Kuro’s Guide to BL, Yaoi and Shounen Ai – Where to Start!

After running my poll on Twitter, it seemed pretty clear that y’all wanted to see more Boys Love posts. So without further ado, I present my Kuro’s Guide to BL, Shounen Ai and Yaoi. I’ll be writing about the different areas of Boys Love as well as giving heaps of recommendations. Between these posts I’ll also be reviewing heaps of manga, webcomics and anime. I hope you all enjoy it

Intro to Boys Love

So BL essentially stands for Boys Love, it refers to any form of media which depicts male homosexual relationships. The BL world is filled with diverse characters and forms of media. To get us started I’d like to explain a few terms.

Uke & Seme: These terms are typically used to describe essentially the ‘top’ and ‘bottom’ of the sexual relationship. Think ‘Uke’ means Butt and ‘Seme’ means stick it in 😛

Shounen Ai: Shounen Ai media are boys love stories without much of a sexual component. Shounen Ai media has a huge range, stories can either be incredibly ‘light’ with only hints of BL to completely revolved around a couple, with lots of kissing ^_^. My next post will be on ‘light’ shounen ai stories.

Yaoi: Yaoi is probably the most popular media of BL. It features gay couples, mostly with a sexual component. Yaoi is incredibly diverse as well, from the characters design to the

Mangakau, Ootsuki Miu often draws feminine character like this

stories. Character designs can range from incredibly feminine to macho masculine. Most masculine characters are found in ‘Bara’ manga, which is usually targeted towards gay men, whereas yaoi is focused on a female audience (but anyone can read either one!).

Other areas of yaoi include shota- which features young boys (which i really dislike and find immoral), omega verse (where male omega characters can be impreganated by male alpha characters) and cross-dressing (note: this rarely includes stories of trans characters, it just features gay characters dressing in female clothes like a maid outfit), just to name a few.

Different Genres and Preferences – Find your fit!

As I mentioned about the entire BL world is filled with so many stories – you’ll be sure to find something that you enjoy. There’s stories about royalty and dukes, yakuza and the military. You can even go for something a bit more ‘everyday’ a read stories about teachers, college students and business men. My recommendation is to read often and read widely, it’s only then that you’ll find your ‘niche’.

A masculine seme and uke in ‘Ore-tachi no kijou jitai’

It’s also how you find out what kind of ‘couple’ you prefer. Some readers love both seme and uke to be ‘feminine’, others just like the uke to be ‘feminine’ or ‘masculine’, or both to be ‘masculine’. It’s really up to you, and what kind of style and stories you like! That’s the beauty of BL it gives you the freedom to express and find yourself.

‘Honto Yajuu’ one of my favourite BL about a yakuza and policeman

For example, my personal favourite stories are ones that involve business men, delivery men, people with mismatched jobs and I absolutely LOVE stories with characters who start off as rivals. I personally don’t really

My BL Journey

To be honest, my introduction to BL wasn’t the greatest. I was 15 years old and in maths class and the two girls in front of me were watching ‘Papa to Kiss in the Dark’, on our government issued laptops. So I couldn’t really read the subtitles from where I was at, so I figured it was just a regular anime. I asked her what it was about and she said “a father and son” anyway fast forward about 20 minutes and father and son start getting it on…sexually. Poor 15 year old me wanted nothing to do with it.

About a year later I started watching an anime called ‘Gravitation’, and I was beginning to be interested in the idea of two male characters in love.  So I began looking into shounen ai, and from there went on to yaoi. I can’t remember what my first yaoi was but I remember reading Junjou Romantic quite early on as well as some Suzuki Tsuta works. Surprisingly I actually spent a lot of time trying to find BL films and anime, rather than manga. I remember one particular film I watched with a friend where as the end one of the lovers just walked into the ocean to kill himself and I was like NO! WHAT!?

So thanks to these two I’m a single Fujoshi with two cats

Anyway fast forward about 6 years and I’m still 100% in love with BL. Not many people know that I enjoy it, to be honest it’s just my mum. And I’m not suggesting that you go an tell your mum you love BL. I got this virus on my laptop where it said the police had locked it and were coming to arrest me. I ran crying to my mum, and sobbed for 2 hours as we researched on the virus together. Of course after we unlocked my laptop it opened onto a BL site. If you want to tell your friends and family you love BL, do it! It’s up to you. I’m not suggesting either way, I just personally keep mine a secret.

Issues with BL

I always believe that to truly love and enjoy something, you have to be willing to look at its faults. You don’t really love something, if you just love it blindly. In BL, particularly yaoi, I find there are two areas that need improvement.

*trigger warning* My first point on this topic deals with rape and sexual assault. If you’d like to skip it, please scroll down past the picture to get to my second point 🙂  

Yaoi and Rape Culture

My biggest concern with yaoi – not other forms  of BL – is the normalisation of rape. The typical ‘rape’ narrative in yaoi is that a uke is assaulted and then sees the assault as a form of affection, and eventually falls in love with the seme. Another form of rape narrative is that the uke is blackmailed into having sex with or performing sexual acts on, the seme. In both ‘narratives’, there is no consent.

Very rarely is focus placed on the trauma of the attack, or the emotional and physical repercussions. In most cases the seme rarely admits any wrong doing, it’s incredibly common for the seme to say that they were seduced by the uke, or that the uke was into it. One incredibly common phrase is that “if you really didn’t want it, you’d fight harder”, “If you didn’t want it, you wouldn’t be so aroused”. One recent manga I read called ’12-ji Kara Hajimaru’ is the story of a uke and seme 12 years after the attack. The first few chapters start with the Uke’s trauma, especially after the seme accused the uke of seducing him and then blaming him for attacking him. But the last few chapters there’s a complete switch around. The uke falls back in love with the seme, despite there being no apology, and similar behaviour being perpetuated. The uke says “all I ever wanted was for you to touch me” – completely underscoring and dismissing his traumatic experiences.

One reader defended the use of rape in yaoi, you can read her article here. Essentially in her article she said that yaoi was a safe space for women to express their sexuality. And that the ‘rape’ or ‘sexual assault’ is an expression of ‘tension’ that ultimately produces affection. I’m not going to go in depth here why I find her opinion disturbing and disagree, I may write my own article in response, but just to summarise.

1. Women should NOT create ‘safe spaces’ for themselves at the expense of other minority groups. Sure it’s great that women can use yaoi to sexually express themselves. I completely support that, but it is completely improper for us to the normalisation of the violation of another human being to do so. Furthermore, while yaoi is often read by women, many other individuals engage in it too. Furthermore why is it so difficult to create stories that feature consensual love?

2. Rape is never an expression of affection. This honestly doesn’t need to be expanded upon. Rape is the sexual violation of another person.

3. Other forms of Yaoi media. As I mentioned before, shota is a form of BL media that features underaged boys. Most shota actually features these young boys being raped or sexually assaulted by older men. How can this be a reflection of affection? How can women  express their sexuality at the expense of a child?

I know that some people may argue that, well it’s just characters, they’re not real. They’re literally just drawings. But why should drawings be expressing such a terrible violation? Why should drawings be limiting and diminishing the trauma that rape victims experience and instead turn it into a normalised fantasy.

Tips on avoiding manga that may have sexual assault or rape:  My main tip on this, it may sound odd, is avoid manga where the characters on the front are either not smiling and/ or not standing next to each other. If one character is frowning, avoid it. If one character is holding one from behind, avoid it. If there are ropes and the character looks upset, DEFINITELY AVOID. Most of these scenes tend to happen in the first chapter or so, so you’ll know pretty quickly when to stop reading. I hope my 6 years of madly closing tabs and freaking out at some stories helps. You can check out another short interesting article on this topic here. All my recommendations and BL posts will feature manga that DOES NOT have rape or sexual assault in it. 

Stories are often the same

A unique take on school friends in  ‘Kurayami ni Strobe’

A smaller issue within BL is that pretty much there are 2 main  stories which are regurgitated again and again. I know I said above that Yaoi is incredibly diverse, I probably should have said in comparison to other forms of gay media. From what I’ve found;

• 35% of BL has a story about 2 school friends, one is in love with the other but doesn’t want to ruin the friendship.
• 35% of BL has a story about 2 salarymen, one is incredibly handsome and perfect, the other views the perfect one as a rival
• 30% of BL is something random and unique

But even within the 35% there is quite a lot of diversity and room for development. Some characters in regular stories stick to you more than the ones in unique stories. It all depends on how well the author can create these narratives.

Conclusion

I hope you enjoyed this intro to my new project, I really do hope to continue writing BL posts on my blog as it is something important to me. Please hit subscribe with either your wordpress account or email address to keep up to date with all my posts. If you have any comments or suggestions, I always love reading them! You can also contact me on my twitter and tumblr accounts!