Shelf Life

Super Lovers

I'll assume that you know why this should raise some eyebrows and why I suspected that it was going to be a major stinker. And boy howdy, was I right – Super Lovers stands as perhaps the most infamous fujoshi show to come out of the past few years, at least in terms of stuff that gets anything more than a quiet OVA release. I believe the attention it drew was due in large part to the show's cover and title combo, which smacks you right over the head with exactly what it is.

Super Lovers lives up to expectations by being a show about lovers, although how super they are is dubious, since unfortunately these lovers are also (adoptive) brothers. The setup is that this dude named Haru travels to Canada to find that his mom has adopted a half-feral little boy from the local orphanage. This boy, Ren, hardly knows how to do anything, so Haru takes it upon himself to acclimate him into the family. Of course, this involves sleeping together and Ren sitting on Haru's lap a lot, since this is That Kind of Show. They share a wonderful (ly non-sexual...yet) summer before Haru is forced to return to Japan for several years. During that time, Haru ends up losing all of his memories of Ren along with his father and stepmother in a tragic car accident. So when a teenaged Ren shows up at Haru's doorstep, the elder brother finds himself both confused and strangely intrigued. What follows is both profoundly and predictably uncomfortable for anyone who doesn't possess a very specific BL/shotacon/incest fetish.

So yeah, this show is only meant to appeal to folks who get hot and bothered by a series of very specific boys-love tropes. The audience for this stuff exists, I guess – Super Lovers even managed to get a sequel. Still, this seems like the sort of thing that people tend to enjoy quietly even when it does well. Personally, I shove BL with this level of fetishization into the “ignore” bin alongside equivalent lolicon shows like Prisma Ilya – until their physical releases show up on the review slate and I'm forced to wrestle with their existence because someone on the team's gotta do it.

On the subject of the seme/uke dynamic, it's sort of impossible to criticize this one instance without prying into the problematic elements of the trope as a whole. However, Super Lovers does seem to stand as an especially egregious example of its genre, because it really emphasizes the sibling stuff, as well as Ren's childishness relative to Haru. Even as a teen, Ren looks real young standing next to Haru's towering yaoi-man physique. So while Ren is technically (if only barely) out of his physical childhood by the time romance starts blossoming between them, he still totally acts like one in most respects, beneath even the still-underdeveloped mental age of 15/16. Moreover, the structural proximity of the sexual stuff to the time when Haru was raising Ren makes it clear that you're supposed to be getting off on the lingering remnants of their parent-child dynamic. Now I know that fetishes exist, are largely involuntary, and that the depiction of something in art doesn't equate to a societal approval of it so much as the need to scratch that itch, but did this material really need to be broadcast on TV? Couldn't this have been condemned to a doujin box somewhere?

Overall, Haru's treatment of Ren is especially disturbing for how heavily it smacks of grooming. For instance, Haru repeatedly emphasizes how it's “normal” for them to sleep together (it's not) or help each other get off (super not). In real life, adult predators frequently take advantage of children's naiveté in this way, by telling them that the abuses they inflict are actually normal behavior, which they'd know all this if they were also an adult. Broader cast dynamics do nothing to improve this situation, as Haru's sexual attraction to the boy are treated as the object of friendly ribbing and not a dynamic of potentially life-ruining magnitude.

I will admit that this would all be more disturbing if Ren seemed even a little like an actual person, but he doesn't at all. (Haru, by contrast, is more of a regular anime guy, a seme of the “reticent” rather than the “aggressive” variety.) Ren's contrived trauma (he was sold by his mom for drug money or something and then socialized by dogs?) has resulted in him having bizarrely selective social stupidity, the worst/funniest example being that he hasn't figured out how to jack off by age 15 or so. (Of course, Big Bro has to help him with this, since what else would happen in this show?) Ren is such a creature of narrative convenience that I don't even feel that bad about him getting taken advantage of, just weirded out by seeing the situation romanticized. But on the other hand, I guess it's not that weird, which is actually the bigger problem. With the exception of the same-sex aspect, these types of situations are often way more normalized than they should be in society. “Disappointed” is perhaps the better word, as well as irritated over having to sit through it.

On a purely aesthetic level, Super Lovers looks alright for this sort of thing. I don't get the appeal of yaoi-bodies where you can't quite tell how the seme's body parts would fit together if we got a clear shot of them with all their clothes off, but it's a popular style, and Super Lovers manages to stay pretty consistently on model. There isn't much motion, but there doesn't need to be, and the pleasing color work keeps the show mildly interesting to look at. That's not to say that Super Lovers is an impressive production – it's just that I've seen some real eye-glazey stuff during my tenure on Shelf Life, and this show lands well outside of the tier reserved for truly execrable visuals.

This is all faint praise since Super Lovers goes right in the garbage bin in all other respects. It's a gross, bad, ridiculous, dumb show that exemplifies a lot of the unnecessarily uncomfortable elements that have been popularized in BL anime. There's no (not-counting-statutory) rape in it, but that's about all I can muster in the show's favor. In the end, nobody in the world should be exposed to this if they haven't chosen to be, and I'd prefer that this hadn't gotten a regular anime release and been forced to stink up my Blu-ray player. However, this show did provide me with one moment of joy – when I showed my roommate the Blu-ray cover, he started laughing so hard that he had to sit down on the floor for a while. Tsukiuta. The Animation can't claim to have done that. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to wash my eyes out with something wholesome, like that Cardcaptor Sakura sequel. CLAMP is truly a bastion of responsible romance writing.
-Gabriella[TOP]