'Does the taste for yaoi ever fade?' someone asked Kitty, who replied by quoting Plutarch. Impressed the hell out of *me*, but I don't know if it was any consolation to the poor fan humming 'The thrill is gone.' Well, yes: the taste for yaoi fades. Once again, and tiresomely, we must define our terms, distinguishing yaoi (m/m using Other People's Charas) from June (m/m using your own charas.) I don't feel like calling the latter shounen ai, though many people do. But half the charas in these original works are indisputable seinen (+/- 18 and up) and some are actual shakai-jin (full-fledged members of society with jobs and all.)
So for today at least, 'original' gets called 'June.' The bad news is that you can tire of both. I won't be as harsh as Kitty and say that the majority of stuff is 'the monotone repetition of an already too familiar theme.' But yeah, there's a lot of repetition involved in both genres. Goes with the territory, I'm afraid. Yaoi in particular (amateur stories produced for amateur fans) involves the fantasies of the author, and let's face it, people tend to have the same fantasies. I suppose you could even catalogue them at some point, as Whoever it was defined and catalogued all the archetypes available. As in:
Section 3- Sex
Subsection 1. RAPE
Division 1. by family member
2. by non-family member
3. by acknowledged lover
4. by infatuated 'friend'
Item:
a-on one's back
b-on one's face
c-with hands bound
d-with hands manacled
e-with resistance (verbal)
f-with resistance (physical)
g-with no resistance
h-by more than one person
i-by animal
So we turn to, say, the dj called Nama2, where we have a Harlem/ Tiramisu 3.1.2 a,d,g,i. Simple; and boring.
June is a little- just a little- better in the
originality category, but there's still a lot of repetition. I hesitate to make the
sweeping cultural statement that Americans (who line up to see Friday the 13th #59 and who
turned Anne Rice into a best-selling author) come from a culture that prizes doing things
differently. Nonetheless westerners do like novelty, and the proof of that is the
popularity of yaoi itself. 'There's nothing like this at home, nothing.' The thrill of
actually seeing m/m happening before your eyes will last a long time: there's nothing like
breaking a taboo to provide hours of emotional energy. But after you've watched the taboo
being broken over and over and over again-- well, the energy fades for most of us. Not
all, she says, with an envious glance in the direction of Asagaya where Mary senpai hangs
out. Mary has been reading about a dozen June mags and manga a month for as long as I've
known her, which is eight years at this point, with no signs of tiring that I can see. But
few of us can match her admirable fidelity. We want something new when we've seen it all
before.
For the record, western slash fen (that's not a typo, BTW, it's the fannish plural of 'fan') go through this on a regular basis as well. They bemoan their loss of interest in slash with the despair of priests who have lost their faith, and their friends encourage them to tough it out and believe that the interest will come back. 'It takes only one show- one intriguing guy looking at another- and you'll see. The energy will be there for you.' And invariably so it happens. "I can't believe this happened- I'd never have thought I'd fall for (an Immortal/ a Mountie/ a vampire) but I'm absolutely besotted by (Highlander/ Due South/ Forever Knight) and I just finished a 200,000 word (Methos/Duncan// Ray/Bennie// Nick/Lacroix) novella over the weekend."
Slash is different from yaoi, as I'll maintain till I'm blue in the face, and what makes most slash fen I've read about lose their interest is that it all becomes too easy. Chara A meets Chara B they fall into bed and have sex the end. In a word, slash becomes like yaoi. Where's the passion? the depths of angst? the romantic thrill? Well, they all come back when the fan is confronted with another two guys who shouldn't be attracted to each other for reasons psychological or professional or just because the charas in question are human disaster areas, like Mulder and Krycek. And who very obviously are attracted, at least to the slash fan's discerning and idiosyncratic eye. 'Oh, *look* at the way Mulder punched Krycek, it's got slash written all over it.' I'm not a slash fan, as you can see. But the slash approach suggests one cure for the same old/ same old blues, and I know at least one person who's adopted it.
Get into slash. The downside is that there are no pretty pictures. The up side is that it's all in English. And see if you agree with me that there's a difference between slash and yaoi fic in English. Slash IMHO is much more detailed about absolutely everything: from the characters' feelings to the characters' clothes to the characters' endowments. Especially the endowments.
Here's where the western obsession with originality goes berserk. More ways to describe a penis than you could imagine. Than you would want to imagine. Ditto for the emotions. Angst under the microscope, close-ups of characters emoting, weirder feelings than Minami Ozaki can dream up. If June begins to feel too frothy, read one or two M.Fae Glasgow stories. They'll bring you down to earth (or bring you down, period) in no time. M/m with a Presbyterian twist is a lot different from what you get in a vaguely Shinto country. You'll be screaming for those feather- headed ukes before you know it.
The other alternative is to get into yaoi. As slash fen find their interest revived by one rivetting character, so June fans need a little stability in their world of fleeting encounters. Too much BBoy Gold can make you feel like you're in a gay bar. The guys come in and fifteen pages later the guys go out. Manga's not much better. However many volumes of Kizuna or Zetsuai there are, there are never enough because only one person is producing them. Compare that with the wealth of creativity that awaits the Gundam Wing or Street Fighter fan. How many ways can Hiiro and Duo or Kurama and Hiei do it, for how many different reasons?
We're still counting. Find a series and fall in love, then look at the djs. Dynamite. The up side of yaoi is the sheer volume. The down side is getting hold of the suckers. Fandom is addictive, and djs are like heroin. And of course, they're all in Japanese.
And of course, when you burn out on the monotone repetition of the djs, then you can go back to June. Or you can apply the methodology of slash to non-June manga series. Peruse the panels of Angel Sanctuary closely for evidence that Kira really does have the hots for Setsuna, that Zaphikel and Sebi were lovers once, that Michael wants in to Raphael's pants. (Or possibly vice-versa. Consider also the possibility that they're brothers, and that you can do incestuous yaoi off them. Who could resist?)
Non-June series have a way of a) being longer and
b) having more charas who c) have more complicated emotions about each other, than June
series. Fodder enough to feed you for days. My final recommendation, and I can't recommend
it too strongly, is to roll your own. Uhh, sorry- *write* your own. I won't belabour the
parallels with self-love (the 
current nice-Nellyism for 'masturbation') too strongly, but
no-one knows what pleases you better than yourself. If June and yaoi aren't doing it to
you any more, write (or draw, if you're one of the lucky ones sob) the story that you want
to read. The satisfaction, the mastery and the relief at not being a passive consumer any
more- there's nothing like it. (And don't say 'I can't.' I thought that for twenty-five
years, if you care to believe it, because one story in high school didn't turn out right.
And when I really needed to I could. Necessity and boredom are the mothers of invention.)
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