Gay (BL) anime has come a long way.  For those that don’t know, the typical BL couple is a seme and a uke – roughly, a top and a bottom.  The seme used to be the older one, and is still usually more serious, more cynical, and overall darker – right down to almost always having darker hair. He also tends to be a protector. The uke is more childlike, almost always light–haired, and both energetic and more openly emotional.  He’s often presented as being more or less useless in any practical “grown-up” tasks, but valuable because he’s adorable and delightful to be around.  In western terms, very similar to a “twink.”

 When I first discovered the genre 20 years ago, the popular titles were things like Gravitation and Loveless – Manga/Anime that weren’t just following the seme/uke tropes, they were introducing them to the west.  They leaned heavily into them, including a typical age gap between the two that has thankfully become less common (it wasn’t just Japan, Western queer media also used to be much more focused on age gap relationships too . . . From This Special Friendship to Machden in Uniform to Queer as Folk. The podcast “Bad Gays” argues that until recently in both Japan and the USA, a power differentiated same sex relationship was actually more acceptable and less threatening than two equal men. Meaning that even if a creator was more interested in egalitarian relationships, commercial and cultural demands would prompt them to hide it under the veneer of a power/age gap. This constraint, so foreign to modern sensibilities, played a large role in the formation of the seke/uke’s dynamic and original form).  

As the medium has progressed, some of the most innovative titles have purposefully sought to undermine the traditional age and power stratifications.  The main characters of Black Butler, while not a romantic couple and therefore not quite BL, share many of the tropes and visual “gazes” of traditional BL.  But there is no light haired bubbly child, and since its a butler and master relationship other aspects of top/bottom dichotomies are purposefully inverted.  The only “twink” in the series appears in the non-canonical season 2 of the anime, where an incredibly demented disaster boy named Alois seems to have been invented solely for the purpose of asking: why the hell would any “seme” in their right mind be attracted to an erratic adolescent?

More recent animes like The Stranger by the Beach and Sasaki and Miyano go even farther in dismantling the tropes. Sasaki and Miyano especially makes a point of bringing up what things are like in BL manga, only to then make a point of showing how thing are different in the “real” world. Instead we have two very real and very unique individuals that do not feel any obligation to live out what is in the pages of their books.

Nakamura-Kun’s subversion of the seme/uke formula takes a slightly different path by initially sticking closer to it at least on the surface.  From the point of view of main character Nakamura (and the anime is almost entirely from Nakamura’s POV), Aiki Hirose pretty much is the ideal uke (without using that specific language, at least in English).  Hirose is childlike, bubbly, good natured, innocent . . . all the things that have been valued in the role since the early days.  And yes he has lighter hair.  Dark haired Nakumura, therefore, looks at his collection of BL manga (which he calls his “field guides”) and tries to take on the role of Seme. 

Its not a role he’s well suited for, since despite his dark hair and taller stance, he’s not actually any more chill or serious than Hirose.  Like star trek slash fiction, Seme/uke literature was originally targeted toward heterosexual women, so despite both characters being male one was extra masculinized (seme) while the other was subtextually feminized (uke) according to Japanese gender expectations.  But here and in Sasaki and Miyano we don’t have stereotypes, we have two sets of high school boys with all the inconsistent highs and lows of being high school boys.  But whereas neither of the characters in Sasaki and Miyano ever felt a big obligation to match the expectations of the literature, Nakamura feels a pressure to live up to those books if he is going to succeed in wooing Aiki.

The pressure Nakamura puts on himself to be hyper masculine will be familiar to anyone who grew up in a culture where romances included the concept that each member had different and particular obligations. Nakamura tries to be rescuer and protector of oblivious Hirose, ultimately failing as he learns through multiple trials that one teenage boy doesn’t usually need another to be his savior, just his friend. Because of Nakamura’s insistence on judging their acquaintance based on external criteria from manga, he’s slow to recognize that he and Hirose already are growing closer until he is explicitly told that they are indeed friends.

Over the course of the series, Nakamura learns through mistake after mistake how to becomes more comfortable with just being himself rather than playing a role, and in doing so comes down to earth in his expectations for what he wants to be a romance but is really just a friendship. Nakamura also learns that the target of his obsession (and yes it does cross over into adolescent obsession) is not Perfect Pixie Dream Uke he originally thought Hirose was.

  The series is firmly realistic, by which I mean outside of Nakamura’s daydreaming and anxieties nothing happens that isn’t pretty typical for high school.  Which is both a point for and against the series.  If you are happy watching Nakamura yearn for the impossible and eventually learn to be happy with the actual, you’re going to enjoy this.  But if reading a high schooler’s journal sounds like tedious hell to you, consider just watching the first few episodes and then the last two in order to minimize the adolescent swings.  Every little look or action is a super high or a super low to poor Nakamura.  That’s interesting in terms of watching a child grow slowly into a new person, but it can also be dull in that he’s going through things that to him are unique but older people will recognize as super common.  

Nakamura takes a realistic and satisfying journey to maturity in this season, leading to a conclusion that technically allows the season to be a stand alone story, though its obvious its meant to continue. A lot of people online see their own youthful longings and awkward fuck ups in the character of Nakamura. But even at only thirteen episodes the story can seem a bit stretched. Still, its more than worth checking out. Even if you don’t stay for the entire season, it’s is a light and thankfully unproblematic way to take a dip into the modern, pleasant, state of the genre.

13 episodes, watched dubbed on Crunchyroll