Our Kingdom is the tale of young country-bred cutie Akira, whose grandmother just died. Aww. The plot device contrived to match him up with a seme is this: he's sent to live with his other grandmother, who turns out to be the president of one of those huge monolithic corporations that seem to run rampant in Japan, if you read enough manga.

The seme is, of course, not the grandmother, but rather Akira's cousin Rei. Rei is the shielded, pampered sort of kid, so his method of showing affection to Akira is to tease him, cling to him mercilessly, and coerce him to promise to stay at the mansion rather than run away back to the country.

This, of course, works quite well on Akira, who finds himself starting to fall for Rei in return. Natch. The only thing that really bothers him about his new life is his studying to be an accepted member of the snooty upper-class familiy. We have yet to see what this studying consists of, though. It looks like actual book-learnin's so far. BORING.



No shounen-ai piece would be complete without something vaguely resembling a rival, and in this case it's Rei's nephew (he apparently has much-older half-siblings), Raoul. Yes, Raoul. He's foreign, but that doesn't excuse that awful name choice, blech. Anyway, Raoul attempts to rape(? at the very least, molest) Akira as a method of riling Rei up, which works quite well. Things tend to go as planned in this world, eh?

There are a couple of things worth mentioning here, though. First off: technically Rei isn't blonde, but he IS light-haired (silver hair and red eyes, don't you love the Japanese view of a "foreign" appearance?), so the fact that he's seme almost sort-of breaks the blonde rule (see the glossary). Second, Akira gets to punch Raoul in the face, and is not as completely womanized as ukes often are. So if nothing else, Our Kingdom (Bokura no Oukoko for you who prefer Japanese titles) is a bit different from a standard shounen-ai in those respects.

But that's about it for unique. It's a cute love story thus far, but nothing special.

Manga-ka: Naduki Koujima
Censorship: N/A
Warnings: Possibly attempted rape, mild incest (hey, I did mention that they're cousins...).