BL Awards Light: The ChillChill BL Character General Election!

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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A Love Letter to the Dumb Boys of BL

We all have our preferences regarding the type of characters we like. For instance, sadistic seme characters have been a mainstay in BL for a long time, presumably because they’re popular. So have tsundere uke characters, or super shy, virginal, naïve uke. You might like sweet boys or soft boys or badass boys or buff boys. But one character type I find enduringly wonderful in BL is simply: incredibly dumb boys.

And thankfully, there’s a wealth of them.

While chatting it over with the rest of the BL team, we decided on five categories of Dumb Boys (TM): dick for brains, beefcakes, naïve boys, school boys, and guys who’re just… really stupid. I put together some recommendations in each category, so if you, too, are a connoisseur of Dumb Boys (TM), please read on.

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