The Carp on the Chopping Board Jumps Twice
Sunday, October 4th, 2009 08:15 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
charmianSo like, the basic problem between the two main characters is, well, actually, why should I bother talking about it when it's basically the main plot! Read it yourself and figure out what you think. XD But yeah, in a nutshell, the main character, Ootomo Kyouichi has kind of fallen into a relationship with Imagase, who is openly gay and madly in love with him. However, Kyouichi is sort of ambivalent about it, because he likes the attention and then likes Imagase as a person, and doesn't want to hurt him; he's someone who's passive about relationships and needs to be loved by the other person. Yet, being passive, in general his feelings on the other end are kind of weak. Imagase is the exact opposite in his philosophy towards relationships; to him whether he loves the other person is the most important thing. Yet Imagase cannot ignore the ambivalence of Kyouichi towards him, in the end, and not wanting to hurt Imagase anymore, Kyouichi agrees that they should break up.
At the same time, Imagase had also been holding back, living with Kyouichi yet keeping his own apartment. He had always suspected this would happen sooner or later. However, after Imagase leaves, Kyouichi realizes that he loved Imagase after all. (Whoops)
Anyway, I would read more BL if more BL was like this (though technically this isn't BL, but Ladies): I'm sick of reading stories where the conflict comes from contrived external situations, and where sex magically makes everything better, and of semes who are ridiculously emotionally bulletproof. Although maybe few people want to read about characters having truly excruciating conversations, and everyone feeling really bad about the situation but not really knowing what to do.
Other noteworthy points:
a) Imagase claims that if he were a woman, he would have resolved the situation by now by getting Kyouichi to marry him, and then he could meet his parents, have two kids, join the PTA, live together for years. Because they are two men, though, Kyouichi is unsure where the relationship will go, and what form it will have (which is why he asks questions which are to the reader bizarre, like 'how deeply do gay men feel for each other?'); in a heterosexual relationship, you know where it is going after awhile, and there is a public form of commitment (marriage). But Imagase can't rely on society to formalize the relationship and make it more easy to bind himself to Kyouichi. There are no social expectations there. There's kind of a parallel drawn to this in the subplot about Kyouichi's co-worker, who is the secret daughter of one of the executives; at the funeral, she can't even cry openly or be recognized as the daughter of the deceased, because no one knows of their relationship. Her half-brothers don't know she exists. This kind of theme seems not to be brought up in BL very much.
b) Switching between top and bottom. Whoa, a rarity in BL. What is also interesting is that Kyouichi is in a state of identity crisis afterwards, because he sees being a top as more gay than being a bottom, because he's more actively participating.
c)This manga actually has a point: Kyouichi and Imagase's ideas of love are diametrically opposed. Should you focus on the other person and enjoy being loved, as Kyouichi does, even if you're not really sure how you feel about the other person? Kyouichi feels their relationship is completely empty, for example, if Imagase does not deeply love him. Meanwhile, Imagase puts being with the person he loves first, regardless of whether that person loves him, but really wants to be loved despotically. (This doesn't seem to work out very well, does it? I've always felt annoyed by characters in romance manga, BL or shoujo, who act like this, and the vindictive side of me wants to see them suffer in this way when the realize that even if they have tons of hot sex, that doesn't necessarily lead to love. (Not that Imagase is like this. Kyouichi is always free to leave, he's just afraid of hurting Imagase's feelings and doesn't know what he wants, so he does nothing until Imagase forces the issue) Also, this manga made me wonder if the reason people like the possessive seme/shoujo hero is because there are quite a few passive men like Kyouichi out there? XD If the hero of a shoujo manga just got together with the heroine because 'well, okay, if it makes you happy' and was generally kind and considerate, rather than being a possessive jerk or a tsundere.... actually, it WOULD be interesting. I wonder if there is something like that out there. )
At the same time, Imagase had also been holding back, living with Kyouichi yet keeping his own apartment. He had always suspected this would happen sooner or later. However, after Imagase leaves, Kyouichi realizes that he loved Imagase after all. (Whoops)
Anyway, I would read more BL if more BL was like this (though technically this isn't BL, but Ladies): I'm sick of reading stories where the conflict comes from contrived external situations, and where sex magically makes everything better, and of semes who are ridiculously emotionally bulletproof. Although maybe few people want to read about characters having truly excruciating conversations, and everyone feeling really bad about the situation but not really knowing what to do.
Other noteworthy points:
a) Imagase claims that if he were a woman, he would have resolved the situation by now by getting Kyouichi to marry him, and then he could meet his parents, have two kids, join the PTA, live together for years. Because they are two men, though, Kyouichi is unsure where the relationship will go, and what form it will have (which is why he asks questions which are to the reader bizarre, like 'how deeply do gay men feel for each other?'); in a heterosexual relationship, you know where it is going after awhile, and there is a public form of commitment (marriage). But Imagase can't rely on society to formalize the relationship and make it more easy to bind himself to Kyouichi. There are no social expectations there. There's kind of a parallel drawn to this in the subplot about Kyouichi's co-worker, who is the secret daughter of one of the executives; at the funeral, she can't even cry openly or be recognized as the daughter of the deceased, because no one knows of their relationship. Her half-brothers don't know she exists. This kind of theme seems not to be brought up in BL very much.
b) Switching between top and bottom. Whoa, a rarity in BL. What is also interesting is that Kyouichi is in a state of identity crisis afterwards, because he sees being a top as more gay than being a bottom, because he's more actively participating.
c)This manga actually has a point: Kyouichi and Imagase's ideas of love are diametrically opposed. Should you focus on the other person and enjoy being loved, as Kyouichi does, even if you're not really sure how you feel about the other person? Kyouichi feels their relationship is completely empty, for example, if Imagase does not deeply love him. Meanwhile, Imagase puts being with the person he loves first, regardless of whether that person loves him, but really wants to be loved despotically. (This doesn't seem to work out very well, does it? I've always felt annoyed by characters in romance manga, BL or shoujo, who act like this, and the vindictive side of me wants to see them suffer in this way when the realize that even if they have tons of hot sex, that doesn't necessarily lead to love. (Not that Imagase is like this. Kyouichi is always free to leave, he's just afraid of hurting Imagase's feelings and doesn't know what he wants, so he does nothing until Imagase forces the issue) Also, this manga made me wonder if the reason people like the possessive seme/shoujo hero is because there are quite a few passive men like Kyouichi out there? XD If the hero of a shoujo manga just got together with the heroine because 'well, okay, if it makes you happy' and was generally kind and considerate, rather than being a possessive jerk or a tsundere.... actually, it WOULD be interesting. I wonder if there is something like that out there. )
no subject
Date: 2009-10-06 12:39 am (UTC)From what I understand of most BL (a genre I would also be more interested in reading if more of it was like this), there's often a good deal of imbalance of power that gets shown in the sex scenes in who tops and bottoms? So possibly the switching is an example of the fact that instead of the power all being in one side, it's weirdly shared between Kyouichi and Imagase. Imagase is more experienced, aggressive, and he knows what he wants, while Kyouichi is passive, inexperienced and too polite to say no. But Kyouichi is older - I /sort/ of get the impression that he's more financially secure, too - and Imagase still calls him senpai, and because Imagase is crazy about /him/, instead of vice versa, he has the power to get rid of Imagase if he just tells Imagase to leave, which Imagase is aware of.
While I'm happy to sit back and see where this goes, what I'd really like is to see /why/ Imagase is the crazy gay stalker over a guy he initially had no realistic chance with. We've sort of gotten a glimpse of why Kyouichi is so willing to go with whatever makes his partner happy and doesn't make waves, but I still can't get a handle on why Imagase is the way he is.
no subject
Date: 2009-10-06 01:52 am (UTC)Yeah, there's a lot of power imbalance in general, IME. Not that Imagase can't also leave Kyouichi, he just doesn't want to, until that point where he just can't take it anymore.
Hmm, I can't really remember how it all started. Although, he did know Kyouichi as a friend before, and he does give that whole speech about why he loves Kyouichi so much, so that's an explanation. I suppose another one would be that he has an obsessive personality in general?
no subject
Date: 2009-10-06 03:46 am (UTC)I guess with Imagase, his obsessive personality has such negative connotations, especially with how things start out, that I, at least, would appreciate a bit more on either why he's so damned obsessive or why he's fixated on Kyouichi (his behaviour early in Mouse skeeved a friend out to the point where she didn't want to read further).
We could say that Kyouichi is just a passive nice guy in general, but I was a lot less likely to smack him for his go-with-the-flow approach to life when we got a look at his father - who seems to have had a rocky marriage - explaining to him how it was better to just agree with whatever the woman wants and make sure she's happy.
And, yeah, Imagase knew Kyouichi when they were in college, but he also knew that Kyouichi was cheating on his steady girlfriend, which doesn't strike me as a quality that one would want in a crush spanning a decade or so.
no subject
Date: 2009-10-06 04:16 am (UTC)Hmm... I wonder whether we won't get some of that in the last chapter. For me, that isn't as necessary, because I see this kind of character trait so much in manga it almost doesn't occur to me to ask.
Yeah, but you have to figure in that Imagase is not the sort who demands to be loved back the most, and even now, in their current relationship, he expects Kyouichi to cheat on him. So apparently he has a lower threshold for cheating than most people.