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The whole consent thing isn't really a surprise, since that's not really a new area for BL, but it is nice to know that she recognized a problem and set about fixing it in a way that basically gave the story a trajectory.
More interesting, I think, is the atheism angle for the depictions of supernatural phenomena. It definitely explains a lot. There's just something weird and off about all of it, and it doesn't really fit into any of the expected molds. It just is.
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Yamashita Tomoko is one of my favorite mangaka ever, so thanks so much for this interview! I, too, would love to see more of her non-BL work published in English.
And her response about how she's written science fiction and fantasy before but that it probably wasn't read as genre fiction is, haha, very true. She has such a literary way of writing her stories that even when she's writing about clearly supernatural things, it always feels like she's focusing on character interiority first and foremost -- a characteristic of literary fiction. (Not to say that it isn't also genre fiction, because it definitely is, but that it's a lot less about the why and the how of the situation and more about the who, which I think is a neat aspect of her writing that I really love.)
(Also, to the person who informed me that her previous one-volume BL works had in fact been published in print in English, instead of being just digital-only, thank you! I actually went out and ordered them a few days after seeing that comment, and now I have both Black-Winged Love and Dining Bar Akira sitting on my bookshelf, and I'm extremely happy about that, hehe.)
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