Review: WILD ROCK

Something I love about BL is that you find just about any premise you want in it...and I do mean ANY premise.

WILD ROCK (Wairudo Rokku), by Kazusa Takashima.  First published in 2002 and first published in North America in 2006.

PLOT:

For years, Yuuen's tribe have been feuding with the tribe on the other side of the lake over their shared hunting grounds.  It doesn't help that Yuuen is too slight and scared to land any big game.  Thus, his father decides to have Yuuen pose as a woman to serve as a honeytrap for the other tribe's champion, Emba.  The trick seems to work, but the more time Yuuen spends with Emba the more he finds himself falling for him.  Eventually Yuuen can't take the deception any more, and his efforts to make his feelings known changes both their tribes forever.

STORY:

For a book that is ostensibly a caveman BL story, Wild Rock is a lot less rough and rugged than you would presume such a thing would be.  It's honestly a very sweet, safe sort of manga.

Aside from the vague prehistoric setting, most of the story beats here will feel all too familiar: rivals turned to lovers, dressing in drag for Plot Reasons, the lead acting like a shojo heroine and literally running away from his feelings in the third act.  Yet Wild Rock also avoids a lot of the pitfalls of these sorts of stories.  There's no cruelty, no rape.  Instead there's a very gentle, even tender courtship that ends with a big, happy gay wedding.  

While there's not a lot of space in the story for character building, there's a little nugget of commentary on masculinity to be found here.  Yuuen initially views Emba as a figure of both envy and admiration, able to look and act the part of the big macho hunter that Yuuen has trouble filling.  Those feelings serve as the seed for their eventually romance, and ultimately it is their decidedly un-macho love and empathy for one another that eventually mends the rift between their people.  It's not a revolutionary conclusion, but it is a good and moderately thoughtful conclusion.

ART:

Takashima's art is good, even if in some ways it was still tied to the past.  Yuuen and Emba's designs fall very much along the traditional seme/uke divide.  Yuuen is slender, youthful and androgynous, while Emba has sharper features, at least 50 extra pounds of muscle, and at least 12 inches in height on him.  Still, she has a good eye for anatomy and very crisp linework that brings out the beauty of her art.  The only place she really lets herself loose is during the sex scenes, where the panel boundaries start to fall apart and the couple seems to drift through the page as if they were in zero gravity.  

PRESENTATION:

The title story is rather short, so the book is padded out with a couple of omake and a prequel chapter.  It's about Yuuen and Emba's fathers, who had a similar (though much more tragic) affair in their youth.  This chapter gives the whole book a sort of cyclical quality, a sort of dark 'what if' scenario.

RATING:

Wild Rock has a novel premise and a gentle soul.  It's not a particularly remarkable book, but it's pleasant enough to make it an easy read.

This book was published by Tokyopop.  It is currently out of print.