See You Guys Again Real Soon

That’s right, after much thought and missing you all so much I plan to make my return to blogging in May 2019. In the meantime I have returned to my old roots of fanfic writing and have been having so much fun, which has been a much needed to help let my creative juices flow once again!

Planned upcoming reviews including, a final review of Killing Stalking, Dakaichi, some fanfic recommendations and so much more!

To keep up to date with me and what I am working on please follow me on twitter! See you guys real soon!

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Cancer, The Ugliest of Words

To my loyal followers, readers and friends within the blogging community I want to thank you all for being patient and supportive with the little work I have posted the last couple of months here on the blog and given a change in circumstances this week and I am now free to discuss what has been going on.

First a little back story on my home situation, I still live at home with my parents and my brother, this has mostly been because of a lack of finances to move out on my own and my difficulty in finding permanent full-time work. Because I have lived at home for so long in my adult life I have grown a strong bond and relationship with both my parents. My mother is one of the most reliable and caring people I know and the same can be said about my father who is the kind of person who would drop everything if he had the time to and help a friend in need. Over the last few years, however, since retiring from being a radiator repairer my father’s health has slowly declined.

For most of last year he was in a lot of pain that slowly grew worse, and at first, we all thought he had taken a fall and not told anyone about it. He is a stubborn man my father you see and rarely asks for help. Early October last year my dad had some scans done on his shoulder. At worse, we were expecting a break that did not heal properly and that was the cause of the pain. Oh, how I wish that had been the case. They found a tumor in my dad’s shoulder, wrapped around the bone and he had to have a shoulder replacement. The tumor was cancerous. My dad was diagnosed with cancer.

The year before last we had a cancer scare in the family with my grandfather and he got treatment and got better. So in the back of my mind, I was like we can fight this with dad, we will all help him to get better. I was worried about my dad all through November but I was also positive he would fight this and get better. But as more and more doctors appointments happened, more tests they did the news just kept getting worse and worse.

In December my dad had the op on his shoulder and while he was in the hospital I heard my mum talking about my father needing Palliative Care when he comes out of the hospital. Palliative Care for those who don’t know is the care someone gets when they do not have long to live. It is special care for the dying.

My father has a very aggressive form of skin cancer, that is now in his blood and to make matters more difficult it is an extremely rare form of cancer which means the doctors do not know how long he has left.

This news has taken quite a toll on me and my family especially when it comes to all our mental health. Especially myself who over the years have had great struggles with mental health. I am writing this post not to look for sympathy in my situation but because this is something I need to talk about. This is why I have been so sporadic with my blogging the last few months and I honestly do not know when or if the blogging schedule will ever be back to normal at this point.

I want to once again thank all the wonderful people I have met through the years of blogging on here! Thank you, everyone, for taking the time to read this post.

Aarinfantasy Needs Help From the Yaoi Community!

If you have been a part of the online yaoi and boys love community for any amount of time, the name Aarinfantasy will have been noticed or mentioned. The Aarinfantasy forums are one of the biggest gathering places for yaoi fans on the net as well as one of the oldest yaoi communities around.

Earlier today on the sites official Facebook page a plea for help from it’s users went out to help save the site from closure. The following was posted.

Dear all,

It took me some time to write this as I want to do this properly but a sad situation is happening… so please hear me out.

The forum is in need of funds to keep it going, otherwise it will be facing closure.

Most of you may not know but the forum has always been funded mainly because of a single person from the forum (let’s call this person “KK”) on each month without fail for many years. KK has always wanted to share the forum joy with everyone through donating to keep it going but unfortunately KK has stopped donating 3 months ago and can no longer donate any more. I felt KK has done more than enough and I will always be eternally grateful to KK for all the contributions. It is unfair to mainly rely on KK to always fill in the gap, though the forum also has a few regular donors whom I am also grateful to as well. While I do make a small profit from my online BL shop, it is unable to cover the forum fund monthly. Previously, I mostly used these profits from my shop for sponsoring BL events and also giveaways/contest prizes… as a give back for yaoi fans.

Therefore, I am now making a donation drive called “Save AarinFantasy Forum” drive to help keep the forum going. You can donate any amount or as how you can.
All donations amount and donor’s initial details (only initials email will be shown to know that you’re the one who donated that amount) will be put out for transparency purposes at the forum here: https://aarinfantasy.com/…/t199045-save-aarinfantasy-forum.…

There are two options:
– SUBSCRIBE (monthly donation, $1, $3, $5,$10 or $20 option)
– KO-FI (single or monthly donation, in units of $2)

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Donating via AarinSecret.com:

The SUBSCRIBE option is a monthly donation that will charge $1, $3, $5, $10 or $20 each month from the day you donated automatically. It is safer to say that SUBSCRIBE can allow me to plan ahead for anything involving the site and at least know what’s in for next month without having to worry if next month’s donation can be achieved. If there are decent amount of subscribers, I would like to setup special perks like extra forum points each month or forum cards making or any nice bonuses that I will think of, and I will be fair for that like for example $10 subscriber will receive more compared to $1 subscriber.

Steps to donate:
– Go to AarinSecret.com page and scroll down till you see the DONATE and SUBSCRIBE buttons.
– Choose either Donate (one time donation, any amount) or Subscribe (monthly donation, choose between $1, $3, $5, $10 or $20).
– At the donation page, please write your forum username on the message box. If you forgot, it’s fine, I will contact you through your email you used.

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Donating via Ko-fi.com:
I setup a Ko-fi.com page for more ease of use and where I can show the donation goal easily.
The total donation you made at Ko-fi will be added up together with the other donation total towards the monthly goal.
You can donate one time or monthly at units of $2 which means you can donate $2, $4, $6 or any even numbers. You don’t need to sign up as a ko-fi member to donate for one-time donation but signing up is free.

Steps to donate:
– Go to www.ko-fi.com/aarinfantasy
– Choose the type and amount you want to donate
– Please write your forum username and any message at the text message box on the page, please set it to Private Message if you don’t want others to know your username.
– NOTE: “Buy a Yaoi for AarinFantasy” is just a cute way of Ko-fi saying Donate.

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For now, I will be using my own money to fund the forum for the previous 3 months (Dec 2018 till Feb 2019) and this donation drive will start funding for March 2019 onwards. Sorry, I don’t think I can fund more than 3 months on my own.

The forum is on its 15th year now and I do hope the forum has a few more years to come (even if it’s a few short years), but at this point, the future of it is unknown. KK and I do hope that with some faith, this drive can pull through and get the site going. It has been a home for many people over the years though trends are moving on to social media and I do keep up at social media too, but it will always be nice to have the forum to be there.

For anyone that asks about how the fund goes, it goes to the website servers, download bandwidths charges, domains (AarinFantasy and AarinSecret), backup server, fansub team server, maintenance, certain fansub projects, and random projects or activities like the AarinSecret magazine which I may be bringing back due to overwhelming encouragement for a next one.

If you like my content and site, please consider supporting what I do. I hope to continue with the forum site and do more for everyone who enjoys yaoi and BL.

Thank you for all your support.

Please share this if you can to any yaoi or BL fans out there.

It can definitely make a difference if everyone can donate just a little bit.

I myself have already donated via their Ko-fi and am making this post to help with the drive for donations. Aarinfnantasy is a very important community for me and many other yaoi fans around the world, more so again in recent months due to all the crap that went down with Tumblr. If you can please donate and also share this post with any yaoi or boys love fans you know!

Knight of Alanoc – Comic Review

I am so pleased to be able to cover another work by the lovely Aero Zero here on Yaoi Playground. As you guys may remember, during last year’s Pride Month I covered there comic Men Plus Monsters and I have been meaning to cover one of their other amazing comics, Ace of Beast for a while now and that review is coming I promise. Today’s review, however, is a prequel to the comic Ace of Beasts recently released called Knight of Alanoc which is available for purchase on the creators site and if you are a fan of buff bara men who are also the most adorable men you will ever see then you need to check out this amazing comic!

Being a prequel to Ace of Beast you do not have to read the previous work to follow this story which tells of the meeting of two of the main characters from Ace of Beast, that being the ruthless lieutenant Osric, who has had no luck when it comes to love and so has recently decided to give up on the idea of love until a mysterious swordsman Xerxes, comes into his life. This is a slow burn romance that will tug at your heart with just how adorable these two are.

My first impression of this prequel comic? This is the most adorable comic I have read in a long time and I do mean adorable! Seriously Aero Zero has really outdone themselves with the character designs of the men in this one. All the characters especially the two main characters come across as tough amazing men, but they have the most adorable sweet side that just makes me swoon. I just love this mix of adorable cuteness and big tough men, it’s cute without losing any masculinity and I know for some this might seem hard to believe but it is true!

Seriously could these two lovebirds be any more adorable?

The story of the comic as I wrote is very sweet, heartwarming and surprisingly SFW for Aero Zero’s work… until you get to the amazing epilogue which contains my favorite kind of swordplay if you catch my drift. Overall this is one amazing comic that if you are a fan of bara with a sweet side you owe it to yourself to check out this comic!

Someone Else’s BL Anime – Anime Review

2018 really was a great year to be a yaoi and boys love. From awesome anime like Hitorijimi My Hero, Yarichin Bitch Bu, and Dakaichi coming out to the announcement of a Ten Count anime! Not to mention the growing number of awesome webtoon and manhwa yaoi stories being released it truly is a great time to be a fan of the genre of my choice. As well as the mentioned anime however there were also releases of some awesome Boys Love animated series in both China and South Korea though like with any medium you will find a mixed bag of good and bad and unfortunately this is one show that falls into the bad.

Maybe its because it’s a South Korean animation but with it’s short run time per episode I found it hard to follow the plot that seemed to move very fast and the prologue that is episode 0 of the series just made things even more confusing. After the confusing episode 0, the story follows two boys whose names I can not remember because of how forgettable they are. One seems to be a quiet student who gets tormented by his classmates until the other steps in and a friendship blooms between the two that I think slowly becomes something more, for one of them or both of them I’m honestly not sure, though the series does use the yaoi/boys love trope of two younger male characters watching porn together out of curiosity, though that seems to be where the series just ends before anything else happens.

I really wish I could say something more positive about this series, the animation is ok I guess and the voice acting is very good. Advertised on Bookcube’s website as the first BL Webtoon original animation the short episode time does not do the series any favors and if you want to follow the story properly you are better off reading the webtoon the series is based on.

The Great Sexodus of Tumblr or Let’s Look at the Real Problem Here Shall We?

In early December 2018, social networking site Tumblr made an announcement to its user base that sent massive shock waves through many a fandom that for years have called the site home. To put it in the simplest of terms as of December 17, 2018, all NSFW content considered pornographic or Adult in nature would be purged and banned from the site. This was a big blow for the yaoi community that for years has called Tumblr home. It was a safe haven for many of us to get to know some of our favorite artists, but this was not my first time having to deal with a purge that has affected the fandom I love so much. To be honest when you are part of certain groups and fandoms you do get used to it after a while. Tumblr is different to other sites of the past that this has happened to however and in this post, I will be explaining why this is different for Tumblr and my personal journey with the site.

Fanfiction.net is a perfect example of purges happening to fandoms. Whether certain sites do not wish for explicit content. The site does not allow work with a rating over MA and outright porn without plot fics are technically not allowed on the site, so this has included a lot of yaoi fics. Another reason works can be purged from a fanfiction site is that the owner of the work the fanfiction is based upon does not allow fanfiction to be created of their work. Ever wondered why there is so little Interview with a Vampire fan works out there? Anne Rice is not a fan of fanfiction and has threatened to sue writers and sites that post such work. I and many other authors have lost much of our early works due to purges within fanfiction communities and the fact that when we first started out we did not have the hindsight to back up our work once it was online. It was in these early days of this happening that I and many others turned to save our favorite posts offline and even printed out and stored favorite stories of ours.

Gaia Online and Neopets are perfect examples of communities who over a decade ago went through such purges. Neopets outright banned certain usernames containing words like yaoi and Gaia Online banned all NSFW groups. Sites like Gaia Online and Neopets were always intended as sites for children and as those children grew up the communities within the site would slowly change. Of course, this was not always the case as with any community aimed at children you would get multiple sickos on these kinds of sites that target children for their own disgusting means, sites like these have always been grooming grounds for the sick and twisted to get access to children. Tumblr however, is different to these sites. It was never intended as a site for children, but over the last few years, it seems to have become a playground for them as well as another group that began on the internet.

I lost my Neopets account that I had for well over a decade when the word Yaoi was banned from the site, the thing is I was not even given a warning if given the chance I would have been willing to change my username to obey the sites new rule.

Launched in February of 2007 as a microblogging and social media platform the site slowly grew into a site where all were welcome and this was even encouraged in the early years and the site became a safe haven for many with many with different tastes to the norm, and many subjects not discussed elsewhere soon became topics of discussion amongst the members of the site. In fact, it was not yaoi or the shipping community that originally brought me to the platform, no it was monster girl ‘artwork’… ok it was outright porn, but it was really well-drawn porn. That’s right I was one of the users who came to the site for the art and the porn, but I stayed because of the communities and friends I made through the site.

Whenever I told people I was a part of the Tumblr community on other sites I would all too often be told, that site is nothing but drama. But if I am completely honest, on the parts of the site and communities I was a part of I saw very little drama. In fact, the only time I ever got into any sort of ‘drama’ was when some of my followers started complaining that I was reblogging hardcore transformers yaoi because they were not into that. I must admit though these complaints just had me rolling my eyes because at the end of the day it was my Tumblr page and I was going to reblog what I wanted to reblog. That is to say, though I was not blind to the drama going on in other sections of the site.

A lot of shipping flame wars have happened over the years on Tumblr from the drama that was Hetalia in its heyday to more recent drama within the Voltron community (a shipping community I will admit I took no part in because and I must confess, I never got into the Voltron series because I did not like the show) and of course if I am going to talk about modern fandom drama I must mention the whole Steven Universe fanart incident. One piece of drama that has not been given nearly as much spotlight, however, was one that disturbed me and many others on the site in recent months.

A growing number of NSFW artists had been getting art commissions and requests from underage users, who were indeed advertising that they were underage. To the point that they had their age stated on their home page, there was also a growing number of underage artists creating explicit NSFW art. I myself came across one such page where the artists stated they were 12 years old! This, of course, brings up a lot of the dangers that I brought up in my post last year, It Should Be Common Sense in the Yaoi Fandom Right? It was because of this growing trend on Tumblr that I came to the decision to write that post. I must admit though, I found myself constantly wondering why the parents or guardians of these children were not monitoring their children’s online activity, yes I said parents and guardians because it is their responsibility to keep an eye on what kids do online, not the sites.

Back when I was under 18 we were not allowed internet in unsupervised parts of the house, now admittedly there was no wifi back then, so as long as the modem was outside the bedrooms this was not an issue, but all our time on the computer was done in areas of the house where a parent would always be watching us. I understand that in this modern age it is hard for parents to monitor everything their child does, but when it comes to online activity there are so many dangers for children.

Child pornography. This is why Tumblr was removed from the Apple store, or at least what they claimed to be the cause. Now I will admit I did come across the occasional shotacon and lolita anime art on the site, but me personally I never came across CP that involved actual children. The laws pertaining on whether or not drawn artwork counts as child exploitation material has been a hot debate in many NSFW communities for years and in many countries including Australia, England and the United States of America such imagery is in fact illegal. So as a yaoi fan I know with many works I am treading a very thin line when it comes to legality. At the end of the day though, Tumblr had to make a business decision concerning the Apple Store because chances are it would not be long till the Google Play store would more than likely make the same decision.

Do I think they rushed the decision to outright ban all NSFW artwork and blogs from the site? Yes, I do, in my opinion, it was like trying to put our a dumpster fire with a kitchen fire extinguisher. Do I think it was a damn stupid decision to use a bot to enforce these new rules? Fucking oath I do, Youtube is a perfect example that these sort of content blocks DO NOT WORK, perfect example the infamous cat killer that still has his channel! While others are fighting tooth and nail to keep their content on the platform! Tumblr making all NSFW banned from its site is a band-aid solution to a bigger problem that was and still is plaguing it and many sites and I am sorry to be that person but that problem is under-age people having access to content they are not supposed to and of parents and guardians expecting these websites to protect their children when at the end of the day it is, in fact, their responsibility.

Papa Datte, Shitai – Episode 1 Review

Right first anime season of 2019, that being the Winter season and it looks like we have a yaoi anime, characters look cute, the trailer looked interesting and it seems it is a short format series with episodes less than five minutes long and there are two versions of the series. One a broadcast series and the second one a streaming series that promises to not hold back sounds like an awesome way to start the year right? RIGHT?

With a tagline like ‘There are Times I Cannot Hold it, Even if I’m a Father’ I thought perhaps we might get a story about a single father seducing the cute housekeeper and the story could still go there, but the first episode though cute… it gave similar vibes to the first episode of
Souryo to Majiwaru Shikiyoku no Yoru ni... from last year and that is an anime I would not like to compare anything to. I really hope as the series goes on it does not turn into a story like The Tyrant Falls in Love and that there are consequences for what just happened in this episode.

I’ll be holding my breath and hoping that this one get’s better, on the bright side this is a yaoi series that goes all the way…