Avalon- eien no ai no shima-1

Author: Akai Toreno
Imprint: Super BBC
Publisher: Biblos
ISBN: 4-88271-665-8

Reviewed by Jeanne

Note: Contains semi-spoilers for the action

Life has its head-banging pleasures, the ones where you do things you know you won't enjoy- like watching daytime TV- because for some perverse reason the not-enjoying of them provides an unalyzable enjoyment. Akai Toreno is one of mine. Her artwork drives me to despair. Her angst is overdone and over the top. Her plot twists are random and arbitrary. She's the equivalent of eating a whole bag of Cheezies, with your fingers coated sticky orange and your stomach protesting at the grease and your arteries clogged and your soul somehow satisfied.

Avalon actually gives some intellectual enjoyment, because it shows you where she's coming from. Classic shounen ai, is where. And it starts with a classic shounen ai situation drawn in, unfortunately, classic shounen ai style. (On the whole I think I prefer it when she draws her characters in the 'side of beef' mode. Those proportions are *just* possible. These ones aren't. Arms too short, legs too long, heads too big, etc etc etc.)

In Germany, in the early 30's, the blond aristocrat Alois encounters David, the new serving boy and a Jew, who's come to take service at Alois' castle. David gets mouthy to Alois about how the name David is pronounced and Alois cuts David's face open with his riding whip. And then is struck with remorse and tenderly bathes David's face with water while holding him on his lap. This becomes Alois' Primal Scene- straight hurt/comfort with a sadistic twist.

Shortly thereafter when out riding again, Alois comes across David and his sister Barbara bathing in the pond. David twits Alois for not joining them --'Can't swim, huh?', then pretends to be drowning. Alois dives in to save him, and David makes a face at him underwater. Alois gets out, takes off the rest of his dripping clothes, and goes over to speak to his horse. The vision of naked boy and mighty horse sears David's sensibilities. This becomes his Primal Scene- straight pure-hearted lust. We get to see both scenes over and over again as the boys grow up.

After that we have random and arbitrary angst and tragedy and people being nasty to each other because they care about each other so much, filtered through a quasi-historical lens and period details. Shounen ai, like I said.

Given that it's by definition an unrealistic genre, there's no expecting the historical givens to be any more accurate than anything else. The fact that Alois is an Aryan aristocrat and David a Jew in the 1930's is milked for angst, but not the kind we've come to expect. As in, Alois is blackmailed into joining the SS (and cutting his beautiful blond curls) by the Nazi officer who knows he has the hots for his Jewish manservant and threatens to send David to a camp if Alois doesn't comply. As in, when David forces himself to ask Alois' help in getting his mother out of the country, Alois says, 'Did no-one ever tell you when you ask someone for a favour, you get down on your knees and beg?'- not deigning to turn from his toilette mirror. David gets down on his knees and begs, and me I think this picture was censored by the editors. 'Couldn't you put his hands elsewhere, Sensei?' Mother is given false papers and passport, and a knockout drug when she refuses to go, and put on a train in company with David's cousin, who we may hope has forged papers of his own or else both of them will be taken off at the first checkpoint.

However, for those with yaoi sensibilities who like seeing the changes rung, this one has some fun bits. The two boys start the same size, with Alois if anything a bit bigger. Then various tragedies happen in swift succession, like Alois being sent off to school without being able to say good-bye to David, only reach an anguished hand from the car that's bearing him away. This has the effect of stunting his growth, making of him a short willowy designated uke. David meanwhile turns into the castle's stud, a large-framed manly man who makes it with the local girls. Alois comes back, and the unwilling attraction between the two starts expressing itself in obvious ways, like David taking one of his girls to Alois' room and having her on his bed, and Alois promoting David from downstairs servant to butler's assistant so he can force him to perform menial tasks under his master's never-satisfied eye. The social superior here is the obvious uke, but an uke with a whip hand. Near the end of vol 1 we have him learning from his SS superiors that alternating kindness and cruelty is the only path to conquest, and off he goes to practise this precept at home. In spite of which one suspects that Alois is desperately sending unconscious 'Ravish me!' signals to David. David, annoyingly, when he has Alois in his power and rips his clothes off him, can think of nothing better to do than jerk Alois off. As an expression of desperate personal love/hate, and class and race-fuelled resentment, that one doesn't quite make it by me. One awaits volume 2 which a fast flip-through reveals to have at least one sex scene, finally. (The sex scene in this one doesn't happen. It's just a little dream Alois has...)

Ah yes- why is it called 'Avalon'? Nothing to do with King Arthur that I can see. Avalon, as the book's subtitle tells you, is 'the island of everlasting love'- which isn't quite what I got from Malory, or Tennyson either, but maybe Akai read a different version of the Morte d'Arthur. And to go one better, where other mangaka have a little blurb about their blood type and preferences on the inside flap of the front cover, Akai has a quote from Stendhal- "Love is a sweet flower, but one must have the courage to pluck it on the edges of a terrible cliff." No pain no gain in Akai's super-Romance land here.