schemingreader

This is all because busaikko started translating for yaoi_daily. I decided to subscribe, and I've been addicted to these crazy Japanese homoerotic comics for months.

Today I was reading one by Mika Sadahiro. She's actually one of the LESS cracky mangaka, and her drawing style is really beautiful. A short story: a younger man is in love with an older man who is paralyzed from the waist down. Okay. Then the older man hires the younger man to have sex with his wife. All right. Then the wife wants the younger man to kill her husband. Okay, I'm following you. But the younger man is in love with the husband, and has sex with him even though he's paralyzed and the consent is dubious. Well, you know, yaoi is all about dubcon.

And so I go on, suspending disbelief and feminist skepticism until we reach the bizarre happy ending: the hero has saved his lover's life by finding him where he had tried to commit suicide by lying in the snow, and killed his beloved's murderous wife, and through the power of prayer, has resurrected his lover's ability to have erections.

And I'm standing here in my living room, laughing helplessly. I could not possibly explain this to anyone in my family.

This is worse than the Victorian romance novels--it makes Mrs. Gaskell and Wilkie Collins look like wimps. (Though if Louisa May Alcott were still alive, she would be writing these comics...)