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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Publisher Showcase: Brite (Tulle & B.Pilz)

As you may have gleaned from our previous publisher showcase on KiR as well as our Citrus Con panel about the ins and outs of BL localization, when it comes to manga, paying attention to the publisher (and the publishing lines within) matters not just in terms of the type of content on offer, but also how easily a license request can be fulfilled. Different companies have ties with different publishers, either through long-standing relationships and trust building, or simply because they may be the subsidiary of a larger company. So it’s useful to pay attention to what publishers a localization company already has in their roster, because if they’ve licensed from them once, chances are the process of doing it again will be much smoother.

As I mentioned in the KiR showcase, we’ve had a long relationship with them as a publishing line, and frequently release their content. But another publisher we have a good relationship with is Brite Publishing, the larger company behind the two BL lines Tulle and B.Pilz . Our long-standing relationship with Brite Publishing is a major reason we’re able to bring you guys so many of their wonderful titles.

As you can maybe tell, we at the RentaBLog love Brite Publishing and the mangaka who release stories under them. I’ve discovered many of my more recent favorite mangaka through getting to work on Brite Publishing stuff through Renta!, and it’s made me really want to help push their BL out to a wider audience.

One of the things I love about Brite is that, as a medium-size publisher, they work with a great mix of established and newer, lesser-known mangaka. This not only means getting to experience lots of new art and writing styles, but since the artists are newer to the scene, they bring a fresh new take on established tropes and stories. Because of this, you might see a lot of youth culture references (which also makes them fun to translate—we live for the challenge!) or themes that previously didn’t show up in BL much. It makes it so there’s always something new and exciting releasing under Brite!

For that reason, we (me, and our newest BL Team member Yomogi) decided we’d showcase a handful of our Brite Publishing favs! (Aside from, you know, the many, many, many we’ve reviewed on the BLog already… hehe★)

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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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