This shrine is dedicated to a yaoi created in the 2000s, meaning it is an 18+ series that contains explicit and sensitive content. Although there won't be NSFW images or descriptions and I don't plan to give a lot of attention to the sensitive stuff, please leave this page if this makes you uncomfortable! I look past the sensitive content in the earlier volumes because I love the story so much (and other reasons), but I understand that some others don't tolerate this kind of media at all, and that's okay! I mostly kept this interest to myself because I didn't want anyone to be subjected to something that would upset them, but now I have a place where my interest is restricted to this page that can be clicked off of.

This page has sections for an overview of the series, why I like it, random trivia, and my personal collection of physical items and my favorite panels. Since this series is a part of my day-to-day life, there is also a blog page attached to this shrine where I'll write about future announcements, recent discoveries (and rediscoveries), events, etc. When my collection grows, I'll write about it while also adding images to this overview page.

Koisuru Boukun (also known as The Tyrant Falls in Love) is an on-going manga written and illustrated by Hinako Takanaga since 2004, and is currently at 15 volumes. I actually didn't know until a few months after picking up the manga that this is a sequel to Challengers, which is another yaoi manga that was released from 1995 to 1999 with 4 volumes. While I'm not really interested in the prequel because of the main characters and other things, I am forever grateful that certain two side characters had their story expanded upon, for better or for worse.

I'm not really good at summarizing things, so here is a plot synopsis that I got from a Fandom wiki:

Tetsuhiro Morinaga is a university student with a long-standing crush on Souichi Tatsumi, an older student he is collaborating with on his research project. Souichi Tatsumi is violent, demanding, and difficult to work with, in addition to being an ardent homophobe and a number of vocal issues revolving around his younger brother's male lover. In Challengers, Morinaga confesses his love to Souichi, who is shocked and repulsed. Morinaga contemplates transferring schools, but Souichi, who is otherwise-friendless and emotionally dependent on Morinaga, insists that Morinaga stay and that they continue as friends without mentioning the incident again, leaving Morinaga convinced that his feelings will never be reciprocated.

At the start of The Tyrant Falls in Love, in 2004, California has just legalized gay marriage. Souichi's brother Tomoe and his lover have eloped to California, and Souichi is furious at the idea that they are living in such a "perverse" state. Souichi goes on a drinking spree at Morinaga's apartment to drown his sorrows, during which he accidentally finds and unwittingly drinks an aphrodisiac Morinaga has been given; not-entirely-consensual sex ensues. This results in a dysfunctional, mutually-abusive relationship which develops slowly into a romance over the course of the series.

So, the start of this story is pretty rough, and I might have even dropped it if it weren't for certain circumstances. I guess it's just a product of its time, and there are so many more manga inside and outside of this genre from back then that had their own issues (not that this doesn't still exist today, but you know). But after the beginning of Koisuru Boukun, it felt like, to me, personally, in my own opinion, that the story became more compelling with each volume. I don't think there are a lot of manga that progress in such a direction, and I'm not really sure how Hinako Takanaga did it. She put a lot of thought into the story, the characters have a lot of depth, and the things that happen actually do have long-lasting consequences that aren't forgotten after one chapter. Blah blah blah, nuances this, media literacy that... I'm not really sure what else I could say. I could go without the sensitive stuff, and even though I'll praise a lot of other things about this manga, I still wouldn't recommend it to anyone unless you're already familiar with the genre and are willing to stick it out for the first half. I hope that makes sense, or at least some of it. I know everyone is different— I just check out almost anything that vaguely interests me and sometimes look past some (not all) of the not-so-great writing decisions just out of curiosity of what direction it goes in and how it ends even if I'm not enjoying it. Koisuru Boukun was almost the same for me, but I got really attached to the characters. Even excluding all of that, it's just REALLY embarrassing for my friends to know that I love this so much because Morinaga and Souichi have sex at least 1-3 times in every single volume (excluding volume 7). -_-;;

I got into this series kind of recently, but this was most likely the first yaoi I ever watched! Around 2012-2014, I somehow found parts of the OVA on YouTube. I didn't know what the plot was at all and why I was even watching it, but for some reason, I held onto the memory of Souichi getting upset about a shirt being too yellow among other random blurs of the OVA for nearly a decade. I might have rewatched the videos at some point, but I still didn't know what the series was. Maybe I thought it was part of Junjou Romantica or something (another yaoi that I don't know anything about). I would just vaguely remember it, and I sometimes thought that this was all just something I made up in my head? For some reason???

In November 2022, I finally found out that what I saw parts of was from Koisuru Boukun and immediately watched all 48 minutes of the OVA. It was. Something! It only adapts the first (worst) volume + the OST and especially the animation is really bad. The only thing I came to appreciate later on is the voice actors' performances. I started reading the manga on November 12th (also known as my yaoi-versary) and have been obsessed with Koisuru Boukun ever since!

I joined a part of the fandom in June 2023 that I'm still in, and it's been really fun! I love seeing official stuff that I've never seen before and all kinds of fanwork and discussions. A lot of people are really nice too, so even though I didn't really put myself out there, I had a lot of pleasant interactions. The second half of the year for me was BAD. Something out there must have been testing me by putting me through as many situations as possible... As embarrassing as it is, any time I felt like I had nothing to look forward to, I would remember that a new chapter of KSB was coming out soon, and the new chapters always cheered me up. Near the beginning of 2024, I knew that I had to try getting my life together. One of the things I did was cut out a lot of people, so I only had a few friends I would still talk to. I was more active in the KSB group and became friends with a couple of the people in there, and then we were best friends, and then close friends, and now I've visited one of them in person three times since they live so close, and yeah! In just this year, I now have the most amazing friends I've ever had, and I would never trade them for the world! We always joke about how we never would have gotten so close if it weren't for yaoi, and we still talk about Koisuru Boukun nearly every day. I'm really happy that I have an interest that I'll most likely be obsessed with and two friends that I'll always have for the rest of my life. Thank you, Tandee and Sama! ♡

My close friends were also the ones who encouraged me to make this shrine. Ever since I started liking Koisuru Boukun, I never talked about it to a lot of people because I didn't want to discomfort anyone, especially any of my friends. I was always worried that I would lose all of my friends because of yaoi, as stupid as that is, and I only recently stopped thinking that way. I have my two friends who are just as obsessed with Koisuru Boukun, maybe even more. I have a few other friends who don't mind it either. I originally never told them the names of the characters or where they're from because I was still nervous, but I've just stuck with referring to the manga as “my yaoi” and the characters as “yaoi glasses guy” and “the other guy” for the past 2 years. I think they definitely know all of the names by now but have never said anything just to keep the joke running (lol!). I only have two IRL friends, one who I've shown Koisuru Boukun to a few times, and the other who might like yaoi 1000 times more than me. My other close friends online seem to like the genre too, such as my bestest friend who is obsessed with Lelouch and Suzaku! I stopped using (most) social media forever ago, so I'm not close to a lot of my friends from back then anymore, and I don't really mind random people reading all of this. Although, I would like to believe that there is at least someone out there that is reading this and relates to some of my feelings... Blah blah blah, I'm thankful that I have friends who are really nice and understanding. And are just as insane about these two as me!

I was working on this shrine in a time crunch, so this section about why I love Koisuru Boukun so much will get WAY more detailed in the future.

The first thing about this manga that caught my interest was its art style. I'm honestly not really familiar with a lot of yaoi manga from the 90s-2000s, but I'm more than familiar with “yaoi hands” and other weirdly drawn proportions within this genre. I find some of the dramatic proportions kind of charming, but it would definitely take me out of the story if I was seriously reading something that was riddled with it. Koisuru Boukun is one of the few 2000s yaoi that I've seen that rarely has this issue, and I really adore the art style. I especially love how Souichi is drawn in the earlier volumes. The way his eyes look makes him seem somewhat cute but not on the extreme end of the uke scale. Almost angelic... Even Morinaga can look really cute in a lot of panels.

Since this manga has been releasing for 20 years now, the art style has developed alongside the story, and it's just really cool how some volumes look different from each other. I really want to try categorizing the different styles and writing about them when I work on this shrine again.

Something that really stood out to me about Koisuru Boukun is that both Morinaga and Souichi are adults, and the settings and conflicts genuinely feel realistic. My preferences in animanga changed because of this, and now I can rarely get into anything if the story takes place in high school and/or if the main cast is made up of characters who aren't adults. I was already kind of tired of high school/teen cast stuff (even though I'm not that old), but Koisuru Boukun made me realize that I'm missing out on a lot of stories with adults as the main characters. That's also why I really enjoyed series like R.O.D, Princess Jellyfish, Darker than Black, etc. Something I can't stand even more than high school stories are high school stories with explicit romances. Koisuru Boukun was refreshing for me and I definitely wouldn't have a whole shrine dedicated to it if the ages of the characters were different.

My favorite thing about Koisuru Boukun is the mostly mature story, and the characters have so much depth that I never would have thought I would be so compelled by and even relate to. From the first volume, this might seem like a stereotypical toxic story where the uke gets blackmailed and endlessly tormented by the seme, but just from reading the second volume, I got the feeling that Koisuru Boukun wasn't going to go in that direction. Maybe it would still seem like that for some people, especially first-time readers, but there are so many subtle and not-so-subtle moments where the characters internalize and vocalize how they really feel. I can point a few moments from the beginning of the story, and there are even more that stand out in other volumes that I'll have to write about in the future. Volume 1 still isn't really a pleasant read— It makes Morinaga really hateable (probably intentional), and it even contradicts his character arc from the prequel (also probably intentional). Morinaga knows he was awful, Souichi knows Morinaga was awful, and the story progresses in a way where Morinaga rights his wrongs and where Souichi becomes more accepting of Morinaga's and his own feelings, causing both of them to build more and more trust towards each other.

In volume 2, Souichi gets extremely pissed off that Morinaga calls themselves sex friends, especially when he presses further about it. Not long after, Souichi accidentally witnesses Morinaga being confronted by his older brother, and he later learns about Morinaga's troubling past with his first partner and homophobic family. Souichi could have walked away from all of this, but he gets upset by how mistreated and hurt Morinaga has been, and he reluctantly accepts his kiss after being told that he is Morinaga's second true love. His thoughts are spaced out across multiple pages, but I think they're really important, so here is a transcript: "What is this guy saying? This guy... This jerk...! Why... is it that sometimes I can't figure out how to go against him? ... I'm weak ... Recently, I have been ... extremely weak to him..."

At the end of volume 1, Morinaga starts to "blackmail" Souichi, but the only thing that Souichi risks is losing Morinaga. He's not in risk of anything bad happening to him— the only thing that would happen is that Morinaga would withdrawal from their university, which really bothers Souichi for some reason. In volume 3, Isogai finds out about the two's "relationship" and asks Souichi what Morinaga could even have on him, and Souichi doesn't say anything. He doesn't say anything because if he did, he would have to say that he just doesn't want Morinaga to leave him. Later, Morinaga admits that he only referred to what they were doing as "blackmail" because it was convenient for Souichi, and Souichi doesn't deny it. Instead of even getting upset, Souichi says that Morinaga should just have “better timing” for when he initiates intimacy, and that he should have the right to complain since he's been changing himself for Morinaga so much. Souichi then tells Morinaga that he should just "figure out" when he really wants to be intimate or not, causing Morinaga to learn how to become more patient with and understanding of him. The "blackmailing" stops after that point, so I consider their discussion from this volume to be really important. I think Souichi has really cared for Morinaga for a long time, before anything from volume 1, considering how he demanded Morinaga to kiss him so that he wouldn't withdrawal from university, and even the manga makes a point that Morinaga doing so wouldn't have ruined his life. Souichi only says that because he doesn't know what other excuse he could have used.

There are a lot of moments like that in every single volume. I'll definitely highlight more parts later. I really think this is an interesting story, and I still don't know how TK made things seem like they would be doomed from the start, only to create a story about two characters slowly building towards one of the healthiest relationships I've ever seen. I really understand that the first volume and other things can be upsetting. Maybe people don't know that 90% of the manga isn't like that, though some people could know that but still think that the story is irredeemable because of how it starts. I just don't feel that way after reading over 80 chapters of Morinaga and Souichi's progression.

Here's my collection! I'll add more and better pictures later.

Not pictured is the english tranlastion of volume 1, the store extra for volume 14, and the store extra that came with my huge charms. I also need to get pictures of my original copy of volume 6, one of the magazines from the doujinshi, and the mini book, which were all given to me by my best friend Tandee! ♡