I Thot You Was a Toad's manga / #palace intrigue(2)

A series of historical short stories about male prostitutes and hosts in a bordello district, and the men who buy out their contracts. Includes a ghost story and a story about palace intrigue. The stories are generally light and cute, and the drawing style is very much like C. J. Michalski's.

Historical fantasy as a thinly veiled excuse for BDSM, slavery, torture, humiliation, etc.. A king slaughters all the people of a neighbouring kingdom whose king murdered his family, except the son who he takes as a slave in order to humiliate and torture him, presumeably as an example to anybody else who gets ideas, but maybe for the shits-and-giggles. So far the aggressive king is straight out of the Snidely Whiplash school of villains, all grimaces and "grr-grrrr-grr", while the enslaved prince is a po-faced trampled blossom who is pitiful, not just because of all the spectacular bad treatment he's been dished, but because every character tells him he is. Because of this, the story tilts into bathos and is very amusing example of popcorn yaoi.