Renta! Staff BL Awards 2024

It’s already that time of year again, and boy howdy was 2024 a wild ride here at Renta! We changed our logo! We opened a Bluesky! There was much emotional (and physical) edging to be had! We participated in our first ever actual panel! The dongs were unleashed! We collected some samples! We saw beastmen in heat, many a delinquent on the brink, and men impregnated chivalrously! We released our very first cakeverse! We fostered brotherly love! We saw some knot-y boys and some nice ones! And many a popular series saw its end!

As we get ready to make 2025 an even more successful and exciting year filled with tons of great manga, we still wanted to look back on our favorite BL of 2024! That’s right, it’s once again time for our BL Staff Awards!

This time we have the usual Ames (hello), Sou, and Yomogi from the localization team, and then the wonderful Pochi, Snow, and Ann from our sales and marketing teams! So if you want to see what we enjoyed having the opportunity to work alongside this year, please read on!

Same as last year, we have the following categories:

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

Feel free to click on each category to go directly to that section, or you can meander through from start to finish to get that full 2024 BL experience! We also decided everyone only had to fill out the sections they have an actual response for, so just know you’re getting our true recommendations!

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Naughty and Nice: BL Recs for the Christmas Season

The Renta! BL team wanted to do a Christmas special again this year, and we were racking our brains on what we could possibly post. Last year’s Christmas BL rec post was actually shockingly time-intensive (two whole 10+ hour work days on top of my regular workload…), so I didn’t have it in me to do it this year. And a manga like A Gift From Santa Claus only comes once a lifetime, and I obviously wasn’t going to review it twice. We spent about an hour in the BL meeting just going in circles—BL recs based on Christmas songs? How about based on popular holiday foods?

But then the glorious Sou was like “well… how about which BL characters will get coal in their stocking?” And thus the “Naughty x Nice” Christmas BL Special was born! For this, the Renta! BL team got together and thought of three recommendations for the following four categories:

・Nice Seme x Nice Uke
・Nice Seme x Naughty Uke
・Naughty Seme x Nice Uke
・Naughty Seme x Naughty Uke

Some boys will be getting a lump of coal and a spanking (😘) this Christmas season, so to see who’s on Santa’s shit-list and who’ll be getting exactly what they asked for, read on!

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Turning tropes on their heads with Kaibashira’s “The Doggy And The Fairy Prince”

Read on Renta!:
The Doggy And The Fairy Prince by Kaibashira

Japanese:
おくりワンちゃん
Okuri Wanchan

Links:
Kaibashira Twitter
PriaL Twitter (publisher)

I think from my presence on the BLog so far, I’ve made it pretty clear that I love BL, tropes and all. I know a lot of people hate that BL as a genre is so trope-laden—smol uke characters with long lashes, massive seme character with pointy chins, private school boys who scream from the rooftops that they’re “totally not gay bro” while simultaneously lusting after their male childhood friend from puberty and sleeping with their dorm roommate, etc. For me, though, I like those tropes—maybe because they cater pretty heavily to my personal tastes, granted. All this to say, I’m not necessarily a BL reader who desires to read BL that are anti-trope. I love the smol pretty uke boys. Give me all of the smol pretty uke boys.

So, when I first saw the cover for The Doggy And The Fairy Prince, I originally thought that was what I would get: cute twink-y bowlcut boy on the cover with his big dudebro boyfriend. Great. Cute. “Can’t wait to see this boy get railed!” I thought to myself. However, I then realized the little bowlcut twink (hereon referred to by his name, Sho) actually tops the massive dumb dudebro (Kuniaki), to which I was originally pretty disappointed. I ended up having to spend a long time with this manga during the final editing process, however, and while I was originally disappointed I didn’t get what I thought I wanted, what I did get was actually even better: an absolute comedic masterpiece.

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