I Thot You Was a Toad's manga / #drama(235)

A failure to be honest and straightforward about their feelings of love and longing shifts a spontaneous sexual encounter between two stepbrothers into a set-up for darker sex, and just when they start to be honest, guilt and other social pressures interfere.

Recounts a sexual tryst between a homosexual archeology professor who is in a long-distance open relationship and a very proud, but previously straight, male artist who has completed some renderings on behalf of a female (married) lover for a restoration project in an Eqyptian necropolis. Kabra Kare provides us with stunning graphite drawings and strong visual references to classical western art, history and architecture, including some lovely images of Romantic Germany. The interesting character-driven plot asks whether pride, stubborness and integrity are character virtues or flaws. I look forward to seeing where this story takes us.

A self-proclaimed "hardcore BDSM" fetishist is courted by his puppy dog neighbour, who he watched grow up and is, therefore, not attracted to at all. But after a gripping confession, he decides to give Young Sprout a chance. The BDSM is vanilla and the D/s power dynamic is upside-down.

Blech. Tatsumi, the empty successor to the Komicho of a Yakuza gang, tries to run away in the arms of his male lover, but it requires accepting him on his sadistic terms, which include hardcore beatings and gangrape for sh*ts and giggles. There is a little jockeying with the yakuza brother, for no other reason, it seems, other than to throw in some incest so void of electrical charge, it can`t even muster a volt of shock, but mostly this is a shallow, dead-eyed, cold fish of a story that offers no reward for reading it. And unless you get off on beatings, it`s boring as a dry wank.

A porn writer coerces a clueless young editor into acting out scenes from his stories under the guise of striving for realism.

Double feature: first story is about a sadistic actor with a fetish for asphyxiating his partners, and the manipulations his producer goes through behind the scenes to satisfy his kink without attracting unwanted attention from the press, and where that leads. The second story deals with a young man who falls for the jilted lover of his best friend, a man who is now married and expecting a baby, which appears to take its inspiration from the single Alexander Pope line of poetry about "Who breaks the butterfly on the wheel?" The first story has an ironic ending. The second is lovely.

An arms dealer purchases an enslaved magical human-like entity with the power to kill or heal by singing. The creature won't sing, until the arms dealer connects with him through other means.

Series of very realistic short stories on the theme of unrequited love, usually from a gay young man toward a heterosexual young man who is his friend.

Dystopian vampire-dominated society where humans are farmed and taxed for blood, controlled by pheromones, until an unlikely Romeo and Juliet transform the entire world.