Pride
season 2

Bara has mostly been written indoors. Workshops, locker rooms, construction sites, bathhouses and barracks: this Japanese tradition of adult male art has long asked the setting to justify the body, and the job to supply the sweat. Pride reverses that arrangement. The street is open, the crowd is thick, and not one of these men has a task to perform. What normally comes from labour has to come from somewhere else here: from how a man holds a patch of pavement, how he stays upright in a press of bodies, how he turns his head a beat too slowly when someone walks past.

As the second chapter, this season resolves nothing, and that is exactly its job. The first chapter sets the place and the faces, the last one tips the day over. The middle one keeps the rope taut without letting go. Its 75 plates are long on purpose: taken one at a time, each advances almost nothing, and the effect comes from accumulation, the same exchange of looks repeated a few metres further down the route, the same heat rising from plate to plate without ever finding its way out.

Three conventions of the genre are treated here as qualities rather than exceptions: bulk, age, and body hair. Bara has always preferred the heavy, mature man to the slim youth, and this chapter does not negotiate on that. What it shifts is the vocabulary of seduction. In the suggestive register, everything passes through posture before gesture: weight settled on one leg, a shoulder opening towards someone, a hand left a little too long on the back of a neck. Nothing concludes. Everything is announced.

The Celebrations series gathers themes in which the crowd is a character in its own right. Pride holds a distinct place in it, because a parade is one of the rare settings where looking at a stranger for a long moment requires no excuse at all. The multitude works as shelter and as exposure at once: you are seen by everyone, therefore by no one, and an exchange struck up among several hundred bodies stays entirely private. That double condition drives the chapter more than the festivity itself does.

This chapter is for readers who prefer anticipation to arrival. If you want explicit material straight away, another intensity register of the same theme will serve you better, and it is worth knowing that before working through 75 plates. If instead you like held glances, thick hairy men caught in full afternoon heat, and the sense that something is about to happen without any indication of when, you have landed on precisely the right part of the story.

Pride is a season of InkDazzle: homoerotic art generated plate by plate, then composed as a chapter you read in order. Every season exists in three registers (suggestive, explicit and anime): the same men, drawn at the intensity you pick. Visitors read the opening plates; members read the whole season, and everything published before it.

The plates are read in order, one after the other, and the register can be switched from this page without losing your place. A season that belongs to a series carries its name at the top. That is the thread to follow if you want the men to come back.