In this sense, the book does not emphasize, or insist on the distance between characters and author or audience. That trauma is, again, sexual trauma-or rape. Rather, the primary emotional point of identification in the book is Juli, or, more precisely, Juli's trauma. Thus, the prurient fan-service which is usually doled out only to men is here explicitly taken up by women, who get to watch more exotic male bodies than you can shake a spectacle at.īut while Hagio may be Siegfried, she isn't only Siegfried. His desire is her desire-and also, perhaps, the desire of her readers. And Siegfried's abuse of Juli, the protagonist, is congruent with Hagio's own stylized sexualization of her characters. Siegfried's fetishization of old Europe parallels Hagio's fetishization of contemporary Europe his dangerous gaze parallels Hagio's dangerous gaze. It is, then, perhaps, no accident that the villain of The Heart of Thomas-a boy named Siegfried-is distinguished primarily by his interest in the Renaissance and by his odd, octagonal glasses. The genre of boys' love, in other words, allows Hagio and her readers to place themselves in a position of power and aggrandizement that is rare for women-as the distanced, masterful position, letting his (or her) eyes roam across variegated objects of desire. Instead of a Westerner thinking about veiled maidens on cushions in some distant palace, the Japanese Hagio fantasizes about beautiful boys in an exotic Europe. In a lot of ways, The Heart of Thomas is an Orientalist harem fantasy in reverse. Specifically, I'd argue that a big part of the appeal of setting the comic at a boys' school is that it allows male, European characters to be objectified, just as Asian women often are in Western fiction. I don't disagree with Thorn's analysis of Hagio's motivations, but I think it's worth thinking a bit more about why and how it's important for the characters in Heart of Thomas to be Other, and why that would be something women respond to. Hagio actually initially tried to set the story in a girls' boarding school-but found that she ended up wanting to make the action, as Thorn says, too "realistic and plausible." The result was, in Hagio's words, "sort of giggly." Thorn concludes that "It was important that the characters be Other in order for Hagio to explore the themes, some quite abstract, that she wanted to explore." But Thorn also suggests that there were formal and thematic reasons for the choice. One is historical Hagio was directly inspired by the tragic romanticism of Jean Delannoy's 1964 film Les amities particuliéres, about two boys who fall in love at a boarding school. In his introduction to Fantagraphics new (and first official English) translation of Heart of Thomas, Matt Thorn offers a couple of explanations. The first story in the genre had just been published in 1971 by Hagio's roommate, Keiko Takemiya.įor mainstream American audiences, of course, the genre remains unfamiliar-and as such, it tends to provoke a certain amount of befuddlement. In 1974, though, when Hagio began serializing Heart of Thomas, boys' love was experimental and even in some sense avant garde.
GAY CARTOON PORN SHOTA SERIES
Today in Japan, the genre is well established and popular, with hit series including Gravitation (with half a million copies sold, and that's not counting the anime adaptation) and Antique Bakery (which spun off into an anime series, a live-action TV drama, and a live-action Korean movie).
Boys' love manga are manga that feature male homosexual romance, written (mostly) by women, (mostly) for women. The Heart of Thomas is, in fact, one of the seminal works in the boys' love subgenre of shojo manga (manga for girls). In case the implications aren't clear, that means that all the characters are boys, and all the romances are gay. Hagio's story is set in a German boarding school. There is one thing, though, that definitively and obviously sets Heart of Thomas apart from daytime serials. There are hyperbolically unrequited crushes, stolen kisses, vertiginous swoons, shocking secrets revealed, tragic death after tragic death till the protagonists can barely emote their way around all the beautiful corpses-and even, at the center of the plot, an improbable pair of distantly-related doubles, whose identical features spurn the dry touch of genetics for the sweeping caress of melodrama. At first glance, Moto Hagio's classic Japanese manga (or comic) The Heart of Thomas looks suspiciously like a serialized soap opera.