Recently, I have been doing a fact a day in our Discord and decided to compile all of them into a singular article. So here we go.
Certain segments from an Article by Emma Hanashiro (2015) “What is BL/Yaoi [Definition, Meaning]
BL manga started in Japan in the 1970s. It was originally called “Year 24 Group” (24年組; 24 nen-gumi) that pioneered the genre. This group consisted of several female mangakas who were all born around the 24th year of Showa, or, 1949.
First, it is important to note that the definitions of Boys Love, yaoi, and shōnen’ai outside of Japan are different than their meanings within Japan. In countries outside of Japan, the following is a breakdown of the meaning of these terms:
Tanbi:
Tanbi is the original term used for any and all MxM relationship manga and novels.
Tanbi is a word meaning ‘the worship and pursuit of beauty’. It was used to describe the early male/male stories that mainly ran in June. June was heavily influenced by a well-known author and literary critic who used multiple pen names, so many of the stories utilized a high literary style. These stories came to be called tanbi – stories written for beauty and the pursuit of beauty only. Tanbi style includes flowery language and uncommon kanji/words, which makes it a difficult read for foreigners.
The tanbi style is mainly a thing of the past. It has been replaced by BL stories – mass-written, easy-to-read stories. Even authors known for their tanbi works like Yoshihara Rieko (Ai no Kusabi) now write mainstream BL and no longer use tanbi style. It’s probably because tanbi, like its name, pursues beauty both in language and storyline. It’s not simple and fast-paced like the modern BL stories.
Tanbi is like shounen-ai, no longer written but important in the evolution of modern BL. Tanbi sometimes is used interchangeably with boys’ love by bookstores, but that’s an old usage.
Boys Love (often shortened to BL):
Boys Love (often shortened to BL) is the translated English term for shounen-ai and has become the new umbrella term for all MxM literature from Asia.
A relatively new term used to indicate broadly manga, anime, or fan works depicting love between men for a presumed female audience. These relationships between men are often sexual and have determined and visually codified “top” and “bottom” positions. BL is characterized by 2 specific character roles: seme and uke. Seme refers to “top” “attacker” “1” “tachi” (gong in Chinese) Uke refers to “bottom” “receiver” “0” “neko” (shou in Chinese.) While they do have sexual connotations (much like the American slang “hitter” and “catcher”), they are derived from formal martial art forms. It is used commonly in some martial arts like kendo when referring to the attitude of an attacker.
Throughout this article, I will mainly use Boys Love as an all-inclusive term for media depicting male/male couplings.
Yaoi:
Yaoi is usually used only for any BL that includes hentai (sexual) content.
Yaoi is a Japanese word, which is actually something of an acronym. It comes from “YAma nashi, Ochi nashi, Imi nashi”, which means “no climax, no point, no meaning”.
In speech and writing, it’s a slang term used to refer to stories that focus on homosexual relationships, usually between men. Yaoi tends to involve graphic sex, often with little or no plot.
While yaoi is used like Boys Love to describe a genre with works focused on men loving men for a female audience, it has the additional connotation of depicting graphic sexual scenes. In typical advanced search options for anime and manga online, yaoi appears far more often than Boys Love, and is used in conjunction with shōnen’ai.
A lot of Japanese people use yaoi when referring to transformative or parody doujinshi, and BL when referring to original works that depict male homosexual relationships while English audiences use the two interchangeably.
If you like Japanese wordplay then the number 801 can also be read as yaoi: ‘short’ reading of the number 8 is ‘ya’, the 0 can be read as a western ‘o’, and the ‘short’ reading for 1 is the letter ‘i’. A joking alternative acronym among fujoshi is yamete, oshiri ga itai (or やめて お尻が 痛い) meaning “Stop, my butt hurts!”.
Shōnen’ai:
Shōnen’ai means a boy/boy BL without any explicit sexual scenes.
It is often viewed as focusing more on the story rather than the hot and heavy action between two men.
In Japan, however, there are slightly different meanings for these words. This has much to do with the history of the Boys’ Love industry and the gradual development of the genre over the past forty years. Shounen = young/teenage boy; Ai = love; Shounen-ai= young boy love. This is why most shounen-ai are set in high school and not with older men.
In fact, most classic old-time shounen ais are published under the tanbi genre. The term shounen ai only come later when the manga industry become more popular and the term shounen was popularized.
Bara
Bara is any BL that has been written by males.
Although sometimes conflated with yaoi by Western commentators, the gay manga genre Bara (薔薇), which translates literally to “rose” in Japanese, has historically been used in Japan as a pejorative for gay men, roughly equivalent to the English language term “pansy.”
Since the 2000s, bara has been used by this non-Japanese audience as an umbrella term to describe a wide variety of Japanese and non-Japanese gay media featuring masculine men, including western fan art, gay pornography, furry artwork, and numerous other categories.
This misappropriation of bara by a non-Japanese audience has been controversial among creators of gay manga, many of whom have expressed discomfort or confusion over the term being used to describe their work. The genre is also known as ML or Mens Love (メンズラブ). Unlike yaoi, which is typically idealistic and created by females for females, bara is targeted at gay men. It started in gay magazines in the 1960s. Bara manga is also called gei comi (ゲイ コミ) or gay comics. They are also less of a bishonen style gay men’s manga or gei comi, also called Men’s Love (ML) in English and bara in Japan, caters to a gay male audience rather than a female one and tends to be produced primarily by gay and bisexual male artists (such as Gengoroh Tagame) and serialized in gay men’s magazines. Bara is an even smaller niche genre in Japan than yaoi manga. Considered a subgenre of seijin (men’s erotica) for gay males, bara more closely resembles comics for men (seinen) rather than comics written for female readers (shōjo/josei). Few titles have been licensed or scanlated for English-language markets.
Yaoi has been criticized for stereotypical and homophobic portrayals of its characters, and for failing to address gay issues. Homophobia, when it is presented as an issue at all, is often used as a plot device to “heighten the drama”, or to show the purity of the leads’ love. Matt Thorn has suggested that as yaoi is a romance narrative, strong political themes may be a “turn off” to the readers. Critics state that the genre challenges heteronormativity via the “odd” bishōnen (“beautiful boys”), and Andrew Grossman has written that the Japanese are more comfortable with writing about LGBT themes in a manga setting, in which gender is often blurred, even in “straight” manga.
Bara is more true to actual gay male relationships, and not the heteronormative relationships between the masculine seme and feminine uke types that are the most common romantic fantasy in women’s yaoi manga. In comparison to yaoi, gay men’s manga is unlikely to contain scenes of “uncontrollable weeping or long introspective pauses”, and more likely to show characters who are “hairy, very muscular, or have a few excess pounds”.
Compared to gay men’s manga, yaoi is “more careful to build up a strong sense of character” before sex scenes occur. The men in bara comics are more likely to be stereotypically masculine in behavior and are illustrated as “hairy, very muscular, or [having] a few excess pounds” akin to beefcakes or bears in gay culture. While bara usually features gay romanticism and adult content, sometimes of a violent or exploitative nature, it often explores real-world or autobiographical themes and acknowledges the taboo nature of homosexuality in Japan.
This one was also originally published in a bara only magazine; gingaku hakase to marmot
Gachi muchi
Gachi muchi (“muscley-chubby”) has been misconsued as bara among English-speaking fans.
This epresents a crossover between bara and yaoi, with considerable overlap of writers, artists and art styles. This emergent boys’ love subgenre, while still marketed primarily to women, depicts more masculine body types and is more likely to be written by gay male authors and artists; it is also thought to attract a large crossover gay male audience. Prior to the development of gachi muchi, the greatest overlap between yaoi and bara authors was in BDSM-themed publications such as Zettai Reido, a yaoi anthology magazine which had a number of openly male contributors. Several female yaoi authors who have done BDSM-themed yaoi have been recruited to contribute stories to BDSM-themed bara anthologies or special issues.
Danmei
Danmei are Chinese BL-themed novels.
The word danmei (耽美; sometimes seen as tanmei）actually came from the Japanese term tanbi, both means “to worship the beauty”. Tanbi authors focused on writing about pure love that is uncorrupted by society, and men x men was a great source of pure love. Then this genre reached China and they developed their own danmei culture.
JJWXC (the main provider of danmei in China) was actually created as a fan forum in 1998 for fan fiction. After a huge fuss, they ended up being bought out and now consist of heterosexual, gay, and lesbian romance as well as stories in other genres, but it is best known as a platform for original danmei novels. They used to be able to post any H works they wanted until they created a censorship program run by readers in the 2010s.
In 2010, a group of JJWXC users who were opposed to the site’s increasing commercialization and self-censorship founded an offshoot forum called Gongzi Changpei (公子长佩, also known as Young Nobleman Changpei) that was aimed at reviving the free (in multiple senses of the word) spirit of early danmei writing. The forum later became commercialized in 2017.
In October 2018, a female danmei author who wrote under the pen name Tianyi was sentenced to 10 years in prison after her self-published homoerotic novel featuring rape and teacher-student romance sold over 7,000 copies, violating laws regarding excessive commercial profit for unregistered books.
Random Facts:
Female fans of danmei often refer to themselves as fǔ nǚ (腐女; lit. ‘rotten woman’) which is borrowed from the Japanese term fujoshi. Male fans are fudanshi. Older fujoshi use two terms to refer to themselves:
Kifujin (貴腐人) meaning “noble rotten woman” is a pun on a word meaning “fine lady”
Ochōfujin (汚超腐人) has a sound similar to a phrase meaning: Madame Butterfly.”
The manga artist group Clamp began as a group creating yaoi dōjinshi. They later published multiple works containing yaoi elements, such as RG Veda, Tokyo Babylon, and Cardcaptor Sakura.
The 1993 film, Farewell My Concubine directed by Kaige Chen, was first a novel written by the celebrated Hong Kong novelist Lilian Lee, who also wrote the film’s screenplay and an updated version of her novel after the film’s release– one of her few novels translated into to English and sold abroad. Categorized as Gay/Historical Fiction, Farewell My Concubine may be the English-speaking fandom’s first taste of danmei.