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REVIEW: Love in Limbo GNs 1-2




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#HayamiLover



Joined: 22 Jul 2018
Posts: 796
Location: Eastern Europe
PostPosted: Tue Aug 20, 2019 12:04 pm Reply with quote
I'm still wondering why there are relatively few gay male authors writing BL, especially considering that most of the yuri authors are still mostly gay or straight women. Of course, I don't want to say that female authors write badly about this, or something like that, I just wonder why men rarely turn to this type of qeer content, more likely to be a female-focused BL audience than representing their own point of view.
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musouka



Joined: 09 Sep 2003
Posts: 705
PostPosted: Tue Aug 20, 2019 5:23 pm Reply with quote
#HayamiLover wrote:
I just wonder why men rarely turn to this type of qeer content, more likely to be a female-focused BL audience than representing their own point of view.


Whether or not they produce it--and people in the industry have implied the ratio isn't as lop-sided as assumed--there are definitely BL series that have a pretty healthy male readership. Could be that when a niche is filled, people don't care as much about the gender implied by the name on the cover.
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#HayamiLover



Joined: 22 Jul 2018
Posts: 796
Location: Eastern Europe
PostPosted: Tue Aug 20, 2019 7:14 pm Reply with quote
musouka wrote:
#HayamiLover wrote:
I just wonder why men rarely turn to this type of qeer content, more likely to be a female-focused BL audience than representing their own point of view.


Whether or not they produce it--and people in the industry have implied the ratio isn't as lop-sided as assumed--there are definitely BL series that have a pretty healthy male readership. Could be that when a niche is filled, people don't care as much about the gender implied by the name on the cover.


Well, I read that a noticeable amount of Bara mangaka originally started as authors of BL works, but I’m practically not familiar with the genre, to say something more.

Also, when I wrote the first comment, I forgot about the existence of a lot of works written by men about homosexual relationship with otokonoko, but as far as I know, for some "reasons" such works are almost never targeted as BL.
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R. Kasahara



Joined: 19 Feb 2013
Posts: 643
PostPosted: Wed Aug 21, 2019 5:37 pm Reply with quote
Thanks for the review! I'll put this on my list of things to pick up once I get through some more of my backlogged manga.
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poisondusk



Joined: 08 Aug 2006
Posts: 60
Location: Brighton, UK
PostPosted: Wed Aug 21, 2019 6:59 pm Reply with quote
Re: male creators and readership, Love in Limbo publisher SuBLime have noted in the past that on average 15-20% of their readers are male, and on some works it goes up to 50%, and that they tend to prefer more romantic works over hardcore stuff (there's a panel transcript here that mentions it, note that some of the images are borderline NSFW). So there's definitely a male audience out there, even if we're not always easy to spot.

It's likely there are more male BL artists than we're actually aware of too, given the way many artists even of mainstream series keep their identities private. Even in geikomi ('bara'), openly gay male artists like Gengoroh Tagame are very rare, so it's hard to get a clear idea of creator demographics, but if plenty of men are reading BL, there's a good chance some of them are creating it too.
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#HayamiLover



Joined: 22 Jul 2018
Posts: 796
Location: Eastern Europe
PostPosted: Wed Aug 21, 2019 7:35 pm Reply with quote
@poisondusk Well, my personal experience will probably be irrelevant, since not being a gay man, I am more inclined to “search” in BL works for stories with realistic portrayals of men and interesting premise, rather than any “interesting pairings”. However, even if a person like me can find something interesting in BL, I can easily believe that your conclusions and statistics are correct.
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