[Sol Falling]

Originally Posted by White Manju Bun

As much as this conversation is a fun read, we're teetering on off topic with the yaoi/yuri debate. Masa's characterization and what the 5 Leaves want with him Im cool with but the rest is borderline. If you keep wanting to discuss it I suggest VM and or PM

Impending off-topicness acknowledged...I'll try to keep this relevant to the show, and any yaoi/yuri stuff brief.

Originally Posted by musouka

This is what I mean about simplifying the plot, though. Allow me to put it this way. You keep on wanting to simplify it as "Akitsu will eventually give in, so where's the tension"?

To me, I'm much more interested in why he's going to give in. The series has set it up as there being two (entirely personal) reasons for Akitsu to give in and join the group. One, he's starving and poor. Two, they provide a sense of companionship he's never had before.

The first reason alone is probably good enough to give in for most people, but it implies a certain pragmatism that Akitsu seems to lack. If, however, he goes into this group expecting the sort of camaraderie he's been seeking, there's a whole other layer to this. That's not a pragmatic reason to join anything; it's an emotional one.

The group might not be exactly what he's looking for. He'll also have to balance getting to know them and his own sense of pride and morality. So it's not just suspense in him joining the group, it's the suspense in how he will make a place for himself within it.

I'll admit the 'tension' thing is part of it. Basically, as you noted, with most of the attention Masa's getting being 'high pressure recruitment tactics' I am simply not very compelled by Masa's susceptibility to it--like I highlighted, his 'weakness'. Yaichi's observation at the end that it wasn't just the pressure-tactics that were pulling Masa into the group does bring a human dimension to his characterization--Masa does long for the interaction they provide him, he's not simply being pulled in against his own will--yet nonetheless it's still the 'love-bombing' that comes off as the most emergent determinant of his behaviour.

Will Masa have to balance his pride and morality with his desire to fit in with them? That is probably true. However, that's imagining his situation as an entirely self-determining one. I kinda feel like Masa's 'place' within the group will not, at least for the near future, be determined by the above 'balance' you are talking about but rather what exactly the rest of the guys can pressure him into.

Are you implying that every woman has "yaoi fantasies" and just some of them are better at hiding it? Because, yes, it would be incredibly easy to read a series that lacked "yaoi fantasies" if the woman in question never had them to begin with!

:P Not at all. That statement was in response to the idea that I was implying that 'a woman can't write about or for men' without yaoi seeping in. What I was saying was, given my impression that Ono is an author who enjoys the constructs of yaoi fantasy (supported by the fact that she has written it), is that she is including it deliberately, not as 'pandering' or 'crossover appeal' necessarily, but as a meaningful aspect of the story. Does the fact that this is seinen make the idea that she might do so impossible? Not at all (emotion =! sex, after all). I haven't actually read it, but from what I've heard, Kuroshitsuji might be a similar example.

You're being too nebulous here. What I'm getting from you is that men who show interest in one another whether through their smiles or enjoying seeing them react to people, is by its very nature an abnormal construct that only women utilize and enjoy.

What if Ono had been a man? What if she had never written male/male? What if I pointed out other series by men aimed at men with similar sentiments? Would it still be a "yaoi fantasy"? Simply by labeling it a "yaoi fantasy", you're flattening the nuance of the situation just as surely as the label "tsundere" can flatten a female character's justified emotional states.

Words don't only have meaning, they have a subtext to them. Using the word "yaoi" and "fantasy" has the same sense of labeling the series as "pandering" and "unrealistic" respectively. And, let me explain, there is nothing wrong with a certain level of pandering or unrealism--this doesn't mean a work can't strike you emotionally, as I'm sure Kannazuki no Miko did for you--but I don't think it fits for this series and the relationship Ono is trying to express.

For a helpful example, I don't really think MariMite falls under the "yuri fantasy" label either (though it is certainly a "fantasy"), and I've had somewhat similar arguments about that.

:P This may be the key misunderstanding here. For me, neither yaoi nor yuri have any implication of 'pandering'. I'll confirm that by 'fantasy', I do mean 'unrealistic' though. What Masa's compulsion towards Yaichi's smile and Yaichi's uncharacteristic interest evidence is a gut-level, reciprocal attraction between males, and of a non-sexual kind at that. That is the stuff of female fantasy, the kind that appeals overwhelmingly to women instead of men (of course there are exceptions). Whether Ono were a man, or there were other similar works by men out there, I'd still have identified these similarities, though I may have had to rebalance my understanding of yaoi's demographic distribution. The point is I am strongly recognizing the (valid) emotional constructs of yaoi in this work, although nevertheless as I have pretty much stated from the beginning I don't think that means it features pandering subtext. Instead, despite being in the seinen demographic, my point has been to acknowledge that this work isn't completely designed to appeal to me; to say that 'doesn't appeal to me' == 'pandering' would be truly arrogant.