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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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8 Comments

  1. Emily W.

    I agree with you. The pretty, feminine uke is a big indicator of yaoi. I love that stereotype since I saw it so much in yaoi. It was different reading m/m romances where bigger doesn’t mean dominant, and both men were likely to be alpha types. I enjoy both yaoi and m/m for their similarities but especially for their differences. Thanks for participating!!

    tiger-chick-1(at)hotmail(dot)com

  2. Amy

    Love the image of Necalli! Very attractive!

    I always loved yaoi for the more delicate guys. I just want to cuddle them… lol! They’d probably slap me though. 😉

    lina7391(at)hotmail(dot)com

  3. Tracey D

    Christie, I love your art works; I can stare at them for days!

    I’m a big yaoi manga and anime fan. I also love m/m novels, romance, mystery, fantasty, etc.

    Two of my favorite yaoi manga are Junjo Romantica and The Finders series.

    Thanks,
    Tracey D
    booklover0226 at gmail dot com

  4. Christie Gordon

    @Minty Chan – Yeah, I got my blog up a little late:( But I’m glad to hear you’re following me and like the books! That makes it all worthwhile.

    @Amy and Tracy – thanks on the art comments. I need to find the time to do more. Drawing is so good for the soul.

    This whole blog hop thing is a lot of fun. I’m so grateful to Haley for putting this together!

  5. Hayley B. James

    Great post 🙂 Yaoi isn’t always believable but yet fans rarely call it out on that fact. In mm romance, unbelievable is often called out in reviews…and usually with anger lol.

    Thank you for participating in the hop.

  6. tony

    First of all, thanks for participating in the Blog Hop. My addiction to Yaoi manga and anime (along with dojinshi) started several years ago with an RP forum my friends and I belonged to. Now we had both fangirls and fanboys, but eventually, us fanboys carried the load as those pervy fangirls couldn’t wait for us to post some M/M sex scenes!

    Well the RP unfortunately fizzled out and I was left wanting to write more and more. So I basically went independent and started dreaming up my own yaoi manga that I wanted to create. Of course reality set in, and reminded me that I could not draw. So I just kept writing and creating my own little yaoi world.

    Thanks to the Blog Hop, my little world grew immensely. I can honestly say that I had no idea that M/M romance novels existed. I saw those female audience focused novels on grocery store racks (you know the one’s with hunky like Fabio dudes on the cover), but I never paid those much attention. Put two hot guys holding one another on the cover then I would spend more time at the grocery store.

    So my aspirations to create my own manga were put on hold and thanks to the Blog Hop, I found that perhaps there was still hope for me yet. But of course the Blog Hop has also been sort of a curse for me. Now that I’ve been hopping around checking out the whole of M/M romance novels, I have bookmarked way to many pages to keep track of. Eventually I will find one writer that intrigues me immensely and buy that first book. Until then, I’ll just continue drooling over those sites with their hunks on them and try not to faint as I read a few excepts that they left on their pages.

    This is going to be a fun journey I can already tell.

    Thanks,

    ~Sai

    tony_can2@hotmail.com

  7. Manda

    I had until now been forced to read mxm vampire stories from fiction press, and other sites like that. I am really excited to see an actual, published, EDITED book! Yours is going on my list of ‘when i have money’ for sure! Keep up the good work, and <3 for writing fantasy!

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