Tag: hina inami

Renta! Staff BL Awards 2025

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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!

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Renta!’s BL Team Sorts BL Tropes

~ ames ~ 3 Comments

One thing that I really love about our current BL Team is that we have all the bases covered. While there is some overlap between the three of us, we all have pretty different taste in terms of characters, stories, and tropes—to the point where sometimes if I’m completely uninterested in something, Yomogi knows that he should probably check it out. This vast difference in our taste means we can give a variety of recommendations to a much larger audience. I’m sure those who’ve been watching our socials, have attended our panels, visited us at conventions, or sat down to business lunch with us already have a fair understanding of what we like: Sou likes “milfs” and mpreg, Yomogi likes strong eyebrows and ojisan uke, and I (Ames) like my characters ultra femme, a little sad, and extremely slutty.

So when I saw this tier maker going viral while I was making my daily coffee break Twitter rounds, I thought it would be fun/interesting to have each BL team member make their own so we could see just how different our tastes really are.

One thing I’d like to note: we generally try not to talk about manga/characters/tropes we personally don’t like, since we try to avoid anything negative and don’t want to bring down those who do like it. We feel very strongly that all BL is “for” someone even if it’s not to our personal tastes. So please know there’s no judgement from us if you adore the tropes we’re personally not big on. Please fly your freak flag high—there’s nothing we love more at Renta! corp than people who unabashedly love the manga they read. Not to mention, as I already said, chances are someone on the team likes it even if someone else doesn’t.

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VTubers and BL Trends

~ ames ~ 1 Comment

As someone who spends a lot of time in Japanese 女性向け (joseimuke, or female-oriented) spaces and also consumes a lot of BL, one thing I really enjoy is how BL manga very frequently reflects what’s going on in those circles—what themes are popular, what fashions are getting big, social concerns women are dealing with (have you ever wondered why JP Omegaverse is significantly more about social issues than hot breeding kink sex…?), etc. But it’s not just these themes and styles, but overarching trends in popular culture that suddenly start showing up as well. And in this case, the one I want to talk about is:

Shikinagi Akira and Hayase Sou discuss their fav BL tropes

Vtubers.

I’m not super open about it, but I’ｍ a Vtuber fan. I’m not as big into them as I used to be—back during the pandemic it was my (and many other people’s, I believe) main fandom. My cat is named after Saegusa Akina. I cried so hard and for so long on the day Mayuzumi Kai graduated that I wished I could call into work the next day but instead went in looking like I’d been punched in the face. I attended the Nijirock concert back in 2021 as well as Fantasia in 2022. Unfortunately, I’m not super acquainted with the newer gens, and I have much less time to watch them now that we no longer work from home, but Vtubers and streamers still hold a special place in my heart for making living alone during the pandemic significantly more bearable.

And the fun thing for me is that many BL mangaka seem to feel the same. When they aren’t drawing Vtuber fanart on their side accounts, BL manga about streamers (and Vtubers to a lesser degree) has exploded in the last couple years, so I wanted to write about the collision of these two things I love.

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