There’s even a name for male fans of boys’ love fans: “ fudanshi.”įor Cal, a gay BL fan in his thirties, the claims that BL is “just” for women and that cishet women make up the fandom spaces are kind of laughable. Then, in a 2018 paper about the motives fans give for consuming this content, 58% of the 724 people who responded were men. While it’s difficult to find recent demographic surveys about boys' love audiences, a 2016 survey from Yano Research Institute said that a third of Japanese boys' love fans are men. (Slur or insult reclamation can be tricky here, by the way, because chances are, if you’re on English language portions of fandom Twitter fighting over boys' love… you’re not someone who can reclaim a slur aimed at Japanese women.) A key term in this corner of the transnational culture war is “fujoshi.” Scholar Björn-Ole Kamm notes, “The Japanese fans of BL reclaimed the term fujoshi (rotten girls) that had been coined by the mass media to describe them, much as the label queer was reappropriated by gay and bisexual people." However, the term “fujoshi” is still used as an insult in English-language social media as a way of marking someone as being interested in boys' love in a potentially harmful way. This feeds back into one of the common criticisms seen in boys' love and slash fandoms for years: that the content doesn’t accurately represent gay men’s lived experiences, and since it is understood as a genre just for women (straight and not) to explore sexuality safely, it doesn’t take real queer men into consideration for the most part.
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Honestly, if you like media about queer guys, there’s probably a boys' love series for you no matter what kind of experience you want.Īnother popular (mis) understanding about boys' love? That the only people who read it are cishet women. The heat level, as with romance media anywhere, can range from light and sweet to a five-flame chilli situation. Boys' love, as a genre, can cover protagonists across a wide range of universes and dynamics living their best lives wherever they are. While danmei series - one name for a version of boys’ love fiction written in China - adhere to many familiar tropes about pretty boys and men falling in love, complex plots and tragic backstories are present in series like The Untamed, the live action adaptation of Mo Dao Zu Shi. In Thai BL series A Tale of Thousand Stars, the protagonists are a volunteer teacher and a forest officer, adults settled in their lives to some extent. Not only is one of the protagonists of Renji’s Monster and the Beast middle-aged, so are several of Scarlet Beriko’s protagonists including dark crime comics like Jealousy. Despite the name, the characters don’t actually have to be boys in high school or college.
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It’s commonly understood that “boys' love” as a genre - encompassing not only manga, but TV and movie adaptations and originals, too - does what the label suggests: explore relationships between male characters at different stages of their lives. In fact, it's quite possible that the bookstore will have one section for manga and a separate section somewhere else for light novels, all depicting male male romance.” “If the store you’re wandering around is large enough, you might find these texts occupying an entire shelf, floor-to-ceiling, or even multiple shelves. These male homoerotic stories might be found in the form of manga - the name for Japan's globally known narrative comics - or in the form of “ light novels” - a local label for lowbrow, highly disposable prose fiction,” McLelland and Welker write. “If you walk into a typical bookstore in Japan today, somewhere on the shelves you are likely to find various books depicting romantic and sexual relations between beautiful, stylish male characters. In the introduction to the 2015 collection Boys' Love Manga and Beyond: History, Culture, and Community in Japan, editors Mark McLelland and James Welker walk readers through this subtype of manga and how it’s commonly defined.