Wednesday, July 28, 2010

This probably means I'm desensitized

Some background:

A few years ago I discovered online manga and got really into it. I'd been watching various anime series for years before that, but then I found out that most anime series are based off of manga, so I switched over. Because I'm a reader before anything else. In the beginning, I would only stick to series that I knew like shows I watched and the manga I read in Shonen Jump. Dragonball/Z, Fruits Basket, Hana Kimi, InuYasha, Yu Yu Hakusho and all that stuff.

Eventually, I ran out of series to read. I had read all the series I knew about, or I was waiting for updates on the series I was still reading. So, one weekend, I started downloading random series from mangatraders.com. I picked titles at random from the selection and went crazy in the oneshot section.

At this time, I was still fairly new to manga and didn't see the warning signs on the manga I was downloading. I didn't look at the rating or the genre, and even if I did I had never before heard of yaoi or yuri. Or ecchi, but I could pretty much figure that one out on my own.

So while on there, I ran into my first yaoi with sex in it. I came across Memories of the Future (or Future Lovers, which is the American title). I thought the summary sounded all right so I downloaded it. It was only one volume long anyway.

I did not make it past the first sex scene. I didn't even make it past the beginning of the first sex scene. The clothes started coming off and away I went. This was probably also the first graphic sex scene I ever read in a manga. So that kinda ruined manga for me for a bit. Then I didn't learn my warning lesson and read Jisatsu Circle, because I'm an idiot, but more on that some other time.

Back to the present:

I was recently reading some manga reviews, trying out a smarter way to find new manga to read, when what should I stumble on but a review of Future Lovers. I didn't know that it was actually Memories of the Future, but some tiny part of my brain suspected it because the review sounded familiar. I looked it up on mangatraders and lo and behold, there it was. The yaoi manga that had scared the crap out of me the first time I read it.

Of course, since my first reading of Memories of the Future/Future Lovers, I have read many yaoi titles of varying sexy scenes, some tamer or wilder than Memories of the Future.

So I reread Memories of the Future and am now trying to figure out why the hell it bothered me so much the first time. I mean, it's not even that graphic. The Tyrant Who Falls in Love, Love Round, and My Paranoid Next-Door Neighbour, which I am all very fond of, and to name a few examples, contain much more graphic scenes than Memories of the Future.

Of course I built up to them, but still. I figure I'm just used to it now. Wonder if that's a good thing or a bad thing.

Even weirder is that Memories of the Future is on my 'manga to buy' list. Weird.

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