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Showing posts from May, 2016

FREE SOUL by Ebine Yamaji

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My third Shoujo-Ai (Girl-Love) manga of choice is written by Ebine Yamaji, a mangaka famous for her works with lesbian themes. One of them, Love My Life,  was even made into a live-action film in 2006. So far, I've read Blue  and Double House , and both were surprisingly insightful and mediative with little to almost nothing explicit in content. I suppose that I've picked shoujo-ai titles over yuri which isn't intentional at all. I still have at least six other titles and I know some of them do have lesbian fanservice. That being said, I'm pretty happy that the three lesbian-themed mangas I've read so far focused more on the serious issues of sexual identity and relationships for gay women. Yamaji's Free Soul  is definitely the most heartfelt and invigorating manga about lesbian identity I've read as of yet. I no doubt plan on reading and reviewing her two other mentioned works. Going by the content of Free Soul  alone, I'm more than happy to tackl

"How we move toward the margins of our own lives, inch by inch"

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Let me start this review by saying that I've read and reviewed Gregory Maguire's most famous and critically-acclaimed work entitled  Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West , which was turned into a Broadway musical hit--and I didn't end up being as impressed about it as I hoped I would be. With that said, I already have extremely low expectations going into this book. It's also noteworthy to point out tha I've read some reviews about it in Goodreads, and they seemed to generally criticize the convoluted plot and subplots, as well as the lack of any clear pay-off in the end. Author Maguire himself has been known to write novels about well-known fictional characters created by other, much like with  Wicked  whose central figure if the supposed villain of the original Wizard of Oz  books. Lost  is the very first time, I believe, that he wrote about an original character. There is a lot about this novel that was entertaining. I honestly enjoyed i

"Blue Sky Complex" by Kei Ichikawa

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Reading shounen-ai/yaoi manga is an acquired taste for a good reason. Its demographic is primarily female, and so you can't expect to read a realistic queer story from these titles because a lot of 'boy-love' manga don't exactly tackle real issues and struggles concerning romantic relationships between men. Most of them tend to be about cutesy, overblown and ridiculously steamy moments between 'pretty boys' where one boy gets to become unavoidably feminine, especially when he is the 'bottom' or 'uke' in the sexual dynamics of the coupling. It's entertaining and adorable as all fuck though, so I tend to ignore whatever real-life implications are being distorted here all for the sake of fanservice. I'd like to think that most female readers are self-aware enough to acknowledge that this isn't how gay relationships work. Authors write these formulaic scenarios because they are female-centered fantasies that cater to what women t

MAY List of Readables

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