It’s not often that I read Middle East stories, so I found the setting quite interesting. The illustrations were lovely and I looked forward to them.
I’m just going to dig right into my thoughts.
I always find June/DMP’s translation good, but the quality can often be lacking - specifically talking about typos. I recall at least three in this novel.
Relationship:
Zayid teased Takeyuki too much, he is partly to blame for Takeyuki’s actions (running away from Zayid). Takeyuki had been through a trauma and was genuinely scared of what Zayid would do to him, and Zayid never reassured him, only made it worse by making it seem like he would keep Takeyuki away forever, just like Metahat’s group/Azzawar. When we find out that Zayid is a prince, it just seems like they’re both spoiled and that part of them clashed. Takeyuki does act like a child due to his spoiled background, and Zayid acts arrogant because of his position.
I’m glad that Takeyuki realized how selfish he was to leave Mustafa’s care in the first place, and no matter how stifled he was feeling by his caretakers, running off on his own can have really serious consequences. There were other ways he could have exercised freedom.
The ‘true love At First Sight and love only you forever’ stuff bothered me. There was too much pointing out of how strange his feelings doing a 180 and falling in love with Zayid was. It made it hard to suspend my disbelief. And I wouldn’t have noticed how much crying Takeyuki did if he hadn’t kept thinking about it himself. I began to wonder if he had super tearducts.
The sex scene could have been sexy. I loved how it went beyond what stereotypical sex scenes are like in other BL - the top gave the bottom a blowjob, and prepared him really well to be penetrated, saying he would take it slowly and make it good for him. It made it obvious how much he cared about Takeyuki and him getting as much pleasure as possible out of it too, instead of the whole ‘sorry, but I can’t stop myself’ crap I see elsewhere. Like I said, it could have been sexy, if not for…
“Magnificent, robust member”
“Magnificent organ”
"Crotch”
“And he was rock hard, almost like a weapon.”
“Panting erection”
“Dirty fluids”
“Manfully erect object”
“Tightly puckered folds”
“Stunning rod”
SO UNSEXY.
By the end I was wondering if the translator was doing that on purpose, or if it was in the actual text.
‘I can never leave you and live.’ -Takeyuki …In a different context, that’s creepy. It reminds me of Zayid teasing that he’d keep Takeyuki as his bride, and you don’t know if he’s serious or not, so much so that Takeyuki felt like he had to escape into the desert. It began to feel like Stockholm Syndrome while they were in the desert.
It ended too abruptly, I wanted to know how it worked out for them – a sequel chapter would have done nicely. Just up and changing his plans to work at his dad’s place, explaining his new relationship without outing Ashif as the ‘Desert Hawk’, explaining how he fell in love with someone in a few days without going into details about being kidnapped??? And that he wants to just move away from his family to a foreign country, without a job and… Yeah. They’ll really think he’s an impulsive child then.
I don’t like their use of ‘dom’ and ‘sub’ instead of seme/uke OR top/bottom. I get not using seme/uke, because maybe not everyone reading it will know those Japanese . But using BDSM to describe a top/bottom relationship is weird for me. There were no dom/sub vibes in the relationship to me. Zayid only ordered Takeyuki around because he’s a prince and in order to survive, Takeyuki needed to help with the chores. Takeyuki didn’t want or like being ordered around and that’s largely what caused him to nearly get himself killed by escaping Zayid.
I was interested to see that there was a drama CD and that this novel is part of an ‘Aristocrat’ series.
