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[secondlina]

 Yaoi and Bishonen ai...

Wow, a friend just told me I was right about Yaoi and shonen ai. Apparently, according to articles about Media culture in japan, shonen ai does not represent what gay relationships are in japan. Japan is actually a very homophobic (fear of homosexuality) country. So, shonen ai and yaoi is not a promotion of gay japanese culture. It's actually oriented entierly to women. It's a transposition of female interrogations about love and interaction with the other gender, hence explaining why one of the characters is female-looking. So basicly, Yaoi really is fan-service O_O wow...a whole litterature genre entierly created to the satisfaction of fandom and the psychological questions of young girls. No wonder it's so popular! This changes my point of view about it entierly (well, I still don't like it, but hey..)

There is actually a big difference between Yaoi and Shounen ai and Gay ai. The first is sex-oriented, the second emotion oriented and the last is socially oriented (and the last is the one I claimed to be the best out of yaoi, sorry yaoi fans, din't realise it was a different category). Apparently the first thing that started the genre was Ribbon no kishi by Tezuka Osamu followed by Versailles no bara by Ikeda Ryoko.

Wow, thank you Fanny for the info O_O

Comments

Fanny the lord of knowledge

[(Anonymous)]

You're welcome ^_^

[ichiban-victory.livejournal.com]

Good to know, but I'm still not going to run out and buy anything shonen ai or yaoi. It might also explain all of the manga I've seen where there's a girl pretending to be a guy, gets a crush on a guy, but the other guy is being weirded out because he thinks the girl/guy is gay. It must be a morbid curiosity over there or something...

Hey, I'm from a Slayers comm

[offdutydane.livejournal.com]

Hey, I just wandered over here to check out your Slayers art ( which I love, BTW :D You should think about joining the fanart100 challenge on LJ ^^ ) and saw this post.

While I am a bit of a yaoi fan, the thing that always bugged me was that it's very gender binary and very stereotypical in the sense that there is a 'male' role and a 'female' role. There's a whole formula set up - uke is girlish looking with larger/brighter eyes, shorter in stature, usually ends up in a dress in some comedy scene while the seme is Mr Tall, Dark, and Handsome. :/ However, I'd really like to find out more about gay ai, because I've never ever heard of it before.

If you'd like to get a real sense of modern (male) homosexuality in Japan, read some of Yukio Mishima's books like Confessions of a Mask or Forbidden Colors.

I think it's odd that American super hero comics have been introducing more LBGT characters into their stories lately and they're usually very focused on the social aspect of it, yet fluffy, stereotypical stuff like shounen ai seems to have a larger audience in America ( which may or may not be more accepting of real - life homosexuality ). Anyhow, that's my two cents.