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Tag: Anime

You Like Anime and You’re How Old?

I'm 50 - Sally O'Malley
I admit it, I’m now a 50 year old woman who likes to watch cartoons. No, not cartoons – anime. There’s a difference. I try to explain this to my friends, of which none of  them understand this little obsession of mine, and they look at me like I’m a Trekky. Nothing wrong with that, mind you, but I’m not a Trekky;) Okay, so I have an engineering degree, I’ve seen pretty much all the Star Trek movies and I love technology. But I’m not a Trekky, because I’ve never written or read KirkxSpock slash.

I’ve gotten off track…So my friends do think of anime like cartoons, except they don’t think of them as “cool” cartoons like Family Guy or The Simpsons or even South Park. No, anime is not cool like that. Anime plots deal with deep issues, like kids whose father abandoned them trying to resurrect their dead mothers (FMA) or a psychopath thinking they can ring in a new era for humanity by killing all the criminals in the world with a magic notebook (Death Note), or  a war which pits  natural born humans against genetically modified humans (Gundam Seed). No, that’s not cool. But having some baby with a head shaped like a football who can talk to the dog is great entertainment (Family Guy). Okay, it is funny. And I do like that as well. My kids love it in fact, even though they don’t get most of the jokes and I’m probably not a great mother letting them watch it. Of course, my kids think anime is not cool.

I did get my boyfriend to watch an anime with me (insert made him watch it under penalty of not making me angry with him), and I think he actually liked it. Though he never asked to watch it. I always had to say, “Hey, lets watch that next episode of Ergo Proxy”. He’d mumble something in return and I’d happily put it on.

I think the biggest gripe I’ve heard about watching anime in the US is that most of it is subtitled. Us Americans do not like to have to read and that rings true for subtitles. I may be talking to wrong audience here, since if you follow my blog you probably read my Yaoi, M/M Romance books and/or fanfiction. But asking an American to read and watch a program at the same time? No way. I have to admit myself that I’d rather see an anime that’s been dubbed. It’s just easier and you can see all the great animation that’s going on without having to divert your eyeballs to the bottom of the screen.

So back to my point about being a 50 year old woman who likes to watch anime – I’m not all that strange, I’m not a Trekky (no, I’m not!) and it’s good, damn it. If you haven’t, you should give it a try:)

Oh, and the latest anime I’m watching is awesome: The Pilot’s Love Song

I want to see some Kal-el and Ignacio Yaoi Fanfiction:)

Yaoi Manga and M/M Romance Blog Hop

Yaoi Manga and MM Romance Blog Hop Icon

Welcome to the blog hop! For those of you who don’t know me, I’m a published author who loves Japanese anime, especially yaoi, JRock and M/M Romance. I’ve somehow found a niche writing what I love – stories that are a little bit yaoi and a little bit M/M romance. For the blog hop, I wanted to pull something together that might help readers of M/M romance understand yaoi, and vice versa.

For me, yaoi means androgynous, pretty male characters. Most yaoi is found in comic form such as manga and anime. The stories usually involve a much larger man, who dominates the relationship and a much smaller man. Although, like everything else, not all are like this. There is a difference in the relationships in true yaoi that I don’t think we see in M/M romance so much, a difference that I believe stems from the difference in Japanese versus Western culture.  That is, there is a clear distinction between the “top”, also called seme, and the “bottom’, called uke. The seme is usually older as well as larger, more experienced more aggressive sexually, etc, than the uke. In this way, there are some very clear roles played by the characters. I think some would say that the uke can tends to be more like a female in a male body. Also, yaoi does involve sex that’s not consensual. In the Western publishing world, this is taboo. The thing I love about yaoi, is the stories and characters really seem to be made for female fantasy. It seems to me that in yaoi stories, there’s not the strict constraints on making sure the guys act like guys all the time and it doesn’t have to be super-believable. It’s about telling a good story and letting the reader get lost in it.

As for M/M romance, this comes from a Western world where I think we do tend to try and make our stories seem as realistic as possible. The male characters look more like real men, gruff, bearded, hairy chested, you get my meaning. Not that some of that isn’t hot:) What’s a bit more freeing in writing M/M romance is probably that there is not this strict seme/uke character constraint – maybe the bigger man’s the catcher, you never know. Maybe the smaller man is more aggressive sexually. What’s great is it spans the whole spectrum.

Yaoi MM Gay Art - Necalli
Necalli from "The First Full Moon" - Portrait of Necalli

So what I try to do is to write a combination of the two. I try to blend the pretty, androgynous characters of yaoi with Western world situations. Although I try my best to blend realistic gay situations with female fantasy, I attempt to make my characters break out of the “men are like this” mold. I hope that makes sense. And yes, I do get a lot of my story ideas and characters from watching anime. For instance, the character, Necalli, in the First Full Moon came from Vincent Law of Ergo Proxy. I wanted the yin and yang in him – to be powerful and brutal and also sensitive and incredibly tortured by his animal nature. For this reason, I made him a smaller man. Everything about him had opposing sides, just like Vincent Law.

My vampire books started out with a Hellsing flare. My character, Sebastian, really got his start being more like Alucard than anything else. Then I tried to drive deeper into him and his past and well, sometimes your characters dictate who they want to be, LOL.

Anyhow, thanks for stopping by!

Christie Gordon

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Famous Yaoi First Encounters – What’s Too Soon and What’s Too Late?

Yaoi Motivational Poster

So this blog post was inspired by this funny Yaoi motivational poster I found on DeviantArt: Yaoi Motivational Poster by SpirosDyingWish00

The poster made me think about all the standard, somewhat cliche first encounters we see in Yaoi – yes, the tripping into someone, the getting drunk, the angry slap followed by kiss, the OMG, you kissed me now I’m going to rape you. Most of which involve the two heros in a compromising close proximity to each other and the “aha!” moment. Oh, how we love these scenes, wait in high anticipation of them and squee with joy when they finally happen, LOL.

I suppose these things happen in a good het romance as well. So we’re following along on the same themes again as in het romances. I also suppose this begs the question -we’re all really pretty much the same when it comes to love then, no matter the gender, right?  And it’s always the discovery that the one dude loves the other dude and low and behold, the other one loves him back. If he didn’t, where would our love story be?

The build up to the love discovery is what’s most important for our first encounter. If we’ve seen a fair amount of each character sighing over the other one, arguing, denying any attraction, then wow, that first kiss is a doozy:) That’s called building the tension. It’s always hard as a writer to know when to let loose of the tension and have that first encounter. You don’t want to do it too soon before there’s a proper build up or that first kiss will hardly be noticed. On the other hand, I’ve read books where I’m more than half way through the book and the characters still haven’t had their first kiss. That makes me wonder if the story arc is only going to be about their first kiss and I get frustrated. And what I really hate? A story line that has the first encounter half way into the book and then, wham, some force takes them apart for a good portion of the book. When I read a romance, I want to read about a romance, dang it. I know each person has their own opinion on this depending on what gets them going. What do you like? What frustrates you in a Yaoi or M/M Romance story line?