Tsuge Amayo

Five stories. We've got the 'misunderstood sweetie' trope, the 'guy who can't keep a relationship up with girls' trope, the 'childhood friends who grew apart and are now stuck together again,' the 'guys who meet in bad/embarrassing situation and then end up seeing each other in their new school/place of work' and the 'student likes teacher, teacher sleeps with student, student realizes teacher is a lecher and is jealous/angry.'

With the title and the cover, pink and covered in hearts, I was avoiding this expecting it to be ultra-cutesey and be full of short, sweet, dumb, pet-like ukes. Luckily (to me), this isn't really the case. Actually, I rather enjoyed this collection, as despite the fact the plots are pretty standard and lack any originality or distinctiveness in execution, it seems like this author has kind of the same taste as me when it comes to general yaoi relationship dynamics.

That is, with the exception of the teacher/student story, the seduce/peruser isn't creepy, overpowering, and manipulative, drawing the uke in like a shady man standing outside a van with a bag of candy. The ukes are ukes because they are as usual shorter and cuter and more often less aware of their feelings, but less like usual in that they have some self-respect and understand themselves to be deserving of respect from the other party as well. Sometimes, they are the instigators of sex (though there isn't much of that here, by the way). The relationships here are just a little more like 'give and take' from both sides, than the usual 'one side take the other side taken' or the just plain 'one side forcibly take, cause the other will like it eventually, right?' While I liked the last story the least (since despite the slightly-stronger-than-typical uke the seme was still a creep), it was the one that really drove home the mangaka's preference for more equal relationships, as once the teacher 'gets' the student, he's promising to not drag him into bed again till he gets older. It didn't really ring true, showing a considerate side that really wasn't there in the rest of the seme's characterization, but it still seemed to me like an attempt by the author to make things more even, even if rather last-minute.

The art here is of the big-eyes variety, but it's clean and attractive. There is a bigger variation in character design than you see in most yaoi, though none are stand-out amazing. On a slightly random note, the art isn't un-yaoi-ish really, but I realized with some interest that I could see art like this being in a non-yaoi, which is kind of out of the ordinary to me. One of the short ukes with spiky hair almost looked like he could have been a character in a shounen manga, or perhaps with those big eyes at least in an action-centered shoujo. As I'm not a huge fan of the usual yaoi styles and how similar they tend to look, this was kind of nice to me.

I feel like the writing here is slightly better than average, but that's probably just my preference for these relationship-types talking. Then again, I do feel like such relationship dynamics are a little more realistic, but then since when has yaoi been about reality? It's up to your preferences, then. It's not particularly good enough to overcome my slight dislike for short one-shots, though, so I wouldn't seek out another volume of little stories like this. If the author does have some longer ones, though, I may check them out. At this point I'd doubt they do anything too refined in characterization and development, and I can't really judge their longer-term plotting with shorts like these, but I feel quite amiable to the characters and everything else. A very light read, but enjoyable.… (meer)