BL Trope Tourney 2025: A Retrospective!

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.

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BL Awards Light: The ChillChill BL Character General Election!

If you follow a lot of BL artists and publishers, there’s a good chance you’ve been seeing the #BLキャラ総選挙2024 hashtag floating around Twitter over the last couple weeks, along with little profiles of BL characters belonging to the artist or publisher. When I first started seeing them about a week and a half ago, I initially assumed it was just a fun new Twitter trend among mangaka, but boy was I wrong (and also super behind on commercial BL news—I guess you can really tell the Renta! office has been super busy these last couple months).

BLキャラ総選挙2024, or the “2024 BL Character General Election,” is another effort by the wonderful BL site ChillChill to spread the love for commercial BL. It was initially announced in early May with the following blurb (loosely translated by yours truly):

For the amazing commercial BL characters who make you feel all warm and fuzzy inside!

This BL election was brought forth in order to shine a spotlight on those wonderful BL characters, spread the love of the BL series they’re from, and introduce new stories to an even wider audience!

This is really interesting, since the ChillChill BL Awards already used to have a seme/uke character section. So in this BLog post I’ll give a brief rundown of the ChillChill BL Awards character ranking history, before showcasing the BL characters whose stories you can read on Renta!, how to vote, and a little chatter about some of my personal Best Boys.

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Like a bug attracted to nectar: Akira Minazuki’s riveting “SMOKY NECTAR”

Read on Renta!:
SMOKY NECTAR
by Akira Minazuki

Japanese:
Smoky Nectar
スモーキーネクター

Links:
Akira Minazuki’s Twitter
Akira Minazuki’s Instagram

Around the time the team first started this BLog, Ames and I headed to a BL café event showcasing Harada, Mitsuaki Asou and the subject of today’s post, Akira Minazuki, and their work, “SMOKY NECTAR”. Already hooked by the gorgeous art adorning the café walls, imagine my elated surprise when, one July day, I found myself assigned to the translation check of that very same manga. ‘Motivation boost’ doesn’t begin to describe it. It’s not just me either; everyone on the team worked painstakingly hard to bring this masterpiece to English-speaking readers in the perfect form it’s worthy of.

Give a girl with a hidden gothic heart a vampire-themed BL and you might as well win her over for life—and well, I’ll follow Akira Minazuki forever, because “SMOKY NECTAR” is one of the greatest manga I’ve had the pleasure of checking at Renta!.

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Renta! Staff BL Awards 2023

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!)

Without further ado, the categories are…

Favorite New Series
Favorite Continuing Series
Favorite Seme
Favorite Uke
Favorite Up-And-Coming Author
Amazing Art
Favorite Renta! Title
Favorite Cover
Favorite Couple

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.

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emo café: B+Library collab showcasing Harada, Akira Minazuki, and Mitsuaki Asou

Nestled in a narrow, trendy side street in Tokyo’s youth fashion district of Harajuku is a bright pink building named emo café, a tiny collab café that partners with mangaka and publishers to turn manga into a culinary experience. emo café is relatively new, having started up in the last few years, and follows in the footsteps of other BL cafés like Toriko Mangaten and ComiComi Studio Machida (r.i.p.).

I first noticed emo café when they did the second B+Library collab, featuring two absolutely wonderful manga that are on our site—Jimi Fumikawa’s I Seriously Can’t Believe you… (one of my all-time favorites!) and Jyanome’s Twilight Out of Focus—as well as Ichikawa Kei’s incredibly famous Blue Sky Complex (licensed by Futekiya).

There’s also been a café for Kurahashi Tomo’s Someday I’ll Fall For You, and a café for Tsubame Koshiora’s There’s Fanfiction About Us?, as well as a handful of other series. Emo Cafe’s had a lot of great stuff on offer.

When I saw they would be doing a third B+Library, this time for Harada’s Happy Shitty Life, Akira Minazuki’s Smoky Nectar, and Mitsuaki Asou’s The Farthest Love in the World I knew we had to go—especially considering Happy Shitty Life is one of our localizations, and Smoky Nectar is coming soon. Unfortunately, because of the massive popularity of all three artists (each one of them being a veteran in the BL genre) I once again couldn’t get in.

…That is, until they extended the end date by a week. Sometimes it pays to sit on Twitter constantly. -w-)b

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