BL Review: BJ Alex

BJ Alex, a story of two degenerates, one who rubs one out to cam boys every night at 10 P.M. and one who *does* cam shows for other degenerates who can’t get laid, seems to be a favorite of many. Man, am I baffled as to why. From the pointless aggressiveness, to the ridiculous misunderstandings to the by-the-book characters and backstories, this manhwa is nothing short of a piece of shit.

Dong-Gyun, your stereotypical loser virgin, is a college student who regularly watches an online cam show hosted by BJ Alex every night at 10 P.M. He soon finds out that Alex is his upperclassman Jiwon. Even after finding out that Jiwon is the embodiment of human trash, he still admires him. Jiwon sleeps with Dong-Gyun cause he hasn’t been laid in a while and needs new material for his audience with no intention to do so again but, as these stories go, Jiwon constantly finds himself looking at Dong-Gyun erotically and decides he wants him as a sex partner.

A good chunk of the story really just hinges on the fact that Jiwon likes to fuck and sees Dong Gyun as a portable glory hole. While the premise is rather intriguing, any and all potential is wasted. It’d be idiotic of me to think a yaoi of this kind would execute a story about sex work in the way I imagined, but it would be nice if this manhwa covered the ins and outs of sex work rather than featuring several uncomfortable sex scenes in every other chapter to cater to a horny audience, two of which depict aggressive sex and rape.

Speaking of, although this manhwas main character is a cam boy, this fact is swept under the rug for a majority of the time so we could watch Dong-Gyun and Jiwon fuck some more. It seems that the only time Jiwons cam show is mentioned or brought up is to create unnecessary conflict between Jiwon and MD or stupid tension and misunderstandings between Dong-Gyun and Jiwon. I also find Jiwons reasons for turning to sex work to be unrealistic. Cliche backstory aside, if all he desired was love and praise why didn’t he just get a boyfriend? Why was his first, and seemingly only thought to jerk of for randoms on the internet?

This stories characters are probably the weakest link. Everyone is so painfully stupid and bland, Dong-Gyun being the most boring of them all. Somehow, his backstory, which is just thrown at you out of nowhere, made me think Dong-Gyun was even *more* boring than before. Jiwon is your basic well built, dominant, emotionally immature “top” while Dong-Gyun is this stories token naive “bottom.” MD seems to exist only so Jiwon has someone besides Dong-Gyun to bitch and complain at and Chanwoo is the embodiment of everything homophobes think gay people are like: a horn dog who’ll fuck any guy who’s down and is interested in any and all things sex related.

As previously stated, Jiwons backstory is painfully cliche and I didn’t find it reason enough for him to turn to sex work. Perfect boy has perfect life but, plot twist, he has an even more perfect brother that makes his life slightly less perfect. It’s apparent that the author tried to tie his backstory into the reason why he does cam shows but it just falls flat once you think about all the other, much more reasonable, routes he could’ve taken to achieve what he wanted.

There really wasn’t any development for these characters, Dong-Gyun is introduced as this stupid, boring virgin and the only thing about him that changed was the virgin part. Really though, why is he such an idiot? Possibly the most annoying thing that Dong-Gyun has done is say, towards the end, that Jiwon had “done so much for him” when all Jiwon had done was be a massive bitch to him and use him as a cum sock.

I’d hardly count Jiwon as a character who developed, he was a immature, bitchy meat head who realized his feelings for the boy he’d been treating like shit for however many chapters and then, over the span of like 4 days, he becomes a better person. You’d think that, considering the shitty back story we’re given and how long he’s spent being a bitch behind the scenes, it’d take him much longer to better himself as a man. But no. It takes like 4 days, Dong-Gyun accepts his “apology,” they get together, Jiwon buys him expensive shit and then they say the big L word as if they’ve been dating for more than 24 hours.

Why anyone likes this manhwa? The world may never know.