a post looking for a subject...

[insaneneko]

It's rather depressing how dead things are on LJ now. Does it always get this way around this time of the year? I can't remember previous years thanks to my stunningly bad memory, but considering that I'm not posting much myself thanks to work, Christmas activities, and general seasonal weariness (make the traffic and the crowds GO AWAY please), I suppose it'd make sense.

I am still amazed I got through half the episodes of Weiß Kreuz. I wonder if I'll ever pick it up again? (Possibly only if I'm assured that Aya never speaks again...But that's just total wishful thinking, I know...) I still haven't returned the DVDs to my friend...


I've been rereading some of my favorite Japanese fanfics that I owned as doujinshi, and it struck me that, on the whole, the level of difficulty of the "good" fanfics are much higher than the average decent BL novel. My impression is that the sentence structure, vocab and kanji are more mature and more complex. I know that BL novels are targeted towards relatively younger audiences, while the fanfics are...well. The authors I've met of the fanfics I consider good tend to be older, say late twenties to thirties. I suppose they simply write at their level. Also, the stories that end up as doujinshi tend to be longer than the typical BL novel so the story and the characters are allowed to develop and become more complex.

I have to admit that in rereading some of the fics, the characters that make me squee the most aren't the main ones (the romantic pairing) but the side characters. It's wonderful to see the side characters fully realized without the onus of being in some romantic relationship and getting stuck in pairing/fandom cliches. And sometimes its the everyday interactions that make me happy, more than any passionate declaration of love (which may just be totally OOC anyway) or (especially) pages of sex.

One fanfic I reread was written by a fairly prolific writer of BL novels. I've read a bunch of her fanfics and BL novels, and it is so depressing to see how much better story and character-wise her fanfics are. Though her fanfics tend to be...oh...at least 1.5 times as long as the typical BL novel (including hers), so I suppose she has a lot more to work with as well.

I was attempting to write a summary on a BL novel in which the uke has a unique personality and thought to myself how nice it was to not have a stereotypical uke. I'm not sure if it's a general trend or just the books I've been reading recently, but my impression is that if a seme or uke is going to be not stereotypical, it'll tend to be the seme. Sometimes the pairing of an original seme with a stereotypical uke works, sometimes it just grates. Why does this interesting guy have to get stuck with that loser? It's the worst when there's lots of sex involved and the uke is one of those virginal, shy, screaming ones. Or those tsundere ones. If you really don't want to have sex, please just deck the guy? Well, unless you are drugged, injured, unconscious, or the other guy is 3 times your weight and/or an accomplished fighter.


Oh yes, and about fanfics? I love AUs, really I do. But when an author gets so caught up in her AU world everything she writes is set in that AU? I can't help but stop caring. What'll get me to lose interest even faster is if an author writes fics centered around OCs all the time. Even if the OCs are awesome, they aren't why I read fanfics of that particular fandom. I can just read original fic in that case.

I just discovered the raw scans of a manga called Nekrateholic by Wasabi Maguro [1] being posted on yaoi_daily. See Chapter 1 (1, 2, and 3 of 3). For the rest see the latest post, Chapter 4 (1 of 3), which has links to all the previous posts. The manga has a lot of things I like: vampires and vampire hunters, hunted vs. hunter, (sort of) non-con, blood-sucking during sex, obsession bordering on love, etc. And it's all wrapped up in pretty art. It's just that I can't shake the feeling that it's all so...ヌルい. You know, weak. The angst and obsession don't have a keen edge, and the switches between the serious and humorous/light-hearted moments feel a bit muddled. The characters lurch around looking for some consistency and solidity while trying to keep up with the switches in tone. The S&M references thrown in are so feeble they shouldn't have even bothered. I'm not saying I don't like the manga. I simply think it feels like a half-hearted attempt at hitting a variety of moe points and not really striking any of them, which is a pity. It could've been so much more...

[1] Wasabi Maguro is the pseudonym Higashiyama Kazuko, a collaborator of the manga Tactics with Kinoshita Sakura, uses for BL stuff, both doujinshi and commercial. I am a bit curious about the Tactics doujinshi the wiki entry refers to, "Love Sick." I only managed to get through five volumes of Tactics before losing interest, but there's only eight total out anyways...

Comments

[keelieinblack.livejournal.com]

I don't know if "a bit curious" counts as a request or not, but since I happen to have scans of that Tactics doujinshi, I uploaded it for you.

Love Sick (http://www.sendspace.com/file/qi6pkh)

It's, well, about what you'd expect. :D And it isn't the whole doujinshi, sadly--just the comic and not the novel, since whoever scanned it probably didn't want to bother with all the pages of text. The one I uploaded is the original untranslated scans; there's a scanlation too, but you probably don't need it...?

[insaneneko.livejournal.com]

Thanks! I suppose I was hoping for something more than sex sex sex...Was I just being totally naive and foolish? Perhaps the novel is deep and meaningful....