Eiki Eiki

[This is an old review.]

This series requires ginormous amounts of suspension of disbelief. You have to be ok with/be able to ignore several things:

- A 25-year-old guy who apparently has a habit of skipping out on important things to go play video games at an arcade can be elected prime minister.
- Despite suddenly deciding he's in love with a 16-year-old girl, he had no past scandals that kept him from being elected.
- Kanata's senior aide is a doctorate-holding 18-year-old who is immature show more enough to run away from his very important job because his crush, Kanata, rejected him.
- Nearly everyone is ok with Kanata's declaration that Minori is his fiancee. No one comments about the utter lack of evidence that they had been dating prior to the announcement, and the age difference does not create a political scandal.

That's just a few things - I'm sure I could make the list longer if I tried. What it comes down to is that this is not a series that wants you to bring things like logic and reality to the table. Read it for the good-looking guys, the humor, and the romance, probably in that order.

I don't think I really went into this series expecting anything much. I got this as part of a used bookstore-shopping haul. It was in the Clearance section and only cost $1, so all I really did was flip through and decide that even though I didn't know what the series was about the artwork appealed to me. After I got home, I realized that I had read at least one work by the author before. This particular author is fairly well known for her m/m romance (hence this quote from the author's brother when she showed this book to him: "It's not gay!"), so Sai being in love with Kanata was not that much of a surprise to me.

Some of the kinds of suspension of disbelief that Eiki Eiki asks of her readers in this particular series put me off a little - I can't wrap my brain around the idea that Kanata even got elected in the first place, much less experienced no problems after declaring a 16-year-old girl his fiancee. However, I do like Eiki Eiki's sense of humor, and I could enjoy the overall situation as long as I accepted it as light, fluffy fun happening in some kind of messed up parallel universe (the word "millennium" in the title refers to Kanata's explanation of how he managed to become the prime minister: "It is the new millennium" - apparently, the millennium has magical powers in this parallel universe.). I enjoyed the very cute Makita, Kanata's S.P. (secret police), and his habit of threatening to shoot Kanata if he tries anything with Minori before they get married. I even liked Kanata's journalist friend, who ends up getting the short end of the stick a lot (being the "bad guy" who leaks Minori and Kanata's "relationship," having to take care of a pathetic post-rejection Sai, etc.).

As far as good-looking guys go, for the most part, Eiki Eiki's style is very pleasing to the eye (the exception being her sometimes awkward facial expressions), so all the guys look good. Eiki Eiki even manages to make several of the guys kind of sweet. For instance, it would have been very easy to turn Kanata into nothing more than a near-pedophile. Instead, I was left with the impression that, as much as he flirts with Minori and tells her he's in love with her, his intentions are actually fairly pure. What he seems to want most, even if he maybe doesn't realize it, is someone to have a comforting morning routine with, someone who will tell him to have a good day and be there for him when the day is over. Basically, Kanata wants a family. There's a bit in the latter half of the volume where Minori is looking at a photograph of what I'm guessing is a young Kanata, his mother, and his father. The woman I think is his mother is younger than his father and looks a bit like Minori. It wouldn't surprise me at all if it turned out he was trying to recreate the family he grew up with. So, rather than being icky, it seems like his relationship with Minori may actually turn out to be more sweet and a little sad.

So far, this seems like a "meh" sort of a series - if I were giving it a letter grade, right now it would probably get a C. The artwork is nice enough to look at (even if Minori usually looks like a cute boy with pigtails), but the characters and story, though far from bad, aren't great either. I would have been very annoyed with myself if I had bought this volume for the full price of $12.95, rather than the $1 clearance price I actually paid. The drama that I'm sure is part of Kanata and Sai's story should be fun, but plenty of manga and anime guys have drama and angst, so more than that is necessary for a really good story.

It's not entirely clear which couple is supposed to be the focus of this series. I imagine Minori and Kanata are intended to be the primary couple, but there's not really much chemistry between the two of them. Minori notices that Kanata is hot, and she thinks he might be a nice guy, but that's it - at this point, I'm rooting for Sai more than I am for Minori, even though I don't know much about Sai yet, simply because I imagine he has a deeper relationship with Kanata. Kanata may say he asked Minori to marry him because he loves her, but I don't see how that could be true. Unless he thinks love means thinking a person's hair is great. There's a stellar basis for a relationship.

I think I might own the first two of this series, which I believe is composed of four volumes total. I'll have to decide if I want to hunt down the rest of the series after I finish the next volume I own, but it's not looking too likely right now, unless I can get those other volumes as cheaply as I got the first two. This isn't the worst thing I've ever read, but there are too many other things I could be spending my money on.

(Original review, with read-alikes and watch-alikes, posted on A Library Girl's Familiar Diversions.) show less

Wow, I'm surprised at myself. It's not often I give a yaoi a rating above the average of the other reviewers, but I guess here we are.

Yutaka is the heir to his wealthy family, pressured to do well and take over the family business. Of course, he has the hots for his new, warm and bubbly but often misunderstood-to-be-a-delinquent friend Tohno. Common enough plot, but while I'm not sure with only two volumes it will be able to win a place as one of my favorite BL, it's definitely on the higher show more end of the enjoyment level. A large part of this I think was the handling of Yutaka's personality and attraction. He's smart and subdued, class chairman, and when he's around Tohno still tends to act as a usual friend, despite the occasional skip of the heartbeat. At the same time, his attraction isn't just a sweet love and longing like it is portrayed in a lot this category of BL, but also a definite sexual desire. He fantasizes about Tohno, sometimes in rather kinky situations, and is QUITE a fan of masturbation. The dichotomy was almost humorous, as these kinds of personality traits aren't usually portrayed together in one character in BL, despite the fact I imagine there are plenty of top male students who are just as preoccupied with sex as Yutaka (though perhaps a little less on the kinky side ^^). Tohno for his part is charming and earnest and wants to understand his friend, and while perhaps a little more interchangeable with many other BL characters of his type from other stories, still won a place in my favor. Both these characters make me wish this manga was longer. While good now, I think with more time they could have even been the kinds of BL protagonists that DON'T completely fade away and blend with the rest in my mind after some time has passed. Still, it isn't really a huge flaw that they may.

The problem? Yutaka devolves through the story (though for the most part in the very end) from a boy who cares about another and wants to have hot kinky sex with him... To a manipulative kid who treats his 'love' like a toy he wants. Both character types are cliche enough, but in my opinion the former was dealt with with some originality and skill, whereas when the manipulative side of his personality starts coming out, the character flattens out completely and seems like all the other manipulative aggressors in yaoi. To be honest, I think he was possibly SUPPOSED to have been the toying manipulative way the whole story through (as the mangaka in her notes seems to consider the story "dark," despite the fact it was not really so much before the manipulative turn in the end) but, perhaps by accident, the author portrayed him at first as a little more considerate and desirous of his partner's love and consent (and thus the story was less dark than she thought/intended). I hate to say I like the author's possible mistakes in character development rather than the ACTUAL way they meant to portray the character, but the former was simply better.

I avoided this manga because of the generic looking art on the cover for quite some time, but I really do recommend it (least of all because the art inside is actually a good deal better). In the end, I still very much want to read the second volume, but I fear the return of the one dimensional Yutaka. Still, my fingers are crossed that Tohno's reaction to Yutaka's..., er, confession, will trip up the flattening out of his character we saw in the end of this volume, and mix things up for the better.

(Unfortunately, the second volume is not yet released in Japan, much less translated and released in the US.) show less

why is BL this way

and why am I this way, picking up like 5 volumes of something i kinda like and then pulling myself through them just to put a cap on it? my refusal to DNF things and how fast I read manga is really a bad mix.

anyhow. I made it. I'd expected it to be quite different because it came recommended to me, but really it's all the same nonsense in this weird genre. i was more into this one's genre-awareness & humour, as well as plot & characters: Izumi being a miserable artist but show more using his acting talent to streamline his way into his (deluded) dream of working on manga...but that was dropped so suddenly in the last volume with no resolution or development, which was a huge bummer. Once we hit the 70% mark of the series and it was diverted by a nonsense amnesia plot I was like [rubs temples] "don't do this to me, i stuck with you through SO much, please don't"

but it did. I can shelve this as an "asked, and answered" kind of series.

rei was so very good though show less

The premise of the story was interesting but it was downplayed a lot so it sort of fell flat to me. Also, Daigo is really dependent and needy to the point of it being a pathological problem. I can understand the trauma of his past but at the same time it pretty much got on my nerves.