Wild Love: A BL Guide to the Animal Kingdom Manga Review (Minor Spoilers)

Synopsis

Wild Love: A BL Guide to the Animal Kingdom is a visual guide to the animal kingdom with a specific focus on facts, trivia, procreation, and comedy through the lens of Boys’ Love stories. From “necking” giraffes to dolphin bro antics, Wild Love is an erotic and educational look at sex and homosexuality in nature.

The Good

Wild Love: A BL Guide to the Animal Kingdom strives to share interesting facts from the animal kingdom that lend themselves to BL couples, and it succeeds in a spectacular and humorous way. I read this from beginning to end, and then I read it all again because there was just so much to take in. The structure of the manga is a series of longer chapters and full pages about a specific couple/species of animal, as well as 4-panel comic gags. There were also informational pages with single illustrations, all put together into a beefy tome of BL romance and animal kingdom facts.

There is a disclaimer at the beginning of the book to indicate that there are some creative liberties taken for the sake of storytelling, but with the amount of captions and footnotes throughout, the manga creator Tsubuko Aratama clearly has spent the time and effort to explain the differences between the imagined “BL” between animals and the real life versions. Each of the longer chapters comes with a handy checklist to give a shortcut to whether that specific species participated in things like courtship displays, mated pairs, co-parenting, and more, which is a nice shorthand way to understand that particular couple/animal.

There are a lot of animals covered, but I enjoyed the chapters dedicated to bluestreak cleaner wrasses the most (“Seme x Seme Sex Change BL!!”). There are various BL tropes present throughout the manga, and in this case, the theme was salarymen in suits. While all the couple characters throughout the book are mostly human in appearance, it was fun to see all the real bluestreak cleaner wrasse drawings and facts about fighting and hierarchy interspliced into a story about two competitive office workers. One of my favorite 4-panel gag panels from this section shows Some-san, one of the bluestreak cleaner wrasse characters, showing off his slime bedtime routine before bed.

It’s hard to express the amount of joy I got from reading this manga. While I have heard stories of gay rams (which technically, in BL-speak, are couples of age gap and size difference) or penguin couples adopting eggs, I learned about all the new science news that I had never heard of before. An example: snails having a chance to be left-coiled, thus limiting their mating potential, as right coiled is much more common. As to why that matters, it’s shown in the chapters related to the snail couple (“Hermaphroditic Definition-Straining BL!!”). The two snails, portrayed as two horny left-coiled characters with little antennae, try to out-smart each other in a battle of who carries the offspring. It’s wild. “A snail can do what!?” was running through my head the entire time. Even as there are sex scenes between each couple and small fact captions floating around, I wasn’t distracted. In fact, it was helpful to clearly mention the creative liberties taken. Yes, you can have your sexy BL times and facts at the same time!

Somewhere in Between

I know this is a common thing that crops up in manga (as I eyeball my reading history of Harlequin shojo manga), but there was one set of stories that was based on elephant seals. The story is about a younger male elephant seal trying to kill an older male elephant seal that is in charge of a harem. The story is using harem in its original form, so it has an Arabian theme. Long-term manga and anime fans have seen variations of this kind of Arabian theme in other media, but if you’re someone new, it might be a bit surprising, as it is a tokenizing stereotype and can be offensive.

The Verdict

I didn’t know what to expect when I opened Wild Love: A BL Guide to the Animal Kingdom, but I am now currently already midway through one of the non-fiction books listed in the bibliography (Nature’s Nether Regions: What the Sex Lives of Bugs, Birds, and Beasts Tell Us About Evolution, Biodiversity, and Ourselves by Menno Schilthuizen, which describes mating habits that make omegaverse sound tame). Wild Love was genuinely educational and engaging enough for me to want to find out for myself how much liberty the artist took to write the stories and what else there is to know. The art is cute, the jokes are funny, and you can tell the artist went all out on the research to bring out the best of Boys’ Love-related animal facts to pique the interest of any BL fan.

After you read this manga, you can never go to the zoo or aquarium again without thinking about (river) dolphin bros having kinky sex together with their blowholes or other naturally-occurring activities of animals in nature. As an omnibus release of what was originally 2 volumes, Wild Love is a delightful whirlwind tour that is simultaneously full of fun BL couples and engrossing facts about nature that will make you come back to study again and again.

If you like Wild Love: A BL Guide to the Animal Kingdom, you might also like…

• Penguin Gentlemen by Kishi Ueno
• Heaven’s Design Team by Hebi-Zou, Tsuta Suzuki, and Tarako
• What the Font?! – A Manga Guide to Western Typeface by Kuniichi Ashiya and Masayuki Yamamoto

Credits

Story and Art: Tsubuko Aratama
Translation: Tristan K. Hill
Lettering: Karis Page
Cover Design: H. Qi
Copy Editor: B. Lillian Martin
Proofreader: Alyssa Honsowetz
Production Designer: Stevie Wilson
Editor: Callum May
Published in English by Seven Seas Entertainment

Thank you to Seven Seas Entertainment for providing a review copy. Receiving this copy did not affect the reviewer’s opinions as expressed here. 

Article edited by: Anne Estrada