Another month, another Author Talks episode. This time, I go on for roughly twenty minutes on the subject of the novelisation. After listening to a novelisation of a Paul Temple serial and becoming interested in how it both matched and deviated, I decided to actually dig into it. Here's to novelisations, perhaps the most underappreciated example of the literary art; turning the story of one medium into another.
Slice of life comedy is something I sometimes don't have much connection to, mostly because many of them haven't been that compelling, especially in the anime space. I adore (most of) Azumanga Daioh, but others like Nichijou and Lucky Star leave me cold. But I recently watched a new series that is essentially a fantasy slice of life.
Kusonoki's Garden of Gods is a 2026 anime produced by Juvenage, and based on the light novel series by Enju. It follows Minato Kusunoki, a young man with overwhelming levels of spiritual energy and a latent talent for dispelling kegare, as he is put in charge of a former family residence. Since he also accidentally purifies a shrine belonging to the local kami Yamagami, the wolf kami comes to live with him. As to a procession of kami and sacred beasts and yokai. Gentle hilarity ensues.
From what I've gathered, the anime is based on the first four volumes of the original light novel series, and cuts or condenses a lot of stuff. I think? It is apparently a good adaptation of the source overall, but oh boy is this anime lean compared to the light novels. But as someone who generally doesn't do light novels (though that may change), the anime was a fairly nice watch.
What so I need to say? It's a slice of life fantasy, something I haven't encountered that often, and it's generally a great comfort watch. The anime does fall into the trap of having so many secondary characters that it becomes cluttered, but I think this is more due to how few episodes there are per volume adapted. Having read samples of the ongoing English translation, there's a tone of breathing room and nuance, plus a number of funny bits that don't make it in, like a full-sized and invisible Yamagami riding in a taxi and badly crowding Minato.. Also I have no idea as yet whether the more actiony parts of the anime come from the light novel, but I'm gently leaning towards...perhaps, but the anime probably overblew them.
The make-or-break point for these kinds of stories is the core cast, here limited to two: Minato and Yamagami. Their chemistry is great, as Minato is basically dumped into being caretaker for a kami who is one of the pickiest eaters in the region and has a rivalry with the neighbouring kitsune kami. They seem to get on with each other at an instinctively level, almost like they're soul mates. Though something that isn't communicated that well in the anime is how lazy Yamagami is, something summed up perfectly in the light novel line: "That slothful wolf, who hardly ever moved from its favourite cushion, truly was a troublesome kami."
So, just like my last anime life, this is something that was a pleasant surprise. An example of a genre I typically don't vibe with, but that managed to click with its character chemistry and lore inspired by Japanese Shinto traditions. It's also got very entertaining performances by the actors, better-than-expected animation, and enjoyable music. Worth a watch? I'd say so. Read the book? Certainly from what I've read, just don't expect them to be one to one. Something I'm learning these days is that adaptations seem to share a similar property between east and west: with a few exceptions, a lot of creative liberties are taken.
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If there are two terms it's probably expected most anime fans should know, it's "Boy's Love" and "Isekai". Apologies, but this explanation is needed to ground the show I'm talking about today.
Boy's Love, often called yaoi in the West though that's actually a pejorative term in Japan, is a genre of fiction that focuses on romantic relationships between men. This genre is primarily though not exclusively written by women, and generally isn't aimed explicitly at an LGBT audience. They're often set in modern day, and lean towards having some bleak themes, problematic content when it comes to consent, and no concrete resolution. Meanwhile Isekai, which translates to 'different world', is a Japanese subgenre of portal fantasy with usually extremely long titles where someone from one world is transported into another by some form of explosion or high-velocity impact, usually ours into a fantasy realm with weirdly gamey rules, but sometimes it's the other way round. A number of Isekai are serious in tone, but most are at least very light-hearted if not outright comedies or satire. Suffice to say, I'm wary of both genres. One thing in common with anime adaptations of both Boy's Love and Isekai is...the budget often isn't there, and the writing can get a bit pedestrian as most are based on prose light novels where a lot of characterisation is in the prose text.
Isekai Office Worker: The Other World's Books Depend on the Bean Counter (yes that's its real title) is a 2026 anime created by Studio Deen, based on a light novel series written by Yatsuki Wakatsu that falls firmly within both genres. And surprisingly, despite suffering from many issues that plague both isekai and boy's love, I enjoyed it.
The story has chronically overworked workaholic office worker (talk about cyclical phrasing) Seiichirou Kondou dragged along with teenager Yua Shiraishi into another world; Yua was summoned as a "holy maiden" to save the kingdom from corrupting miasma, while Seiichirou is there by mistake and quickly becomes ill from the world's omnipresent magic. Enter knight commander Aresh Indolark, who finding Seiichirou near death is forced to take...intimate steps to prevent him from dying. Cue a somewhat cockeyed love story with emotional confusion to varying degrees on both sides.
This story walks a fine tonal line between comedic exploration of a Japanese office worker's habits and financial knowhow transplanted into a low-tech fantasy kingdom, and some actually serious story beats surrounding how Yua and Seiichirou were dragged from their world against their will and how factionalism is holding the country back from meaningful change. I'd say it falls more on the side of being a romantic comedy, but it strikes a balance fairly well. Albeit it still has things that irritate me like the fantasy world's clothing being a blatant slapping together of late 18th Century Europe and modern day Japan, which... How does that work exactly?
As with any romance, the two leads are important, and I was surprisingly invested in Seiichiro and Aresh as characters. They're like oil and water, but they somehow get along. Although this is also where some problematic stuff rears its head as Aresh turns from being attentive to outright possessive at several points, making Seiichirou and by extension me uncomfortable. Aresh has trouble sorting out his feelings since he innately mistrusts this 'otherworlder' who wasn't supposed to be there. A positive I found is that the conflict within Seiichirou about the romance doesn't seem focused internalised homophobia, but is more to do with this being a foreign world and maybe never having experienced this kind of love before; also how they initiated their relationship was Aresh needing to "make love" to Seiichirou to normalise him to some type of magic to stop him dying. Yes, that's the story's excuse for the initiating bedroom fun times, although Aresh was careful to ask Seiichirou's permission before doing it, so that's a plus.
Under most circumstances I'd count this anime as a guilty pleasure and not bother writing in this series about it. What tipped it over the edge was that the dub is very good. The English script turns a lot of the more pedestrian parts of the story into something quite enjoyable, mostly because the Japanese script's humour gets repetitive. The variations in Seiichirou and Aresh's banter are a lot more pronounced in English, and this is one of the few times I'd say the Japanese track is weaker than the English one.
This isn't a series where I score or recommend different anime explicitly, but I do show my opinions. And in my opinion, I found Isekai Office Worker enjoyable, but not exactly ground-breaking. It has the same flaws as many other boy's love and isekai titles, but the way it blends them together combined with its tonal balance and a great dub mean that, for the first time in a long time, I actually enjoyed a boy's love story.
And if you want to read my original posts during or after this (there are some necessary differences), here they are linked for you!
Writing Queer 1: unpromising beginnings
| Writing Queer 2: My early fictional attempts. |
| Writing Queer 3: Editor’s Feedback and Real Life |
It's been a wild few weeks this Pride Month. And it may get a little wilder yet. Because today we're heading for the wild world of writing advice, something I'm usually terrified of giving in any serious way. For the past weeks I've shown my own queer journey, my earliest attempts at writing queer characters, and a major turning point when I landed a publisher. Now I think I feel confident enough to give some tips and guidance for writing queer characters. To be clear, this is from my perspective and my experience. Everyone will have a different bit of advice to offer, and no one way should be taken as gospel.
Also apologies in advance if any of this comes off as inflamatory.
1: Don't make gender and orientation the only thing about a character. This is something that can really rub me up the wrong way, the thing where some creator (especially mainstream straight) trumpets a character as queer without saying anything else about why they're a compelling character. If the story is a romance, then I think that's a usable exception. But if your character is a detective, or a magic user, or a scientist, then show that. You know, they're a gay detective, but they're still a detective.
2: Keep your representation broad. Again in mainstream, but not in fiction in general thankfully, there can be a tendency to go either gay or lesbian, treating orientation as a situation of extremes. But there's bi, trans, ace, demi, pan, and the more general queer. There's intersex, which I've always found interesting. And many other variations and classifications beyond the standard 'human' which everyone -- gay or straight -- is. Just...be broad, reflect reality. And the reality is they're everywhere, it's just the people up top who insist they're not.
3: Have more than one queer character. Obviously there are some possible exceptions people will think of, but this is also something that rubs me the wrong way. The token character, the representative to point to and say 'yeah, this good now, ook ook'. The "Gay Best Friend" is a trope for a reason, and I dislike it. If you're going to have queer, then have queer. In lots of places. Humanity is a spectrum, and a lot more varied than the Western heteronormative. So embrace it!
4: Avoid tragedy unless absolutely necessary. Again, a pet peeve of mine, the Bury Your Gays trope. From Maltese Falcon to Copycat to Left Hand of Darkness to Hermaphroditus knows what all. It's thankfully not as common as it once was, but it's deeply rooted in the Hayes Code's puritanical obsession with punishing any and all kinds of non-standard stuff. Sure, I've admitted to creating tragic narratives, and progressive voices have used tragedy to make a point, but nowadays I just find queer characters need much less tragedy. Or not at all, preferably. If you're going for tragedy, just make sure it's dolled out equally to straight and queer characters, get your priorities right.
5: Don't let "history" bully you. This applies to both ethnic and gender diversity, but if you're doing something set in a historical time period of history-inspired time period, there can be...pressure to make characters white and straight. That's bull, because even a cursory glance at actual historical records will show not only ethnic variety galore, but a spectrum of orientation either inferable or confirmed. Yes there's reading between the lines involved, and you can go too far the other way especially if you're touting history to sell a fictional scenario (looking at you, Mary Villiers from Mary and George). But on the whole, look it up. Do the research. It's very fabulous.
6: If you need to have sexy stuff, do it with purpose. You don't need romance and partnerships and relationships and steamy episodes in bed all the time. Though again, can be genre and tone dependant. I mean, children's' literature doesn't need it, but it benefits greatly from increased representation. It can be an easy pitfall because of... Well, due to pressure from fringe groups who see it as "obscene" and "degenerate", queer content has been tarred with the "filth" brush, and producers of certain media have leaned into that. But you can be queer, and sweet and wholesome. It's completely possible to do that.
And that's it! The end of my long series on this blog. I hope it's been either informative or entertaining, or both. There's more coming at the end of July, so stay tuned. And Happy Pride!
We hit the third post this Pride Month, where I delve into my seemingly both slow and fast journey through the world of "well, I'm writing queer characters now so I need to do it well/properly". I've previously chronicled my own internal journey and my early fictional stumbles. Now I'd like to go more detailed and nitty-gritty. This time, through the story of writing the book that got me to publication, I'll show I had to confront a final odd hurdle within myself and push back at that little bit of myself that was still stuck in the past.
Be warned, this article will contain references to and discussion of a storyline that involves assault and its associated trauma. There will also be spoilers for one of my books.
My debut novel, Starborn Vendetta, is in broad strokes a reimagining of story elements from Count of Monte Cristo, Faust and Macbeth. But in particular, there was a character who starts off the story and forms a core part of how things progress. That character is Gaspard Atarex, a member of the Feles people in the Cluster who starts off as a guard within Prison Station d'If, where protagonist Mercedes Solari is sent. Within the first chapter, I wanted to show Gaspard as bitter, hollowed out by his duties, detached from any real passion. He is gay, has a preference for human males, and due to the prison environment has an outlet without needing another person. When Mercedes appears, her magnetic personality awakens a wish to protect her from the vindictive warden, and the only way he can do that is through someone he loathes.
The root of that became another character, a Feles prisoner dubbed Echo. Later in the story, it is revealed that Echo found Gaspard trying to help prisoners, which would've gotten him into huge trouble, and blackmailed him into a relationship. Echo is a predator, plain and simple, and Gaspard is his victim. Things happen, the d'If is exploded, and both Gaspard and Echo survive. Echo tracks down Gaspard and essentially stalks him. At the end of their combined story, Echo is killed by another character. But here's the kicker; in the original draft of the story, Gaspard never resolved this core issue and...kinda made...peace with Echo? I'm getting embarrassed remembering it.
I see that this may be interpreted as a form of internalised homophobia. We'll come back to that, but I will say it reflects a passive acceptance of behaviours and ideas of redemption that not only queer media, but other media had been pushing for decades by this point. The Beauty and the Beast trope taken to one of its logical extremes, the deeply toxic "it's okay, they're fixable" or "see there was good there" attitude which is unacceptable in real life. The odd thing is that when I was writing it, I didn't think of it in terms of them both being men. I wanted a character suffering from that kind of trauma, and either could easily have been gender-swapped. Equally the fact that Gaspard was gay didn't feel like a factor related to this, just an aspect of how Gaspard was in the world.
My editor at the time called this conclusion out immediately, saying that Echo's actions didn't merit any kind of forgiveness. They didn't ask me to do a gender flip, but they did say I needed to show this wasn't a good thing, which I hadn't originally due to how dark my original tone was. I looked through, and had to agree with their stance. I'd gone through some more writing by this time, and some more media and real-life encounters that reshaped my ideas.
The most basic change I made was that I removed any forgiveness Gaspard originally met out to Echo. Instead he very actively broke away, and when Echo died, he declares that he hates him and doesn't forgive or forget. Gaspard's emotions are still confused and he's still traumatised, but he is on the path to breaking away from that and finding a life beyond that. I also rewrote some bits to show that Gaspard's emotions towards Echo were extremely confused, influenced by being placed in a vulnerable position and taken advantage of; at his core he hates Echo, but some part of him believes Echo's statements that he actually desires the connection. I did further research into the accounts and treatment of sexual abuse victims during this rewrite (I know, I should've done that from the first), and incorporated some of that into his personality and actions. I'd like to think I managed to make him a more nuanced figure in the final draft which made it to publication.
Reading back through this, I'm thinking "What the hell?!". And maybe you've got similar reactions. I wrote Starborn Vendetta during a pretty dark period of my life. My maternal grandparents where in the final stages of their lives, my father unknown to me was also dying and only had months left, and I was struggling with other things in my family and coming to grips with my own mental health and identity. This included not being embarrassed by my tastes in media, finding my own style of clothing, and asserting myself as an individual within the family.
Prior to the revisions, several things happened. First, my father died a few months after I finished writing the initial draft of Starborn Vendetta, which required something of a mental reset for myself. Second, I became more fully aware of how many queer people were actually within my own family, which opened me up to the realisation that what I was writing needed to be respectful not just for nebulous others I hadn't yet encountered, but people within my own family.
So going forward, I was. By the time the dev edits for Starborn Vendetta came in, I'd already written or part-written the next two entries in the Cluster Cycle and it brought me face to face with elements of how I might've ended up writing elements of the next few books. Suffice to say, there was course correction, and that correction was necessary. Since then, I've always been very careful in whether or not to consider incorporating that kind of story, and what I should be researching when portraying it in a respectful and empowering manner.
For more information on the kind of pitfalls I half-fell into or nearly fell into, see Emily Inkpen's article "Writing Sexual Assault - Things to Remember".
So where do we go from here? I've talked for the past weeks about my writing journey relating to queer characters. Next week, the final Sunday of Pride Month, I'll be giving what have become my guiding principles for when I include and write queer characters. Until then, stay fabulous, stay safe, and if you're writing a story based around assault or trauma, remember to do your research. And sometimes, there can be no forgiveness.
Last week, I looked back my early exposure to queerness before I came to accept my own bisexuality. This week, I'm looking at my early attempts at writing queer characters. I won't bore you with many, since I didn't really attempt anything like that for a long time.
Many of my first attempts came from the first extremely long story I wrote, and something I initially attempted to self-publish. That was The Leviathan Chronicle, a story set within a heavily-fictionalised version of the Crusades in a separate world, where two opposing supernatural factions (the Seraphim and the Powers) used humans marked by their power to fight the holy war as a proxy conflict. And out of the five lead characters, three had some level of queerness relating to their stories or personality.
To briefly summarise; the titular character Leviathan was intersex/gender queer, and standing as an outsider to the conflict. The other two were Elathan, a spy who loses his lover Paimon and is revived after being executed once found out; and Mastema, one of the faction leaders who suffers from trauma due to a certain kind of abuse from his father. All of them live to the story's end, don't worry, but...let's just say I wasn't being very tactful with how certain aspects of their stories were handled excepting Leviathan. It goes without saying, this was my angsty era, and I was working through some stuff in my mind at that time that needed a dark outlet. The fourth lead was Astarte, a woman driven by revenge to the exclusion of all else. But I hardly consider my need to be dark that as an excuse.
Basically, because of some elements of my media exposure at the time, many of my stories were and are tragic in tone. Not completely depressing, but still tragic. A different story, which was written as a tragedy from the outset following eight reincarnated people in a fantastical Medieval Europe, had a central subplot where one was reincarnated as twins, with another seeing the surviving twin as her soulmate when he in this incarnation is gay. He survives right to the end, and isn't persecuted because of his sexuality, but the fact that the female lead isn't able to rekindle his initial incarnation's love for her is the main issue in the story. I don't want to dwell on this longer than necessary, mostly because I feel queasy knots of embarrassment twisting round me when I think about my early writing, plus this is a story I'll likely never revisit. But it's still worth mentioning, because it sums up something I was doing at the time; I wasn't being violent to LGBTQIA+ characters, but I wasn't exactly putting them in happy scenarios.
I think you can see through these examples that I was going through a stage of...how do I put this? Standard angsty storytelling? War, suffering, religious questioning, the tragedy of reincarnation, all that stuff. That didn't always focus down to specifically queer issues, but I'm sure people will see how queer characters can be magnets for them. I know this from personal experience writing. It wasn't until my earlier experiences of less problematic relationships that my own writing began to change. As I said last time, I was a sheltered type, and I was also shy of asking about those subjects with anyone close to me.
I also lacked emotional maturity. I hadn't known truly deep emotion, either for real people or fictional characters. I hadn't cried at media in any form. It took that kind of emotional connection for me to think "I want to create something that moves people and even saddens them without falling into the usual traps I'm seeing in popular media." There's enough sadness in the world of people on the spectrum, and while those are valid experiences, I wanted to create experiences that weren't built on heartbreak and abuse, tainted by sorrowful memories. I want experiences that are built in simple love, innocent happiness, the kind of thing straight love stories have held onto like vices for decades. Things are changing for the better, especially when you take a step back and look at the broader range of stories outside the narrow mainstream bubble, but there's still steps to take. And I'd like to live and see a day when both counterculture and mainstream can exist side by side, as equals.
So how did I get past this hang-up that I've outlined in both struggle and result? How did I manage to create worlds and universes that I was able to write more realistic and less tragic examples of the wonderful spectrum of existence? Well, you'll find out next week.
