Tapas and LGBT Sensitivity Failures

I haven't seen those ads, but the kind of queerbaiting in the "woman in disguise" ad would make me really uncomfortable, too. From your description it seems like the ad was really targeting LGBT readers wanting representation.

As far as the "seme/uke" thing goes, a lot of the gay people I know do like to throw around the labels of "top/bottom," so I suppose it can be useful to them. But at the same time straight people applying those labels to gay people and characters can come off as injecting binary stereotypes into same sex relationships. Pairings between masculine and feminine gay people definitely happen, but every couple is wildly different and I would like to see more variety in how gender and sexuality are expressed.

There's a real disconnect from the ads and some recently approved works and their support of the LGBT+ community. Is it okay to dehumanize the characters into sexual positions first, actual writing later just because it's gay people? We had SEVERAL threads about how BL gets constantly othered and it's why we have mods in the first place, and then this drops from the company account.

The biggest problem with that post is that a large account about yaoi works QRTed to vaguepost that some people dared to not like the seme/uke/seke stuff, and it seems their followers went into the post to start fights or QRT with their own hot takes. And well, now other big artists that do MLM saw this and are pretty disgusted.

The first few times that Snailenz mentioned seemed like mistakes that fell through the cracks, but this is just getting deliberately uncomfortable. Fiction is fiction, yes, but it affects real life and well it sucks pretty bad that the public view of the site is going right back into the "problematic yaoi library" view it used to have, taking its LGBT+ artists with it.

Well, thank you for the enlightenment on seme/uke, I never knew what it was called something. I have a little theory as to why yaoi is like that and it has to do a lot with who draws yaoi and where they learnt it from.
Because I've noticed a very big difference when I've read something that was written by a gay manga artist that wasn't even yaoi, and the former.

It's definitely a good point to bring it up because it just feels stupid, and not much different than the format used in shoujos, just the "woman" has more balls (not a pun btw) and the "man" can be a little "rougher."

Yaoi continues to spiral in that direction (I may be thinking of manga more than online comics). Some old yaoi was like that too but there were several that didn't make the main characters a "man" and a "woman." Though there would be a feminine or pretty boy as the love interest, they weren't in dominant/submissive roles.

Also just to add to the ads you're referring to, Do you know if the artist might be ESL? Like Chinese for that first one you mentioned?

These are coming from the Tapas social media account, not independent artists.

As an LGBT person I find that I want to read more BL but shy away from it because I don't want to be flooded with bad representation and stereotypes.

Heres the thing. That first post with the weird wording about the secret girl and this most recent BL one give false representation on what it means to be trans or gay

it makes trans people look like something thats fake or over exaggerated. It makes gay people appear sexualized and like their whole Identity is just about being gay. all of the prompts on that BL post are just surface level features OR something that wouldn't/shouldn't come through with just one OC design. Making characters Gay or trans is fine, but basing the entire character around that one aspect, especially if it is to fetishize is a real problem. not only does it make LGBT people feel uncomfortable and like we don't have a place on this site but it also gives people outside of the LGBT community wrong ideas about us and makes it harder to get support when we need it.

this reminded me of a story I wrote several years back that featured 2 gay teenagers falling in love and the first question I got asked when I shared my work was 'who's the boy and whos the girl' this is the type of thing these sorts of posts normalize to Cis-het people, its not positive representation

which sucks because I initially joined tapas FOR the LGBT inclusion.
when I first joined I saw this comic called 'Rock and Riot' about lesbians in highschool on the first page and it was just a simple love story. I saw LGBT comic and creators in a variety of styles promoted on the front page. That year they had a massive pride collab on the site with all sorts of creators and it filled me with joy to see the representation I was lacking as a kid!

Now I just get recommended a bunch of BL that all looks the same and I'm too scared to look at because of how prevalent these tropes are and I feel like there isn't a space for legitimate LGBT stories if sex or scandal isn't the main focus. which is really too bad.

2-cents, I just find it strange. Like there is some clear disconnect with marketing and the community (and everyone else). Really this is just gonna cause tapas to have "trashy yaoi" stigma. Like I understand the click bait and sensalisation if all you care about is the views and not care about the reputation.

But when if involves a community of people then it's just...brah. Tapas get your head in the game, and pay more attention to how your marketing comes off as.

glad it was resonating with you!

I’m a gay man. I read BL and create my own BL comic. In general though I’ve just accepted that most BL stories do not represent realistic relationships between men. BL and Yaoi are primarily written and consumed by straight women. This is a big part of where the stereotyping and weird heteronormative gender roles come in.

I don’t write a GL comic because I know that I don’t have the necessary background to do those relationships justice. Anytime you have someone writing a story about people whose experiences are drastically different from their own they are going to get things wrong. Especially if they don’t have input from the kinds of people they are trying to represent. Having more queer writers in genres focused on non-heterosexual romance is honestly the only way to fix this. You can see this in how male/male relationships are handled in the Bara genre, which in contrast to BL/Yaoi is generally written and consumed by gay men. Hopefully this genre catches on, but right now it’s still pretty niche.

That being said, since the main audience of BL/Yaoi is straight women and it’s doing incredibly well, trying to make the genres more realistically representative of the relationships they depict may not be wise from a business perspective. Seeing Tapas find a way to feature and promote queer stories by queer writers with ad content that is at least reviewed by them as well would be a great step in the right direction though.

On the specific subject of BL, there is an argument that most people know it's not realistic (I'm not sure everyone who reads is aware of this but I do understand the argument) in the same way you enjoy a slasher horror but know it's not realistic or an action movie but know t's not realistic or know romcoms aren't realistic. They know it's not realistic but enjoy it. And the BL actually should only encompass BL that falls and plays into these tropes. That it has genre conventions like any other genre and just a romance between two men without the tropes should be Gay Romance and would fall under LGBTQ+ stories.

One quick way to deal with this would be a proper if vague description of genres when you select them. Does Tapas consider BL a genre with it's own tropes or just any story forced on gay romance? That way both readers and creators would know what to expect from BL, unrealistic and tropey and we should look to LGBTQ+ for more realism or potentially more realistic ones somewhere mixed in, you've just got to find them?

I do notice Tapas seems to mostly promote BL of the typical tropey variety (and tbh this accusation could be leveled against some of the het-romances promoted too). I understand you promote what's popular and Tapas is a business, but it would be nice to have a bit more variety. I appreciate GL and LGBTQ+ are newer categories on Tapas and probably not as popular, I'm only just starting to see them turn up on the front page regularly, so I guess they're working on it (I hope they're continuing to do so so we get more variety there.).

I think one of the biggest issues with BL that we're seeing right now is the clash between queer identity and cultivated identity.

One of these is about the labels people apply to themselves and are tied into the real world experiences of people who identify under these labels (so in the instance of BL: gay men, trans men, trans masc people who also are attracted to men). The other label is a largely consumptive identity based around the content and commodities people consume (gamer, Whovian, fujoshi, etc are examples of cultivated identities).

The issue comes when these two models clash, when a person who has built their identity around what they consume comes up against the lived reality of someone whose identity has been commodified. As a brand, Tapas does need to move away from allowing cultivated identities to decide marketing and acquisitions powers, because ultimately while the money is there you can end up in very sticky situations with that: cases in point Gamergate or the most recent Star Wars movie.

@HGohwell I do consider BL as unrealistic fiction when consuming it, and most people I know around my age (upper 20s-30s) are also aware of its tropes genre when they read it as well. The stereotypical "fujoshi" behaviour we see online is often new fans of BL who are still young and discovering a genre that they assume is reality and not fiction.

My friend, a consumer of BL, (cis male, bisexual) calls it "a genre that's very similar to shoujo romance, from the types of couplings like teacher x student, to the wild tropes like wall slams". We all don't consider shoujo manga to be realistic, and he similarly compares BL manga to shoujo manga.

BL feels like that middle ground between shoujo and josei manga. It has the unrealistic flappy romance adventures that shoujo would have, but characters would often be older like the office ladies from a josei manga. Considering that it is technically considered a genre "made by women, for women", this description of BL fits well as a road between girlish shoujo and mature josei.

If I wanted realistic LGBT stories, I would specifically read stories that are tagged LGBT, not BL. I consider BL to be it's own genre.

Unfortunately, it's often the youngster who are loudest and most annoying in most areas. So, I do think it's quite useful for us older fans not to berate them for it but to try and teach them. Most of them will mature out of it. One credit I will give to Twilight is Stephanie always said she never wanted Bella to be a role model. It wasn't supposed to be for people to look up to, it wasn't supposed to be realistic, it was just what she wanted to write. And I think that approach needs to be taken with more typical tropey BL. Just some acknowledgement that this isn't what you should be looking for irl. Unfortunately this doesn't always work.

This is true and I think it's partly because of the perceived sexual nature of it. The same way Erotica in general is looked down on compared to romance genres no matter what the actual story.

As I say, something like a sentence at the top of the BL search or when you select it while making your comic/novel to make clear what it's supposed to be along the lines of "typically highly something-ized (there's a word here that's not simplified or stylized but I can't think what it is, fictionalised maybe, just something saying unrealistic without saying unrealistic) romances between men relying typically Japaneses tropes" or "typically stories focused on a romance between men" would make it clearer what Tapas thinks BL is.