Sasaki And Miyano And Me

 

 

Let me get this out of the way: I am aware of BL and gay rights and all that.  I am “woke”, in the proper sense of the term, in that I do my best to be open-minded and tolerant and understanding of all innocent people who have never done anything to me or other innocent people and are just trying to live their lives.

 

That being said, I am not much for yaoi or BL (boys love).  I am 100% straight, but I do find titillation in sexuality of all kinds.

 

But the other day (literally, the other day), I found a copy of Sasaki and Miyano Volume One.  (And, I believe, it has also recently gotten an anime, if anyone’s interested.)

 

The reason I talk about BL is not only because the series is a BL, but also because a lot of the story and humor derive from the whole BL phenomenon.

 

Cute underclassman Miyano, the BL fudanshi (male fanboy perv, as opposed to fujoshi, the female fangirl perv) just happens one day to witness a bullying incident.  He is right in the middle of calling for help when delinquent upperclassman Sasaki tells him that [Sasaki] is going in to break them up.  Three months later, the two of them are on their way to developing a potentially-more-than-friends relationship.

 

The art for this series is good, especially the eyes on Miyano, plus each main character introduced in Vol. 1 is different enough from all of the others that I can tell them apart easily.  That being said, one can easily mistake it for a 4-koma gag-a-day comic from the formatting, which may turn some readers off.  Also, the wordings and speech balloon placement can, at times, make it hard to keep of who exactly is saying what to who at any given time.

 

A lot of the humor comes from the unintended cringe of Sasaki casually saying something about BL (his own fascination with which Miyano is trying to keep on the down-low, the “BL DL”, if you were) and Miyano frantically trying to shush him.  But there is also slapstick and traditional “Japanese humor” (as I call it) involved, so there is some variety.

 

Sasaki is just dumb and lazy enough to carry the odd joke here and there, and Miyano has definitely got the whole “cute but self-conscious about it” thing going on.  Together their antics almost make me smile.

 

And, while Sasaki does at times struggling to understand exactly what his new feelings for Miyano are, it is always treated with respect.  There is no homophobic bullying (at least in Vol. 1) and nobody finds this possible attraction to be odd or off-putting at all, save for possibly Miyano.  It is played as a gentle, heartfelt introspection.  And major points for showing/mentioning actual girls as well, rather than keeping the series all-male as some yuri/yaoi series are wont to do (even if the story does take place at an all-boys school).

 

It's an ordinary falling-in-love slice-of-life manga that just happens to have LGBT+ protagonists, that's all.  The feelings are what's important, and they are carried off quite well.

I could probably compare it to Kase-San and Morning Glories, a similar yuri manga I read a couple of years aback, albeit with boys instead of girls and working the jock angle rather than the fudanshi angle.  I also don’t seem to recall Kase-San and Morning Glories to be all that funny.

 

But they are both cute, innocent slice-of-life manga with LGBT+ protagonists, so that’s something, right?

 

PS: I also wound up going to the bookstore the other day, so I do have a list of other manga that I am meaning to read ASAP and then review for you, so stay tuned!