Category: Event

Citrus Con 2025: Going All Out!

~ ames ~ 1 Comment

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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Yamayade “You Should Be The One To Come Kiss Me” STELLAMAP Drink Stand

~ ames ~ Leave a comment

Today, March 21st, the drama CD for Yamayade’s smash hit Omae no Hou kara Kiss Shitekure yo (released on Renta! as You Should Be The One To Come Kiss Me) came out to much fanfare, and in celebration a pop-up shop for the series also opened at Sofmap stores across Japan! In collaboration with the Akihabara location’s STELLAMAP café, which often hosts BL collabs and cafés, there was a drink stand on the sixth floor. Thankfully, our kind boss graciously gave us the go-ahead to take a short work trip to hit up the drink stand and pop-up on opening day, so we’ve decided to post a report!

For the drama CD itself, the following write-up is from Sou, since I’m not particularly well-versed in the drama or seiyuu scene:

The main cast features none other than Chiaki Kobayashi as Eito Kanda and Ryōta Suzuki as Kou Ueno. The two of them are accomplished seiyuu with a long list of roles under their belts in a myriad of series, including both mainstream and BL works. Perhaps most notably for BL fans, the two of them recently co-starred as Kiyoshi Adachi and Yuichi Kurosawa respectively in the drama CD and anime adaptations of the mega-hit BL series Cherry Magic! Thirty Years of Virginity Can Make You a Wizard?!

The CD comes in both regular and deluxe edition (titled the “Kiss me more?” set — how adorable is that??), with the latter including an extra CD with bonus tracks and a special booklet that includes a bonus manga, a Q&A with the characters, and other special extras. Plus, there may be little bonuses that vary depending on where you purchase the CD from, so be sure to check out the 特典情報 (“bonus info”) for whatever retailer you’re looking to buy from! For Sofmap, this is a pair of “polaroid-style” cards with a foil-stamped replication of Yamayade-sensei’s signature. I was particularly stoked for this bonus, so I immediately bought a copy from Sofmap while enjoying the pop-up shop and drink stand. And, you know I had to splurge on the “Kiss me more?” deluxe edition for that extra booklet and audio! I’m personally excited to experience this story all over again, with the new addition of voices for the characters I’ve come to love so much.

Sou was super excited to be able to pick up the CD along with the drinks and goods, and spent much of their time in line going over the various special editions from a bunch of different stores. I, unfortunately, actually get really flustered and embarrassed listening to voiced BL content, so I don’t usually partake. But it was fun seeing Sou excited over the drama CD release.

But we’re rushing into things…! Let’s start from the beginning.

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J.GARDEN 57: Return to Paradise

~ ames ~ 1 Comment

Spring is here! To many people that means the scent of melting snow, the blooming of flowers surrounded by freshly green leaves, beautiful warm weather, cute spring clothes, the excitement as summer approaches, etc. etc. but for me…

It means J.GARDEN is back again, baybeeeeee!!

I unfortunately had to miss J.GARDEN 56 due to going back to the States for the first time in two years, which was devastating (though, nice to see my family and enjoy Minnesota’s fall weather), but thankfully Sou was there to step in and pick up all the books I wanted. (Including all of Jiro Kawaii’s!) Either way, I’m stoked for J.GARDEN 57.

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ChillChill Awards 2025!

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Make sure to cast your vote! ChillChill Awards 2025 nominees dropped this last Friday, and boy is the competition intense. Around this time last year I wrote about the ChillChill BL Awards and why they matter so much—about ChillChill’s rise from a review and indexing site into essentially the community hub for all lovers of BL manga in Japan—so I’ll spare you from having me write too much here. Nonetheless, I still wanted to make a quick index of all the nominees from the 2025 BL Awards that you can read on Renta!

Last year we had quite a few, and thankfully this year is no different. Also, not just in regards to Renta!, this year’s BL Awards are a testament to how big BL is getting in the West because many of the nominees are licensed by a variety of other localization companies—both digital and print. It’s so wonderful to see how many BL get brought to an international audience now, not to mention so fast. It used to take much longer before BL was licensed for release in the West, and the options used to be so few and far between. It’s such a testament to Western BL fans who keep showing up pushing that BL isn’t just some niche genre—it’s got a massive and excited fanbase ready and willing to support the genre and its creators in any way they can. I love that so much, both as a fan and obviously as someone who works in the field. I can work my dream job only because of the BL fans who show up to support its creation. Thank you so much!

Another thing that’s a bit of a pride point for me is that two years in a row, now, most of our associated BL Awards nominees (particularly our own licenses and localizations) are in the up-and-coming category. That’s honestly so exciting! I talked a little bit in my post about the benefits and drawbacks of being a digital licensor about how we’re able to take more risks on lesser-known, up-and-coming talent due to the lower entry fees of digital versus print, and it fires me up every time I think I get to play even a tiny part in bringing these new artists to a wider audience. And this year’s BL Awards have a particularly good mix of super popular, established artists and rising stars!

Anyway, without further ado, here’s the list of the 2025 ChillChill BL Awards titles you can find on Renta!—including some sneak peaks into exciting upcoming licenses! 🤭

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2 Professional BL Manga Editors Answer YOUR Pressing Questions (Bonus Q&A from Citrus Con)

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The recorded Citrus Con panels have been posted to their official YouTube page! You can check out the live drawing with Tsutako Tsurusawa here, and here is the link to our industry panel on localization, working at the BL Factory, and our finishing Q&A! I know I’ll now be spending the rest of my workday listening to all the panels I missed due to timezone constraints.

While we’re still incredibly happy about how our Citrus Con panel went, our only regret was that we didn’t have as much time to answer everyone’s questions, and also weren’t able to read the main chat as we were doing the Q&A. So we went through the video recorded by our wonderful coworker in Sales (which had the chat visible) and took down all the questions we missed so we can answer them here!

Some of the questions here are continuations from questions asked during the Q&A, to make sure to watch the Q&A first (timestamp: 39:40)!

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Renta! Busts Onto The Con Scene: Citrus Con 2024

~ Admin ~ 4 Comments

This past weekend, for the first time ever Renta! was able to take part in a convention: Citrus Con 2024. In previous years we’ve been able to attend conventions as either industry or as sponsors, but never as actual panelists or participants. It’s admittedly a bit hard for us to stay on top of the convention game from all the way in Japan and with a relatively small English-speaking staff, so opportunities often come up only once they’re too late to jump on. But this year, we wanted to participate, and since the Citrus Con staff was so on top of everything and gave us plenty of time to get our ducks in a row, we were able to pull it off!

What is Citrus Con, you ask? Well, Sou already wrote a wonderful report on last year’s convention, if you want something more in-depth. For the tl;dr version, I’ll let Citrus Con’s about page speak for itself:

Citrus Con is a virtual 18+ convention dedicated to BL/queer media, shipping, fan works, and honoring how fan culture has grown in the past two decades.

Citrus Con is one of the few English anime/fandom conventions where BL a is not only welcome, but is actually the main focal point. Another wonderful selling point of Citrus Con is that it’s highly inclusive—fans of all types of ships, fandoms, and content are welcome and celebrated. Plus, since it’s online (and free!) you don’t have to break the bank traveling across the world to attend!

In this Citrus Con 2024 con report, we want to discuss the process of preparing for Citrus Con, all the activities that were available for the weekend of the convention, some of the panels we attended, and our final thoughts about attending as participants and panelists. If any of that interests you, read on!

Just like this bakery display case, Citrus Con is filled with many a delectable treat… (Shoutout to Citrus Con staff for providing their official graphics for us to include here…! They’re all so beautiful Heart eyes)
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BL Event Report!: ChillChill Festival 2024

~ ames ~ 3 Comments

On April 6th, Sou and I had the honor of attending two separate talks at ChillChill Festival! What is ChillChill Festival? What did the talks entail? And why the heck were we able to go? Read on and you’ll find out! Morning after party

On a Friday in mid-March, our coworker Snow (also a participant in the Renta! Staff BL Awards 2023) suddenly approached me after the weekly company-wide meeting and asked if I’d heard of “ChillChill Festival.” Spurred on by my confused post-hour-long-meeting look, she brought up the event page and told me tickets were available through work, since our main Japanese branch is a sponsor of the ChillChill BL Awards. We were allowed to pick two talks, and attend them with one friend if we so desired.

While I would have loved to bring my friend Merry (interviewed on the BLog here), she was unable to come. So, I was thinking I’d go alone—until I brought it up with Sou. Since they’re also a huge fan of Kishimoto-sensei (we discuss her adorable tweets regularly), they said they’d be interested in coming with. Thus, I requested two tickets each for “Discussing the Frontlines of BL Trends” (BLトレンド最前線を語る) featuring Kishimoto, Satou Sugar, and Teku Rin, and “BL Fetishism in the Reiwa Era” (令和のBLフェティシズム) featuring Okita Yuuho, Nikuya Inui, bov, and Yukiharu.

However, before we go into the day of the actual event, let’s discuss ChillChill, and the history of ChillChill Festival!

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“Picnic at Dawn” Lullaby of the Dawn Cafe Report

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Aside from the fact that I’m allowed to openly display BL goods on my work desk and read BL for large chunks of the day, another great part of working my job is that I get paid to attend BL conferences, conventions, and collab cafés. For this installment, I was allowed to stop by the Lullaby of the Dawn (夜明けの唄, or Yoake no Uta) collab at Manga10, a wonderful event and café space (‘ten’ sounds the same as 展, which means ‘exhibit’) that frequently hosts collabs for BL and other media popular with women.

A short summary for those who aren’t familiar with Lullaby of the Dawn:

To be a ‘kannagi’ is to give oneself up for the world, cutting one’s own lifespan short while protecting the land and its people against the black sea. Elva is one such kannagi, his limbs stained black since youth from battle after battle against the dark waves. When orphan Alto stumbles upon him, it’s the only time since becoming a kannagi that Elva isn’t looked at with scorn and fear, but instead with curiosity. Alto, seeing and understanding the loneliness in Elva, decides to stay with him—and somehow, Alto’s tenderness and touch over the years reverses the stains marring Elva’s body. Is this a sign that the lifespans of the kannagi don’t need to be sacrificed to the sea, or is there something larger at play…? And what role does Alto have in it?

Especially considering the fifth volume is currently on the way, it’s an incredibly plot-heavy BL with tons of intrigue, so if you’re a fan of such stories I can’t recommend it enough! Thankfully, volumes 1-3 have already been released by TOKYOPOP, with volume four hopefully coming soon. (Admittedly, some of the Japanese is rather specialized and difficult to understand, even as someone who usually reads in Japanese… Melting face So, I also super appreciate the TOKYOPOP version!) But, what I really love is that, even though the central plot is the freedom of the kannagi, Elva and Alto’s relationship doesn’t get sidelined, and there’s still lots and lots of great BL content for those who’re like me and prefer relationship development over driving action. This series is truly a good mix of both!

Also, can we just appreciate how beautiful Ichika Yuno’s art is? You know I’m incredibly hung up on Elva—with his tsundere personality and incredibly ethereal features, how could I not be? He’s stunning. Of course, Alto is also wonderful and is like a huge puppy-dog—incredibly kind to everyone around him, but intensely protective of Elva. The rest of the cast is also just amazing, and it’s so fun seeing everyone play off each other.

Anyway, because I’m a huge fan, and it’d been a while since we did a café report, I requested to go so I could write about it. I booked a reservation for March 10th, which was the last weekday available for the Tokyo café. (It’s now taking place in Osaka!) Thankfully, the weather was stunning, and I didn’t have too much outstanding work to be stressed over, so I went to Ikebukuro to take my lunch before heading over to the café.

Spring do be coming quick…
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Rockin’ Out at a Given Concert IRL [BL Fan Diaries: Syh Concert]

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The mega-popular BL train that is “Given” shows no signs of stopping yet; following the manga’s conclusion, a sequel series has just started running in Cheri+ magazine, and fans of the anime adaptation are raving about the latest theatrical release and already looking forward to the next one.

In my 2024 BL anime rundown, I wrote about how excited I was for the latest “Given” movie, “Hiiragi Mix,” which premiered on January 27th. I went to go see it opening weekend, and was blown away by the animation, the feels, and of course, the MUSIC.

More info about the next installment of the two-part movie series, which will presumably cover what’s left of the manga material, has also just been announced, with the title revealed to be “Umi e” (“To the Sea”)(@manga readers: If you know, you know 大声で泣いている), and scheduled to hit theaters in fall of this year. Two “Given” movies in one year?? We are truly blessed.

Concertgoer Sou (avoid looking directly into laser eyes)

But the “Given” magic doesn’t stop there. Now, one of my biggest passions in life (besides BL, of course) is music, and I’m thrilled when it intertwines with my other interests, such as anime. Plus, I’m a rocker at heart エモ and love to enjoy music live whenever I get the chance (fun fact: Alice and I attended the same punk rock festival last spring to see MCR, having no idea the other was present until after the fact びっくり). So, when I caught wind of an IRL concert of the tunes of “Given” — more specifically, highlighting the music of the in-universe band headed by Hiiragi called “Syh” — being held, it’s only natural that my interest was piqued.

Music is the heart and soul of “Given” (honestly, I can wholeheartedly recommend the soundtrack even if you’ve never read or watched the series because it just GOES so HARD), so seeing the in-universe music live felt like the next big step in my interaction with the franchise.

Read on for my experience as a BL fan getting to hear the music of one of my favorite series brought to life!

Continue reading “Rockin’ Out at a Given Concert IRL [BL Fan Diaries: Syh Concert]” →

BL and its place in LGBTQ media.

~ ames ~ 5 Comments

From Japan’s やおい論争 (Yaoi Ronso, or Yaoi Debates) to the online discourse of today, the most common question surrounding BL in media and social criticism is “what is BL’s place in the larger sphere of LGBTQ media?” Does it belong there at all? Is it a genre that, while revolving around MLM, remains entirely separate from LGBTQ culture? Does it mostly being written by and for (supposedly) straight cis women fully disengage it from being LGBTQ? Is BL a force for good, or does it only exist to promote stereotypes of queer men? And what about BL’s treatment of women? Which supersedes the other: the queer men who’re uncomfortable with the content in some BL, or the fans who use BL as a reprieve from the stifling nature of the heteronormative media landscape? Or is BL, in itself, heteronormative?

Those are just a handful of the questions discussed at the Meiji University symposium “BLの国際的な広がりと名国のLGBTQ,” or “LGBTQ Issues and the Globalization of ‘BL’.” Hosted by around twenty scholars, academics, fans, and community members from around the world, this symposium aimed to share research around how global queer communities interact with and shape BL in their own image post-import.

First, a little background. Taking place on November 25th and 26th, the event was hosted at Meiji University, which is often at the forefront of manga studies and research in Japan. The actual lectures were held at the Nakano campus, which just seemed right considering Nakano is also home to Nakano Broadway, a huge multi-level otaku hub for used manga, doujinshi, and goods. It’s been years since I was personally on a university campus and, being a huge nerd (I probably would have tried for my graduate degree if I hadn’t landed my dream job), I was pretty excited to feel those academic vibes again. Especially since the temps recently finally took a turn in Tokyo, so not only was it academic vibes, but cold weather, fall leaves, grab-a-huge-ass-coffee-before-class vibes. The perfect atmosphere to nerd out about BL manga for two days straight. (And get paid for it… 😏 I love my job.)

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