Wild Love: A BL Guide to the Animal Kingdom Review

Warning: This is an 18-rated adult title not suitable for children. This manga also covers subjects that some readers may find disturbing.

Before getting into anime and manga, I had other passions. I got into the furry fandom before manga (hence my penname), and I’ve always liked comedy. Anyone who has ever watched QI will have come across peculiar animal sex facts, whether it being male pigs having corkscrew-shaped penis while females have corkscrew-shaped vaginas that turn the other way, or the shocking academic paper about mallard ducks committing homosexual necrophilia.

Despite all this, nearly all the furry pornography (yiff) is basically human relationships portrayed through animal characters. Wild Love by Tsubuko Aratama feels very much the reverse of this: animal relationships portrayed through humans.

A two-volume series combined into a single collection, Wild Love consists of short stories about male gay relationships among certain species, but with the animals being depicted as humans, often dressed up as the animals in question. It begins with Adélie penguins, a wholesome relationship with a gay couple also wanting to form a family and raise an egg together. This is followed by hot-blooded rivalry-filled giraffes, with the story being set in an all-boys school. A tale about hermaphroditic snails sees one gastropod trying to hook up with someone over a dating app and getting more than he bargains for.

A story about bluestreak cleaner wrasse follows an office romance between two male heads of department, but one wishes he go back to his feminine younger self. A plot set in an old-style harem and a young male wanting to assassinate a king forms an adventure about the sometimes-disturbing relationships between elephant seals. Finally, we encounter the frisky world of dolphins, as two beach bums who fail to get it off with the ladies decide to get it off with each other. The action of all of these stories is broken up with four-panel yonkoma providing extra information, and between each main story is a one-page extra covering other species, so we also encounter a wolf trying to blend in with a new pack, a man-hating femboy bighorn ram, gender-transitioning clownfish and penis-fencing flatworms (anyone else thinking of Dick Fight Island?).

This manga is an interesting mix of education, comedy, romance, and sometimes the downright horrific. There is certainly plenty of interesting information regarding not just the gay mating habits of animals, but other tangential details as well. For example, in the penguin story they talk about the birds moulting their feathers. This is comically depicted with one of the penguins in the main couple starting to wear more revealing clothing as their feathers fall out, exposing the bare skin underneath. In the snail chapter, one of the yonkoma strips talks about Jeremy the “left-handed” snail which was one of the few positive news stories of 2016. In it, Jeremy is depicted as a handsome young guy, although you could argue he is also inaccurately clean-shaven given that Jeremy was named after bearded left-wing politician Jeremy Corbyn.

Regarding the romantic side, while no genitalia are shown – there is even a comic sketch of an actual penguin with a blacked-out arsehole – we do see plenty of action, whether it is the snails oiling themselves up to mimic the slimy bodies of real snails, or one of the dolphins engaging in self-pleasure.

However, anyone who knows about the viciousness of the animal kingdom will be aware that not all animal sex is as nice as you would hope. For example, snails sometimes use love darts to increase their chance of impregnating their partner. In the manga, the love dart is depicted as a syringe containing a chemical, which one snail jabs into the other’s neck, which appears to be both non-consensual and perhaps akin to a date-rape drug. In the elephant seal story, one yonkoma talks about how bachelor males outside of harems can become so pent-up that they will end up assaulting others, including children, sometimes killing them. While no violence is depicted in this strip, some young seals are clearly frightened and it is still scary to think of.

As a result, this manga is clearly not for everyone. However, Aratama is clearly a good writer and artist. The manga also describes each of the stories as a specific subgenre. This book thus contains stories it labels as pure-love childhood friend BL, hot-blooded school life BL, hermaphroditic definition-straining BL, seme x seme sex change BL, king and his harem BL, brutal sexual assault BL, heartwarming school-life BL, and friends-to-lovers partnership BL. Feels a bit overwhelming, and I speak as someone who is also into heavy metal, which also has loads of subgenres, and subgenres in those subgenres.

In terms of production, the team at Seven Seas have done a good job with this manga. Tristan K. Hill works well in terms of translation. In the manga his English translations replace Japanese text on signs, a choice I assume taken by editor Callum May, and here it works well. Standing out is letterer Karis Page, and particularly the use of crooked text when some characters become uncomfortable. The cover is designed by H. Qi, with the front depicting the six main couples and the back the actual animals they represent. There are plenty of extras in this manga too, including colour pages, background notes from the author, and a bibliography of academic sources used as research for the manga.

Wild Love does make for an unusual change of pace within manga in general, not just BL. While at times what it depicts can be troublesome, there is no denying that when it is good, it really is entertaining.

(Also, we should really be thankful that Tsubuko Aratama did not do a story about mallards.)