However I see a major difference between West End and the run of the mill raping seme and weepy uke stories, of which I've seen far far far too many in both djs and pro stuff. The stock helpless weepy uke has no reason to be a passive piece of kleenex. It offends my western notions of logic and consistency that a guy who's a functioning member of society is incapable of grabbing his raping seme's balls and twisting. The other guy isn't holding a gun or a knife on him, so what's
the matter? The stock helpless shota-con does have a reason for being kleenex- he's physically weaker than the adult who's raping him. But the shota-con's realism comes at the cost of readerly nausea. West End gets around both illogic and nausea by giving us something that looks like a shota but isn't. Demis are legitimately weak and cute but by definition they're not human. Their ability to act voluntarily is supposed to be down at the level of a very dumb computer or Windows 95. You get all the frisson of watching helpless suffering and none of the irritation and ick.

    The authors take it a step further. Half the sadistic/ masochistic thrill of innocent suffering comes from watching the sufferer's awareness of his/her own suffering. Your victim has to be able to feel, but this risks bringing up the ick factor again. WE does a double spin and a half-gainer on this one. 1) Demis don't feel. 2) Tonami is an exception: he does feel. 3) Tonami doesn't know what it is he feels. Thus we have our cake and eat it. We see Tonami suffering because he's lonely, unsatisfied, unfulfilled and in love with Kiri. We know he's all those things. Tonami doesn't. Hell, it takes the kid (ok- the toaster, the dog, the rubber plant, the whatever equivalent he is) three volumes to make the grand discovery that he's not worried about his human discarding him, he's worried about Kiri discarding him. Swift he isn't. But of course this obtuseness, annoying in a human, is only what you can expect of a toaster/ dog/ rubber plant/ demi.

    In other words, the authors have deconstructed the weeping uke image. They take all itscharacteristics- passiveness, helplessness, gratuitous suffering, copious tears- and give you rational reasons for their existence. This has the effect of showing just how irrational those characteristics are in the stock formation. This isn't news, but what is new is the device that lets you have your favourite suffering uke without guilt. I don't want to see all weeping ukes replaced by realistic short-
haired male lovers. I kind of like the artificiality of the genre and the shota overtones. I'm like an 18th century opera lover who doesn't want to have all castrato singers replaced by women. What we want is the castrato voice without the necessity of castrating anyone to get it. In opera we now have countertenors. In yaoi you get West End.

     The other reason I like West End is its take on Kiri. There are two kinds of dirty rotten semes in stock yaoi. There are the Unredeemed (100% dirty rotten semes) and the Redeemed-- dirty rotten semes with a) delicate sensibilities (Iason) b) tragic pasts (Tai) c) a pure-souled sincere desire to rape which is its own justification and a virtue in its own right (Kouji Nanjo.) Add to that the faux-raping seme who for some unlikely plot reason is forced to rape the uke for the uke's own good.
(Bringing him out of catatonic grief is a good one.)

    Kiri does none of those things. He's a bastard- a cheerful mercenary killer who cuts people up with no hard feelings. He's had a shitty life, but the authors don't take the line that his deep dark suffering justifies his homicidal actions. He treats Tonami more decently than any of the other humans around, but this doesn't make him a seme on a white horse. He also tells Tonami to sell his ass if he wants his drugs. They both work, is
how Kiri figures it, doing what they're good at. Kiri kills, Tonami whores. A pragmatist. Not surprisingly with that outlook and background, he's as emotionally illiterate as his demi. Kiri has as little idea as Tonami about what he really feels. But in Kiri's case it's a natural result of the society he lives in and the kind of life he's had. As with Tonami, we know what he's
feeling even if he doesn't, or more accurately, even if he'd rather die than admit his feelings even to himself.

    This kind of complexity of characterization isn't what you expect of stock raping semes. The teaser about Kiri is the might have beens. He's someone who'd be fundamentally decent if he lived in a decent society. He's not petty or malicious and he still keeps some of the basic goodness, even if it's liberally mixed with amorality, self-interest and emotional dumbs. He doesn't do noble, he doesn't do tragic, and his artists thank god don't do sentimentality about him in any form. Since
sentimentality is practically an occupational disease among Redeemed Semes (oh, those poor sweet bay-bees), that alone is a praiseworthy achievement.

    Oh- and the West End of the title isn't London's theatre district. The meaning is closer to the farthest West, where Kiri's been told there's a man who sees the deaths of others. Kiri wants to find him to find out how- or even, given his recuperative abilities- if he'll die. Any parallels to the Chinese classic The Journey to the West are doubtless unintentional, though Kiri as Monkey-King is an image I find hard to shake.         

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