What is BL& GL

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BL stands for Boy’s Love. It originated in Japan tracing back to the 1970’s and is a genre of fiction which depicts romance between two male characters, and was originally created by women for a female audience. 

A lot of people recoil when I explain that it is 'boy’s love' and not 'men’s love', I am sorry to say that I do not have the power to rename the genre, I did google how to make a time machine to go back to 1970’s Japan but it turned out to be impossible. 

When we look at live action BL

In 2014 GMMTV, a production company in Thailand, made Love Sick the Series, bringing BL (or Y-series as it’s named in Thailand) to Thailand, and then in 2020 in the height of the pandemic they released 2Gether the Series and the Thai BL scene exploded. 

The same year Korean BL Where Your Eyes Linger releases, but it isn’t until 2022 with Semantic Error that Korean BL really enter the scene in terms of popularity. 

As mentioned before BL has existed in Japan since 1970’s but in terms of live action it was Ossan’s Love from 2018 which brought the genre into the mainstream. 

Who watches BL?

As mentioned above the genre was created by mainly straight women for mainly straight women, which might confuse some readers, thinking that it should be written by queer men for other queer men. In looking into the reasons why straight women are even into BL these were the main reasons I found popping up time and time again:

• Not only do we get one attractive man we get two.

• There is no inherent inequality between the leads.

• It’s a safe space to explore romance and sexuality as there is no one you can compare yourself to. 

• Female romance characters are so poorly written they'd rather do without.

• Finally a story about men showing affection and having deep personal bonds.

Whether you agree with those reasons are up to you, as for my reasons you can read about that in the 'About Me' section.

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Since the genre has gotten more popular there has been a more diverse shift in the audience with more men, non-binary and queer folk joining the fandom.

Turning our eyes to the less popular genre GL

As you can probably guess GL stands for Girl’s Love (again no time machine was available to change the name). GL also began to appear in Japanese fiction in the 1970s but began growing more popular in the 1990s. 

In terms of live action GL it has come far in the past year or so, but is still vastly less popular than BL (which boils my blood butI I digress)

The first Japanese live action GL was Transit Girls in 2015, but other than one other show (Futari Monologue in 2017), the genre doesn’t become popular until 2022 with She Loves to Cook and She Loves to Eat, which had a sequel in 2024.

I’m still waiting for Korea to really give GL a real shot, other than shorter series which can mainly be found on Youtube, series that can be really good! But are shot with the budget of three dollars and a dream.

Moving on to Thai GL, the first big show and the one that paved the way, is of course GAP from 2022, the main actresses Freen Sarocha and Rebecca 'Becky' Patricia Armstrong going on to have achieved wild success with careers that seemingly just keep flourishing (and deservedly so). Since GAP proved that GL can be incredibly successful, other companies have decided to give it their own try and we’re seeing more and more GL shows coming out of Thailand.

Who watches GL?

Now a lot of the reasons for why women watch BL has to do with the lack of female characters, so why would the same audience give GL a chance? The sad truth is many will not watch GL shows. Perhaps not citing those reasons exactly, instead I see many saying that the shows ‘simply aren’t as good’, and to those people I must ask, how many shows did you watch before coming to that conclusion? 

Now you might think that the audience is perhaps just straight men citing the same reasons just in reverse. That is not the case. GL shows are made mainly with the female gaze in mind, not attracting a whole lot of men. Instead the main audience seem to be queer women and non-binary folk. 
 

LGBTQ+ Media vs. BL/GL

Now that you are educated on the terms of BL and GL you might ask me: “Does this mean that Moonlight is a BL?” “Is Rent a BL or GL or Both?!”

Now, now, calm down.

The rule is all BL/GL is LGBTQ+ media but not all LGBTQ+ media is BL/GL. Remember that BL/GL is a romance genre, romance takes center stage. LGBTQ+ media highlights queer people as main characters and romance is not needed.

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Now that we've got that settled, please enjoy this blog!