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!)
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.
The few times I’ve had the joy of reading people’s opinions on Renta!, there’s been a continuing theme: the weird titles. Whether people find them annoying or funny, Renta!’s titles seem to have become an inseparable part of our branding within the BL fandom. So I thought I would talk about why Renta!’s titles sometimes look the way they do, why those changes occur, and the overall culture pressuring us to handle our titles this way.
First, I want to talk about the general manga titling culture in Japan as of late. As discerning eyes may have noticed, manga titles keep getting longer and longer and longer, and more and more… err… upfront (?) about the manga’s themes. “I Was A Struggling Office Worker But Now I’ve Been Reincarnated As The Rich Mean Villainess But I’ve Decided To Go Against My Fate!” etc. I’m sure we’ve all seen those. This is a naming dynamic I like to refer to as “hyper-meta titling,” and it’s been popular in Japan for the last five or so years. I’m not sure what initially caused this trend (that would be its own interesting rabbit hole, and perhaps a blog post for another day), but it means these titles are already quite long and weird in Japanese, and often get even longer and weirder during translation. You also see them semi-frequently in BL, in the direction of “I Met A Hot Guy At The Gym And Now We’re Friends With Benefits and I Want to Lick His Nipples” (not a real title… unfortunately) etc.
But those aren’t the titles I want to talk about with this post. Instead, I want to talk about adult content, SEO, and the pinch of an increasingly anti-porn culture in the West.
Damn. Sounds a lot less sexy now, huh? 😅
For those who don’t work in fields that have a significant online presence, SEO stands for “search engine optimization.” You might hear your favorite influencers discussing it sometimes in terms of using the best words and phrases to get clicks—things that are currently trending, or are consistently popular. In the case of this blog, for instance, we’d want to include a lot of BL-, manga- and otaku-related phrases, keywords, full titles in a variety of spellings (English, romaji, and Japanese), etc. in order to help the right audience find our content.
However, in the past ten or so years and for a variety of reasons (some incredibly valid—we don’t want children stumbling across our content, obviously—and some a little… uh… less so), the overlords who have the most sway over the internet have cranked the breaks on SEO when it comes to adult content. Any words generally seen as sexual or pornographic in nature can get your site flagged and pushed pages and pages into the search results, even if your content is exactly what’s being sought out. The same has been happening with social media sites—I’m sure you all remember the Tumblr apocalypse where the site banned porn (and gave birth to the wonderful phrase “female-presenting nipples”) and subsequently lost half their users within the next few years. Twitter, too, has been recently cracking down and issuing shadow bans on adult content.
(But we keep trucking, because Twitter is all we have left… 🙃)
Renta! actually has entire lists of phrases we can’t use in our titles and synopses specifically because they are incredibly damaging to SEO. Because I don’t want to severely damage the SEO for our blog, I’ll post a little image here:
However, as has already been established, Japanese artists and publishers as of late love being particularly blunt in their titles, particularly when it comes to porn. So a title like ZOMBIE HIDE SEX (ゾンビ・ハイド・セックス) has to become… Fooling Around While The Zombies Roam. My Love Story as a Slut with a Wet, Needy Hole (恋するビッチのとろ穴事情) becomes A Hole Craving to be Touched. Masturbating Online (ひとりえっちオンライン) becomes I Caught Him Getting Off Online! The titles essentially have the same meaning, but using safe, clean words. But using “safe, clean words” can make it feel kind of bizarre…
We do our best to retain titles that still convey the Japanese (and the content of the manga itself) while also skirting the regulations on adult content for SEO.
And I know what you’re thinking. “But Ames…” you’re about to say with a furrowed brow. “You guys have TONS of stuff on your site that uses those words…” We do. And the answer is simple: those aren’t localized by us. While we also localize lots and lots of great content, we also host lots of content localized by our wonderful partners. (This is what the “Localized by:” tag on the product details means!)
On the one hand, we could take a page out of their book and translate the titles more literally, since there’s a possibility having any of those words on our site removes us from the running in the SEO race, so why not just go ham? But we hope that offsetting it at least a little with our own titles can help the anti-porn situation much of the West has gotten itself stuck in.
Localizing content from a highly porn-positive culture like Japan (though, with strict censorship laws… the contradictions are confusing) for fairly anti-porn cultures in the West comes with a lot of strange, unexpected hurdles (and many an explanation to our JP staff on why we can and can’t do things the same way they’d be done in Japan). But, for us it’s worth it if we can continue bringing the wonderful content we love to an even wider audience. We hope to continue sharing lots more bizarre, silly, cute titles with you in the future, so I hope you all look forward to it!
What are some of your favorite silly Renta! titles? I’d love to hear them on the comments or on Twitter! 🤗
When I first heard whispers that the next Renta! fan letter campaign would center around THEYuo Yodogawa, I could hardly contain my excitement. My company would be serving as a bridge between international fans and one of my favorite BL mangaka in the game today?? Heck yeah!
In case you’re unfamiliar with the wildly popular Yodogawa-sensei, I’ll quickly share how I became a fan. Have you ever fallen in love at first sight with an art style? I believe that’s what I experienced upon laying eyes on Yuo Yodogawa’s art for the first time. Little did I know when I stumbled upon a chapter in the middle of a random manga and thought, “Huh, that art looks really nice!” that I would quickly be sucked into the Yodogawaverse — and I couldn’t be happier.
If you’ve never had the pleasure of experiencing a Yodogawa manga, I suppose the best way to describe their body of work would be as sexy, funny, and cute — but that doesn’t do it nearly enough justice, so I’ll just use this space to gush about a few of my favorite series from Yodogawa-sensei!
I hope you’ll join me in the Yodogawaverse, and discover some BL series that are both awe-inspiring and “aww”-worthy!
It’d be remiss of me to let the Halloween season pass without giving some much-deserved love to this hit zomBL series that’s just BRIMMING with action, horror, romance, and plenty of heart-pounding smut in between the heart-stopping thrills. Yuo Yodogawa’s “Fooling Around While The Zombies Roam” (Japanese title: ゾンビ・ハイド・セックス / Zombie Hide Sex) is a genre-blending masterpiece that’s exciting right from page 1 and keeps that momentum throughout.
Convenience store employee Haruomi’s life gets flipped-turned upside down when a zombie outbreak throws the world into chaos. By chance, he’s saved by a handsome soldier named Kazuma, but just when the two have made it to safety, Haruomi is confronted by another problem… Kazuma’s hard dick!! Apparently all that adrenaline pumping can get the blood flowing to all sorts of places! Thus begins a confusing yet mutually beneficial relationship between the two —wherein Kazuma protects Haruomi, and in exchange Haruomi takes care of Kazuma’s “needs” with his soft and supple body (sorry, I had to, that boi’s got some CAKE ). The two set out together to find supplies, other survivors, and maybe even a cure for the disease that started all of this… all the while their feelings for one another deepen.
If you’re a fan of shonen battle manga, zombie flicks, and a bit of gore (though nothing too stomach-churning), you’ll love the action-packed man vs. zombie fight scenes. If you like BL on the fluffier side, you’ll enjoy seeing the cute, bespectacled Haruomi and the gruff but kindhearted Kazuma grow closer throughout the series, and become the ultimate power couple in the face of a dangerous world.
You can now read the first 4 volumes on Renta! The story only gets better as new characters join the cast and details about the nature of the zombifying disease are gradually revealed.
I’m currently working on a longer review of this series (with some inside looks at the gorgeous art), as well as other series by the incredible Yodogawa-sensei, that will be up on this BLog very soon — perhaps even with a special announcement… so keep your eyes peeled!
…And that’s a wrap for Beast Week 2023! But don’t worry — we’ve still got quite the MONSTER of a post waiting to be published on the spookiest day of the year, and if any of the manga we’ve introduced this week have appealed to you, we think you’ll be very pleased with it . So, stay tuned for our Halloween Special, and in the meantime, treat yourself to some of these wicked BL titles!
Thus begins a confusing yet mutually beneficial relationship between the two —wherein Kazuma protects Haruomi, and in exchange Haruomi takes care of Kazuma’s “needs” with his soft and supple body (sorry, I had to, that boi’s got some CAKE 
). The two set out together to find supplies, other survivors, and maybe even a cure for the disease that started all of this… all the while their feelings for one another deepen.
. So, stay tuned for our Halloween Special, and in the meantime, treat 
yourself to some of these wicked BL titles!
rentaBLog 