I got an interesting question this morning asking about yaoi. The question was that since yaoi seems to always be guy on guy, hardcore romantic action – is there anything of the sort for women? Something with a male/female pairing for example was what this reader was searching for.
All the professional yaoi I’ve encountered is usually soft-core and most prevalent in manga not anime/hentai form (comic book form versus cartoon) but is unmistakably the type of content that is aimed most often at female readers/viewers rather than male. It’s considered to be aimed at women because of its much more romantic content, not because of the male/male pairing. The characters in a yaoi title usually dress up (nearly as many fantastic costume changes for the male characters as there are usually for female characters) designed with more ‘feminine’ features (expressive eyes, flowing hair, fuller more pronounced lips) have unrequited loves, go the extra mile to make romantic gestures and tend to give their partners that ‘gaze of love’ that women like to see and men are completely oblivious to. All things that women ‘crave’ in their romantic fantasies and for some reason the male/male pairing allows readers to easily insert themselves into the scene while a male/female can make a reader feel intrusive and incapable of having the objects of their desire (it’s like fake lesbian porn to straight men).
Though there are more than a few yaoi mangas the most popular yaoi pairings are often fan based pairings of anime/manga characters. The wildly popular manga/anime series “Naruto,” for example has popular fan fiction pairings between the main characters, Naruto and Sasuke, as well as several teacher/student, student/student and even teacher/teacher pairings (search SasuXNaru for examples). While there are examples of fan fiction/fan art depicting female/male pairings (Naruto and Sakura, NaruXSaku, or Naruto and Hinata, NaruXHinata, come to mind) these aren’t as popular among female fans as the “double bang for your buck” male/male pairings. Fan fiction/art also tends to ‘go farther’ than the mangas do because the manga invites use of the imagination and the fan fiction is a direct result of that. Some lovely yaoi manga/anime titles I’ve enjoyed include, “Loveless” and “Junjou Romantica.”
That’s not to say that there isn’t male female romantic manga/anime titles just that they’re generally less popular. With hentai, there are a few ‘romantic’ storylines but they’re a total world away from the yaoi titles which don’t hesitate to take several episodes of careful ‘wooing’ before the characters exchange their first kiss, while your typical hentai involves maybe five minutes of the male character convincing/forcing the female character to submit to their romantic desires – or has the male character sleeping with everyone else while pinning after the one female they actually like but haven’t slept with (i.e. not really terribly heartwarming or romantic). Examples of relatively, by hentai standards anyway, romantic titles that I’ve already reviewed would be “Sex Warrior Pudding Collector’s Complete Edition,” “Karakuri Ninja Girl,” and “Jiburiru Vol. 1.” That said there are a few male/male hentai titles out there and I’m hoping we’ll get a few of the good ones sometime soon so I can really go all fangirl in my review.
This was just a very brief overview on what yaoi is, so if you’ve got more questions trying reading this much more in depth article.
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