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Mmm, "ya-oy".
May. 4th, 2005 09:37 pmManga Jouhou posted a link to this article about yaoi in the Boston Globe called "He loves him, she loves them". It was pretty lucid, I thought, except for the pronunciation of yaoi. Personally, I think "ya-oh-ee" is a lot more accurate, but hey. I mean, they defined uke and seme! I remember it took me a while to figure out what those meant.
I think they should have mentioned much earlier that there's a difference between BL and yaoi, though, and stressed it more. I hate people labeling shounen-ai as yaoi, and it sucks if it's true that American companies aren't bothering to make the distinction. There was a thing recently, when this person got people to watch Kyou Kara Maou and then got burned because some idiots who wouldn't give the show a chance immediately complained that it was all gay and would have been awesome if they'd just put in a few cute girls. So when she talked about Sukisyo, she immediately had huge warnings about how the show was "boy + boy = loving!" and was thus yaoi (which is more like "boy + boy = sex!" XD). And promptly got burned again because people thought she was the one being homophobic. Though Sukisyo is much more explicit than Kyou Kara Maou.
[It's funny, apparently in Japan they tend to call shounen-ai BL, for "boys' love", whereas I'd always heard Westerners calling it shounen-ai. It's kind of like how some fansubbers will put "arigatou" when the character says "sankyuu".]
But I swear, if ADV starts labeling Kyou Kara Maou as yaoi, I won't buy the DVDs. >/
The other problem I had with the article was that they mentioned straight guys' reactions to yaoi but not gay guys'. Who, if you believe the Yaoi Con website, would laugh at it because the relationships are unrealistic, too, not just the way the series deal with homosexuality itself. But no animanga romances are like real life, I guess, so it goes without saying.
And I guess the discussion of scanlations and doujinshi is way too brief, and doesn't really explain that they can be complementary, or completely unrelated, and generally not substitutes for each other, which was the impression I got out of the article. Also funny how, for brevity's sake, the terms doujinshi and scanlation themselves become rarefied fangirl vocabulary "not even familiar to people within the manga universe". I doubt they'd find many people agreeing with that.
I think they should have mentioned much earlier that there's a difference between BL and yaoi, though, and stressed it more. I hate people labeling shounen-ai as yaoi, and it sucks if it's true that American companies aren't bothering to make the distinction. There was a thing recently, when this person got people to watch Kyou Kara Maou and then got burned because some idiots who wouldn't give the show a chance immediately complained that it was all gay and would have been awesome if they'd just put in a few cute girls. So when she talked about Sukisyo, she immediately had huge warnings about how the show was "boy + boy = loving!" and was thus yaoi (which is more like "boy + boy = sex!" XD). And promptly got burned again because people thought she was the one being homophobic. Though Sukisyo is much more explicit than Kyou Kara Maou.
[It's funny, apparently in Japan they tend to call shounen-ai BL, for "boys' love", whereas I'd always heard Westerners calling it shounen-ai. It's kind of like how some fansubbers will put "arigatou" when the character says "sankyuu".]
But I swear, if ADV starts labeling Kyou Kara Maou as yaoi, I won't buy the DVDs. >/
The other problem I had with the article was that they mentioned straight guys' reactions to yaoi but not gay guys'. Who, if you believe the Yaoi Con website, would laugh at it because the relationships are unrealistic, too, not just the way the series deal with homosexuality itself. But no animanga romances are like real life, I guess, so it goes without saying.
And I guess the discussion of scanlations and doujinshi is way too brief, and doesn't really explain that they can be complementary, or completely unrelated, and generally not substitutes for each other, which was the impression I got out of the article. Also funny how, for brevity's sake, the terms doujinshi and scanlation themselves become rarefied fangirl vocabulary "not even familiar to people within the manga universe". I doubt they'd find many people agreeing with that.
