Yaoi - No Anal?

lol There is no "delicate" way to talk about this subject, which is why it's here instead of anywhere else in my internet life. Because I kinda just need to rant on this a bit.

I was reading through some forums - I believe they were the ones at Manga-Updates - and thought I'd check the yaoi threads. I don't have friends in to yaoi, and it seems the genre is just fading off in local bookstores. So I was kinda missing feeling like a group with fellow fans.

And I hit one of the current threads - a fan looking for yaoi manga with NO anal. Sick of the anal. No mention of it, nada. And I'm like....wait, what?

And no other fan has this reaction. They just throw out titles that might work for this person - mostly BL (boys' love) type stuff. Evidently, I'm the only bothered by the fact that the fan is actually looking for no anal.

So I take a look myself and try to figure out what about that request bothers me. The conclusion I've come to is this: As a older yaoi fan, I worked hard to FIND anal. So some newb coming along and complaining about it kinda pisses me off.

See, in the world of yaoi 10 years ago in the US, fans had to look for it. And what made this search so frustrating was the almost-yaoi type titles. Back then, even yaoi jokes in titles was harder to find. Hell, anime was harder to find. But I did track down CLAMP's Tokyo Babylon. Titles like that annoyed me slightly, because the leads would hold each other and kiss and generally be all tortured lovely, but NOTHING ACTUALLY HAPPENED. And for a while there was this line, because there were still a lot of people against yaoi. So to keep things "straight", they'd sometimes argue that "they're friends! They never actually did anything!". So I was always wanting to find that one manga or anime that was irrefutably yaoi - where they did *everything*.

And, yeah, I guess at some point it become necessary to me. And I'm not saying it's about seeing the scenes. Don't get me wrong, I love the smut, but that's not even the point to me. Another part of the issue is that so many yaoi mangas feature one or even both lead characters that have had relations with women in the past, or at the very least are still denying they're gay. And that pisses me off on a personal level. You can't say you're straight and have a same-sex lover - that's denying that lover. I don't care if you're bi or gay or whatever, but you're not straight. But most such characters don't give in to their love until after they have gone all the way. Sometimes even then they try to deny it some more. But that moment - when they consciously and willingly decided to go "all the way" - was always the big climax of the story. Honestly, no pun intended. It was how most storylines came to a close because it was a decisive moment of "okay, I accept everything about me and everything about you and I trust you enough to let this happen now".

And I guess now all those emotions of acceptance and trust are just too involved in that moment for me to dismiss it so easily. That's what I want in my love stories - I want that moment of perfection, of total trust and honesty ...and, well, love. And like I said, I don't have to see it. Have it fade out on a closed door. Have it as a far-off promise of the future. But don't deny it.

Okay, I'm done. It's just one of those moments I feel old and have to shake my head and go "you youngsters will never understand". Because younger anime and manga fans never will really get it. They don't remember the days of sending off for VHS fansubs. The days when Ranma 1/2 was just about the only fricking graphic novel in the US and it only published like - what? - once a year? They'll never get the devotion we once had. It wasn't about learning the language or the culture. It wasn't about going to Japan. It was just the stories. We fell in love with a type of story telling that wasn't available anywhere else. And these days, that's not even true anymore. Because anime has been so popular for so long that everyone is picking up on it and those types of stories and that type of telling has leaked in to everything.

Saa.