Prior to reading BL, I've head that yaoi was just sex sex sex and shounen-ai had just as many cliches as your average shoujo romance manga. I was kind of reluctant to pick up Hanamatsuri since I though it would shatter my expectations of Aki's manga, but it actually gave me a lot of hope towards BL.
Though this series doesn't really have actual BL relationships, it's still really slashy and focuses on relationships between men. However, these relationships aren't what you normally would expect. For instance, in the second chapter
Inuou's Flower Master doesn't love Inuou for who he really is but rather his "false" stage appearance and accepts the difference in character. That was really refreshing because it didn't turn into the common "I'll love you for who you are and not who you pretend to be!!" cliche.
Aki also manages to develop the characters just right within each short story. That's usually hard for most mangaka because they can't cram all the information into a one chapter story. And the flowers' personalities are really adorable [especially the last flower]! The flower masters were nice too, and they synced up with their flowers' personality well. The only problem is that all of the stories turned out to be a little unrealistic and too ideal. It matched the atmosphere well, but it's just too perfect for me...
The art wasn't that glamorous [actually pretty bad compared to other Aki works], but it was really cute. I have a bias towards Aki's style so... ^^; Aki itted herself on her blog that she didn't feel like she did a good job on this series. But nevertheless as a reader, I thought that this was a really nice and sweet. I also recommended Hanamatsuri to a lot of people, especially those new to BL, and they all really liked it too.
