Hiroto Kujirada – rentaBLog

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.

Christmas Gift Recs: BL Style

Perhaps it’s a bit late in the month for gift recommendations, but at least with Renta! you don’t have to worry about shipping! (Let’s give those overworked postal workers a break…) Since it’s that giving time of year, I figured why not make a nice list of recs for that BL fan in your life? Or, for yourself? Christmas is still a good time for self-care in the form of BL, surely.

So I decided to take our top ten categories and list my top three for each, and why I think they’re a great option for anyone who’s into those tropes.

1. Older Bottom
2. Delinquents
3. Omegaverse
4. Beast
5. Childhood Friends
6. Younger Top
7. Hosts
8. Businessmen
9. Sadistic Boyfriend
10. Fantasy

Without further ado, read on for thirty of my personal pics that should satisfy and heal any BL fan during this hectic holiday season!

A Love Letter to the Dumb Boys of BL

We all have our preferences regarding the type of characters we like. For instance, sadistic seme characters have been a mainstay in BL for a long time, presumably because they’re popular. So have tsundere uke characters, or super shy, virginal, naïve uke. You might like sweet boys or soft boys or badass boys or buff boys. But one character type I find enduringly wonderful in BL is simply: incredibly dumb boys.

And thankfully, there’s a wealth of them.

While chatting it over with the rest of the BL team, we decided on five categories of Dumb Boys (TM): dick for brains, beefcakes, naïve boys, school boys, and guys who’re just… really stupid. I put together some recommendations in each category, so if you, too, are a connoisseur of Dumb Boys (TM), please read on.