Hi hi! In the middle of writing something else, (you already know what I'm going to say) I've accidentally written an entirely different blog post. Happens! Following is an impassioned post regarding one of my favourite comic artists of all time, Hayakawa Nojico, and her recently released in english for the first time ever Strobe in the Dark.
So here’s the thing about Strobe in the Dark: is it my favourite Hayakawa Nojico? No. Did Tokyopop release my dream perfect vision of Hayakawa’s first ever english print manga? No. Do I think the story is outstanding or particularly moving? No! Did I, regardless of all of those things, cry basically through the first chapter because I was so overwhelmed at the very idea that I was holding this first ever physical copy of a Hayakawa Nojico manga in english? YES!!!!!!
(my copy of Strobe that I cried on, lovingly photographed in front of flowers.)
I realise that saying all of that does not imply a very impassioned recommendation for the manga itself aside from the volume as a concept, which I would now like to correct. To me, the true pleasure in reading a Hayakawa Nojico manga does not necessarily lie within her storytelling ability, but rather in the feat of her comicking as a storytelling medium. You will likely open up a spread and be met with a barrage of connected dialogue bubbles laid over smatterings of jagged cut panels and white space that at first glace seem messy and difficult to follow, and then at further consideration as you connect with the page, you will find that the dialogue leads you around the page, and when it does not, the panels do, and when they do not, you will be lucky to be treated to what may be spiraling, knotted, or clamorous use of shape; a fistful of ribbons, an unspooling roll of film, the bold hand-drawn clack clack clack of deafening train tracks, which will lead your eyes into understanding precisely what Hayakawa has intended for you to understand. And so it is not simply the images and words which are used to depict the story, it is the form they take as well. It is the idiosyncratic craft of her comics which make them so relentlessly compelling to me.
(in order: Yozora no Sumikko de, Strobe in the Dark, Endou-kun no Jikken Note. oh my god dude )
I almost, almost wanted to end that sentence with “regardless of the content of the comics,” but that would be untrue, because I believe that one could not be without the other. In Strobe, main character Arata is in frantic, flushed anguish sixty (perhaps seventy!) percent of the time, overwhelmed by his best friend Shotaro’s fearless affection for him; his anxious thoughts jitter down pages in sharp boxes, frenzied staccato dialogue is mirrored in form as frenzied staccatos of speech bubbles, pools of film developer drip down a page as if thoughts melting away. It’s never that you’re reading the text of the story accompanied by visuals, but that the story is being depicted through all aspects of the medium.
(arata freaking out)
Strobe charms itself to me particularly in its central metaphor of film as anxiety. Arata’s anxiety over the risk of homophobia collides with his desire both to reciprocate Shotaro’s feelings and his own private knowledge that he wants to alter their relationship beyond recognition, and he, as the son of professional photographers and a photographer himself, relates this to the idea of light hitting undeveloped film and overexposing it to the point of destruction—when your own perverse desires which you keep tucked and hidden in the dark are exposed to light, you risk the light becoming irreversibly tainted by those desires. I own and use my father’s film camera from the 1980’s and because of this I really connect with and enjoy the use of film photography as metaphor in Strobe, so I hope you’ll forgive me for this but I’m going to continue the metaphor here: Arata eventually finds that when given the time and care to develop his relationship with Shotaro, not only does the bright, quick light that is Shotaro’s presence in Arata’s life not become tainted by Arata’s desire, Arata comes to understand that when that light hits the darkness of Arata’s secrets, they become a kind of lightness too.
If you’re a BL fan, Strobe in the Dark does not necessarily tread new territory, or say what it has to say in a particularly profound or awe-inspiring way. However, if you’re a comic fan, a fan of manga as a comic medium, a fan of comics as a storytelling medium, I absolutely cannot recommend Hayakawa Nojico’s works enough, and because Strobe is the first of hers to get an official english release, I implore you with all of my heart to check it out. Request it for purchase at your local library, check it out at your local library, buy the print version, the digital, whatever whatever, it doesn’t matter, I need you to see it. In fact, you should read everything of hers that you can: Yozora no Sumikko de is my favourite for its delicate and emotionally wrenching back and forth between its two adult main characters, I recently reread it’s sequel Yoake ni Furu and it made me cry despite what might read as a little bit of tedium. Read her unfinished and seemingly discarded stories because they’re beautiful and intriguing (Hana no Saku Koro is the one I long for completion the most,) her oneshots are really great (Ame Arare, Kari Karare is a single delicious bite of something deeply compelling, Ameiro no Toge is one of my favourites,) read it all!
If ever there is another official english release of a Hayakawa manga, I will be there. I hope after all I’ve written that you would like to be there too.
(a page each from Yozora no Sumikko de and Yoake ni Furu. do you see what i'm saying. you seriously see what i'm saying right. that page from yozora literally makes me catch my breath each time i see it. i'm not kidding around!!!!!)
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This write-up was intended to be a short one—for a quarterly round up post—but as I was writing it I found that I had much more to say about Hayakawa Nojico as a comic artist than I had to say about most of the other titles I had begun writing about (sorry other titles!) and I figured that just this was worthy of standing on it’s own as a single post. Perhaps at the end of the year I’ll be able to properly articulate my feelings on Descending Stories: Showa Genroku Rakugo Shinjuu (of which I have so much they overwhelmed me and prevented me from articulating anything at all) or compose a thoughtful post comparing Harada’s Color Recipe to Hanasaki Manio’s Kitanai Kimi ga Ichiban Kawaii (which I strongly recommend reading if you’re a fan of Color Recipe.)
Other posts that I have promised are on the way (I say once again with never-failing optimism.) I hope you’ve read something good this summer so far. See ya for the next one!
36/50: the n-body problem (mcqueen studio, "secret relationships")
McQueen Studio's "Secret Relationships" opens, as many works of fiction do, with the childhood of our main character Jung Daon. Nothing dramatic has happened to him or his family (no loans or runaway parents), but he is nevertheless the eldest son in a family of four children that can barely support itself. Though he is able to test into a prestigious college, the stress of making enough money for tuition drags the best years of his youth into a gutter of tutoring jobs and nosebleeds from overexertion. Upon graduation, he cuts ties with his family, believing it to be the only way for him to achieve true economic freedom, and becomes an ordinary salaryman at an ordinary office, albeit one that employs an intern named Cha Sunghyeon with whom Daon routinely butts heads. To Sunghyeon, Daon is a mass of contradictions: a cheapskate who fills up liter bottles at the office water cooler but drives a luxury car, a harmless colleague whose work barely affects Sunghyeon's day-to-day but who nevertheless gets on Sunghyeon's last nerve. The only things keeping Sunghyeon going are the gym and reading the Thursday updates of the in-universe webnovel "Secret Relationships"—whose author is implied from the first chapter to be none other than Jung Daon.
Reader, if I stopped here, don't you feel like it'd be easy to write the rest of this story? Don't you feel like you have read it before?
What if I told you that almost every fact I recounted in that paragraph has no bearing on the rest of "Secret Relationships?"
(this post contains substantive spoilers for the end of "Secret Relationships")
The plot of "Secret Relationships" does not unfold so much as it is excavated one misleading layer at a time. What begins as a cute though unremarkable office romcom between Sunghyeon and Daon turns out to just be a prelude for something much more convoluted. We are introduced eventually to Daon's longtime friend Shin Jaemin, whose kindness (which ranges from financial assistance to tutoring to life advice) has been a guiding light for Daon and on whom Daon has clearly had a crush for over a decade. Despite their great intimacy, Jaemin has kept Daon at a remove, not quite a younger brother but far more than a friend, the end effect being that Daon continues to plague himself with fantasies about Jaemin; not, you suspect, dating Jaemin, but perhaps merely admitting to his feelings, so that he can be properly rejected, gently laughed at, and then entombed permanently in the role of beloved dongsaeng.
Thus, when faced with Sunghyeon's innocent, dogged advances, Daon tries to turn him away by saying, "there's someone I've liked for a long time." But to Daon's surprise, Sunghyeon already knows that Daon's heart belongs to another man. It's just that Sunghyeon thinks that other man is Kim Soohyun, a college classmate of both Daon and Jaemin's, who is nominally Jaemin's ex but presents himself as returning from America for the sole purpose of reinserting himself into Daon's life.
If there is one person for whom the eponymous relationships of "Secret Relationships" are truly secret, it is Sunghyeon. Even the reader is more knowledgeable than him of the events surrounding Daon. Sunghyeon is a toddler McQueen Studio has sent out blindfolded to play 9D chess against two grandmasters, even though he has barely learned the rules of tic-tac-toe. Like a baby, his moods live and die at the hands of his beloved Daon; like a baby, he doesn't think twice about eating affection that Daon does not mean to give him and is devastated when Daon hastily yanks that affection away.
But, like a baby, Sunghyeon is also resilient. His love for Daon is dropped on its head repeatedly, and he recovers each time. What can Sunghyeon bring to the table that the other men in Daon's life cannot? Of course, it is that he will treat Daon better than both Jaemin and Soohyun. To the reader who knows Jaemin and Soohyun have strung Daon along and left him floundering for ten years with no way out, that is a bar with a permanent residency in hell, but to Daon, that is a promise of salvation.
In the end, Sunghyeon makes good on his promise. He is the only man in Daon's life who is resolute in his love for Daon. He is willing to stand up to Jaemin and to confront and push Soohyun away. His love gives Daon the courage to move on from Jaemin and Soohyun, but of course, this being a Korean bl, the story needs to go on for fifty more chapters before it can resolve. Things happen. Revelations are made. Shockingly, no one's rich family intervenes, or at least, not for long. In the end, Daon and Sunghyeon ride off into the sunset together. For once, the second—or third!—man has emerged as the last standing survivor of a love polyhedron. It is good, McQueen Studio concludes, to love and be loved by a normal ass man who has never beaten someone up or cut his hand open with a knife just to keep you around. This is a take so lukewarm you feel tempted to throw it in the microwave for a good five minutes.
Poor Sunghyeon! When I realized I liked him best of Daon's suitors, I knew he was doomed—not by the narrative, because he turned out to be the winner, but by his creators, who gave him the most boring layer of the story's plot. It's no fun being the puppy dog top, if you're in a series full of foxes. But someone's gotta do it, and at least Sunghyeon has saved us from living in some horrible, underbaked version of "Secret Relationships" that would end with Jaemin redeemed and defanged, a toxic top loved out of his psychopathy by a weepy bottom with a heart too big to fail. We have so many of those in the genre already, thank you very much.
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The n-body problem is a general term describing the attempt to predict the movements of multiple bodies interacting gravitationally. The most classic example is that of the interaction of celestial objects in our solar system (for example, the earth, moon, and sun). Generally speaking, for systems with three or more bodies, the system is mathematically chaotic and thus impossible to solve. In other words, you cannot write a mathematical equation that would be able to describe the position of all three bodies at any given point.
Well, I am not going to pretend I understand orbital mechanics or anything else about physics, a subject matter that I actually have never taken despite my lengthy secondary and tertiary education. All this was most recently popularized by Liu Cixin in his novel The Three-Body Problem, and he does a much better job explaining it than I could ever dream of doing. Perhaps because three—or four—people in a relationship is not a matter of physics, "Secret Relationships" is a solvable n-body problem. At any given point in the Jaemin, Soohyun, and Daon relationship, you can always predict where they will be, because there are not multiple factors in their solar system. There is only one true force, and that is Jaemin.
The first time Jaemin and Soohyun interact, they are at a church. Soohyun is there reluctantly, a victim to his mother's devotion. As for Jaemin, McQueen Studio leaves it more enigmatic, as they will do with almost all of Jaemin's motivations throughout the story, whether he is a true believer or whether it is a broader metaphor for the way Jaemin carries himself throughout the story. Jaemin is imbued with the pettiness of the Old Testament God, the wrath and passion and jealousy of the Olympian pantheon at their worst. He is bathed with a kind of blasphemous holiness; even a scene where Jaemin dries Daon's hair feels like Jesus washing the feet of a prostitute. Daon treats Jaemin like a savior, and eventually Jaemin internalizes it.
But the help Jaemin offers is not really help, but rather a kind of monopolization. Sometimes it looks like generosity; more often, it is rejection, entrapment, manipulation. When Jaemin realizes the power he holds over Daon, he begins to covet it unconditionally. Love is too weak for what Jaemin wants to do Daon. The problem is that if Daon falls in love, Daon could also fall out of love. Soohyun, poor oblivious Soohyun, who accidentally sweeps Daon off his feet with just a little afterschool kindness and a bottle of perfume, is the most blatant example. No, instead what Jaemin aims for is total possession. He doesn't want just Daon's feelings, but rather all of Daon. There can be no part of Daon that does not act as Jaemin wants him to act, and if that means Jaemin has to use every tool at his disposal—Daon's family circumstances, Soohyun's family circumstances, Daon's blind trust in him—then so be it.
Too scared to be honest, too proud to be vulnerable, too late to walk away. Those are the three equations of the Jaemin-Soohyun-Daon system. But to solve this actual three-body problem—that of the gravitational pull of Jaemin—Daon must leave that system entirely. He must slough off his old body and become a new body, like a part of a planet scraped off, hurtling blindly through the darkness of space, unrecognizable. It is no small ask.
No wonder, then, that Daon—and in turn, Soohyun—submits to it for ten years, not realizing that the longer he remains in that system, the more difficult it becomes to escape. What begins as Jaemin lying to Daon eventually becomes Daon lying to himself. As the years pile on, as Jaemin becomes more cruel and Soohyun's behavior more baffling, Daon has to pretend he doesn't realize what's going on, that Jaemin loves him and has always loved him in his perverse, high-handed way, that Soohyun allows himself to be paraded around by Jaemin like a muzzled dog just to be near Daon, that Daon has chosen to wear his feelings for both of them like an invisible hair shirt. He choses to play the fool, and perhaps somewhere in those ten years, he loses himself in that performance.
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A few months ago a fellow comrade in bl sickoism responded to my ranting about "Jinx" and bl's obsession with asshole redemption by suggesting I read "Secret Relationships." I had tweeted at the time that more bl should allow the bottom to eviscerate himself in the bowels of a relationship that was clearly bad for him before forcing him to crawl out. I am of the opinion that fictional self-sacrifice is more powerful when it is not physical or about extreme physical or material circumstances. Not starvation, or poverty, or cutting off your arm, or standing despondent in the cold rain, but rather allowing yourself to get your own hopes up time and time again, throwing yourself at some object of your fantasy and affection, knowing you will be let down.
Well, that is not quite the thesis of "Secret Relationships," but I certainly understand why S. suggested I read it. For Daon's story in "Secret Relationships" is not really a love story so much as it is about a different kind of self-evisceration. By the time Sunghyeon meets Daon, Daon is no longer a lover, but an addict.
Daon is addicted to his love for Jaemin, and like most addicts and their addictions, it ruins his life. Like any other addict, when he is in its grips, nothing matters to him: not his teenage sister at the hospital with his concussed dad, not his own career or his physical well-being, not his loving boyfriend Sunghyeon who tries to step in and right Daon's life for him. For Jaemin, Daon will give up anything, his family and loved ones and time and effort and sanity, offering them up time and time again to be burned away at the pyre of his hopeless love for Jaemin.
In times of sobriety, Daon can recognize that his behavior is irrational and destructive. Though he never hides his relationship with Jaemin, he is also never truly honest with Sunghyeon or Soohyun about what he does with Jaemin, or what Jaemin does to him. He knows however subconsciously that his relationship to Jaemin is a series of humiliation rituals, and he is ashamed of his willingness to undergo such abjection. He makes resolutions, notably in the second half of the story, that he will tell Jaemin he has moved on and wants to be with Sunghyeon. But as Soohyun eventually points out, "You can't control yourself when you are with Jaemin."
Daon's behavior understandably confuses Soohyun and Sunghyeon, but Daon is no more able to explain it to them or even to himself. They are all searching for answers where there are none. Why does the drunk pick up the bottle? Why does Daon allow himself to be sucked into Jaemin's madness? There is no reason, because it is not reasonable.
The mistake that Soohyun and Sunghyeon make is that they believe their love can cure Daon. "I'll treat you better than Jaemin," Soohyun tells Daon. "If you really loved me, then you wouldn't hurt me by seeing Jaemin," Sunghyeon tells Daon. But any family member or partner to an addict knows that you cannot love someone out of an addiction. The only time an addict will truly get better is when they want to. No matter how much you think they are ready, or that there is no further for them to go, you must let them hit their own rock bottom and come back up.
So it is with the final arc of Daon and Jaemin's relationship. Daon does hit rock bottom, on his knees in front of Jaemin, hands clasped together in prayer, pleading for forgiveness, to be let go. Jaemin does not make it easy. Like any addiction, in these final moments, he is a mirror of all of Daon's worst fears about himself. He calls out what he sees as Daon's cruelty, his selfishness, his capricious heart which lands on any man willing to give him kindness. He asks Daon to end his life, knowing full well that Daon could never do it. In this way, he also calls out Daon's cowardice.
But if addiction can be irrational, unreasonable, uncaring of time and place and convenience, so too can the moment of revelation. In the end, Daon is ready to walk away. As the saying goes, he finally puts down the shovel. He is ready to stop digging. Battered, bruised, and barefoot, he walks out of Jaemin's house and finds Sunghyeon waiting for him. In the final throes of his addiction, he tries to degrade Sunghyeon, to bring everything down to his level. "Are you stupid?" he mocks Sunghyeon. "You came just because I called. Don't you have any pride?"
Like any addiction, in these final moments, Daon is a mirror of his own worst fears. The person he truly wants to hurt is himself. Sunghyeon, though, is a resilient baby, carried forward this far in the plot by the force of his love for Daon, his belief that there is something better for Daon than what Daon can envision for himself. If he is hurt by this, he can bear it. He can bear anything, for Daon.
"You are the stupid one," Sunghyeon tells him, and then takes Daon into his arms.
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In the forward to Another Last Call: Poems on Addiction and Deliverance, poet Kaveh Akbar wrote:
For a drunk, there's nothing but drink. For an addict, there's nothing but the drug. For me, there was nothing in my life that wasn't predicated on getting drunk—either getting fucked up itself or getting money to get fucked up by working or slinging this drug for that drug or that drug for cash. There was nothing of my life that wasn't set in motion by that narcotic gravity.
Getting sober means having to figure out how to spend twenty-four hours a day. It means building an entirely new personality, learning how to move your face, your fingers. It means learning how to eat, how to speak among people and walk and love and more than any of that, learning how to just sit still. You're moving into a house the last tenants trashed. You spend all your time ripping up the pigs-carpet, filling in the holes in the wall, and you also somehow have to remember to feed yourself and make rent and not kick every person who talks to you in the face. There's no abstinence in it. There's no selfwill. It's a chisel. It's surrender to the chisel. Of course you don't hope to come out a David. It's miracle enough to emerge still standing on two feet.
Akbar was an alcoholic by the time he was in college. Once, he got into an accident bicycling while drinking a handle of whiskey. When he called his friend to come get him, they did not go to a hospital. Instead, his friend carried him up to his apartment, where together they finished the handle of whiskey. This, by the way, was not the moment he decided to get sober. That would take Akbar another few years of heavy drinking and drug abuse.
I thought of this passage because "Secret Relationships" shares a flaw that underlies many stories about addicts: the addiction is unfortunately the best, or at least the most interesting, part. There is a lot of interesting writing about and as a result of alcoholism, but I think comparatively less about and as a result of recovery, the rebuilding that comes after. Akbar is one such exception; both his addiction and eventual recovery feature heavily in both his poetry and his debut novel, Martyr!, which in fact includes a cannibalized version of this passage. He writes, often, about that nebulous, difficult, unglamorous after, the work of rebuilding and revealing the sober person with whom you will have to live for the rest of your life.
I suspect McQueen Studio did not set out to write (or did not know they were writing) a story about addiction, so I do not fault them for not writing a very good one about recovery. But one must acknowledge that once Daon's choice is made in Sunghyeon and the others are safely shuttled off to their respective endings, the wind falls completely out of the sails of "Secret Relationships." It's most obvious in the side stories, which are usually where an author is indulgent and sappy to the point of teethrot. In the case of "Secret Relationships," they are perfunctory to the point of boredom, a dull trudge in which Daon and Sunghyeon go on a trip and lose a camera. There is a baffling lack of chemistry or character work in these chapters that doesn't do justice to how charming Sunghyeon and Daon had been in the main story, even before Jaemin or Soohyun were involved. What happened to the funny, puppyish push-pull of those early chapters? It's like they were bled away along with Jaemin's hand injury.
But I also think Akbar's passage illustrates why Sunghyeon and Daon were always meant to end up together. In the final chapters of the main story, as Daon finally leaves Jaemin's house, Daon recalls talking to Sunghyeon about their first impressions of each other. "I thought maybe you were just an immature rich kid, and that's why you weren't very friendly," Sunghyeon says, which makes Daon laugh. You saw me as the complete opposite of what I am, Daon tells him, to Sunghyeon's embarrassment. But privately Daon admits that it made him happy to know that Sunghyeon didn't see him as a charity case, a poor boy, a victim, an unknowing pawn in an emotional game of someone else's design. Sunghyeon saw Daon the way Daon wanted to be seen.
Or put another way, to Jaemin and Soohyun, Daon will always be an addict. Because Sunghyeon could see none of that, he gave Daon the power to see himself as the man he wanted to be, free from Jaemin and Soohyun's control, free from that narcotic gravity. Sunghyeon saw David, when Daon, Jaemin, and Soohyun could only see the dirty marble of Daon's feelings for Jaemin, upon which they all trod. "I wanted to start over," Daon tells Sunghyeon at the end. He says it to Sunghyeon, because Sunghyeon is the only route that would offer Daon that rebirth.
Because to Sunghyeon, it is not a rebirth. To Sunghyeon, Daon is already, and always has been, a miracle standing on his own two feet.
Some personal notes about Fanime 2026 and Manga Ichiba
I had the unique opportunity to table at the inaugural Manga Ichiba of Fanimecon during Memorial Day weekend of 2026!
I also enjoyed the con as a regular attendee (I cosplayed!).
Note: this is less about Manga Ichiba and more of a personal diary entry. I wish I took better daily notes, but the bottom line is that I will return given the opportunity.
Chapter 1: Yeeting my application to Manga Ichiba
I logged into Twitter one day and found that there was an open call for artists looking to sell their doujins at Fanime for a manga-focused event. Prior to this, I had been a frequenter of local zine fairs and have found a paucity of fanzines being sold, so I was very excited! As I live across the country from Fanime, I wasn't sure if I would go even if I got accepted, but I thought, why not! and decided to submit my application with my circle name, "Passerby C".
I introduced a tag "#camryportfolio" to the tumblr posts that I wanted the curator of MI to look at, and included that as the "website/portfolio" field for my application. Or, so I thought. I accidentally inputted my regular degular art tag, "#camrydraws" into the field. Mind you, this tag had EVERY art I had ever posted on my 11-year old tumblr, including the rough sketches followed by paragraphs of text. In a panic, I edited every single art post I had ever made on tumblr to remove the "#camrydraws" tag if it didn't pass QC; and for those that didn't pass QC, another tag "#camrydrawnt" was introduced. We're off to a great start.
Despite my initial blunder, I got the email for my acceptance in December. At that point, I was still undecided about whether or not I wanted to table or not. The requirements were that I had to have a >= 8 page manga that I had drawn myself. I knew I already had stuff to print, like my 20-page Jayvik comic, my 16-page Tsukitsuru comic, and my 30something-page Hawks comic... I just didn't know if I wanted to actually do it. Because no matter how I spun it, as I was flying cross-country and staying all 4 days of the con, I knew the hotel and flight costs could not be recuperated in a 6 hour timeslot. I would be doing this for the love of the game--
and also as a reward to myself! <- This will be made clear later.
Chapter 2: Con prep (and other things)
Below are the calendars that I was using to keep track of my Fanime prep, which includes handcrafting my Golden Kamuy (Asirpa) cosplay as well as the prep for Manga Ichiba, which was basically formatting my books and redrawing any panels that needed reworking.
Since I was borrowing a friend's sewing machine, I decided to prioritize the Asirpa cosplay over printing my zines. (I can make a separate post about the cosplay making process if there's any interest).
I was initially planning to also print the Hawks comic (link), but during the editing process for my main two doujins (Jayvik link) (Tsukitsuru link) I became so tired of looking at my own art and decided to not print that one. It was made in 2023 and my artistic tastes had evolved way beyond what it was then TvTb. Actually, even looking at my Jayvik and Tsukitsuru which were newer was torturous. I put my whole pussy in these comics at the time, but when I look back at them now, the flaws stick out to me like neon green paint. Artists, I'm sure you understand.
Now, you may be wondering: if you're not keen on printing your old art, why didn't you make a brand new comic? Great question. For this I have a great answer.
This:
This was my graduation day. I was being awarded my Ph.D.
This meant that family was in town for the early part of May, and that January ~ April was dedicated to finishing my dissertation and preparing for the oral defense. This, on top of my desire to ✨slay✨in my cosplay, meant that I had no time to prepare anything substantial other than 1 new sticker design and 1 new minizine.
This was what I ended up bringing to Manga Ichiba:
Oh well. Let's hope I have something new for next time.
Chapter 3: Fanime Day 1
I arrived to my hotel (strategically I booked the same location as MI) a little later than I expected due to a flight delay, and opted to grab dinner instead of trying to squeeze in badge pickup at the last minute. I realized on Friday morning that this may have been a grave error on my part: I had picked up my badge and went circled back to the DoubleTree around 11:00 AM after picking up a Subway sandwich. I thought, surely, there would be plenty of books left just one hour after the A slot had started... and was devastated to know some of the doujins I coveted were sold out! I proceeded to acquire as much on my shopping list as I could. I was a little too shy to introduce myself at this time to the artists I bought from, and truthfully, I didn't want to be presumptuous and accidentally initiate a nonconsensual zine trade, so I just snuck around like a regular attendee.
As 2 PM neared (the time at which artist alley opens), I went back to my room upstairs and put on my Asirpa cosplay so I could wander the main con and be first in line to complete this Houseki No Kuni stamp rally. There was one guy ahead of me, though, and I saw him on a different day buying up stock at a table in the night slot of MI that I was also in line for. He doesn't know this, but he is my rival now.
I safely completed the stamp rally, and was finally able to relax. I wandered outside of AA to catch my breath and ran into some fellow Golden Kamuy cosplayers! We traded Instagrams (note: I hadn't updated my art Instagram since 2022;;) and decided to meet for an impromptu photoshoot. It was amazing.
I was headed back to the con, but as I was contemplating on getting in the gigantic line for the shuttle, I got a text from my friend (who I roped into the trip even though she is not a big anime person) saying she was on her way. Due to my friend Ubering me for free, I got to skip the gigantic line for the shuttle and make it in time for the opening of the Friday night slot. The night slot was even more popping than daytime, which may be due to the traffic to night market but also people were there for specific doujins and artists. I remember lining up for the circle "durian soda" (@dohu) who had a line about 30 people strong.
I am nosy, so I eavesdropped on some attendees' conversations. I was pleasantly surprised to learn that they were here specifically for certain circles and doujins, and not just because they happened to be here because of Night Market. One attendee I overheard was here specifically for every Hollanov doujin, and another was here specifically for durian soda's originals as they had been following her since her Kuroko no Basket days. I thought that was so sweet, and I hope durian soda-san had time to speak to the attendees even though the longer the line gets, the greater the (perceived) pressure is to move as quickly as possible and not make small talk.
After I got the books I wanted, I ate the rest of my Subway footlong for dinner.
Chapter 4: Fanime Day 2 (in which I didn't go to Fanime)
On Saturday morning, I touched a lot of grass with my friend. She and I went to the Santa Cruz mountains and despite an agreement to "keep it easy and chill", we ended up walking in rugged terrain for 7 miles.
We also got a flat tire on the way home, which meant that I was not going to make it to the tail end of Manga Ichiba's B slot. When we finally made it back to the hotel, my legs were tired, not so tired that I couldn't browse the Saturday night portion of MI. This was where I ran into my aforementioned "stamp rally rival" again while lining up for a huge line. I don't remember who the artist was, but I *think* they were situated near the central staircase/bathrooms and had tables to their left and right. As a result, the huge line (and curious onlookers) was blocking access to the nearby artist tables until MI staff started doing traffic control. The attendee behind me was getting agitated, saying "are people cutting in line up there?! Why's it taking so long?" to which I said "I think the artist is taking time talking to the attendees" to assuage them. I know the lines can get long, but the best thing about events like these is the opportunity to yap about your specific interests! The artist also had several books at their booth, so I would presume that once people got to the front, they had to peruse through the choices, which may have added to the wait time. I was, again, surprised: it was only day 2 of a first time event... and attendees were already getting... competitive about obtaining their books!
While in line, I was reminded of the concept of "wall" circles (壁サークル) at Japanese doujin events, in which popular circles are strategically set up on the periphery for easier traffic control. Durian Soda and this particular circle would have been a "wall" circle, and the thing is, they were set up against a wall. In fact, most of the circles had a wall behind us just from the layout of the event.
But since we were set up in a concave space, if the line got too long, it could impede traffic/visibility for adjacent booths. If MI were to be held in the same venue next year, placing the more popular circles at the tail end (booth 20-21) might not be a bad idea.
After I acquired my books and ate dinner with my friend (the Original Krung Thai btw, iykyk), I hobbled back to my room and died on the bed. My legs were in so much pain from standing on my feet all day -- so much so that the thought did cross my mind that I wouldn't be able to table the next morning.
Chapter 5: Fanime Day 3 (it's time...)
I woke up around 5:30 AM for some fucking reason. Thankfully, the ache in my legs had subsided. I knew I only had 30 minutes to set up my booth, so, trying not to disturb my sleeping friend, I made these.
I was giggling to myself as I cut these up. Others who visited my table found it funny, too. It gave me so much joy to see people pointing to these and reading it aloud.
My table setup was minimalistic, with 4 doujins and 1 free mini-zine that I was using in place of a business card, but overall I think I did a decent job filling up 6ft of space. I don't think the attendees cared all that much about an eye-catching setup. They also didn't really care about the quality of the paper. They didn't really care if a zine was printed on copier paper or had a color cardstock cover -- they just wanted the damn books. I had a plan to sell the zines with the slightly torn covers at a lower cost, but I completely blanked due to stress and just started dipping into the damaged stock at the same cost as the good copies... sorry... TvT
My stock was low to begin with. I had brought with me 8 Ichiruki, 11 Usao, 16 Tsukitsuru, and 30 or so Jayvik doujins. I thought Jayvik would be the top seller since it was crowned the most popular ship of 2025, but to my surprise, the demand for Golden Kamuy was higher! I sold out completely of my Usao, Tsukitsuru, and Ichiruki zines despite two of these being printed on my home laser printer. I actually had intended to print 15 Ichiruki, but my printer was plagued with misprints and I ended up with just 8.
For the Usao zine, I also intended to print more, but I ended up changing my mind about the dimensions halfway through the printing process and felt so guilty about using MORE paper that I just... stopped at 11. lmao.
As for the Tsukitsuru zine, I thought, surely, a zine about old man yaoi from a series that hasn't seen much popularity outside of Japan -- surely that would only beget ~5 sales max at the event? And ordered a conservative 11 copies initially: 10 for sale and 1 for display. The initial print order from MCE had a tear along the spine of the booklets, so I had them reprinted and I had 22 copies total. I decided to bring only 16 of the stock because I didn't anticipate much demand. I was pleasantly surprised. I think the demand came from the fact that I was the only circle selling Golden Kamuy stuff and that I was a non-R18 circle.
Another thing that surprised me was that, when I ran out and started telling people "it's available to read on tumblr for free", an attendee responded "I know, but I want the physical copy to hold in my hand." I also love flipping through physical pages, but part of that is still driven by a desire to know the full story, and that desire wanes if I have the option of reading it online. I am deeply flattered that people find my physical fancomics collectible enough to pay me a fee for it, even though they are free to print it themselves for personal use.
Since the crowd had started to die down by ~1 PM and I wanted to browse artist alley and watch the Masquerade at the main con, I cleared out around 2 PM instead of staying for the whole duration of my tabling slot. I still had a lot of Jayvik stock (again, surprising!), but I didn't feel confident in moving any of it, as I imagine those who really wanted the doujin would have dropped by earlier.
At the con, I was in full Asirpa costume trying to find Ogata, who was supposedly there as well, but to no avail! Next year, we must plan an actual Golden Kamuy cosplay gathering.
Chapter 6: Some personal reflections and lessons learned
Truthfully, I didn't quite keep good track of what happened on what day. This whole convention experience was just one big blur of happiness.
It may help to mention that before I moved cross-country for graduate school, I had spent most of my life in the SF Bay Area. I am a first generation Japanese immigrant: I moved from Japan to San Jose at an age when acquiring a second language was as easy as losing the first. In my youth, I yearned for anime and manga. There were no subscription services back then, so we borrowed manga from a store in San Jose Japantown and rented VHS tapes of Crayon Shinchan from a video rental store attached to Mitsuwa Marketplace. When I reached high school, however, it became less and less acceptable in my mother's eyes to "still" be into anime and manga. Despite her trying every year after I turned 16 to convince me to "graduate" from otakuism, I am convinced I can still speak, read, and write Japanese fluently because of my love of anime and manga.
Manga has allowed me to make new friends with fellow artists, cosplayers, and even the guy sitting next to me on the flight home who noticed me reading manga on my iPad. I reunited with old friends and attached faces to mutuals' usernames. I obtained more art than I had ever done at a single event in my entire life. I have always loved drawing, but this trip has only solidified in me that I am utterly in love with manga and art itself, and has shown me that there is an entire community of people who feel the same way.
I'm so glad this event exists. Previously, I had one small, low-stakes attempt at artist alley in 2018 at Kinyoobicon. I didn't cater my table to things that were "in" at the time and had a table full of my specific interests: Hunter x Hunter, Kpop, Daiya no Ace, and Ping Pong the Animation.
Admittedly, this was a trial run: I just wanted to experience what being on the other side of the table was like, and it was definitely fun to practice my setup in my room, but at the event, I just kind of sat there the whole day and didn't have a whole lot of fun. I didn't feel like I was a part of a community, and I also wasn't sure I wanted to spend my time creating more marketable merch to fully commit to being a part of the artist alley community. Even printing out my prints felt inauthentic to me, and looking back on it, I'm glad I just continued to pursue my specific interests.
Fast-forward to 2021. I started graduate school during the Covid lockdown era, and since I spent most of that time indoors, I had more time to dedicate to art. Since all of my Japanese art mutuals at the time were night owls, I would join voicecall sessions in the mornings to motivate myself to work. Eventually, I became inspired by their passion for fan manga, and because I was also very VERY invested in my Tokyo Revengers rarepair, I decided to draw my own! I had no idea what I was doing and worked in a B5 size, which is a little bigger than what I usually go for these days. After 6 months of hallucinating dialogue during my daily walks and pressing CTRL+Z, it was finished. I was very proud of it! You can read it here if you want. I printed exactly 4 copies with Mixam: one for myself and three for my friends in Japan. Since this was such a rarepair, I knew from the start that printing and distributing this doujin widely, especially in the US, would be unrealistic, but there was a small part of be that was jealous of my friends in Japan who got to attend doujin events in person with their rarepair books. Nonetheless, after I moved on from this ship, I continued to make little fancomics for my hyperfixations.
When the lockdown had ended, I began attending local indie comics festivals and zine fairs instead of anime conventions, as they were all free for general attendees and I was trying to save as much money as possible, graduate stipend and all. I gravitate toward a manga-adjacent art style, and I didn't quite find what I was looking for most of the time when I attended these zine fairs: from the hauls people have posted, I think I would probably find more of my vibe at Comitia, for example. In 2025, I attended a local anime convention and found myself amongst a sea of prints and wearable merchandise and virtually no comics or zines. I like buying prints and wearable merchandise to an extent, but I am not inspired enough to want to be on the other side of the table creating and selling these items. I have thought about applying to the zine fairs in my area, but many have a >50% originals rule, which I currently do not satisfy as 100% of my existing comics are fan comics (this will hopefully change in the future. I'm working on it!). With fan comics, I can dedicate 20 pages just to Portray A Vibe or a Capture A Specific Moment without thinking about worldbuilding and character design. I can just use these premade characters and build off of them, so I find it much easier than originals... I'm trying to make an original comic now, and it is so much fun, but so challenging. Anyway -- back on topic.
When Manga Ichiba was accepting artist applications, I felt, "finally! Somewhere I can unabashedly be behind a table filled entirely with fancomics!" And I say "being behind the table" instead of wanting to "sell my fan comics". I would give them out for free if I could, but unfortunately, it takes money to make things. Like, I just wanted the experience of being able to share something with the art community IN PERSON. With Manga Ichiba, I was finally able to feel a sense of community with both the artists and the attendees there. The artists were a part of a Discord group and seeing everybody's WIPs and process pics leading up to the event made me feel so excited and inspired. I loved small talk with the attendees while we were waiting in line. I loved being able to assign human faces to online avatars. I loved being able to slide my chair over to my table neighbor while she showed me her doujin on her iPad that she ran out of time to print!! I loved trading books with people. I loved laughing with the attendees when they noticed my silly signage. I loved the ease of just... running over to the other artists' in my tabling slot with my apron full of cash and pulling out a bill I literally just got from an attendee to buy their thin book of hyperfixations.
With that being said, I made some mistakes. I, stupidly, left stock at home not based on luggage space, but based on vibes. I listened to the demon in my head going "no one's going to want this". It's always better to have too much than too few, especially if it's already been printed and there's space in your luggage. Additionally, I priced and spent at the event based on, again, vibes and gave up way too soon on trying to be financially sound. This was the first event of its kind and I was admittedly treating myself to a vacation to celebrate my graduation, so yes, this is a bit of an anomaly --but I want my participation in future US doujin events to be long-term: whether this be investing in a better home printer and hand-binding zines or sacrificing a little bit of comfort by sharing hotel rooms with more people, I'd like to investigate cost-saving measures so I can keep my prices fair while having the revenue subsidize some of my expenses. I don't particularly want to make money off of fanwork, so I think as I transition into having more original work, I would likely price the originals a bit higher than the fanwork just because I would like to get paid for my original ideas. That's all in the future, though.
Anyway, TLDR: I loved it. Was fun. Will return. (with R18!? maybe?! and an actual budget) :3
MANGA ICHIBA: MY EXPERIENCE, WHAT YOU CAN TAKE FROM IT TO FURTHER THE DOUJINSHI AGENDA, AND OTHER THOUGHTS ON NURTURING DOUJIN CULTURE OUTSIDE OF JAPAN
By now a lot of people who attended the event will have already shared similar thoughts, but I still wanted to write down my observations and opinions on what made Manga Ichiba a success. My motivation is, of course, that I hope others around the country & the world hoping to organize similar events and grow more spaces for “doujin culture” outside of Japan can take something of value from this! For people who are really context thirsty, I’m going to write down a bunch of details about the event, but if you were there or just want to get to the good part feel free to skip right to TL;DR: WHAT WAS THE MAGIC SAUCE?
Because I know I’m going to write way too much, I want to say upfront an enormous thank you to the organizer Tiara, to anyone behind the scenes at Fanime who helped them make this happen, to the volunteers there that weekend, and to all artists and readers who came together for DOUJIN!!
I may also write up a Part II which is not a dissection of Manga Ichiba and how to make a Big Event happen, but just some thoughts/questions about possible alternative spaces for doujinshi I’ve been mulling over recently.
FACTS
Manga Ichiba was part of FanimeCon 2026 in San Jose, CA. Tabling fee was only $20, but you had to purchase your badge for Fanime separately. (This seems to apply to the main artist alley at Fanime as well, though that table fee is something like $300.) Manga Ichiba was held over 3 days (Friday-Sunday.)
It was located in the Doubletree hotel, which hosts other Fanime programming, but is some distance away from the convention center where the main events of the con are held. There was a free shuttle bus that would take people between the convention center and the hotel (about a 15-20 minute trip.) Notably, the “Night Market,” an 18+ version of the artist alley, is held at this same location from 6PM onwards, and the Manga Ichiba tables were set up in the lobby/hallway basically right in front of that hall.
Each day of the event was split into a “daytime” and “nighttime” slot, and each artist/circle was assigned one of these slots. If you were exhibiting 18+ artwork, you were placed in a “night” slot. 2 slots x 3 days = six different rounds of artists!
Promotion of the event beforehand: There was an informational page on the Fanime website leading up to the convention, but it was very much a description of what the event was conceptually, with few practical details for fans hoping to attend. I believe they officially promoted the event a few times on Fanime social media accounts. And eventually, we got a very cool list of circles up on the website, with useful filter options. This page went up a little more than a week before the con. Artists also did their best to promote not only their own presence but spread the word about the event itself beforehand. Very noteworthy were tomatobird’s flyer and unofficial guides, which were extremely informative!
When you attend Fanime, you also get two handy booklets that list all the programming info. Manga Ichiba was listed in both these booklets, so any attendee of the con flipping through could learn about it on the spot. I will say one wrinkle is that because it was a halfway 18+ event, and hosted at the Doubletree where all the 18+ programming is sequestered, its placement in the program did make it seem like a completely adults-only event, and you’d sorta have to read the fine print to see that it wasn’t. I don’t think this had much of a negative impact on the show, but just was one of the ways in which balancing all the logistics and complexity of the event was a bit tricky.
MY EXPECTATIONS
I knew it was a first-time event. I read about the event being a shuttle ride away from the con proper, and combined that with the fact that there would be SIX separate waves of artists at different times. I did not fully understand, having never been to Fanime before, that Fanime is sort of spread out over a few locations and people might be kinda used to hopping around. And even if I had understood that, I still thought no one but a few die-hard nerds were gonna get on a bus and leave the main con multiple times in a weekend. So to be honest: I went into this mentally prepared for this event to be nothin’ but crickets. But STILL! Something in my heart told me I HAD TO BE THERE!! FOR DOUJINSHI!!
(Oh, and I also thought “this event is trying a little too hard to do everything the way a Japanese event does it. I admire that idea, but we need to adapt things to what people are used to here, right?” Spoiler alert: wrong.)
TURNOUT
It was awesome!
First of all, as tomatobird put very well, it’s not like “selling the max amount of books” is the full picture of what makes a doujin event a success. I personally thought that the way this event brought together “seasoned” doujin-slingers, first-time comic makers, and everyone in between was really beautiful. Because each section was fairly small (you could probably get a good look at everyone’s table within 15 minutes) it didn’t have the overwhelming, overstimulating feeling of big artist alleys. I felt like people were often approaching artists and chatting with them/picking up their books even if they had no clue what their fanart was for, and that was pretty special. There was so much willingness to strike up conversations with artists, tons of interest in both people’s art and the overall concept of the event, and lots of time to chat with enthusiastic people (especially after I sold out of all my books & was just sitting there LOOOOOL ahem)
So yes, I sold out of every single book I brought. I think many people did. Now, lest we get carried away by our hubris, let me point out: because this was a new event and we were managing expectations, most of us did not BRING that many BOOKS. We were all DEEPLY UNPREAPARED for the enthusiasm and attendance. So “selling out of everything” in a matter of hours is not necessarily a shocking data point on its own. I don’t want people tragically overdoing it next year, lmaooo. HOWEVER!! It was an almost universal sentiment that both the amount of people who showed up and the amount of books they bought exceeded expectations. Speaking for myself, I sold in just a few hours what my circle usually sells at a whole weekend-long show that goes “pretty good,” and I would have sold a lot more
That’s actually the part I want to stress the most: several of us who frequently table at other anime artist alleys/indie comics festivals observed that we usually do not sell as many books as fast or as thoroughly as we did at this show. Often, we do not sell *THE SAME EXACT BOOKS* as fast as they were snatched up at this show, when we have taken THE SAME EXACT BOOKS to other shows repeatedly in different contexts. So clearly Something Was Working.
TL;DR: WHAT WAS THE MAGIC SAUCE?
Limitations on what you could sell and how you could display it kept the focus firmly on comics/zines.
Tabling fee was cheap.
Being attached to a larger, established event was a game changer…
…However, some friction/separation narrowed that huge audience down to those who actively wanted to seek out doujinshi, or were predisposed to be interested in it.
People just really really want this and are ready for it!!!
Ok now allow me to yap about each of these points.
KEEPING THE FOCUS ON BOOKS & CREATING A PLACE FOR “DOUJINSHI”
Everyone who got excited hearing about Manga Ichiba had the same THING burning in their heart. It’s not like there’s no other way & no other avenues to share fanbooks and zines and whatnot in the U.S. But we do not yet have a place to celebrate and nurture THIS specific KIND of artist-and-fan-practice. If you get it, you get it! And so the number one thing you have to do if you want to make a space for it is to really laser focus onto that practice.
Manga Ichiba achieved this by
1. Doggedly sticking to the lingo & structure of a Japanese event, effectively sending out the bat signal to the doujin-obsessed
2. Limiting what could be sold & displayed by participants.
I’m not going to explicitly report on all the exact rules, and honestly for this first go-round they were kept a little loose and honor-system anyway, but it boiled down to this:
You were not allowed to have too many “merch” items. People were allowed to have stickers, charms, prints, etc only in proportion to the amount of books they were accompanying.
You were not allowed to construct a display above a certain height. The tallest and most complex displays were people like me, who brought upright wooden book stands to help display several books on one table, or a few modular panels to hang signs on. Still quite simple. Plenty of people just set the books out flat on the table along with a few info signs! [Example, Example, Example, Example]
Limitations like this kept the focus on books, with guard rails against people feeling like they had to sink time, effort, and money into “competing” against more established artists or more elaborate displays. Even Manga Ichiba’s insistence on using Japanese lingo, using terms like “circle” for each artist/group of artist – which one could argue is a little goofy to do at a U.S. con – I believe all served to create the right expectations for the event, and attract people who were looking for this specific experience.
Because the tabling fee at ManIchi was extremely cheap compared to Fanime artist alley as well (see below) I can also see these rules becoming important in the long run to make sure that there is no incentive for artists who *aren’t* truly prioritizing books to try to use it as an alternate tabling option for cost-saving purposes, which would eventually dilute the focus of the event.
TABLING FEE WAS CHEAP
This was quite important imo. First of all, this makes it easier for any artist with the drive to share a comic to participate. You shouldn’t have to be a con-circuit pro, and you shouldn’t have to have already built up a lage catalog of books.
Also, if it’s affordable to participate, it becomes acceptable to risk, expect, or even intend to sell your books at a loss. I think that’s pretty essential for a proper doujin ecosystem, and it’s one of the biggest barriers in both a practical and cultural sense to doujin stuff fitting in to existing U.S. fan market… places.
IF YOU BUILD IT, THEY WILL COME, BUT IT’S EASIER TO GO WHERE THEY ALREADY BUILT IT
By being attached to a large, well-established, pre-existing event (FanimeCon) Manga Ichiba was able to have amazing attendance despite limited promo beforehand, and logistical obstacles at the con itself. I think it’s a no-brainer for anyone hoping to start a similar event in their area to look at whatever established anime/comic* conventions are near you, and start by trying to work with them.
*In the past I would have thought it definitely needs to be an anime con, but anime/manga/manhwa is so mainstream now, the lines are all blurring, nerds are converging, it’s a whole new world baby who knows
QUALITY OVER QUANTITY!!! OF GEEKS!
Even within general nerd/otaku world, doujinshi and zines are something that depend on all parties “getting it.” If I had set my table up in the middle of the main Fanime artists alley, thousands more people would have physically walked by me all weekend, but I don’t think I would have sold all of my books, and I certainly wouldn’t have had such a positive experience.
The thing that I had assumed might throttle this event – having to take a shuttle 15 minutes away from the main convention – I believe actually served to focus the attendees. Basically, the majority of people who bothered to come out there came BECAUSE they heard “doujinshi” and said “SIGN ME UP!!” and/or (for the nighttime timeslots) they were people interested in the Night Market (essentially a NSFW-focused Artist’s Alley) in which case they may not have been there for doujin/comics specifically, but still had a good chance of being familiar or interested in doujin... for a variety of reasons. Namely that most people here first learned about doujin via the porn ones, lol.
This “insiders only” vibe is something essential to the “culture” of doujinshi, but even I had underestimated it, or perhaps I simply assumed it was too abstract and touchy-feely to be actively worked into event planning. But I’m now here to tell you that it IS part of the magic sauce and you CAN try to control certain factors with this in mind. So if someone does succeed in setting up a similar event attached to another existing anime con, I think it is actually key that there is some physical separation from the “normal” artist alley. Finding the balance of what is too far away depends on the layout of the event. But I believe that simply trying to direct the maximum amount of traffic to wander by is NOT an ideal setup, counterintuitive as that may seem.
THE PEOPLE ARE READY, THE PEOPLE ARE HUNGRY
What was shocking to me was that so many different tables seemed to have a pretty amazing response. Allow me to explain why my mind was boggled so bogglingly.
At doujin events in Japan, tables are sorted by fandom/pairing, and that information is well known ahead of time. This typically holds true whether it’s something massive like Comiket or a smaller event. At a giant event, there will be a whole section of the hall for [fandom] and that will then have sub-groupings of [pairing] etc etc. Or you might have “only” events where the entire thing is organized around one fandom/ship/etc. Sometimes these are events-within-events. The point being, at such an event you can kind of EXPECT people to just walk up to your table and immediately buy your newest book, or everything you have, with no hesitation. They came there FOR that stuff and maybe even specifically for you and your book. This is also why these events are packed into a way shorter time period, and why you’ll see artists packing up and posting on social media about their delicious post-event meal celebration with friends at like, 2pm. Everyone comes and buys the books in a frenzy for a few hours, and then you call it a day!
It stunned me that we replicated a similar experience at Manga Ichiba when a) the event itself was relatively small b) there wasn’t too much in the way of grouping tables, and c) there wasn’t a ton of promo. The organization that did exist was: obviously anyone who had 18+ works were grouped in a night slot. And there was an unofficial attempt at sorting *a lot* of the BL and *most* of the yuri onto certain days. But there was still tons of overlap! There was a totally ecclectic spread of fandoms and pairings, of fanwork and original work. There were tables with only original work. There were tables with nothing but 5 books of the same OTP. There were tables with like 5 different fandoms (me.)
And yet, people from all these categories managed to sell books. I even sold all (ten) copics of shmuffalo’s Yuri On Ice rarepair doujin about the American and Chinese skaters working out their gay bi feelings. We usually have to explicitly point this book out to DIEHARD YOI fans at other cons, and most of them still don’t pick it up. What this tells me is, people were showing up just THIRSTY AS HELL to support DOUJINSHI IN GENERAL and to get their hands on whatever cool art caught their eye. I certainly was!! And damn… ISN’T THAT FUCKING COOOOOOL
OTHER THOUGHTS… YEAH SORRY I’M GOING TO KEEP TALKING YOU CAN LEAVE NOW IF YOU WANT
HANDLING R18/ADULT ARTWORK
As I mentioned, artists with 18+ works were all scheduled for the 6pm-start “night” slots, which overlapped with the “Night Market.” At that time, Fanime volunteers would be posted at the entrance hall that led into all Manga Ichiba tables/the Night Market/other 18+ Fanime programming, to check IDs and distribute wristbands.
How an event handles a mix of general audiences & adult books is always going to be a unique decision that depends on the laws where you are, the rules of the venue you’re at, the rules of the con if you’re hosted by a bigger con like Fanime, etc etc. Manga Ichiba itself was far from perfect; though I don’t think they suffered too much for it, the daytime-slot exhibitors may have been at a disadvantage because they didn’t have the traffic of the thirsty hordes of people coming over there for the night market. But I definitely think splitting the event up geographically would have been a terrible move, so all in all I think the right compromises were made.
I just want to reflect that this was my first time tabling at a space that was totally adult-restricted, and it was pretty freeing haha. Usually we sell a mix of comics at shows where the responsibility is on us to check IDs before people browse or buy our 18+ books. It’s always fine, but it just takes a bit of mental energy and vigilance to stay aware of who is reaching for what. So that was neat for me!
WHAT MAKES A U.S. DOUJIN EVENT DIFFERENT FROM AN INDIE COMICS EVENT?
There was a bit of discussion in the event planning Discord about requiring books to be “manga”-like or manga-inspired. The intention as I understood it was to ensure books desperately looking for a place to belong found it, and books that already have a place at indie comics fests don’t take up those spots.
My 2 cents on that topic is this: It only matters that the way an event is described by the organizers helps guide the right people to find it & come into it with the right expectations. But I don’t think much good can come of maintaining rules that attempt to scrutinize an individual artists’ style. And for Manga Ichiba, being attached to an anime con, my feeling is that this is probably a non-issue. As someone who straddles the fanart and original-indie-comics world myself, I know there’s a ton of overlap with artists walking both “worlds”, and what makes a doujin a doujin is less about the visual “style” of the artwork and more about the “style” and intention of the book itself… in a way that is hard to define. Obviously any book that is fanwork, or any artist who has a large percentage of fanwork, is likely going to fit in great, regardless of what their art looks like. And when it comes to original work… I guess I don’t expect too many people to be clamoring to get into an event like this if their comic is a total vibe mismatch. And if they are a total mismatch, they probably just won’t have a great turnout or an incentive to come back.
So I think if an event is juried, it’s best to be clear about event priorities but vague about art-style specific “rules”, keep an open mind and “know it when you see it.” And if an event is not juried, it’s fine to trust that the people who think they belong probably do. Shrug!
JUST BECAUSE JAPAN DOES IT, DOESN’T MEAN IT’S GOOD
I mentioned that I went into this thinking “we can’t just COPY a Japanese event like that, it won’t necessarily WORK HERE” and I was WRONG and I now see that it was actually IMPORTANT to use Japanese-event terms and structure in order to attract people who understand it already, and thereby SUMMON the spirit of a different kind of event into being.
But that being said! I do still think that while we are nourishing a new budding subculture, we have an opportunity to pick and choose what we are missing, what we admire, and what works best. Both logistics and culture wise, some things might need adapting. And thats okay. Just wanted to put that out there lol
DOUJIN AND LEGAL STUFF
I’m not going to go into this deeply because I am by no means informed enough to educate other people. But I really want to bring this up as something that too often gets left unsaid when people start conversations about “man, why can’t we have Comiket too!”
When it comes to selling and/or exhibiting fanwork, there is always going to be both a legal and cultural landscape determining what you can do. In as general terms as I can put it, not only are doujin artists in Japan operating under different copyright/IP laws than your country probably has, but perhaps more importantly, they are operating under a set of different expectations about what is cool and what is crossing the line. What people new-ish to doujin may not realize is that these expectations are not always even unspoken ones, and that events like Comiket AND individual IP holders have a variety of guidelines that artists are expected to follow and basically self-enforce. And because it’s in Japan… they do.
So I just wanna say: don’t be afraid, be free, make transformative art, because it rules and it should always exist. But stay smart, protect yourselves and the wider community of fanartists, and always keep some humility when you’re making creative work with other people’s characters and ideas. And be aware that doing this stuff in the U.S. right now is more or less the wild west (heh) simply because it’s too small and niche to rustle anyones feathers. If things were to grow significantly, feathers will surely be rustled, one day.
Oh, and one practical PSA: You may notice that JP doujin often have a boilerplate disclaimer in the back of the book that says stuff like “don’t redistribute or post this online.” It’s also standard to write something like “[xyz] unofficial fanbook” as a subtitle on the front or back cover. Can you “Disclaimer: I don’t own this” out of trouble? No. But should you do these things anyway? Yes. It makes your intentions clear, which a) helps people who are new to doujin understand what they are looking at, and b) removes any ambiguity that you are trying to pass your book off as “official,” which definitely helps keep you out of hot water. PUT THAT SHIT ON THERE SOMEWHERE
MONEY MONEY MONEY
How much you sell fanwork for, or if you even “sell” it at all, is always a complicated topic. My general view is, it’s pretty clear at a glance who is doing something out of passion and who is trying to grift off of whatever IP is hot right now. By and large, the latter won’t get a warm reception from real-ass nerds, and the former can do whatever they feel is appropriate based on… what I can only describe as “the organically-formed community-agreed upon ethics of the nerddom they reside in.” Personally, I tend to price my fanbooks a bit lower than original work of a similar length, and/or offer them digitally as “pay what you want” either simultaneously or at some point after I start taking them to shows as physical books. There’s a ton of different philosophies on this and the unique situation around each artist and their project also factors in a lot. My hope is that we always give each other grace and good faith, and only keep an eye out for people who ignorantly/recklessly put everyone at risk. I want to shout out this event report by faiell for sharing thoughts on pricing and its effect on the overall culture and health of doujin events. I especially want to draw attention to it because the push to keep doujin affordable and profits slim, which I strongly agree with, runs counter to deep sentiments in the *cartoonist* community that artists are harmed by under-valuing their own work, which I ALSO strongly agree with! Doujin in the U.S. is currently in an awkward spot because it has had to make a home in general “comics” spaces, and therefore be treated the way we want “comics” to be treated. Big thanks for opening up this discussion.
MY FEEDBACK / HOPES FOR MANGA ICHIBA SPECIFICALLY
While my doubts were thoroughly smashed, it WAS a big hurdle that there were *six* separate slots of artists at a location physically removed from the rest of the con. Even I, who came specifically to participate and support this event with my whole ass, missed a few groups entirely because I had to like… go eat food and stuff. I think it might be best if ManIchi was condensed down to a two-day event with only four rounds, if there was a feasible way to fit a greater number of tables into those days. From what I can tell each individual group still had a good turnout, but as an attendee it’s a shame to have to miss any section of artists completely!
Being camped outside the night market was pretty major. So moving away from that hallway in search of a more wide-open area to stuff more tables in (upstairs?) also has its drawbacks. But hey, maybe after a year or two of establishing the event, that trade-off will no longer be so important!
The more artists and organizers can coordinate to sort into groups by genre/fandom beforehand, and get their info out about what books they will have on what day, then the more attendees can prioritize when they absolutely gotta make it there. I gotta say again that that filterable circle page is rad. And it only works if we artists SEND IN OUR SHIT haha
Since I wasn’t tabling until Sunday night it worked out fine for me, but it would definitely help people out if they could pick up their badge for Fanime at the same time & place as checking in with Manga Ichiba.
This year you could only do a full table. I thought this would be an easy win for the future re: fitting more artists in less time, but honestly, having now confirmed the size of the Doubletree’s tables (a normal 6 feet) I’m not so sure. Half tables would work out ok for those artists who only have a few books each! But when the crowds and lines were at peak, it would have been really hard to manage. Like, it does suck if a ton of people want your neighbor’s book and are blocking off your table for hours, and I can see that becoming an issue were we squished more tightly together. It was actually really nice that multiple people could browse and flip through without obstructing the whole table. Still! Everything is a trade-off. I think it could be a good option for some percentage of artists if ManIchi has the organziational bandwidth to pull it off in the future.
I don’t know if this is at all feasible for Fanime to support, but if people stay as thirsty for books as they were, and if this event starts GROWING and getting even THIRSTIER, then being able to ship books directly to the con ahead of time starts to become a much-needed option for artists!
let's go to fanime pt. 2: the unbearable lightness of fujoing out
I went to Fanime and Manga Ichiba and all I got was a bunch of thoughts about what it means to be in a community.
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Despite having been an anime and manga fan for most of my life, I have only been to two anime conventions prior to going to Fanime (and one of them was as a panelist, though it has been over a decade and I can no longer remember what for). Part of it is because I have always been Your Most Employed Oomf and prone to saving my vacation time for international travel with friends and family. But the other part of it, if I'm being honest, is because of shame.
In another life, I wrote about being a person motivated by shame, who hides the things she loves so that it is easier to maintain a normie persona for over forty hours at her job each week, who never tells her coworkers exactly why she's going to St. Louis or Los Angeles or that she once rescheduled her honeymoon so that she could watch the League of Legends esports world championship in Shanghai, because then she'd have to explain the entire concept of esports to people who are at least ten years older than her and/or have multiple children and have never heard of, much less ever accessed, Twitch.
Well, seven years later (and it has been almost exactly seven years since I wrote that blog post), I still have not changed. I am still that girl, motivated by shame and the desire to "pass" as normal. Though I have a sticker of Hoshi-sensei from Onna no Sono no Hoshi on my phone (which people routinely mistake for BTS merch), and though I have a "Let's Go to the Family Restaurant" keychain on my work bag (which people never notice or ask questions about), I still lie when asked about my interests. What do I do in my free time? "Oh, movies," I say with a smile. "And I cook." Not, I read approximately ten hours of BL manga a week, probably, and if I'm lucky, sometimes I write about it.
Recently I have been thinking about this a lot, because recently I have been trying to make peace with another revelation about myself: I am not One of the True Perverts.
By this I do not mean sexual perversions (though I am mind-numbingly boring in that area as well). I mean that I do not love things vehemently, depravedly, abnormally, the way a True Pervert does. Instead, I am apprehensive in my enthusiasm for things, a cormorant who furtively dives into the water before reemerging to, motionless, spread its wings in the sun, as if to say, nothing to see here. To be clear, I am not (as the kids might say) a tourist or a larper. When I love something, I am genuine and effusive in my praise for it. For better or worse, my tastes have always been too idiosyncratic to ever risk me becoming a bandwagon fan. But I live in fear of being consumed by something. I do not ever want to seem perverted by my love, derailed from some nebulous path that is cousin to "respectability" and a relative of "sanity." I fear the abyss, over or into which the true fan—the True Pervert—jumps.
The end result is that I am always in awe of my fandom compatriots who do throw themselves headfirst into the abyss. I'm jealous of friends who have favorite idols, series, pairings, authors, dynamics; who have, for lack of a better word, A Personal Aesthetic; who can easily list their influences and formative experiences and pinpoint when and how they first fell in love with [x], whatever [x] is; those friends whom you associate with that One Thing and their love of that One Thing is cleanly obvious. From my chilly vantage point, they are the SS+ heroes, whereas I am the lonely F-ranker who can only love things like a normie, a side character whose soul has a limited capacity for true love, who perhaps does not even have a soul with which to love, and thus does not love anything at all.
The point is, at Fanime, I was surrounded by the True Perverts. They were my friend and her long-time cosplay friends, who not only invest hours into costume design and makeup and wigs and prop construction, but also travel with boxes of costumes and book themselves for eight photoshoot sessions in a single day. They were the couples in detailed handmade outfits interpreting characters from series that have long fallen out of mainstream attention. They sold and bought body pillows of the lads from LADS. They traded stickers, and fan goods, and tips on which artist was selling unusual merch, and memories, and in-jokes, and a deep, vast understanding of characters from games I had never even heard of, much less played. In some cases, they were the True Perverts that Drank the Miku Feet Juice, and on that, I have nothing at all to say.
When asked if I had fun at Fanime, I kept saying that I had a great time, only it was just a little overwhelming. At some weeks distance, I think that statement was a lie designed to protect myself. In fact, at Fanime, what I felt was an abstract loneliness. I had learned in my many years of fandom life to be too self-sufficient, internalized too strongly the admonition to not seek validation from others.
What I have sacrificed, in return, is an openness to belonging.
Belonging is not the same as blending in, or getting along, or making friends-for-the-time-being, all of which I consider my strengths. I have friends (she says, well aware that having to say such a statement out loud makes it automatically suspect) and have never considered myself friendless or a loner—but to have many personal friends is not the same as community.
In fact, in some ways, to belong to a community is diametrically opposed to being enmeshed in a personal network of friends. It requires both an allegiance to and a responsibility for and an ownership over perfect strangers. Belonging is not about a total erasure of discomfort, alienation, or resentment; community is not and was never meant to be utopia. But it is a recognition that tolerating others in your community—and receiving that tolerance from others in turn—is important in the face of some grand cause, which can sometimes be simply belonging itself.
This may be controversial, but I believe community should be in service to some greater cause, and as a result, it is a disservice to be "in community" with everything you like. To create belonging is no small undertaking, and is an obligation that should be taken seriously. It's okay to not treat your fandoms or your hobbies like your community (which is not the same as saying it's okay to be rude!), if you don't feel like they are in service of a cause, or a cause that is important to you. I find it enormously difficult to believe in bestseller charts or streaming numbers or awards or rankings as a grand cause. This is probably why I didn't survive for long in kpop fandom (and also perpetually find myself cheering for the worst team in every league).
And this is probably why I have not found it important to find community in anime or manga. I have been lucky enough to have friends, and to have found belonging in other ways, and to carve even in my fandoms little gatherings of fellow sickos who dive into the same waters and sit on the same logs and spread their wings beside me, enjoying the same sun. I haven't discovered a grand cause worthy of devotion. But then again, I haven't needed to.
At Fanime I thought for the first time, what would I need to be in community here? Who would that community be with? And what could we possibly be in service of?
In Fai's post about their experience at Manga Ichiba, they wrote about how their experience of kinship with other anime fans has changed:
Fandom now is bigger and more varied than ever. Anime is mainstream. When I first started going to anime conventions as a young adult, the most exciting feeling I had was kinship. I could be confident that everyone near me knew the same jokes, watched same shows, heard the same songs, and these were all things we couldn’t easily share with other people in our lives. Cons still give me that feeling, but fandom is pop culture now, and monoculture is dead; it’s become too vast for a one size fits all to actually work as perfectly as it did before. I can’t turn to the person sitting next to me and talk about the best anime ever made (Fullmetal Alchemist) because they may not even know what that is (ouch); they might be only into Gacha Games, or Vtubers, or TCGs, or Danmei, or Webtoons, or they might have only watched Demonslayer. And you know what? I haven’t watched Demonslayer. That puts me at an extreme disadvantage.
On the bus to Manga Ichiba, I knew that the people sitting around us all liked doujinshi. That was the same kinship I used to get in AA, when it was hard to get official merch of any kind of your favorite anime unless you went to a con. If you read my post about prepping for Manga Ichiba, you’ll know that in the midst of my busiest drawing time I decided to take a week off in order to go to Final Fantasy XIV Fanfest, an official convention for the MMO video game. The kinship was overflowing there.
Recently, I've been listening to a lot of Rian Phin's video essays on fashion, not because I am particularly interested in fashion but because it's clear her mind moves a hundred miles a minute tying together art and philosphy and the search for both in our daily lives in a way that is catnip to me. In one about the different interpretations of Y2K fashion, she talks about how it's easy to assume that people wearing mainstream costume-y interpretations of trends don't care about authenticity, but we must recognize that there is psychological safety in numbers and in the comfort of being clearly legible to others. It is disheartening to not be understood, so to interpret a trend differently, even if that different is "more realistically" or "more authentically" or "more deeply researched", is a risk that you have to be willing to take. In doing so, you signal that it is important to you to find others with those small overlapping circles of interest. There is social value in being seen and understood, not just seen.
I am going to state the obvious: Being an anime or manga fan (and, similarly, being a fan of BL) is not at all like being into fashion. You participate in fashion, whether or not you want to be, simply by wearing clothes, but being an anime or manga fan is largely a cryptic fandom. The choice to identify as such is wholly intentional; you cannot accidentally demonstrate interest in being an anime or manga fan (though you could be a fan of an individual anime or manga without the rest of the identity attaching on). Thus, when faced with an opportunity to gather as a group, I think many of us (especially older fans like me) have not left the early mentality of wanting to embrace everything and everyone, of thinking about ourselves as belonging to the same community of nerds, even though we have long outgrown that as a useful mode of organization. I think spaces like Fanime still inherit this old-school purpose of being a public place where you could be, above all, seen and understood as an anime or manga fan. It is a no-judgment zone, a show-and-tell lovefest where all your interests are accepted, all your faves valid, All Perverts Welcome.
But to do so in an age where we have access to so many anime and so many manga (and so much bl and so much danmei!), we end up flattening our fetishes. Our safety in numbers is safety in the easily legible, and our commitment to tolerate each other is a genial kowtowing to the Intellectual Property, because that's the only way to communicate. Oh, you like Dark Souls? I also like Video Game. Oh, you like SVSSS? I also like Danmei. Oh, you like Chiikawa? I also like Cute Things. Oh, you like Umamusume? I also like Horse Yuri. When we left the convention spaces and walked the streets of San Jose, we were an undifferentiated smoothie of cosplay and fursuits and itabags and anime merch. We are all Perverts of the Same Kind, and in being so, we are no perverts at all.
Well, all this is an overly long prologue. I went to Fanime, my first anime convention in decades, not because I suddenly wanted to experience the community of my fellow anime and manga fans, but because I wanted to be a part of the inaugural Manga Ichiba, the first ever dedicated doujinshi market in the United States.
And it probably comes as no surprise that at Manga Ichiba, I was delightfully shocked into feeling the sense of community I didn't realize I was looking for. What I found at Manga Ichiba was this unapologetic expression of the subversive, the risky signaling of the in-group that Rian Phin espoused, the rejection of the need to buy everything simply because it is There and part of the General Anime Intellectual Property, replaced by the passionate drive to only participate in the very specific thing that made you a True Pervert. Weeks out from the event, I can't stop thinking about all the True Perverts I met at Manga Ichiba: the one artist during the Saturday morning session of Manga Ichiba who was selling, of all things, a Boogiepop Phantom doujinshi and was excited when I approached their table to talk to them about the 2001 anime, the free pamphlet encouraging you to watch all 100+ episodes of the slowest and most body-count-heavy space opera ever written (Legend of Galactic Heroes), all the variety of original comics I saw that ranged from demoted MyReadingManga incest tags to short, plotless adventures with longtime OCs that, understandably, no one recognized.
None of these were profitable ventures, and they were not trying to be. They were little lighthouses on lonely shores, shining a beacon out into the darkness, hoping to be seen and understood, and we were all boats paddling furiously towards each artist's table. You could not be there in that space as a lover of manga and not feel a kind of a protectiveness, an anxiety over the precarity of the event's existence, but also somehow a delirious hope that it might go on forever and ever, spreading all over the United States.
Comic Market, still (?) the largest doujinshi convention in the Japan and thus the world, is famous for its motto that "there are no 'customers' at the Comic Market." In the eyes of Comiket, we are all simply participants. While the circles provide works and concepts, the general attendees participate as readers and supporters of the creative works.
I love this conception of the doujinshi market, because firstly, I love the Weird, the works where you can feel the creator's soul moving like the spirit of God over their work of art, where something is so imbued with the individuality of its maker that you know it is off-putting to someone. To encourage this kind of art, the reader cannot be a "customer," to be serviced and pandered to. Instead, the artist and the reader must be co-conspirators, participants in a crime of self-expression. And at Manga Ichiba, I was a participant in many crimes.
But Comiket's explanation of the doujinshi holy trinity does not end there. The doujinshi market is where "creativity," "collection," and "community"—that is, interaction among participants—meet. And importantly, the reader participates not just through their purchasing of doujinshi but also in their "interaction."
What does it mean to be a non-artist participant outside of simply buying? Comiket seems to posit that there is an obligation unique to the reader that extends long after money and doujinshi have exchanged hands. In other words, it's not the buying that makes a reader part of the community. It is the reader's interaction with the doujinshi.
Nowadays we favor the term "BL" over "yaoi," but a part of me has always been drawn to the playfulness of "yaoi" as a word, even more so when I realized that it was a self-deprecating in-joke based on one artist's friends reading an original doujinshi she wrote literally titled "Yaoi" (夜追い). To me, this is the essence of yaoi, and with it, doujinshi: an exercise in whimsy, an act of bringing forth art and weirdness and selfhood into the world, but also something that can only spring into existence through community participation, through its creator offering it up for presentation, the readers recognizing its existence and commenting on it, and its placement in—or rejection from—the commercial world.
"Yaoi has been called 'masturbation fantasy,' but its pleasures are nevertheless meant to be shared," Patrick W. Galbraith wrote in "Moe Talk: Affective Communication among Female Fans of Yaoi in Japan." I have posited before that the yaoi/BL/slash fiction space is so unique but also prolific with its very specific tropes and formulations of narratives because the lines between authors and readers are so porous. BL creators tend to also heavily consume BL, both amateur and professional, and often inspired to create by comments from their readers, even citing suggestions or overwhelming responses from their readers as inspiration for their work, while readers often become inspired to create their own work.
I think, then, if we are to have a community, our readers must read, and let others—not just the authors, but also other readers—know what they have read, how it made them feel. Not in a product review way, or like a customer reviewing a restaurant on Google, no matter how glowing such a review may be. But in a way that reflects the reader's own self-expression, that reaches deep into the reader herself, and leaves her a little vulnerable. Yes, that's why I ended up writing a post blurbing every doujinshi I bought at Manga Ichiba. And it worked! It was a labor of love in every way, and writing it made me feel like I was giving back to the authors in a way separate from money, like I was helping Manga Ichiba in its journey to continuation and proliferation, like I was actually contributing, opening myself up to be seen and understood.
I realize it's incredibly self-centered to write a three-thousand word post that basically boils down to, "I went to an event full of wonderful artists and had a realization about Me." But I'm so thankful I went to Manga Ichiba and that it made me think about the reader's place in community, my place as a reader, my obligations to the wider yaoi community. I believe we have a grand cause: self-expression. I believe every day we live in this world, with its constant commercialization and domination by corporate interests and consolidation of capital in the hands of increasingly robotic and soulless men who do not see the value of art, that cause is under attack. I believe in the power of the True Perverts, of the appreciators of the Weird, of necessity of self-expression in all its forms. And I believe we can all bring forth the whimsy that is Yaoi in the World, as readers and creators both, as participants, as partners in crime.
Is famiresu iko getting a third book or is wayama sensei writing a new couple
famiresu is definitely over! as for what wayama-sensei is going to do next, your guess is as good as mine. i personally would love for her to do a slice of life horror.... but for the time being her only ongoing series is sonohoshi.
let's go to fanime. pt. 1: limited reader's viewpoint
This was originally going to be in the same post as my reflections on attending Fanime, but then I thought, you know what, I don't think it's fair to make people suffer through my maudlin ramblings if they're just interested in knowing how the doujin were.
So here are some reading notes on the doujin I bought at Manga Ichiba, loosely arranged by time slot! (The little red fujoshi octopus sometimes appears in pictures to hold a cover down. You can buy your own here.)
"Smoke," by kan and ico
I struggled at kan and ico's table for so long because I wanted to buy ico's beautiful Neon Genesis Evangelion artbook but was reminded by my friend that I should stick with what i came for (doujin and original art). Having seen an example of their upcoming Persona artbook, I can only say, you MUST buy their goods if you love paper. I tweeted a while back that American readers simply do not have the appreciation for paper that we should, and when I saw kan and ico's work I was reduced to repeatedly saying "this is so fucking cool" because I was clearly standing in the presence of people who do appreciate paper. The Persona artbook has special translucent pages with foil accents!! The cover of the Eva artbook is lightly textured around the character outlines!! You just have to touch their books to get it. There is so much care and attention to detail.
"Smoke" is an OC oneshot and is relatively short, with very little background given about the characters (except in the profiles at the end). But it has the air of a fanfic from a practiced writer, with a conceit about deaths from cigarette smoking (one of the characters is a forensic pathologist) and withdrawal symptoms that is classic bl fare. It's moody and atmospheric, clearly calling out for a longer work, and of course the bonus photocards are unexpectedly delightful paper products, featuring a luxurious matte finish that you'll want to run your hand over.
As of this writing, "Smoke" is not available online or for purchase.
Two doujin from halveablock.
"Beacon" (Gundam Witch from Mercury, SuleMio)
Reading this made me realize I don't remember as much of the anime as I thought I did, but I was so thrilled to see any Witch of Mercury doujin at all…! The opening pages, with a wordless dream sequence that starts with Suletta floating in space before waking up in her hospital bed are particularly memorable. It is neither a requirement or even always desirable for a doujinshi to hew closely to the canon designs, but here I was impressed with how close Xed kept the art to what you see in Witch from Mercury's anime. No small feat given that Suletta and Miorine both have frankly unreasonable amount of Anime Hair.
"Happiness" (Land of the Lustrous, with sketches from Elien/@_neile)
Xed's comic shows that they have a really strong grasp on the shoujo paneling tradition, with lots of organic movement that carries you across the page, and it makes the moments when they return to square/rectangular panels particularly powerful. The whole fancomic portion is an ode to Houseki no Kuni's complicated and deeply conceptual ending. It feels like a prayer for a kinder world, one that doesn't exist, that may never exist, that we nevertheless want to exist, if not for ourselves, then for others, except a dream like this always contains in it a kernel of selfishness, a desire that the better world we worked hard for had existed for us too, so that we need not have ever learned the importance of striving for that better world. That's what Phosphophyllite's happiness means to me and, I think, to Xed too.
You can order physical copies of Xed's doujinshi from their website!
Three original comics/doujins/zines.
"When the tide returns," by vivinhun
Caught me instantly with the vision test imagery in the opening, so i knew I had to have a copy. What awaited me inside is a wonderful exercise in elision. Minh, a memory worker, is told that he has been "processing too many memories" and should see a specialist, Dr. Rivera, who lives in a lighthouse. He brings along two kids (Kamon and Luka), whose relationship to Minh is never explained. The comic depicts a simple outing: collecting shells by the water, making a meal with friends, a quiet conversation, but there's a sense of something disquieting just outside the four corners of this oneshot. What is a memory worker? What is Dr. Rivera a specialist of? Is it so bad for our memories to soften over time, so that it is hard to tell what are our real memories and what are stories others have told us? Even the art hides mysteries. Though the images look at first like loose pencil sketches, the more you read the more you realize they aren't the first draft of a storyboard but rather fully formed and planned panels that are then re-rendered in pencil (a suspicion collaborated by the artist in the afterword).
Incidentally, prior to this trip to San Jose, I had just finished a video essay exploring the origins of the images used in the autorefractor machines, including the red barn image with which vivi opens "When the tide returns." The video essay creator talks about having bad eyesight all his life and developing a personal connection with the red barn test image. When he discovers that it was based on a real, still-standing structure, he makes a pilgrimage to the farm on which it is located. Everything about it is different now. There are no fences, and the barn isn't even red (it's likely the red was added to the photograph for the autorefractor image). But he is still excited to be there. "It's real," he keeps saying. "It's a crazy feeling to be here."
I don't know if vivi has watched this video too, or if they, the video essayist, and I all have bad eyesight and an affinity for this red barn image, if this is all just a coincidence, random threads I am tying together to make meaning. But I can't stop thinking about how photographs are like a memory someone else has of you which you then internalize as your own memory, that every image is real, and not real (just like the pencil sketches in this comic are real, but not real), that a place can be "realer" in your memory than in reality, that sometimes we have to live and breathe and feel in the present to be able to properly "see" the past, that every reality is reconstructed. When I read vivi's afterword, many things fell into place: this is a story about navigating transience, how to make peace with becoming a cracked vessel for the experiences and memories we accumulate and, inevitably, lose hold of.
You can preorder this comic from vivi's website.
"Transient Solids," sketches from ketsal
In case you can't read it from the picture, the blurb on the front says:
drawings from sketchbooks (physical)
that were edited (digitally)
and then printed (physically)
… which really felt like a sign of the times! So many works at Manga Ichiba feel like they exist in that in between space of paper and digital. These days, digital distribution is easy, and we could technically have a digital only doujin event (and you do in fact see this all the time, both in the English-speaking and non-English speaking spaces), which would cut out all the issues that go into printing and flying into a physical space and tabling. But that friction is part of the appeal, isn't it? Picking up a book, feeling the weight of cardstock, commiserating about ordinary home printers that aren't up to the task, the thrill of getting something that may only be printed and available physically this one time—I understand this appeal now!
Anyway, I picked this book up because the first page I flipped to was a doodle of a bowl of chazuke, which ketsal mentions they first tried because it came up in "Run with the Wind." I do that too, making food because it comes up in a series I am reading, so it made me feel great kinship to them. Imagine my surprise when later that evening, I turned the page only to find that ketsal had also doodled some characters from Sugiura Shiho's "Silver Diamond," which is their #1 manga and one of my all-time favorites as well! It's these little moments that made Manga Ichiba so fulfilling to me. ketsal, if you are reading this, I hope you know there are dozen of us Sugiura fans! Dozens of us!!
"I will teach you how to fish." by halveablock
My absolute favorite of the halveablock doujins I bought, and weirdly in dialogue with vivinhun's "When the tide returns," with themes of memory and disorientation... the letting go of something you were trying to grasp of the past so that you can be the "you" of the present... and fishing.... Most of the action focuses on main character Mael trying to gut a fish that has been infected with something called barnacle sickness, which causes it to grow eyes all over its body.
This doujin is beautifully produced, with a striking cover that has a cutout window so you can see the risograph page inside. The limited uses of red and blue, sometimes purposefully offset from the black outlines, add to the sense of unease. There's a feeling in the story like you are clearing your head after being punched, and you know you have a few screws knocked loose in your head, but you don't know where they are and what they used to hold together. The style, both art and paneling, feels more like "western" comics, maybe a little touch of the Vertical imprint, and I say this as a compliment. You know I love a metaphor that's all about fish death, and this delivered in spades. Fantastic execution — creepy, murky, kind of "Blue Submarine No. 6"-ish.
You can, as mentioned above, get physical copies of Xed's doujinshi from their website, but a digital version of this comic is also available for purchase!
Collection of doujins from durian soda / Lina.
I'm lucky enough to claim Lina as a personal friend whose art I have always admired, so naturally I am biased when it comes to talking about her work. She is not only enormously talented but also prolific and had so many books (and fans!!) at her table that visiting her during the Friday night session felt like being in the presence of a minor celebrity. She draws so much, it's disgusting (I say this with a beatific smile). I already purchased "Bad Luck Angel" when Lina first released it on her website, and I bought the Haikevah artbook for a friend, so I'm really only reviewing two of the works below.
"Lucky": I am the only fujoshi in the world for whom "Heated Rivalry" did not hit (or at least that's what it sometimes feels like), but I love Lina's continued dedication to pushing out multiple storyboards where all the characters do is fuck, beautifully and a little athletically. Ilya's voice here is very good, punchable but sweet, and I love her super hot anime-boy rendition of Shane, who is so extremely uke-coded in this that you are tempted to join in with Hudson's deranged fantasies of a sex scene where he tops his own character. My favorite detail is how large and round Lina drew Shane's thighs during the blowjob, which are exactly the kind of quads that made specialty tailors for hockey players a real thing. The only thing that could make this better is if Shane also got a beautifully rendered sparkling asshole, a la nocori. Next time!
"Hot New Thing": If you know Lina irl you know that she is a raucous tumbleweed of irreverent humor, so it's no surprise that I love this doujin so much because it is outrageously funny. There is a sequence here where one of the characters has a cinematic daydream about his Labubu avatar getting cucked and it may be my favorite two pages from this haul. Shun, the main character, is such a devilish virgin(?) bottom who accidentally sows enormous chaos in the heart and mind of his best friend Take who has had the misfortune of being in love with him. They are idiots and I wish them a happy life together. Side note: Shun's idol is an Ayer-senpai who I think maybe a crossover from Lina's other original doujinshi, "Bad Luck Angel!"
You can get ALL of the doujinshi pictured and more!! from Lina's website.
"Craving," by juliegg
I love Julie carrying on the great doujin tradition of writing a special issue for a doujin event that's just their own OCs fucking. This is a very important ritual and with it, we baptize Manga Ichiba properly. Breeze once wrote in their report that there is a characteristic "fujo-grin" that one sees on the face of a reader who is enjoying something very perverted. If someone had seen me after I finished reading "Craving," I suspect I would have had just such a wicked fujo-grin on my face. To be honest, I am not a cat boy aficionado, but I bought this on the strength of Julie's own enthusiasm, and I loved flipping to the author's notes afterwards, because all of her favorite parts were my favorite parts, including and ESPECIALLY the part where Rui rubbed his tail on Kouta's tip. Julie… perhaps you are a genius…..
You can buy "Craving" online at Julie's website.
"Possession Session," by faiell
Vincent is a shaman with a crush on an influencer (?) named Sydney, whose girlfriend Mira died in a freak car accident. Vincent offers to take Sydney on as a client and let Mira possess his body, nominally under the banner of grief counseling, but Sydney (and Mira-in-Vincent's-body) choose to use that time to have a marathon sex session.
This doujin features my hands down favorite cover—the color combination, the striking placement of the title, the placement of the earring across Vincent's face suggesting that he is perhaps levitating sidewise, the hands (his own? Sydney's?) by his neck as if threatening strangulation. I love that Vincent's tongue is almost split by one of the letters and I am exercising great restraint into trying not to read too deeply into that design choice. Sydney is such an unrepentant scumbag that of course he's also a livestreamer, like bro please stop streaming your girlfriend's funeral?! His utter indifference to showing any care or decorum for Vincent is tragic, and flipping to the end where Fai writes that Vincent is "the type of guy who mistakes lust for love" felt like the sudden sense of doom when you realize you've accidentally eaten expired food. Poor Vincent, you are too gorgeous and slutty and lovingly designed by your creator to suffer this asshole, no matter how much his appearance may remind me of a Gen Z Char Aznable!!
You can preorder a copy of "Possession Session" at Fai's website!
"forever and always" by arestinnia (Jujutsu Kaisen, Fushiguro/Itadori)
This is a post-canon/Modulo!era Megumi/Yuji doujinshi and one of the ones I was most looking forward to buying from Manga Ichiba when the circle cuts came out. Arestinnia's style is so accurate to Akutami's own, especially in the very opening page where Maki is scolding Yuji for not accepting a compliment and a fabulous middle sequence where Yuji is eradicating cursed spirits but is caught by Megumi, who has come in his child form to fetch Yuji. It's of course a wonderful tribute to the sequence in the manga where Yuji tells child!Megumi that it is lonely without him, but with a bittersweet twist (Megumi accepts that he cannot bring Yuji with him, as Yuji is determined to remain on earth and do good). I'm always sad when I think about Modulo!Yuji, who will have to experience the death of everyone he has ever loved, but I wonder if in arestinnia's world, spirit!Megumi will come and sit with Yuji occasionally, get ice cream with him and get scolded by Maki with him and just be not alone. It might make the many years Yuji has left go down more easily.
As of this writing, "forever and always" is not available for purchase, but arestinnia has indicated they will put it up on pixiv!
"Sorcery Fuck", by Some Mollusk (Jujutsu Kaisen, Todo/Itadori)
Incredible premise that is based on the artist's own fanfic (!!): Todo and Yuji are sent to Tokyo Bigsight where they have to get rid of some cursed spirits, among which is the Comiket Curse, which immediately traps them in a fujoshi domain expansion where they can only leave if they have—and this Yuji and Todo test exhaustively—fully penetrative penis-in-asshole sex.
Y'all this doujin is HUGE in size (and surprisingly lengthy in page count too!). I know there was some discussion about the expectation of how big a doujin "should" be, but "Sorcery Fuck" is the largest of all the books I bought, so big that I was able to fold up my "Happy Birthday Kim Dokja" poster from BeAl2O4EA08 in it. I love the concept of a Comiket curse that instantly traps any two hot men standing five feet apart (and thus, of course, gay) into a "fuck or die" room, and I love Some Mollusk understanding the assignment and bringing that as their Manga Ichiba offering.
I also enjoyed comparing these two JJK doujins, because it shows that there are as many approaches to doujinshi as there are creators and fans in the world. "forever and always" hews closely to Akutami's style, down to the lettering, and feels like such a natural extension of the canon, while "Sorcery Fuck" has the romp-like energy of a digital extra at the end of a two-volume bl. Some Mollusk's art style and panelling feels more western and has the miles-of-jokes-per-second rhythm of a very well-edited commentary video. I don't know how to explain, but there are pages where you almost can hear the Vine boom sound effect. I mean this all extremely positively—it's very hard to keep up a constant level of humor and hijinks in a story that's almost entirely porn. Every time I revisit this doujin to write about it, I notice a new punch-line worthy joke that Some Mollusk throws in there like it's no big deal at all: the Comiket Curse dropping an anal plug when it's fighting Yuji, Sukuna giving Yuji the middle finger from beyond the grave, a doodle of Takada-chan in a lab coat explaining time dilation. This time around, my favorite joke is Yuji wringing the neck of a fleshlight and picturing a hamster trying to deep-throat a banana when he sees Todo's, ahem, assets for the first time.
As of this writing, "Sorcery Fuck" is not available online or for purchase.
"Making Peace," by banditry (Metal Gear Solid V)
Val is another personal friend, so again my effusive praise may lack objectivity, but I sincerely believe their work, as shown in this edition of "Making Peace," is on another style level. That they printed and bound the comic on their own, so that they could use kraft paper and Acco fasteners that would be thematically in line with the aesthetics of MGS, is just the beginning. "Making Peace" is for sure more "graphic novel" than it is "manga": each double-page spread features a different wash of color and central image, around which Val has positioned text (sometimes in dialogue bubbles, but usually not). You can take in the comic casually and quickly, letting the artful touches of color, bold images, and measured prose wash over you, or you can scour each page desperately, picking it apart for hidden meaning: the diagetic section numbers, the recurring circle-and-intersecting-line imagery that echoes the individual elements of the peace sign (another meaning to "making" "peace"), the obsession with eyes and glasses. "There's layers," Val writes in the afterword about MGSV, which is the same thing I'd say about their comic.
I am not a MGS fan (for reasons that are too boring to get into, I have basically only played about five video games in my life), and I'm only vaguely familiar with the characters in "Making Peace," but I think there is in both the comic and the making of the comic (and my own experience reading it) something about the theme of having to make peace with one's own limitations, and how our lives are shaped as much by what we cannot do as it is by what we end up doing. To make peace is, inherently, positive: to lay a conflict down to rest, to cast off one's dissatisfaction, to be able to move on. But it is also, inherently, a surrender, an admission that there is nothing more that you can do—if, indeed, there was ever at all. But that struggle may only be legible to ourselves. When we look too closely at ourselves we often only see the flaws. From the outside, one only sees the success of a turmoil ending, an achievement obtained. Just like I from the outside can only see how ambitious, how beautiful, how perfectly formed "Making Peace" is.
As of this writing, "Making Peace" is not available for purchase, but (UPDATE!!) Val has made it available online!
"Hitchhiker," by yiyuehua (My S-Class Heroes, guideverse AU, HJYJ)
"Hitchhiker" is an illustrated doujin version of a previously published fanfic, with a special bonus at the end that is in more traditional manga form. The story opens on Yoojin driving in the rain and coming across Sung Hyunje, who derails Yoojin's car and forces himself inside. Hyunje is an S-class esper and injured, and of course Yoojin is an S-class guide (masquerading as an F-class guide and undertaker), and of course they end up fucking, though one could hardly call it good, giving, or game.
To be honest, I was at a loss for a while about what to write about "Hitchhiker," but that is because it is just plain delicious, the kind of old-fashioned meat-and-potatoes slash content on which I grew up and to which I still gravitate. Yiyuehua's writing and art are perfectly tuned to bl novel or webtoon sensibilities. You would, I think, believe me in a second if I told you this was on Publang or Tappytoon, and if it were, I would have subscribed in a heartbeat. Alas, "Hitchhiker" remains regrettably only a snapshot from a much larger story that exists as of now only in Yiyuehua's mind, though there are so many tasty details that I feel like a dying man being drip-fed a mirage. How did Yoohyun die, and is Yoojin capable of necromancy, and oh my god, is his dead brother's body really rotting—or reanimating—in the trunk of his car while he and Sung Hyunje fuck? Many questions that I hope against hope Yiyuehua will one day answer.
As of this writing, "Hitchhiker" is not available for purchase, but with some simple Googling, you can find the fanfic online.
"As You Wish," by saltcheee
"As You Wish" stars Cain, a royal magician, and his pet demon Yohan (Johann, maybe?). One of them has made a pact with a demon for great, perhaps unbearable power, in return for a promise, though who and what that promise is remains a mystery to the reader until the end.
I am not exaggerating when I say that reading this (at times through Google Translate) made me feel like I was dying. Salt, I think you need to get serialized… I think you need to go pro… I think you need to make that your number one priority because every aspect of this doujin fooled me into thinking I was reading the second chapter of a bl manga in a commercial magazine. The sequences with the demon and the promise felt like moments from episode 8 of Sonny Boy, the one with Yamabiko the talking dog, and the overall feel of "As You Wish" reminded me of Bikke's "Shinkuu Yuusetsu," also about two magical not-quite-lovers and not-quite-friends. Though the pages tend to be sparse, lots of white and implied backgrounds with screentones, it's the same kind of movement through space and panels that you'd see in any professional work. Like I truly cannot emphasize enough how much this felt so beholden and in harmony with the technical aspects of Japanese bl!! I also want to give a special shoutout to the character designs. Though a lot of the story feels vaguely fantasy Europe, with vaulted ceilings and tympanums along with the very European names, all the characters are wearing cheongsam-inspired robes inside their hooded coats. A very fun detail!
As of this writing, "As You Wish" is not available for purchase, but you can read a lengthy preview of it on pixiv.
"Game Show," by yanyan46e20 and BeAl2O4EA08 (ORV x MSCH crossover)
I'm sure both artists do not want to hear this from me, but unfortunately I would eat up 20 pages of this. No, 25 pages. No, 50!! Every page had a little something that made me laugh, from Yoo Joonghyuk immediately saying "KIM DOKJA" in an irritated voice when the game show starts (with a footnote that he says it as if this whole thing is somehow automatically Dokja's fault) to Uriel and Yoohyun in the audience cheering on their respective faves to the bonus cute off at the end (PRECIOUS. AMAZING. 10/10). This is short, and silly, and full of warmth for both canons. It is no exaggeration that I wanted to make sure I was early in line for Saturday's evening session just to make sure I could get a copy, and I do not regret it at all. I think the authors should consider letting Bihyung and Newcomer brainstorm more Situations to put our characters in. I think that would bring about world peace, really.
As of this writing, "Game Show" is not available online or for purchase.
"Daydream," by BeAl2O4EA08 (ORV, Joongdak)
The side benefit of having been almost first in line at BeAl2O4EA08's table is that I got to buy a copy of "Daydream." Saturday PM session of Manga Ichiba was perhaps not the bloodbath that Sunday PM became, but it was still busy enough that I didn't linger at the table, so I wasn't able to tell BeAl2O4EA08 how extremely legit everything about "Daydream" is. The binding, the design, the colored end pages, the heft. It is so luxurious and, yes, dreamy. I don't know if BeAl2O4EA08 ever intends to reprint it, but if you get a chance to buy it, please do.
As for the story itself, it is genuinely one of my favorite tropes, the dream that is not a dream, two lives intersecting at cross purposes, two people who can only meet in a place that operates on dream logic (extra special because it is ORV, of course) and desperately trying to grab onto each other. I know the Mandarin text ("Daydream" is presented bilingually!) is skewing the feeling, but "Daydream" reminds me a lot of Korean webtoons and Chinese manhua, with big panels that move almost exclusively vertically down the page and the frequent use of full-page images to break up the rhythm. My favorite sequence is when Joonghyuk and Dokja kiss in a subway car filling up with water, but, well, I am an "Adolescence of Utena" superfan after all. Reading "Daydream" made me think of the ways Utena and ORV are similar, about the ways we create our heroes and then desire our own created heroes only for them to in turn desire us, the idea of the End of the World as both an ending and the beginning, and the soft spaces in our subconscious where desire reigns, where we cannot turn away from our desire, where we are exposed by our desire, and how harrowing that can be.
As of this writing, I think "Daydream" is no longer available for purchase, though there was a reprint interest check previously. Perhaps there will be a re-reprint interest check!
"Merry Bad End Boy," by mousouhousou/Convenience Store Pudding
So, a confession: when I made a note to buy this, I didn't realize it would be het/NL. That said, this was such uproarious fun that I am very happy I own a copy. Mosouhousou presents most of this story as a series of 4-koma, and it's good to see that The Traditions Are Still Alive. I often joke that a lot of modern tropes I see in bl manga are actually expressions of our desire to escape capitalism (like for instance when a character you pick up off the street turns out to be your perfect housewife who heals your body and soul and that allows you to get promoted and/or escape from your toxic work environment). Here, mousouhousou quite explicitly explores that fantasy in the context of a yandere boyfriend. Naturally, my favorite sequence is "Do you do taxes, too?" where the yandere boyfriend helps the main character get a reimbursement for a client dinner because he knows where all her receipts and bank statements are.
There is a kind of "twist" ending which I will not spoil, but suffice to say, this is such a fun and unintentionally biting look into modern romance. What do today's heterosexual women want their partners to provide? It is not the fantasy of romance, which the main character (and many other heterosexual women like me!) finds in fiction. It is not the trappings of material luxury, like a house or money or a car, which we often can provide for ourselves. Instead, what we long for is a partner who is curious and attentive to us, who sees us both in our public and most unguarded private moments, who is willing to get a little silly with us, who takes initiative and does not wait for our direction or approval. The yandere is the crooked interpretation of that desire, but it is still nevertheless a manifestation of that desire, and "Merry Bad End Boy" understands that perfectly.
As of this writing, "Merry Bad End Boy" is not available, but a digital version of it will be available for purchase soon!
Three "Ace of Diamond" doujinshi by hongslice/tigrbalm.
I hope I did not embarrass/overwhelm Steph at her table by asking for copies of all three doujinshi as well as sticker sheets and a keychain. But it is so unusual to see a KuraMiyu shipper in the wild! Actually while I was at her table, one attendee was explaining to their friend that "usually people ship him (pointing to Miyuki) and him (pointing to Sawamura) together" and I wanted to butt in and shout BUT THAT'S WHY YOU NEED TO SUPPORT HONGSLICE, DON'T YOU SEE? But I am a fake fan who still hasn't fully finished Daiya Act I. Perhaps next year, Steph will come back, and I will act as a proper missionary!
"Where You Are": This is the KuraMiyu doujin hongslice wrote special for Manga Ichiba, featuring university student Kuramochi who is making new friends and professional player Miyuki who is learning that he gets jealous. This is one of my favorite happy-sad sports pairing scenarios too, because I am a sicko and this is essentially forcing a pairing to live through an ersatz breakup. "I am waiting for the day we can play together again" is "Even if you move on, I'll always love you," and "I'll always be cheering you on fron the sidelines" is "it's not you, it's me," but in sports anime/manga terms. I wish for nothing but delicious bittersweet happiness for these two forever.
"A Cat's Interlude": Sawamura fosters a stray cat, and Furuya gets involved, because he loves cats and also he loves Sawamura. I actually put my hand to my mouth when I got to the end of this doujinshi, because Furuya??? Are you OK???? I felt extremely Sawamura-kin at that moment, wanting to yell and hug Furuya in equal measures. You know, maybe only Sawamura could put up with this Furuya's silliness. Congratulations on your marriage.
"A Show of Love": Sawamura and Furuya have been dating on the down low for a while, so as not to impact their professional careers. Furuya wants to go public with their relationship, despite Sawamura's concerns, so Sawamura makes a bet with him: if he can hit a homer off of Narumiya in their next game, then they can announce they're dating. This has the same kind of story beat as the Scott and Kip subplot in "Heated Rivalry" and, well, that formula works for a reason and it works here! As a person who has adopted Narumiya Mei as her patron saint, I too felt bad for him being the unwitting and unwilling catalyst for this bakappuru but some sacrifices must be made. I also feel like this is the most artistically ambitious of the three doujins, with actual!! scenes of baseball!
As of this writing, I don't believe any of these doujin are available online or for purchase, but Steph does have a storefront.
"Quod Ames," by tomatobird
I have been so thankful to Tomato for their continued promotion of Manga Ichiba and unofficial guides to the event which predated the Fanime info dumps for weeks. It is because of them that I was prepared to attend the event at all, and undoubtedly one of the highlights from that weekend was getting to meet them in person and briefly monopolizing their time at the help desk. I had told them previously that I unfortunately was flying out of San Jose before the Sunday PM session and would miss getting a chance to buy their doujin in person, and they surprised me by bringing a copy of "Quod Ames" to the Saturday day session so I could buy an advance copy!
The minute I opened "Quod Ames," I was reminded of a zine I had read a while back, "Best Yaoi Movies of the 20th Century," and I was going to message Tomato about it. But then I did the diligent thing of checking the bylines on "Best Yaoi Movies" and wouldn't you know it? Tomato was a co-author, and was the author of the blurb on "The Lion in Winter." I love when a person has a cohesive aesthetic sense, a throughline of interests and influences which they telegraph loudly, and what little I know of tomato, they seem just such a person.
I too am a fan of "The Lion in Winter" (and "Beckett" and "Lawrence of Arabia"), so unsurprisingly, I am a fan of "Quod Ames" as well, which explores a possible romantic relationship between Phillip II of France and Richard I of England. I love Philippe, who is naive and doesn't know it and, when made uncomfortable, does not hesitate to resort to minor cruelty to regain equilibrium. Much of this first part of "Quod Ames" are Philippe's fantasies, and he has two: one where he allows Richard to bed him, and another where he is a haughty authority figure and Richard, abject and groveling, kisses the edge of his robes. Both are rendered like illustrated manuscripts or stained glass windows, eschewing traditional paneling for a fecund tangle of vines and limbs and memories, a profane iconography that is so unique and fitting for the subject matter. I cannot wait for Part 2, and I hope it is not long coming.
You can buy a physical or digital copy of "Quod Ames"!
Some miscellaneous small zines:
"Catte," by Eastern Downpour: I have been telling everyone that this is the most important zine I bought the whole weekend. It is so precious and filled with the artist's particular sensibilities. I only wish they had put their socials somewhere on the zine itself!
"Shipping Patterns," by puppetbomb: Perfect execution mimicking the Campus notebook branding and design, and featuring doodles of their favorite pairings throughout the years as if you are flipping through a private notebook. I'm seethingly jealous I didn't think of it myself.
"The Love of the Game," by poxei/nico/vivi: I love all three artists and in fact have bought art from poxei and nico previously/separately. This beautifully printed 8-fold features art from six different sports anime/manga, including Prince of Tennis (!) and 100 Meters (!!). I can't wait to get the OC zine from the half dozen collective later this year!
LOGH pamphlet, by cathartesaurora and cyr: Amazing and inspirational. I am already brainstorming what I could do that's similar for next Manga Ichiba. Every table should have their own pamphlet. I am so serious, we should have a Pamphlet Phest.
Thank you to all the artists who sacrificed their time, sleep, energy, and sanity to make Manga Ichiba the success it clearly was. I will likely talk about this in more depth in part 2, but attending Fanime / Manga Ichiba resurrected all the questions I was brooding on a while back about how to make bl manga a hobby outside of "consumption," or, at the very least, spending money. I don't think I have figured out the answer, but I think there is a role for the reader who takes their job seriously, who wants to form connections with other readers, who understands that in this community and fandom, the readers are often creators as well, that the creator of one doujin may be the reader of another. This may be all I can bring to the table, but at least I am here. At least this is my table. At least I have something to put on it and offer you. And I hope you found something in here for you.
Wow… happy 2026 everyone! My final list is either a day late or precisely on time.
For the final list of my favourite manga reads of 2025, I’m writing about the manga series that made me feel the worst. Made me feel bad, freak out, have to pace around the room, etc. You know. Everything written following this is an endorsement, I promise!
X / CLAMP
1992-2003, 18 vol. Read (half) in March
Have tragically (or maybe for the better?) only read the first nine volumes of X thus far, but it deserves a spot on this list for how bad it made me feel. Man what the hell. When Subaru meets Seishirou for the first time in ten years, and the first thing he does is light his cigarette for him ?????????? [clutches at my hair in agony]. And the sudden inclusion of the tragic lesbian one-sided (?) romance/obsession that ends in a love propelled self-sacrifice? Whatever the hell is going on with Shirou Kamui???? Don’t let my suffering hold you back ladies, lay it all down, I wanted to feel like this! I can’t wait to find out how Subaru and Seishirou reconcile and work it out in the back half of X! Just kidding. I can’t wait to find out how they kill each other (???) and how terrible it will all feel, and how terrible it will feel when I get to the end and there’s like three chapters remaining forever. When I finish it next year it will surely show up on a list such as this once more. Thanks CLAMP!
Happy of the End / Ogerestu Tanaka
2020-23, 3 vol. Read in March, September, and! November
Made me feel bad. What else is there to say. I love when a character makes a choice that makes them (and the readers) feel bad but for storytelling purposes it’s the best choice. I never want to read another story where the characters make the boring choice. Don’t indulge me! Send your romantic lead to suffer for his actions dictated by his own negative self perception! Make him cry with longing and grief! Let him come back to his lover only when he can no longer stand to wallow in his self-hatred alone because he craves love even when he does not believe that he deserves it! Personally I like to crack open my long (long) awaited copy of the third volume of this just to read the part where Haoran goes to Chihiro’s photo exhibition to make himself feel bad, and then he sits on the stairs and cries. Awesome stuff. What the hell.
One Room Angel / Harada
2019, 1 Vol. Read in March
MADE ME FEEL SO BAD!!!!!!!!!!!!! LIKE WHAT DO YOU MEAN!!!!!!!!!! Sat in bed after finishing this and tried so so hard not to disturb my sleeping girlfriend as I clutched my chest and sobbed. Like, man. Whatever. Thanks Harada. When Kuma finally publishes the physical of this in english you know I will be there, even if it’s delayed 6 times, I will be there.
Onii-sama e… / Ikeda Riyoko
1974, 3 vol. Read in April
Wow……. my cool and beautiful tragic butches…. Thank you Ikeda Riyoko…….. Everyone should make sure that they read this because it’s awesome, first of all, and second of all—oh my god. Man. What the hell man. Guys, my—my beautiful and tragic butches….
The Heart of Thomas / Hagio Moto
1974, 3 vol. Read in April
Let’s get melodramatic at the German boarding school, stat! Let’s reject our own feelings due to trauma! Let’s allow guilt to govern us and force our hands to clench when there are open hands held our way! Let’s yearn! Let’s repress it! Let’s scream and cry and shout!
Kitanai Kimi Ga Ichiban Kawaii / Manio
2019-22, 5 vol. Read in October
Ouch, owie! Cutting and terrible and romantic. This is just oozing with that co-dependent desperation that made me want to claw at my hair. What if love and control felt the same? What if they were the same? If you give up control, does love replace all the empty places you’ve left inside you? Or is it something else? Juicy!!!!!!!
The Night Beyond the Tricornered Window / Yamashita Tomoko
2013-20, 10 vol. Read in November
Around the midway point of this story, actually at the precise moment that Mikado (reasonable adult character) tells Erika (burdened teenage girl character) “It’s not selfish to ask for help” I started crying and am not sure that I stopped doing so until the end. WOW!!!!!!! The Night Beyond the Tricornered Window, huh. The bl in this isn’t even what made me feel the worst it was seriously about Erika. Stop making teenage characters who take everything onto themselves and who then get overwhelmed when there are suddenly adults around them who are like “Please rely on us,” it makes me FREAK OUT!!!!
The Cornered Mouse Dreams of Cheese / Mizushiro Setona
2004-06, 2 Vol. Read in December
Texted my friends a series of messages while reading this which ranged from “I LOVE YAOI” to “[rending my hair and gnawing on my wrist]” and “[IN SERIOUS MENTAL DISTRESS] DON'T READ THE CORNERENED [sic] MOUSE DREAMS OF CHEESE” and then “maybe the cornered mouse.... will receive cheese?” so that about details how I feel about it. What if you were earth’s most repressed man and you got manipulated by some annoying freak who desperately wants you and you fell in love with him… you think? No, no no, that isn’t what happened. You didn’t fall in love, it’s just that you’re easily manipulated because you’re afraid to take anything seriously, especially not an important feeling like love. And anyway, you’re not sexually attracted to men at all. Right? Wait a minute, but is that guy the only person you’ve ever wanted to keep coming back? But that’s just because he manipulated you, right? Love isn’t the same thing as desperation. But in the absence of any other feeling, is it wrong to think of it as love? Do you want it to be love? Does it feel better when you think of it as love? Or does it feel worse? Would you give up everything for it? You would? I see.
Wooowwza what can I say. What can I say about The Cornered Mouse Dreams of Cheese? Nothing, everything, I don’t know. Made me feel sick and bad and crazy. Don’t read this one. Please read it. What a mess. What a maddening and sublime interrogation into the psyches of two characters who are desperate for something that they refuse to articulate.
Sakura-Gari / Watase Yuu
2007-10, 3 Vol. Read in December
Oh boy. What, you want me to write my feelings out about Sakura-gari? I don’t want to do that. No, I don’t want to, I’m scared, I can’t do it! No, no! Truthfully, I am in fact having a hard time articulating anything at all about Sakura-gari. I’ll say that, after I completed it, I went on a mostly unsuccessful pursuit to find bl manga that made me feel the same way that Sakura-gari did. This knocked me to my knees, kicked me in the gut, and when I stifled a cry into my fist it said, “Well, what did you think was going to happen?” I think it’s brilliant and tragic and [looking you in the eyes] if you’ve never read it: this is not a recommendation, unless you want it to be.
A gutting exploration of how the cycle of abuse and violence stymies a person’s ability to understand their own desires and how to act on them, and doing it wrong. A torrent of wrongs! A hot, stinging wave of wrongs! Ack! Argh!
Blue Morning / Hidaka Shoko
2009-17, 8 Vol. Read in December
Haha, wow… to write about the meandering and sober melodrama of Blue Morning after failing to talk about Sakura-gari… But not to fear, I ended my year with this one, I'm happy to write about it. Just superb stuff happening here. Failing to come to an understanding over and over again despite continuously attempting to do right by each other, losing your sense of self after falling in love…. because it causes you to make decisions based on emotion (which scares you) rather than cool calculation (your default), running away but always coming back because being loved by another feels good despite the anxiety it brings you… AND you’re a THIRTY year old BUTLER and the person you’ve fallen in love with is a lovesick eighteen year old whom you raised for the last eight years who is your young master. Ugh, the agonies! Blue Morning has a lot of cogs spinning while all of that goes on, namely its Meiji Restoration noble system machinations, the set dressing for its agonies. Awesome. Made me clutch my hair and stomp my feet.
And with that, this completes my year in review of manga 2025!!! Thank you for reading. Anything at all that I've listed in any of my 3 lists IS! a recommendation. If you've ever read something by my recommendation (here or anywhere!) I would love to hear your thoughts. Even if it's about the dreaded cornered mouse dreams of cheese. Happy 2026! Let's read some manga this year and let's talk about it together.
I apologize if this is a complicated question or if it kind of scatters everywhere and doesn’t have a coherent point.
I’m new to BL, but one thing I’ve noticed from people both within and outside the community is that a lot of people say BL as a demographic is generally catered toward romantic stories.
Obviously there are exceptions, but non-BL queer stories seem to cater more toward identity-based narratives, if that makes sense. I’ve also seen people criticize the fact that some BL uses internalized homophobia more as a plot device rather than really treating it as a narrative that gets deeply explored.
And also I’ve seen people critique BL for when it delves into a guy having a girlfriend and then suddenly liking a guy, and it doesn’t really explore the complicated feelings of discovering that for the first time.
That then leads to the whole “I’m not gay, I only like you” trope. But even that trope itself, I feel like, isn’t really delved into from a nuanced perspective. I feel like it could make sense and be written in depth, but a lot of the time it isn’t.
And this leads to people kind of using this as a way to discard the whole demographic as not really being queer, even though it involves two men, because it doesn’t seem to want to get involved with the actual queerness of the characters — like the in-depth, complicated feelings someone might experience.
I’m not trying to dismiss BL or attack it. I just want a nuanced perspective on this from someone who doesn’t completely dislike or discard BL as a demographic.
I apologize again if this is complicated or scattered.
Hello! Thank you for reaching out to me, and your message wasn't incoherent at all. As is always the case with online social media discussions, a lot gets lost between people trying to best one another and snappy one-liner gotchas. I also think there are certain aspects that people don't take into consideration when talking about BL/LGBTQ+ comics, their tropes, and structure. You asked for a nuanced perspective, so you're getting a lengthy post haha. I'll try to break them down and hopefully, there'll be a useful takeaway here somewhere.
You're right in noting the distinction, and that's also my very broad rule of thumb. I often say that BL focuses more on romance, while LGBTQ+ comics tend to focus more on identity. However, it's important to notice that this is a spectrum. On one hand of the spectrum, we have wish-fulfillment, on the other, interpersonal drama and identity politics. Works in both genres fall somewhere on this line. As the IRL LGBTQ+ movement pushes forward and the identity politics/allyship discussions gradually become a topic of everyday conversation, you will see its effects on the genre without a doubt. Just like how climate change and discussions around scarcity are topics that are increasingly delved into, like in Fool Night, or discussions around neurodivergency give way to works like Spacewalking With You, BL changes and evolves too.
We also have to take into consideration that sexuality, gender, and how they are performed IRL are contextual and cultural. What we see in works from East Asia may not fit into what we want to see from a Western perspective. It's also possible that certain cultural codes that signal queerness elude us simply because we're not accustomed to them.
For example, the "only gay for you" trope you mentioned is still being tossed around, but it's been quite a long time since I've read a BL work that explicitly incorporates it. Now, one of the leads identifies as heterosexual until he meets the other lead, and after certain tribulations, they reach their hard-earned happy ending, but it isn't portrayed in a "I will never be with another man if we break up" kind of way, as certain older works have explicitly put those words onto the page to portray a very narrow, singular devotion. The characters cease to exist the moment a story ends, and unless the creator openly explores what happens after the breakup, we can't really speculate whether that ex-hetero character is now open to dating men or not.
To be honest, I'm reluctant to approach fiction simply through the lens of "How much of it exists in real life," but even if you wanted IRL correlation, there are people out there who, despite identifying as heterosexual, seek out gay sex for reasons of their own. Some BL explicitly mention discovering bisexuality and there are more and more openly queer characters in the genre. As I've talked about in a previous post of mine, people read very little BL and the ones that they read are the handful of extremely popular series, then they go around and base their whole opinion on a genre on these titles. They are loud, and the algorithm amplifies divisive takes. Then it looks as if everyone thinks that way.
Imagine believing every shonen series is like Naruto... It is no doubt an influential work, and you can trace the shonen staples in many works that come before or after it, but can you really say Gintama and Naruto are the same? Chainsaw Man? Promised Neverland? Or Marriagetoxin?
It is, again, important to keep in mind that BL in Japan is a genre that stemmed from shojo manga. You can, again, trace artistic sensibilities that are adopted — paneling, screentones, structure, tropes, you name it. BL's approach to love is also reminiscent of the shojo series that focus on romance. There is, and always will be, a wish-fulfillment side to BL, just like how there will be one to romantic shojo manga.
This fulfillment can be about a happy ending after hardship or about a world where two men can experience simple misunderstandings or run-of-the-mill interpersonal problems when getting together, instead of the crushing weight of heteronormativity and phobia. Or, it could be about extremely good-looking, kind, sweet, smart (or extremely evil, toxic, vile but hot) men that are either too good to be true, or you'd change countries if you were to come across one. Throw robots, beasts, and supernatural beings in the pot, and you have yourself a feast. The levels of this fulfillment vary as well. Some works are more grounded, while others are unrealistically sweet or unbearably kinky. Either way, it's so engaging, fun, and compelling to read all kinds of characters to find each other and fall in love and rearrange each other's guts in all kinds of ways!
I personally consider BL to be queer, not only because it focuses on two men, but also because we don't need fiction to spell things out for us. Simply engaging with fictional works creates the possibility of change, and it's no coincidence that countless people rethink/discover their own sexuality and/or gender through BL. I also suggest you check out Cathy's answer to an anon on subtext/canon BL. I'm not touching upon its transformative power for cishet women and their relationship with patriarchy since your message was about queerness.
Now that these are out of the way, I'll mention other key points that I don't often see taken into consideration.
Industry
Commercial BL, and comics in general, are an art form that is strongly tied to the publishing industry. What that means is that what gets published (both in and outside of Japan) is heavily shaped by the companies and, as an extension, fans. Each company, platform, and manga magazine has its own identity and style, and has a say in which series gets a bigger cut from the marketing budget. Fans are getting more and more reactionary, and with the purity culture that's infested the English-speaking fandom (can only speak for this fandom, as idk what the situation is like in others), the works that publishers dare to license are gradually getting sanitized. The overall far-right tendency around the world we've been experiencing over the past couple of years has been detrimental. Barely anyone takes any risks anymore, and that includes not taking risks in terms of art style or diverse works as well.
I highly suggest you check out Cream's blog post on Tsuki to Pieta. It's not like diverse works don't exist, or there aren't any artists who are interested in delving deeper. Sometimes, publishers don't take the risk or can't figure out how to frame a work in a neatly packaged, appealing way, and eventually, they reject said work. Other times, they don't promote certain works as much and they fly under the radar. I know I'm pretty biased about Dal Hyeonji's Love for Sale, to give you an example, but even disregarding the love I have for it, it's an excellent character study! Or you tell me why people aren't going crazy over Takahashi Hidebu's Stigmata! I'm not approving publishers' behavior, but that's how commercial publishing works and a lot depends on where they will allocate their resources and time. What is being read, what is popular, and what gets published is like a cycle that feeds each other. I also want to finish this by mentioning Breeze's blog as a BL artist. There are lots of interesting bits and experiences that we readers may not know much about on the creation side, but they break it down in a fun-to-read manner!
Form and style
This is obviously tied to the industry side as well, but when we are talking about commercial BL, almost all series (unless you're a big name or you're serializing your work in a digital magazine and accept that your work may not get printed physically) are single-volume stories. Saying that it doesn't allow much space for exploration or delving deeper would be a misleading remark, but it does play a role.
Just like in literature, different forms require different stylistic approaches. You can't approach writing a short story in the same way as you would a novel. So obviously, you'd have to find a way to tell the story you want, according to the space you're given. A one-shot has to be structurally and tonally different from a single-volume or a several-volume work. It's true that not many are great at short-form storytelling and instead opt for incorporating the standard beats within a volume, at times disregarding how cramped it reads or how superficial the themes can become.
It is also true that not everything has to be about identity and one's struggle with normativity. This doesn't make a work objectively "less valuable" or "less queer". It is, I guess, a balancing act. You can't drown in your pain and struggle day in and day out, but you can't completely turn away from it either. And I wholeheartedly think BL, GL, and LGBTQ+ comics together cover everything I might want and more from a genre! These three don't work against each other, but complement one another. And together, they paint a fuller picture.
Artist preference
Since we can't form an argument over speculation, we don't really take this into consideration but... sometimes you just want to create something simple and sweet, no matter how overdone it is, and regardless of readers' expectations! One fic I've written that's super dear to me came out of me wanting to write something extremely cringy and melodramatic, like the daytime soap operas you see on TV. Of course, since I'm the creator, the fic ends up being "my version" of a cringy soap opera, but from a reader's point of view, it might be just another random, sappy, "mid" fic.
The same goes for any creator. Not every work has to leave a mark or aim to be exceptional or deep. Not every artist's body of work is diverse, either. Sally Rooney has an interesting take on this (she was so patient with this awful interviewer, stronger than I could ever be tbh). From the BL perspective, look at Furuya Nagisa's works; they keep returning to the very same themes and characteristics, to the point that it's sometimes hard to tell one work from the other. Are they doing it because they know it will sell? Or because, as an artist, they find themselves wanting to keep circling the same spot? Who knows! But it is an important parameter in the equation.
Reader/fan assumptions
I will talk about two assumptions here that I notice are being made both by the fans and the antis.
First is the assumption that the type of work one wants to read has to dominate the market and just magically fall into one's lap. No. You have to dig and swim neck deep into the sea, acquire your own taste, find your own favorites, and make friends who can introduce you to what you might be missing out on. You have to jump headfirst into series you have no idea about and get a taste for yourself. That is the only way to survive and get past the surface-level popular stuff that may or may not be okay at best. The worst that can happen is you'll stumble into something that's not for you, and you'll swim away. Easy as that.
I came across a dead dove fic the other way and started reading it out of curiosity. I don't seek out dead dove. I'm a pretty mild reader compared to some, but I consider myself to be immune to pretty much everything. The fic turned out to be much... more than I could ever imagine it to be, for lack of a better word. And I was just like, 3 paragraphs into it, mind you. I closed the tab and went on with my life. The mental image persisted for a while, but you know what? I survived. And discovered a boundary that I didn't know was there. Only through encounters like this one can one discover what's good or right for them, and this is why fiction is irreplaceable for me. It allows me to approach the world from a safe distance and helps me discover ideas, circumstances, or sides of me that I didn't know about before. You just have to keep in mind that your boundary or taste is not, cannot be the norm, and reading is not activism.
The second assumption is that BL is a silly genre. It is silly and whimsical at times, sure. That's the spirit of BL. But anything that focuses on romance is immediately put into the "not worth pondering on" box. Emotions are silly! Interpersonal relationships are silly! It's simply about, for example, two university students in the same club, and they fall in love. What kind of "deep thought" can you extract from that?
That's where people are wrong again. I have so many mutuals who write extensively on BL, both specifically on works themselves, BL as a genre, and discourse similar to the questions you asked me. Let me tell you, there aren't enough people who do this!! Some of them I linked above, but you can visit the directory Cream kindly put together, and discover long and short-form writing that people are consistently putting out. I argue it's much better than reading simplified, snappy takes on Twitter!
I apologize that the answer got lengthy, but I can't give you a simple yes or no answer because it depends on so many parameters! And sometimes the same parameter can be regarded as good or bad depending on the context. But the tl;dr of it is industry, trends and real-life politics heavily affect the works created and licensed, and BL is a very diverse and fulfilling genre. However, it's up to the reader to put in the effort and discover not-so-hidden gems, while meeting other fans who read as diversly and engage with the genre critically AND whimsically!
we are all enriched by having nora in our lives!! the amount of care and effort she puts into her asks and posts should make her eligible for canonization.
i just wanted to add that my first reaction to this ask was a combination of these two points:
... people read very little BL and the ones that they read are the handful of extremely popular series, then they go around and base their whole opinion on a genre on these titles. They are loud, and the algorithm amplifies divisive takes. Then it looks as if everyone thinks that way.
and
The second assumption is that BL is a silly genre. It is silly and whimsical at times, sure. That's the spirit of BL. But anything that focuses on romance is immediately put into the "not worth pondering on" box. Emotions are silly! Interpersonal relationships are silly! It's simply about, for example, two university students in the same club, and they fall in love. What kind of "deep thought" can you extract from that?
the reality is that bl is like any other collection of work created by many diverse individuals with diverse experiences, subject to diverse editorial and publishing choices, sometimes separated by great swaths of time and even language. no one particular work can perfectly capture every issue, and queerness looks very different to everyone. "i'm not gay. i just like you!" may not be a nuanced depiction of queerness to one reader but could resonate with another. i feel this way with many works of fiction, including novels with main characters who have my background (asian-american, female, maybe even a lawyer). the characters often have what i consider shallow realizations about their identities or selfhood, but then i'll be talking to a friend and find out it resonated with them. i've accepted that i have idiosyncratic taste, and like nora says in the post, that requires me to dig deep and approach algorithmic recommendations with suspicion. we must!!! do the same with bl!!
i also think many readers tend to downplay that bl manga like all other manga is a visual medium first and foremost. maybe nora is too nice to say this, but bl mangaka are not exempt from the weakness that plagues their non-bl counterparts, or even their western comic artist colleagues: being a good artist does not make you a good or even coherent writer. it is not easy to write in-depth, complicated feelings. many times, romantic developments are plot devices, because this is a manga and we have to progress the story so there can be more excuses to draw things happening.
yet fans are willing to give, say, akutami gege the grace and (volume) space to write a story that is interpreted as having meaningful nuance even when his pacing and plot issues are at their nadir!! where is that grace for bl? it is like we are sitting around waiting for the perfect series that will tackle every feeling and every experience to land in our laps, instead of making like shounen manga fans and celebrating the works for what they are and even valorizing their failings. if i read too deeply into bl every week, it is because i think we have a right, and a need, and maybe even an obligation to do for bl what shounen manga twitter does for their series. we too can [gen z voice] glaze bl into legitimacy.
35/50: the loves of others ("gray to blue no aimade," "inu mo kuwanai," "manic love")
Itoi Nozo's "Gray to Blue no Aimade" begins with a red herring: its main character, Koutarou, meets a man. The man just so happens to be his father-in-law Koushi, and he just so happens to catch his father-in-law making out with another man, a sex partner who cruelly throws Koushi to the ground and then warns Koutarou to "give up on this geezer" who "likes weird sex play." Koushi begs Koutarou not to mention any of this to Haruka, his daughter and Koutarou's wife, and of course a shell-shocked Koutarou agrees. But, concerned about Koushi's wellbeing, and inspired by a rooftop conversation with one of his openly gay students, Koutarou shows up at his father-in-law's house the next evening with two convenience store bentos which they end up ignoring in favor of Koushi's homecooking. "It tastes the same as Haruka's," Koutarou says. Of course, Koushi scoffs. Who does Koutarou think taught Haruka how to cook? "This was the first homemade meal she made for me," Koutarou continues. "That's when I fell in love with her."
Well, in a bl manga, that kind of line is portentous. If you are genre savvy, you may think you know where this story is going. Haruka is working a busy job abroad, neglectful of Koutarou, seemingly uncaring of his day-to-day troubles, and Koushi is a good listener who lets a drunken Koutarou bother him at home. Koutarou is straight but an ally who watched movies with gay relationships just so he could better understand the difficulties gay people face, and though Koushi scoffs at Koutarou's naivete, he also finds himself thinking of his first love when Koutarou is around. It's unusual that a wife becomes a forerunner for her father as a romantic interest, but, well, a father-in-law and his son-in-law isn't exactly incest, is it?
So it may surprise you to learn that "Gray to Blue no Aimade" is actually a love story between Koushi and Koutarou's aforementioned student, a hotheaded romantic with a bit of a libertine streak named Sayotani Masatora. Koushi saves Masatora from a physical altercation and accidentally takes a page out of the pick-up artist bible by negging Masatora in the process. This, predictably, works like a stick of dynamite on Masatora, who begins stalking Koushi to his local coffeeshop and desperately trying to get Koushi to acknowledge him as a possible love interest. Unnerved and unwilling to get caught up with a man—no, boy—much, much younger than him, Koushi resolutely rejects Masatora, until a series of coincidences leads Koutarou to realize Masatora's new crush is none other than his elderly father-in-law. Koutarou tries to give both Koushi and Masatora a lecture about propriety that backfires spectacularly. In the middle of all this gay drama, Haruka calls Koutarou from New York: she's coming back to Japan, she's fallen for another man, and she wants a divorce.
As a straight man in a bl manga, no matter how much Koutarou is set up to be the main character and a force for good, he is still a figure of impotence. Though he channels the meddling, overly-invested spirit of a bl love interest in his interactions with Koushi, he lacks follow-through. He is like an insect drawn to a light behind glass, unable to consummate his desires, no matter how much he may beat his wings against the barriers of his own heterosexuality. By the end of the series, with no other options, Itoi dooms Koutarou to his troubled marriage with Haruka. He is a cuckolded husband who cannot get angry at his wife's infidelity, who is blind to the tenderness and heartsickness Koushi projects onto him. That is for Masatora, who instantly clocks that even at his big age Koushi is not above crushing on a straight man who can't love him back. Koutarou is tragically, almost constitutionally barred from the world of gay romance. His one great act of shamelessness is simply to ask his father-in-law to remain his friend. This is all Koutarou can imagine and ask for. He has no imagination for anything more.
It's not a kind fate, but it is a necessary one. Koutarou's straightness, his impotence, is also a refuge for Koushi. No matter how perverse his feelings may be, no matter how much he may be trying to reenact the trauma of his first love, no matter how much he begs for Koutarou to mistreat him, Koushi cannot alter Koutarou. For Koutarou, Koushi is his wife's father, and no amount of sad gay attempts at self-debasement can erase that. In a way, this echoes Koushi's final capitulation to Masatora. Koushi is surrounded on both sides with men who maintain a light in their hearts, a brightness in their worlds, and who are determined to bring Koushi into that light with them. They see Koushi in all his negativity and determination to be alone, and they remain unmoved in their intentions for him. One could do far worse, to be surrounded with such love at Koushi's age.
"Gray to Blue" is full of interesting in-betweens, secret third things that defy its characters' attempts to find refuge in convention or a more obvious unconvention. Masatora is presented at first as willowy, long-haired, almost uke-coded, but by the end of the series he is an enthusiastic short-haired younger top who happily discusses domming Koushi in the future. Koushi is a respectable older man who raised a young daughter all on his own, and also kind of an unrepentant slut who is trying to make up for lost time. At the center of it all is Koutarou, the "in-between" hinted at by the title ("what lies between gray and blue"). The "gray" is a reference to Koushi, of course, and the "blue" to the youth/seishun of Masatora. And between the two is Koutarou, a bridge who is neither the third leg of the triangle nor bystander/cheerleader, yet somehow all that and more. Koutarou is rival and mentor and friend and former romantic interest and confidant and disapproving adult to Masatora. Though Koutarou has little romantic experience, it is only because of his steadfast straightness that he could be a safe harbor into which Koushi could wash, to prepare Koushi to open his heart to Masatora. "Gray to Blue" would not have worked without him, or rather, without him it would not have stood out, even with the dramatic age gap between Koushi and Masatora. Sometimes your guardian angel is a painfully straight history teacher who is your son-in-law. What a concept!
What if we take all the elements of "Gray to Blue no Aimade" and remixed them? What if Koutarou and Koushi have been in a secret third thing for years, but that secret third thing was psychologically confusing and toxic, and Masatora purposefully drops himself into the center of it in order to seduce one of them, only to come out the other end fully involved with both of them?
Well, then, you might have Psyche Delico's "Inu mo Kuwanai," whose title is a reference to the Japanese idiom that "even a dog won't eat a marital quarrel" (fūfu-genka wa inu mo kuwanai). It's surprisingly similar to another allusion to dogs and quarrels in the Bible of all places: it's better to take hold of a mad dog by the ears than to take part in someone else's argument (Proverbs 26:17). The mad dog in question is Utsugi, a private investigator who is hired by Professor Yamashiro to find proof that his wife is committing adultery. What Utsugi ends up uncovering, however, is a long-standing rivalry-cum-obsessionship between Yamashiro and his colleague Okuzono, who has stolen every single one of Yamashiro's romantic partners from him since high school. Unbeknownst to Yamashiro, however, Utsugi has his own reasons for wanting to get involved; ten years ago, he had met and fallen in love with Okuzono, only to be rejected. Now, he sees a perfect opportunity to get Okuzono to fall for him: enter into a fake-dating relationship with Yamashiro to catch Okuzono's attention, killing two birds with one stone.
Dogs may turn their noses at marital quarrels, but Psyche Delico has never met a weird triangle dynamic that she wouldn't eat up. When people talk about love triangles, they usually mean a V-shaped dynamic, where two people are in love with one person whose ultimate selection of a victor collapses the whole shape. Not so with Psyche Delico's characters, who always twist themselves into the most complex knots, locking the triangular framework into place. In her stories, characters do not mislead or cheat or secretly carry on an affair. Instead, they throw all their cards on the table, and the story's delights come from Psyche Delico shuffling the deck and dealing out the hands.
In "Inu mo Kuwanai," all three main characters are perfectly aware of the game(s) they each are playing, yet are unable to resist stepping into the Saw-like emotional traps designed specifically for them. Utsugi cannot resist chasing after a second chance with a man who rejected him, Yamashiro's guilt over throwing his past romantic partners unwittingly into the maw of Okuzono's obsession leaves him vulnerable to Utsugi's manipulations, and Okuzono would never turn down a chance to fuck with Yamashiro, as long as it doesn't involve actually fucking Yamashiro.
The point of both dog-related idioms is, of course, that a sensible person should stay out of other people's business, to which Utsugi is very "the sign can't stop me because I can't read." Utsugi is a meddler and once given the opportunity cannot help but dig deep into Yamashiro and Okuzono's shared history. He's a private investigator after all. Yet Psyche Delico pulls a similar trick to Itoi Nozo in the story's resolution. Like Koushi hiding from Masatora the aftermath of his first love and his projection of that disaster onto Koutarou, Okuzono denies Utsugi (and the audience) any real insight into how he feels about the end of his relationship with Yamashiro. "That's an answer I'll carry alone to my grave," Okuzono tells Utsugi. "I'm not interested in discussing the details with you." To the very end, Okuzono is possessive, secretive, selfish. His relationship with Yamashiro is for him, not for Utsugi, and in a way, not even for Yamashiro.
So what is the thing that Okuzono comes to accept about himself and Yamashiro? I think the solution lies in chapter four, when Utsugi approaches Okuzono and Okuzono explains why he steals Yamashiro's things. "I felt like anything Yamashiro touched was somehow special," Okuzono explains. Later, as he traces the kiss marks on Utsugi's body left behind by Yamashiro, he says, "You have a splendid body. He really does have exquisite taste."
Yamashiro claims that Okuzono is the kind of person who loses interest once he has a thing he has been chasing. "That is why I have to keep running away," he tells Utsugi with a rueful smile. But that's not entirely true, is it? The only things in which Okuzono has lost interest are the things that Yamashiro has cast aside. In short, they are not-Yamashiro. By consuming the things Yamashiro consumed, Okuzono hopes to become like Yamashiro—a man with exquisite taste. But he also longs to be the person touched by Yamashiro, chosen by Yamashiro, consumed by Yamashiro, because then he too would be transformed into something special. It's no coincidence that after having his love acknowledged by Yamashiro, Okuzono seeks out the only other man who admired him before knowing Yamashiro even existed.
Both Okuzono and Yamashiro seem to want to diagnose their relationship as avoidant and elusive, when in fact I think the truth is far simpler: Okuzono is a narcissist who wants to satisfy his own ego, and Yamashiro got too carried away by the attention to put his foot down. That they carry on this way into their big age is embarrassing, but also endearing and, unfortunately, relatable. Who among us wouldn't be just a little bit flattered by the prospect of being someone's decades-long unrequited crush or wouldn't thrill at the chance of playing the tragic romantic lead who has loved one unattainable man for years?
Perhaps that's why at the end of "Inu mo Kuwanai," Utsugi goes to Yamashiro again with an unusual proposition: what if Yamashiro were to steal something (that is, Utsugi) from Okuzono? In doing so, Utsugi reifies his own worth as a participant in this triangle, instead of just a prize Okuzono earned by getting over Yamashiro, or a solution Yamashiro arrived at to get Okuzono off his case. Utsugi too is a messy bitch with an ego problem (positive), like all of Psyche Delico's best characters, and his reluctance to let this three-person party come to a close is what gives "Inu mo Kuwanai" that ineffable Psyche Delico touch. In Yamashiro's cheerful and steadfast acceptance of Utsugi's machinations and Okuzono's wicked, perverted personality, Utsugi has perhaps found his soulmates. Good for them, because no one else should have to deal with them!
"But Cathy, I am sick of secret third things," you might say. "I am sick of people who talk in riddles, who have sex with one person when they really want to be with another, who can't admit their feelings until it is too late or at all. And I am so sick of all these old men!" (You would never say that to me.) "Can you recommend something else?" you might say.
Well, once upon a time there was a mangaka named Yamagata Satomi. She specialized in a wispy, modern, yet very josei-adjacent style, full of men with long-ish hair half-pulled out of their faces, troubled teenagers skipping school, ambiguously romantic friendships and platonic situationships, rooms with two people lonely or together or lonely together while their faces are crossed with light. Her work is a successor to the "daughters of Garo" and a predecessor to more recent mangaka like Etsuko. In the 2000s, she published a slate of bl manga before transitioning entirely to josei. Of course she was licensed by June, and thus has fallen completely out of English language publication. Of course she has since gone into hiatus, and apparently hasn't written anything new since 2017. No one in the English fandom is probably reading Yamagata Satomi for the first time in 2026, which is, I think, a tragedy.
"Manic Love" (also known by its Japanese name "Kanjou Kairo," or Emotion Circuit) is the introspective teen drama mirror to "Gray to Blue to Aimade" and "Inu mo Kuwanai," one that only Yamagata Satomi would write. Its main character Maki is a high school student who has lost interest in his studies. He asks his teacher Mizuguchi to introduce him to a cram school, and Mizuguchi recommends one at which a specific math tutor named Haruji teaches. Maki is interested in Haruji's classes, but that interest then translates into interest in Haruji himself. Soon enough, Maki and Haruji are deep in a no-strings-attached sexual relationship. But when Maki reveals his relationship with Haruji to Mizuguchi, he learns that Mizuguchi and Haruji have a past, one that may have influenced Mizuguchi's decision to send Maki Haruji's way.
"Do you want to be him, or do you want to fuck him?" For all the softness or literary pretentiousness or psychological convolutedness of "Gray to Blue," "Inu mo Kuwanai," or "Manic Love," this is the crude, well-worn question that sits in the center of all three stories. And the answer is yes. These characters want to be each other, and want to fuck each other, and search desperately (fruitlessly?) for some secret third thing that is neither and both at the same time. Koushi wants to protect himself and protect the fragile relationships he has with Koutarou and Masatora by keeping them at a remove; to let Masatora see his weakness is to utterly destroy the sense of self he's spent years building. Yamashiro and Okuzono have spent their whole lives reenacting a dynamic they fossilized as teenagers, because to do anything else would force them to confront the things (time, energy, other people's affection) they have sacrificed just so they don't have to confront their own feelings.
In "Manic Love," Yamagata Satomi poses this question in its most straightforward iteration yet. Mizuguchi met Haruji when Haruji was just barely older than Maki; now he sends Maki to Haruji, who is the same age Mizuguchi was when they first met. Maki is Mizuguchi's student, but he is not Mizuguchi. Will you treat him like I treated you? Mizuguchi seems to ask. Will you become me, or will you remain you and make Maki into me? "If I had known you were one of his students, I would have run away," Haruji grumbles to Maki when he realizes the trap that has been set for him. But like Yamashiro, even when he knows the trick being played, he cannot resist taking a bite of the forbidden fruit thrown his way.
Maki is the most elusive and powerful of the characters so far, proof that the miracle workers of bl are always the characters that can fully and shamelessly embody their desires. He wholeheartedly embraces the experiment Mizuguchi has signed him up for, but his solution seems not to be what Mizuguchi expected. Instead of offering Haruji a second chance, Maki is determined to repair what came before, to be a channel between Mizuguchi and Haruji, the "emotion circuit" that connects their hearts. He loves Haruji, as himself and as Mizuguchi's substitute, and as himself and also Haruji's substitute also learns to love Mizuguchi. Yamagata posits through Maki that just like with any other adult behavior, teenagers learn how to love by imitating—sometimes wholly becoming—the adult lovers around them. "I admired Mizuguchi's coolness," Maki muses to himself. But he cannot become Mizoguchi, if only because he cannot hold Haruji the way Mizuguchi could. In that gap between wanting to be the man to hold Haruji and being instead the boy that Haruji holds, Maki finally learns how to love and, predictably, gets his heart broken.
Love is about the Other, but it is also about the discovery of the Self through the Desire of the Other. Love has the power to change, and in fact will change us, even when we are deluded by Love—or some other feeling wearing Love's skin—into believing the only way to keep Love alive is by rejecting change. Here, Love is a young man who admires an older man, who wants to be that older man but doesn't want to repeat the older man's mistakes, who is determined to not let the older man repeat his own mistakes. Moirai-like, these characters move in and out of their roles—lover, beloved, teacher, student, subject, object—each time buffered by a third man who acts as a bridge. I love the gray areas these stories offer us, the refusal to whittle down a romance so that it only consists of two people and nothing else, the rejection of a simple story or happy ending that would go down easier. A story that catches in your throat—in the end, that is what I read bl for.
34/50: friends with supernatural benefits ("yotsuya ghost knight," "my bad painkiller")
One thing about me is that I've never met an exorcism plot I won't at least try. Exorcists, shamans, onmyouji, priests and monks with a specialty in the supernatural—these are all catnip to me, a self-identified cat person. So "Yotsuya Ghost Knight" had two things going for it: (1) a main character who is an exorcist and (2) possibly one of the best cover designs I've seen in recent history.
What is that old adage about never judging a book by its cover? I've bought many things based on uninformed and purely aesthetic criteria. (Admittedly, most of those things have been bottles of wine to bring as housewarming gifts.) I'm afraid "Yotsuya Ghost Knight" proves the adage true. One shouldn't judge a book by its cover, and one shouldn't buy manga just because someone with amazing aesthetic sensibilities combined deco-boom with a graphic style that looks like a typography sample pack vomited all over a stack of talismans (positive). Alas, I probably will not learn any lessons from this.
"Yotsuya Ghost Knight" despite the modern aesthetics of its cover design, is a very old-fashioned story, to the point where I was surprised to learn that it was not from the extra porny early-2000s but was first published in Japan in 2023, apparently as Shiroi Choco's debut work. Exorcist Yotsuya Okuru is the most gifted and powerful ghostbuster of his generation, but a combination of past family trauma and isolation from ordinary people due to his line of work have made him a shy, awkward introvert. This isn't a problem, except that someone has unleashed an incredible evil spirit, and the only way Okuru can properly exorcise it is to squirt. Yes, from his dick. For, you see, spirits can be overcome with bodily fluids rich in life energy, and in the ranking of available bodily fluids, squirting is even more powerful than semen, and certainly more powerful than the tears Okuru has been using so far. Okuru is, however, a virgin, with absolutely no sexual experience in anything but vanilla masturbation. A chance encounter with AV star Fukase Naito, also known as the Squirting Squire, may just be the key to his troubles.
I'm sure this summary has raised many questions that you are hoping the story will answer. I had the same questions. Why squirting? Why a squirting squire? Like, in his videos, is Naito in a sexy knight costume? What is the premise? Does he wander the countryside making people squirt? With a sword? Does the sword he's holding on the cover of the DVD get used? Is that really enough to make him so popular that he's swarmed by a mixed-gender mixed-age all-demographics crowd the minute he goes out in public? Is he equally good at making men and women squirt, and if not, is it a transferable skill between the genders? Also, okay, Okuru says in the first chapter that semen is more potent than the tears, but "it's harder to use in actual battle," so that's why he saves his tears in vials to use during exorcism, but then how in the heck does he expect squirting to come into this equation? Does he have to save up the fluids that he emits from the squirting? How is that different from ejaculating into a vial? Or is he supposed to make himself squirt in the middle of an exorcism? And how did the exorcism community even arrive at the conclusion that squirting works better than semen? Who was doing the A/B testing?
Friends, these are not questions that "Yotsuya Ghost Knight" will answer. Instead, it will introduce even more questions that you did not even think to ask, because you understandably did not know the story would go there. Why is a side character named Ito-senpai who appears to have no connection to Okuru other than being a fellow exorcist so obsessed with Okuru, to the point of summoning an extremely powerful cursed spirit that possesses both Ito and Okuru? Why is Naito able to punch spirits in chapter one, an ability he never shows again? Why is Okuru, who is well-versed in understanding spirits and helping send them on their way, so convinced that his dead parents' spirits hold a grudge against him, when it is even obvious to Naito, a total stranger, that they like every other spirit have a lingering attachment they don't want to relinquish? And is Naito's protein powder business at the end sort of, ahem, semen-themed?
All this to say, "Yotsuya Ghost Knight" is a mess, a bunch of story elements thrown together and scrambled in between light-hearted (though very explicit) sex scenes. The headlights of its plot flicks aimlessly between character moments, never building tension or chemistry between any two characters. Okuru is a bog-standard introverted lead who gets in his own head and is described as being kind-hearted even though we really don't see him do anything particularly kind. But Shiroi Choco seems unwilling to make him truly negative or off-putting, so we're expected to believe this naïve and withdrawn boy draws in friends, obsessive stans, and a seasoned sex worker, even though his personality is thin to the point of translucent. The most interesting part of Okuru is his exorcism abilities, and we never get to see much of them. No paraphernalia, no talismans, no hand gestures to make seals—just Okuru making like a sprinkler all over some evil spirits. Likewise, I love AV actors in bl manga plots, but Naito's job is barely a footnote in a story where the whole premise hinges on him being an expert at making people squirt.
I spend a lot of time trying to think deeply about the series I read for this blog, ruminating on themes and how to present them in unexpected ways, so that I can shoehorn them into what I see as broader themes in the genre. But it is sometimes fun (and humbling) to encounter a story that totally defies any of my attempts to say anything deeper. "Yotsuya Ghost Knight" is just such a story. Shiroi Choco is certainly competent as a mangaka, with an airy cute style that works for Okuru's teary-eyed uke faces and Naito's mole-inflected handsomeness. But how this of all series got licensed out of the sea of bl manga that is published every year is, I think, the true mystery of "Yotsuya Ghost Knight."
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500 words or not, I don't like ending any week on such a disappointed note. So let's pivot to something I read a little while back: Murasaki Hiro's "My Bad Painkiller," a story I can only describe as "My Little Inferno but written by someone who is not Asada Nemui." Mikuni Leo is sick of his life. He's plagued with debt he inherited from his parents, stuck in a dead-end job as a server in a diner, sexually harassed by boss, and is all around lonely and friendless. Believing himself utterly abandoned by God, he turns instead to the dark arts, hoping to summon a demon who will do his bidding. What he gets instead is an ex-con named Sakaki Amane, who is more than happy to take advantage of Leo's various offerings (food, body, and emotions) to get a foothold back into normal society.
The moment I knew that "My Bad Painkiller" would stay with me for a long, long time is when, in chapter two, Amane hunts down Leo's former bullies, uses them as a dartboard, and takes a picture to show Leo. "This is obscene," Leo says, trembling, and both the reader and Amane are prepared to believe this is a bridge too far for Leo. But as it turns out, Leo is deeply, deeply moved by the lengths Amane would go, both in terms of his cruelty and for Leo. "You are a demon," Leo tells Amane. "You are my savior."
Leo and Amane have both rejected humanity—or, perhaps, believe humanity has rejected them both. Leo feels abandoned by God, his family, society, stuck in a bad place with no path to get out. Amane is a criminal with no family and a presumptive boss of the criminal underworld determined to bring Amane back into his fold. But the reality is that they crave a space where they can feel human, deserving of normal human emotions like love and validation. Like "My Little Inferno," the saving grace in a cruel world is a thin, treacherous path of normalcy. Leo and Amane live together, have sex with each other, and go on what could reasonably be described as "dates," but far from being romantic, these things feel like two people simply hanging out, enjoying if not each other's company, then each other's human warmth, like two animals snuggling together in the cold. They have been through too much to believe that another person could become their entire world or solve all of life's problems for them. Instead, they yearn for someone to be at their side, with whom life is just that little bit easier.
In the final chapter, Amane's criminal underworld ex asks Amane one of the eternal questions of bl's rejected men: Why didn't you chose to me? What does he have that I don't? Amane, by then, had already ridden off, no prince on a white horse but a demon on a black motorbike with Leo safely seated behind him. The answer to the unnamed boss's question, then, comes in the form of a flashback to their younger days, when he had told Amane, "the key to living a lonely, unloved life is to fill that void with ill-gotten pleasures. And the only person who can give you that is me." This was, of course, the wrong answer. What Leo offers Amane is not love, necessarily, but a companionship in exigent circumstances that can be identical to love. His promise is to be with Amane, come police attention or high water. What Amane—and Leo—wants is not a solution to how to live lonely and unloved, but to no longer be lonely, no longer be unloved.
This, I think, is one reason why "My Bad Painkiller" works for me in a way that "Yotsuya Ghost Knight" did not. Both feature characters trying to summon divine—or demonic—intervention to solve a nominal problem, only to bring into their lives a very human man who solves a problem they weren't even willing to articulate. "Yotsuya Ghost Knight" does this too straightforwardly. Naito's superpower ends up being, quite literally, the ability to make Okuru come as he never has before. (There's also, I guess, some "met as children once and forgot" side revelation, and you know how much I loathe this in a romance story.) But as powerful as exorcism through squirting is, it doesn't compare to the power of companionship in "My Bad Painkiller," which cannot transform the physical world around Leo and Amane but transforms them as people who can defy the world around them. Is Amane a demon? Does he have demonic powers? To the extent that demons are desire and the perverted fulfillment of desire made flesh, yes. But the true demon summoned is Leo himself, who despite being powerless and penniless and physical-prowess-less stands firm at Amane's side. With a gun pointed at him, at risk of losing his life, the only thing he truly has in his possession, he says, "Amane is my friend for life." Not "I love him," or "he belongs to me," but "no matter what, I am on his side."
"Yotsuya Ghost Knight" is available from Tokyopop. Renta used to have "My Bad Painkiller" but I can no longer find it in their catalog, which makes me very sad!
33/50: don't stop believin' (dayoo, "lovers on the last train")
Hello. I know it has been a long time since I last posted. I wish I had a good excuse, but the reality is that I skipped a week, and then one week became two, and then two weeks became close to two months, and I found myself simply unable to write. Yes, the holidays happened in between, and yes, I did do some travel, some friend-seeing, some rest and relaxation. I watched "Heated Rivalry." I held my friends captive to watch "100 Meters." I went to a Korean spa, and ate Yemeni food for the first time, and spent New Year's Eve in an overly-warm New York apartment bathed in the smell of raclette singing Auld Lang Syne and watching our host open a blind box that was supposed to oracularly represent what was in store for us in 2026. (We got the Butterfly Dream Skullpanda, which I understand to be very rare and thus portentous.) And then I came home to my apartment, and went back to work, and simply did not write anything about bl.
I've thought a lot about how writing is a discipline, a practice, and a ritual. To me, it is as much, maybe even more, these things than it is a hobby, the result being that what enjoyment I get from it is delayed, sometimes purely hypothetical. I have to want it, and I have to want wanting it. And even though it is something I can do, am even sometimes good at, and am recognized as having some small talent for, I frequently do not want to do it, and do not want to want to do it. What gets me sitting in front of a keyboard to do it is either (1) blacking out in the grips of a new obsession or (2) shame. In this case, I made a commitment to do fifty posts on bl manga, and by god, I will see it through.
Well, I told myself all this three weeks ago. And as you can clearly see, nothing happened. When one week becomes two, and two weeks become close to two months, it is hard to get back on track. Writing is a discipline, a practice, a ritual, but unfortunately, so is not-writing.
At a certain age, inertia becomes a driving force, sometimes the only driving force. If you are a stable, pragmatic person, and nothing tragic has happened to you yet, it is very easy to decide, "This Is Fine." Your life has been long, but hopefully, it will be longer still, and in light of that, any dissatisfactions in your life suddenly seem immaterial. What is imperative is to keep going. To give voice to discontent, to struggle for something different, threatens to derail all the progress you believe you've made. Might as well keep going down the same track. Might as well stay on the same train.
Dayoo's "Lovers on the Last Train" finds its main character Harue Shindo in just such a dilemma. At 42, he has never had a boyfriend—or any relationship, for that matter. Despite his bland exterior, his workaholic persona, and his total lack of dating history, Harue is a man of capacious, though cryptic, desire. In food as well as love, his eyes are bigger than his stomach. He wants a tonkatsu lunch set that he can't finish eating. He wants one more drink after overtime, before he has to go back to work the next morning. And he wants a fairytale forever love, but is terrified when it comes sauntering headfirst into his life in the form of Fujishima Yoshitaka, a suspiciously handsome wedding planner with whom Harue accidentally matched on a dating app.
There are no obstacles to Harue and Fujishima's love. They are attracted to each other instantly. They get along well. Fujishima is good-looking, outgoing, accommodating when it comes to Harue's inexperience, and finds Harue's purity and innocence one of his most attractive features, rather than something for which Harue should be ashamed. Harue, on the other hand, is straightforward, honest, and appreciative of Fujishima's romanticism and idealism. They spend a night in a hotel. They even manage, eventually, to exchange contact information. And yet, despite all this, the story comes to a standstill, as they try to navigate to the next step, which is not at all obvious even though they both, very obviously, like each other.
Harue is exactly who he says he is: 42, and gay, and a total virgin in love and sex. But so is Fujishima. He is 100% who he claims to be—it's just that who he claims to be seems impossible. Dayoo is not interested in unexpected or uncomfortable depths. There are no skeletons in Fujishima's closet, except for that of his pet cat who tragically passed away a month before the story begins and whose likeness Fujishima wears as a charm necklace. Faced with the 100% perfect man of his dreams, Harue experiences a total mental collapse. He was never immunized against love to begin with, and Fujishima's uncanny ability to catch Harue at just the right moment and sweep Harue off his feet leads Harue down the path of foolish behavior. He finds himself googling "what does it mean to hold hands with someone in a dream?" Instead of drinking a juicebox gifted to him by Fujishima, he stores it in his own fridge for over a week. He starts to worry about the way he looks, the way he smells. Desperate to present his best possible self to Fujishima, he doesn't realize that the only thing Fujishima really wants from him is to simply show up as himself. There is no better way to kill momentum than through overthinking, and Harue's overthinking ends up tying Fujishima into knots with him.
If vulnerability is showing yourself as you really are, opening up your soft underbelly trusting that it will not be torn to shreds, then there is incredible vulnerability in asking for exactly what you want. Not what you think you should want, and not what you think you deserve, but what you think good and lovely and want for yourself. As we get older, we become accustomed to not getting what we want. Eventually, we stop even asking. "When you want something but it's just outside of reach, and you think you can handle the pain of missing out on it, you end up wasting your chance to get what you want," Fujishima's friend scolds him. "Eventually, you get to the point where that pain becomes normal, and you're stuck in a loop of losing whatever's important to you." Growing up, Fujishima realizes, is not making peace with lack, but going all out to get the things you think are important.
Harue learns this too when, embarrassed of his messy, musty overtime self, he dodges a dinner invitation with Fujishima and catches up instead with an old crush, now happily married with kids. Once, Harue would have been fine settling for a quiet, nonconfrontational acceptance, the friend who was understanding enough not to ask questions. But what he really wants—what he needs—is someone who will enthusiastically, proactively love him, enough to overcome the anxious attachment Harue has developed through his years of inexperience. That person is, of course, Fujishima, who reassures him that "when you are 100% yourself, that alone is genuinely perfect for me."
"Lovers on the Last Train" is light on character development and plot and dramatics, but Dayoo has a careful, lyrical touch with their writing. Of particular note is an early monologue from Harue where he compares his lack of relationship experience to an empty drawer that he has always ignored and is now forced to acknowledge. Dayoo's strongest work is in the opening pages, which is actually a flash forward to a year later, when Harue and Fujishima are dating. Exhausted from a long day's work, and wrapped up in the arms of his loving boyfriend, Harue finds himself casting a spell: Please don't have second thoughts. Stay with me forever. The juxtaposition of the comfortable domesticity of their lives with Harue's quiet desperation towards Fujishima is so delicious that if there's one thing I could fault Dayoo for, it's that they skimped out on the "getting along" part of Harue and Fujishima's relationship in favor of the more conventional "getting together" story.
(Side note: does anyone else feel like "Lovers on the Last Train" feels like a spinoff, as if Fujishima were a character in another story that Dayoo forgot to publish? The pet cat, the ex-lover that Harue briefly glimpses who may or may not be the same lover that catches Fujishima stalking Harue on his soba date with Ida, the former client who divorced his wife to be with Fujishima— these all feel like details referencing events that Dayoo assumes we're familiar with and threw me for a loop when they were all dropped without follow-up.)
I originally had a four-parter planned for #33, but it was unfortunately mostly me panning some series I'd read and found lacking. But in the in-between weeks, I realized that wasn't the energy with which I wanted to start 2026. I had purchased "Lovers on the Last Train" on a whim while in New York, browsing the Kinokuniya shelves and thinking—berating myself—about not-writing. I carted that volume to the new year party. It sat in my bag when the host opened the blind box to reveal The Butterfly Dream. That felt portentous. Do you know what The Butterfly Dream is supposed to symbolize? Fantasy, mysticism, but above all, transformation. It is a reference to Zhuangzi, who once dreamed he was a butterfly, and woke up unsure if he were a man who dreamed he were a butterfly, or a butterfly who dreamed it was a man. "Lovers on the Last Train" is unrealistic, but, well, isn't love often unrealistic? What makes something "unrealistic" anyway? In dreaming that such love can be possible, that it can be possible for Harue and Fujishima, that it can be possible for me and you, do I not transform reality? If life is just a dream, then I can dream into life the unreality of dreams. Isn't that what bl is? A little dream of love, of transformation, for ourselves as well as the characters.
"Lovers on the Last Train" is available from Seven Seas.
hi there! i recently got a mangaplanet subscription bc of the futekiya news and i was wondering if you had a thread on twit with ur recs before it ultimately goes down? or am i hallucinating? if so.... would you still be open to listing some recs i (and anyone else!) should check out? and thank u for all that u do!! my bl reading has been so enriched with ur musings and recommendations
hello! i had a very old notion site where i was collecting brief reviews that i did for futekiya: today in futekiya it is many years out of date, but they are rich in my stupid musings if that's what you wanted lmao
other than that, i'm so sorry, i didn't list out the blrecs weekly posts by publisher. but if you search my tumblr for "futekiya" as a term, they should come up!
i would be remiss if i did not include @allthefujoshiunite's very well curated rec list, some of which are lesser mentioned futekiya stories! if you have not read her accompanying post, please do! FAREWELL TO THE GOLDEN AGE OF BL – IT'S YOUR FAULT THAT I'M NOT POPULAR!
32/50: stray cat blues (sunmyeong/chub, "stranger")
I am writing this week about "Stranger," but I am not too proud to admit that this is not the post it deserves. It needs someone who has the time and energy to dive deeply into all the ways it is similar and different from other "older man picks up a young man in dire straits" stories, what its limitations say about our ability to talk about poverty and socioeconomic conditions in fiction and specifically in the manhwa form, and maybe (if I had the time) how it differs from the novel.
But I don't have the time, and more importantly, on December 18, "Stranger" is leaving Manta, where it is currently free to read for premium users.
So here is the tl;dr: read "Stranger" now, before its license with Manta expires. It is meditative and quiet in the places where other stories are loud and demonstrative. It is about taking ownership of yourself, but more than that, it shows its characters practicing that self-ownership in their ordinary, everyday lives. Though it begins with a big splashy action, it understands that love—and life—is demonstrated through little repeated ones. And occasionally, especially in seasons 1 and 2, the artist Chub frees themselves from the workaday competence of drawing handsome men in sterile environs and pulls out a dream or metaphor image that stops you in your tracks with its outlandish beauty. If you like stories about unexpected age gap relationships, a man taking in a stray cat of a younger top, breaking the cycle of violence and victimization, you owe it to yourself to read "Stranger."
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You have read this kind of story before. An older, wealthier man finds a young, poorer man on the street. The younger man is jobless, hapless, arrestingly beautiful. The older man is bored, amused, arrestingly handsome. Together they determine the terms of their relationship, which oscillates wildly between father-son, guardian-ward, patron-patronage, and lovers. You feel strongly here the bl mantra that the gayest thing one man can be for another man is family.
Kim Jiho is a product of his bad circumstances: a college drop-out, a former pickpocket, saddled with a father who drinks, gambles, and was violent towards Jiho. When Yeon Woojung picks him up off the street, Jiho (and the reader) assumes that it is nothing but the whim of a well-off stranger who wants to play Daddy Longlegs to an unfortunate youth, an assumption that is deepened when we learn that Woojung is a prosecutor. Woojung is impeccable, if inscrutable, in his role, buying Jiho a bed and a new wardrobe, telling Jiho he has no expectations that Jiho work, go to school, or even do chores at the house. Eventually, however, Jiho realizes that he and Woojung are more similar than they are different, and that far from wandering into an extended petplay roleplay, Woojung is hoping to heal himself through caring for Jiho.
One of my favorite fictional characters is Baek Eunyung from Wanan's "No Home," who like Jiho is saddled with a violent drunkard of a father, bad family circumstances, and a personality that is the imp of the perverse made flesh. Throughout "No Home," Eunyung pushes everyone and everything around him to the breaking point, doing his best to destroy the fragile edifices of family (found and otherwise) and friendship that the other characters are trying to erect around him. This is because the Eunyung we meet initially in "No Home" wants to prove that the world is bad. If the world is bad, he reasons, then all the bad things that happen to him are not a function of him being bad or unlucky or pathetic, but rather because bad things happen to everyone. If he ruins a good thing, it is because good things do not exist. In ruining every good thing that comes his way, of course, he has created a self-perpetuating cycle that proves his point: the world is bad to Eunyung, because he has made it that way.
Jiho is not quite the same as Eunyung. Woojung canonically compares him to a cat who attacks its loving owner for no reason, but I don't think that's right either. Cats attack because they are overstimulated, because despite how much they love us, they can only tolerate so much. Jiho's imp of the perverse is a relative of self-harm, an attempt to punish himself. Jiho believes his violent, dark thoughts are unique to him, instead of something anyone in his situation would come up with; he believes that his reactions are a consequence of his inherited or innate bad personality, instead of the natural reactions of a child beaten and pushed into a corner. So instead of dismissing them, he forces himself to voice them out loud, expecting each time to be hurt for his bad thoughts, because hurt is what he deserves.
What, then, is Woojung's problem?
There is a core to Woojung that must be broken somehow. No normal person picks up a teenager, however beautiful, off the street and invites them into their home, to live without responsibility or obligation or even protection against theft. It's almost more normal that Woojung then allows said teenager to fuck him within an inch of his life, multiple times—at least then there's a reason for Jiho being there! Woojung doesn't date, keeps his friends at a remove, is friendly but not personal with his coworkers, doesn't want to get married, works a little too hard in a job in the justice system that he takes seriously but doesn't seem to love. These all speak to who he is somewhere outside of Jiho's worldview. But Woojung's interiority—and Jiho's narrative voice—is so strong that the reader too is warded off. All we have are implications and our own readings of them.
The closest we ever get is the chapter that shows Woojung's point of view when he first picks up Jiho. But this, of all the Woojung actions, is the least interesting to me. This action needs no explanation, because it is the necessary catalyst for the story to exist. What I want is a peek into the cracked core that keeps Woojung there, that tried to turn away from Jiho's attraction only to, almost immediately, take the boy into his bed, that jeopardizes his neutrality as an arm of the law so as keep Jiho out of the criminal system, that expresses his anger at Jiho leaving him by asking snidely upon his return, "Did you enjoy your little trip?" If only we had access to what lies behind the measured adult Woojung forces himself to be afterwards, the one who has learned to be suspicious of immediate reactions, and his own most of all.
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What I love about the first season and a half of "Stranger" is the specificity to the characters. But as the story goes on, that specificity is clouded somehow. Love erases the individuality of Jiho and Woojung as people and reduces them simply to lovers molded in each other's shape. Their sentiments are those eternal sentiments of all lovers: I wish I had been there for you when you were a child, I will never let go of you, I love you no matter who you were or who you turn out to be.
I'm tortured by this, because I want true love for Woojung and Jiho, but I also want the thorns and armor and (on Woojung's part) eel-like ability to slip out of expressing his actual feelings that were the reasons they needed love in the first place. Taken to the most extreme, "Stranger" seems to argue that just as all happy families are alike, all lovers are alike—and boring in that sameness. Late-stage Jiho is just a sulky black cat who lashes out when teased too much or given too much love. He is domesticated, full of smiles and tender demonstrations of affection (though just for Woojung), instead of the interestingly tangled snarl of contradictory emotions that he began as.
"I wanted to look normal in front of Woojung," early Jiho says. He longs to be loved like a normal boy. By the end of the series, Jiho has achieved normalcy, so much so that he is anonymized, has become any number of fiercely loyal younger tops. But it was his pain, his abnormality, that drew him to Woojung initially, because it echoed Woojung's own. Later as he falls more and more in love with Woojung, those abnormalities no longer matter. Jiho insists that he doesn't care about Woojung's past. He will always accept Woojung, as he is, because who Woojung is at the moment is a man who loves Jiho.
This is a beautiful love story, but not a particularly interesting character story. Woojung becomes a man defined only by his love and not the specificities that speak to the life he has lived up until that moment: his habit of throwing cups when angry, cheekily putting beer in Jiho's hoodie, picking at his food like a bird or the world's worst mukbang streamer, the way he strips down and dives into bed when sick. In the first stages of their relationship, Woojung has to remind Jiho to resist the totalizing gravity of love, which always tries to subsume the beloved into the lover's cannibalistic heart. First love makes Jiho unwilling to share Woojung with even Woojung's own memories. "You can't have my every first moment," Woojung chides Jiho. What Jiho falls for is a person who has lived a life without Jiho, and has chosen to live his life with Jiho going forward. It is a treasure Jiho has to learn to savor, and one that unfortunately bends to the demands of the requisite love story by Season 3.
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I feel like I have been complaining too much, or at least picking too much at the threads that "Stranger" leaves behind. So as a finale let me highlight what "Stranger" does best.
When trying to explain why he is helping Jiho, Woojung says, "I am just stepping on the brake pedal once in a while." This ethos of taking space, giving breathing room, distrusting one's immediate reactions, pervades the series, both narratively and in the characters' actions. Where other stories might lean in, "Stranger" always seems to be taking a step back. Too often, longer Korean bl manhwa become a series of characters reacting to plot points. But "Stranger" is a story that tries not to rush, that realizes its strength is in the depiction of Jiho and Woojung feeling each other out.
Sometimes this makes "Stranger" feel slow, even plodding, like chewing the gum of Woojung and Jiho's dynamic until there is no more flavor left. But at its strongest moments, "Stranger" exercises the kind of steely self-control you expect from its title character Woojung. In the beginning of Season 2, Jiho seethes at Woojung, "What do you know about my life, when you live in this comfortable house?" As it turns out, Woojung knows a lot. He has been exactly where Jiho is, and doesn't deserve this kind of treatment from Jiho.
But instead of being angry, Woojung lowers the temperature. "That's a bit too harsh," he says. He doesn't try to explain himself. He doesn't yank out his album of photos showing that he too grew up in foster care, that he has been in Jiho's position, that he doesn't need a lecture on how precarious safety can feel when you have nothing. He gives Jiho the space to calm down, regret his rash actions, even feel ashamed of lashing out. That makes Jiho's eventual apology all the more sincere. It isn't that he was wrong because Woojung was once, too, a figure of pity; he was wrong because of his own feelings, his own actions.
The ultimate theme of "Stranger" circles around personal responsibility. What can, and should, we take responsibility for? In the end, the only thing we can, and should, answer for are our own feelings and the actions we ourselves take in response to those feelings. Over and over again, Jiho asks: what if I rob you? What if I kill you? What if I betray you? What if I love or leave you? Over and over again, Woojung answers: then you will have done what you have done. He cannot control Jiho. He can only judge Jiho for what Jiho chooses to do.
Love can be a feeling held simply in one person's heart, but in that form it is incomplete. True love, as "Stranger" argues, is putting that feeling into action. In the final climax of the series, Jiho betrays Woojung, not by being violent, or stealing, or showing his weaknesses, or being caught in any other crime, but by abdicating on the only choice Woojung has asked of Jiho, to stay here with him. Woojung of all people knows what Jiho has lacked in his life up until this point, and he has tried his best to give Jiho all of it: reassurance, the space to make mistakes, firm but kind guidance and correction, the tools to navigate the traps and labyrinths your anxious brain can create without you. Isn't that enough? What more can Woojung give him? All he has asked in return is what Jiho is capable of giving, and that is Jiho himself.
Instead, Jiho runs away. And in reaction, for the first time in their relationship, Woojung shows a white-hot anger, and one directed towards Jiho specifically. "I had dreams about killing you. I even imagined it once," Jiho admits when he is faced with Woojung again. "Great," Woojung says, with a surprising immediacy. "I wanted to do the same to you."
I love this ending sequence, which I will not spoil in detail so that you too can enjoy it. There are many ways this last arc of their relationship could go, and instead of a tortuous separation arc or some confluence of plot points, Sunmyeong and Chub wisely choose instead to focus on Jiho learning to take responsibility for himself and his feelings and showing us, finally, a crack in Woojung's armor, a peek into what hurts him the most. After a whole series being accommodating and generous and the bigger person, so to speak, in bed, Woojung even demonstrates a brief moment of venom when goading Jiho into fucking him, showing us there are more ways to be mean during sex than just humiliation or physical pain. If I wished for him to go further, if I wished for Woojung to finally lash out and show us the delinquent that Seok Joongwon tamed into submission to make the adult Woojung is now, that's probably my personal kinks coming out. (I also think Woojung should have topped once! Just once!) It's enough to recognize that Woojung too can be emotionally compromised, and that of course it is Jiho who does it in the end. It is these weaknesses that make them the distinct characters they are and define the distinct love they are finally able to share in the end.
You can read "Stranger" (but not for long!) on Manta.
hiiii! this will probs sound vague but i wanted to ask: can you recommend 5 movies you think a fujin must watch? they don't need to focus on the sexual identity itself explicitly or be about romance but maybe sth about the vibe, the dynamic, or the flavor that makes u go "omg that's so bl". idk where i'm goin with this, but maybe you get me. u can ignore the msg if it's silly. thanks either way!
anon i would never ignore a silly message, and this is far from silly!
based on what you are asking ("the vibe, the dynamic, the flavor"), i think you are not asking for movies that are important to bl as a genre, but instead movies that i personally love and think everyone should watch and feel like bl. so i tried to think of movies that are not clearly about gay/queer romances or the gay/queer longing of one man for another man and have excluded obvious ones like "brokeback mountain" or the luca guadagnino double feature of "call me by your name" and "queer." i also realized there was a whole subset of movies here that were categorized in my head as "straight movies that feel like bl" ("decision to leave" came to mind immediately, but also something like "comrades: almost a love story"/"tian mi mi"), but i understand not everyone loves asking for "things that feel like bl" only to receive a het romance. what does this leave us with? a lot of very homoerotic films from across the ages!!
in vague chronological order:
1. "maurice" (1987)
immediately i violated my rule of "no movies explicitly about queer characters," but the reality is that every fujin has to watch this movie and no list of "important bl movies" would be complete without this one. it comes up over and over again in the history of bl as a genre and inspired more than one member of magnificent 49ers. the original book (by e.m. forster) is perfectly serviceable, but if i had to hazard a guess, it is really young hugh grant's face, stunningly charming and then slowly cooling into terrified heterosexuality, that launched a thousand fujo ships, just as timothee chalamet would later do (rather in reverse) in "call me by your name."
2. "lawrence of arabia" (1962) / "becket "(1964) / " the lion in winter" (1968)
the unofficial "peter o'toole is caught in some unacknowledged gay shenanigans" trilogy. you don't have to watch all three, but you should watch at least one of them. if you want the most cinematically important one, it's "lawrence of arabia." if you want the most toxically gay one, it's "becket." with "lawrence," there is some debate as to whether the real historical figure himself was gay, but the director even admitted that one of the central relationships (lawrence and ali) was written as gay, so it's hard not to see the way the whole movie functions as a metaphor for a man struggling with self-hate and unbelongness, including with respect to his sexuality. with "becket" and "lion in winter," well, if you like old man yaoi where men desperately and despondently sublimate their feelings into their work (monarchy is a job!), you will like this. o'toole and burton in "becket" have such palpable, overpowering, and tragic chemistry that the movie simply splutters to a feeble end when they're no longer together, a complaint i have made about many a bl. as for "lion in winter," it is the most straight-passing of this group of three, but it does also imply that philip ii was fucking richard just to later blackmail richard's father (henry), and i eat those fucking scenes up with a spoon.
action films with two important male characters are always bl-flavored (see also: "top gun," "john wick 4," "tinker tailor soldier spy") but i weeded out the masses to arrive at this hk-film-noir-ish-sometimes-tony-leung-is-in-it group of three. as above, if you had to watch one of them, the cinematically important one is "hard-boiled," though my heart lives and dies with "infernal affairs." (but not "the departed." fuck "the departed.") "a better tomorrow" is old-school loyalty-as-the-ultimate-romance, and chow yun-fat does such a good job portraying what it looks like for a man to yearn for another man (straightly). in "hard-boiled," he and tony leung are thrown into a marriage of (violent and criminal) convenience; it is less bl-flavored, but entertaining. and if you throw both of those two movies in a blender and add in some early-2000s economic and social anxiety, you might get "infernal affairs," which bravely asks, "can a cop ever be a good person?" and also "is there anything gayer than two men pointing guns at each other in a standoff?" as "john wick 4" will prove later, no, there is not.
4. "the talented mr. ripley" (1999)
if you define bl outside of its country-of-origin, its existence as a genre/marketing tool, its history and its niche, and try to define it purely based on vibes, then you would get "the talented mr. ripley." this was matt damon, jude law, and gwyneth paltrow before they became headline famous, and they are so young and beautiful and vibrant that they feel like manga characters come to life. peter seymour hoffman appears here as a side character so detestable and charming that you know if he were an anime character he'd have a solid contingent of dedicated fans with itabadges and shrines. of course the story is classic bl fare: adoration, jealousy, coveting the luxuries of the rich, a friendship that gets too close and cools too fast, violence. what explicit gayness the screenplay cuts out of the novel is more than adequately replaced by an original ending that is one of the most tragic toxic bl-flavored scenes that could ever be dreamed up, starring none other than a young pre-"pirates of the caribbean" jack davenport flashing the bedroom eyes of a golden retriever top. minghella sets it all in a lush fictional italian village fit for any 70s shoujo magazine. Now That's What I Call BL.
5. "inu-oh" (2021)
i thought long and hard about what to put here, and decided to go with "inu-oh," both because i think it is a monumentally fantastic work of storytelling and animation and adaptation (it adapts the "tales of the heike" into a psychedelic rock opera, by in fact creating a character who goes on to do stage shows that can only be described as "freddie mercury but in feudal japan") and because it is an entry on this list about two male characters coming together, supporting each other, fighting for each other, and making each other into the best versions of themselves. though it is not explicitly about any of these things, it feels like a movie about queerness, about being "born wrong" but turning that into your superpower, about self-acceptance and radical self-love turning into a transformative power. it is, also, about how the world will try to crush all of that. it is a film so wild and weird that it feels like only yuasa masaaki could have made it. but it is, without a doubt, one of the best anime films i've ever seen.
bonus 6. "and then we danced" (2019)
this is very, very explicitly about gay longing and homophobia and coming out and marginalization, so i excluded it from the list initially, but then i thought about it, and i thought about how netflix is going to release "ten dance" soon, and decided i needed more people to know about and watch this film, which is set in georgia and is about a young dancer who becomes enamored of a new dancer who joins their troupe. this film is imbued with so much specificity of place and culture and fear, and it is a film about dance (and i love films about dance!), but above all there is a moment where one character dances to robyn's "honey" for another character, and it is one of the most beautiful and honest depictions of trying to show someone you love them you'll ever see.
31/50: you can't always desire what you want ("ichigenme: the first class is civil law" and "don't blame me!")
We English-language bl manga fans have not always had it easy, but those of us who are Yoshinaga Fumi fans (and especially those among us who have been fans since at least the mid-2000s) have always eaten well. Most of her work has been licensed, which is unsurprising in the case of her award-winning non-bl series like Ooku and What Did You Eat Yesterday?, but is exceptionally surprising when it comes to her early explicitly bl work like "The Moon and the Sandals," "Truly Kindly," and "Solfege." For this I think we have "Antique Bakery" to thank. A shoujo series (with a prominently gay character) so popular it received an anime adaptation and Japanese, Korean, and Thai live action adaptations (none of which, in my opinion, ever fully captured Yoshinaga's particular charm and style), "Antique Bakery" was the first of Yoshinaga's series to be licensed in English, and for a while it remained understandably her most well-known. It is, as we all know, not enough to be good to make it in the English market; you must also be sellable, and when all else failed, you could always bill Yoshinaga Fumi in the mid-to-late-2000s as "the creator of Antique Bakery."
Which DMP did, when they licensed "Ichigenme: The First Class is Civil Law" under their 801 Media imprint. How else do you sell this two-volume manga, whose plot requires you to have, of all things, a passing understanding of the "zemi," a uniquely Japanese higher education tradition where undergraduates choose a small-group seminar that historically furthered both one's academic and social/professional lives? In this story, straight-laced and determinedly middle-class law student Tamiya joins a zemi purely based on his interest in the subject matter, only to find out that due to the professor's notoriously easy grading, it is The Gathering Place for his well-to-do classmates who don't care at all about studying. Among them is Tohdou, the son of a congressman, who despite his frivolous personality and appearance earnestly pursues first Tamiya's love—and when that fails, his friendship.
"Ichigenme" is one of Yoshinaga's earliest professional works, but in it you can already see the bones of what will come: the complicated complicity of women and the men they love that appears in "Ooku," the archetype of the competent man who hides his trauma behind a frivolous exterior that will later haunt "Antique Bakery," and the finely detailed food spreads and depictions of domesticity as an expression of love that star in "What Did You Eat Yesterday." Tamiya and Tohdou are not Yoshinaga's strongest character work; they are constantly shown up in both volumes of "Ichigenme" by the supporting roles: their classmates who show no compunction using Tamiya's bookishness for their own gain, a professor who attracts Tamiya's respect and then attention, later Tohdou's own brother who weasels his way into the bed of Tamiya's colleague. My personal favorite is Terada, a female classmate and Tamiya's only other friend, who is ostracized by the entire student population when a nude picture of a woman who looks suspiciously like her appears in a magazine. Terada, like many other Yoshinaga characters, is steely, shameless, all-in on her own survival, and she is undoubtedly the heroine of her own story. Tohdou—and to a lesser extent, Tamiya—are involved, but it is as if they along with the readers are reacting to the merciless rhythm of Yoshinaga's plot, a world over which they have no control. This is another common Yoshinaga trait. Her main characters often suffer this fate.
But this is the joy of reading a Yoshinaga Fumi bl. What she offers in her stories is not a series of dots that connect into a line, but a scatterplot of interactions that each time miraculously shows her reader something about the experience of living in the world. She excels at the tension between two objects, be they faces or characters or concepts or even body parts. The most classic of the Yoshinaga Fumi scenes is of one person shouting down another in righteous anger, while the expressions change on the other's face. The tension is always in the shot/reverse-shot. She has never been proficient with the full human form, least of all when it comes to bodies naked and writhing in a sex scene. When Tamiya and Tohdou have sex, as they eventually do, their bodies engage in congress without us or even the rest of them. We see a hand or a tongue on a body part, and then, separated by panels and pages, a close-up of their faces reacting in pleasure.
The two-volume bl manga is an exercise in excess and restraint. You need a story strong enough to stand on its own, but expansive enough to fill more than a few chapters. You need the vision to build out a world, but the discipline to not get distracted by too many sideplots. Yoshinaga's answer to this has always been the anthology approach, with a strong opening to ground the setting and dynamics before playing couples (both romantic and otherwise) off of each other (both directly and indirectly). The most perfect example of this is the second volume she gave to her debut work "The Moon and the Sandals," which eschews any kind of connective narrative tissue in favor of a series of interludes into her characters' lives. The most moving for me is a very short chapter she dedicates to a female side character who was rejected by Kobayashi, the main character, in volume one. Upon learning that Kobayashi is now dating her brother, she tries to put on a brave face, but then collapses into tears, and it's her monologue fervently wishing for time to heal all wounds and give everyone "our place to belong" that closes out volume one. "Naru-chan Thereafter" is her exit from volume two. Framed as if the reader has managed to grab her off the street for a quick interview, it consists only of panels of her face as she reassures us that she is happy. This is the luxury the two-volume series affords us: a space for all characters to find their happiness and a space for Yoshinaga to flex her creative prowess.
When Yoshinaga is at her peak, her tendency to skip along the surface of time in her characters' lives feels poignant and well-observed. When Yoshinaga falters, her almost pathological avoidance of linear storytelling is frustrating. So it is with the second volume of "Ichigenme," which comes off like a superfluous collection of original doujinshi, with its many sex scenes and the sudden pivot to Tohdou's brother Hiroaki. Where I think Yoshinaga lets the story down is Tamiya and Tohdou's dynamic. At the end of volume one, they are more than friends but hardly lovers, but volume two opens with a smash cut to them gainfully employed and happily cohabiting, with nary a thought for the seven years of in-between. The Tamiya and Tohdou here are only superficially similar to the characters we meet in volume one, and much more similar to extras we might have met in "Antique Bakery," which Yoshinaga had either finished or was writing simultaneously at the time of "Ichigenme" volume two. Freed from the structure of the zemi, Tamiya and Tohdou's interactions feel aimless, even at their liveliest, in a way that's not true of Kobayashi and his eventual lover Toyo from volume two of "The Moon and the Sandals."
But it's still a joy to sit with them, to see where their lives have taken them. The final story, about Tohdou's brother Hiroaki, is Yoshinaga at her most heart-strings-pulling, most quietly devastating. It doesn't fit with anything else thematically in "Ichigenme," but still, you cannot be upset watching a master practice her craft. Perhaps Yoshinaga is the rare type that either excels at the oneshot or the five-plus volume saga. If I mourn "Ichigenme's" short run time, it is because after this, Yoshinaga will write the long series that cement her as one of the all-time greats. One cannot help but wonder what she could have done with a true bl epic.
Yamada Yugi has not fared as well as Yoshinaga Fumi in recent times when it comes to English licenses, but once upon a time someone—or many someones—employed by the constellation of now-defunct publishers must have loved her as much as I still do, because a surfeit of her early work was licensed ("Spring Fever," "Glass Sky," "Laugh Under the Sun," "Picnic"). I've already written about "Close the Last Door," and I meant to save the rest of this post for another week so that I would have a backlog and could get off the weekly treadmill, but I love Yamada Yugi (and you, my reader!) too much to hold back.
Yamada's works may have never gotten the acclaim of "Antique Bakery," but very few bl manga have ever surpassed "Don't Blame Me" in its use of the two-volume format. "Don't Blame Me" is Yamada Yugi's transition from oneshots to a longer running series, though even in her current career, she remains a one-volume queen. Perhaps that's why the first chapter of "Don't Blame Me" feels so unconventional, too self-contained and unromantic for a bl, more like a pilot to a slice-of-life josei that was never written. It opens not on either half of the main couple, but on thirteen-year-old Makoto, who pays a surprise visit to his cousin Kaji Toshiaki after seeing his name in the credits of a mediocre romance film. Upset by Kaji's denouncing of his dreams to one day direct a movie, Makoto is determined to find out what happened to the passionate Cousin Toshi of his memories, only to get himself entangled in the whirlwind of Kaji's friends, all former members of their college film club, who take it upon themselves to acquaint Makoto with the endless complications of adult life—including Kaji's boyfriend Nakamura.
One reason why I wanted to add "Don't Blame Me" to this week's discussion of "Ichigenme" is that they are both two-volume series with very similar premises that turn out to be drastically different and, in those differences, reveal their creators' styles. Though they both star college students and main characters who are surprised by a guy-on-guy French kiss as an initiation ritual (both even feature a character who turns away from the study of law against his father's wishes!), from there Yoshinaga and Yamada's approaches to storytelling heavily diverge. While things technically happen in "Ichigenme," they often do so in the background; Yoshinaga's interest is mostly in the changing internal lives of her characters, which she either depicts through her signature microexpressions or in internal monologue. On the other hand, characters in early Yamada Yugi rarely change; instead her stories meet her characters where they are and hold space for —or rather, are wholly in service to—their antics. When Yamada Yugi is at her best, it feels like being caught up in someone else's tempo, tumbling faster and faster down the hill with her characters and dreading when you will eventually smack head-first into the end.
I know I have leaned too heavily on cinema as a comparison as of late. I cannot promise I will stop. "Don't Blame Me" is a story about loving movies, after all. What Yamada Yugi understands is that manga is a visual medium, perhaps the only one that can match movies for visual tricks. "Don't Blame Me" is full of scene transitions that, like dissolve cuts, only work because of the medium. In volume one, a character is forced to interrupt a dramatic scene between Makoto and Kaji by yelling "cut", which suddenly transforms the panels that came before into a scene. In volume two, the climax of the college backstory arc breaks into present day and the return of Makoto by way of a VHS being played. I would never go so far as to say Yamada Yugi is formally inventive, but she has such an intuitive understanding of how to move a story from scene to scene. Though nothing about the paneling or the style tries to convey cinematic language, reading "Don't Blame Me" feels like watching a quirky dramedy, more so than other manga that actually attempt to look like a movie.
The two-volume bl manga is an exercise in excess and restraint, and reading back this series in 2025, what I marvel at the most about "Don't Blame Me" is its ruthless economy. The amount of things Yamada Yugi manages to shove into the nine short chapters of "Don't Blame Me" would make a modern uke taking in a bl manhwa horse dick blush. The opening and closing chapters being told through the point of view a thirteen-year-old cousin aside, there's also unrequited love between two half-brothers, a returning alum struggling with depression, someone's mother in the hospital,detailed notes on John Carpenter's films, a pregnancy, a whole student movie being filmed, and of course, Kaji and Nakamura's love story. In 2025, you'd be tempted to think I was describing a three-season Korean webtoon.
How does Yamada Yugi manage it? I think it is because she is a master at pacing and momentum. A good story must know where it is going and how to get there and above all it must make you feel like it is bringing you along. When for instance Nakamura begins to get jealous of what he perceives to be Kaji's feelings for fellow club member Kujirai, Yamada Yugi does not let Nakamura's feelings dominate the story. There is no easily severable "jealousy arc." Instead, the jealousy sits like a quiet passenger in volume one alongside the other pieces of the story: Kujirai's troubled relationships with the various men in his life, which Kaji tries unsuccessfully to detangle, Kaji's burgeoning interest in cinematography and film-making, Nakamura own friendship with Kujirai who is less "other man" and more "chaotic relationship counselor." By the time volume two turns its eyes squarely on Kaji and Nakamura, the jealousy doesn't feel like a plot point added just to progress the relationship. It is natural. It has been there the whole time.
This too is the luxury the two-volume bl manga can offer us. Time enough for everything, and time enough for love, too.
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Last week I talked about the two types of desire in bl manga, the cannibal and the artist. But there is, as always, a secret third thing: he who doth protest desire too much.
It would be a cliche to say that bl is often about repression, men refusing to confront the shape of their true desire. But in the best of these stories, that repression is not just of desire for another man, but of desire, period: denial that one could be capable of wanting another person at all, rejection of the body as a locus of desire, horror that one can be rendered so foolish by unruly passion, which accomplishes no purpose except for itself. In "Ichigenme," Tamiya is repulsed by his own lust. When he is forced to confront his disappointment that a kiss from a male professor was not any kind of advance but rather just the bad habit of a drunkard, he tries to use Tohdou's obvious attraction for him as a weapon with which to hurt himself, as if to turn himself permanently off desire once and for all. When Tamiya comes out, it is with very specific words in mind: that he is "unable to have sex with a woman," not that he is gay. Sex of any kind, especially penetrative sex, embarrasses him even seven years later. It is not that he is embarrassed of finding men attractive (he unabashedly tells Tohdou to his face that he finds his brother Hiroaki handsome), but he is embarrassed, still, by his very embodied desire for Tohdou specifically. There are maybe issues here for Tamiya to unpack, but alas, the title of the series is not "The First Class is Sex Therapy."
In "Don't Blame Me," the three point of view characters—Makoto, Kaji, and Nakamura—think of themselves as observers to the passions of others and are shocked when they are forced to confront it in themselves and, in the case of Makoto, in their loved ones. Nakamura is so horrified by his greed for Kaji's body that he overacts and tries to reject Kaji's friendship too. Why, he bemoans, can he not be satisfied by simply spending time with Kaji, watching John Carpenter marathons with Kaji, seeing the love of movies bloom in Kaji? Why must he also want Kaji carnally? Like Tamiya, Nakamura can only conceive of desire as some horrible force that will bulldoze everything on the path to consummation, a sign that there is something wrong with himself. It is hard enough for him to bear the weight of his own desire; the idea that it might be requited, that he might have to bear Kaji's desire as well, is unthinkable.
As for Kaji, Yamada Yugi performs a clever sleight of hand with Kujirai, who is positioned in "Don't Blame Me" as an object of fascination, inspiration, ridicule, and ultimately desire. It's Kujirai that makes Kaji want to pick up a camera; it's Kujirai whose expressions Kaji wants to observe; it's Kujirai whom Kaji thinks he can sleep with. But Kujirai points out rightly this is because Kaji is chronically avoidant, more comfortable trying to solve other people's problems and filming other people's desires than confronting his own problems. "You're not in love with me," he points out. "You're just trying to take the easy way out." In any case, for all his hypersexuality, Kujirai doesn't actually have sex with any of the main characters of "Don't Blame Me," as implausible as that sounds. He may be crazy, but he does so with a deep sense of responsibility for his friends and cordons himself off appropriately.
This too is the luxury of the two-volume bl, which gives us time enough for everything, even different kinds of desire. Kaji wants to be moved, but only at a remove, from behind the viewfinder and never in front of it. Time and time again, he films Kujirai's most vulnerable moments, and Kujirai never flinches, yet when Miki turns the camera back on Kaji (and Nakamura with him), Kaji balks. If he is to mature at all, he must learn that "I want to film him" is not the same as "I want to fuck him." If desire were only the compulsion to admire from afar, to capture beauty and wrestle it into a frame, then everything would be simple. It would be rational, as Makoto pointed out, if Kaji's love interest were Kujirai. But "the scariness of Carpenter's films," Nakamura points out, "comes from not having explanations." Desire, too, is irrational. In the end, all this theorizing is for naught. "You make me feel stupid thinking about things too deeply," Kujirai informs Kaji, throwing a drunken Nakamura into his arms.
We want what we want, and who we want, no matter how irrational or embarrassing.
You know what else is embarrassing? Having to once again explain that 801 (the publisher of "Ichigenme") and June ("Don't Blame Me") are both DMP imprints and thus zombies with uncertain fates, shambling along with their half-dead list of publications. If you want your own copy of either series, you're best off trying to find them secondhand, or sometimes on Amazon. As for me, not to brag, but you'll never buy these babies off of me.
30/50: the best way to a man's heart is through his stomach (tojitsuki hajime, "even just the tip")
In 2009, financial columnist Bruce Watson advanced a theory that has stayed with me ever since: that zombie films are popular during boom times and vampire films are popular during times of imminent recession. Zombies, he argued, represent mindless consumerism and consumption, while vampires represent an ambivalent posture towards decadence. From Watson's column to public radio to online platforms popular in the early-to-mid-2010s like Salon and Slate, the theory spread like wildfire. While the zombie half of Watson's thesis has gotten less love, "vampire films are a recession indicator" has since become a pop culture old wives' tale, with plenty of armchair economist analyses. (What that means for the recent adaptations of "Nosferatu" and GDT's "Frankenstein" both popping up, I will leave for proper film-and-finance columnists.)
I love taking a pop culture theory too seriously. I applaud Bruce Watson for putting a weird idea out there, and then doubling down on it. So I am here to propose a zombie-vampire duality of my own. In bl manga, there are two modes of expressing desire: cannibalism and portraiture.
As you can see in the table above, "cannibalism" need not always be an act of consuming another human's flesh, and "portraiture" need not always be the act of depicting another's likeness in a painting. But they represent two ends of a spectrum: the taking of the object of desire into your own body versus the creation of a separate object with which you imbue your desire.
To act on desire is always an exercise in mediation, because the true nature of desire is impossible. The object of desire is always at a remove, and we desire to bring it closer. Impossible! Closer can be literal—into our own body as meat, but the meat/body of the one we love can never represent the wholeness of them. Closer can be figurative—creating something separate from both our bodies, a thing that, unbodied, represents the one we love. But a representation is just that, and will always remain just that: a substitute. Both cannibalism and portraiture are imperfect, but it is through the friction of that imperfection that we create bl, over and over again.
Well, maybe all this is just a facile restatement of Byungchul Han's argument in "The Agony of Eros." Alas, I am too stupid to understand Han but too smart to hope I could get away with pretending I did. When he wrote that "the negativity of otherness—that is, the atopia of the Other, which eludes all ability—is constitutive of erotic experience," I think he already had this thesis in mind, that desire always struggles with a drive to pervert the object of our desire into something we can understand or have or possess. True love is, perhaps, only achieved when one willingly surrenders to that eternal unknowing, unhaving, unpossessing.
Until then, let's talk about Tojitsuki Hajime's oneshot, "Even Just the Tip."
Art student Tokuji is struggling with his recent lack of inspiration, when he suddenly encounters a tattooed ramen shop cook named Ryuuzou taking out the trash. One glimpse of the dragon tattoo on the stranger's thigh and neck is enough to activate Tokuji's imagination—and also his libido. Desperate to better observe the man in order to sculpt him, Tokuji begins a tentative friendship with Ryuuzou, one that is complicated by Tokuji's near-constant wet dreams which star none other than a fully naked and fully tattooed Ryuuzou letting Tokuji have his way.
"Even Just the Tip" is a simple story, told with humor and Tojitsuki's robust artistic sense, and certainly very enjoyable, but hardly one with endless depths to plumb. What draws me to it, then, is Tojitsuki's perfect straddling of the boundary between "cannibalism" and "portraiture." Tokuji is a sculptor, and his final product is a lifesize clay model of Ryuuzou, complete with imagined tattoos painted on. There can be no purer expression of "exorcising the feeling into the creation of an Other" than making a 1:1 scale clay model, yet doesn't something about it feel cannibalistic? Perhaps it's no coincidence that, of all the professions Tojitsuki could make Ryuuzou, she made him a cook, one who directly feeds Tokuji's body and is thinking of opening his own shop. In his fantasies, Tokuji is rabid, feral, all teeth. He'd eat Ryuuzou if he was on offer, I'm sure.
In this, "Even Just the Tip" differs from its other portraiture siblings, like, say, Arai Niboshiko's "Give Me A Nickname," whose artist character Amou only has sex with his muse Jose because "this is where I'm closest to Jose." In the first chapter, Amou runs his hands all over a sleeping Jose, and when Jose wakes up, horny and roaring to go, Amou escapes into his room to draw, leaving Jose to masturbate outside his door. Tokuji wants sex with Ryuuzou, or at least the fantasy of it, and even fantasizes about the sex not meeting expectations, literally getting off on being sexually inadequate for Ryuuzou. Meanwhile Amou follows a more conventional portraiture storyline, with Jose begging Amou to see him as a man and not a god, an Other that is the fount of Art. "I can't show you the you I see with my twisted eyes," Amou tells Jose, and Jose, hurt, delivers the finishing blow: "What you want to protect is not me, but your feelings for Jose." Amou's portraiture of Jose has done too good of a job exorcising the desire. It now lives on as its own zombie of Jose in Amou's mind.
Of course, Arai—and Noda Ayako—is a mangaka who skews towards the portraiture side in all her work. Tojitsuki, on the other hand, later wrote "Double Suicide," a one-volume bl story that is both metaphorically and quite literally about attempted cannibalism expressed through blood-drinking. (I might as well call this theory the Tojitsuki Hajime continuum!) Sometimes art is devouring, and that makes it cannibalistic. Even here, the horseshoe theory has credibility.
For all his attempts to recreate Ryuuzou as art, Tokuji never gets close to the real Ryuuzou. He never actually gets to see Ryuuzou's naked form or even the entirety of Ryuuzou's tattoo. Though Ryuuzou offers, we only get gestures to where it is on his body: the neck, the thighs, all down his back and along his butt. Tokuji never confesses, and even at the end, Ryuuzou treats Tokuji mostly like what he is: a friendly regular at his ramen shop. I love this elusiveness, the distance we and Tokuji feel from the Ryuuzou, who for all Tokuji's vivid fantasies is never elevated to idol/god status. Ryuuzou remains wholly another person, and one that Tokuji cannot "know."
In this way, I can finally understand Byungchul Han through Tojitsuki Hajime. When Han wrote, "only the negativity of withdrawal brings forth the Other in its atopic otherness," I think he meant something like the ending to "Even Just the Tip," where Tokuji wins a prize for his statue of Ryuuzou and goes to the ramen shop with the news. His statue, unlike the real thing, is covered from face to toe in tattoos, thus scrawled all over by Tokuji's attempts at "knowing" Ryuuzou. This Ryuuzou belongs wholly to Tokuji, reduced to an expressible Other, but it is not enough. It will never be enough, because it is not the real Ryuuzou. The real Ryuuzou is enough, because Tokuji will never have him. Tokuji will never own him, not even just a little bit, and that is what makes Tokuji want him. Ah, Tokuji thinks, as the real Ryuuzou sneakily gives him a free bowl of ramen on the house, "he's so sexy!"
