Here’s one of the posts I’ve been working on forever… a follow-up to my previously-expressed thoughts on YAOI/shounen-ai manga. Every so often, I see someone talking about the genre(s) and feel compelled to bring my thoughts into the mix, but quickly lose that train of thought.

Found via MangaBlog, former Shonen Jump editor Jason Thompson’s overview of the genre offers a lot of food for thought, helping me pinpoint why the genre bothers me so often. He summarizes the genre as:

Shonen ai/yaoi is, frankly, EXTREMELY formulaic. It’s one of those things where you have to read book after book in hopes of uncovering some slight variation on a theme, some marginal playing around within the restrictions of the genre. Every genre is formulaic — there’s not that many fighting manga which end with the hero getting his ass kicked, or romance manga which end with the main characters breaking up — but shonen ai seems unusually so, possibly because the stories are so short. Basically, every manga is a monogamous romance between two guys, with no serious rivals, and it always ends happily. (”Happily” meaning that they get together, that is… there may be rape, coercion or borderline incest and pedophilia involved, but the moral of shonen ai is that it’s always okay because they love eachother.) :/

Part of the problem for me is that I hate the core formula, it’s not one I find the least bit romantic or escapist since it tramples on many of my personal ideals. Worse (for me, at least) is that this formula is so hard to escape. The whatever-we’re-calling-it-this-week manga (Sigh, I’m tired of hearing so many conflicting contentions of what the different terms mean and/or imply… I’m just gonna start calling it BMB comics for Boy-Meets-Boy.) I’ve enjoyed in the past has mostly defied that formula, but finding those titles is challenging (which brings up the question of if the formula is so heavily used in the genre or if we’ve got a bad fan filter Stateside).

The talk about formulas got me thinking about Harlequin novels and how one of my English teachers broke down the core Harlequin formula to compare it to Mishima’s The Sound of Water (she said she toyed with the idea of dabbling in romance novels for the money, but found the formula so silly she couldn’t get very far). I don’t know the romance novel industry very well, but from what I can tell, there are now a number of formulas in use (all nicely separated in their own easy-to-identify imprint) that have their own audiences. That left me wondering why there hasn’t been much development in the genre.

(Okay, tangential flashback, this English teacher was that legendary teacher one spends their adult life talking about and I just realized what an influence she had on me in mentioning that she had us compare Yukio Mishima to Harlequin romance novels.)

For example, I remember first becoming aware of media for the “girls who like boys who like boys” when I read an article about author E. Lynn Harris in a 1994 Los Angeles Times article. The way the article summarized Harris’ past novels made it sound like there was an unusual formula to Harris’ work — all his stories seemed to focus on a straight Black woman helps two gay Black men work out their relationship issues. There are so many ripe formulas that could be used in this genre that it’s frustrating to see one formula appear on bookstore shelves.

A lot of the BMB I have enjoyed did move into new formulas, like Yellow which reminded me of a sexploitation thriller (like Silk Stalkings or those movies that used to air late at night on Cinemax) with both of the “will they or won’t they” protagonists being guys — a rather subversive change to an old formula. Similarly, Only the Ring Finger Knows puts two guys through the versatile Pride and Prejudice formula, creating another effective translation of the a classic romantic conflict.

As David Welsh notes, turning to a formula isn’t a problem if convincing characters and credible plot developments are included (then again, if we’re talking about dominant formulas in BMB manga so much, perhaps the real problem isn’t the formula but the implementation of the formula?).

I sometimes find myself disagreeing with the contention that these stories aren’t about gay men, as sometimes these stories handle gay issues (emotional, not political ones) as a source of romantic complications that wouldn’t have as much impact if these characters were heterosexual, or even the “straight-except-for-this-one-guy” type. Take Desire for instance, where seme uke Toru struggles to deal with his feelings for Ryoji, feelings Toru expect will only lead to heartache because he doesn’t think Ryoji’s interest goes beyond sex. Desire’s conflict taps into a conflict found within the gay community (from an American perspective, at least) where some pundits argue against “assimilationism” and that queer identity should be about “renegade sexuality” leaving someone like Toru struggling to overcome a badly-formed impression that his emotional attachment to Ryoji is abnormal and unrequited. If the reader doesn’t look at the characters as gay, the story loses a lot of its impact. The “my boyfriend is with me only for the sex” conflict has a lot more drama when a cultural issue of self-acceptance is part of the subtext.

In other stories (ones that I can’t recall right now) sexual orientation adds to the angst just because the odds are so greatly against any sexual attraction being reciprocated. That’s always an issue for lesbians and gays — if you fall for someone you met through everyday encounters (instead of through queer meeting spaces like gay bars) the odds are greatly in favor of you facing rejection. One could come up with a similar “he probably doesn’t like me” scenario with an “ugly” heroine, but such a story wouldn’t have the same dynamic since “ugly” heroines can (and, to the frequent frustration of many, do) get “fixed” by a makeover. Sexual orientation, on the other hand, provides an obstacle that can only be passed through the providence of nature (which can be taken as further proof that the two were meant to be together).

(Edited to add: I suspect some of this may be something that may resonate for American gay males in BMB manga, that might not reflect the experience of gay men in Japan.)

In the end, this would be one of those times when being so far behind in my comic reading becomes a good thing (I still haven’t cracked open the first volume of Monster and I haven’t learned the title of that other title I keep hearing praised — Dragon sumthin — so that I can find it at a bookstore) as I get to wait to hear BMB fans with similar tastes as mine pick out promising titles.