RePlay by Tsukahara Saki

Finally, some yaoi.

If your fantasy is sweaty high school baseball players, RePlay is for you.

SPOILERS

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I can’t say that this one was for me, exactly? I honestly only picked it up because I got so giddy with my new library card from St. Paul Public Library that I accidentally put it on hold, not realizing it would come as an e-book.

I’d like to imagine that the concept for this manga came to Tsukuhara-sensei like this, “Oh, my god, did you know that there’s a baseball term called a battery, in which a pitcher choses a favorite catcher and they stick together in every game! Also, oh my god, Pitcher and Catcher!! Think about it! The pitcher will be the actual top, and the catcher can be actual the bottom!! This basically writes itself!”

Amusingly, while RePlay is ostensibly a baseball manga, there is almost no game play in it. A couple of times you think maybe we’ll see some baseball, but, naturally, that’s the day that the game is rained out. I kind of admire this? Because, honestly, if I were going to write about baseball, this how I’d have to do it.

Look, the mangaka remembered to add a baseball somewhere in the picture!

If only this were plot-what-plot, I might be able to forgive this, but no. The set-up is that Ritsu and Yuta are in their fourth year and so have to drop out of baseball to concentrate on college entrance exams. (A reoccurring theme in many, many sports manga.) Yuta doesn’t want to give up baseball… or is the real reason he can’t seem to let go of the game because he will have to stop being Ritsu’s “married partner” (as they call their battery)??

Obviously, it’s the latter, but it takes Yuta a long time to get there.

In fact, they don’t manage to get it on until the last chapter, when they are fully graduated and move into an apartment together. In a romantic gesture I do not recommend, the two intentionally go to the same college just to stay together, even though Yuta could barely pass the entrance exams to qualify. I would love to see a sequel to this, actually, where Yuta has dropped out, because what is he even studying? He would have been better off taking the coach’s recommendation to go to a college with a baseball scholarship. I’m actually deeply upset that the big “romantic” gesture Yuta does for Ritsu is turn down an actual chance to do what he loved. (Although Yuta talks himself into believing he only plays the game to be with Ritsu.)

Yeah, I wish you would, but you ended up going to the same place in the end. Even though Ritsu is the only one who is interested in an programs there.

This relationship is SO full of red flags.

Because Ritsu is also always doing things in secret “for” Yuta, like learning to drive a car–which he only seems to do because he’s jealous of how much time Yuta spends admiring the coach’s car–and buying them an apartment without even asking Yuta if he actually wants to live together.

But, I guess the sex is good?

It’s not terribly explicit, and the art is otherwise in the “wispy” category. So, while I ended up reading the whole thing, I can’t really recommend. I did go looking to see if there was anything else by Tsukahara-sensei that might also be fun and I skimmed through Escape Drop, which is a love story between a bodyguard and the mixed-race scion of some Italian business cartel. It has a similar structure in that jealousy plays a huge part of the romance, but I sort of enjoyed this one a bit more, if only for this amazing line…

Because we all know that Italian men just don’t even have an international reputation as Lotharios…. (but, not like I necessarily disagree? It’s just funny.)

At this point, I’ve talked about these longer than it took me to read them. Feel free to check them out if they interest you, however, the sex is very naked upper torsos with carefully placed legs, etc., so as to hide the salient bits. It’s not PG, but it’s not really R, either.