The manga that broke my heart.
February 15th, 2008 by Lianne
I know we don’t talk much about yaoi/BL at this place, but I just heard that 801 Media bought the license to Uki Ogasawara’s Black Sun.
When I first read Black Sun, my heart sunk to my stomach. I stared at the floor awhile, then I went out for a walk, but ghostly images of the comic kept reappearing in my head. It’s that insidiously sad.
The plot is about a Crusades-era-ish monastic knight who falls into the clutches of an unpredictable middle eastern war general. The sex is sudden, plentiful, and extremely graphic. But more than anything, the way war and rape and punishment are handled is downright traumatizing. During one scene, the main knight has a flashback to his long-missing army superior, and how before a big battle, the knight asked to sleep in the same bed as this superior because that sort of affectionate comfort would help him better face death on the battlefield the next day. The superior gently reprimanded him that such a thing would be a sin for holy knights, and the knight immediately felt embarrassed. This flashback is happening while the knight is being repeatedly raped in order to save the lives of his troops.
This manga is in no way for the young or weak of heart. It’s one of the most gorgeously drawn BL you’ll ever read, and the plot was more interesting than I imagined. But DO NOT READ IT IF YOU DON’T KNOW WHAT YOU’RE GETTING INTO. I never thought it would get licensed - I didn’t think anyone would dare. Now that this book is going to be on bookshelves, it’s going to haunt me more than ever before.
Dammit.
I read it recently and didn’t find it disturbing at all. It’s sex, it’s a comedy, even if there are hard scenes the’re not meant to be evil, at least that’s my opinion. It’s not like the character has a trauma of it. And you know, I’m someone who doesn’t take rape lightly, in fact I avoid it as much as I can. But if it’s done like this, I can’t take it seriously.
It’s true that if it was agirl I would be avoiding it like hell, cause I would relate to it stronger but that’s normal isn’t it? It doesn’t want to portrait reality.
Whoa, whoa! Are we talking about the same manga? Black Sun may have had one or two comedic characters and a few running jokes, but it was in no way a comedy. And even though the knight wasn’t physically harmed by the rapes (because he was being drugged with stimulants, etc.) doesn’t mean he wasn’t traumatizied on a mental/emotional level. There were mutiple times in the beginning when the knight asked “If you’re going to kill me, don’t humiliate me as well” or even “I’d rather die than keep up with the shame and humiliation of this.” How is that not trauma?
BL is a genre traditionally filled with rape in various levels of offensive; I think it’s pretty well accepted that BL is a way for girls to explore rape fantasies that are many degrees of separation from the readers’ reality. But how offensive the rape is REALLY depends on the BL in question. Black Sun isn’t the most offensive manga I’ve ever read, but it’s extremely sad because of how much detail the mangaka goes into regarding the cultural/emotional trauma the celibate knight suffers through because of the rapes. I’ve read a lot of BL, and although I found this manga interesting because of the complexity of the situations and emotions, it saddened me in a way I’ve rarely been saddened. You don’t have to feel the same, but I think it would be unfair for you to write this off as “comedy” to someone who hasn’t read it yet, because it sure as hell upset me as a 26-year-old reader who’s read her fair share of BL.
[…] from 801. Over at Sleep Is For the Weak, Lianne Sentar warns that one of those new titles, Black Sun, is not for the faint of […]
Yeah, I’m afraid we’re talking about the same manga. XD I think it’s interesting to hear different oppinions.
It’s just that I couldn’t take it seriously at all… Maybe because the characters meant nothing to me.
On another level… there’s something erotic about humiliation, even if you never want that to happen in real life, like you said it’s a way to live that in a fantasy. It’s a scary thought, though…