I Thot You Was a Toad's manga / #unrequited love(68)

Haru has an obsessive attachment to his brother's best friend, Soudai, and follows him compulsively from school to school, even into club activities. Suddenly, however, Soudai becomes aware of how Haru struggles to overtake him and withdraws to a place which is, for all purposes, unreachable. What will Haru do?

A young man has a sexual relationship with his cram school teacher in order to explore the meaning of 'like' and 'love', never realizing that this teacher was in an intimate relationship with his regular high school teacher. His intervention provides a means for both teachers to connect with their feelings honestly. An exploration of emotional detachment and the toll it takes on the heart, rendered in beautiful line drawings by Yamagata Satomi.

Classic yaoi BDSM fetish club.

Two stories by Konno Keiko. (1) Two childhood friends stay in touch long after leaving school, traveling long distances to stay with each other, brushing off their lovers in order to make time for each other and, yet, never realizing what this says about their true feelings. (2) A man plays at a relationship with a woman until he can make the gay man with whom he's in love commit with his full feelings. Slice-of-life stories, not necessarily sympathetic characters especially in the second story, but realistic.

Abuse-trope soap opera about a doctor, Motoki, with his own private clinic, who believes that he is in a one-sided love affair with a yakuza enforcer, Kashima, because Kashima is cold, arrogant and abusive toward him. A visit from Kashima's underlings gives Motoki some hope, but is it false? Kirishima Tamaki, like Tamaki Wren, has a particular drawing style in which her men seem to have strangely flat facial features, even in the midst of emotional upheaval. But it is a stylistic element, not an inability to draw.

Childhood friends who live under the same roof. One suffers from amnesia. The other from unrequited love toward the amnesiac.

This story is a hot mess, like mainlining libidinous crack. It starts off with two rejected suitors for a couple now embroiled in father x son incest, all living together under the same roof. I mean, W! T! F!!! Rejected suitor #1, Rai, soothes his ego by sinking into BDSM club depravity and raping his would-be rescuer, rejected suitor #2, Mamiya, followed by regret, a crisis of conscience and a weird act of contrition for which the only response available to Mamiya, according to this strange logic, is pity and ever greater concessions to more sexing up. I mean, there is nothing wrong with the contrition, atonement and redemption. Those are actually wonderful themes for a story. It would just hit the heart a little closer if Rai weren't such a damned Gary-Stu, with a wildly unrealistic resolution to his issues with Mamiya, and if Mamiya weren't such a pushover. There are a lot of complaints in the comments about the feminine appearance of the characters, but they really do look like Visual Kei rock stars or hair band stars, who had that feminine quality about their style. After that brain-mush, the end leaves readers hanging. Yet, there is something quite weirdly fun about this strange, strange little story. If you can overlook the many, many things that really stank and were a pure splooge-fest, it was lively and entertaining, like Todd Haynes' Velvet Goldmine or Baz Luhrman's Moulin Rouge (except for gays.) SSSSSPPPPPLLLOOOOOOOOOGE! That is all.

Stories about high school boys who develop crushes on each other. The art has a gestural quality.

Two very different one-shots. (1) A highschooler blackmails his tutor into sex by threatening to reveal that he has a crush on his older brother. This one has a spectacular plot twist and is very engrossing. (2) Zany comedy about a highschooler who spends so much time chasing after an unrequited love, he completely neglects to notice someone who is in love with him. The first story is much more absorbing than the second, but it doesn't look as though this collection of short stories is going to be finished since it hasn't been updated in forever.