ChillChill Awards 2025!

Make sure to cast your vote! ChillChill Awards 2025 nominees dropped this last Friday, and boy is the competition intense. Around this time last year I wrote about the ChillChill BL Awards and why they matter so much—about ChillChill’s rise from a review and indexing site into essentially the community hub for all lovers of BL manga in Japan—so I’ll spare you from having me write too much here. Nonetheless, I still wanted to make a quick index of all the nominees from the 2025 BL Awards that you can read on Renta!

Last year we had quite a few, and thankfully this year is no different. Also, not just in regards to Renta!, this year’s BL Awards are a testament to how big BL is getting in the West because many of the nominees are licensed by a variety of other localization companies—both digital and print. It’s so wonderful to see how many BL get brought to an international audience now, not to mention so fast. It used to take much longer before BL was licensed for release in the West, and the options used to be so few and far between. It’s such a testament to Western BL fans who keep showing up pushing that BL isn’t just some niche genre—it’s got a massive and excited fanbase ready and willing to support the genre and its creators in any way they can. I love that so much, both as a fan and obviously as someone who works in the field. I can work my dream job only because of the BL fans who show up to support its creation. Thank you so much!

Another thing that’s a bit of a pride point for me is that two years in a row, now, most of our associated BL Awards nominees (particularly our own licenses and localizations) are in the up-and-coming category. That’s honestly so exciting! I talked a little bit in my post about the benefits and drawbacks of being a digital licensor about how we’re able to take more risks on lesser-known, up-and-coming talent due to the lower entry fees of digital versus print, and it fires me up every time I think I get to play even a tiny part in bringing these new artists to a wider audience. And this year’s BL Awards have a particularly good mix of super popular, established artists and rising stars!

Anyway, without further ado, here’s the list of the 2025 ChillChill BL Awards titles you can find on Renta!—including some sneak peaks into exciting upcoming licenses! 🀭

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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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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.

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Community Tags, Why They Exist, and Why They Matter

While searching on our site, you may have noticed we have two tagging systems:

If these tags appeal to you, they’re for the series Chew Me Up and Teach Me About Love!

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.

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Beast Week Day 4: A Lone Wolf’s Bad Romance

Read on Renta!: Chew Me Up And Teach Me About Love

Okay, so maybe this entry is cheating because technically Kamiya isn’t a werewolf in the traditional sense, butΒ it was only a matter of time before I stopped chatting my coworkers’ ears off about my love for this series in favor of giving it a spotlight on this BLog.

Pokerou’s “Chew Me Up And Teach Me About Love” (Japanese Title: ε™›γΏη •γ„γ¦ζ„›γ‚’γŠγ—γˆγ¦ / Kamikudaite Ai wo Oshiete) is admittedly more sweet than spooky, but it’s such a good mix of fluff, angst, and sexiness that I just HAD to recommend it for Beast Week.

Hitomi is a timid but well-meaning college student who finds himself drawn to his buff and manly yet kind neighbor Kamiya. Unsure if his feelings go beyond admiration, he maintains some distance while doing his best to be a good neighbor to the mature and cool Kamiya, in an effort to get closer to the gentle giant. However, he’s forced to confront his confused feelings head-on when one night, seemingly out of nowhere, Kamiya pushes him down and starts licking and grinding on him… Say whaaat?!

It turns out Kamiya has theriomorphosis — a condition which causes a person to develop animal traits (in his case, wolf features) and also become really horny out of a desire to reproduce because, well, of course it does.

Despite the shock of his encounter with his hot neighbor, Hitomi still wants to be a part of his life, and finds himself trying to be as helpful to Kamiya as possible — buying his essential supplies since he can’t go out in public with a tail and ears, grooming him, and just keeping him company in his time of duress (learning that you’re transforming into an animal takes a pretty big toll on one’s psyche, it turns out). Both of them enjoy this arrangement, until they both start to realize they want a little something more out of their relationship… and aren’t sure whether taking that next step is a good idea.

The stimulating sex scenes contrast with the softer emotional side of the story, and each installment keeps you on the edge of your seat.

You need only check the community tags (assigned by the lovely users of Renta!) to see why so many other fans of heartwarming and sexy stories have come to adore this manga.

I wholeheartedly agree.

…There’s so much more I want to say about this series, but we’ll save that for another day when I give it a proper long-form review. In the meantime, why not add it to your Spooky Season reading list and get caught up on this ride of feels? Chapters 5-6 will be available on Renta! from November, and let me tell you, the story gets JUICY — so you won’t want to miss it!

Beast Week Day 1: Vampires バンパむを

Beast Week Day 2: Beast People γ‚€γƒŒ

Beast Week Day 3: Succubi ζ‚ͺι­”