From the pit of despair... (or, Newgrounds dating sims)

[papillon]

There's plenty of shoujo stuff that isn't yaoi-heavy. Just research the series/game/whatever before you buy it. If it has yaoi and you hate yaoi, skip it and get another one!

I'm not personally much into yaoi (although vague unspoken *hints* of it that don't dominate the story are good for me. Look at, say, Utena (anime version). There are clear *suggestions* of m/m relationships, but for the most part, they remain subtexted.)

However, even though I'm not a yaoi fan, I react negatively to seeing you talking about it as a "disgusting" amount of "sick stuff". Maybe I'm missing something, since I'm not familiar with the exact stuff you're referring to. And as this is not in the H forum, I can't start describing the sort of thing that *I* would consider worthy of being called 'sick stuff'.

[N0UGHTS]

Err, I went overboard with the smacking and the shanking, huh?
:pulls scissor out and tosses it behind self:
:insert man-scream here:

Heheh, sorry... I'm just sick of people saying "BL is awesome GL sucks" and vice versa, and I assumed it was one of those instances again... And I hold the freedom of sex between sexy individuals very close to my heart! Very close...

Ah, so it's just a "I hate girl stuff in my boy stuff" thing. All right, sorry for the misconception.

Concerning the BL in your shounen, well... Isn't that what CLAMP does? You know, trying to catch more than one demographic with their manga? Isn't their versatility the reason why CLAMP works are so popular and why Sunrise hired them to do character designs for Code Geass? And they've contributed lots of input for that show from what I've heard...

If mixing traditionally "masculine" things with "feminine" things is so, well, repulsive, I'd like to point out that works that do that seem to appeal to many audiences. Hoshi no Koe isn't considered an abomination even though it has mecha and the kind of sad romance that's popular with many women. The same with Elfen Lied, too. It has lots of ecchi, blood, and violence, which usually appeals to male audiences quite well, and it's tied with "angsty romance," as a female friend of mine put it. It had girl stuff with it's extreme, "dirty man-stuff." And it's one of ADV's best-sellers.

[Wintermoon]

Do the CLAMP manga really contain significant amount of BL? I certainly can't tell from the anime adaptions.

I recall that Cardcaptor Sakura (the anime) had mild traces of BL, which I thought was cute. If anything, the anime was too hetero for me. (The Sakura/Shaoran pairing only seemed to exist to give the main characters a politically correct hetero ending. Sakura/Tomoyo would have made more sense.)

[Vatina]

Do the CLAMP manga really contain significant amount of BL? I certainly can't tell from the anime adaptions.

No, it's all on a very low level (and what the fans make of it). I haven't read all there is of xxxHolic yet, but I find it a bad example of BL in manga :/ Besides, if a girl and a boy can't be "friends", and even two boys/girls can't be "friends".... do friends exist at all anymore? ^^;
(I'm not talking about SakuraxTomoyo here though, that one was obvious )

Yes, I'm getting away from the point here.... sorry about that, just had to mention it. I do sympathise with your annoyance towards yaoi bait sometimes though. (When the yaoi isn't there, but they're obviously still catering towards those who write fanfics )

[N0UGHTS]

Well, now that you've asked that question...

No, not really. At least, not in my opinion. It's usually just teasting, teasing, and sometimes joking with the reader. The teasing isn't even that often, now that I think about it... Most of the time you can't even call it BL. It's just... I think the mentality of the fujoshi-teasing is like this:
"Hey reader! Yeah! You with the bra! We're bishounen. And we're hugging. And we will never kiss. Never..." [evil bishounen laughs here]

Like I said, it's just me... I only think BL is excessive in a manga if it's just smut, smut, smut. Of course, you don't find smut, smut, smut in a shoujo manga. :p

[DaFool]

Aw man, I hope that Guest didn't run away (who was not me I swear), because though the argument seemed petty, the delivery of it was well-written (just imho).

If I was an enlightened anime director adapting some work to capture the most audience (in these days of declining anime revenue), I can either go two ways:

1.) pander to neither
2.) pander to both demographics

If it were a mainstream show, the first approach would fit and I would keep things neutral. But for a late night show catered to otakus and fujoshis, you bet I'd cram in as many teases as I could possibly can: All the male leads would have friendships bordering on the homoerotic, and every girl's scene would start with an upskirt camera angle. The fujoshis will have to suck up the upskirts just as the otakus will have to tolerate the BL undertones, otherwise they should just stick to watching mainstream shows.

Then I'll let the ratings and actual audience determine whether the work will be classified seinen, josei, shoujo, or shounen. (Like that recent case of elementary school manga on discovering sexuality where the mangaka was surprised during her signings that most of the patronage came from thirtysomething men -- classify it as seinen... assuming it's still legal lol... )

[PyTom]

If it were a mainstream show, the first approach would fit and I would keep things neutral. But for a late night show catered to otakus and fujoshis, you bet I'd cram in as many teases as I could possibly can: All the male leads would have friendships bordering on the homoerotic, and every girl's scene would start with an upskirt camera angle. The fujoshis will have to suck up the upskirts just as the otakus will have to tolerate the BL undertones, otherwise they should just stick to watching mainstream shows.

That seems like a _really_ bad idea. I mean, I like my upskirts, but if a show was to have nontrivial amounts of BL... well, I can get my upskirts elsewhere, thank you very much. (And I suspect the BL-lovers would feel the same way in reverse.)

[Samu-kun]

Cramming it with upskirts seems like a pretty bad idea too... We all know what happened to Strike Witches thanks to that... XD

[PyTom]

medium_phoenix_wright_objection_.gif (5.56 KiB) Viewed 1963 times

There are very few upskirts in Strike Witches.

That's because there are very few skirts in Strike Witches.

[N0UGHTS]

Well, DaFool's anime might appeal to the bisexual hentai portion of his viewing audience. Or maybe that's just me. :p

<— That'd be me watching this anime of DaFool's.
(Not my image, from another forum, won't say :p , but I'm hosting it on imageshack to be server-friendly.)

Unfortunately for DaFool, not everyone who watches prime-time anime is a bisexual hentai like me. And all the bisexual hentai would sue DaFool for causing the loss of copious amounts of blood. XD

Or, maybe that's just me again. Who knows.

P.S.
I'm stable now. XD
By the way where the heck's my scissors?

[Wintermoon]

Actually I'd rather have the almost-homoerotic friendship than the upskirts. Panty shots are overused to the point where they're not even effective as gags anymore. If I want porn, I'll watch porn. If I'm not watching actual porn, that's because I don't want to watch porn at the moment, so why cram it with half-assed attempt at eroticism?

On the other hand, I actually enjoyed the Loveless anime, and the BL in that went way beyond subtext. BL relationships actually have some novelty value to me (so long as it doesn't enter porn territory).

[N0UGHTS]

BL relationships actually have some novelty value to me (so long as it doesn't enter porn territory).

What about Ai no Kusabi? Though by today's standards it's more gei than BL. XD The art, the story, the lack of fluff... The only thing that looks like it's aimed toward women is the angsty, dramatic romance part. Especially the ending... And I'm talking about the OVA. I didn't really like the novel translations... It just felt like the translator took too many liberties. It was... almost more like an adaptation instead of a novel :p

[Guest]

I'll post more later, as soon as I get to join...can't really do that now, since I'm technically not supposed to be on this site at this time...

But just to let everyone know, the pairing I complain about in xxxHolic is Watanuki and doumeki (hope that is how he is spelled) which kind of detracts from the fun yuuko and watanuki get into, at least in my own opinion.

Also, the personality of doumeki just pisses me of, since he seems way too arrogant just to get watanuki to cook for him...
Granted, I guess I shouldn't complain about non-canon stuff, since I like Yukoxwatanuki in that series, but it still annoys me how that guy gets put in the story so much, even though, from what I can tell, there is no other reason to do such other than to entice fangirls.

But I'll talk about this some more, in a couple of hours, when I get back home.

[Loveli]

Maybe this has no longer a thing to do whit the conversation and the last post was a long time ago... but I have someone else that deserve to be mentioned as someone making shoujo games in the Newgrounds, since the first post said she liked games like that one... I am not sure what to say... just check it out: http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/525977

The one that created this game also has a lot more and allso a DeviantArt username so... yeah I like her games I tough they where wort mentioning.

[gekiganwing]

Back in 2008, it looked like the few complex romance games on Newgrounds would be shelved into the 'mature' section (no matter what sort of content the games had). And after trying to appreciate a few games with distressingly bad writing and characterization, I just about gave up on the site.

But a year or two later, I discovered Flash games created by Nummyz and Pacthesis. I was also surprised to find a handful of demos and relatively similar games on Deviant Art. So yeah, I'm lad to hear that some of Pachethesis' games are also hosted on Newgrounds... though I'm not sure what category they belong to.

Now that indie game creators and some fan translators are working on complex, often worksafe romance games, I no longer have despair over thinking that the only content in English is (if I may use fanfiction slang) spamfic or badfic.