Your biggest pet peeve about BL?

[Kalchi]

I feel like some people are misunderstanding the objective of this thread. Like how I responded to @candiedcotton, I'm actually referring to the writing aspects of BL since I'm a writer. I I mean sure we can talk about het romance or GL too but I prefer to be specific rather than too big hence the reason I specifically mentioned 'BL.' Also because I'm currently writing one. I thought that people would understand, but I guess I should've included the word 'writing' in the title.

Anyway, looking at the replies, I guess most of us basically share the same opinion lol. Thankfully, there's a few recent BL that I think are decently written, with a proper plot and intriguing storyline instead of just smut every page lmao.

Thanks a lot to everyone for answering!

[DarkSena]

@Kalchi Because pron and smut sells and it doesn't have gender.

It's kinda sad, it keeps making me sad that the biggest titles which exploded are mostly exactly the same. Some people obviously don't need a plot. To have two characters who are attractive enough and they make out in every second chapter is enough for your have exploding fame.

[Katzalcoatl]

On the writting aspect from my personal opinion BL has, in general, more sexual tension than GL. I think GL is more focused on the romance aspect.

I am only talking in general. I do know some BL have way more romance and less sexual tension scenes but authors usually tag those as LGBT instead of BL for some reason.

I do enjoy works with sexual tension from time to time but I prefer romance and drama way more.
I like to feel fluffy inside.

[candiedcotton]

I think part of the issue is that anything with gayness is sort of lumped into the title of 'BL', when some of it is really just gay porn. Like, if we took all the het porn from all the porn sites and marked them as 'straight romance', it'd probably have the same issues.

I think we just need to differentiate what is basically yaoi (gay porn generally made for women) bara (gay porn made for men) from shonen ai (actual gay romance stories). They're quite different. Hentai frequently has the same tropes as yaoi, after all. But for some reason we don't call it part of the straight romance genre.

[Freemints30]

Hentai frequently has the same tropes as yaoi,

This... so much this. Honestly Ive seen/heard het vn that would turn send you straight to limbo, hell and heaven and back. Maggots anyone?

But Ive never seen as much reporting and bitch about Het romance compared to Bl. Its odd

[candiedcotton]

99% of the het romance genre is just step sisters and getting stuck in weird places.

[candiedcotton]

One more quick thought, and this is sort of a side topic, but I want to express it while it's in my mind.

I really do support women writing BL, and it bugs me that this also gets a lot of heat. There's nothing wrong with women enjoying gay romance or even porn. For a long time anything remotely sexual was built for the straight male gaze, and especially lesbian 'relationships'. It wasn't about (and usually still isn't) lesbians being represented, it's just fap material made for dudes and is almost always unrealistic.

So as a gay dude, women have my full support in taking a step up in an industry that has been ripe with sexism and built for straight men. Enjoy what you enjoy. I don't care if it's gay porn or some cute romance. I'll enjoy it, too.

[BlairFujin]

Thing is those are only fandom terms that became part of western fandom's vocabulary through a game of early internet telephone. In Japan it's all BL. Yaoi were parody porn without plot works I think in 90s, shonen-ai were stories about literal boys and bara is a considered a slur and a more proper term for those comics with heavier, more masculine characters are called geikomi. And geikomi are still considered BL.
But, yeah, there is an issue when very tame love stories are lumped together with some hardcore niche porn from pixiv...

[candiedcotton]

That's fair. I'm used to the old terms because I got into manga and whatnot in the early 2000s, lol.

Thing is, it would just be common sense, as it is with het media. But the only difference is that it's gay dudes.

I also feel like most of the people who complain about it aren't exactly the target audience and probably haven't read much BL, especially modern BL.

[BlairFujin]

Yeah, I've noticed that complaints tend to be focused on 10-20 years old series (can we leave junjo romantica alone? I also don't like but it's so old and irrelevant at this point...) or just vague "there's too much just straight up porn without any plot" and then I think about the titles I've got on my shelves and wonder what they're talking about... (ok, they are mostly 18+ ones, but it's more because those without any sex scenes tend to focus on younger characters and I'm nearly 30 and not as interested in stories about highscoolers 'xD)

[NickRowler]

I looked it up and apparently the reason why people use yaoi/BL interchangeably is that a lot of vanilla MLM romance was marketed as “yaoi” in the West. I am not sure if it had to do with taboos on gay relationships at the time or weeaboos preferring things that sound Japanese.

I think I sort of have an issue of BL being a caught all term. Mostly because I associate “boy” with young men. It’s weird calling romantic relationships between middle aged men “boys love”. It might also be the audience trying to seek out stories about young men. The BLs I have written have been about adults but I had a commentator call them teenagers.

[candiedcotton]

I agree very much. Especially the 'boy' element, it's kind of weird. BL feels like a newer term to me (I don't know how long it's been around, but I mostly remember 'yaoi' being the go-to phrase for any gay content) and when I first heard it I genuinely thought it was some sort of weird pedo stuff. I still don't like the term and I wish we could just say "gay romance" instead of all these weird alternative terms.

[BlairFujin]

Well, it's been around since 90s - https://yattatachi.com/history-of-boys-love the use of yaoi and shonen-ai in the western fandoms came out of some kind of misunderstanding of the terms and my guess would be that the switch to just labelling everything as bl came with more works getting official translations

[candiedcotton]

Yeah, I mean more in the west, I think BL is a sort of newer term generally here. If I recall, it kind of started to get traction on tumblr, but don't quote me on that, lol.

[BlairFujin]

took a look at my bookshelf and the oldest mangas I own that got labelled as BL are 10 years old, before that, whenever we'd get any bl released it'd be either under the yaoi term or there would be no genre name
so... that's how things went in Poland, I guess 'xD at that time we got a new publisher that started out focusing mostly on bl (then started translating light novels as well and got a cash cow in sword art online) and then other publishers noticed that there's money here and now we've got only one that doesn't publish any bl...
So... yeah, 10 years ago... it could have been when tumblr was more relevant

[candiedcotton]

Honestly, you might have just been ahead of us as far as terms go, too. I remember that it was really hard to find anything in the genre in public stores (even really niche bookstores and there was only a single manga/anime oriented store in my whole town) so almost everything was ordered online. But I might just have been a bit oblivious to seeing the genre evolve, too.

[NickRowler]

Yeah, I mean more in the west, I think BL is a sort of newer term generally here. If I recall, it kind of started to get traction on tumblr, but don't quote me on that, lol.

I remember "shonen ai" being a term used since I was in middle school.

Even the Urban Dictionary is dated 2004

Urban Dictionary: boys' love

I am not sure about Tumblr, seeing how I didn't use it in the early days. But the term did exist online when talking about scanlations and webcomics. I think the term probably grew more in webcomic spaces due to people who were not Japanese writing these stories. When I first posted my webcomic 10 years ago, I labeled it as a BL.

[candiedcotton]

Yeah, it's probably just that I wasn't really involved in webcomics at all back then. I only bought books, and usually it was just direct-translation manga of various sorts.

[amouraccompli]

Noncon/Dubcon. Bar none my least favorite foible. I dunno if it's like some internalization of the 'boys will be boys' trope, or if it's supposed to be an indicator of just how much desire is going on, but eff all of that.

Literally wrote my own series because I was so sick of getting my heart broken by sex scenes that also double as crime scenes. Like what the ...stop trying to rape people into loving you or telling you whether they cheated on you or whatever the hell.

If consent is your kink, feel free to read my crap. Lots of sex, zero rape.

Read Free Will | Tapas Web Novels

[UrMom]

1. (This is more of a problem with Yaoi than BL) Self-lubricating assholes. Every time I've seen it my mind goes to watery diarrhea, and I can't unsee it after that. Truly disgusting! I can only imagine the smell.

2. All the chicks are either antagonists or extremely disrespectful fujos. I feel particularly bad for the antagonist women because 90% of the comics they're in it turns out they used to be the love interest's partner, who gets cheated on. While they usually show the dude is miserable with her, or the story treats her like a throne, it's shitty that the guy just doesn't break it off with her until after she find out he's cheating.
   Like, that's a whole ass fictional depiction of a human being treated like crap to make the main relationship look good. How garbage is that!

Other than these two I don't necessarily have a problem with the subgenre, my beef tends to be with how the creators treat others, which has gotten much better over the years. A lot less cis/het teenage girls sexualizing real gay men, or shipping real people like objects than when I was a teen.
Sure, some tropes can be gross, like the SA stuff. Although I don't want to judge the work since the person could be dealing with trauma via their stories. (Even the romanticized SA stuff can be therapeutic for some survivors since they're still taking control over the situation via the fiction.) Children and people incapable of differentiating fiction from reality definitely shouldn't consume that stuff, because they will probably take it to heart, but most adults who like weird/gross art/fiction don't tend advocate for it irl. As long as the creator isn't a rl rape/abuse/sexism/etc. apologist, or isn't a freaken monster themselves, I couldn't care less.

... Admittedly I'm probably a little bias since I am one of those creators making gross fiction. Lol

Bonus romance peeve that isn't just used in BL: Love triangles. Why can't the three of them just hook up and have a nice poly relationship? Especially when they all have good chemistry with one another.