Hare Takizawa – rentaBLog

2025 was another big year for Renta!—a bit of a whirlwind, really! We’ve been so busy, in fact, I couldn’t remember 99% of what we did, and Sou and Yomogi had to step in with a bunch of ideas. So here’s a quick year in review!

We did multiple BL projects over the course of the year! We were able to do two more mangaka interviews: Jiro Kawaii and Nobiru Hoshi. One thing you might not know is that the BL Team actually gets to choose who we interview, and we get to write the questions as fans of the artist, so these are always very exciting for us with many an afternoon meeting where we just go through Sensei’s socials and reread their work and jot down our burning questions. So we really hope you all enjoy the interviews as much as we do!

We also did a fanletter campaign for the wonderful Yamayade! A HUGE thank you to Sensei for being willing to participate in the project while they were working hard on the OmaKiss continuation (which we’re in the process of translating and getting into your hands ASAP 😎). Staff member Agedashi mentions it in one of their award picks, but Sensei’s illustration of UeKan in high school was too cute. I can’t recommend checking out the linked page enough! You can also read the handwritten mini Q&A!

We were able to do some really fun mini events on our socials this year, which gave us a wonderful opportunity to interact with our users a lot more! It’s been so fun getting to know some of you! In March we hosted the BL Trope Tourney, pitting popular BL tropes against each other, which was a blast. We actually wrote an entire retrospective, but just know that we heard you all loud and clear: you want more older guys (and more mutual pining)! We also did Kinktober on the Twitter, where we decided to go all in on some more raunchy stuff, so we really appreciate everyone being so supportive! Hopefully our fellow perverts got some good recommendations.

For conventions, in 2025 we went all in on Citrus Con! We participated both as major sponsors and with more panels than ever, and tried to stay active all weekend in our Discord chat. We played the BL Sugoroku we made for our users, discussed 2025 BL trends, and hosted a Live Drawing by the wonderful Pokerou-sensei! You can read our full retrospective here: CLICK! We also participated in our FIRST EVER in-person convention with a booth at AnimeNYC where we also debuted the wonderful R-kun! It was such a joy to finally get to meet so many of our users in person, not to mention all the wonderful fellow industry people who stopped by, and we really hope we can go back again next year!

Closer to home, this year was also our parent company‘s 30th anniversary, and we’re so proud to continue as part of the larger Renta! family. We refreshed our BL Homepage this last spring, and have also have started dabbling more and more with lightly censored (and—soon!—entirely uncensored) licenses in-house! We also attended J.GARDEN 58 as the full BL Team (Yomogi’s first time!), and then met up with some great BL industry friends afterward, which was a blast!

As for what’s coming in 2026… 😇 Just know that we have a lot of amazing BL waiting in the wings, and some projects we worked on ALL through 2025 that we can’t wait to debut this coming year. Trust me when I say the BL team—and the entire English Renta! staff—have been working extremely hard behind the scenes. Thank you so much for all your support through 2025, and we can’t wait to bring you more and more wonderful BL in 2026!

Anyway, enough about what we did in 2025—what about BL manga we loved? We have the usual categories with some new guest stars. You can either click the links below to go directly to each section, or just read the full recommendations.

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

Don’t forget to check out the previous years as well: 2023 ＆ 2024!

Continue reading →

Six months went by in a flash, and it’s already time for J.GARDEN 55! Regular readers of the BLog likely already know, but we attended J.GARDEN 54 as a business trip of sorts. This time I’ll be attending by myself just as a regular BL fan, so I won’t be writing another attendance report, but I figured I could still update everyone on who’ll be there, and which artists and books I’m personally super excited for.

Because the pamphlets sold out within a week last fall, I was careful to leave for Akihabara at 8AM on February 18th—I was going to be there at store open on the morning of the pamphlet being released, and I was going to get the damn thing. I went to Akihabara because it’s less popular with fujoshi than my usual haunt of Ikebukuro (land of the infamous Otome Road), and last year Akiba took way longer to sell out, so I wanted to go to Shosen Book Tower, an incredibly popular (and old) bookstore in Akihabara. However… the pamphlet wasn’t there lol. Ope. So I asked the staff, and they confirmed they WERE supposed to get a shipment in, but something went wrong and it was delayed.

Which was fine. Because you could also buy the pamphlet at Animate, and Animate Akihabara was only a few blocks away. (And I could look at Genshin goods while I was there…)

Tip that I actually didn’t know at the time (I spent a good ten minutes combing each floor with no sign of the pamphlet before asking the staff): pamphlets like this are actually generally kept behind the counter of the main floor. So if you’re ever in Japan and looking to purchase an event pamphlet, ask the staff first before wasting a bunch of time looking for it! (They’re very nice and helpful, and if you don’t speak Japanese just show the image on your phone and they’ll understand!)

Anyway, pamphlet obtained! Onto the actual content for the upcoming J.GARDEN 55!