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owlectomySankyuu Tatsuo, "BL as a proof of pure love"
I... cannot always follow this guy's logic, which may be a reading problem or a logic problem. It's kind of a strange article and I think I largely disagree with him. My own commentary is [in brackets].
Sankyuu is a straight man who was first interested in moe anime, then discovered Boys Love and got into that.
Some people say that the turn-on is the relationship dynamic (boss/employee, teacher/student, etc) but in his case the moe is the connection: what makes this person more than just another employee, for example.
[moe... is hard to translate so I am leaving it as is. A lot of people, like Sankyuu in this essay, describe it as not a feeling of sexual desire, but a feeling of sort of paternalistic affection -- "I want to watch over this person, I want them to be happy." I will leave it as moe.]
In the 'pure love' kind of BL, sex is treated as the final outcome of overpowering love.
Men are stereotypically able to disconnect sex from love, but there are also an increasing number of conservative 'herbivore' men who only want to have sex with people they love: men who've had bad experiences with putting sex before an emotional relationship, or who've fallen into despair as the result of being unable to communicate their feelings. This is why an increasing number of men are reading BL.
BL is a search for pure true love: what's important is the emotional relationship more than the sexual desire, especially since there's not 'next stage' (e.g. marriage) for the relationship to go to. [This is... not necessarily my own experience of reading BL!]
Sankyuu sees moe as not necessarily identifying with either character, but identifying as a sort of 'guardian angel' who wants their favorite character to be happy, to be in the kind of relationship where both people are going to stick together and support each other no matter what.
Says that the feeling of having your "manly romantic friendship" reinterpreted by women as "romance" is very much like the appropriation of Japanese culture by westerners as "orientalism/Japonisme." It's finding a new meaning in something you never thought about that way. It's like how Japanese people first realized how great ukiyoe is because of western appreciation [WAIT REALLY? That conclusion is pretty strange but also kind of interesting when you're considering BL as a kind of appropriation.]
I... cannot always follow this guy's logic, which may be a reading problem or a logic problem. It's kind of a strange article and I think I largely disagree with him. My own commentary is [in brackets].
Sankyuu is a straight man who was first interested in moe anime, then discovered Boys Love and got into that.
Some people say that the turn-on is the relationship dynamic (boss/employee, teacher/student, etc) but in his case the moe is the connection: what makes this person more than just another employee, for example.
[moe... is hard to translate so I am leaving it as is. A lot of people, like Sankyuu in this essay, describe it as not a feeling of sexual desire, but a feeling of sort of paternalistic affection -- "I want to watch over this person, I want them to be happy." I will leave it as moe.]
In the 'pure love' kind of BL, sex is treated as the final outcome of overpowering love.
Men are stereotypically able to disconnect sex from love, but there are also an increasing number of conservative 'herbivore' men who only want to have sex with people they love: men who've had bad experiences with putting sex before an emotional relationship, or who've fallen into despair as the result of being unable to communicate their feelings. This is why an increasing number of men are reading BL.
BL is a search for pure true love: what's important is the emotional relationship more than the sexual desire, especially since there's not 'next stage' (e.g. marriage) for the relationship to go to. [This is... not necessarily my own experience of reading BL!]
Sankyuu sees moe as not necessarily identifying with either character, but identifying as a sort of 'guardian angel' who wants their favorite character to be happy, to be in the kind of relationship where both people are going to stick together and support each other no matter what.
Says that the feeling of having your "manly romantic friendship" reinterpreted by women as "romance" is very much like the appropriation of Japanese culture by westerners as "orientalism/Japonisme." It's finding a new meaning in something you never thought about that way. It's like how Japanese people first realized how great ukiyoe is because of western appreciation [WAIT REALLY? That conclusion is pretty strange but also kind of interesting when you're considering BL as a kind of appropriation.]
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