I Thot You Was a Toad's manga / #soap opera(14)

Fuwa Shinri is great at yaoi soap operas. In this series of short stories, we read about gay men who stay closeted for the sake of family, pesky fan girls who want to out them, divorce and child abuse, rape and the odd ways survivors punish themselves for having been raped ... They are generally quite authentic apart from some of the outward emotional reactions which seem a bit overt, but still within plausibility. One very realistic element is that not all the conflicts are resolved or the injuries healed. Fuwa Shinri is good at this sort of story.

Another slice of life drama from the Queen of Yaoi Soap Operas, Fuwa Shinri. This time stepbrothers, Sora (5 years older) and Tatsuki, love each other in every sense of the word, but they will never say it. Noooo .... instead they have to take each other and everyone else they love on a long and torturous journey that includes Tatsuki moving out, psychotic fans (Soru is a popular mystery novelist), stabbings, aggrieved girlfriends (and rightfully so), a miscarriage, runaway avoidance crap, incensed editors (and rightfully so), a near-death accident and drama-rama-rama! It's a darned good thing Tatsuki's ex-girlfriend isn't the stabbing sort, because in her case, he deserves it. Instead, he gets stabbed for something else. It's also a good thing that the relative who Tatsuki hates so much is so plain-spoken, or these two jackasses would take their closeted gay secrets to an early grave. In Sora's case, he nearly does anyway. So, yeah, it's a ride on the tearjerk express, but Fuwa Shinri does that so well, and even when the story's just too much to qualify as realistic, it still feels like it could happen.

Baba Takaaki is a real piece of work, a womanizer, liar and unreliable narrator in his own inner dialogue, but he falls hard for Aoyama, a first year student at his college. Too bad he can't keep his pants zipped. Even worse, when he's caught, he doesn't fight for Aoyama, and so begins a five-year love drought for both of them. Fuwa Shinri has crafted another yaoi soap opera by homing in on emotional pitfalls. I am not completely convinced in the reconciliation process, but it still exists within the realm of plausibility. It would be more satisfying to see "Baba-san" work a little harder..

Yuki is the fulcrum between his childhood friends, Chihiro and Ryuutarou, in this love triangle soap opera by Hiro Reiichi. Yuki is also an amateur mountaineer amongst professionals in a dangerous sport, and it's on one of these expeditions that he receives and accepts a love confession, which has the expected consequence of banishing the third friend from their circle of intimacy just as tragedy strikes. But all is not fair in love and war when it comes to yaoi, so this otherwise perfectly structured yaoi romance acquires a sentimental and slightly clunky resolution. Even so, it's a lively story and one of Hiro Reiichi's better ones.