takeshobo – rentaBLog

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.

“Where’s the Dong??” – the Confusing Mechanisms of BL Censorship

If you’ve spent a good amount of time in the spicier part of Japanese BL fandom, it’s likely that you’ve encountered some form of censorship. A dick scratched out here, a hole whited out there — basically anything to keep the images from being completely explicit. It may have left you wondering, in a genre focusing on guy-on-guy romantic and sexual relationships, why is there nary a peen to be seen?

This phenomenon isn’t unique to Japan, though – it’s also present in Korean webtoons, for example, and other adult-oriented media in countries where anti-obscenity or anti-pornography laws exist.

It begs the questions: what rules are in place, if any, that keep us from enjoying our pr0nz in their uncensored glory? And, what point even is there if the intended audience is over 18 anyway, and we already know full well what’s going on behind those teeny tiny censorship bars?

I decided to take a trip down the rabbit hole and explore this sometimes annoying, often confusing, yet in some ways necessary aspect of BL and share my findings with you all. Please note that this article pertains to Japanese BL manga specifically — it’s the type I’m most familiar with, dealing with it on a daily basis for work and enjoying it in my free time as well. The censorship landscape may look different in other countries and across different media, so this is but a small case study!

Beefcake Special (Happy Good Meat Day!)

For all lovers of BEEF — dinner is served!!

It’s finally cooled down a bit here in Tokyo, and the Christmas decorations lining all the shopping centers and Mariah Carey blaring from every store’s loudspeaker do a wonderful job of reminding me of the upcoming holiday season.

…But maybe you’re the type of person who wishes the holiday cheer could hold off for a bit longer, and prefers to savor the time between Spooky Season and the lively-but-potentially-exhausting year-end festivities. In which case, Japan’s got you covered!

As we briefly touched upon in our Yaoi Day post, Japan has lots of “special” days throughout the year, based on wordplay that’s possible with the Japanese pronunciation of a given date — and November 29th is one of these days! In Japanese, 1-1-2-9 can be pronounced いいにく (ii-ni-ku), which is a homonym for 良い肉 (also pronounced iiniku), which means “good meat.” As such, 11/29 has been designated “Good Meat Day” in Japan.

Unfortunately, as far as special days in Japan go, Good Meat Day isn’t really that big of a deal — beyond some meat vendors having special offers, or meat lovers treating themselves to a delicious, protein-rich meal .

However, here at RentaBLog, we like to spice things up and take every opportunity to celebrate different aspects of Boys’ Love — and thus, I decided that on this day, we’d give the spotlight over to the beefy guys of BL, who make our hearts pound with their rippling muscles — the buffer, the better!

Hope you’ve saved room for a feast, because meat is on the menu tonight!!

emo café: B+Library collab showcasing Harada, Akira Minazuki, and Mitsuaki Asou

Nestled in a narrow, trendy side street in Tokyo’s youth fashion district of Harajuku is a bright pink building named emo café, a tiny collab café that partners with mangaka and publishers to turn manga into a culinary experience. emo café is relatively new, having started up in the last few years, and follows in the footsteps of other BL cafés like Toriko Mangaten and ComiComi Studio Machida (r.i.p.).

I first noticed emo café when they did the second B+Library collab, featuring two absolutely wonderful manga that are on our site—Jimi Fumikawa’s I Seriously Can’t Believe you… (one of my all-time favorites!) and Jyanome’s Twilight Out of Focus—as well as Ichikawa Kei’s incredibly famous Blue Sky Complex (licensed by Futekiya).

They then did a collab for SHIKKE’s spectacular series Unexpected Attraction, which I tried to get into but reservations sold out within the first five minutes. (There will be a revival café, though!) There’s also been a café for Kurahashi Tomo’s Someday I’ll Fall For You, and a café for Tsubame Koshiora’s There’s Fanfiction About Us?, as well as a handful of other series.

When I saw they would be doing a third B+Library, this time for Harada’s Happy Shitty Life, Akira Minazuki’s Smoky Nectar, and Mitsuaki Asou’s The Farthest Love in the World I knew we had to go—especially considering Happy Shitty Life is one of our localizations, and Smoky Nectar is coming soon. Unfortunately, because of the massive popularity of all three artists (each one of them being a veteran in the BL genre) I once again couldn’t get in.

…That is, until they extended the end date by a week. Sometimes it pays to sit on Twitter constantly. -w-)b