#ZENIKO SUMIYA COME BACK

[obstinaterixatrix]

[listless] if only I could convince a good bl writer to write bl and just change it last second to women

[absolutebl]

Please allow me a little manga shoutout~

I just found out that the English edition of Iki Dekinai no wa Kimi no Sei (which I am reading in Japanese) by Zeniko Sumiya has been out for a while already as Breathless Momentum!

(I also haven't heard of any translations scandals, so here is hoping this isn't going to come biting me like OtoTsuku did.)

I feel like the author and their works deserve some mention:

They appear to really be set on to dwarf those old trodden uke/seme expectations, as well as its conflation with the top/bottom stereotypes. It happens in all of their BL works, and they once said on twitter that they don't like people/characters be seen as uke/seme, but also mentioned the woes and dilemma over tags out of a sales perspective to make readers pick the works up. So sounds like a very aware, intentional choice.

They don't do your usual explicit bed scenes. The tweet of theirs makes it sound a lot like they are also going out of their way to avoid them as part of the uke/seme trope avoidance. Which is, I think, a really bold stance, given that some subjectively perceived 90% of the BL manga genre lives from being literal porn.

That being said, they don't go the forced sanitized sex negative, innocent-pure fluff instead either. Physical attraction and intimacy is very much a thing for their characters to deal with, and it gets very much shown. Some of their adult characters are depicted as quite horny for and palpably in it for wanting to bone each other on the regular. All the while, it never goes porny. Which seems to be a pretty darn noteworthy skill, given how rare works like that exist out in the wild.

Sometimes some visual allegories for the spice get employed, and I thought them to be quite hilarious.

They also like to have their characters get to have healthy conversions about themselves quite quickly, or have side characters pushing them to have them. Admittedly, especially in Breathless, it sometimes comes at the costs that the climax comes off as a bit anticlimactic. As in, "That was all it took? So simple?" And then to stop for a moment and go "Sure, so simple if folks actually TALKED." (Which another subjectively perceived 90% of all romance never seem to manage.)

Some titles went to be about couples in already in a relationship, so it goes and explores some domestic settings. (Also very rare in romance in general.)

What I personally also think is interesting is how some of their works has protagonists being "sexual deviants" (the characters' own words). Like in Breathless both main characters get the hots from playing music, and it gets more intense the better the performance gets. Usually any sort of such deviancy tends to be framed as something creepy, shameful or something to cringe over or is abused as a throwaway joke. This series instead rolls with it with a sense of practicality that is used in a comedic way, but doesn't feel like it's judging, and later chapters in the Japanese release even pick it back up as something they have, always will have and need to live with.

(The author also has a fantasy GL work called 5 Seconds Before a Witch Falls in Love that's also been released in English. It dodges your typical Yuri tropes, but is imo a bit too short story-styled (it also has two completely separate narratives collected in there) to really go anywhere in terms of fleshed out character development.)

I also haven't heard of any translations scandals, so here is hoping this isn't going to come back biting me like OtoTsuku did. 💦

Ooo thanks for the rec, I'll check it out. I just finished I Cannot Reach You and I have to say I found it a bit boring. So I'm intersted in something new. I'll put Breathless Momentum on my watch list (right now there's no print edition and I don't read graphics in digital, so Imma haffa wait.)