#pornographer the series
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Today on BL Fashion:
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An Apology to Ossan's Love and The Novelist
I'm writing this post today as a formal apology to both Ossan's Love and The Novelist for avoiding them in 2018-2019 due to general negative fandom takes about them. Both shows are great, and I should have watched them six years ago.
I recently watched the Pornographer series thanks to @lurkingshan burning some of her coupons to make me properly engage with the series. In that series I found one of the most compelling expressions of internalized homophobia I’ve ever seen. Rio was not only cut off from being sexual with other people, but he felt like he couldn’t even be a proper man.
Later, in Mood Indigo, we got to see the messed-up way Rio became an erotic novelist but also finally seemed to connect with an important part of himself. He also found a mentor who, despite his proclivities, became an important paternal figure to Rio.
Finally, in Playback, Rio finally faced his own insecurities and accepted that Haruhiko loves him and reciprocated it. At every stage of this story, they are able to communicate so much of their story through the sex that’s happening. We’re applauding depictions of sex happening in the genre now that this series was doing half a decade ago.
I decided to give Ossan’s Love a second try when I saw @isaksbestpillow getting so excited about the second season and providing context for the original show. With Ossan’s Love, I understand why people might have bounced off this series right away. A lot of folks don’t enjoy the way the Japanese do comedy, Haruta is intentionally unlikeable at the beginning, and I’ve seen concerns about the boss either being a predator or that his feelings would be treated as a joke.
Thankfully, I tend to enjoy Japanese comedy and found the show hilarious! I was laughing out loud almost every single episode because of multiple characters, but most especially Yoshida Kotaro as the boss. This show generated so much of its comedy from the core characterization of each character, so every joke landed so smoothly for me.
Something I really liked about this show was that it never said we were wrong for disliking Haruta for being a mess and a slob. He cannot take care of himself, and he barely gets better at it before the end of the show. I like that Maki breaking up with him didn’t make him suddenly straighten up his ways about this and become a fully-functioning housekeeper, but he did get better about doing some chores even as the chief started taking care of him. Haruta isn’t the easiest character to like on the domestic front, but he is good at his job and he is a kind character. I like that you have to figure out why these guys like the mess that is Haruta, because I like the audience has to think about what in men that gay people find attractive. Is that a rosy-eyed read? Yes. I don’t are.
As for the boss, he never uses his position over Haruta, and they’re also in sales. It’s not as egregious to me as it would feel in other positions. I also like that his attraction to Haruta isn’t a joke, but the fact that he’s older and maybe isn’t speaking the language of the youth is very funny. He’s an extremely endearing character and I love Kurosawa Musashi.
So, this is my apology to both of these shows for letting negative fan opinions stop me from facing these shows properly. Both of them were great. I’m currently working through the Ossan’s Love: In the Sky season to get to the movie and new show.
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For the BL trope ask game: 8, 9 and 10
Whew, coming out swinging! Ok here we go.
8. May/December
There really are not a lot of these where the age gap is truly significant. My actual favourite BL couple with an age gap where their ages are part of the conflict they face is The Pornographer/The Novelist though I acknowledge their age gap is probably not enough to fully be considered May/December. Rio becoming a mentor for Haruhiko does add to the May/December aspects so I'm just going to commit lol.
The concerns around their age gap came up in the sequel short more than the original series, but they definitely started their relationship in the original series at different life stages and it was one of the things that caused Rio to run from Haruhiko in the first place. To my memory there are some funny reversals in this one because Haruhiko gets his life together faster than Rio does but that means even as Haruhiko gets older they remain at different life stages and it continues to be a source of conflict.
Also just going to say, for anyone looking for old man yaoi, there is also a bonus fantasy/nightmare imagination scenario that Haruhiko pictures between Rio and his mentor that takes place in Continued Spring Life (though I would not call Rio's relationship with his mentor a romance!).
[NGL my favourite truly May/December romancecin BL is Choko and Maru from Ossan's Love and Ossan's Love Returns in which Choko is older than Maru's mother and it is a major source of conflict between her and her new mother in law until they find common ground.]
9. Fake Dating
I know I'm pretty alone in this, but YYY is one of my faves and it is actually a perfect example of the fake dating trope. For those who never saw this show, the central plot is that Nott and Pun are pretending to date in order to be allowed to stay in their apartment (the landlord loves BL). There are constant misunderstandings, pining, and it's compounded by the fact that one is also in a BGP with a different guy. There are real stakes tied to their fake dating, and the faking of the relationship becomes painful to the point that they become willing to risk those stakes (getting kicked out) rather than continuing to fake it. This show is absolutely wild and a LOT of nonsense happens, but the core is a pretty standard execution of this trope! And I love it a lot.
10. Bodyguard
I'm going to include censored projects in this because my ultimate favourite in this trope is Sleuth of Ming Dynasty. Zhou is at points of the story assigned to be a literal guard for Tang Fan, but he also just does it anyway off the clock because that's who he is. This show, to my mind, hits all of the important beats related to a bodyguard tripe including the person being protected balking at the protection and sacrificing himself so that his protector is not hurt (as well as at other times and being entirely blasé about his own safety because he trusted Zhou to protect him and had full faith he would).
Link to the original ask game post!
#ask game#thank you for the ask!#the pornographer#the novelist#pornographer: playback#yyy the series#the sleuth of ming dynasty#typed so that I can stop thinking it#bl tropes
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re: The Novelist
c.c. @petrichoraline @sadday4sure @thewayofsubtext @waitmyturtles
I liked it. I liked it quite a lot. I'm still processing (/starting Mood Indigo), so I'm not sure if I have much I can articulate about it yet.
All I knew about it going in was the basic premise (pornography writer and his assistant) and that it was from the other side of Japan's BL traditions, meaning that it was "dark," contained dubcon, and was high heat. So I wasn't sure if it even was a romance or would have any sort of happy ending and thus I kept my heart to myself for the first few episodes, not trusting the show with it. I watched with a more analytical mindset at the beginning, which morphed into a love for the characters as they showed their own hearts.
Perhaps if I'd gone in unaware I would have found it dark and disturbing, but as it was a found it more aching and melancholy than anything else. The dubcon was no worse than other shows I've seen, and fit the story and the themes better than many (I won't get into those comparisons here). There was angst and loneliness and lashing out, but the power never felt overly weighted toward Kijima's side, despite Kuzami's youth and relative innocence, and the tangle of debts and their work relationship.
The actors were all excellent. I was relieved to see that my newfound love Izuka Kenta (who I'd seen for all of 5 minutes of screen time in Candy Color Parodox) is in fact very good actor, and brought nuance and strength and complex desires to the part of Kuzami.
I can't help but comparing shows to other shows these days, so here is what I was thinking while watching this one. The Novelist came out favorably, if it was a comparison of quality.
There is of course the use of dubcon, for which my only other real reference point are Thai BL, and that analysis is a multi-tentacled beast that is would get me off track for the rest of this post, so I won't start on it. I will say that one thing I noticed was that the pornographic fantasies were generally (all?) dubcon ones, and that both affected my interpretation of the characters' feelings about the real dubcon scene (because they both were into dubcon in fantasy), and habituated me to seeing dubcon in the show by the time the fifth episode came around. The other thing I guess I will say is that it feels different to me, easier to tolerate and move past, to see one character violate another out of sadness and fear and the desire to push someone away and hold them close at the same time. In real life absolutely no, the reason for ignoring consent matters not, but seeing it in a story I can work with that.
And then there are the pornographic fantasies, which were used so interestingly here. They were our (and seemingly Kuzami's) introduction to desire and sex. They usually featured other actors portraying the porn characters, which at first bothered me - I wanted more time with Kijima and Kuzami as they wrote together - but then came to make sense, for reasons I can't articulate now. The show's seduction of us followed Kijima's only half intentional seduction of Kuzami. It lured us in with his voice dryly describing lurid sex acts, sounding humorous at first, but soon grew more genuinely erotic as the music and the cinematography and Kijima's voice changed. And there was something about the way the porn fantasies provided both distance from the characters and simultaneously made them seem even more vulnerable, their minds laid even more bare than their bodies, that created this uncomfortable, seductive eroticism of the show. Kijima was arousing Kuzami while still pretending Kuzami's arousal was meaningless to him.
Which was part of why I didn't know what to expect from the show at first. Was this going to be an overcast and complicated story of self-discovery, about how Kuzami was changed by one summer with this seductive twisted older man? It wasn't until Kido showed up and Kijima fell slightly to pieces, that I understood that it would be both their stories, and that I could hope for romance rather than just sexual awaking, even though I wasn't yet sure of a happy ending.
The fantasies too changed over the course of the series, going from the ones about men and women that Kijima wrote, to Kuzami's fantasies of the two of them, and then disappeared altogether, as they stopped wanting a fantasy and started their convoluted paths to wanting and seeing each other's real selves, not the fantasy version.
(The comparison about fantasies in my mind, which I probably only thought of due to a coincidence of timing, was to the innocent romantic fantasies of My School President. Which despite the very different content, share a similar role of showing the character's desires to the audience, and of pointing to the contrast between unrealistic fantasy and the reality of loving and being loved by another actual human being with their own subjectivity in the world.)
(This honest dive into arousal while creating erotic art in collaboration with someone desired was what I was vaguely hoping for, though did not expect, from Oh! My Assistant. So I was glad to have it done so well here.)
Closely connected to the fantasies was how much the show was about writing. Both literally, a good portion of screen time was spent watching Kuzami writing Kanji and listening to to Kijima recite the words of the novel, and in that Kijima's story was about his journey as a writer. I felt the pain of his not being able to write, I felt the isolation of "writer" being his only identity, his only sense of self. This was what I wanted from Happy Ending Romance, which frustratingly did not feel like it was really about writers. This very much did. I could dig deeper into why it felt that way, but this post is already much longer than I meant for it to be.
The focus of the story was so tightly held on Kuzami and Kijima in their time together that fevered summer. We learned very little about them beyond their moments together. And I think that works. It builds the heightened intensity of their connection with each other, like they're living in a world apart from the rest. Kijima seems to have been living in this isolation for most of his life, while Kuzami apparently has friends and classes and a life outside this bubble, but it is Kijima whose backstory we end up learning more about. In a less nuanced show Kuzami would be almost a blank slate, ready to be molded* by Kijima's desires, but Izuka Kenta and the subtleties of the script imbue him with a quiet strength. At the beginning he doesn't yet know what he wants, but when he figures it out he has a solidity of purpose that won't let him be pushed around.
*yes it's a mixed metaphor but I didn't like any of the matching sets I could think of
And he sees Kijima, because he so desperately want to. Once he figures out that it's Kijima he wants, he works so hard to get under his mask and see him. Despite Kijima doing his damnedest not to be seen. Takezai Terunosuke is excellent in the role, playing both the Mona Lisa mask and the broken man beneath, and showing the cracks to get there. When he broke down in tears, back to Kuzami... I cried. This show, which I thought was going to be about how Kuzami was changed by their time together, ended up being about how Kijima was changed by him.
I feel like I'm talking circles around the center of them, but there is so much that could be said, so many ways to examine their relationship.
Oh! and the cinematography/editing/sound/etc! So good. I kept thinking about everyone's brilliant responses to my questions on this post, and really noticed the use of wide long shots and letting the actors come in and out of frame. It served the story well.
This was my first "dark" JBL, and I want to watch more now, to better put this show in context.
Fuck, y'all. This was supposed to be a single paragraph simply stating that I liked the show. And maybe naming a few topics I found interesting. Instead it swelled into this, and still feels very incomplete. But I will leave the rest for another day. Especially as I expect I will have an even more thoughts on the characters after watching the rest of the series.
#the novelist#pornographer series jbl#japanese bl#thoughts on consent and boundary violations in bl#gillianthecat reacts to bl#conversations with blblr#conversations with qlblr#my ramblings#wow that's a lot of words#no [editing] we die like men#how deep#do i need to bury tags#in order to keep them out of searches#but still let people filter them#hopefully this is deep enough#(wrote kijima in his latest novel)#my school president#oh my assistant#candy color paradox#happy ending romance
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spotify wrapped: bl edition! [insp.]
1. muna - end of desire
my love, are you taking me home?
2. phoebe bridgers - waiting room
whatever happens to me, i know it’s for the better.
3. sufjan stevens - tell me you love me
my love, i’ve lost my faith in everything; tell me you love me anyway.
4. babygirl - homemade holiday
we don’t need a flight to get to paradise.
5. now, now - set it free
you look so sweet in the heat of summer.
6. flower face - cornflower blue
who will i say good night to when you’re gone?
7. yeule - don’t be so hard on your own beauty
you turn this horrible place into orange light, sunset in sight.
8. lana del rey - radio
it’s like a fuckin’ dream i’m living in.
9. clairo - bags
i can’t read you, but if you want, the pleasure’s all mine.
10. dizzy - stars and moons
no one in my hollow heart holds a candle to you.
#this was actually so much fun#tag time!#spotify wrapped bl edition#danyok#not me the series#kinnbig#kinnporsche the series#tintol#triage the series#togawa x nozue#old fashion cupcake#sajou x kusakabe#doukyuusei#xuexiao#the untamed#hira x kiyoi#my beautiful man#kijima x kuzumi#the pornographer series#history 2: crossing the line#qiu zi xuan x xia yu hao#eternal yesterday#koichi x mitsuru
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Done watching all installment of pornographer series,
Loved it
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The Novelist HD Screencaps
202 HD hand-capped Screencaps of The Novelist ( Japanese BL drama ) season 1.
Mediafire link - Zip
#pornographer playback#the novelist#japanese bl#terunosuke takezai#the pornographer series#the novelist screencaps
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Goodbye Squall!
He has SUCH brain damage about his fish gf yall its not even funny.
Bonus: The full concept sketch of the first panel that got mostly cut away when I opted to draw it as a comic:
#OC#Original Character#Arrow Squall#Princess Aurelia#Ship: Wind and Sea#Series: JourneyBound#t4t#harpy#mermaid#idk its a bit spicy but its not totally pornographic so ill just. leave it like this lol#snix art
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I want to say they wouldn’t dare put the resolution of a two season arc in a movie that the vast majority of viewers will have no access to… but I know better with Japan.
#they truly do not gaf about international audiences#they would totally do this#this is exactly what happened with the pornographer series actually#utsukushii kare#shan shouts into the void
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Watch list tag game
Thank you @homo-ousios for tagging me! 🤗
Currently watching (Binging)
Cutie Pie (currently at ep 11): I'm finally watching this show. I'd say the first half is better than the second half, but overall I'm really enjoying this show.
Dark (Season 2 ep 2): The only non-BL-series on this list. It's a german science-fiction thriller series about time travelling and it is really good! But you need to pay attention while watching otherwise you'll be confused to no end. Check it out, it's probably the best show Germany has ever produced.
Currently watching (Airing)
Eclipse (Ep 2): It looks interesting, but I'm not as invested in it as most other people seem to be. I don't know why, maybe I'll enjoy it more as the story continues.
Takara-kun to Amagi-kun (ep 3): I love this show even though it hasn't the most innovative plot. It's just cute. Japanese BL are either fluffy and cute or really dark, there is no in-between XD
Rewatching
Pornographer (ep 4): I plan to rewatch the whole Pornographer franchise. I've already rewatched Mood Indigo and now I'm watching Pornographer. This series isn't for anyone, I know that. It's dark, makes you sad and frustrated, but it feels so real. Life isn't fluff, but it can get better as time goes by. And this is the message I get from this show.
Looking forward to
Cherry Magic: The Movie: It feels like I've been waiting ages for it. Please give me the fluff Japan! Once the DVD is released I'm going to buy and watch it. (At least I've heard that the DVD has english sub, so fingers crossed)
Between us: I loved Win and Team in Until we meet again. I'm so happy they got their own show. I really hope they aren't butchering this...
I'm tagging @nevermiind @huggy-bears @thatmomentwasperfect and everyone who reads this and wants to do it :)
#tag game#asian bl#cutie pie the series#dark the series#eclipse the series#takara kun to amagi kun#pornographer#cherry magic the movie#between us the series
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The Novelist (2018) Ep 1 Stray Thoughts
At the insistence of @lurkingshan and @waitmyturtles I am giving this a proper watch. I skipped over it at the time based on the mixed reactions of others. I am watching via GagaOOlala. Let’s proceed.
Ah, a man on a bike. Must resist the urge to rant about sustainable urbanism and accessibility.
I need to do research on bicyclist insurance in Japan now. At least with a bicycle collision someone is less likely to die.
TRAIN SPOTTED!
Episode 1: The Awakening of Unknown Emotions
I like the novelist remaining unfazed about Kuzumi’s discomfort with the work.
I think the reason I like voiceover so much in Japanese media is because of how much it feels like their culture calls for repression. We need the internal monologue because characters cannot express things aloud.
I like the apartment, though. My dude has floor-standing speakers, a turntable, and a big TV.
This man said, “Grow up and do some research. I’ve clocked your tastes already.”
I need to draw attention to the fact that ya boy is sweating after cranking it, and falls back on the bed next to the book like they both just finished. I see what they’re doing here.
They keep putting this really specific shadow over Kuzumi’s eyes that I’m not sure how I’m reading.
Kijima’s glance there was so knowing.
I wonder if Gregg Araki has seen this? This is almost something he would have put into a film.
“I’m just teasing.” I see, so it’s going to be one of those things where I quietly scream about the line around the word “joke.”
Of course this man is left-handed. I will excuse him for messing with this dude because this is kind of funny.
I think I would have been far more embarrassed about the frank sexuality of this in 2018 than I am now. Now, I’m just intrigued by the psychological games being played with Kuzumi’s curiosity. I’ll continue!
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i need to stop telling people i read because im tired of being recommended Colleen Hoover books and the ACOTAR series. i simply will not read them!
#personal#books#they seem bad!#and listen I’m not above bad books#we are all allowed our own kind of garbage#but uhhhhh don’t want to spend 400 pages rooting for a dude who beats up women#and I tried reading the first ACOTAR book and the writing was comically bad lmao#and you can’t use the excuse that it’s for a younger audience or a new author because there is so much good scifi and fantasy out there#and don’t act like writing for a younger audience means the writing is any less impressive or interesting#like hello the earthsea series??????????????????#and I’m not gonna read a book for it’s pornographic elements because an author who is bad at prose will also be bad at writing sex#lmao
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vegan you sick son of a bitch
#oh god#the pornographic torture#aren't they like a big ship?#how can ppl ship them 😭#leg is watching kinnporsche#leg is live blogging#kinnporche the series#kinnporsche
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oh fascinating. I was perusing the MDL page of Izuka Kenta, because he caught my eye (so pretty!) playing the actor Inami Kei in Candy Color Paradox. And it turns out he was a lead in (some of? I'm not sure how that series worked) the infamous Pornographer series in 2018-2021. I hadn't planned on watching them, as what I've read about them didn't really appeal other than as a kind of sociological curiosity about Japanese BL history, but knowing he's in it does tempt me now.
What a beautiful man. And it's interesting that he's now in a guest role in another BL. It seems like Japan tends to do that?
#izuka kenta#bl actors#japanese bl#pornographer series jbl#i uh don't know how to tag that one without getting this post shadowbanned#candy color paradox#the novelist
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someone tell me why i get so irrationally emotionally attached to angry dramatic bitches who truly deep down inside believe that they are incapable of being loved
#they're just so !!!#i see a depressed bastard and i go yeah he's mine now hurt him at your own risk#it's like. instinctive#kinnporsche big#not me sean#jiang cheng#jiang wanyin#kijima rio#kinnporsche the series#not me the series#the untamed#chen qing ling#the pornographer series
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インディゴの気分 Indigo no Kibun/Mood Indigo (2019)
#indigo no kibun#mood indigo#like ouch#pornographer series#the novelist#the novelist series#marukido maki#bledit#bl jdrama#takezai terunosuke#yoshida munehiro#thank you god for yoshida munehiro
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