BL Featuring Childhood Crushes

With the possible exception of Where Your Eyes Linger (which I watched a long time ago and can’t really remember) all of the ones I screen capped actually depicted the younger selves on screen (with one or both protags recast with child actors). 

This is a contentious one (it touches on taboo for a lot of people) and I’m actually not sure on the source. It is in yaoi but mainly coupled to the stepbrother trope, and even there it’s not all that common. So I hesitate to call this a yaoi trope. 

Early live action “seed” yaoi adaptations out of Japan sometimes had this trope but didn’t actually depict the childhood, only referenced it (Takumi-kun & Forbidden Love come to mind). Thailand still does this, but often for side dishes like TulHin in A Chance at Love. 

This is one we occasionally see in het historical romances from the 1980s and earlier, sometimes coupled to arranged marriage. But usually the two child characters are depicted hating each other, not actually falling in love (or starting to).