Patrick Galbraith, a visiting researcher at Sophia University and author of The Moé Manifesto, has spent years in Tokyo studying the explosion of BL superfandom, which, according to his findings, pulls in more than $120 million annually, and accounts for roughly 4% of all printed manga in Japan.Īlthough many young women like Hana prefer to keep their comic book predilections a secret, Galbraith estimates that there are well over a million self-titled rotten girls in Japan, which has created myriad sub-genres within the BL universe. Hana sees great disparity in her country’s gender gap, citing a World Economic Forum’s report, which finds Japan towards the bottom of the gender equality list.īL has become Hana’s fantasy world where two people are drawn together for no other reason than the simple fact that they love one another and strive to overcome any impeding obstacles in order to be together. The other problem, according to Hana, with the love between a boy and girl, is that it comes with a lot of societal pressures, like marriage and pregnancy, that can sully the purity of romantic desire. She’s never told anyone about her ten-year obsession with BL comics and wants to make sure she gets it right. She’s come prepared with notes, like any good otaku, and shuffles her pages of penned thoughts like a deck of cards. Hana seeks refuge from the buzzing lights of Otome Road in a nearby café and makes another swirl with her straw. They flock to Otome Road, or “Maiden’s Road”, a wide-set boulevard with a parade of animation-related boutiques selling everything from collectable figurines to thousands upon thousands of comic books. While Tokyo’s neighborhood of Akihabara is known worldwide as the center of otaku culture-a veritable capital of geek-dom, if you will-female enthusiasts tend to congregate beyond of the spotlight in Ikebukuro, on the other side of the city. They’re obsessed with what is called BL, or Boys’ Love-fictional stories that detail the romantic entanglements of two men. Rotten girls, or fujoshi in Japanese, is a self-inflicted term used by women throughout the country who fall under a certain category of ardent manga (comic book) and anime (animation) fandom. She slowly moves her straw through the whipped cream in her designer latte and looks up. In this article, we are going to attempt to compile a list of all the popular Boy’s Love anime! I asked a lot of my female fellow weebs for help on this one, so let us hope I do not offend a bunch of fans. Started out as fanworks the mangas and other works grew so popular that now it has become one of the most popular anime and manga genres of all time! The genre also attracts the male audience, don’t get me wrong but it is catered more to the female audience, it has good-looking boys, dynamic relationships which cross all societal norms and some sexual tension, and in some cases even more than just tension.īL, or sometimes referred to as the Yaoi genre has a rich history but it took to the audience in the 1980s when several female mangakas finally got their works published. The BL genre has become quite popular in recent years with some great attention from big-time anime studios like MAPPA, Lerche, and many more.
Boy’s Love has taken over all the female anime watchers like a tsunami.