking at them. I wouldn't go so far as to say that Naono Bohra never employs types, but her types are pretty much sui generis: her characters are not like anyone else's, and neither are her stories. I hope that Awakening Desire is the first of many Naono Bohra titles to be licensed: she deserves a much wider audience.