Why Yaoi?


One of the interesting things in yaoi/slash is that outside Japan it hardly exist in any other forum than fan fiction. In Japan it's seldom. I know only few commercial manga and OAV's (Straight to video anime movies), for example Zetzuai 1989, of the subject. Of course there are the fan published works, doujinshi, but they are quite hard to find because there are no ISBN number in them, and even harder to purchase when one is a student without a credit card. The newest thing in the west is a British television series, Queer as Folk and Poppy Z. Brite novels, which can be counted as slash in a open sense of the word.

So, we have managed without slash as far as the coming of the internet. Why suddenly there appear tons of amateur fiction about male/male relationships? They are (mostly) not porn, so what are they and why people write/read them?

The main reason in my opinion is that yaoi fiction is the writer's statement of refusal to follow the classic narration of a story. In classic narration, as well as in classic Hollywood cinema, women are seen a victims, as passive objects, never in a role of the active hero. She loves, she suffers, she heals, yeah, really interesting. When the writer removes the women from he story, we have the freedom to relate to whoever we want.

The second reason is that it gives an opportunity to write stories that are not related to the writer. Males are males and because we writers as females have no idea of what are they truly thinking, reading two male interact, even illogically, makes more sense as more believable than male and female. In other words, when reading Yaoi we don't have to listen our woman's logic!

The third reason is that some women find the thought of two men erotic. "How on earth could that be?!" You may think. What is so weird about it? The studies say that most men think women/women relationships erotic. Nobody think that as odd. So, it's only natural that a few women, too, sees male/male relationships as erotic. Simple as that.

Yeah, and one more reason: Why write a story with one gorgeous guy and one *sigh* boring girl, when you could have two or more gorgeous boys at once! These are no common daydreams, where you automatically put yourself in them as a main character. Or maybe it's just it, in yaoi, you can relate yourself as a main character and his emotions without the thread of relating for the physical stuff. Maybe that's it...

Thoughts about freedom of anonymity

I heard from my friends a true story about a woman who wrote and read Star Wars slash. She was very good and somewhat known in their little internet community. Until one day, somebody find out her real name and address and sent printed copies of her writings to her boss and her mother. She got fired. Her personal life got complicated. In the end she quit her internet life and killed her "internet personification" for good.

That story made me think of where I stand in the net. That happened in the States and I live in Finland, where we are very open-minded. That would never happen to me. Right? Right? I have nothing illegal in my page. But: I had downloaded some doujinshi in my computer. Some very graphic doujinshi (not porn) with some very underage-looking characters. I thought nothing of it. Some biggot would have thought them as pedofilistic material. Although, there still was nothing wrong with my actions because drawn material, involving no actual people in the creating process, is not considered illegal. But What If? What if somebody, like the one who sent the copies of the woman's fiction to her boss, tells the police that I have illegal material in my computer. There isn't, but they would have to check it. Never mind that it's the same material that the net is full of. People are easy to judge. It would need just that rumor that "Police came and..." to ruin my reputation between the people who don't know me that well. So I deleted the files...

In the other hand, I have a friend who read her slash fiction in their philosophy class in high school. Out loud. From her teachers encouragement. I consider myself as an open minded person. I have told my friends what kind of fiction I read. Still my Yaoi page is semi-anonymous in a sense that there is no link to my official pages. I can't risk a possibility that my potential boss would look out my pages and find out my "hobbies". So, I'm open minded, but only when it's easy.



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