Apologies for the lack of BLog posts lately! We’ve been pretty busy in-house working on lots of great BL series (look forward to it!) and thus have less time for writing and research. But today (July 9th) happens to be my babygirl Genshin Impact Kaveh’s birthday, so I figured why not do a short and easy oshikatsu post about celebrating your oshi‘s birthday?

This culture has been going global more and more, considering an entire mall in Shanghai is currently celebrating Kaveh’s birthday, there are birthday cafés set up all over China, and there will be a video showcasing his beauty in Times Square. It’s always been A Thing in fandoms worldwide to acknowledge and celebrate your beloved’s birthday. Japanese fandom often likes to play it on Hard Mode, though, so I’ll talk a bit about common ways to celebrate your oshi’s birthday here.

I would say the most visible and common celebration you’ll see online is: fanart! It’s very common for fans to plan way in advance and compose an artwork that perfectly sums up their oshi, what they love about them, how they feel about them, etc. I don’t think this is particularly different between the cultures—there’s tons of wonderful artwork from all around the world every time a much-beloved character has a birthday. Of course, there’s other great fan content that’s often released on and around characters’ birthdays as well, such as cosplay photoshoots, fan videos, etc. These are often marked with the tag #NAME生誕祭YEAR so they’re easy to search!