My Mr. reads the manga, although it's vaguely disheartening to hear them summed up as "pretty funny"!

I'm glad it was a good birthday!

He's so funny with some of the manga I get! I had left Antique Bakery in the bathroom. I don't know if you're familiar with that one - it's basically a witty soap opera about 4 men running a French pastry shop in Tokyo. The chief pastry chef is a "gay of demonic charm" (actually, he's a complicated character who seduces other men as a means of filling the emptiness he feels inside), and the Mr. once commented that it was nothing but "guys making eyes at each other." But he read all 4 volumes anyway ... .

As long as a story has some decent plot to it, I think he can appreciate most of them on some level. The only one that's completely put him off thus far, I think, is the teeny-bopper-ish one I got purely because one of my LJ friends did the script, and I wanted to support her. And he lost interest in Fruits Basket fairly quickly. But there are times that I get fed up with Fruits Basket myself!

Hee, and AB really isn't even that much of a yaoi-fest, either -- aside from Ono, two of the guys are totally straight, one seems to be bi; and their love lives are really only one strand of the plot. It's as much about friendship and dealing with the ghosts of the past, and lavish foodporn, as anything else.

(Now, the manga-ka has also done her own post-series "official" doujinshi, and those are a very different story indeed so far as the proportion of BL content goes. *fans self*)

Oh, and belated birthday greetings! :)

Have you read Fake - which we're pitching to avierra in my Shaman Warrior thread-snarl down-LJ - ? It's a short (7-volume) BL series about a pair of cops in (a rather fantasized) New York City. Dee is an openly, cheerfully bi guy who instantly develops a crush on his new partner, shy, half-Japanese Randy. Most of the story is about their developing relationship both as partners and (at the very, very end) lovers. The UST simmers along nicely and makes the final scenes pack a lot of punch.

Mmmm, yeah, I've mostly been ignoring mine for years because they've tended to be unhappy occasions. Bah.

And I'm with you on being of two minds of the explicit-vs.-subtext debate; they've really both got their merits, and I've got favorites on both sides of the fence. Subtext-only is much more inspiring for fanworks, IMO, since you have so much more imaginative room to play with without fear of contradicting canon; but at the same time it can just be so deeply satisfying to see a favorite couple get together in canon when there's been a long buildup of UST and subtext to ramp up that delicious tension.

And the tension is definitely a major factor for me, too, in what series I like; even in something like Crimson Spell or Under Grand Hotel where the sex starts pretty much in the first chapter or so, there's still huge amounts of tension over whether it means anything, unspoken emotional content, misunderstandings, and so forth; there's still plenty of unresolved tension to keep the plot spinning, even if it's mostly not UST!

(But I'm a real sucker for the UST when it's done well, too. One of my favorite series has been in somewhat-irregular publication for over thirty years at this point, with the pursuit and tension between the boys still cheerfully unresolved...)

I liked the first part of DeathNote, but L was my favorite character, so you know at which point I thought the whole thing went south! Since then, I've only read a few volumes - just enough to understand telophase's many snarky Mello references and icons. My favorite icon of hers:

AB is nice, but very different from most of the manga I've enjoyed, which are generally fantasies of some sort. And it ended after only 4 volumes ...   >sob<

I'm not too worried about Saiyuki since by all accounts it's one of TokyoPop's top sellers, and probably got a boost here in the states by the anime running on a cable channel last year (hey, it's what sucked me in to the series!) But I know what you mean, I've had several more obscure favorites end up in limbo partway through their run, and I live in fear that other oddball titles like From Eroica With Love will end up the same way.

Death Note I've only been casually watching the anime as it's broadcast here, so I'm not up to any of the Mello stuff. It's definitely struck me so far as the sort of thing you watch more with your head, for the cat-and-mouse puzzles and watching the plot play out, where the characters are more apt to be interesting than likeable; but from the anime version, at least, it's been interesting enough for me to watch as it comes around, but not interesting enough to drive me to seek out more. I'd probably read it if it all fell in my lap, but I'm not at the point of spending money or even book-swapping points on it when there's so much else that I'm vastly more intrigued by out there...

Light is evil, evil, evil. L reminded me of a lot of brainy, not-quite-there-socially guys I knew. In fact, I have a couple of his tics myself, although nowadays I can usually control my temptation to build towers out of coffee creamers and such ... .

The only thing I could see sinking Saiyuki is Minekura's health. It's enough to make one want to try some sympathetic magic, to keep her vigorous and drawing.