New Years is the perfect time to look back on the last twelve months and think to yourself… “What was the best BL manga I read in 2023?” Best-of lists are common this time of year, so we wanted to get in on the action and make a list of our staff’s favorite BL titles a la Chill Chill’s BL Awards. However, our list is less a ranking of the absolute top popular titles as voted by our users (you can find that by checking the “best sellers” list), and more just us—as a team of BL fans—wanting to celebrate some of our favorite titles that were added to the Renta! site this year. (The 2024 Chill Chill BL Awards should be happening again in march, with people already discussing the nominees, so let’s look forward to that in the coming months!)
To make sure it wasn’t just our main blog team pushing our favs we’ve already talked about at length, we also invited Nan, Agedashi, Anne, and Snow from our Japanese side to share some of their favorite titles they got to work with this year!
For each category there’s a good mix of responses, showing just how varied BL fans are in their tastes. However, in the spirit of not making this post too ridiculously long, we’ll just highlight two or three staff comments for each and then list the rest of the choices below.
If you’ve spent a good amount of time in the spicier part of Japanese BL fandom, it’s likely that you’ve encountered some form of censorship. A dick scratched out here, a hole whited out there — basically anything to keep the images from being completely explicit. It may have left you wondering, in a genre focusing on guy-on-guy romantic and sexual relationships, why is there nary a peen to be seen?
Inquiring minds NEED to know.
This phenomenon isn’t unique to Japan, though – it’s also present in Korean webtoons, for example, and other adult-oriented media in countries where anti-obscenity or anti-pornography laws exist.
It begs the questions: what rules are in place, if any, that keep us from enjoying our pr0nz in their uncensored glory? And, what point even is there if the intended audience is over 18 anyway, and we already know full well what’s going on behind those teeny tiny censorship bars?
I decided to take a trip down the rabbit hole and explore this sometimes annoying, often confusing, yet in some ways necessary aspect of BL and share my findings with you all. Please note that this article pertains to Japanese BL manga specifically — it’s the type I’m most familiar with, dealing with it on a daily basis for work and enjoying it in my free time as well. The censorship landscape may look different in other countries and across different media, so this is but a small case study!
For those who’ve ever wondered why in the world we need two tagging systems, or what these two tagging systems are used for, I figured I’d do an explainer. I’ve noticed the community tags in particular seem under-utilized, and since they’re sincerely more helpful the more people actually use them, I was hoping I could “take a Selfish” and talk about why I think the community tags are important.
The few times I’ve had the joy of reading people’s opinions on Renta!, there’s been a continuing theme: the weird titles. Whether people find them annoying or funny, Renta!’s titles seem to have become an inseparable part of our branding within the BL fandom. So I thought I would talk about why Renta!’s titles sometimes look the way they do, why those changes occur, and the overall culture pressuring us to handle our titles this way.
First, I want to talk about the general manga titling culture in Japan as of late. As discerning eyes may have noticed, manga titles keep getting longer and longer and longer, and more and more… err… upfront (?) about the manga’s themes. “I Was A Struggling Office Worker But Now I’ve Been Reincarnated As The Rich Mean Villainess But I’ve Decided To Go Against My Fate!” etc. I’m sure we’ve all seen them. This is a naming dynamic I like to refer to as “hyper-meta titling,” and it’s been popular in Japan for the last five or so years. I’m not sure what initially caused this trend (that would be its own interesting rabbit hole, and perhaps a blog post for another day), but it means these titles are already quite long and weird in Japanese, and often get even longer and weirder during translation. You also see them semi-frequently in BL, in the direction of “I Met A Hot Guy At The Gym And Now We’re Friends With Benefits and I Want to Lick His Nipples” (not a real title… unfortunately), etc.
But those aren’t the titles I want to talk about with this post. Instead, I want to talk about adult content, SEO, and the pinch of an increasingly anti-porn culture in the West.
Damn. Sounds a lot less sexy now, huh?
For those who don’t work in fields that have a significant online presence and this is thus something you never have to think about (lucky you!), SEO stands for “search engine optimization.” You might hear your favorite influencers discussing it sometimes in terms of using the best words and phrases to get clicks—things that are currently trending, or are consistently popular. In the case of this blog, for instance, we’d want to include a lot of BL-, manga- and otaku-related phrases, keywords, full titles in a variety of spellings (English, romaji, and Japanese), etc. in order to help the right audience find our content.
However, in the past ten or so years and for a variety of reasons (some incredibly valid—we don’t want children stumbling across our content, obviously—and some a little… uh… less so), the overlords who have the most sway over the internet have cranked the breaks on SEO when it comes to adult content. Any words generally seen as sexual or pornographic in nature can get your site flagged and pushed pages and pages into the search results, even if your content is exactly what’s being sought out. The same has been happening with social media sites—I’m sure you all remember the Tumblr apocalypse where the site banned porn (and gave birth to the wonderful phrase “female-presenting nipples”) and subsequently lost half their users within the next few years. Twitter, too, has been recently cracking down and issuing shadow bans on adult content—i get hit with a “sensitive content” slap pretty frequently.
(But we keep trucking, because Twitter is all we have left… 🙃)
Renta! actually has entire lists of phrases we can’t use in our titles and synopses specifically because they’re incredibly damaging to SEO. Because I don’t want to severely damage the SEO for our blog, I’ll post a little image here:
However, as has already been established, Japanese artists and publishers as of late love being particularly blunt in their titles, particularly when it comes to porn. So a title like ZOMBIE HIDE SEX (ゾンビ・ハイド・セックス) has to become… Fooling Around While The Zombies Roam. My Love Story as a Slut with a Wet, Needy Hole (恋するビッチのとろ穴事情) becomes A Hole Craving to be Touched. Lost Virgin: how to sex (ロストバージン how to sex) becomes Lost And Undefiled: Lessons in Sensuality. The titles essentially have the same meaning, but using safe, clean words. Using “safe, clean words” can make it feel kind of bizarre, however…
We do our best to retain titles that still convey the Japanese (and the content of the manga itself) while also skirting the regulations on adult content for SEO (and, more recently as you may have read from the issues with DLsite, credit card companies).
And I know what you’re thinking. “But Ames…” you’re about to say with a furrowed brow. “You guys have TONS of stuff on your site that uses those words…” We do. And the answer is simple: those aren’t localized by us. While we also localize lots and lots of great content, we also host lots of content localized by our wonderful partners. (This is what the “Localized by:” tag on the product details means!)
On the one hand, we could take a page out of their book and translate the titles more literally, since there’s a possibility having any of those words on our site removes us from the running in the SEO race, so why not just go ham? But we hope that offsetting it at least a little with our own titles can help the anti-porn situation much of the West has gotten itself stuck in. Also, in line with all the other crack-downs on on adult content, having sexual words in the title makes it impossible to advertise the series in any big way. Womp womp.
Localizing content from a highly porn-positive culture like Japan (though, with strict censorship laws… the contradictions are confusing) for fairly anti-porn cultures in the West comes with a lot of strange, unexpected hurdles (and many an explanation to our JP staff on why we can and can’t do things the same way they’d be done in Japan). But, for us it’s worth it if we can continue bringing the wonderful content we love to an even wider audience. We hope to continue sharing lots more bizarre, silly, cute titles with you in the future, so I hope you all look forward to it!
What are some of your favorite silly Renta! titles? I’d love to hear them on the comments or on Twitter! 🤗
When I first heard whispers that the next Renta! fan letter campaign would center around THEYuo Yodogawa, I could hardly contain my excitement. My company would be serving as a bridge between international fans and one of my favorite BL mangaka in the game today?? Heck yeah!
In case you’re unfamiliar with the wildly popular Yodogawa-sensei, I’ll quickly share how I became a fan. Have you ever fallen in love at first sight with an art style? I believe that’s what I experienced upon laying eyes on Yuo Yodogawa’s art for the first time. Little did I know when I stumbled upon a chapter in the middle of a random manga and thought, “Huh, that art looks really nice!” that I would quickly be sucked into the Yodogawaverse — and I couldn’t be happier.
If you’ve never had the pleasure of experiencing a Yodogawa manga, I suppose the best way to describe their body of work would be as sexy, funny, and cute — but that doesn’t do it nearly enough justice, so I’ll just use this space to gush about a few of my favorite series from Yodogawa-sensei!
I hope you’ll join me in the Yodogawaverse, and discover some BL series that are both awe-inspiring and “aww”-worthy!
rentaBLog 