Gods exist because mankind prayed for them. This is how the “Yaoi” God spoke to us. While Yaoi God contends that a person’s gender has no bearing on their love for another, Moon God believes that men and women should marry. What will happen as a result of Moon’s traditional thinking clashing with Yaoi’s progressive thinking?
Yaoi is a fictional media genre that has its roots in Japan and features homoerotic relationships between male characters (/jai/; Japanese: [ja.o.i]). Its acronym is BL, and another name for it is the Wasei-eigo construction boys’ love (, bizu rabu) (, beru). [a] It is distinct from homoerotic media targeted at homosexual males, known as bara (, lit. “rose”), even though it frequently features male artists and draws a male audience. It is mostly created by women for other women, however men can also make it. It covers a wide range of entertainment mediums, such as manga, anime, drama CDs, books, video games, television shows, motion pictures, and fan works. Even though some fans and commentators in the West use the terms “Boys’ love” and “BL,” the term “yaoi” is still more commonly used in English. In Japan and the majority of Asia, this type of media is commonly referred to as “boys’ love” or “BL.”
The 1970s saw the emergence of the subgenre of shjo manga, also referred to as comics for women. There were other names for the new literary genre, including shnen-ai (literally, “boy love”), tanbi (literally, “aestheticism”), and June (literally, “du ne”). In the context of djinshi (, self-published works) culture, the term “yaoi” first originated in the late 1970s and early 1980s as a portmanteau of “yama nashi, ochi nashi, imi nashi,” which translates to “no climax, no purpose, no meaning.” The phrase was employed in a mocking way to describe amateur fan works that were exclusively concerned with sex at the expense of plot and character development. The term “boys’ love” was later coined by Japanese publications in the 1990s to describe male-to-male romantic media marketed to female customers.
One of the ideas and themes related to yaoi is the existence of androgynous men, often known as bishnen. Yaoi is also related with representations of rape, devalued female characters, stories that highlight homosociality while downplaying socio-cultural homophobia, and stories that emphasize homosociality. One of the distinctive features of yaoi is the custom of pairing characters in relationships according to the roles of seme, which can be translated as “sexual top” or “active pursuer,” and uke, which can be interpreted as “sexual bottom” or “passive pursued.” Yaoi has a significant global following since the 1990s. This has been done through the licensing and international distribution of its works, as well as the unauthorized internet sharing of those works by Yaoi fans. Yaoi fanworks, culture, and fandom have been the subject of extensive investigation and writing by academics and journalists from all over the world.