A blogger from Dublin named Katherine has some interesting reflections on yaoi. Katherine is recovering from a recent yaoi binge, and after reading so much of it, she really saw the conventions of the genre, such as the fact that despite the lovers are two men, they tend to fall into stereotyped male/female roles, down to the submissive partner having bigger eyes than the dominant one.
The idea that there might be a sexual relationship between two people of equal strength would never enter your head if yaoi was your main source, and you have to wonder: do gay Japanese teenage boys borrow their sisters’ yaoi manga and get confused by all this, thinking that that’s what it means to be a boy who likes boys? It’s a depressing thought.
Still, she allows that the fact that both partners are male is a bit “subversive.”
She goes on to talk about some of the standard plot devices. I don’t read yaoi, but what she wrote certainly crystallized a lot of the reviews and commentary that I have read. In the end, she concludes that it’s just as well she’s given up on yaoi:
It’s fun enough, if you’re into that kind of thing and you’re just being self-indulgent, and there are occasional gems — the gorgeous Kaze to Ki no Uta (Song of the Wind and the Trees, for instance — but my God, the laziness of most of the writing drove me up the wall. Just because it’s pornography doesn’t mean you don’t have to make the characters distinct, you know.
