It can be hard to distinguish between different genres and subgenres in Manga andAnime. This is obvious when it comes to boys' love, which doesn't necessarily have any strict boundaries in what it can contain in terms of story, characters or themes. Even if it's the preferred mainstream marketing term in Japan for the genre, things get even mudder.
Boys' love is a Japanese term used to describe fictional media that is centered around male/male romance. For example, Given is a musical drama as well as a BL romance, Junjo Romantica blends comedy with its romance and drama, and so on.
What Is Boys' Love and How Is It Marketed as a Genre?
Largely created by and marketed toward a female demographic, it's important to note that boys' love is a distinct genre from what's known as gei comi or bara. Boys' love often features depictions of gay men and romance that are unrealistic and unhealthy, such as rigid dominant and submissive roles, presenting sexual coercion or rape as an act of love, rather than the other way around. Although not all boys' love titles incorporate these ideas or themes, they are still well-known hallmarks of the genre.
There are many series that straddle the line between boys' love and those stories that feature a potential or heavily implied main male/ male couple. The intimate relationship between the main characters Victor Nikiforov and Yuri Katsuki has led many viewers to label the show a boys' love animation. The show is a sports title, not a romance, and it has a more down-to-earth take on this couple than the likes of Loveless, Ai no Kusabi or Junjo.
While boys' love has gradually been adopted as a mainstream term for the genre by publishers and consumers in Japan as well as overseas audiences, it wasn't always that way, and some confusion still exists. The abbreviation 'yaoi' was created in Japan in the late 1970s and early '80s as a way to refer to fan-published works. The tendency for these titles to abandon any real plot in favor of sex has been described. "Yamete, oshiri ga inai" or "Stop it, my butt hurts" were the alternatives to the acronym.
In Japan, yaoi, which means "all levels of sexual content" in Japanese, became a way for fans in the West to differentiate between levels of sexual content. It became popular on fanfiction sites for some stories to be labeled as yaoi only if they contained explicit sex scenes or were heavier on sex than romance. It might be labeled as either boys' love or shonen-ai if the story had a bigger focus on romance.
Although shonen-ai is the direct Japanese translation of boys' love, many Western fans use the term interchangeably. It was only in the 1970s that it became a term to describe romantic relationships between shojo Manga-style male characters who were presented as effeminate or androgynous.
In the early and mid-90s, boys' love became the main umbrella term by Japanese publishers for stories about gay romance, rendering words such as shonen-ai and yaoi obsolete. English-speaking fans love a genre that blurs a lot of lines, whether that's in terms of character types, storylines or level of sexual content. In the West, what might constitute a boys' love (or yaoi, or shonen-ai) for one viewer might be different from how someone else defines it.
