I Thot You Was a Toad's manga / #tragedy(15)

Confusing and muddled. It starts off as a sweet romance and turns dark, then darker, revealing a horror-filled tragic backstory. Somewhere along the way, there's a suicide pact, and then, ghosts. Good luck making sense of it.

Tamaquis Wren specializes in yaoi where the uke surrenders himself to love so much, he gives up his own dignity. Dignity is reinstated by love returned, a classic romance trope. This story is hardcore, however, for, instead of love, the sole motivation is vengeance, and there is no surrender, just rage-fueled detachment and dissociation. To extract the cruelest revenge he can, Yan, the son of a murdered king, becomes the favourite catamite in the court of the Chinese Emperor who committed regicide against Yan's beloved father. Bent on destroying his enemies and slowly debauching the Emperor past his body's capacity for tolerance, the only revenge Yan can extract is what he has, himself, endured. In the end, in spite of page after page of strangely utilitarian sex and seduction with child rape, gang rape, slavery, sex cults, drugs, felching, castration, BDSM, odd sex toys, vegetable-slicing(!) and a huge and surprising reveal right at the end, the story is empty and cold, just like Yan. Weirdly, it's the court intrigue and politics that move it beyond mere shota wish-fulfilment smut fantasy and redeem it (for me; I can't abide child rape), transforming it into Wren's best work. It isn't romantic at all and, for once, Wren doesn't pretend that soul-crushing depravity and oppression are romantic. Wren's drawings are distinctive and stylized, but here they focus on lips, hair, eyes, skin and a boy whose naked body is modified to look like a young woman's. Everyone else is nameless, fully dressed and, either a wild-eyed and lust-maddened rapist, or a fellow scheming manipulator — distorted through the lens of obsession. Yan is an interesting character who gains his individual freedom, revenge and personal power, although nothing else — certainly not love.

A tragedy and its grief return in the form of bad dreams and self-realization for a young structural engineer whose brother died crossing an untested footbridge. I wouldn't really call this yaoi.

A high school student, with a tragic past and loving brothers who inspire him, is hired to be a housekeeper-companion to a wealthy young man who has contracted a mysterious illness. Complications set in as a result of mistaken identities, deception (well-meant, but poorly executed) and confused feelings. I usually don't like Sou Irime's stories because I found her semes have a nasty streak, but she has crafted a rather nice tear-jerker here, and there is no intentional cruelty in the trick that is played on the uke.

A cornea transplant leads to an entirely new existential paradigm for a young man, who abandons his fiancée, and their planned-out life together, to chase the doctor who performed his surgery to Norway. The corneas belonged to the doctor's former lover, but the spookier, supernatural elements of the story are less important than the man's self-realization.

Series of oneshots mostly dealing with desire and discontentment in a supernatural, after-death context, usually along the lines of "Surprise! The wish genie is a dick."

A story about real cruelty and manslaughter.

The bond between a shark and seagull spirits, their story and a girl who helps fulfill a ghost's ties to earth.