I know Brigid calls it a thoughtful essay on Yaoi but there is something that is seriously bugging me about Jason Thompson’s livejournal post, Boku no Shonen Ai (or “Jason overanalyzes something and takes all the fun out of it”).
The immediate reaction is just too see it as another “Oh lord, women read this stuff?, but it’s like dirty!” post.
That’s probably being a little disingenuous to Thompson but rarely have I seen an article which covers Boys’ Love which doesn’t one time or another slip into this trap.
Yaoi is yet another bombing raid on the already smoking ruins of the “women don’t like porn†myth.
It’s old hat, we don’t need to keep going there, can we just get on with talking about the material instead?
Whenever I get stuck or am unsure about my terminology, and quite frankly the Boys’ Love field is a veritable minefield in that department, I turn to the fountain of all knowledge who promptly links to Aestheticism nearly every time for my answers. In this particular case I’d like to just link to the description of what Shounen-ai is;
Shounen-ai
Shounen-ai is an obsolete term. Shounen-ai refers to stories about strong relationships between pubescent or pre-pubescent boys. The stories featured angsty, poetic, platonic or romantic relationships. It is used only to point to shoujo manga written in the 70’s and early 80’s by authors such as Hagio Moto, Takemiya Keiko, etc. (Titles such as Gymnasium in November, Heart of Thomas, and Song of Wind and Trees.) Shounen-ai is no longer written, ceased to exist as a sub-category of shoujo long ago, and this term has long since fallen into disuse. Later stories with male/male sexual relationships are termed yaoi, tanbi, june, or boys’ love.
Shounen-ai is not the same term as boys’ love.
The current common usage of shounen-ai is to refer to adults who like young boys (i.e. pedophiles).
Shounen-ai really doesn’t cut it as a term now which is why I’ve swapped my writing to just use Boys’ Love. I know everyone else tends to use yaoi as the blanket term but BL is just so much simpler when talking about Japanese licenses, which this article is only purely interested in.
Okay so what’s bugging me? I mean the women like porn comment is only really mentioned at the beginning and is hardly a good reason to not like an article, and neither really is the terminology thing. Admittedly it’s not difficult to find out the correct words but you know Thompson stresses at the beginning that this is his first foray into the field so there has to be some leniency.
For me it is the idea that the Boys’ Love work licensed here and that which is available in Japan can be assessed based on the works of Digital Manga Publishing only. I’ve read about 90% of DMP/Junes output and some of it is very good, some of it not so good and some quite frankly would have been better left behind in Japan, but it is a only a representation of the what Boys’ Love means and it is also a very limited representation.
What I mean by “very limited” is that the kind of works we get translated here tend towards the safer and more gentler BL works. To use the most very basic of categorisation you could see Boys’ Love split into titles that appeal to kids, you know the kind, romantic stories kissing and such like nothing too graphical. A step up from that could be say BL for teens or young adults which as one could guess also features a step up in the story content till you finally reach BL for adults which, well you can probably get the picture by now.
Guess which of those three we DON’T get licensed over here by DMP?
The reasons for this are numerous and varied and really haven’t changed all that much since we last talked about them. But just for a quick recap, until both publishers and bookstores alike can cope with the idea of releasing more darker and mature BL and at the same time society in general can cope without having to throw a hissy fit and run screaming into the dark at the mere thought of BL then we are only going to see the more easy going titles.
I mean, after being introduced to Kaori Yuki and in particular her title Boy’s Next Door, I’d pay good money to see that licensed, but I’m under no false pretence that it is ever going to happen. Take Kitty Media’s recent announcement that they are to release Motoni Modoru’s Poison Cherry Drive, yes I’m interested in reading it, but you know Shiikugakari Rika would be more intriguing to me, but yes again, it’s not going to happen.
Or at least not any time soon. At one point, surely, there is going to come a time when we can start seeing licenses which explore the darker/harder themes which we know exist, but until then I guess the young Boys’ Love manga market here in the west has to stay with the young Boys’ Love manga.
Thank god then for the Global Boys’ Love arena which quite frankly owns the scene at the moment in terms of works covering all aspects. If you want something which is more then just two-dimensional characters and you know covers just about every theme possible then you could do a lot worse then check out what these creators are doing all around the world. Drama Queen is going to hopefully blow some peoples minds at Yaoicon 2006 when its anthology finally appears. ^.^
To be fair to Thompson it is an interesting article he has created and it certainly got me thinking about it, which is never a bad thing. What I would dearly love to see though is maybe in a few months time a follow up article. Maybe after he’s had a bigger introduction to the world of Boys’ Love through be it scanlations ( I know!!) or through reading the original books, one only has to look at sites like JPQueen to soon get overwhelmed, and dare I say maybe some Global BL works too.
I’d be really interested to see if his opinion has changed if at all. Now that would be worth reading. ^.^
