Haru wo Daiteita (Embracing Love)
Japanese Title: Haru wo Daieteita
English Title: Embracing Love
Length: 2 OAVs
AniDB Listing: Link
AnimeNewsNetwork: Link
Production Studio: Trinet
MEYDAY Rating: Rewatchable (considering that it's porn)
Sexual Rating: X for porn
Violence Rating: T for some guy getting punched in the face once
Genre(s): Slice of Life?
Setting(s): Real Life?
Theme(s): Boys-love
Target Audience: Jyosei
Production Vintage: 2005
First Viewed Vintage: October 2005
Number of Rewatches: Hahahaha
Review:
Haru wo Daiteita is a gay porno about two porn stars who are chosen to star in a porno together (if my memory serves) and fall in love along the course of shooting the film. They then go on to make a non-porn film together, but I don't know if that happened in the OAVs or just the manga. The OAVs followed the manga exactly, so it's really hard to keep them separate in my mind.
I really liked HaruDaki. Yeah, it's porn, but it's porn well-done - exceedingly cheesy at points, but the characters are interesting (especially the side-characters - I adore their transgendered producer and her lover) and the plot, where kind of haha yeah right in places, isn't all that off in lala land. The two lovers irritate the life out of each other, the issue of work-stress affecting the relationship is touched upon (much moreso in the manga, but it's not ignored in the OAVs), and despite being gay porn, it manages to avoid the seme/uke stereotype. I ranted about it back when I'd first watched it, but basically, the uke is usually the light-haired younger character, and the dark-haired, brooding older character is usually the seme. In this one, that's switched (as far as the details of their coupling goes), and even at that, the receiving character isn't some shoujo stereotype. It's nice. Kind of refreshing.
Even if it is still just gay porn.
List of all series I've watched can be found here.