documenting the BL fan experience
My first experience had three steps I can recall: first I uncovered the Duo Maxwell/Heero Yui ship in online forums and Google image search, then my best friend bought a VHS copy of Maki Murakami’s Gravitation, and finally I purchased a manga titled FAKE by…
I like soft romance as well as hardcore smut. I would like to see more realistic and romantic portrayals of m|m genre, by that I don’t mean just hide the dark side or anything. It should reflect the story the author is trying to show. …
My first BL introduction was around 2000. The Internet was still pretty limited in my country and my family was one fortunate enough to have access. I was around 10 years old snooping around the web, where I was able to find a closed group on LiveJournal who shared doujin scans. At that time I was not yet familiar with manga terms. I thought doujin was just an indie published original manga (instead of fanworks of existing IP). I binge-read almost all the scans available, where mostly were ‘yaoi’ doujinshi. I just rolled with whatever I could get for free from the internet, as I didn’t have my own money to buy regular shoujo or shounen manga in bookstores. Indonesia was (still is) very wary about homosexual relationships, and this was one of my first exposures to that aspect of sexuality, where the younger me could accept that BL can be just as nuanced and deep as heterosexual romance manga. (Haha) I have some memorable BL titles that I still hold dear even now that made me cry while I was reading it. Then it snowballed as I dove deep into fandom, reading fanfic, etc. I mostly joined the shounen manga fandom, so with an abundance of male characters, alot of the popular pairings are also M/M.
While certainly I recognize that some people were apprehensive about people’s first contact with homosexual relationship was through BL, I think it’s still better to be able to access something that conveys homosexual relationship not in hateful light. I was able to learn about the LGBTQ movement later because I had seen BL first and enjoyed it. A better understanding can be gained by having desire to know more and being open-minded, instead of instantly judging as it is in the current fandom climate.
— 23, She/Her, Indonesia
I’m quite grateful for pirated stuff still because that’s how I access even more titles from my country, as opposed to published BL that are mostly US/Euro-centric in its distribution. I do subscribe to Futekiya, but find other publishers a bit too unaffordable at the…
I think most of the people that like BL that surround me are also part of the LGBTAQ+ community, and we are pretty chill about it. I just have two friends that are really involved with original BL stories. Most of my friends like reading…
I’ve learnt very very basic katakana, so if the guiding katakana is given in a BL comic, I am able to follow it, although it does take me some time to decipher it.
—20, She/Her, India
The same as my opinion on m|w representation in romance… it depends on who wrote it, the story, and the characters. Everything stands alone. Yes, the genre has tropes, but I don’t like to assign a “genre” caveat to what I consume and generalize an…
I think here in the Philippines the more mainstream BL fandom is into Thai BL now, but there’s a large following of the “traditional” Japanese BL manga/anime since a lot of us grew up with general anime/manga. — 29, She/Her, Philippines
The depictions in BL are often exaggerated and don’t always reflect real life. It is a work of fiction after all. I know that as heterosexual person, my understandjng of LGBTQ relationships to not be as deep as an actual LGBTQ person. As long as you recognize that and don’t generalize, or impose things on people, just enjoy what you like.
— 23, She/Her, Indonesia
I grew up in the era of Ai No Kusabi, Kizuna, FAKE and Ayano Yamane. I read Tokyo Babylon and X/1999 as queer (at the very least deeply queer-coded) and works like Utena and Neon Genesis Evangelion were revolutionary to me. BL wasn’t easy to…
