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AKA: 間の楔, The Space Between (English)
Genre: Science fiction shonen-ai
Length: OAV series, 2 episodes, 50 minutes each
Distributor: Currently unlicensed in North America
Content Rating: 17+ (Sex, Profanity, and Graphic Violence)
Related Series: Ai No Kusabi 2012 (Remake)
Also Recommended: Fake, Gravitation, Loveless, Fuyo No Semi
Notes: Based on a novel series by Reiko Yoshihara, which ran between 1986 and 1987 in Shousetsu June.

This series is sometimes treated as an adult title, since it has sex scenes; there's nothing shown onscreen that would legally classify it as pornography in the US, but consider it borderline.
Rating:

Ai no Kusabi

Synopsis

In the far future, humans have become a space-faring, technologically-advanced, widespread, and, concurrently, intensely stratified race. At the bottom of the hierarchy sit the impoverished "mongrels," one of whom is a frustrated biker named Riki, but one day, Jason, one of society's elite "blondies", suddenly saves Riki from death at the hands of a rival group. Apparently out of a sense of internal debt to him and a lack of any other means of repayment, Riki submits himself to Jason as his "pet", a legal sex slave. As time passes, however, they, without intending to, begin to turn into something more than "slave and master", which puts Jason at odds with the other elites and places him in a dangerous political position. Meanwhile, Riki has been absent from his gang long enough that his relationship with them has become irreparably damaged, and upon his eventual return he seeks to hide his new status as a blondie's "pet" from Guy, his anxious lover.


Review

I have to admit that I've come across very few examples of "shonen-ai" anime that I've actually liked; given my ever-strong hope of finding positive depictions of LGBT romance in anime, this depresses me. It's true that I've seen very few yaoi anime, but what I've found is that their depiction of gay characters frequently come across as melodramatic and astoundingly stereotypical. Now, I've sometimes heard the OAV Ai No Kusabi described as being one of the pinnacles of the genre, and it's true, it does provide plenty of erotic male bodies while hinting at an interesting story on occasion. But the dearth of compelling characters, the melodrama, and the lack of a plot that can hold up without the shonen-ai elements will make this dull viewing for anybody besides diehard yaoi fans, in my opinion.

The light novel on which this OAV is based is, apparently, one of the very few to have set a shonen-ai romance to the backdrop of a science fiction story, and it presents us with what seems to be a world in which humans have colonized other moons, women appear to be around only in highly reduced numbers, a hierarchy with blond men at the top and so-called "mongrels" at the base has emerged, and, most strangely, certain males are kept as "pets" for the pleasure of said "blondies". But much of this is guesswork on my part. There's no background information given anywhere in the series, and this adaptation seems to serve as a "spotlight" for the novels, designed for the benefit of those who have already read the story rather than first-time viewers. It's honestly quite hard to understand, and even when the show, in the second episode, makes a slightly larger effort to make the setting important to the plot, we still learn absolutely nothing about the important facts. Ai No Kusabi never tells us why there are no woman around or how this society even came to be, and on top of this, the story is laced with inconsistencies, including the fact that the "mongrels" seem to have much more freedom of movement than their described status would indicate. As such, the setting simply feels gimmicky.

I might have been somewhat more forgiving had the characters been a bit more bearable, but sadly, I didn't like a single person in the series. Riki is crabby, angry, and loudmouthed, while Jason is overly-cool and calculated as well as generally unpleasant. Meanwhile, Guy, Riki's gangmate and original "lover", begins as a bland but at least vaguely pleasant character but has a sudden and jarring shift to a mean-spirited jerk by the end of episode one, and by the end of the second part he's become alarmingly irrational, violent, and borderline psychopathic. Basically, they all feel like they were written as stock characters: nobody's behavior makes the slightest bit of sense to me, with Riki's needless and apparently voluntary submission to sex slavery taking the crown, and whatever "development" occurs feels more like a set of jarring, arbitrary inconsistencies than an actual spectrum of human emotions. It's also a bad sign when I root for people simply because they aren't doing the awful things that everyone else is, and while I won't elaborate, said acts involve some, very, very disturbing acts of mutilation that made me quite uncomfortable (and I'm usually not squeamish in the slightest). I could empathize with the characters when particularly bad things happened to them, but the fact that the show's creators had to go to such a horrendous and over-the-top extent to make me care in the slightest really only reminded me of the larger problem.

Ai no Kusabi is quite skilled at using shonen-ai techniques; there's no shortage of attractive, muscular men, said men getting shirtless screentime, lengthy kissing, lust, and sex, which, while only shown indirectly, is as consensual as a relationship with a human "pet" could ever get and generally fairly tasteful. The problem with this series is that it's a mess in almost every other regard. Scenes bleed into each other without transitions, annoyingly easy-to-miss time skips occur in several places, minor characters survive seemingly fatal wounds with little explanation, and flashbacks entirely ruin the mood by breaking scenes into pieces on multiple occasions. In addition, I'd heard people say that this title had a fairly realistic romance for a yaoi title, but if these angsty, shallow, irrational, and ridiculous love stories really are the top of the heap, that makes me very sad indeed. The narrative often slips at the expense of the sex scenes or out-of-place kissing and stroking, and while the series sometimes lingers on the science fiction elements just, just long enough to make you think that they'll explain something, it invariably slips away from that within seconds. Moments like those make me wonder if the creators didn't quite know whether they wanted this to be a sci-fi story with yaoi elements or a yaoi story with a sci-fi backdrop. Because of this indecision, we get a show whose weak story combines with shoddily animated fight scenes, a dull color scheme, and a mediocre synthesizer soundtrack to make an unimpressive, boring, and disappointing piece.

I had high hopes for Ai No Kusabi, and I wanted to like it much more than I did. I'll concede that the science fiction setting has a lot of potential, and even as someone who has no romantic attraction to men whatsoever, I will admit that the fanservice is well-played in spite of the annoyingly inane relationships themselves. But Ai No Kusabi really just isn't all that interesting. The ghost of something fascinating is here, and maybe that something simply got lost in the process of making an OAV out of the original story, but in the end, everything besides the sex itself is just window-dressing.

It had potential, but it really was a huge disappointment. Yaoi fans may add at least one star.Nicoletta Christina Browne

Recommended Audience: There's explicit sex in this OAV; just, just enough is obscured to keep this out of the "adults-only" range, but I'd call this an erotica piece.

There's also some graphic violence, including some shots of the aftermath of some awful body mutilation and dismemberment.....



Version(s) Viewed: digital source
Review Status: Full (2/2)
Ai no Kusabi © 1992 Rieko Yoshiwara / AIC / Magajin Magajin
 
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