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.
Happy Cat Day! Or 猫の日 (neko no hi) as it’s called in Japan! As we’ve discussed previously on the blog, Japan loves to play word games with numbers (i.e. 8/01 or Yaoi Day, 11/29 or Good Meat Day, etc.), and 2/22 in Japanese can sound like nya-nya-nya, or the sound a cat makes. So, everywhere you look in Tokyo is currently covered in cats: the convenience store has tons of cat sweets and snacks and cat-related campaigns, department stores are hosting pop-up shops for cat-themed goods and toys and accessories, and shelters are obviously taking advantage of the cat festivities with fundraisers and adopt-a-thons! The weeks leading up to 2/22 are a very good time to love cats in Japan.
Family Mart mofusand cat coffee cups for Cat Day.
“What in the world does this have to do with BL manga?” you’re asking? Is this going to be a special about cat boys? How about beasts? Cats who can shape-shift into cute boys and fall in love with other cute boys? Or maybe about boys who love boys but who also love cats? BL where cats are heavily featured?
BZZZZT. You are incorrect.
Highly in-the-know people will probably already see where this is going: this is a post about bottom supremacy.
As quite a few of you may know, the slang for someone who bottoms during gay sex, which originated in gay circles before slowly meandering into the BL consciousness, is neko (ネコ)—or, cat! Well, we actually can’t be certain if cats are the one-to-one reason for “neko” being used. When preparing for this post, I was reading quite a few theories online as to whyneko is used to refer to bottoms. This article about gay slang points out the two most common reasons: it could come from pussycat/pussy (as in… women’s genitals… lovely), but it could also come from the Japanese word for a wheelbarrow, nekoguruma (because this is the way you might hold someone’s legs while you’re… umm… y’know). This article by drag queen and TV personality Mitz Mangrove about cats (in general) also discusses how cats are often seen as feminine in Japan which possibly is what led to neko having become the universal phrase for a man who bottoms.
It appears the true reason neko has turned into the slang for ‘bottom’ is unknown, but the fact still remains: cats and bottoms are now linked.
As the resident number one cat lover and bottom absolutist in this town, I figured I would celebrate Cat Day by discussing uke archetypes, my favorite uke characters that are available on Renta!, and slip in a little cultural/language lesson for good measure.
For those who’ve ever wondered why in the world we need two tagging systems, or what these two tagging systems are used for, I figured I’d do an explainer. I’ve noticed the community tags in particular seem under-utilized, and since they’re sincerely more helpful the more people actually use them, I was hoping I could “take a Selfish” and talk about why I think the community tags are important.
The few times I’ve had the joy of reading people’s opinions on Renta!, there’s been a continuing theme: the weird titles. Whether people find them annoying or funny, Renta!’s titles seem to have become an inseparable part of our branding within the BL fandom. So I thought I would talk about why Renta!’s titles sometimes look the way they do, why those changes occur, and the overall culture pressuring us to handle our titles this way.
First, I want to talk about the general manga titling culture in Japan as of late. As discerning eyes may have noticed, manga titles keep getting longer and longer and longer, and more and more… err… upfront (?) about the manga’s themes. “I Was A Struggling Office Worker But Now I’ve Been Reincarnated As The Rich Mean Villainess But I’ve Decided To Go Against My Fate!” etc. I’m sure we’ve all seen those. This is a naming dynamic I like to refer to as “hyper-meta titling,” and it’s been popular in Japan for the last five or so years. I’m not sure what initially caused this trend (that would be its own interesting rabbit hole, and perhaps a blog post for another day), but it means these titles are already quite long and weird in Japanese, and often get even longer and weirder during translation. You also see them semi-frequently in BL, in the direction of “I Met A Hot Guy At The Gym And Now We’re Friends With Benefits and I Want to Lick His Nipples” (not a real title… unfortunately) etc.
But those aren’t the titles I want to talk about with this post. Instead, I want to talk about adult content, SEO, and the pinch of an increasingly anti-porn culture in the West.
Damn. Sounds a lot less sexy now, huh? 😅
For those who don’t work in fields that have a significant online presence, SEO stands for “search engine optimization.” You might hear your favorite influencers discussing it sometimes in terms of using the best words and phrases to get clicks—things that are currently trending, or are consistently popular. In the case of this blog, for instance, we’d want to include a lot of BL-, manga- and otaku-related phrases, keywords, full titles in a variety of spellings (English, romaji, and Japanese), etc. in order to help the right audience find our content.
However, in the past ten or so years and for a variety of reasons (some incredibly valid—we don’t want children stumbling across our content, obviously—and some a little… uh… less so), the overlords who have the most sway over the internet have cranked the breaks on SEO when it comes to adult content. Any words generally seen as sexual or pornographic in nature can get your site flagged and pushed pages and pages into the search results, even if your content is exactly what’s being sought out. The same has been happening with social media sites—I’m sure you all remember the Tumblr apocalypse where the site banned porn (and gave birth to the wonderful phrase “female-presenting nipples”) and subsequently lost half their users within the next few years. Twitter, too, has been recently cracking down and issuing shadow bans on adult content.
(But we keep trucking, because Twitter is all we have left… 🙃)
Renta! actually has entire lists of phrases we can’t use in our titles and synopses specifically because they are incredibly damaging to SEO. Because I don’t want to severely damage the SEO for our blog, I’ll post a little image here:
However, as has already been established, Japanese artists and publishers as of late love being particularly blunt in their titles, particularly when it comes to porn. So a title like ZOMBIE HIDE SEX (ゾンビ・ハイド・セックス) has to become… Fooling Around While The Zombies Roam. My Love Story as a Slut with a Wet, Needy Hole (恋するビッチのとろ穴事情) becomes A Hole Craving to be Touched. Masturbating Online (ひとりえっちオンライン) becomes I Caught Him Getting Off Online! The titles essentially have the same meaning, but using safe, clean words. But using “safe, clean words” can make it feel kind of bizarre…
We do our best to retain titles that still convey the Japanese (and the content of the manga itself) while also skirting the regulations on adult content for SEO.
And I know what you’re thinking. “But Ames…” you’re about to say with a furrowed brow. “You guys have TONS of stuff on your site that uses those words…” We do. And the answer is simple: those aren’t localized by us. While we also localize lots and lots of great content, we also host lots of content localized by our wonderful partners. (This is what the “Localized by:” tag on the product details means!)
On the one hand, we could take a page out of their book and translate the titles more literally, since there’s a possibility having any of those words on our site removes us from the running in the SEO race, so why not just go ham? But we hope that offsetting it at least a little with our own titles can help the anti-porn situation much of the West has gotten itself stuck in.
Localizing content from a highly porn-positive culture like Japan (though, with strict censorship laws… the contradictions are confusing) for fairly anti-porn cultures in the West comes with a lot of strange, unexpected hurdles (and many an explanation to our JP staff on why we can and can’t do things the same way they’d be done in Japan). But, for us it’s worth it if we can continue bringing the wonderful content we love to an even wider audience. We hope to continue sharing lots more bizarre, silly, cute titles with you in the future, so I hope you all look forward to it!
What are some of your favorite silly Renta! titles? I’d love to hear them on the comments or on Twitter! 🤗
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