We’re in the heart of winter here in Tokyo, and the days are cold and… wet, with little snow but plenty of rain . What with the cloudy skies and frigid air, I think it’s the perfect weather to snuggle up inside with a cup of hot cocoa (or your beverage of choice) and some good BL. My BL tastes lean towards the feel-good and fuzzy-inducing, so anything on the fluffy side would probably be my go-to for days like these.
One BL artist in particular that comes to mind when I think of soft, comforting, and heartwarming BL is Toworu Miyata — a quickly rising star in the BL manga world, some of whose works have just recently become available in English through Animate International. I couldn’t be happier about this, as I’ve been a fan of theirs for a while myself, and I’m sure there are plenty of readers across the world who will adore Miyata-sensei’s cute and touching manga.
Today I’d like to spotlight two of their works — plus a fun bonus chapter — which are now available in English. Hopefully by the end you’ll understand why I think reading Miyata-sensei’s manga feels like drinking a nice, warm cup of cocoa on a cold day. If fluff is your game, you’re in for a treat!
When the idea of a “guilty pleasures” blog post was floated during one of our BL meetings, I (Ames) was originally not super into it. While the intention was good—creating a space to talk about less-common or accepted niches within the BL sphere—I’m not someone who likes the idea of ‘guiltily’ or ‘ironically’ liking things. (I know, I know—perhaps I’m a bit too serious and sentimental.) In my honest opinion as an ancient BL fan, just enjoying the things you love with your whole ass is most often the way to go.
There’s already so much shame in fan spaces as it is for just enjoying BL on its own, so I’m not so big on adding even more shame by referring to things as “guilty pleasures.” We already agreed this blog would be a positive space for and by BL fans, and I want to uphold that at all costs. So rather than making a post about guilty pleasures, Sou and Alice have shamelessly gone whole-hog talking about the aspects of BL and MLM media they love that maybe gets a little flack sometimes—but who cares? If you love something, love it.
I admittedly wasn’t able to participate in this post this time around, but maybe someday. Nonetheless, I hope you all enjoy Sou and Alice baring their “rotten” souls to the world discussing Mpreg, and assholes.
It’s that time of year again! This past Friday, ChillChill opened voting for the 2024 BL Awards! But I figured there might be some of our readers asking:
“What is ChillChill?” “What are the BL Awards?” “Why does this even matter?”
…which is why I’ve decided to write a post about ChillChill, the BL Awards, the recent history of year-end BL best-of compilations, as well as this year’s nominee pool and what you can actually read on Renta! So let’s just jump right into it!
I feel like anyone even vaguely versed in Japanese BL fandom has heard of ChillChill—that’s the level of impact and importance the site has in the Japanese market. You can barely search a BL artist or title without the site popping up as one of the top results.
ChillChill came onto the scene in 2008, starting out as an indexing and community site. Essentially, it was the BL version of sites like MyAnimeList. You could build a profile, share your favs, post reviews, take part in discussions, find new recommendations through their intense tagging system (which I’ve also discussed briefly in my post about why our community tagging system is important), make friends with similar tastes, etc.
TW: yandere trope as a whole; emotional, physical and sexual abuse
In my endless rant about yandere BL, the manga that I gave the most love to was Sanayuki Sato’s “The Prefect’s Private Garden” which I can describe confidently as a masterclass in how to write yandere angsty romance. I’m biased, because the story includes a bunch of tropes I adore (TsukihitoTsukihitoTsukihi—), but, to borrow wise words from Sou, you know when you find a manga that hits just right?
The very first of anything is something to remember—which is why I remember that the very first BL I got to check after joining Renta! was a short rollercoaster of a story, Akota’s “My Perilous Darling Boy”. My trainer back then probably couldn’t have asked for a better vehicle for getting all our style-guide rules into my head: Akota’s stunning art is packed with details, which means that there could easily be mistakes in replacing sound effects; speaking of sound effects, there were many, so you could miss or mistranslate some; and the translation itself, in a story this subtly complex sometimes, was another challenge altogether.
But we’re not here to talk about translation/checking woes, we’re here because I wanna tell you that, aside from the fondness I have for this manga for being my first BL task, I do genuinely love it.
There are too many BL about Japan’s legendary host clubs to count, but this one earned its stripes, in my opinion, by humanizing not only the hosts but also their clients.
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!.
It’s finally time for me to rant/write about my not-so-guilty pleasure in the Renta! catalog: ITKZ’s “The Titan’s Bride”.
(When I announced my intention, Sou jeered at me from behind her huge monitor, “You’re finally going there??”)
I still remember when news of an animation adaptation had taken some corners of Tumblr by storm way-back-when; now, this manga is past the 30 chapter mark and still going on. One reviewer on Renta! brilliantly describes it as a “shamelessly smutty fever dream”—but I would argue that enough fantasy story-building has gone into that good-ol’ isekai flavor that there’s enough plot to pad and support the gratuitous, giant x normal human smut. The art is wonderful, too; as someone who got into BL from reading shonen doujinshi, it gives me the same vibe. Coincidentally, ITKZ seems to be also active in doujinshi-selling events.
So, anyway, come with me into this review to talk about isekai and, uh… macrophilia.
There’s this huge store in Ikebukuro that’s floors and floors of anime and manga goods, even an exhibition space. Having moved to Tokyo recently, the first time I visited it isn’t that far back—so I very clearly remember the gorgeous artwork on the walls, advertising one particular BL manga that had recently released its first collected volume. I didn’t have time to stop and catch its name, but I did stare at the beautiful, realistic art, almost daydreaming every time I passed it by; then, I noticed that many other stores around Ikebukuro were advertising the exact same manga, so I knew it had to be a phenomenon in the making.
When I saw a manga named “The Monster & the Ghost” in my work assignments, I let out a squeal of excitement at its cover, like, “OH! IT’S THAT MANGA!!!”
And I’m obviously not the only one who’s been entranced by this work since. Both Japan and overseas, people seem to be buzzing about this story—so, what is it about?
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! 🤗
With the forces that decide which manga I get to check each month being out of my control (and fully in the hands of the team project coordinator), Shima Yashiki’s incredibly angsty and sexy “This Poor Beta Doesn’t Know About Love”(Awarena Betaha Koio Shiranai) appeared on my laptop screen at work quite unexpectedly.
Up until this story, I had never read omegaverse once (yet, after this, I also got to enjoy a certain fox-and-mouse romance), so this was a wholly new experience at that time. Obviously, as a twenty-something that spends most of her time online, I’m familiar with the concept, but not the nitty-gritty of it, you know? So, a couple of comprehensive guides later, I rolled up my sleeves and was ready to dive into this manga—to discover the perfect BL about fictional mind-games and emotional edging (maybe even the physical kind, too).
. What with the cloudy skies and frigid air, I think it’s the perfect weather to snuggle up inside with a cup of hot cocoa (or your beverage of choice) and some good BL. My BL tastes lean towards the feel-good and fuzzy-inducing, so anything on the fluffy side would probably be my go-to for days like these.
Nonetheless, I hope you all enjoy Sou and Alice baring their “rotten” souls to the world discussing Mpreg, and assholes.
rentaBLog 