The popularity of Boys Love or BL is growing more and more, not only in Japan, but also in the rest of the world, so much so that recently a tweet became known on the Twitter/X platform thanks to the user @nametainu. And he shared a series of images with a rather curious story, as it is about a boy who goes to a club in search of love, opening the debate on how the plot within this type of stories is usually very entertaining.
According to the Otakus, Boys Love is quite entertaining.
The images in question of this curious work Boys Love show us a character who goes to a club, the drawing in question is one of its main distinguishing features, as we can notice the thick strokes, nothing detailed and quite rough, the illustrations are done in black and white as almost all manga. Once this thread of images was uploaded (which consists of 4 sections) users made several comments where we could notice them very amused with what they had just read.
“It’s a line you shouldn’t cross”, “Do you know the key points that make you feel good?”, “It’s the man who knows everything about men’s erogenous zones…” Are some of the comments left on the publication. On the other hand, Internet users opened a debate where they commented on why Boys Love content is so entertaining and it seems that there are many stories that once you start you can’t stop reading.
There are many reasons why the BL is gaining great weight, here are some of them; The exploration of social issues is something that this type of series manages to cover with its wide range of stories, we can easily find stories that cover different social issues and cultures or even acceptance, search for identity or discrimination itself.
A clear example of this topic could well be the manga Ao no Flag, as it explores precisely these aspects throughout the work. In addition, it is worth mentioning that thanks to globalization we not only have access to manga thanks to licensing, also many works are licensed on different digital platforms and hence many manhwas or manhuas are already well known.
Some of these Boys Love series are Here You Are (which you can find in Webtoon) and even the popularity of more adult works like BJ Alex or Painter of The Night have grown incredibly, to Painter of The Night we dedicated a post talking about its touching ending and you can read it here.
Another aspect that we could talk about and that has contributed to the popularization of Boys Love is undoubtedly the diversity of genres it has. These works can focus on stories between two boys, but these same stories can be police, supernatural, school or drama, plus you can find an endless number of clichés that may be to your liking and so say what story to start reading.
Now we must give thanks to globalization that has managed to popularize these stories and has given them a global reach, allowing many of these stories to be licensed and translated into other languages. Likewise, LGBT+ representation is a very important factor because representation today has helped many people identify with characters who have gone through the same things they have gone through, from confusion, to acceptance, to discrimination.
As you can see, all this exchange of ideas about Boys Love came about thanks to a couple of images that were shared on a platform. And yes, everything seems to indicate that BL has significantly influenced culture today, expanding the diversity of romantic stories and contributing to greater visibility and acceptance of diversity in relationships.
