Drowned

Asada Nemui's oneshot "Ai, Sei" stars two men: 36-year-old ordinary office worker Sei who, after failing out of every romantic relationship, only sleeps with sex friends, and 20-year-old university student Ai who has the body of a gym rat, the sex drive of a porn star, and the heart of an innocent child who never got over the trauma of learning he can't marry his mother because his father is already married to her. Their sexual compatibility is off the charts, resulting in them meeting almost weekly for marathon sessions, a state of affairs that has Sei worried about how he'll cope when Ai eventually gets a boyfriend. When he catches Ai laughing with a friend on the phone, Sei probes Ai about his dating prospects, only to be told that Ai believes desire and love are two separate things, and that the more he loves someone, the less he is able to think of them as a prospective sexual partner. "I wouldn’t want to have sex with my family or friends," he says to Sei. "I don't want anything in particular from them. I just want to spend time and laugh together with the people I love, and mostly, I want them to live a long, health, and enjoyable life."

Bl manga, like any romance genre, is full of characters who are bad at setting boundaries or end up setting unrealistic boundaries that they know they'll never be able to enforce. How many times have we seen a character with an unrequited crush agree to a friends-with-benefits arrangement, knowing full well it will hurt him? But Sei is not like those other men: he knows what he wants and he treats Ai accordingly. He wanted just to be sex friends with Ai, made his intentions clear, and even spends part of the story making sure that he and Ai are on the same page. What makes "Ai, Sei" so poignant, then, is watching him in real-time be surprised by the realization that he wants to be worthy of love, and specifically Ai's love. Fully ready to give Ai up to real love (though he jokingly wonders whether he could convince Ai's hypothetical boyfriend to give him one night a month with AI's dick), he is not prepared to discover that being desired by Ai means he already lost—not to any particular man, but because that is the nature of Ai's heart. One can never accuse Asada of sentimentality, so it is with characteristic brusqueness that she portrays Sei hiding his tears in the shower, trying to sleep with Ai despite his broken heart, and then having to tap out midway because his feelings overwhelm him. Whereas previously Ai's monstrous desire for him elated him, he now cannot help but see every second he spends in Ai's arms as validation that he is forever cast out from the garden of Ai. In the pantheon of "crying while fucking" scenes, this surely deserves a spot.

We, or at least romance stories, often consider love to be all encompassing. To love another person is to want to be with them, to care for them, to spend time with them, to have sex with them. Physical intimacy, and especially sexual intimacy, is treated as a substantiation of a relationship. It's rare enough to find a story that asks the question, "what if you don't want sex?" It's even rarer, I think, to find a story with this particular strain of aromanticism, which is sometimes called fraysexuality. The opposite of the more commonly discussed demisexuality, this is a person whose sexual attraction to someone decreases when they form an emotional bond. In Ai's case, it's hard to tell when that revulsion begins and whether this is, like Sei accuses him of, something he'll grow out of, when he actually meets someone he's romantically and physically compatible with (Asada, for instance, says in the afterword that Ai will eventually get a boyfriend, but it's unclear whether she means he would have sex with said boyfriend).

But taking Ai at his word, he suddenly becomes a recognizable cousin to an older tanbi counterpart: a slut with a heart of gold who can never be sullied no matter how much filthy sex he engages in, the innocent being of love who is trapped in the overly desirable body of a temptress. It may be very modern of us to be able to call out Ai as an aromantic, but the particular conception he lines out, of sex being something that feels inherently violent and degrading which demeans the participants while love is something pure and uplifting and absent of any selfishness, is a conflict at least as old as the term "shounen ai." The only difference here is that Ai emerges from the story unscathed, while Sei is the one who suffers. Then again, in the tanbi tradition, Ai would have to be a bottom (!).

Whether or not Ai is or remains aromantic, the tailspin he sends Sei on feels true to the experience of encountering an identity or sexuality that you heretofore have never considered. It makes you not only see the other person in a different light, but yourself as well. You put yourself in their shoes, then step out of them to feel how your own pair differs. I wonder if Sei is able to grasp Ai's framework of love and desire so easily because he, too, experiences relationships as one from the margins. He is, to put it somewhat jokingly, an "in-aro," an involuntary aromantic, desirous of love and forced to settle with desire. In the extra, we learn that Sei and Ai try to be friends, but fail miserably and end up having sex, multiple times. In the end, Sei is too much of an allo. He wants both Ai's love and desire, to be cherished by Ai but also to be railed seven ways to Sunday in a maid outfit. This, too, speaks to Asada's good writing sense. It's wrong to believe that those who live in the "default" (straight, allosexual/romantic, cis, etc.) never question their identities, and to question your identity doesn't always mean you suddenly discover you fall somewhere else on the spectrum. Sometimes the journey of self-discovery reaffirms where you landed the first time, for better or worse. In the end, Ai is still "ai" (愛), and Sei is still "sei" (性).

In Ido Gihou's "Yoru wa Tomodachi," Masumi happens across his former high school classmate Tobita being accosted by a businessman on their college campus. Tobita reveals that he is gay and into BDSM (the businessman being a former partner), and on a whim, Masumi offers to engage in sex play as Tobita's dom. Though they are surprisingly compatible during scenes, Tobita remains aloof, almost alien-like in his interactions with Masumi otherwise, and Masumi finds himself increasingly frustrated with the limits of his relationship with Tobita. The boundaries and rules separating their play from their day-to-day lives start to break down, pushing Masumi to face the unwelcome realization that he wants to be with Tobita as ordinary lovers, outside of—or perhaps without—their BDSM play.

BDSM as a genre has exploded in popularity post-omegaverse, much of it circling around "BDSMverse" stories, where there are secondary genders of "dom" and "sub." Like omegaverse with its pheromones and hierarchies and ruts, BDSMverse comes with its own well-understood rules of engagement, but the biological determinism of BDSMverse in my opinion makes those stories fundamentally different from the dynamics of vanilla non-biological BDSM, where the characters have to set their own rules and boundaries. Tobita is the more experienced one, but there are no scenes of him educating Masumi on how to dom. Rather, and rather realistically, they come up with their own ad hoc system, and sometimes Masumi fucks it up, and when he does, he feels uncomfortable and unhappy with his own behavior and his ability to engage further in sex play with Tobita. Both characters are, fittingly for the title, grasping in the dark for a handle around their relationship, and Ido complements this with fluid, sketchy sex scenes that imply the action with the movements of her characters' bodies rather than any particular explicit details. Tobita remains, to the end, inscrutable and a little aloof; you spend much of the later chapters wondering whether or not Tobita is still getting off on Masumi's escalating abuse. It's in that uneasiness that "Yoru wa Tomodachi" stands out and apart from biological BDSMverse stories, where questions as to whether any particular character is enjoying themselves feel more legible.

Here is where I reveal to you that in this post, I am sneakily answering the question sometimes posed of "where are all the aro characters in bl?" and "are there any bl characters you think are autistic?" I think there is a good case for Tobita being autistic, down to the oft-cited finding that people on the autism spectrum are more likely to engage in BDSM and kink-related sex. Tobita has difficulty expressing his emotions in a way that other "normal" people—that is, Masumi—can understand. He stresses to Masumi that there is no grand secret reason for his kink—he was never abused as a child, for example, and he doesn't use it as a way to punish himself. He simply enjoys it, is turned on by it, and in fact can only be turned on by it. When he attempts to show Masumi his appreciation, he hands Masumi (well, throws from his apartment balcony at Masumi) a copiously annotated book on astronomy. The evidence, your honor, speaks for itself.

Is Tobita an aromantic? Here the evidence is less obvious. He clearly struggles with going on an aquarium date with Masumi and reacts poorly when Masumi calls them lovers. In one heartbreaking scene in chapter 6, Masumi tries to hold Tobita "as if we were lovers." In a detached voiceover, Masumi reveals that Tobita can't get off on it. It's clear that Tobita values his connection to Masumi, but it's not clear whether he would accept it in the absence of sex. But that might also be because he knows that to love Masumi the way Masumi wants to be loved would require actions from him that he is simply not capable of giving. What they land on by the end of the series is, I think, further proof that Tobita fits comfortably on the spectrum, with him initiating romantic gestures "because [Masumi] seems happy when I do stuff like that."