Yaoi Place

The world of yaoi is a strange, sometimes creepy, very often twisted place. I won’t pretend to understand all the intricacies of the art form, but its appeal at the outset is undeniable. To see characters such as Dragonball Z in various stages of sexual liberation is akin to seeing Superman bound and gangbanged – and liking it. There’s something about the innocence in yaoi, or any comic for that matter, mixing with free-for-all sexuality that makes you stare no matter how much you want to look away.

Yaoi Place is a website full of the vibrant, Asian-inspired art form. Some of the featured galleries are more cartoonish; along the lines of the aforementioned Dragonball Z, while others seem more grown-up. It’s up to the viewer in the end: Do you prefer your yaoi outlandish and improbable, or more…ahem…proportionate?

If you yearn for the outlandish (after all, what’s animation for but to experiment with our imagination’s limits), then there’s plenty for you here. The artists display in their work some very interesting, shall we say, form manipulations. If a man’s cock could do what a yaoi toon’s cock does in these works, oh happy day! Having said that, the more cartoonish of the cocks look a little frightening. The aesthetic beauty of the penis is replaced in yaoi by a fleshen monster, completely hairless and a distinct, greedy, slobbdering being separate from its owner. You almost feel sorry for the poor, puckering bungholes they forcefully enter.

One issue that does concern me about yaoi (and I’m not the first to mention this, I know) is the look of some of the characters. They almost look too young, all rosy-cheeked and bright-eyed. It made this reviewer a bit uncomfortable. I wanted to ask for an age of consent form from these toons, which is of course crazy because… well, they’re toons.

Yaoi Place also hosts some movies if you like that sort of thing. I’ve never been a fan of this style of animation, but they are of good quality and length. There’s also a series of strangely animated shorts called “Gay Life” set in LA. The cast is the usual set of gay stereotypes animated in a distracting style a la House of Moorecock and voiced so annoyingly that I had to turn off the feature very soon after I started it.