Forum - View topicAnswerman - Why Doesn't Yaoi Anime Get Dubbed?
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MissT
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My reason for assuming that a lot of people whining about YoI being called BL are anti-bl is because a lot of them are. You would be surprised how many people I've heard praise yoi for it's good and healthy m/m representation and at the same time write off Doukyuusei as "just a BL anime", despite the fact that they are pretty similar in tone - the main difference being that Doukyuusei actually shows the pair kissing. I have nothing against YoI myself, but I'm very tired of it being praised as some revolutionary masterpiece. Like, don't praise shows for things they have not done, it's like praising Sherlock for great LGBT representation (it's not).
Look. I'm asexual. So I sympathize with the wish to see more queer representation in media but I'm also not Japanese (though I am asian). I'm not sure if you are Japanese (if you are I apologize) but from what I can tell the majority of people who praise yoi for it's representation has been white westerners. Very few Japanese LGBT people seems to care about yoi and I find that very telling. I mean the fact that yoi is set in a world seemingly free of homophobia and oppression where they can get married, despite same-sex marriage still not being legal in either Japan or Russia (let's not even talk about Russia here) is unbelievable. One of the main gripes Japanese LGBT people have with BL/yuri are that it's unrealistic and does not reflect how it actually is to be LGBT in Japan and that fits Yuri on Ice to a T. The show is created by Japanese people. The target demographic are Japanese people. If you feel represented by yoi, that's great. But a lot of Japanese LGBT are not going to agree with you. And frankly, demanding that japanese anime creators should cater to western interests and standards - especially if it comes from people who heavily pirate anime/manga is full of entitlement and is also dare I say, mildy racist.
As for my reason to bring up the time slots... You brought up the airtime of Yamada as a reason that it could show m/m kissing, making it sound as if YoI was not a late night anime and therefore could not show the kiss, which was not the case at all. Though I feel like I might have misunderstood you. I'm still fairly certain that the reason for the kiss not being shown was a very deliberate and stylistic choice. |
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lebrel
Posts: 374 |
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As a lot of the posters here have already mentioned, I think both the question and answer were a little off base; plenty of BL and Technically Not BL anime has been dubbed over the years. The economics may make dubs less likely, but they do happen.
In the case of YOI, like No. 6, it is Technically Not BL, and thus is more mainstream-acceptable both in Japan and the US. I'd bet my next month's rent that if we could pin down the directors and feed them truth serum, they'd admit that YOI never makes the relationship unquestionably overt specifically in order to keep it mainstream enough to get the buy-in necessary to make something with that much ambition. If it had been no-plausible-deniability actual BL, it would have been much harder to get real-life skating professionals as consultants, professional costume designers, extra key animators, and all the rest of the resources that went into making it such an awesome-looking show. (And Bill 156 has nothing to do with it; the Technically Not BL safe harbor existed way before that.) As to whether YOI or No. 6 are BL-esque or "real gay stories", as with most Not Technically BL stories the only thing that's keeping them from being actual BL is that they maintain a thin layer of plausible deniability. If you want to see romance stories that deal with actual gay issues (from women's perspectives, admittedly), you are better off looking at the more mature end of BL, since the characters can be overtly gay and the stories can address that directly. There are limited options in English for non-BL takes on the topic, but Fumi Yosinaga's What Did You Eat Yesterday and Gengoroh Tagame's My Brother's Husband (which just came out this week) are general-audience seinen manga that deal with gay issues. |
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louis6578
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I've gotta say, while I'm a straight man, for some reason when I see gay romance in an anime, it makes me think that the anime is more mature than I otherwise might think. Part of why I tricked myself into liking Future Diary all these years is because Akise seemed like too good a character to be in a bad show.
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BlueOla
Posts: 161 |
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I don't think it's about "not being one of those girls", it's just that saying that yoi is BL is implying that it's ONLY that, whereas in reality it's mostly a sports show with a gay romance on the side. It's like saying that SAO is a romance anime; I mean sure, it features romance, but that's just part of it and that's not the main selling point and not the only reason why people watch and enjoy it. Apart from that it's the fact that the word BL brings mostly negative connotations whereas I (and many others) consider YOI one of the few anime with good gay representation. Calling it BL cheapens that aspect. I also think that it actually relies on very few BL tropes? I mean, I've seen many fujoshi saying "I love yaoi, but I hated YOI" or saying that Victor and Yuuri's relationship is boring etc etc. Really, I'd say it actually used very few tropes and reversed some on their heads. And I'm surprised about the amount of people saying that YOI was just baiting or that the relationship was too ambiguous or deniable or just not explicit enough. I mean spoiler[it showed two men exchanging gold rings under a church and later on one of said men referred to them as engagement rings and said they would get married. Oh, and let's not forget that both of the men later explicitly kiss the rings. Not to mention the final same-sex pair skate which currently isn't even legal in the real world due to ISU being a conservative organization, which makes the entire sequence a pretty overt political statement.] Surely, if they wanted it to be just baiting then they didn't have to go that far? Just hugs and an implied kiss would have been enough to satisfy the supposed fujoshi fanbase. I was actually surprised with how much respect the relationship was handled. I know it could have been even more explicit but I can't blame them for not stepping over the final line - after all this was all an original project that could have easily flopped should they limit their fanbase too far. It's understandable that they'd be cautious, but even while being cautious they went very far. When does "baiting" stop being baiting? When everything is made 100% explicit? Until then, the couple could get married but if they never explicitly confessed their love for each other or openly kissed then that would still just be baiting and fanservice? I really don't understand this logic. |
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Juno016
 Posts: 2391 |
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On the topic of Yuri on Ice being a BL anime, the new manga anthologies for the series were placed in the BL section of the local book store AND Book Off. And in Nagoya's Mandarake, the BL section was filled with both doujinshi AND magazines and artbooks for the series. While BL doujinshi can exist for non-BL shows, the other stuff kinda makes me think that the fanbase in Japan has already classified the series as BL, and they don't seem one bit upset about it.
Really, genre classifiers are not as black and white as we believe they are most of the time. Utena has enough elements of the magical girl genre in it that it sometimes gets MG the label, but even that has been debated for decades. Inuyasha is technically shounen (it was in Shounen Sunday), but it frequently gets a partial "shoujo" label by its fans because the romance is so shoujo-esc. Magazine qualifiers aside, blurry genres are fine. Yuri on Ice most definitely has BL elements in it, which means it will likely appeal to many BL fans for those elements. Even if it's mostly a sports series, it's also BL, and there's nothing wrong with that. Some BL are more realistic than others, and some are better-written than others, and some are more "BL" than others. Really, it's up to you. |
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Gina Szanboti
Posts: 11378 |
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By a cast with almost nothing but hentai on their resumes, like they were dubbing Sensitive Pornograph or something. 
Me too. 
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lebrel
Posts: 374 |
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BL series can have more going on than just the romance; in fact, for Not Technically BL stuff it has to, otherwise it loses that crucial plausible deniability. And whether or not you have negative associations with the term BL is irrelevant to the categorization of the series.
The central relationship and character dynamics use a lot of BL coding. I didn't notice any tropes it "reversed". It's not BL because the creators were careful not to step over that line, not because it is so different from other BL.
Considering that the first BL manga to include a gay wedding, as in "get up in front of all of your friends wearing a tux and exchange vows" wedding, was in 1987, and that there is a ton of modern BL that explicitly discusses the legal status of gay marriage, YOI didn't go very far at all. (Note that it's a side character, not Yuri or Victor, who voices the "marriage" interpretation of the rings.) As you mention, YOI couldn't have been completely explicit about the relationship between the guys without losing a lot of its mainstream appeal; the creators know what they're hinting, the audience knows what the creators are hinting, the creators know the audience knows, but they never come out and say it. |
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MissT
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lebrel beat me to the reply, but I'm gonna post mine anyway orz
I'm a bit curious where you think I (or anyone else) implied that just because something is BL it can only be BL and nothing more. BL is mainly a demographic, it's not a genre. Calling yoi a BL does not make it any less a sports anime. In fact simply calling it BL is awfully vague. Is it a BL fantasy, sports, sci-fi, romance or horror manga? Because all these things exists. That is like saying that a manga is a seinen. Okay, so is it like Berserk or Chi's Sweet Home? They are both seinen but are of completely different genres. Yoi is called a BL because the target demographic are fujoshis. This is the truth. If people think that Kubo/Yamamoto wrote this with japanese LGBT people in mind they need to rethink.
The reason it brings negative connotations is A) because some yaoi fangirls are/have been very, very annoying and B) because many anti bl people have pretty much never read a BL in their life that wasn't Okane Ga Nai or something similar. Read better BL is my advice.
Of course some fujoshis are not going to like yoi. Just like how some ecchi harem fan does not like every ecchi harem anime out there. Or how shoujo fans may like Ouran High School Host Club, but detest First Love Monster. The same fujoshis who call yoi boring may be the same people who adore Saezuru Tori wa Habatakanai. People are different, and fujoshis are different.
Some animes bait. A lot. Samurai Flamenco ended with the two male leads promising to get married to each other and the director still insisted that they were not gay. Considering how vague Kubo has been when asked about the kiss, the rings and the final performance it's safe to assume that the relationship was deliberatly done to be vague. Seriously, every interview with Kubo has had her saying this like "the rings are good luck charms" or "why does it matter if it's canon? Why is it so important to know?" and that just says a lot about her actual intentions. |
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Alexis.Anagram
 Posts: 278 Location: Mishopshno |
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I love it when I enter a thread and find all kinds of different truths being stated and it's like, I agree and disagree with ~everyone~. That's fun. Like:
YES. Truth. Thank you.
I actually laughed because this is absolutely the only reason I ever liked this show and it hurts. YOI occupies such a weird space for me, because while I love the (100% undeniably) queer relationship which centers the whole narrative, I have to be realistic and acknowledge that (while I have no clue what it is like to be queer in Japan) I get the distinct sense that it plays politics with queer identities in an effort to retain a certain mainstream entertainment value, invoking various genre cop outs which don't do actual queer folks a whole lot of favors. It's like "respectability politics" writ large, an effort to cozy up to social trends which have been historically inaccessible to queer folks for a reason and which, from my- perhaps unwarranted- perspective, need to be smashed to pieces, not validated and given shelter by an LGB platform that isn't necessarily looking out for the interests of the most vulnerable queer populations. BUT I am so goddamn thirsty for queer rep I make every effort to embrace this show even while imploring it to be more challenging, to stick up for its queer audience a little bit more. And, I mean, it's a lot of fun: it's a good show, just a bit confused at heart and with a consequent penchant for self-sabotaging its greater potential. And I'd say it's not BL. Sometimes I think its creators are using BL as a conscious point of reference and playing with BL tropes to keep fans of that genre clued-in, on the periphery, but I think it's important to preserve its most tangible accomplishment: the presentation of a gay romance that isn't filtered through the lens of fetishization which is the hallmark (arguably the entire point) of the BL genre. It's not just "boys kissing," it's "boys kissing for the explicit purpose of audience titillation targeting their gayness." Victor and Yuuri exist very much as human characters with interests, drives and goals outside of hooking up and being in denial and acting super embarrassed and shamed/shaming and manipulative of each other: they don't orbit each other as a signal for fans to experience the *wonder* of a romantic catch-22 vicariously through them; rather they act as a team, purposefully, to realize their goals and in so doing advance the thematic directive of the story which is what we're meant to be paying attention to and applauding. And I have to say, I applaud that. |
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lebrel
Posts: 374 |
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I see two things here: 1) if "titillation" is all you think BL is, you need to read better BL; and 2) you don't seem to like romance (as a genre) all that much... Do you feel the same way about shoujo romance-with-other-plot vs. shoujo romance-is-the-plot (assuming you read shoujo), and if so, is the latter also fetishizing? |
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Juno016
Posts: 2391 |
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A lot of the LGBT issues raised here do have to do with a lot of bias and ignorance on Japan's side. In particular, there aren't very many authors of the works who actually indulge in the Japanese LGBT community and there are Japanese LGBT members who recognize the dissonance and look the other way. That said, there's a pretty idealistic sense of fantasy and a conscious sense of recognition that BL portrayals in most BL stories are not realistic, and the fans simply don't want realism. It's kinda like how many male otaku are obsessed over fictional women, but have no interest in actual dating.
On the one hand, it IS upsetting that so much of LGBT representation and recognition in fiction and media comes from this stuff. I'm straight, and even I kinda feel weird when a story pulls out idealistic rubbish and foregoes realism in a serious story about LGBT characters. But I also feel just as invested in some of these representations that I don't just want them to be demonized and forgotten. The best scenario would be to slowly get closer to reality without foregoing the attractiveness of the story or characters in that "idealistic" sense, and that's partially why I like Shimura-sensei's works so much. But yeah. Until Japan's LGBT community is able to comfortable assert itself as a normal part of society, I don't think we'll see a lot of progress. For now, I enjoyed Yuri on Ice as a story and didn't mind one bit that the main characters ended up gay for each other. It wasn't very realistic, but the progression and acting felt natural enough to believe, and that's a challenge that is hard to match in general. I think it deserves the recognition it received. Now, as for dubs... I honestly remember watching Gravitation in English. Man, that was... interesting. Who was the voice cast in that? I feel like I can remember the voices, but not the names. I don't watch English dubs anymore, but I should probably remember cast names of that time period. Time to dive into the encyclopedia... |
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Alexis.Anagram
Posts: 278 Location: Mishopshno |
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Well, I certainly don't aim to be reductive, but I'm also not going to argue into a void: so what constitutes "better" BL? Is the convergence of ideas here meant to suggest that I might not hold heterosexual romance (i.e. shoujo?) to the same standards as I do gay & queer romance? I'm not sure I follow. I enjoy plenty of romance genre material and I don't see a fast-and-hard line between romance-as-plot and romance-with-plot (do you?), so that seems like a straw man waiting to happen. My objection to BL is not a personal grievance with centering romantic or sexual attraction but a response to the ways in which BL does so as a means to a specific end. And, I guess maybe this would answer your question somewhat though it's not a one-to-one comparison, it's the same or at least a similar objection I have to the methods employed by series like Twilight which also exploit a romantic angle to convey a particular and not especially empowering message. |
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relyat08
 Posts: 4125 Location: Northern Virginia |
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Yeah, I'm with you. My time with anime has given me a greater understanding and appreciation for that subtlety and ambiguity, honestly. And yeah, just the fact that it plays a much bigger role in Japanese culture as a whole has become much more apparent over time. I do think that many heterosexual based romances feature more of that than what we would be used to in the West as well(I'm a big fan of KyoAni works, and those almost never end with a definitive relationship). Though it definitely seems even more vague in a lot of homosexual content. |
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lebrel
Posts: 374 |
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By "better" I mean BL that is, you know, better: better written, more mature, more artistically ambitious, whatever. Typically aimed at an older audience. More on the order of Red Blinds the Foolish rather than Junjo Romantica. The question regarding shoujo was trying to get a better idea of what it is about YOI that makes it not have the "fetishization" that you propose to be the defining feature of BL. If your objection to BL is unhealthy relationship dynamics, well, a) there's an awful lot of BL that doesn't have unhealthy relationship dynamics, and b) there's an awful lot of stuff that isn't BL that has unhealthy relationship dynamics, in works for every demographic and pairing type, including those aimed specifically at gay men.* People are kinky and fiction doesn't have to be about healthy prosocial topics to be entertaining (look at all the fetishized-violence action shows out there). With your clarification, I think your argument in your previous post is edging into "if I like it it's not BL" territory. (*If you haven't yet, look up the Massive anthology, which is a sampler pack of manga oneshots and interviews with popular gei comi authors, and shows some of the range that gei comi covers; several of the guys also read or write BL, and they talk a bit about differences between the genres. Be warned the manga parts are 100% NC-17.) |
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MissT
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I feel that "fetishization" has become one of those words that are constantly thrown around in the name of social justice but has been so misapplied that it has just about lost all its meaning and no one knows what it's actually supposed to mean anymore. Currently the most popular seems to be "if I don't like it it's fetishizing, if I like it it's not." I'd say this entire discussion just shows how it was probably a smart move for Kubo/Yamamoto to not specifically label Yuri on Ice as a BL. Because it's pretty clear that the same people singing its praises would not have been nearly as forgiving had the title actually been labled as one, even if the content had remained unchanged. And I still don't know what yoi has done that no other well-written BL manga has not done before it. Someone, please tell me what it is. |
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