vignette00's manga / #Love Triangle(8)

In both style and writing, incredibly similar to Shoowa's "Non Tea Room" (http://www.mangago.me/read-manga/non_tea_room/), which is also about a love triangle where all participants are hiding more than they are revealing (and where some of the participants are in a band!). Here, Miki's childhood friend Keisuke introduces Miki to his current crush: a kouhai named Chiba. Miki, who has had a crush on Keisuke for a while, sublimates his feelings into seducing Chiba. What he doesn't expect is for Chiba to 1) fall hard for Miki and 2) to decipher Miki's real feelings about Keisuke. All the characters end up finding themselves torn between selfishness and their better selves: Miki wants to make things work with Chiba (who he sees as the epitome of everything he'll never be -- earnest and cute and a good kid) but can't seem to really commit, Chiba lets his doubts about Miki's feelings (which are well-founded!) inspire him to put Miki and Keisuke's friendship in danger, and Keisuke doesn't know how to prioritze his crush on Chiba and his friendship with Miki. There's a woodness to the placement and body language in the art, but in some areas the construction really shines. Chapter 2 is a particular stand-out: the bookends of "you sure are loved," the speech bubbles of Chiba and Miki as they talk about first names, the thread that goes from Miki's monologue to Keisuke's childhood memories. Despite Furutsuji's lack of titles to her name, there's a deftness to the characterization and writing. Keisuke feels straight despite his crush on Chiba, and he plays "straight, devoted friend" to Miki in a way that makes their friendship real, fleshed out with concrete, unique details that many other manga forget to add. Miki is the more experienced of the three, and starts off the story with a wicked streak, but he has a vulnerability that draw you to him like it must have drawn Keisuke. It's not that he's helpless, but you can tell when he's going to make a bad decision or let a bad decision be made on him. And Chiba toes the line of victim and victimizing. I don't buy the other readers' comments that sympathize with Chiba, who was, it's true, used by Miki in the beginning. Miki puts in a good faith effort to make right by Chiba's feelings. It's Chiba who uses Miki in the end, and I think his exit from the story is both poignant and fitting. He's not villanized, but Furutsuji doesn't want to vindicate him either. In the end, it's a story that feels really modern and young, but not immature. The resolution is kind to everyone, even Chiba, who has friends that will pull him out of his heartbreak, just as Keisuke is there for Miki's heartbreaks. A solid read all around.

The end to Harada's Messiah series (Messiah no Yakubi and Messiah no Kyojitsu) brings back the the nameless Messiah's friend in an unexpected role: as the person behind the rape in the first one-shot. Turns out Friend was the one who hired Seme. Which brings up ALL SORTS of questions, like how did Friend and Seme meet, and how did Friend realize that Seme had the Skills (tm) to resist Messiah's mouth, and most importantly, what the actual fuck?! I don't find the ending, where Messiah has to choose between an obsessive, boundary-ignoring, bullying rapist and a manipulative, monopolizing, and pathetic rape-conspiracist, to be funny or sweet, and honestly neither does Harada, who throws in a peanut-gallery who calls both choices "trash" and a strange "it's all just a story!" implication to the final page, making Messiah and Seme metafictional characters to boot. Friend's long rambling speech where he reveals his plans for Messiah's sexual submission is disturbing in an over-the-top parodic way, especially when he misunderstands Messiah's ability to see only him as a person apart from his penis as some sort of longcon hater joke by Messiah. And that's really Harada's wheelhouse -- sexy, dubious consent-y romps with not very nice characters. Still, something here smacks of victimization: Messiah feels too much like a victim who has spent all their life being sexually abused and thus can only respond with inappropriate sexuality, and when he's caught between two abusers, he doesn't make the obvious, self-empowered choice to leave. Instead, he feels like he's forced to go along with one of them just because they like him (or, maybe, because he knows neither one of them would leave him alone even if he said no). Here's hoping that Seme's inability to understand "no means no" is mostly motivated by Friend's money and disappears with the closing pages of this oneshot. I wouldn't hold my breath, though. At least the sex is hot.

Mindreader is torn between his childhood best friend and his sympathies for his abused cousin. Features a twist you saw coming miles away, a classic Weepy and Woobie Uke, and completely undeveloped and sudden Family Drama, and tolerable if only because the right man ends up the victor for the main character's nascent understanding of romantic relationships. One day we'll get a manga that tries to guide its main character healthily and sympathetically through a road of separating sympathy, empathy, pity, and love. Until then I guess we have I Can't Even Breath Without You http://www.mangago.me/read-manga/i_cant_even_breeth_without_you/.

Two stories, both about bizarre love triangles. In one, two schoolboys develop an unhealthy cat-and-mouse game of affections, which involves roping in third parties as bait. One of them manages, in a Psyche Delico kind of way, to rope in a third party who bites as well as he takes to being chewed. In the second, a man falls in love with his brother-in-law, who is afraid he used marriage as a way of binding himself to a man who refuses to be helped. After his death, the brother in law and a best friend reminisce, and it ends, in a Psyche Delico kind of way, poorly. I find Psyche Delico most interesting in what she doesn't say, rather than what she actually puts in the mouths of her characters. This isn't "Choco Strawberry Vanilla" levels of fascinating and fresh three person dynamics, but ultimately it's one of the better fictional representations of what separates a crush from true love. The two professors/schoolboys in the first story are too afraid of rejection to have a loving, mutual relationship with each other, so (spoilers!) when the confession comes at the end, it doesn't branch off into "old men finding each other" comfort and understanding; instead, it terminates the relationship and causes Okuzono to pursue the next thing -- which just happens to be Utsugi, a guy who is too much like him and Yamashiro both for their own good. Utsugi, too, was most fascinated by Okuzono when Okuzono was at his darkest and most untouchable, i.e. most obsessed with Yamashiro, so one can only guess what the consummation of that relationship is going to look like, now that he finally has what he wants. You know that bit in bl manga where someone realizes, "I only loved you when you were in love with someone else"? That's it, that's the whole story. The second half is interesting for the dissonant climax and conclusion. We're looking at three guys who keep settling for their second best because they think or know their first choice is out of reach, but it's a Penrose triangle of impossibility that feeds into itself: Masaki thinks Otohiko is only sleeping with him because he can't get Daigo, and Otohiko can't tell Masaki that he's using Daigo as a reason to sleep with him, because he really does love Daigo, and so on. An interesting enough set-up, but Psyche Delico balanced atmosphere with emotional development and slighted the latter to lean more heavily on the former.