vignette00's manga / #rape(26)

Two (or three) longer stories and one true oneshot to close out the volume. The first is probably Kusama Sakae at her atmospheric best (c.f. Carnivorous Animal's Table Manners), about two soldiers learning to cope with the effects of the war ending. A two-parter about isolation and reintegrating into society, it lets the perfect amount of introspection remain unspoken, and the effect is heady, humid, and affecting. More disturbing if you compare it to the real life story of Hirou Onoda, but the privilege of fiction is that you can take and leave what you like of history. And then, the Between 1 and 2/ 0 and 1 stories. Between 1 and 2 is a classic "bl chara doesn't understand that childhood friend is a dude, not a lady" story, and skims lightly across the hinted-at dark sea of, essentially, childhood sexual trauma. Kusame doesn't do much with the implied sexual predator in the story, and so the effect is simply froth (well-executed froth, but still froth). As for Between 0 and 1, though, the rape is explicit, textual, and disturbing, made worse by the fact that the characters don't really address it. It's a little like that Ono x Tachibana dj for Antique Bakery that Yoshinaga drew herself, the one that breaks open their sexual tension, only Kusame doesn't make the characters sit down and talk to each other afterwards like Yoshinaga does. Instead both of them get lost in their own heads and then they yell at each other and then they start a relationship that mostly consists of goading each other on. I don't mean to be disapproving, and I think Kusame's liner notes at the end show what she's trying to do (the characters are a mended lid to each other's broken pot). It's thematically consistent with the first story and the last oneshot -- to wit, a broken thing becomes stronger and more beautiful when it is mended with love. Whether or not you buy it depends on how you feel about the use of rape in stories. I wouldn't say that Kusame is condoning the rape, but it's certainly not treated with the weight I would think it deserved. Overall, though, worth it for the first historical oneshot.

Main character Gin is from a rich family who refuses to accept his homosexuality. He strikes out on his own as a famous professor of archaeology, but has been for 14 years sex friends with his childhood friend Ei, himself a forensic scientist. Gin has been denying his feelings for Ei, but Ei is determined to prove to Gin that they, too, can find love. The story is ultimately about one person's (Gin's) dramatic reaction to the equally dramatic rejection of his sexuality. I love the story for Ei and Gin's relationship -- not because it is realistic, but because it manages to retread setups and ideas without feeling tired. There's a little bit of Koisuru Boukun (which I hate) and a lot of Junjou Egoist (which I'm fonder of) in the setup, but Ei has Nowaki's steadiness and Morinaga's devotion without Nowaki's inferiority issues and Morinaga's... everything else.... and that really turns the story around. He's not fazed by anything Gin throws his way, because he hasn't spent 14 years loving a difficult man for nothing. I want to love this story of human feeling transcending all else, but there's the issue of just how tried all the other components of the story are. It's not that these aren't real social issues gay men face every day (rejection by family, professional ostracization, sexual assault), but somehow throwing them together into the same story and giving it a rapid fire approach cheapens Gin's story. So ultimately but for the grace of Ei goes Gin -- this is a story fully saved by Amasaki's humanism.

Seems like Ogawa Chise read Motoni Modoru's "Rika the Breeder" and was inspired to make her own version -- right down to the system of Kings, Queens, and Jacks. 'Course, since only Motoni Modoru can be Motoni Modoru, "Caste Heaven" is far less twisted and sick and has sex scenes that are probably designed for you to feel sexy about them, instead of disgusted and morbidly intrigued. Ogawa Chise has a thing for badly codependent relationships, with a "weaker" character hiding the fact that he's manipulating his "stronger" companion into remaining with him for better or worse -- and it's always worse. Ogawa makes an argument in the latest chapters that this kind of manipulation is, in some ways, just a way to "protect" a love that would otherwise be crushed, but just like the caste game itself, Ogawa's fondness for unhealthy possessive relationships is like the air itself to this story, and every twist is designed to make a pure feeling dirty.

This story reminds me of a Japanese term "腐れ縁" (kusare-en), which means basically a destined but unwanted bond you have with someone. Sora and Tetsuya are childhood friends who become estranged, then reunited, then estranged again, all the way from childhood into adulthood. Tetsuya wants to protect Sora, but thinks the only way to do that is to make Sora depend on him, and Sora wants Tetsuya to recognize his own agency in a way Sora's father can't, which leaves us with two people talking at cross-purposes with an extra dollop of sexual tension on top. So of course Tetsuya runs away to college and gets a girlfriend, only to be called back to rescue Sora, and of course Sora has to escape from Tetsuya's smothering, only for all three of them (Tetsuya, his ex-girlfriend, and Sora) to reconnect when they're older. Things would be easier if Tetsu learned how to stop projecting his own insecurities all over his partner before he got back together with Sora, or if Sora learned how to advocate for himself before he reconnected with Tetsuya, but -- kusare-en. Which is how we get three volumes of bad communication, followed by a strangely paltry climax bringing Tetsuya and Sora together. I'm making this sound bad, but actually I really enjoyed it. It feels a little like Mimurake no Musuko (http://www.mangago.me/read-manga/mimurake_no_musuko/), a similar three volume work about childhood friends, with a slow meandering plot and people behaving selfishly but not, necessarily, badly. I think what Kinoshita is trying to convey is the careful interplay of saving someone and helping yourself: Sora and Tetsuya couldn't be together until Tetsuya stopped needing to see himself as the cool, collected white knight and Sora was able to choose Tetsuya because of love and not because he needed Tetsuya to save him. With that theme in mind, the aimless plot makes sense. They needed to fail first before they could learn to succeed. An extra shout-out to Ryoutarou, Sora's best friend, and Yui, Tetsuya's ex/girlfriend, for being the MVPs of this series. Ryou is the pitch-perfect almost-ran boyfriend, and you get the sense that Kinoshita had to make him small-minded and less forceful so that he wouldn't actually end up the better boyfriend for Sora. He's awfully similar to Ogawa from Emotion Circuit (http://www.mangago.me/read-manga/emotion_circuit/an/emotion-circuit-chapter-4.html/1/) only Sora has none of Maki's self-awareness. Yui gets the Cornered Mouse/Chopped Carp treatment, as she's clearly too good for Tetsuya and is unfortunately delegated to being a stepping stone (twice) for Tetsuya and Sora's relationship, just like the ill-fated Natsuki and Tamaki.

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.