Daredevil Prince - New MM Romance Release!

Daredevil Prince is now available at Amazon and Kindle Unlimited!

When an American voice actor and the Japanese voice actor who plays the same role in an anime series meet in Tokyo—sparks fly!

Jake Rowan is a struggling Hollywood actor. He’s mostly known for being “Pool Guy” in a pool supplies commercial. So he’s thrilled when he lands a role dubbing the wild Prince Erik in a fantasy anime called Daredevil Prince and is invited to Japan to do appearances with the Japanese voice cast.

In Japan, Prince Erik is voiced by Shinsuke Shiratori, a handsome rising talent with the dubious nickname of “the Ice King.” Shinsuke’s remote, unapproachable personality intrigues Jake who is instantly attracted to him.

As he pursues Shinsuke, the air of mystery around him deepens. There’s something he shares with Shinsuke—that he thought he’d buried long ago—and now the two men must face it so they can be together.

Anime and seiyuu fans unite! :-) The Amazon link is below.

Daredevil Prince - Kindle Unlimited and Amazon Buy Link

The Female Gaze - Through a Different Lens - New Book Release

The Female Gaze: Through a Different Lens

What is the female gaze and why is it important?

Arts, entertainment, and culture have been defined through the male gaze for centuries. But things are rapidly changing. The question is not whether society is ready, but whether women themselves are ready to fully express what they see through their gaze - their unique perspective as women.

The Female Gaze discusses how the female gaze differs from the male gaze in books and movies such as Star Wars, Fifty Shades of Grey, Nomadland, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Emily the Criminal, and The Woman King, and also examines slash, Japanese yaoi, and m/m romance as alternatives to traditional heteronormative romance stories.

Amazon

Barnes & Noble

Kobo Books

Summer Hiatus and Upcoming Book Release

Sometime in the next week or two I’ll be announcing the release of a new book. It’s a short non-fiction book that I’ve been working on for a while. It includes a discussion on yaoi and boy’s love among other things. I’ll post the release announcement here and at my writing blog.

After that, this blog will be on summer hiatus until mid-September. Enjoy the dog days and I'll see you then!

Depressed Avengers Assemble! The Night Beyond the Tricornered Window and Anime Beyond Stereotypes

Sometimes one can get too comfortable in a niche. It can be cozy and comforting and when the niche is something like boy’s love/yaoi, there’s the added in-group cache of “no one else appreciates this, but at least we appreciate it.”

There’s a wide spectrum when it comes to boy’s love. There’s out-and-out yaoi like Youka Nitta’s Embracing Love series and many others where yaoi is definitely front and center in the story. Other manga/anime fall into the “will they or won’t they” category where the BL interest is plain but the characters (often teenagers) may not be ready to act on their desires.

And then there’s what I call not the “will they or won’t they” but the “are they or aren’t they” group. This is where the BL is teased and played up, but one or both characters won’t acknowledge the attraction between them, so you aren’t even sure whether to call it BL or not.

At some point watching the first episode of such a series, regular anime fans who aren’t okay with BL will just move on. They see what looks like a BL or BL-adjacent story and flee without giving it a chance. The problem is that you can miss some seriously good stories this way.

Which brings me to The Night Beyond the Tricornered Window. This paranormal suspense series based on the manga by Tomoko Yamashita is a hidden gem. It’s a tightly constructed mystery with beautifully realized characters that are based on solid knowledge of human psychology. There are twelve episodes total, and by the time you’re watching the second episode, you are hooked.

... But you have to get beyond the first episode to get there.

Kousuke Mikado is a shy bookstore clerk. Unfortunately for him, he’s had the ability to see spirits his entire life, which scares him to death. One day, a tall handsome man named Rihito Hiyakawa is summoned by the bookstore manager to exorcise the ghosts that are rumored to hang around the store. Upon spotting Mikado, Hiyakawa is immediately taken with him.

Hiyakawa: You are my destiny...

As Mikado tries not to look at a dark spirit standing nearby, Hiyakawa sees it and without asking permission, puts his hands on Mikado.

Mikado: Hey! Stop! Pull out! I said get out of me!

Hiyakawa: It’s all right. I’ll go slowly. It should feel good. It feels really good for me... I’m going to touch it now.

And he does. No, he doesn’t touch that. By touching Mikado’s heart, Hiyakawa can access Mikado’s “core,” which is akin to his soul, and together they can perform the exorcism more efficiently that way.

I should mention here that non-consensual touching is one of the hallmarks of bad yaoi. The dominant one is a controlling bastard, and like a M/F taken-by-the-barbarian romance, manhandles the passive one against his will.

Hiyakawa’s not respecting Mikado’s boundaries, his supernatural “entering” of Mikado which is mind-rapey, and the unbelievably on the nose double entendres (pull out... get out of me... it’s all right... I’ll go slowly) all led me to think that I knew what this series was about. And so I settled in for eleven more episodes of campy, stupid BL fun.

What I got instead was an absorbing and deepening mystery that quickly pulled me in. Hiyakawa runs what he euphemistically calls a “cleaning business,” and hires Mikado with his extrasensory ability to help him move lingering spirits on their way. Mikado discovers that Hiyakawa often assists the police with their unsolved criminal cases. In one particularly gruesome case involving body parts, the pair are led to a high school girl, Erika Hiura, who appears to have some connection with what happened.

Erika has a yakuza bodyguard, Kazuomi Sakaki. At first it appears that Sasaki controls her, but actually it’s more the other way around, as Erika is a first-class manipulator. Her paranormal ability is that she can absorb the souls of spirits who refuse to leave earth... but these same spirits are used to commit crimes.

As Mikado and Hiyakawa investigate the case, they meet a psychic reader, Keita Mukae. At first Keita seems like a charlatan as he has no ability to actually read cards, but in fact he does possess real psychic gifts that enable him to solve his clients’ problems.

(Around Episode 3 or 4, the comments at Crunchyroll turned from “ooohhh BL” to “this is really good” and “this series is underrated.”)

Hiyakawa’s police contact is Lt. Hanzawa, a gruff but good-hearted middle-aged detective who appears to know him from way back. Mikado picks up on this, and eventually he becomes curious about Hiyakawa’s past.

It turns out that Erika is being exploited by her father, who sells her psychic-criminal abilities to a man known only as “Sensei.” The odd thing about Sensei is that no one can remember his face or name after they meet with him.

The episodes build on each other in a natural progression as more and more is revealed about Hiyakawa and about Sensei. It is, however, Mikado’s past that unexpectedly provides the connection that explains everything.

In Episode 7 it all comes together, as the entire group - Mikado, Hiyakawa, Erika, Sasaki, and Keita - recognizes the real threat and resolves to do what needs to be done. All the slow building of characters and their relationships, revelations of the past, and seemingly unrelated scenes are brought into sharp focus, like a kaleidoscope that suddenly presents a clear picture with one final shake.

I liked one of the comments that somebody wrote about Episode 7 - “Depressed Avengers Assemble!” Not all of the group is depressed, but the quote captures the feeling. Even if life leaves you feeling battered, you still gotta do what you gotta do.

By the end, Mikado and Hiyakawa undergo a sort of role reversal. Mikado has developed inner strength, while Hiyakawa’s false front of confidence is dissipated and he is left vulnerable.

Yamashita’s thesis is plain as day. Each person must take responsibility for the hurt that they cause others, and if they began life as victims, somehow, in some way, they need to process those emotions in order to move on. There are no exceptions to this rule. And forgiveness and letting go doesn’t mean that you need to see that person again: indeed, you might instead leave them wallowing in anger and grief on the floor as you walk out the door with your lover, because we are only ever responsible for our own shit and nobody else’s.

There’s a maturity to this story that I admire, and as a writer, I also appreciate the tight story structure. It’s a story that respects all the characters as being worthy of compassion and redemption, but again, only with full accountability. And it doesn’t do it with a lot of melodrama and overhyped emotional scenes either, the way I’m afraid too many psychological anime series tend to do.

The Night Beyond the Tricornered Window is so good that I almost found myself wishing that the BL aspect had been left out to make it more accessible to mainstream anime fans. And then I caught myself. While it’s true that the story could have worked without that angle, the yaoi attraction added emotional heft. I have no idea if Yamashita intended the BL as a simple hook for fujoshis or if she genuinely felt the story wouldn’t have worked without it, but as a m/m romance writer myself I shouldn’t be assuming anything, nor should I question the validity of any writer’s choice.

... As it is your choice to see The Night Beyond the Tricornered Window - and I hope you’ll consider it. I believe you’ll find it worth your while.

The Evolution of Barnes & Noble Bookstores and BL Books

It’s funny how seeing one thing from the past can bring up so much.

I was doing some spring cleaning recently when I came across this relic:

For those who are unfamiliar with Borders bookstores... Borders was a bookstore chain that was popular in the 2000s, the first decade of this century, with hundreds of stores throughout the U.S. and abroad.

The height of its popularity coincided with the period of time when I was most active as a translation rewriter and freelance editor for publishers like Digital Manga Inc., Tokyopop, Bandai Entertainment, etc. That was also my most rabid and manic anime/manga fan phase. I would go to Borders and buy shopping baskets full of manga and – when I could find them – light novels.

Barnes & Noble was also a national bookstore chain back then, but I greatly favored Borders. The reasons were many. Borders’ membership card was free, while B&N charged for their membership card (they still do). Borders also had a fun store-within-a-store called Paperchase that sold kawaii stationery items. I still have some of those notebooks.

While B&N was stodgy and stuffy, Borders was fun. Their in-house café was Seattle’s Best and they sold crazy drinks like Cake Batter Latte.

But the single most important reason why Borders was better than B&N was in their manga and light novel offerings. Not only were the manga aisles at Borders always bigger and better stocked, but they actually sold boy’s love manga and light novels.

Barnes & Noble had a policy of shunning BL and yaoi books. As I heard at the time, they judged them to be too explicit. Some of them were, of course, but this attitude is one that I’ve also seen in the gay romance field and it makes no sense. Just because a story is about gay people doesn’t automatically mean that it’s X-rated; to treat those books as such in a blanket fashion is ignorant and discriminatory. It’s as if you’re saying that to be gay is all about sex and sex-related things and nothing else.

Borders had no such inhibitions... they happily sold translated boy’s love manga along with regular manga, which meant that I could edit Digital Manga’s The Selfish Demon King light novel or Aurora Publishing’s Cigarette Kisses manga and see the finished products on the shelves at Borders. That was a lot of fun for me as - being middle-aged - I sometimes felt awkward even being an anime fan at my age. I had years of editing experience prior to becoming an anime fan, and looking back on it, I wonder if I started editing in the field in part because I felt a need to justify my presence in the anime and manga world...

Alas, Borders filed for bankruptcy in 2011. Stu Levy cited this event as being the main reason why Tokyopop’s U.S. publishing arm went out of business, and there were similar repercussions for other publishers across the industry.

I missed Borders dearly, and still do. However, they are truly dead and gone, so there’s no need to hang onto the loyalty card as if they might rise from the grave at any moment, I get that.

Their bankruptcy meant that Barnes & Noble was the last chain standing. I held my nose and started patronizing B&N, though it wasn’t the same.

But recently, something has changed... mainly B&N’s tune regarding boy’s love. Suddenly, they’re okay with it. And in a fairly big way too.

A few months back, I started getting B&N emails advertising books that looked suspiciously... BL. I’d never spent a lot of time examining the shelves at my local B&N to see if they were stocking boy’s love manga these days, but it turns out that they are.

I saw one book when I was shopping at a B&N that I kept in mind to buy the next time I was at the store. The next time I went to a B&N, I spent a lot of time looking for it in the manga section, even enlisting the aid of two young saleswomen who brought me BL book after book, asking, “Is this the one?” I finally realized that I was at the wrong B&N, and that the B&N store I’d seen the book at was some miles away.

When I went to that store, I found the book, and also discovered why I couldn’t find it at the other store:

The book is called Heartstopper, and it wasn't in the manga section because it isn’t a manga. It’s a graphic novel by an English artist/author, Alice Oseman, and it was in the “Young Adult - Graphic Novels” section of the store.

From the book description: “Boy meets boy. Boys become friends. Boys fall in love. An LGBTQ+ graphic novel about life, love, and everything that happens in between... Charlie and Nick are at the same school, but they've never met... until one day when they're made to sit together. They quickly become friends, and soon Charlie is falling hard for Nick, even though he doesn't think he has a chance. But love works in surprising ways, and Nick is more interested in Charlie than either of them realized. Heartstopper is about love, friendship, loyalty and mental illness. It encompasses all the small stories of Nick and Charlie's lives that together make up something larger, which speaks to all of us.”

Boy’s love - by whatever name, whether LGBT Fiction or Gay Romance or anything else - is becoming mainstream. The Heartstopper series is published by Scholastic Books, amazingly enough - the bastion of conservative educational books and non-controversial children’s and young adult fiction. It’s not just ‘weird stuff translated from Japan’ anymore.

Just recently at Barnes & Noble, I purchased the following lovely-looking book:

Sayonara Game is a Sublime boy’s love manga with older (not teenaged) characters and what promises to be excellent character designs. I’m picky about character designs, particularly in yaoi. I say that it’s promising because I haven’t opened it yet: it’s shrinkwrapped. As any fujoshi knows, this means there’s smut good stuff inside. ;-)

Sublime only publishes manga and not light novels, despite being the U.S. publisher best suited to do so. They have a major corporate parent - Viz - and they’ve been in the BL business for ten years now.

According to their site’s FAQ, they do not publish BL light novels “as they are very costly to translate and do not sell as well as BL manga do.” I’m not sure what they’re basing the “don’t sell as well” part on. But then, I remember - as perhaps they do - the old Digital Manga Publishing yaoi light novels. I was the translation rewriter/editor on a number of them. Fred Lui at DMP used to tell me that their yaoi novels actually sold quite well, but despite that, DMP (or Digital Manga Inc. as they’re known today) stopped publishing yaoi novels of the sort that I worked on years ago. Looking at their site these days there is new manga, but all the novels look like reprints. Not sure why they gave up on that model...

But! In another surprise find at B&N - I bought the following from them the other day:

OMFG... what gorgeous art and character designs! And it’s a light novel! The description states that the story involves “romanticized love between two men (danmei).” What’s more... there’s already an anime of it at Funimation! How did I miss this when it came out?

The publisher - and all kudos to them - is Seven Seas. I’m looking forward to reading more danmei books and to seeing what else Barnes & Noble sells in the future.

An Appreciation of My Hero Academia and What I’m Watching Next

A couple of months ago, I was watching an episode of My Hero Academia when I thought to look something up. Sure enough, I was within a few episodes of the end of Season 5 - meaning that I was about to run out of episodes to watch.

The manga continues on, of course, but the next anime season begins in October 2022. Without realizing it - just watching and enjoying the series over time - I’d managed to finish all the available anime episodes.

Looking back, I understand how it happened. My Hero Academia is very easy to watch. Without a lot of dramatic cliffhangers or extreme violence and intensity, it’s an example of modern shonen at its finest. There are exciting action scenes, comedic scenes, and believable character development in a school setting that somehow manages not to be boring.

School stories aren’t my favorite, particularly the slice of life ones. The school in My Hero Academia is a training academy for teen heroes, so it’s not the usual high school hijinks. The students are put through actual life-threatening exercises from the beginning, and we get to know the core group pretty quickly.

Besides the main character, Midoriya, there’s the fierce Bakugo with his permanent outdoor voice and over the top reactions, the loyal Uraraka, earnest Iida, the lively Kaminari and Kirishima, and so on. The obvious comparison would be with the early seasons of Naruto and its shinobi academy, and they are similar, and for more than the obvious reasons.

My Hero Academia’s ensemble of characters, in their group dynamic, is the most engaging I’ve seen in a shonen anime since Naruto. I think the modern setting factors into that. Whereas Naruto is set in a ninja village following a great war, and the village is a rather grim place where enemies could attack again at any time, My Hero Academia’s present-day urban environment is more relaxed, even though villains with their evil use of their “quirks” are definitely dangerous.

At first, UA High is a commuter school, but eventually the students move into dorms on campus. The "found family" dynamic really kicks in then. What I especially like is that everyone accepts everyone else. You know that they would save even Mineta, the standard-issue annoying little perv, if he was in danger, because he’s one of the family.

My favorite character is Shoto Todoroki. His quirk is that he’s half cold, half hot - literally. He can eject ice as a weapon from his right hand, and fire from his left hand.

Shoto comes from a troubled family, one of those families that looks perfect from the outside but is broken on the inside. His father, Endeavor, is the No. 2 hero in Japan, after All Might. What the public doesn’t know is that Shoto’s mother has been institutionalized for years in a psychiatric ward ever since she burned Shoto with boiling water, leaving him with a red scar on his face.

She was sent over the edge by Endeavor, who was physically and mentally abusive to her and to their children, including little Shoto. In a moment of panic, she burned Shoto, thinking that he was Endeavor coming towards her.

After Izuku Midoriya, I would say Shoto and Bakugo are the second main characters. Together they add some spice and interest to a cast that is headed by a somewhat bland Izuku as the protagonist.

So... I’ve caught the My Hero Academia bug, like many other anime fans. But the anime won’t be back until October, so what can I watch in the meantime?

I’ve noticed that Crunchyroll has a few recent BL offerings. One of those is the awkwardly-named The Night Beyond the Tricornered Window, a supernatural mystery series.

From the site: “Mikado Kousuke, a young man working at a bookshop who seems normal at first glance, is actually the owner of a peculiar ability to see eerie things. One day, Hiyakawa Rihito appears in the shop where Mikado works. Hiyakawa declares that it must be destiny as the job he has come to do is none other than an exorcism! When Hiyakawa discovers that Mikado can see spirits, he forces Mikado to help with the exorcism. He then requests that Mikado continue to work with him, but...”

The series is rated pretty highly at 4.5 stars overall. True, the number of people voting is small, but then we BL fans are a select group. ;-)

The second BL series - or actually, it looks like a one-off - is Yes, No, or Maybe?

This one also has an overall good rating, but reviews that indicate a lot of triggering stuff in terms of sexual consent issues. I’ve seen Level-C and Ai no Kusabi so nothing can shock me in that regard, but that was back in the day. We’re in a more woke era these days, even where yaoi is concerned. I’m not sure about this one... may watch it, or may not.

Finally, on Funimation, there’s Sasaki and Miyano. This series is getting weekly episode reviews at Anime News Network which is unusual for a BL title, so I’m intrigued.

From MyAnimeList: High school student Yoshikazu Miyano is saved from a group of bullies by Shuumei Sasaki. Miyano is - secretly - a fudanshi, a boy who is into boy’s love. When Sasaki discovers this, surprisingly, he doesn’t judge, but instead enjoys the boy’s love manga that he borrows from Miyano. (I assume things proceed from there. ;-))

With Tricornered Window and Sasaki and Miyano, I have enough for a personal BL fest in my home, lol.

Finally...

You may have wondered why I haven’t mentioned Attack on Titan’s final cour - the end of the series - given my coverage of the series over the years.

Yes, I will watch it. The series is so violent and brutal that I have to be in the right frame of mind to watch it. It’s like an assault that you steel yourself to withstand. I can’t put it off too much longer though, because I don’t want to come across spoilers on the internet.

Anime fans are the best. Seriously, even though it’s been a year since the first cour, I haven’t read any spoilers at all for the final cour of the series. But that can’t last forever, so I’ll definitely be steeling myself soon to watch the end of Attack on Titan.

"Everything You Left Behind/Became My Everything" - Given and the Power of Music

What comes to mind when I say the words boys love?

Is it the now it’s humorous, now it’s angsty worlds of Junjou Romantica and Sekai Ichi Hatsukoi, or the adult dramas like Youka Nitta’s Embracing Love series?

How about the bright comedic fun of Love Stage or an older series like Gravitation?

Whatever you thought of—Given is something entirely different.

Ritsuka is a talented teenage guitarist. He’s good enough that he’s in a band with two twenty-somethings: Haruki the bassist, and Akihiko, the band’s drummer.

Lately, Ritsuka has lost his edge. After starting out as a teen phenom with his guitar playing, at 16 he’s lost his enthusiasm and doesn’t know why.

A mysterious transfer student starts following Ritsuka around, asking him to teach him how to play the guitar.

This transfer student—named Mafuyu—is a little weird at first. He has a deer in the headlights stare and doesn’t express himself easily. He owns an expensive electric guitar, and Ritsuka wonders why he has it if he doesn’t even know how to play it.

Eventually—maybe out of boredom—Ritsuka agrees to teach Mafuyu a little guitar. Mafuyu tells him there’s a melody that keeps running through his head, and one day, he sings it in a wordless la-la-la way to Ritsuka.

Ritsuka is amazed to hear the quality of Mafuyu’s voice. He invites Mafuyu to session with him and the rest of the band.

Given is not for the impatient. The story moves an inch or two per episode, with Mafuyu’s past being revealed little by little. It’s a tale of young love and the loss of a loved one to suicide, which explains Mafuyu’s numbness and inability to show emotion.

As Ritsuka gradually realizes his feelings for Mafuyu, none of the hijinks one usually sees in teenage BL stories happens. There’s no mixed signals, no stupid misunderstandings that blow up into crises. Even the female classmate who’s attracted to Ritsuka and divulges Mafuyu’s past to him, hoping to get him to reject Mafuyu, is later ashamed of what she did.

Every character in the story is treated with dignity, including Haruki and Akihito, the twenty-somethings who each work three part-time jobs to support themselves as they pursue music as a career. Haruki is silently attracted to Akihiko who still lives with his ex-boyfriend Ugetsu, but without the relationship part anymore, as Ugetsu now dates another.

Mafuyu joins the band as rhythm guitarist and vocalist. For their initial performance as a foursome, he’s tasked with putting lyrics to the melody he’s brought to the band. He tries to find the words, but finally tells them he couldn’t.

On the night of the performance, the rest of the band assumes they’re going to play the song as an instrumental, but as the song begins Mafuyu opens his mouth and starts to sing.

It’s an astonishing vocal performance, raw and emotional. The slow build over nine episodes reaches its climax in this song, and all one can do is watch, open-mouthed and in tears, with chills running down one’s spine, as Mafuyu finally expresses all his feelings about his lost lover.

Given is only eleven episodes, but the manga story is continuing and a movie is in the works for 2020. With its unusual—for boys love—gravitas and adult-level regard for its characters, I’ll be there to watch whatever comes next.

Yuri on Ice - Review

And now—and only two years after everyone else watched and reviewed it—here’s my review of Yuri on Ice! ;-)

I think I waited too long to watch the series. I’d read so much about it that I built a head of steam around it in my mind. In the end, Yuri on Ice turned out to be both more and less than what I expected.

Yuri Katsuki is a professional Japanese figure skater, nationally lauded and praised by the public. However, after a disastrous showing at the international Grand Prix Finals, Yuri returns to his rural hometown and family onsen business discouraged and considering giving up the sport.

Alone at his local ice skating rink, in a pensive mood, Yuri skates a routine made famous by Russian star Victor Nikiforov, the five-time international figure skating champion Yuri greatly admires. Unbeknownst to Yuri, a secret recording of it gets uploaded to the internet. It goes viral, soon capturing the attention of Victor himself.

Yuri then comes home one day to find Victor relaxing in the family onsen. He has a proposition for Yuri.

No, not that kind of proposition (…yet). Victor offers to coach Yuri to prepare him for the next Grand Prix Finals.

What follows is a pleasant, easy to watch series with beautiful figure skating scenes, enjoyable characters, and a very nuanced relationship between Yuri and Victor. More on that relationship in a moment.

The third lead character is Yuri Plisetsky, a Russian teen phenom figure skater. After discovering Victor has moved to Japan to coach Yuri, the Russian Yuri shows up on the Japanese Yuri’s doorstep.

As foul-tempered as he is beautiful, the punkish fifteen-year-old insists that Victor coach him instead of Yuri K. Yuri P. gets nicknamed “Yurio” to distinguish the two Yuris from each other. Though he hates it, the name sticks.

Although we don’t see any of Victor’s early background, it’s implied that the fiery, brilliant Yurio is following in Victor’s footsteps as a young prodigy. Victor’s old coach is now Yurio’s coach, and it’s clear Victor recognizes Yurio’s talents.

However, Victor has the two Yuris compete to win him as a coach, and the Japanese Yuri wins. Once Yuri P. returns to Russia, his story continues as a parallel to Yuri’s K.’s story, for reasons that become clear in the final episode.

Yuri P. is the best male tsundere I’ve seen since Wolfram in Kyo Kara Maoh, which was a long time ago. Nearly every close-up of his face shows him as pissy or enraged—and he’s hysterically funny.

Now, for Yuri and Victor’s relationship.

Yuri on Ice has been called shonen-ai, BL, and/or yaoi because of the main characters’ relationship. I would argue their relationship is something simpler, more basic than these things.

First, it should be noted what Yuri on Ice is not. It’s not a schoolboys in love story, or an older man/younger teen angst fest like Loveless. Nor is it a comedic will-they-or-won’t-they story like Sekai Ichi Hatsukoi, a yaoi series I adore.

Victor is older than Yuri, handsome and worldly, whereas Yuri is a plain sparrow to Victor’s gorgeous peacock. Yuri even more or less confesses to Victor that he’s still a virgin.

But while this is clearly a senpai-kohai relationship, or coach-student if you prefer—Victor is no Svengali seducing the trembling virgin here. When the story begins, Yuri and Victor already know each other as fellow professional athletes. More importantly, Victor is 27 and Yuri is 23. Though Yuri feels inadequate next to Victor much of the time, he’s a full adult and Victor’s equal as one of a small number of elite international figure skaters. There’s no huge imbalance of power between the two.

This then is a story about two men, adult men, who perform on an international stage in the same profession, who come to love each other. It is a love story, plain and simple, one that happens to involve two men.

The textual evidence is threefold. First, a kiss shared on the ice in front of the crowd. Second, the two later choose to wear rings that are literally wedding bands. And three—towards the end, when Yuri, possibly with the idea of giving Victor the freedom to leave him, suggests that they end their coach-student relationship—Victor becomes emotional and sheds tears at the idea.

What is normally only hinted at in boys-love stories is conducted openly in Yuri on Ice. There’s no need to “read into” the characters’ words and actions for subtext. It’s all canon and textual. The only interpretation needed, if one wants to go deeper, is into what extent their relationship is physical, i.e., sexual.

My personal interpretation is that sometime after the kiss in episode 7, Yuri and Victor begin a sexual relationship. This would explain the two major relationship moments that come after the kiss scene: Yuri’s gift of matching rings for himself and Victor, and Victor’s tears at Yuri’s saying they should end the mentoring relationship. These moments are too deep, in my view, to have come from anything less than a romantic relationship that has been consummated.

One can call Yuri on Ice yaoi, if one likes. But I think “love story” covers it nicely. =D

Yuri on Ice has, besides the Yuri-Victor romance, beautifully choreographed figure skating scenes, ones you’ll be as entranced watching as if they were real-life competitors on the ice. All the skaters are wonderful to watch, but in particular, Yuri’s passion for the sport transforms him; there are moments when his face is ethereally beautiful as he skates.

Where the series left me wanting was in its lack of character development. There’s a curious arms-length distance feel, in emotional terms, to this story. The international skaters, though competitors on the ice, are all friends off the ice. No one has a dark history, or a dark present. Even Yuri and Victor’s relationship has little friction, but deepens in time anyway, despite too few scenes that actually show their gradual building of feelings for each other. Perhaps because Victor lives with Yuri and coaches him for nine months, we’re to assume they spent a lot of personal time together and their relationship grew as a result. Still, it would’ve been nice to see those scenes.

There are many, many ice skating scenes in Yuri on Ice, so many that surely some of them could’ve been shortened or left out in favor of more plot twists and character development.

The final episode of Yuri on Ice concludes in a satisfying way, while leaving the door open for a continuation of the series. A second season hasn’t been announced yet, but seems inevitable given the anime’s great popularity.

When it finally comes out I’ll watch it, because while yaoi stories are great—love stories are even better.

Queen of Califia - Now Available

I'm pleased to announce that Queen of Califia, the concluding novel in The Califia Trilogy, has been released and is now available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble (Nook), All Romance Ebooks, Kobo Books and the Apple iBookstore.

Please visit my writing blog for additional information on this book and on The Califia Trilogy:

Atypical Romance

Kaminishi: Four Seasons

I'm pleased to announce that Kaminishi: Four Seasons, the sequel to Kaminishi, has been published by DSP Publications.

For more information, please visit my writing blog:

Kaminishi: Four Seasons - Released Today!

Yaoi Con 2015 Report

Yaoi Con 2015 was held September 18-20, 2015 in San Francisco.

The location was the same as last year and in 2010 – the Hyatt Regency SFO.

I’ve always called this hotel “The Mausoleum” due to its high closed atrium—which makes you feel you’re in a giant terrarium…

I did a panel again this year. More on that in a minute.

Digital Manga Inc. is still the owner of Yaoi Con. I went to their panel, which was presented by Kristine, their brand manager.

I know I take bad pictures, but I have no idea why the screen is so insanely reflective here. Anyway…

DMI announced 24 new manga titles—all digital. The print titles are being negotiated. Kristine noted that DMI releases 2+ digital yaoi titles each month.

Kristine then introduced the new releases. The audience was polite and receptive. The release that got the biggest reaction was Even So, I Will Love You Tenderly by Kou Yoneda.

Right after the DMI panel was Sublime’s panel.

Sublime is Viz Media’s boy’s love imprint. Like the DMI panel, it was well attended.

The crowd at the Sublime panel was more enthusiastic for its upcoming new releases, which were announced by Sublime editor-in-chief Jennifer LeBlanc. The ones that received the most wildly excited reactions (cheers and screams) were the latest volumes of His Favorite and Awkward Silence, as well as the titles Midnight Stranger by Bohra Naono, Don’t Be Cruel by Yonezou Nekota and Ten Count by Rihito Takurai.

I also attended the "Writing a Comic Script" panel presented by Yaoi Revolution, a small yaoi publisher. The panel was geared toward writers who write manga/graphic novel scripts who have never worked with an artist. A lot of helpful advice was presented, including cutting back your dialogue (as a writer you’re going to write too much, and it’s just not going to fit), make sure the contract terms are clear to both parties, and have the artist finish the complete web series before releasing the first page (as artists often bail on projects for justified or unjustified reasons).

I saw a lot of Haikyu and Dramatical Murder cosplay this year. In keeping with my current anime burnout phase or whatever it is I’m going through as a fan, I took almost no cosplay photos.

Not sure what anime this character is from.

The panel I did this year was on “The Female Gaze.”

I’ve been considering the issue of the male gaze for some time now. We’re all so used to movies and TV series being presented from a male—and usually white male—point of view that it’s accepted as the default for filmic storytelling. But why?

In the panel, I introduced the topic by reading from the TV Tropes essay on what is meant by ‘gaze,’ and then talked about some movies that are told from a female gaze/female point of view: Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and Frozen.

I brought up various aspects and consequences of the male gaze being so predominant—like sex scenes where the female is shown nude but not the male. And finally, I asked what makes a female hero, as well as what would we like to see in a female hero?

The panel was advertised as a moderated discussion and safe space to talk about these things, and I believe that I—in combination with the wonderful audience that attended—achieved this. There was much audience participation, and my deepest thanks to all who came. I hope you got as much food for thought out of it as I did.

I may put my thoughts on this topic into an ebook at some point—so if you’re interested, stay tuned to my writing blog.

I enjoyed Yaoi Con this year. I always enjoy Yaoi Con, though as the years go by, each year’s con pretty much merges indistinguishably into all the others in my memory. This year, I especially enjoyed it for a personal reason: friends from Boston attended the con and we had some good times together.

The sameness of Yaoi Con each year I think is due to the fact that yaoi and boy’s love don’t appear to be growing in the U.S. After the initial rush ten years ago when yaoi felt fresh and subversive and exciting—and the recession that nearly put the U.S. manga industry six feet under that followed—it seems yaoi has now found its audience, but that audience isn’t getting bigger. The people who love it will continue to buy it, but there’s currently no growth in the genre.

DMI gets flak for a lot of things, but they can’t be blamed for this. DMI and Sublime and smaller yaoi publishers are still doing what they do, but the related genre of m/m romance is growing and yaoi isn’t.

It’s too bad, because yaoi really is special. I only have to recall Fuyu no Semi or Mirage of Blaze and that tingly excited feeling comes right back, echoes from that era of my anime fan life when yaoi and boy’s love stories had an almost magical effect on me as a fan, a woman and as a writer.

In any event, DMI has announced that Yaoi Con will be held in the terrarium again next year, so I expect I’ll be back for my tenth year and filing another con report then. Let’s hope that yaoi and boy’s love see greater sales and a growing market before Yaoi Con 2016.

Supporting the Industry - What I Did in April 2015

I bought something a few months ago that was pretty atypical for me.

I should explain first that I’m not a gamer – truly. The only games I was ever decent at were Galaga and Tetris. If my character has a machine gun and has to kill zombies, the zombies will eat her first. I’m not adept at action games where you have to move a character around and make her/him do things.

But I have two young friends who are gamers. One works in the game industry. We’ll call him Ryan, because that’s his name. ;-) The other is Yumeka, who writes a popular anime blog you've probably read. =D

Both Ryan and Yumeka own Nintendo 3DS XL portable game consoles. After watching them play, I decided to buy one of my own.

And here it is.

The machine is plain black, but I bought this nice golden Asian-themed metal case for it.

Even though I’d watched Yumeka and Ryan play on their 3DS XLs, I was clueless when I bought mine. Still am in many ways. More on that below. =D

So, here is the home screen:

How did I support the anime industry with this purchase? Because there are anime-themed video games available for the 3DS (actually, there are more available for the Sony Vita, but I digress). And in April, I bought one – the Hakuouki - Memories of the Shinsengumi game.

I saved money by buying the download of the game instead of the cartridge, which I found out I could do while browsing the Nintendo eShop. ;-)

Hakuouki – Memories of the Shinsengumi is a visual novel game. The game opens with a very nice song and a montage of the various characters. Here’s Saito:

Previously, my only familiarity with visual novels were the clips I’d seen on You Tube. Here’s one for the Hakuouki - Demon of the Fleeting Blossom game. It’s not too clear, but I just wanted a short clip to show the general idea of visual novels:



Basically, a visual novel is a kind of walk-through of a story utilizing pictures and captions. Visual novels are very popular in Japan, but I don’t think games like this are produced in the U.S. I could be wrong about that, though.

I’m a huge fan of Hakuouki the anime. But I need to say something about this game.

So far, I’ve only played through part of the prologue. If you’ve seen the anime, this is the first episode where Chizuru arrives in Kyoto and gets chased by vampire samurai.

She arrives, it’s nighttime, she thinks about her missing father who she came to Kyoto to find… she thinks some more about her father… why she hasn’t heard from him for a month, how worried she is about him… and then…

… A vampire samurai appears! Chizuru hides and watches while other samurai kill him!

And then she thinks about how frightening this is… and how scared she is… and how she doesn’t know what she’ll do next… and… and…

Are you getting the sense of what my experience has been so far? I honestly was excited to get this game and start playing it. I’ve played it for about 40 minutes now, and those 40 minutes turned out to cover – wait for it – the first seven minutes of episode 1 of the anime.

I'm not going to judge based on this first experience with it. I haven’t gotten to any of the “paths” yet, each path being Chizuru choosing a different Shinsengumi love interest, that is the heart of the game. Plus, the game offers other things like Media, Encyclopedia and Extras that I haven’t even looked at yet.

I had heard that each path of a visual novel takes hours, but I didn’t believe it. I believe it now - trust me. The question is: does a visual novel do what it’s supposed to do? Is it, in fact, entertaining?

Again, I’m still at the beginning of this game, so I can’t answer that yet. I can say that the story captions, while written in (thankfully) good English and easy to follow, became tedious to read after a while. The illustrations were lovely, the sound effects added realism to the story, all was as it was supposed to be. The only confused element was the player, me. Was clicking through the narrative “playing” this game? Or was I meant to do something more?

The beautiful elegiac Hakuouki anime series I love so much was based on this game. The game came first. Which is food for thought, especially since I’m a writer. It piques my curiosity. What is the appeal of this form of storytelling?

When I’ve been through all the paths in the game, I’ll write a review. It might be a few years from now though, at this rate. ;-)

I guess I’ve been on a gaming roll, because I then downloaded two games for my Amazon Fire.

Sonic Dash is my first experience with Sonic the Hedgehog. I’ve heard of Sonic for years, but never watched the anime or played the games.

(I have read a fan essay that slashed Sonic the Hedgehog and Shadow the Hedgehog together. I’m saying this just so I can mark “yaoi” as a label for this post. LOL)

As I said, I’m not good at action games. All Sonic does in this game is run madly along a road where he has to jump over obstacles. I keep sending Sonic headlong into brick walls and into bodies of water where he drowns. I’m slowly getting better, but I’m guessing that games like this were not destined to be my forte.

The second game I downloaded is the exceedingly sparkly and pretty…

Yumeka showed me Frozen Free Fall on her phone. I saw it while browsing Amazon’s app store and downloaded it. Amazingly, both it and Sonic Dash were free. I guess these free games exist to advertise the companies’ paid games.

I do okay at puzzle games, though I won’t win any competitions. And Frozen Free Fall is really beautiful to look at, which adds to the enjoyment of playing it.

I also received two free games for my 3DS, both Pokemon games - Pokemon Shuffle and Pokemon Rumble World.

Pokemon Shuffle is a simple puzzle/aim-and-capture-the-Pokemon game, but Pokemon Rumble World sends Pikachu and other Pokemon characters out to fight enemies.

I had difficulty maneuvering Pikachu in Rumble World until Ryan showed me that the round rubber button on the console’s upper left slides. I had been pressing down on it, really hard, expecting this to move Pikachu around.

Yeah. Real gamers have no reason to fear me anytime soon. =D

Seiyuu Appreciation Day - All Paired Up!

February is Valentine's Day month, so what better frame of reference for Seiyuu Appreciation Day? XD

Relationships are among the most fascinating things in life, and anime frequently gives us pairings in various ways that make us think... well, of things maybe we shouldn't be thinking.

For example, Naruto and Sasuke. One of the most enduring, admittedly imaginary yaoi pairings in anime. What if...

...Naruto and Sasuke fell in love in real life?

Of course, there's no hint that this has ever happened with Junko Takeuchi and Noriaki Sugiyama, or will happen in the future. But what if? Wouldn't that leave countless fans awestruck? Just imagine the reaction. An added bonus is that it actually could happen, since one is male and the other is female. (As opposed to most imagined yaoi pairings where both seiyuu are men.)

Putting this aside - and I understand the squick factor when it comes to involving real-life people in speculations like this and confusing actors with their roles, so I'll stop with that and go on to just plain old friendships. Seiyuu who are friends in real life often pair up to do radio shows and perform as singing duos and the like.

Junichi Suwabe and Kousuke Toriume, for example, hosted a radio show together in the past. Currently, in Kuroko's Basketball, they play two teammates who constantly fight with each other, Aomine and Wakamatsu.

Fans who know that two seiyuu are friends in real life get jazzed when they play roles in the same anime, especially two characters who are at odds with each other.

A case in point: real-life best friends Tomokazu Sugita and Yuuichi Nakamura.

These two have hosted a radio show together for years, but if I'm correct in this, they've only been in the same anime playing major roles, characters who are enemies, once:

In one of the later seasons of Gintama, a suspicious character named Kintoki Sakata tries to take Gintoki Sakata's place. Gintoki wakes up and realizes that this interloper Kintoki has somehow wiped Kagura's and Shinpachi's memories of him, to the point where the opening and ending credits actually feature Kintoki instead of Gintoki(!) and with the name of the anime now Kintama in bold letters. (An added bonus and snark factor was the fact that "kintama" is apparently Japanese slang for... balls. XD)

The storyline only ran for a mini-arc, but it was funny as hell and one has to imagine the Japanese fans, who know the close relationship between them, really appreciated the in-jokiness of having Sugita's best friend Nakamura playing the evil Kintoki.

But the best example I've seen so far of two seiyuu who are friends in real life, who host a successful radio show together, and who have played memorable roles in which their characters are at odds is...

"IZAYA-KUN..." Who could forget Daisuke Ono's Shizuo Heiwajima roaring Hiroshi Kamiya/Izaya Orihara's name in Durarara!!?

Hiroshi Kamiya and Daisuke Ono have always seemed an odd couple to me. Kamiya is Ono's senpai (if that even matters when both of you are in your thirties), but both are at the top of the seiyuu ranks, pretty much equally up there. I mean, personality-wise, they just seem very different. Kamiya feels cerebral to me and Ono is more earthy... or something like that. XD

They've each got long lists of credits, so I'm sure Izaya/Shizuo isn't the first time they've been paired in major roles in an anime together. Right now, they're playing opposite each other in Kuroko's Basketball as Seijuro Akashi and Shintaro Midorima.

Akashi is the former captain of the Teiko Middle School award-winning basketball team that featured the "Kiseki no Sedi" or "Generation of Miracles" players that included Midorima.

Now in high school, all the Generation of Miracles members are battling each other with their various high school teams. As it turns out, Midorima is no match for his old captain Akashi. Akashi has the "Emperor's Eye" that can predict your future moves in the game, and there's basically no way to beat a trick like that.

Kamiya plays coolly superior, left-brained characters very well. My favorite role of his is Tieria Erde from Gundam 00. Not only does Tieria have a cold personality, but it turns out he's not actually human and was grown in a lab, which accounts for said coldness I would say. XD

I've seen (heard?) Ono in a lot of roles over the years, and he doesn't seem to be typecasted as any one kind of character. He plays a lot of tough guys, yes, but not all the time. I can sometimes recognize his voice right off the bat, but usually not. He's a good actor, but I have to say that maybe a large part of his appeal is his looks. After all, they are performers in the public eye, even if as voice actors they aren't actually seen when they do their roles.

I wonder if someday we'll get a manga or anime about seiyuu and their lives and relationships. The closest we've come to that is the excellent Shirobako, but so far at least the series hasn't gone in-depth in that direction. I can't complain since what the series has shown is a fascinating look behind the scenes of the anime industry. And maybe acting in such an anime - an anime about seiyuu - might hit too close to home for the seiyuu performing in it. Still, I would absolutely love a story like that, whether in manga or anime form.

Maybe a story about two seiyuu who play ninjas... who fall in love behind the scenes... and both seiyuu are bishonen males...

Dang, I think my alarm clock just went off. XD