The following was written in June 2003 as an email reponse to Manna, with regard to this comment in Livejournal discussion:
"If you've got time to talk about it, I'd love to hear some more about the similarities between the Administration characters and yaoi. As you correctly guessed, I know absolutely nothing at all about yaoi, but the Administration stories seem to have hit a chord with a couple of anime/yaoi fen, and it's interesting to hear that there are some thematic similarities going on."
There are thematic similarities - though with yaoi it's more along the lines of genre convention. I'll give you a few paragraphs on the thing itself first, so you'll know what I'm comparing your stories to. ^_^
The fanword "yaoi" in Japanese actually means something close to "m/m PWP" (YAma-nashi Ochi-nashi Imi-nashi = no peak, no end, no sense). It's been semantic-shifted in English to designate what the Japanese themselves call "Boy's Love" (yes, they use English), or BL for short. In the seventies it was called "shounen-ai", and thought of as a subset of "tanbi" manga, i.e. heavily aesthetic - as in 19th-century British Aestheticism - girls' comic books. During the eighties this gradually morphed into an emphasis on doujinshi (fan comics - I have it reliably that the first ones were actually RPS of Japanese rock bands, most of which took Ziggy Stardust as their prophet of the moment), as well as a few influential novels and manga series. In the early to mid-nineties BL exploded in quantity, and now it's settled into a reliable subgenre of girls' comics (both pro and fan) and fluffy Harlequin-type romances respectively, as well as a not-infrequent theme in gen pop lit (think Mercedes Lackey). In other words, it's a lot better labelled in bookstores over there, and it usually comes with pictures.
Typically if someone says they're into "yaoi" online, it means that they 1) write m/m fanfiction or draw m/m fanart for anime/manga/video games, or 2) collect m/m doujinshi, or 3) are into original m/m anime/manga/novel series in Japanese. Or all three. Most will use the words "yaoi" and "slash" interchangeably, and combine the genre conventions of the two; in fandoms like Harry Potter, where everyone loots Japanese anime-style fanart and doujinshi as a matter of course, the line is very blurred indeed. (Note 1) However most yaoi fen are anime fen first and foremost, and most slash fen know very little of yaoi.
The thing is, though, the actual genre conventions of Japanese BL (and of those English yaoi writers who're more inspired by the Japanese end of things) are fairly different from the genre conventions of slash. (Note 2) Most slash - not all, because "slash" is as broad a designation as "sci-fi", but most - upholds as ideal a sexual equality or partnership of a type difficult to achieve entirely in descriptions of heterosexuality, and a preoccupation with both emotional and physiological realism. In other words, if one character is written as the top too often in a pairing, people will typically complain. If one character is too weepy, people will complain. If the lube gets skipped, people complain, et cetera. BL/yaoi in its pure form, however, runs counter to both equality and realism. :P For one, it's very rigidly top/bottom, as in penetrator/penetratee ("seme/uke" are the terms used - from the attack/defend positions in martial arts, believe it or not). A Japanese mangaka would be frankly bewildered if you told her m/m didn't have to be boxed-in t/b roleplay. Maybe 99.5% of the time top/bottom also corresponds to dom/sub, at least on a surface level. (The .5% are clever-clever gender deconstructionists.) This accounts for a lot of the people who say they're bothered by yaoi - sub often means very sub, female-identified in both looks and behaviour, and pushed around in bed to boot. The emotional territory covered can extend into melodramatic soap opera, and frequently into classical grand opera. It's also a primarily anime-based genre, so physiological realism goes right out the window. Self-lubricating doujinshi boys are a hoary joke in English-yaoi circles.
That being said, the underpinnings of yaoi have nothing to do with top/bottom per se, but with power dynamics. To generalise grosso modo, the interest to the reader lies in the process of negotiation that (hopefully) makes up the majority of the story: the slash archetype has the two characters negotiating themselves into a position of mutual equality and understanding, the yaoi archetype has them negotiating themselves into a control-based relationship. Seme/uke is an external - material - indicator thereof. It's not quite as simple as saying the dominant has control over the submissive either, though that's probably what most people think it is. For one, there are "reversible" characters (luffly terminology that, makes me think of coats). For two, there's what one might call "seme x seme", or stories about two characters who are both classic dom types. For three, just because I've drawn a doujinshi in which A is top and B bottom doesn't mean I can't turn around and drawn one in which A is bottom and B top, as long as each story justifies itself and is internally consistent. In all these instances (and there are more) there's still an eventual t/b outcome, but the negotiations are more complex and subtle.
(Why Japanese m/m is primarily based on power dynamics is a very good question. Likely it's a societal thing - Japan as a culture places a huge amount of emphasis on control and hierarchy and flattening of affect. As with your Warrick, sex becomes a place where one can let that part of oneself go, often in a manner that seems dangerously violent/chaotic to the outsider. Japanese het erotica has similar themes: rope bondage is a national art, sort of like sumo or tea ceremonies or flower arranging. (The other one is origami decorations for the penis. I'm not making this up.) And word on the street is that the gay/lesbian scene in real life is very rigidly top/bottom as well, so it may be more of a realistic view than most Westerners assume.)
Finally, in what most fans think of as the memorable "classics" of Japanese BL manga - Zetsuai, Ai no Kusabi, Kizuna, debatably Fake and Gravitation - the seme has the "hard power", but the uke has the "soft power". In other words, the top is at a physical advantage, but an emotional disadvantage. This is about where your books come in. (Whew. ^_^) When I say Toreth is like a classic yaoi seme... well, he is. He's controlling, unscrupulously manipulative, and crazily possessive (how he always says "you're mine" during sex - that if nothing else is an ultra-classic BL line). He's very much the top, at least in the game. (The forced pleasure/seduction scenarios they play are very doujinshi-reminiscent - there's not a lot of stories like "Wait For It" in English, AFAIK, whereas the Japanese can and have started an entire published series based on that game premise, which once again tends to freak your average slash writer out.) He's also volatile, tortured by insecurity and vulnerable in general toward that one person. The one who's emotionally centered and keeps the relationship together is Warrick, even if he is sexually "submissive". (He's not submissive at all outside the bedroom, and to be honest is a good deal less, um, useless than BL ukes tend to be. If the Administration series were manga I'd say it was "seme x seme". Picture Warrick in a relationship with someone much more effusive and clingy - even someone like Sara, say - and he'd be the one with the emotional distance issues.) And the basic relationship theme of the series is how they negotiate the intricacies of... call it power or control, or better yet call it trust. Physical control/trust is the touchstone for Warrick (including not just the game but such things as towels on his bathroom floor), emotional control/trust for Toreth. They come to a balance, and something happens to throw them out of that balance, and then they have to find a different balance. And so it goes.
Then there's a lot of little things. Details of aesthetics or character tropes. The near-futuristic setting, say; the fascist-fashion uniforms; the... the fact that you have one dark and one blond. *grins* (In manga it's almost always thus, because it's more interesting to draw.) Sara the cheery super-admin. The disturbing way in which the Carnac-Toreth-Warrick dynamic mirrors the dynamic in Fake, except about a billion times better written. (Fake is... the most unrealistic anything I've ever read, basically. It's set in a version of the NYPD in which everyone's gay, and drawn/plotted by someone who obviously knows nothing about America except what she's gathered from reruns of Miami Vice. That aside, Carnac plays a similar plot role to Commissioner Rose, and looks like him too. Upon which my biochemist friend asked me who I thought JJ in Fake corresponded to, and I nearly said Barret- Connor, except I didn't think B-C wanted Toreth at the time. So, er, if you write that it'll be doubly disturbing!) Some of the side characters like Paul, who could've walked out of 70's tanbi manga, or the catboy who's... well... a catboy.
Once again, I don't know why there are so many bits that match up, if you're not and were never into anime. (If Blakes' 7 is like anime... well, I wouldn't be overly surprised, given that it's dark space opera with improbable clothing, but I've never heard anyone so much as make the comparison.) All I know is that yaoi fen who read your series would probably pick up on most/all of the above, at least subconsciously, and that's what strikes a chord.
Notes:
The following are the more on-topic responses in the email conversation that ensued (i.e. apart from the parts of the discussion that grew heavily story-specific and/or personal). It proved easier to reproduce them this way than to rewrite the essay to include the valid points therein. ^^; Italics are Manna's responses, plain text are mine.
Shared population, for starters. HP appeals to anime fen because the canon is intrinsically anime-like, in the sense of being an intricate fantasy high-school set-up primarily targeted at a YA audience, and also in the sense of, well, did you see Lucius Malfoy in the film? :P So a lot of the online anime fen behaviour (like surfing for Japanese fanart) simply carried over. It helps that the Japanese fandom is equally sizeable.
FWIW the other one that's like this is LotR.
The equality between characters that comes with modern slash was a later development. I've heard it argued that it was at least partly induced by the increasing awareness of queer politics within slash circles, which helped move stories away from the 'we're not gay, we just love each other' style of the early days.
So possibly some of the animosity against yaoi style amongst slash fans may be due to what are perceived as a resemblance to the 'bad old days' of slash when it was (allegedly) steeped in partly unconscious homophobia. Kind of like the way the Romans vehemently condemned the practise of human sacrifice in other cultures because they'd only given it up recently themselves. But I'm not a proper slash historian, so take all this with pinches of salt.
I knew, but didn't connect it in my head. That could be the reason, yes; I've heard allegations of unconscious homophobia directed at the more girly run of yaoi. (Heck, it's difficult to say it isn't - though unconscious heterocentrism would probably be better terminology for it.) OTOH none of the Really Old Slash I read for research purposes normalised the edge of non-con the way BL does, though it tended to be effusively touchy-feely.
I think that's very true -- people throw the word homophobia around when it's more probably that people just haven't considered that there might be an issue at all, and could be pretty receptive to different ways of looking at things. Although classic WNGWJLEO, with extensive justifications for why this one relationship is *different* is rather suspicious. Even there, though, I think it's possible that at least some writers are more focused in part on wanting to make the relationship ultra-special and destined to last forever, and are using the 'look, it's so Meant To Be that it even overcomes the fact that I'm technically straight!' to emphasise that specialness.