Archived fic rec - The Other Side

Title: The Other Side

Author: Katsue

Fandom: Yami no Matsuei / Descendents of Darkness (manga/anime, 1996)

Rating: NC-17

Pairing: Tsuzuki/Hisoka

Warnings: explicit sex (gay), sexual trauma/past noncon, madness, minor character death, violence/gore, allusion to incest, BDSM elements, animal-like behavior

Other notes: incomplete/abandoned fic, canon-based AU, demons, failed sex, hurt/comfort

Length: unknown, incomplete fic

Summary: A case goes horribly wrong, leaving the shinigami struggling to deal with the aftermath and potential consequences.

My thoughts:

I’ve been having some trouble going back to do anime recs. I do have a goodly number of them saved in my bookmarks, but–well, tastes change with age, I suppose, and a lot of stuff has been purged from fanfiction.net, livejournal, and personal sites. I usually tended more towards doujinshi than fic for anime fandoms, and sharing doujin is a bit more difficult, since most of them are unofficially fan-translated, and finding hosting for explicit images is harder than explicit text.

That, and I’m a touch embarrassed at how fan-girly some of these old fics are, with random ~kawaii~ Japanese inserted and all that good stuff. (I’m embarrassed that I used to write that that, erk.)

Yami no Matsuei is an interesting series, in that it’s full of those gorgeous pretty boys being emotionally intimate with each other that just screams ‘this is a gay manga’–but, no, it’s mostly just baiting. The most significant gay moment is that the sadistic villain raped and murdered one of the lead characters, and there’s even a very odd moment when the other lead character denounces homosexuality as sinful–granted, he was undercover as a priest, and it ended up that they were investigating a series of killings at a religious school that had something to do with a forbidden love affair between a priest and one of the students…

Let’s just say, it’s a series where there’s a lot of potential for that slightly melodramatic hurt/comfort, and, while there is genuine angst and torment and potential to write touching stories, there’s also an unfortunate amount of fic that sort of treats the subject matter a bit more lightly than I’m comfortable with. Magical healing cock is a bit of a thing.

Lordy, that was too much intro.

Anyway, I picked this fic–this unfinished scrap of a fic–first because I thought it got into some of the more serious aspects of the YnM fandom. I really wish there’d been more.

This is a nice look at Hisoka, I think. He’s a complicated character, in that he’s empathic, suffered extreme abuse and isolation because of his family, and was ultimately raped and murdered by the villain. And now he gets to live–well, exist–post-death, eternally stuck as a teenage boy. Handling all that angst in a meaningful way is difficult. You usually have to deal with him being a rape victim, which is not easy subject matter.

Tsuzuki has his own angst, in that he–spoiler–committed suicide. Still, Tsuzuki is a more familiar archetype–the person who smiles and acts goofy and only ever so often offers a fleeting glimpse of how much pain he feels, and how much he hates himself. The Tsuzuki in this fic is different than him in canon, so, while I find demon!Tsuzuki oddly compelling in his simplicity and instinctive nature, I feel he’s different enough that it’s not a real exploration of his character in canon.

But, back to Hisoka–his confusion, his pain as he tries work past his trauma but can’t–I thought that was surprisingly well handled. It seemed like it was heading towards a more complex way of him working out his issues with sexuality and intimacy, and then–the fic just ends, alas. I was hoping to see something more nuanced than the old, “my love for you allows me to overcome my trauma” sort of thing. Still, what is there is both creepy and still sort of hot and emotional, so I think it’s worth a read.

(Looking for more fic recs?)
Originally posted on tumblr on 09/30/12