BL Manga Rec: Acid Town
Sep. 7th, 2017 03:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
labingiI am officially in love with Kyugo’s BL manga series, Acid Town, and want to spread the love to others. Many thanks to ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
imperfekti for putting me onto this wonderful series. She likened it to Mirage of Blaze (novels) in having an intricate, interesting plot with a great ensemble of characters, and that’s all quite correct.
General Review and Rec:
spoilers only for the chapter 1 setup
The story, which is currently ongoing, is set in a near future dystopia run by yakuza and opens with the tough life of a teen boy, Yuki, who has to pay the hospital bills of his chronically ill and adorable little brother, Jun. Yuki and his friend, Tetsu, get a break—or do they?—when a yakuza boss, Hyoudou, agrees to pay Jun’s bills in exchange for Yuki visiting him once a week.
Acid Town is definitely boys love, but it breaks a lot of conventions. The reader has to wait for the romance, and when it shows up, it’s not necessarily where or how you might expect it. Like many a BL manga, it is rife with sexual abuse. But it also devotes a great deal of attention to relationships that are not sexual, producing a strong sense of multiple ties that bind people simultaneously to family, friends, lovers, colleagues, mentors, etc. It is a tightly plotted, intricately crafted story that builds its relationships (sexual or platonic) out of a lot of typical angsty tropes but also out of a great deal of psychologically astute character development.
Acid Town is also very unusual (unique?*) for me in being a manga/light novel-style series in which I enjoy every single significant character. There is not one subplot, to date, I have found boring. There is not one major character whose adventures I am not happy to ride along with. The story moves from one person’s arc to another, and it’s all engaging, not least because it’s all interconnected. Indeed, there is a Dickensian level of coincidence in everyone being connected to everyone. But that’s okay. The emotional payoff more than pays for the suspension of disbelief.
If I were to put forward a one-word theme for Acid Town, I think it would be “corruption,” in the sense of a process, not a static state. The story walks through several multi-year, non-chronological accounts of characters being beaten by yakuza life into more cynical, more secretive, more conniving, more ruthless people. One of the series’ fundamental questions is how to save oneself from that descent, and to what degree one can. Character by character, we’re asked to consider how much of the more innocent person is left after X-number of years of this. It’s harrowing at times but, despite the fantasy yakuza dystopia elements, feels very psychologically real. (And occasionally characters do escape to a healthier life, and it shows.)
A word about the women: like most BL manga, Acid Town marginalizes the female presence. But when women are there, they tend to be extremely well written characters put into highly stereotypical abused female tropes. In a word, the characters are better than the corners they’re written into, and although one doesn’t go to BL to read about women, I find myself wishing that they were allowed more agency and long-term development because they have the character weight to pull it off and make it satisfying. The story needs a dose of Kill Bill! (Acid Town is also highly unusual for me in making me actively want more of the female characters in a BL text.)
The only other niggle I have about the series is its accessibility. Its production appears to have slowed in recent years, and it’s unclear if the series will be finished—to say nothing of when. Moreover, it is only available in English in scanlation. (I have mainly been reading it in the German edition.) This inevitably puts an avid reader up against a wall of frustration. But well. Better some Acid Town than none.
I strongly recommend the series to fans of darker BL manga with a strong interest in character, psychology, and plot.
* The only other BL story that comes to mind in which I’ve been this engaged (or nearly) with every major character and subplot is Ai no Kusabi, the original version, before it kept getting revised and elongated.
imperfekti for putting me onto this wonderful series. She likened it to Mirage of Blaze (novels) in having an intricate, interesting plot with a great ensemble of characters, and that’s all quite correct. General Review and Rec:
spoilers only for the chapter 1 setup
The story, which is currently ongoing, is set in a near future dystopia run by yakuza and opens with the tough life of a teen boy, Yuki, who has to pay the hospital bills of his chronically ill and adorable little brother, Jun. Yuki and his friend, Tetsu, get a break—or do they?—when a yakuza boss, Hyoudou, agrees to pay Jun’s bills in exchange for Yuki visiting him once a week.
Acid Town is definitely boys love, but it breaks a lot of conventions. The reader has to wait for the romance, and when it shows up, it’s not necessarily where or how you might expect it. Like many a BL manga, it is rife with sexual abuse. But it also devotes a great deal of attention to relationships that are not sexual, producing a strong sense of multiple ties that bind people simultaneously to family, friends, lovers, colleagues, mentors, etc. It is a tightly plotted, intricately crafted story that builds its relationships (sexual or platonic) out of a lot of typical angsty tropes but also out of a great deal of psychologically astute character development.
Acid Town is also very unusual (unique?*) for me in being a manga/light novel-style series in which I enjoy every single significant character. There is not one subplot, to date, I have found boring. There is not one major character whose adventures I am not happy to ride along with. The story moves from one person’s arc to another, and it’s all engaging, not least because it’s all interconnected. Indeed, there is a Dickensian level of coincidence in everyone being connected to everyone. But that’s okay. The emotional payoff more than pays for the suspension of disbelief.
If I were to put forward a one-word theme for Acid Town, I think it would be “corruption,” in the sense of a process, not a static state. The story walks through several multi-year, non-chronological accounts of characters being beaten by yakuza life into more cynical, more secretive, more conniving, more ruthless people. One of the series’ fundamental questions is how to save oneself from that descent, and to what degree one can. Character by character, we’re asked to consider how much of the more innocent person is left after X-number of years of this. It’s harrowing at times but, despite the fantasy yakuza dystopia elements, feels very psychologically real. (And occasionally characters do escape to a healthier life, and it shows.)
A word about the women: like most BL manga, Acid Town marginalizes the female presence. But when women are there, they tend to be extremely well written characters put into highly stereotypical abused female tropes. In a word, the characters are better than the corners they’re written into, and although one doesn’t go to BL to read about women, I find myself wishing that they were allowed more agency and long-term development because they have the character weight to pull it off and make it satisfying. The story needs a dose of Kill Bill! (Acid Town is also highly unusual for me in making me actively want more of the female characters in a BL text.)
The only other niggle I have about the series is its accessibility. Its production appears to have slowed in recent years, and it’s unclear if the series will be finished—to say nothing of when. Moreover, it is only available in English in scanlation. (I have mainly been reading it in the German edition.) This inevitably puts an avid reader up against a wall of frustration. But well. Better some Acid Town than none.
I strongly recommend the series to fans of darker BL manga with a strong interest in character, psychology, and plot.
* The only other BL story that comes to mind in which I’ve been this engaged (or nearly) with every major character and subplot is Ai no Kusabi, the original version, before it kept getting revised and elongated.
