Kou Yoneda – rentaBLog

プロフィールの最大の謎項目が「睡眠時間」#BLキャラ総選挙2024 pic.twitter.com/OgZDr79DjT
— キシモト🐟ドラマCD発売中 (@kishi108) July 26, 2024

If you follow a lot of BL artists and publishers, there’s a good chance you’ve been seeing the #BLキャラ総選挙2024 hashtag floating around Twitter over the last couple weeks, along with little profiles of BL characters belonging to the artist or publisher. When I first started seeing them about a week and a half ago, I initially assumed it was just a fun new Twitter trend among mangaka, but boy was I wrong (and also super behind on commercial BL news—I guess you can really tell the Renta! office has been super busy these last couple months).

BLキャラ総選挙2024, or the “2024 BL Character General Election,” is another effort by the wonderful BL site ChillChill to spread the love for commercial BL. It was initially announced in early May with the following blurb (loosely translated by yours truly):

For the amazing commercial BL characters who make you feel all warm and fuzzy inside!

This BL election was brought forth in order to shine a spotlight on those wonderful BL characters, spread the love of the BL series they’re from, and introduce new stories to an even wider audience!

This is really interesting, since the ChillChill BL Awards already used to have a seme/uke character section. So in this BLog post I’ll give a brief rundown of the ChillChill BL Awards character ranking history, before showcasing the BL characters whose stories you can read on Renta!, how to vote, and a little chatter about some of my personal Best Boys.

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Gay edit of this meme by u/olafl on Reddit. Animu added by yours truly

Anime has been an important piece of BL fandom for decades, and thanks to online streaming services, it’s now more accessible to overseas fans than ever! Plus, the popularization of simulcasts in recent years has made it so that fans the world over can watch shows basically in real time together each week, and revel in the joy of screaming their reactions with fellow fans over social media.

As much as I love reading the original manga of my favorite series, there’s just something so special about seeing the world in full color, hearing the characters speak, and getting new tunes in the form of those catchy OP and ED songs to add to your playlist each season!

When it comes to BL anime adaptations for television or the big screen, sadly the number of new works coming out each year is but a teeny tiny fraction of the plethora of manga being released, and they’re typically but a blip on the radar to anime fandom at large. However, that just makes it extra exciting when a new BL anime is released! Not only is it fun for established fans of a manga to see their favorite characters and scenes animated, but anime adaptations are also a great way to introduce even more people to the original series, thus adding to the overall hype for a title and growing the BL community as a whole. A win-win for everybody!

It’s a new year and a new anime season is upon us, so I figured I’d give a quick rundown of all the BL anime we can expect this year — as well as a few potential projects in the works that are definitely worth keeping your eye on