B-Lーshit: Nigatsu no Eden is awkward and dumb

I envision B-Lーshit¹ to be a series of blog posts where I share my thoughts on various BL manga be it good, bad or in-between. I used to be a big yaoi manga consumer in the past especially back in my school days. Now not so much, but I thought if I still waste my time on this shit from time to time I might as well write a quick post.

I'll be looking at all this BL shit from three points: 

Story. It's clear, I'll be judging the plot, if there's any, in my own smoothbrain way.

Let's go on a tangent a bit on "if there's any" part, which can be summarized by that phrase really. YAOI initially was the abbreviation for "Yama nashi, ochi nashi, imi nashi" meaning "No peak (climax), no fall (punch line/denouement), no meaning". I don't think the term is wildly used in Japan anymore. Instead the term BL is used for both yaoi (has explicitly shown sex scenes) and shounen-ai (no explicit butt sex), probably. At least, that's how I use the term BL, haha, hence the title of the series. However, I still use the terms yaoi and shounen-ai along with English speaking manga sites, and I read mostly yaoi, 'cos it gets faster to the point. That's all being said, I think that initial term holds true to this day coming from the fact that many yaoi manga are generally one shots or not too long and basically are homoerotic hentai drawn by women for women.

Art. Because manga is a visual medium, the way it's drawn is as important as the story for me, if not more in many cases. I can look over bad plot if the art is good depending on my mood.

Sex scenes. YAOI also stands/stood for "Yamete, oshiri ga itai" ("Stop, my ass hurts!") among fujoshis. As I said, yaoi/BL/whatever is basically a homo porn by fujos for fujos. The main outcome of "the story" is often smutty love making in BL. If the sex scenes and the art is very good in my book, it's capable of trumping over non-existent story depending on my mood.

______________________________________________

Nigatsu no Eden

I discovered Nigatsu no Eden (Eden in February) last month. I don't remember 99% of it now, but from what I understood from a note on my phone: it is like some noob like me was the mangaka and the author of the manga. Here's what I wrote in that note (slightly edited):

Story: fast paced (normal if we're using yaoi metrics), sappy, dumb. 'Tell, don't show' type of crap and I don't want them to show, 'cos the art is bad. No sense of smooth transitioning. Went thru fast (that's not a compliment). I wanted to get done with it already in the process of reading. Paced like Elon Musk's speech on Joe Rogan's podcast. Shiki (prolly the black haired dude) is overreacting like a man child (??). I don't like the tragedy.

Art: awkward. I didn't take the manga seriously because of it. I doubt, however, that good art would have saved this manga.

Sex scenes: bad. Good they're gone by fast.

I don't recommend Nigatsu no Eden.

____________________________________

1. B-Lーshit can be read either as BLshit or as "bullshit". Applying magic rules out of my ass, here's why:

。"-" stands for "silent" "U" similarly to now defunct KPop girl group f-ve dolls fashion.

。"ー" stands for second "L". ー is a katakana (one of the Japanese alphabets) character which repeats a previous sound and makes it "long". For example, ビール [biiru] (beer). I don't think it works for consonants, but oh well. The first one doesn't really work too lol.

I'll probably change the title of the series in the future.