Review of Yes, No, or Maybe?

I give up. Why is this still considered acceptable? I admit, I'm not familiar with the light novel, so maybe it wasn't as creepy, or maybe it just has a big following, but why did this have to be one of the few BL works to be adapted into animation recently? Why did they choose this one? Yes ka (shortened for the sake of my fingers) is, according to this adaptation, a very traditional BL that follows along the lines of Sekaiichi Hatsukoi and the like. Literally everything about this production screams of a work that's right at home in that mid 2000s to around the2011 mark, and the animation quality and lineart will back me up on that one. I legitimately think that the Black Butler anime, which debuted in 2008 (and which I also dislike heavily) had better looking art than this film in every sense. There must have been budget issues going on behind the scenes, or else this movie got shafted in terms of funding. The musical score also screamed 'royalty free', I must say, in that the vast majority of it is comprised of plinky piano tracks that kind of sound like someone listened to a shitload of Ludovico Einaudi's ambient piano themes and decided, with no composition experience whatsoever, that they could 'do it better'.

The story is... humdrum. Not bad, not good. It's tropey for anyone who's squinted at BL in the last quarter century, but not unbearable. Its themes are pretty obvious, and in some cases literally spelled out to viewers, and while they're quite nice themes most of the time, I can't call this well written. This is writing that comes at you in a back alley with a hammer. No shade on the LN, because I can't rightly say whether that was any good, particularly since translations can be a bit shaky. But this film, at least, was very blunt with its overall themes of duality of self and such. (Edit: in hindsight, the reason for this is likely that the scenes and dialogue are lacking in subtext. Scenes do exactly what they need to do to showcase the movie's themes, and no more. They don't really serve to enrich the characterisation, or actually dissect the subtextual themes, or present interesting ideas. There's no hidden or double or nuanced meaning to think about in Tsuzuki's stop motion animation, or in his dialogue with Kunieda, just a very bluntly delivered message that serves to highlight how nakedly artificial that message is in the context of the film. If the film had purposefully set up Tsuzuki's dual nature, through foreshadowing in his dialogue and interests, and thereby made the rape at the end make sense, this could have been a brilliant Hannibal-esque toxic romance, where Kunieda's pride prevents him from speaking out in the end, thereby solidly delivering on his own characterisation as someone who internalises his problems.) If you want a film that actually discusses that theme properly, maybe try Perfect Blue instead. If there hadn't been rape, I'd probably be calling this a tropey but cute BL film to watch when you want to shut your brain off, and given it a 6/10. But really, the thing everyone's really here to discuss is the rape, so let's get onto that, because it's a doozy.

Now, BL has some interesting roots that I won't go into too heavily here, but needless to say, it was important in allowing women to enter the manga industry. Look up 'Year 24 group' or 'the 49-ers', or the works of Mori Mari if you're curious. Long story short, this gave us works with very androgynous, almost 'third gender' characters that could be projected onto by just about anyone, such as Gilbert from Kaze to Ki no Uta. In terms of female empowerment, it removed the woman from a sexual scenario, so that they could enjoy romance without placing themselves in situations they found threatening, due to the power dynamic between men and women at the time. Despite doing a fair amount of research for a layman, I'm honestly not sure how this ideal metamorphosed into the creepy, toxic BL tropes we see today, but I suspect a little film called 'Death in Venice' might have some answers. DiV is, at its core, a pedophile fantasy that the author, Thomas Mann, drew from his obsession with a Polish tween he met while on vacation in Venice. This work was, arguably, very influential on some members of the 49ers back in the seventies, and it's not surprising that the idea of a bigger, older man forcing sexual scenarios onto a younger, protesting, boyish character would enter the BL scene, although DiV ends with the obsessed man dying of cholera the moment he decides to actually do something. I can't prove it, but I know DiV was influential on those people, and it seemed plausible as to where this trope could have originated.

Anyway, we got the Seme-Uke thing somewhere along the line, either from works like Death in Venice, or possibly from the 'grow your own spouse' elements of the Tale of Genji, or possibly even through cross-contamination with the shoujo industry's complicated relationship with writing women. And it's bad, at least for gay men's general health and wellbeing. Because BL isn't about androgynes like Gilbert anymore, but much more recognizably about men, with male physiques and rippling muscles, and when you factor in the DiV angle... urgh. Yeah, gay men have been grappling with the rapist/pedophile accusations for longer than I've been alive, and this work does absolutely nothing to change that perception. We're in 2021 now. Gay marriage has been legalized in a lot of countries. And last month, Japan pushed out a dated-looking fifty minute 'film' that features one of the worst 'rape as love' moments I've seen in years.

It's not uncommon for a character to moan 'yamero...' in Japanese erotica (women would probably say 'yamete...' instead), which can literally be translated as 'stop...', but Japanese is a pretty thorny language when sex is involved, as far as I can tell as a non-native semi-speaker. 'Iyada', meaning 'don't' isn't unheard of, but often the reason for all of this is essentially 'we shouldn't do this, it's embarrassing for me', because of Japan's very reserved attitude towards sex. Hence the preponderance of characters declaring 'I can't control myself anymore!' while their love interest essentially screams 'we can't!'. This whole self control vs loss of control thing makes some amount of sense to me, given the cultural background. Now, what I can't get my head around is Tsuzuki's absolutely cursed sounding ways of essentially denying Kunieda's right to say no to him. I get that Kunieda isn't averse to the idea of having sex with Tsuzuki, but he was definitely saying 'not right now', even in the cursed world of BL translation. And then Tsuzuki held him down and screwed him anyway. Look, if that whole pre-sex business was meant to come across as tsundere flirting, then maybe it shouldn't have been shot at dutch angles, and maybe the VAs shouldn't have made it sound quite so realistically panicked.

Either way, it's presented as a solidly 'rape as love' angle, and it was horrible to witness. It felt out of character for Tsuzuki to be so inconsiderate and pushy over sex. Maybe this work was meant to make me wonder if Tsuzuki also had another side, but that wasn't established at all, and his 'other side' is so repulsive yet treated as loveable with no explanation that I can't not call it bad writing. It felt out of character for Kunieda to be fine with things after that, considering his bitchy personality. If Kunieda had a rape fetish in the story, or this had been presented as a legitimate BDSM relationship with safewords, I might have been cool with this. Rape presented as a sign of true love is way too accepted in the BL industry, and despite the help BL has given women in becoming mangaka historically, this needs to stop. I don't give a damn how wet the uke's screams made you. This kind of depiction is quantifiably harmful for gay men in real life.

We can all do better than this crap by now.