Tag: nikke taino

What We’re Thankful For This Year

~ sou ~ Leave a comment
It’s never a bad time to take a moment and appreciate all that yaoi has given us…

It’s that time of year again — at least for the folks who celebrate Thanksgiving 🦃 — where we fill our bellies with all kinds of festive delights, spend just enough time with family for some sort of decades-brewing drama to surface, and promptly retreat to a secluded space to continue reading that BL you’ve been meaning to get around to.

Sou after Thanksgiving dinner, or after a large serving of big tiddy BL

Whether it be personal relationships or developments in the world at large, there’s never a shortage of sources of stress and despair. Luckily, I’ve found that BL is a reliable mood lifter in both the good times and bad — it’s just the thing I need to make me go, “Maybe this Chungus life isn’t so bad after all.” (Well, that and pumpkin pie piled high with Cool Whip, but sadly neither of those things are exactly common in our corner of Japan.)

When I proposed this post theme to my fellow BLog members, they asked whether “things to give thanks for in the BL sphere” meant BL tropes, changes in trends, specific BL series or characters, or recent BL news. I decided not to limit the theme so as to release as much BL gratitude from the depths of our hearts as possible — so get ready for our unfiltered gracious yaoi ramblings.

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J. Garden 55

~ ames ~ 3 Comments

Six months went by in a flash, and it’s already time for J.GARDEN 55! Regular readers of the BLog likely already know, but we attended J.GARDEN 54 as a business trip of sorts. This time I’ll be attending by myself just as a regular BL fan, so I won’t be writing another attendance report, but I figured I could still update everyone on who’ll be there, and which artists and books I’m personally super excited for.

Because the pamphlets sold out within a week last fall, I was careful to leave for Akihabara at 8AM on February 18th—I was going to be there at store open on the morning of the pamphlet being released, and I was going to get the damn thing. I went to Akihabara because it’s less popular with fujoshi than my usual haunt of Ikebukuro (land of the infamous Otome Road), and last year Akiba took way longer to sell out, so I wanted to go to Shosen Book Tower, an incredibly popular (and old) bookstore in Akihabara. However… the pamphlet wasn’t there lol. Ope. So I asked the staff, and they confirmed they WERE supposed to get a shipment in, but something went wrong and it was delayed.

Which was fine. Because you could also buy the pamphlet at Animate, and Animate Akihabara was only a few blocks away. (And I could look at Genshin goods while I was there…)

Tip that I actually didn’t know at the time (I spent a good ten minutes combing each floor with no sign of the pamphlet before asking the staff): pamphlets like this are actually generally kept behind the counter of the main floor. So if you’re ever in Japan and looking to purchase an event pamphlet, ask the staff first before wasting a bunch of time looking for it! (They’re very nice and helpful, and if you don’t speak Japanese just show the image on your phone and they’ll understand!)

Anyway, pamphlet obtained! Onto the actual content for the upcoming J.GARDEN 55!

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Renta! Staff BL Awards 2023

~ Admin ~ 8 Comments

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.

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Beast Week Day 1: There’s a Vampire in the School

~ ames ~ 2 Comments

Read here:
The Black Cat & the Vampire

Japanese title:
寄宿舎の黒猫は夜をしらない
Kishukusha no Kuroneko wa Yoru wo Shiranai

“If vampires have the power to charm people, that would fit him perfectly.”

Set in a snowy fantasy boarding school in a nonexistent country, Nikke Taino’s “The Black Cat & The Vampire” sets the perfect eerie Halloween mood. Following honor student Yuki who just wants a quiet life of studying, there’s a mystery at the school when fellow student Aula wakes up dazed and weak, two bloody puncture wounds on his neck. Thus starts the rumor that surely there’s a monster on their secluded scenic campus—a vampire.

Almost instantly, Yuki starts to suspect the stunning and charismatic head boy Jean. “Vampires seduce people with their beautiful looks. And then latch onto their necks, so they say.” Vowing to get closer to Jean to find out the truth, Yuki feels himself drawn to the older boy, seeing a yearning and sadness in his flirtations. Jean says Yuki is the only one he can love and trust, specifically because Yuki doesn’t care for him. But what will happen if Yuki finds himself falling for Jean…?

Jean isn’t disgusted by garlic, nor does he avoid human food, and his teeth are as normal as anyone’s. But Yuki can’t shake the feeling that there’s some sort of supernatural allure to Jean. Strange things keep happening at their school and around Jean, but is Jean actually the culprit, or is he just another victim of circumstance?

I LOVE Nikke Taino’s work, and this is no exception. I live for the yearning and drama of Jean being madly in love with the only person who he desperately wants to never love him back. The characters are all so wonderful and have their own endearing personalities, and having such a wide cast of characters—as Nikke Taino generally does—makes the world feel so full and alive.

If you’re in the mood for a wonderful, fantastical winter mystery, I can’t recommend this enough. Is Jean really a vampire, or is he just an ethereally alluring man surrounded by misfortune? You, dear reader, just have to find out for yourself.