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The sexually explicit series took nine years to go to print due to its controversial content, which included themes sexual assault, pedophilia, drug abuse, and homosexuality. That is, until Takemiya’s long-running 1976 manga Kaze to Ki no Uta. These boys were more than friends but less than lovers. Yet, these relationships weren’t explicitly gay there was an air of homoerotic ambiguity, a general queerness, to the characters and their interactions. There is a dark whimsy, even tragedy, that permeates these earlier Boys’ Love stories, as the female artists rejected heteronormative gender dynamics and subverted misogynistic views of masculinity. But The Heart of Thomas isn’t a love story it’s a portrait of pain steeped in violence, resentment, and melodrama. The story itself revolves around the death of a teenage boy and the others who carry on without him, not completely unlike Mafuyu’s own struggles. Takemiya’s short story In The Sunroom, published in December 1970, depicted the genre’s first kiss between two men Hagio’s 1974 manga series The Heart of Thomas is oft-regarded as one of the era’s most seminal works. In the 1970s, shōjo manga experienced a creative boom led by women artists like Moto Hagio and Keiko Takemiya, who emerged at the forefront of homoerotic storytelling. These stories emphasized romance and intimacy, and they also featured beautiful boys (known as bishōnen) with sparkling doe eyes, floppy hair, and lithe, willowy frames. It all started in the pages of shōjo manga, comics targeted to teenage girls. While these works focus on men, they’re told through the female gaze, as BL is predominantly written and consumed by women. The second collection of The Heart of Thomas.
However, yaoi is categorized as a more explicit subgenre of Boys’ Love, which was coined in the 1990s. In the West, it’s popularly called yaoi, a name that actually started as a joke among mangaka in the late 1970s as a portmanteau of yama nashi, ochi nashi, imi nashi (“no climax, no point, no meaning”) - a reference to works that focused on sex over substance. “Boys’ Love” is a genre of Japanese manga, anime, and media that centers on romantic relationships between young men. The fantasy of BL begins with its inception. “Because BL itself is very much a fantasy, let’s support it with a realistic foundation.” Kizu herself had gained recognition for her doujinshis, or erotic fan works. “I wanted it to have a suitable realistic feel,” writer and illustrator Kizu told Pash! in 2019. Confessions aren’t always explosive or volatile sometimes, they’re quiet realizations and clumsy kisses. It’s a slow burn, yes, but it’s also simple in a way that BL, or “Boys’ Love,” isn’t often depicted. Kizu creates a world that feels lived in, and her characters seem real.
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Mafuyu doesn’t talk much, which makes him a natural foil to hot-headed Ritsuka, who teaches him how to play the instrument, albeit reluctantly, and invites him to join the band he started with bassist Haruki and drummer Akihiko, two college students who are dancing around their own sexual tension. Given is partially the story of Mafuyu finding his voice - both literally, as the band’s frontman and main lyricist, and figuratively, as a young man who shut himself off from everyone following the death of his boyfriend Yuki, whose guitar he carries with him every day. And in the context of its genre, Given becomes practically radical. The story is a chaste entry into the Boys’ Love canon, but one that is part of the genre’s modern evolution. In Given, the queerness of male leads is never questioned or fetishized. But that doesn’t make it any less intimate. The movie, like the manga and anime that came before it, puts romance second to its characters. The manga was adapted into a 11-episode anime of the same name in 2019, and a sequel film, aptly titled Given The Movie, recently premiered on Crunchyroll. That, in essence, is the plot of Natsuki Kizu’s Given, the story of four young men in an amateur band who learn to love and be loved over the course of six volumes (so far).
Rather, it was a gradual fall, just a couple of boys fumbling with their feelings while plucking their guitar strings and humming unfinished melodies.
Ritsuka Uenoyama and Mafuyu Sato fell in love in an unlikely place: a high school stairwell.