FAKE

Title:  FAKE
Mangaka:  Sanami Matoh
Length:  7 Volumes
English Translation?  Yes.  All released by Tokyopop
Demo/Genre:  Yaoi/Shounen-ai/Action/Romance/Comedy

How did I hear about it?  A friend loaned me this series.

Dee and Ryo are two American detectives in New York City.  The two begin their odd couple relationship as partners, and eventually become, well...partners.  Dee is bisexual and doesn't disguise his advances on Ryo.  At first, Dee's flirtations are only to rile up Ryo, but as they continue to work together, he finds himself falling for him.  Despite the fact that he's only ever experienced heterosexual relationships before, Ryo finds that he's attracted to Dee as he slowly lets his guard down around him.  Also along for the ride are two street kids, Bikky and Carol, whom Dee and Ryo have come to more or less care for.

Banana Fish was my very first taste of anything even slightly shounen-ai oriented, but FAKE was my first real yaoi outing.  It has been explained to me by a true fujoshi that there is a difference between shounen-ai and yaoi.  I believe FAKE's first six volumes fall into the shounen-ai category.  There's a build-up of the romance, lots of kissing, but nothing too hardcore.  The seventh volume ramps it up quite a bit, though still not really "hardcore" by the standards set by most of the yaoi out there.

I have discussed on a couple of different occasions that my attraction to yaoi (though I would not say that I've turned into a fujoshi just yet) is the different dilemmas that the characters must face.  Oftentimes, shounen-ai/yaoi depicts characters who haven't had a homosexual relationship, so the reader must watch the character(s) learn to come to terms with this aspect of themselves.  Also, there's the dilemma of how will the people and the world around them react to their relationship.  These are things that aren't typically an issue in standard romances, so it provides a refreshing point of view.  Now that I've said all that, I'd like to point out that FAKE doesn't really explore these issues.  An unbelievable amount of characters have homosexual tendencies in this manga, and the rest are all too accepting of the two of them.  Not that this is a problem.  I'm just pointing out that this manga foregoes the more serious issues of homosexuality in order to concentrate more on just telling a fun story.

I have to say that I did not care for the art.  There is a little bit of a shift in the style between the first and last volumes, but it never really settles into something that I was fond of.  In 2007 Matoh-sensei began a second season of FAKE, and the few images I've seen of it show that her artwork greatly evolved in the years between the two series.  I'm much more fond of the new style.  I'm tempted to read it just to see if I take to the characters a little better when they don't look so...awkward.

As for the characters themselves, I can't say that I'm crazy about them.  As is typical for BL (boys' love), one is a clear seme (top) and the other is established as an uke (bottom), personality-wise.  Ryo (the uke of this relationship) does exhibit some strength occasionally, but most of the time, he was entirely too wussy for me.  Dee on the other hand was so touchy-feely.  Pretty much every scene that saw the boys not on the job had Dee trying to paw Ryo the whole time.  It became a little tiresome, and to me, it just didn't further their romance any.

At the end of most of the volumes, there would be a bonus chapter featuring Bikky and Carol as teenagers that depicted the growing romance between the two of them.  These chapters tended to be funny and charming, and their romance was actually kinda sweet.  I have to admit that that boggles my mind just a little bit.  I would think that someone who was writing a shounen-ai series would almost undoubtedly be a fujoshi themselves, yet she gives the heterosexual relationship in this manga much better treatment than the featured same-sex one.  That's just my opinion though.

All in all, I didn't hate FAKE.  It had its funny moments, and its sweet moments.  The characters were a little inconsistent, but they weren't terrible.  I know I just spoke really critically of it, but in the end, I came away with a positive experience.  I don't have any particular urge to revisit the characters though, so I doubt I'll make it a point to collect this series.