June 2025 – rentaBLog

The heat and humidity has cranked up in Tokyo, June is coming to an end, and with it Citrus Con 2025 is officially over! 😭 We’re so sad! The lead-up to Citrus Con was so stressful, but the weekend was just amazing.

This was our third year with Citrus Con; we also wrote event reports in 2023 as attendees, and in 2024 as panelists. Every year we have so much fun and it’s such a wonderful experience that we want to crank it up a notch, so this year for Citrus Con 2025 we did MULTIPLE panels on top of being major sponsors, and also tried to be in the Discord as much as we could (timezones notwithstanding… 🙃), since this is a rare and vital opportunity to actually interact with our users.

Being in Japan, it’s unfortunately incredibly difficult for us to stay on top of the Western convention scene—which is much more vital for participation in the English manga industry than you might expect. Not only are many big announcements planned around convention season, with it being an amazing opportunity to showcase your service and wares and drum up hype, but it’s one of the few chances to get face to face feedback by interacting with your actual customers.

However, since Citrus Con is an online convention—and ALSO currently the only large-scale English-based convention focused solely on the BL community—this one we can attend! We MUST attend! And so we did. 😎

In this report we’ll talk about about Renta!’s history with the convention scene, what it’s like on the industry side preparing for a convention, and our experience this year! So, without further ado, let’s hop into it!

Citrus Con Homepage
Citrus Con Twitter

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Recently we’ve been trying to brain storm how to change our BL Twitter so it’s more fun and interactive! Over the past year, through conversations with readers and community members, we’ve been doing a lot of trial and error regarding what our followers do and don’t like about our social media presence. “Stop posting the same series over and over and over again”? Got it. “We want more culture and recommendation posts”? Working on it! We want to make the BL Twitter as fun to follow as it is to run.

As part of our push to have a more engaging Twitter presence, this last spring we hosted the “BL Trope Tourney”! This was our take on the incredibly popular March Madness men’s college basketball tournament, which we’d wanted to do for a while. Initially, we wanted to face specific popular series off against each other, but that was understandably shot down by our licensing team since it could potentially be upsetting/negative to the publishers and artists. So we shelved the idea for some time—until we realized there were other ways to have a fun bracket without making our wonderful partners uneasy!

Thus, the BL trope Tourney: 16 popular BL tropes were pitted against each other, and over the course of 15 days we held a poll to slowly eliminate the tropes one by one until only a single trope reigned supreme.