Gerard & Jacques 2

There’s such a happy amount of sex in this!  Just when you think a scene or mood is going to get too serious, out comes the merry sex.  In the period at the beginning of the book when noone is in a position to have sex, Jacques just masturbates again and again as a little warmup.  You think you may have to hold off this volume, perhaps the relationship will need to warm up a bit and you’ll get a lot of sex at the end… but that’s what alcohol’s there for!  Also, Gerard gets some rough stuff from a third party that he doesn’t necessarily want, and this scene was a bit hard on me, but it didn’t riddle me with guilt nearly as much as the first scene in the series did.

You know, Gerard and Jacques have a good relationship together, too.  It was kind of weird to follow up Guru Guru Pon-chan with this one, because I admire the relationships in similar ways.  Pon-chan has had more time to develop its main relationship, and it’s really cutesy and fun to watch, whereas Gerard and Jacques had to get together quickly, and they share some macho man-love.  Again, with my negative experiences when first dabbling in the Boy’s Love genre, I’m glad stuff like this series emerged with good relationships and plot.  Granted, this one is extremely porn-oriented too, but the fact that it still manages to cram so much sex, plot, and character stuff into two volumes earned my admiration.

The only thing I didn’t like about this volume was the detour into the French Revolution.  The characters discuss it at length near the end of one chapter, and it kind of flew over my head since I’m not terribly familiar with it (though with as much Art History as I took, I can describe to you what most of the people look like and who painted their portraits).  They kept talking about it though, and eventually it became more important to the plot and Gerard and Jacques got drug into it and the series kind of ended with the history tie-in.  I really liked the ending, but I guess I didn’t want a big history lesson in with my sex.  But they taught me French history with sex and characters I liked, so I suppose that’s okay.

Gerard, for writing erotic lesbian fiction, also has some really classy lines when he’s doing his work down there.  It made me laugh several times.  Highly recommended series!

Gerard & Jacques 1

PORN ALERT.

So I was reading the Overlooked Manga Festival (which is linked over off to the right as of yesterday) and there was a feature on this manga.  I have yet to read anything from Blu, and this one sounded awesome, so I bought both volumes and had a go at it.

It does start off with a rather explicit sex/rape scene with a younger version of Jacques, and though I knew this was in here, it still made me feel really uncomfortable.  As I mentioned last week when I was talking about You and Harujion, older/younger relationships make me feel uncomfortable in general, but the rape just kind of turned that up a bit more.  It ends on a happy note, and we get an older version of Jacques not too much later than that, so the rest of the sex in this series is all okay.  Well, at least in this volume, anyway.  And only relatively speaking in this volume, because there are still some young looking men as sex partners, but they are very willing and obviously don’t want my pity.

This is the first actual yaoi-in-the-actual-sense title I’ve read.  Most or all of the other male/male manga I’ve read are more BL and not terribly explicit.  This one features a lot of sex, including a f/m/m 3-way, but the only sex where we get to see things is the m/m.  While reading this, I realized I don’t own a lot of really graphic smutty manga.  There are certainly some with lots of sex in my collection, but none are semen-in-the-face-oh-look-a-penis explicit like this one is.  I know I can get stuff that is just porn from Icarus and a couple other places, but this one has both sex and plot.  I like that.

This one’s actually a weird mix of sex and character development.  Gerard is both a really good character and a sex maniac.  He encourages Jacques to read and understand certain types of social philosophy while he is actually in the process of boning and/or blowing other young men.  Whether or not Jacques is more interested in social philosophy or getting it again from Gerard remains to be seen, but I’d be willing to bet that two pretty main characters can’t be separated for very long.

We get a ton of sad backstory for Gerard, whose career turns out to be an author of smutty romance titles.  He had a wife who cheated on him all the time, but despite the fact that he would often get it on with both his wife and her lover, there was still something unforgivable that his wife could do to him, and it actually winds up being a really sad backstory that turns out to explain a lot about him.

This series is also alternately very serious and very funny, and it balances out both well.  This is a feat, because I hate it when series can’t decide which they wanna be.

Wonderful stuff, this porn.  I don’t think I’ll be trying out the Antique Bakery by the same author, but I may go for Flower of Life, despite the fact it is just… not the same.