BL Metamorphosis is a quiet story. The quietness that surrounds it is one that the act of reading implies almost inherently. I felt this first watching my grandmother do crosswords and wondered why it felt so sad. It was only after a lot of reflection that I realized the state of calm itself was not sad, but rather a state one can enter to untangle sadness. This feels a little overly abstract so let me rephrase it.

An emerging and effective therapy for PTSD is sensory deprivation. Not necessarily just a full on, body temperature bath in absolute darkness, but sound proof chambers have been used as well. This is different from the quiet of a house. There is no obscure humming from the kitchen, the rolling of an air conditioner isn't there either. In a room like that, potentially after a brief spike in anxiety, some people enter a state of boredom that can be deeply healing.

This comparison isn't to suggest that BL Metamorphosis is boring. I don’t even really want to call it healing. Rather, I think the manga’s narrative and atmosphere fosters a sense of melancholy that is adjacent to this silence. It comes out of both protagonist’s slowly built isolation. Their friendship would not have happened without it. The ambiguity between found family and fellow hobbyist they explore, grows heavy with expectations and the intimacy it holds takes up more and more space in each other’s lives.

Boy’s Love as a subject for their attention was chosen to highlight this increasing dependence, this difficulty of explanation surrounding the situation. You could call Yuki and Urara friends, but that would obscure the sharpness of their mutual affection. I don’t mean to suggest this as romance, but rather, a euphoria following both characters sudden and unspoken relief of having something to look forward to.

This is how the manga shows their loneliness to the reader. It shows it in the same way you would hear it in someone’s voice as they, a little too eagerly, tell you about the show they’ve been watching. The brightness of their expression can make you unconsciously see backwards, deep into the previous week as they sat in a room by themselves for one reason or another.

While there is not denying a certain sadness that accompanies that loneliness, it doesn’t necessarily require, or even encourage, some sort of pity from the onlooker. Instead you can see the self-cultivation that accompanies solitude, and you can choose pity, admiration, or some other emotion based on what they’ve cultivated.

BL Metamorphosis shows you what its characters grow off the page in quietly giddy moments shared between two women who would’ve never exchange much more that polite conversation if they’d had other outlets.