Tuesday 18 March 2003

Pic of the day: Also, it took me some time of playing The Sims before I got this screenshot.

Shounen Ai, revisited

This will make very little sense to those who don't know me, and absolutely no sense to those who do. I wasted much of the last couple days writing shounen ai. (Japanese expression meaning "boy love", or less literally "Japanese gay romance, normally written or drawn by women".) Not to be confused with yaoi ("Japanese gay p0rn, normally written or drawn by women"). Of course, a quick search on the Net will show that lots of people mix the two up anyway.

Anyway, this is an artistic endeavor. I have not gone over to the pink side. And of course, being a woman is not an absolute requirement for writing about boy & boy romance. It is not like these fangirls actually press down the keys with the weight of their breasts when they type these stories, you know. It is just that it seems to be a very girly thing to do, and I am trying to find out why. I think I am on the right track.

***

"Write about what you know" is an old saying, but Stephen Donaldson put it a little differently. Good fiction, he said, was a combination of the familiar and the fantastic. (OK, I am paraphrasing this as I forgot where I read it, but that was the meaning of it.) For instance, he was familiar with leprosy because his father worked at a clinic with the stuff. So in his most famous series of books, the main character was a leper in a magic fantasy land. The mundane nature of the main character made the magic believable. (If anything, the character was too realistic. Many people gave up early in the first book because the main character was such a scumbag.)

So I am writing a heart-warming, gentle, clumsy, rather platonic love story about a mystic and a med student. ^_^ Of course they are both pretty young men, and I've thrown in some supernatural things, ancestor spirits and mystic powers, and home-made Japanese names. (I am particularly proud of the names.)

It is interesting because in a fiction which Could Not Have Been Me, you sidestep some of your own complexes and can write things that would look bad if people thought it was autobiography. Of course, since I am male, shounen ai could have been true, and I would not be surprised if people thought so. I mean, most people are dumb. (Present company excluded, of course. You are not most people ... most people don't read my journal.) But to me, it is something that Could Not Have Been Me, so I get an idea of how that works.

The female/female equivalent of yaoi is called yuri, but I don't think there is a female equivalent to shounen ai. I believe this is because girls are like that already. They have close, touchy-feely, almost- erotic relationship already. Real men don't have slumber parties.

OK, so it wasn't a very good excuse for the delay, but it was an excuse! Meanwhile, the war has begun. Have fun.