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you know about the voices that speaks in your head?i listen to them somtimes. most of the times. sometimes they tell me good things. sometimes they make me wish for bad things. |
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it's basically the inside of sakinah's brain.but mercifully edited, censored, and anaesthesised with a heavy dose of prozac. tagboard
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Homoerotic, but not BL: House of Five Leaves
Subtle homoeroticism has been around in anime targeted towards a mature female audience for quite some time, but the clearest landmark I can recall in recent memory without having to rely on wikipedia is Natsume Ono's House of Five Leaves. Putting aside the blatantly BL/Yaoi titles at the time, House of Five Leaves stood out with it's two male protagonists who are clearly more than a little interested in each other, but the subject of whether that interest was romantic or platonic remained hard to tell. In fact, in terms of a BL timeline, the entire series could very well have just been the first 18mins of the first episode before they start off on the raunchy and steamy scenes. Not that I have anything against that- except for everything but that's a topic for another day.Anime titles for female otaku have been more or less a rather niche market. They either cater for younger, older women, and/or soooomewhere in between. I suppose BL would usually fall into the gray whirlpool of indeterminate aging category because of it's mature content but the cliche storylines and themes also make it easy to market towards a younger audience. Perhaps it's sort of like a cesspool breeding ground for future hardcore fujoshi/fudanshi #tongue-in-cheek. Which brings us back to House of Five Leaves because it blurs the lines a little. The storyline and pacing is written with a mature audience in mind, but the developing relationship between the male protags is undeniably the focal point of the story, and hence, its major marketing ploy. This is where it gets ambiguous. It's clear that the two of them are beginning to include the other into each others' worlds, and the playful dango-bite at the end might even paint a romantic scene to those that are so-inclined. In the end, however, viewers/readers are open to their own interpretation regarding the protags' relationship. Naturally, there are other points to House of Five Leaves besides the vague and questionable pairing. That's just one of the points that stood out to me the most because there wasn't another show quite like it at the time. There's the bug-eyed and expressive design and flair that is a regular trademark of Natsume Ono's. That is to say, it may take some time to get used to, but it's a style that works well enough. I find the pacing and the storyboarding very relaxing as well, and yet it still manages to leave a deep and lasting impression. The music score helped to make the scenes more memorable as well, I think. These days, the anime industry does offer more in terms of choices to their ever-expanding female clientele. Well, they'd have to. The tweens that grew up watching Kare kano or the insanely-popular Fruits Basket have grown up (for the most part) into adults with expanding horizons. And I believe House of Five Leaves helped open up doors for stories with subdued atmospheres and questionable pairing of older adult males. And I think that just makes it more exciting for a consumer such as myself. What other strange stories are they going to come up with in the future? |