10/5 (Sat) 16:16 Kyodo News – In China, where the authorities impose strict censorship, Boys’ Love (BL) works depicting romance between men are capturing the hearts of women. Hit works born from novel submission sites have expanded into countries around the world, including Japan, Russia, and Europe. Despite the restrictions, the story has also been adapted into a TV drama, which has resulted in raising awareness of sexual minorities in China, where prejudice against them is deeply rooted. [Photo] Heart-pounding romance between two handsome actors! Thai BL drama is hugely popular worldwide, with its roots in Japan. A panel of a handsome, half-naked man with dark skin and a beautiful boy in the form of a mermaid. A store in a shopping center in Beijing is lined with merchandise related to BL works. “If we only featured male pairings, the authorities would take notice, so the trick to displaying them is to mix in ’ordinary romance’ stories between men and women as well,” said a store staff member. In China, BL is considered “aesthetic” and most of the writers and readers are female. It is said that pirated copies of Japanese works began to flow in and become established in the 1990s. With the spread of the Internet, the number of authors publishing novels online, where there is less oversight than in print or video, has increased dramatically. In China, sexual depictions, not just homosexuality, are subject to regulation. In 2021, the Xi Jinping leadership declared feminine androgynous men and BL to be “delinquent culture” and announced their exclusion.
>>1 Male homosexuality has been prevalent in China since ancient times. Both in Han and nomadic countries. Japanese fujoshi would research history thoroughly before creating their works, but Chinese fujoshi probably just line up young celebrities and get excited.
>>4 Basic hentai erotic works were fully developed in China, but they were hidden by the Communist dictatorship. Jin Ping Mei was written over 400 years ago.
I think that bromance stories about passionate friendship and loyalty between men that don’t go as far as BL are quite popular in China. You can do it just by writing historical novels lol.
>>19 What you find in a normal story is a test of the maturity of the reader. It starts with easy-to-understand BL, then goes through shounen manga, then history, and eventually ends up including stationery.
There is a story that seems to remain of a Chinese intellectual who studied in Japan during the Edo period, and was shocked when a Japanese intellectual suggested that he should try homosexuality.
They talk about how it’s expanding and that its roots are in Japan, as if it’s coming from China, but it’s all stuff that’s from Japan and copied from there. I don’t want to talk about that area, but the depths of that world in Japan are not something that a Kyodo News outlet can grasp.
>>41 Not really. You can get married and have kids while still being rotten. The problem is that you can’t stop fantasizing about your kids having BL with each other or with your parents and children. Unfortunately, you can only fall for handsome guys. You’re likely to fall for someone who’s been slut-shamed and fall into depravity.
There are rotten women in every country. I saw a blog where an American woman was doing a BL about Smallville Superman. It was a homosexual illustration of Clark Kent, a high school student, and Lex Luthor, a young man with full hair.
In China, sexual depictions, not just homosexuality, are subject to regulation. In 2021, the Xi Jinping leadership declared feminine androgynous men and BL to be “delinquent culture” and announced their exclusion. The more it’s banned, the more it will ignite, and book burnings and aesthetic ignorance will occur.
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