Finder Series 3: One Wing in the Finder

Ayano Yamane – Be Beautiful – 2007 – 7+ volumes

“Please look forward to all the action Akihito’s butt will get!”

I will, thanks! <3 THIS IS WHY WE CAN’T HAVE NICE THINGS.

More Asami and Takaba. I love that Be Beautiful has dropped all pretense, and now the character introductions are just a series of sex panels. In particular, each character profile image for Asami and Takaba features one going down on the other. I miss CPM books. They have a very distinctive presentation. They all have lengthy, well-illustrated character information pages, story so far segments, generous extras in the back, and wonderful endpapers that are often something hilariously inappropriate, even when it’s not a Be Beautiful book.

This time, Fei Long is back, and he’s using Takaba’s friends to blackmail him into getting information from Asami. Except all this does is drive Takaba into Asami’s arms, and they have sex for awhile while Fei Long calls and periodically listens. Takaba’s friends remain bound and gagged until, for some reason, Fei Long lets them go. There’s an altercation involving Asami, Fei Long, and a third party. I’m not too clear on what’s happening here, or who is where when the action goes down. But the storyline carries over into the next volume, and Takaba has fallen hard for Asami, though he still won’t admit it to himself.

Aaaah. The cover of the book tells me this is the “most controversial yaoi saga ever!” I’m not sure about that, but I am glad that June is re-releasing the whole thing. I’ve got volume 4 and 5 handy for reading, and will probably indulge in both as soon as I finish writing this.

It’s romantic stuff, to be sure. Asami is a pretty typical stoic seme, but he guards Takaba quite jealously, and Takaba needs guarding from the variety of bad guys that are after Asami and whatever bad-guy stuff he does. I like that Takaba also seems to have a knack for snooping and taking pictures, and takes a more active role in getting abducted than the usual scenario… as in, he actually deserves it for apparently trying to blackmail these guys with photos. Not that he deserves what Fei Long actually does to him (there’s lots of non-con in this series… really brutal non-con, at that, and I hate hate HATE that it’s in all these books). But he does walk into the kidnapping part, at least. Literally. Like, walks into it more than once, and doesn’t learn his lesson after the first time.