Tag: yanase seno

Renta! Staff BL Awards 2025

~ Admin ~ Leave a comment

2025 was another big year for Renta!—a bit of a whirlwind, really! We’ve been so busy, in fact, I couldn’t remember 99% of what we did, and Sou and Yomogi had to step in with a bunch of ideas. So here’s a quick year in review!

We did multiple BL projects over the course of the year! We were able to do two more mangaka interviews: Jiro Kawaii and Nobiru Hoshi. One thing you might not know is that the BL Team actually gets to choose who we interview, and we get to write the questions as fans of the artist, so these are always very exciting for us with many an afternoon meeting where we just go through Sensei’s socials and reread their work and jot down our burning questions. So we really hope you all enjoy the interviews as much as we do!

We also did a fanletter campaign for the wonderful Yamayade! A HUGE thank you to Sensei for being willing to participate in the project while they were working hard on the OmaKiss continuation (which we’re in the process of translating and getting into your hands ASAP 😎). Staff member Agedashi mentions it in one of their award picks, but Sensei’s illustration of UeKan in high school was too cute. I can’t recommend checking out the linked page enough! You can also read the handwritten mini Q&A!

We were able to do some really fun mini events on our socials this year, which gave us a wonderful opportunity to interact with our users a lot more! It’s been so fun getting to know some of you! In March we hosted the BL Trope Tourney, pitting popular BL tropes against each other, which was a blast. We actually wrote an entire retrospective, but just know that we heard you all loud and clear: you want more older guys (and more mutual pining)! We also did Kinktober on the Twitter, where we decided to go all in on some more raunchy stuff, so we really appreciate everyone being so supportive! Hopefully our fellow perverts got some good recommendations.

For conventions, in 2025 we went all in on Citrus Con! We participated both as major sponsors and with more panels than ever, and tried to stay active all weekend in our Discord chat. We played the BL Sugoroku we made for our users, discussed 2025 BL trends, and hosted a Live Drawing by the wonderful Pokerou-sensei! You can read our full retrospective here: CLICK! We also participated in our FIRST EVER in-person convention with a booth at AnimeNYC where we also debuted the wonderful R-kun! It was such a joy to finally get to meet so many of our users in person, not to mention all the wonderful fellow industry people who stopped by, and we really hope we can go back again next year!

Closer to home, this year was also our parent company‘s 30th anniversary, and we’re so proud to continue as part of the larger Renta! family. We refreshed our BL Homepage this last spring, and have also have started dabbling more and more with lightly censored (and—soon!—entirely uncensored) licenses in-house! We also attended J.GARDEN 58 as the full BL Team (Yomogi’s first time!), and then met up with some great BL industry friends afterward, which was a blast!

As for what’s coming in 2026… 😇 Just know that we have a lot of amazing BL waiting in the wings, and some projects we worked on ALL through 2025 that we can’t wait to debut this coming year. Trust me when I say the BL team—and the entire English Renta! staff—have been working extremely hard behind the scenes. Thank you so much for all your support through 2025, and we can’t wait to bring you more and more wonderful BL in 2026!

Anyway, enough about what we did in 2025—what about BL manga we loved? We have the usual categories with some new guest stars. You can either click the links below to go directly to each section, or just read the full recommendations.

Favorite New Series
Favorite Continuing Series
Favorite Seme
Favorite Uke
Favorite Up-and-Coming Author
Amazing Art
Favorite Renta! Title
Favorite Cover
Favorite Couple

Don’t forget to check out the previous years as well: 2023 ＆ 2024!

Continue reading “Renta! Staff BL Awards 2025” →

BL Trope Tourney 2025: A Retrospective!

~ ames ~ 1 Comment

Recently we’ve been trying to brain storm how to change our BL Twitter so it’s more fun and interactive! Over the past year, through conversations with readers and community members, we’ve been doing a lot of trial and error regarding what our followers do and don’t like about our social media presence. “Stop posting the same series over and over and over again”? Got it. “We want more culture and recommendation posts”? Working on it! We want to make the BL Twitter as fun to follow as it is to run.

As part of our push to have a more engaging Twitter presence, this last spring we hosted the “BL Trope Tourney”! This was our take on the incredibly popular March Madness men’s college basketball tournament, which we’d wanted to do for a while. Initially, we wanted to face specific popular series off against each other, but that was understandably shot down by our licensing team since it could potentially be upsetting/negative to the publishers and artists. So we shelved the idea for some time—until we realized there were other ways to have a fun bracket without making our wonderful partners uneasy!

Thus, the BL trope Tourney: 16 popular BL tropes were pitted against each other, and over the course of 15 days we held a poll to slowly eliminate the tropes one by one until only a single trope reigned supreme.

Continue reading “BL Trope Tourney 2025: A Retrospective!” →

Prepare for trouble and make it double (and furry): yanase seno’s “Double Beastly Trouble”

~ Admin ~ Leave a comment

Read on Renta!: Double Beastly Trouble by yanase seno

Japanese title: ダブルドッグバディ・Double Dog Buddy

Links:
yanase seno’s twitter
doujinshi twitter
website
instagram
pixiv
all of yanase seno’s works on Renta!

That’s right. We’re talking, once more, about what’s building up to be a masterpiece by author Yanase Seno (stylized in lower case), “Double Beastly Trouble”: the tale of two beast-men joining the military so as to reach the top… and to harass a deeply troubled young man. We’re not too many chapters in so far, be it in Japan or our English release, and yet it’s already sucked me in with its multi-dimensional characters, the developing mysteries around their relationships, and the unassumingly delicate world-building that promises so much more to come.  

If my prior mini-rant on this fantastic story left a lot to be desired, come with me to delve even deeper into this tale of military power struggles and hot, but also adorable nekomimi (‘cat’, in this case, ‘beast-eared’) men.

Below be spoilers, so don’t go rummaging like these two >:0
Continue reading “Prepare for trouble and make it double (and furry): yanase seno’s “Double Beastly Trouble”” →

Renta! Staff BL Awards 2023

~ Admin ~ 9 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.

Continue reading “Renta! Staff BL Awards 2023” →

Beast Week Day 2: would you make these two your dogs?

~ Admin ~ 4 Comments

“Two (upcoming) beast-person manga reviews for Halloween?” Well, no, you see, the beast-people in Yanase Seno’s “Double Beastly Trouble” (Double Dog Buddy) are “beastly” (hah), sure, but they’re a species of their own, therefore they’re not the same as any other run of the mill wolfish beast-person. (Putting those rhetoric high-school classes to good use.)

Our protagonist, Sir Ewan Gwenthia, is an aloof, capable soldier, leading a squad against an underground dogfighting ring, where two members of a humanoid species, known as the “larga,” are being exploited. The two reigning champions, cool Zazie and dorky Seto, are unwilling to part with their turf, just as Ewan himself is loath to come anywhere close to a larga. As circumstances would have it though, the twain choose to follow Ewan as his ‘dogs’ and Ewan is obligated by the military to train and subdue them.

Many Renta! readers might be familiar with Yanase Seno’s gorgeous, crisp art-style from their other hit, “Geminis Craving Love” (Aisaretagari No Gemini), which means they might also be familiar with sensei’s apparent preference for 3P/poly action/ménage à trois. So far, the two larga that comprise this threesome are in agreement that they want to “toy” with Ewan. There’s more to them than their animal instinct for domination though, as, at times, they display a more nurturing side, too. With his small stature and very relatable thirst to prove himself, Ewan seems to bring that protectiveness out in the larga, just as much as their need to “play”.

Personally, I’m very keen to see where this plot is going. Ewan has character the depth of the Mariana Trench, and his unresolved family issues are a key part of the story. There’s also the intricate worldbuilding that doesn’t seem to be just there as a setting, but intrinsically connected to the characters, their background and hopefully their path forward. I’ll stop here before I end up spoiling anything, but, let’s just say, if you’re looking for a beast-flavored ménage BL for this Spooky Season, give Yanase Seno’s “Double Beastly Trouble” a spin. And, if you have read it, do tell, whom of the two larga do you prefer so far? (I’m team Zazie, btw.)

For more goodness:
Sensei’s works on Renta!
Sensei’s Twitter
Website
Instagram
Pixiv