The gachi muchi ("muscley-chubby") subgenre of boys' love, also termed bara among English-speaking fans, represents a crossover between bara and yaoi, with considerable overlap of writers, artists and art styles. 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.
The men in bara comics are more likely to be stereotypically masculine in behaviour and are illustrated as "hairy, very muscular, or a few excess pounds" akin to beefcakes or bears in gay culture. Compared to gay men's manga, yaoi is "more careful to build up a strong sense of character" before sex scenes occur. 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". 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.īara 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. Matt Thorn has suggested that as yaoi is a romance narrative, strong political themes may be a "turn off" to the readers. 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. Yaoi has been criticized for stereotypical and homophobic portrayals of its characters, and for failing to address gay issues. Few titles have been licensed or scanlated for English-language markets. 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). Bara is an even smaller niche genre in Japan than yaoi manga. I had to go to Wikipedia for the Bara related explanations, so it's more influenced by the Japanese history and development of the genre and is longer.Īlthough sometimes conflated with yaoi by Western commentators, 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. This has much to due with the history of the Boys Love industry and the gradual development of the genre over the past forty years. In Japan, however, there are slightly different meanings to these words. It is often viewed as focusing more on story rather than hot and heavy action between two men. When used in opposition to yaoi, shōnen’ai means a boy/boy manga or anime without any explicit 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. 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. Throughout this article, I will mainly use Boys Love as an all-inclusive term for media depicting male/male couplings. The “top,” also called the seme, “attacks” or rather gives love to the “bottom,” or in other words the uke. These relationships between men are often sexual and have determined and visually codified “top” and “bottom” positions.
In countries outside of Japan, the following is a breakdown of the meaning of these terms:Ī relatively new term used to indicate broadly manga, anime, or fan works depicting love between men for a presumed female audience. Article by Emma Hanashiro (2015) “What is BL/Yaoi įirst, 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.
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