I spent an entire month talking about
Arina Tanemura so let's move on to someone different,Lily Hoshino.
She's been featured here a couple of times before for her yaoi
collections and after last months heterosexual extravaganza, I could
use a shake up. Mr. Flower Bride is yet again a collection of yaoi
stories though the volume neglects to mention the other stories
instead focusing on the titular story. I can forgive it though since
the other stories are far less interesting and take up space that
could have been used for the better main story.
The Mr. Flower Bride chapters focus on
Aoi and Shinji as they get swept up in Shinji's family tradition of
marrying the youngest son off to a guy to prevent succession disputes
among the children. While this could be an interesting jumping off
point for dealing with people forced to love a person of a gender
they have no interest in,this is never explored. It does however take
a short time to show Shinji coming to terms with his attraction to
Aoi despite his worry of getting Aoi involved in a tradition that
people view as a punishment in someway.
The remaining chapters detail their
wedding night and a few other isolated events and it works well to
develop their relationship and how it affects others. I wouldn't call
the characters fully developed but they work well enough for the
short time we see them. Like My Only King there is the starting of
something rather interesting here but it fails to follow through. The
story right after that is a role reversal of the main couple's
archetype and actually lends a little more to building up the setting
with more insight into this tradition. Letting this run alongside the
main story would actually be interesting as a way to expand the
setting. However, my hopes for this story will have to wait for the sequel as it's pushed aside for more one shots.
The other two side stories are just
sort of sitting there. One's about a bodyguard who needs protecting
and a pretty boy in a brothel finding his true love. It's well trod
ground for yaoi and seems to be struggling for a reason to exist
outside of fulling a boy sex quota. The latter story breaks the mold
that the book set by again putting a girly uke in it. Up till now the
manga-ka had stopped drawing her ukes too girly. They were just
feminine enough to work and the role reversal chapter works better
because of the style. However,here he's back to being a borderline
trap,and while not a bad story, it's was done better in The Seabed
of Night. On there own these would be okay stories but here they
are interrupting a better story and lack the interesting aspects and
developments of the main story..
Like Mistress Fortune, the main story
is going along with the sillier bits with a wink and a nod. Unlike
that however it does try to build a setting that works and examine
different facets of this relationship. The more stand alone style of
the chapters could form an interesting tale given the time but this
was a story shot in the legs and left for dead. Overall not worth
it,unless all you want some nicely drawn guy loving.
No comments:
Post a Comment