My favourite topic of all time.

Some of you seem to be subject matter experts. 

Then, let's exchange about what makes the fandom so lucrative as of lately. Why should one jump onto the wagon and not be left out. What is the link with the LGBTQ+ community, if any ...

A favourite topic of mine as well. There's no clear-cut answers to some of those questions. 

But to start off with, what is the link to the LGBTQ+ community? There's so many! For one, not only straight women are fans of BL, although they're the largest target group. Lesbian and bisexual women have always made out a considerable part of the fandom. I once talked about this with lesbian friends who were also fellow BL fans, and they talked about how BL creates a utopia where being queer is the norm. And many BL works ignore homophobia, so it's wonderful for LGBTQ+ people to sort of imagine themselves in this dreamworld where none of our real world problems constantly hangs over us. 

And although not all gay men love BL, seeing as it can be seen as exploitative/appropriation of gay culture etc, there's always been male BL fans as well.  There's this huge stigma against men and liking romance, but I know so many guys who love romance stories, straight as well as gay. 

Circling back to lesbians/bisexual women who read and/or create BL, many of the Japanese manga creators who explored these kinds of stories at what is generally considered the beginning of the medium during the 70's also wrote yuri/girls love. I'd love to eventually see more of those kinds of stories being adapted to movies or drama series as well. 

As for why the genre has become so lucrative, well, economics and statistics are a huge part of that: (note: extremely simplified explanation of complicated subject matter mostly from the Japanese perspective): women used to be seriously undervalued as customers, but the rise of single career women or housewives with lots of spending money and time to actually read and watch movies and television made companies take note and start targeting them as valuable customers. 

I'm less knowledgable about this subject matter as it relates to the genre spreading to other countries, but the companies are obviously making a lot of money on BL. As I understand it, it's a bit of a gold rush in, say, Mainland China after The Untamed became such a smash hit. And Thailand seems to have an impressive BL industry set up. 

I'll stop there before this becomes a whole essay... ;) 

Even SamYU are paying attention to this thread. Please keep on writing. ?

I’m ace + nonbinary (an alien, in other words), and the characters who look / act / think like me happen to be men, so it’s not like I have much of a choice, lol. I’ll watch anything LGBTQA, BL, GL, whatever, as long as the story makes sense and doesn’t drown me in cheese. 

I've definitely found more queer women in BL than not, myself included, and I find those spaces to have less stereotyping when writing fanfic. But there is also a lot of heteronormativity in parts  of fandom particularly around who tops and who bottoms and basing those roles on personality or appearance.

I also think a lot of commerical BL is very divorced from LGBT issues, we see a lot of gay for you and refusal to label (which is valid not everyone likes labels but as a genre just ignoring sexuality a lot of the time?). Bisexuals rarely exist. So much dub con. I don't have an issue with dark subjects, I do take issue with how common it is in the genre? Even the rom coms?

not to mention RPF shippers, some of whom are fine, they stay in their lane but I've seen some of them harass the irl partners of people. Boundaries people.


i read this great article the other day that looks at both sides of the homophobic vs. feminist arguments about BL that just sort of laid out both sides (imho it can be both those things). When I'm not on mobile maybe I'll share it.

Dani, I'd love to read that article if you find it again! 

I agree with your post! I also wish modern BL wouldn't lean so heavily into heteronormativity, like the rigid ideas of tops/bottoms and how it leans into heteronormativity, and sexualising abuse and non-con is a big no-no for me. I've always preferred BL where the characters feel like LGBTQ people with a queer identity, rather than walking BL tropes like the "only gay for you" cliché you mention. 

While I get that BL nowadays is a "dreamworld" as I mentioned in my reply above, originally the genre leaned toward melodrama that explored heavy topics like forbidden love, identity, religion, sexual abuse and so on. The characters were usually quite androgynous. My read on these early days of BL (before it was even called "Boys Love") is that the writers weren't trying to exploit LGBTQ+ people, though there was actually a bit of an exotic angle to their writing as these were Japanese women mainly writing about European young men falling in love.  

Obviously BL has transformed completely since then, and since BL (as well as western slash) spread across the world it has become almost mainstream. I think that once they started making movies and tv-series based on BL manga/novels, it became something very different. 

For one, BL now isn't something that's mostly being written, drawn and/or read by a female audience; it also includes male actors who star in these fantasies of male gay love. I remember how straight male Hollywood actors used to win Oscars for portraying gay men because of how rare it was, and nowadays we have so many male actors breaking into the industry by taking these BL acting roles and even established artists taking a BL role in order to grow their brand. The BL fandom and industry are almost unrecognisable from what it was when I first became a BL fan. 

IRL shippers was the biggest surprise to me. I knew about it from the Supernatural fandom, but I never knew that it had grown into such a huge part of the industry as well, with all the PR events and actors being contracted to use performative fanservice as a way to attract attention. It's...quite down putting actually. There's a discussion to be had about privilege – both the actors' and the audience's.  

It's also a bit uncomfortable to see fans so utterly convinced that all the actors experience character bleed. I've seen so many references to partners – real or suspected – being attacked by fans, and I've also seen the heartbreak when fans realise that their IRL shipping couple "breaks up" or are otherwise revealed not to be real. It can't be good for anyone involved, except for the ones making money on this sham. 

https://soar.suny.edu/handle/20.500.12648/1337

The main difference I found with western slash fandom is that, at least in the early days before having queer people on screen or in books became more common, was that a lot of it was fanon. Spock/Kirk was never going to happen on screen, it was all that just fandom conjecture. With, as you mentioned, the show runners and actors sometimes leaning into that in a preformative way that often felt queerbaity (Sherlock comes to mind as well). Whereas BL tends to be a mix of doujinshi and officially published works, I feel like western media doesn't quite have the same genre specifically aimed at woman? Slash fandom, itself, definitely follows some of the same tropes but there's no official equivalent that I'm aware of anyway.

Also fanservice in the BL industry is so over the top? Like I'll admit a part of me loves watching the stupid party games they make people play but I'm also simultaneously uncomfortable at the way it feels almost exploitative? Of both the actors and of queerness by making men kiss (or nearly kiss) for a paying audience. I've never seen this type of fan service for straight series and there aren't enough GL to really compare (which is a whole other rant tbh).

You're last paragraph is spot on! I remember watching Glee and being a fan of Kurt and Blaine (Klaine). Darren Criss, the actor playing Blaine, was a straight man in a long term relationship. His then girlfriend, now wife, was often harassed on twitter because people shipped the actors IRL. People would go so far as to ask bloggers on tumblr to tag posts containing her because they found her "triggering". 

Just wanted to say this somewhere and didn't know where I could so Yuki's mom from Life Love on the Line and Pete's dad from Kiss me and again and Deep Blue Kiss are the BL world GOAT parents