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189-444: Boys' love ( Japanese : ボーイズ ラブ , Hepburn : bōizu rabu ) , also known by its abbreviation BL ( ビーエル , bīeru ) , is a genre of fictional media originating in Japan that depicts homoerotic relationships between male characters. It is typically created by women for a female audience, distinguishing it from homoerotic media created by and for gay men , though BL does also attract

378-493: A yaoi series published in the shōjo magazine Margaret , was originally a Captain Tsubasa dōjinshi created by Ozaki that she adapted into an original work. By 1990, seven Japanese publishers included yaoi content in their offerings, which kickstarted the commercial publishing market of the genre. Between 1990 and 1995, thirty magazines devoted to yaoi were established: Magazine Be × Boy , founded in 1993, became one of

567-560: A 2008 bookstore survey finding that between 25 and 30 percent of yaoi readers were male. The 2000s saw significant growth of yaoi in international markets, beginning with the founding of the American anime convention Yaoi-Con in 2001. The first officially-licensed English-language translations of yaoi manga were published in the North American market in 2003 (see Media below); the market expanded rapidly before contracting in 2008 as

756-450: A BL author, suggests that women are typically not depicted in BL as their presence adds an element of realism that distracts from a fantasy narrative. Since the late 2000s, women have appeared more frequently in BL works as supporting characters. Lunsing notes that early shōnen-ai and yaoi were often regarded as misogynistic , with the diminished role of female characters cited as evidence of

945-624: A benefit from the in-group to the out-group) means "[I/we] explained [it] to [him/her/them]". Such beneficiary auxiliary verbs thus serve a function comparable to that of pronouns and prepositions in Indo-European languages to indicate the actor and the recipient of an action. Japanese "pronouns" also function differently from most modern Indo-European pronouns (and more like nouns) in that they can take modifiers as any other noun may. For instance, one does not say in English: The amazed he ran down

1134-535: A blurring of the distinctions between the genres; anthropologist Thomas Baudinette notes in his fieldwork that gay men in Japan "saw no need to sharply disassociate BL from [gay manga] when discussing their consumption of 'gay media'." The two participants in a BL relationship (and to a lesser extent in yuri ) are often referred to as seme ( 攻め , lit. "top", as derived from the ichidan verb "to attack") and uke ( 受け , lit. "bottom", as derived from

1323-458: A celebrity's public image and creating slash stories with them. Real person slash gained popularity with the 1990s rise of boy bands in the pop music industry. In the Supernatural fandom, slash fans who were uncomfortable with shipping the two main brother characters moved into writing and reading Jsquared/J2 fic (slash involving the lead actors Jared Padalecki and Jensen Ackles ). This led to

1512-487: A chaste kiss, or even contain nothing but unfulfilled yearning; stories may be labeled "UST" for "unresolved sexual tension". Some sites require all stories to be rated and have warnings attached, often by using a beta reader . The term no lemon is sometimes used to indicate fan fiction stories without explicit sexual content. Anything with explicit content, especially with erotic scenes without accompanying romantic scenes, may be labeled "lemon". The term lemon arose from

1701-589: A complex system of honorifics , with verb forms and vocabulary to indicate the relative status of the speaker, the listener, and persons mentioned. The Japanese writing system combines Chinese characters , known as kanji ( 漢字 , ' Han characters') , with two unique syllabaries (or moraic scripts) derived by the Japanese from the more complex Chinese characters: hiragana ( ひらがな or 平仮名 , 'simple characters') and katakana ( カタカナ or 片仮名 , 'partial characters'). Latin script ( rōmaji ローマ字 )

1890-499: A concept can be found disparately throughout East Asia , but its specific aesthetic manifestation in 1970s shōjo manga (and subsequently in shōnen-ai manga) drew influence from popular culture of the era, including glam rock artists such as David Bowie , actor Björn Andrésen 's portrayal of Tadzio in the 1971 film adaptation of Death in Venice , and kabuki onnagata Bandō Tamasaburō . Though bishōnen are not exclusive to BL,

2079-460: A convenient label, so this distinction has not been widely adopted. Some slash authors also write slash fiction which contains transgender themes and transgender/ transsexual or intersex characters. As a result, the exact definition of the term has often been hotly debated within various slash fandoms. The strictest definition holds that only stories about relationships between two male partners ('M/M') constitute 'slash fiction', which has led to

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2268-414: A distinct language of its own that has absorbed various aspects from neighboring languages. Japanese has five vowels, and vowel length is phonemic, with each having both a short and a long version. Elongated vowels are usually denoted with a line over the vowel (a macron ) in rōmaji , a repeated vowel character in hiragana , or a chōonpu succeeding the vowel in katakana . /u/ ( listen )

2457-420: A fandom based on the concept of slash. Many early slash stories were based on a pairing of two close friends, a "hero dyad", or "One True Pairing", such as Kirk/Spock or Starsky/Hutch; conversely, a classic pairing between foils was that of Blake / Avon from Blake's 7 . The first K/S stories were not immediately accepted by all Star Trek fans. Later, authors such as Joanna Russ studied and reviewed

2646-523: A favourite character, or create a story about two original male characters and incorporate established characters into the story. Any male character may become the subject of a BL dōjinshi , including characters from non-manga titles such as Harry Potter or The Lord of the Rings , video games such as Final Fantasy , or real people such as actors and politicians. Amateur authors may also create characters out of personifications of abstract concepts (as in

2835-624: A gay audience. The economic crisis caused by the Lost Decade came to affect the manga industry in the late 1990s and early 2000s, but did not particularly impact the yaoi market; on the contrary, yaoi magazines continued to proliferate during this period, and sales of yaoi media increased. In 2004, Otome Road in Ikebukuro emerged as a major cultural destination for yaoi fandom, with multiple stores dedicated to shōjo and yaoi goods. The 2000s also saw an increase in male readers of yaoi , with

3024-557: A gay male audience. Gay manga typically focuses on masculine men with varying degrees of muscle, body fat, and body hair , in contrast to the androgynous bishōnen of BL. Graham Kolbeins writes in Massive: Gay Erotic Manga and the Men Who Make It that while BL can be understood as a primarily feminist phenomenon, in that it depicts sex that is free of the patriarchal trappings of heterosexual pornography, gay manga

3213-465: A genre. In a 2015 survey of professional Japanese male-male romance fiction writers by Kazuko Suzuki, five primary subgenres were identified: Despite attempts by researchers to codify differences between these subgenres, in practice these terms are used interchangeably. Kazumi Nagaike and Tomoko Aoyama note that while BL and yaoi are the most common generic terms for this kind of media, they specifically avoid attempts at defining subgenres, noting that

3402-419: A glide /j/ and either the first part of a geminate consonant ( っ / ッ , represented as Q) or a moraic nasal in the coda ( ん / ン , represented as N). The nasal is sensitive to its phonetic environment and assimilates to the following phoneme, with pronunciations including [ɴ, m, n, ɲ, ŋ, ɰ̃] . Onset-glide clusters only occur at the start of syllables but clusters across syllables are allowed as long as

3591-573: A greater quantity of material was published. The Internet allowed slash authors more freedom than print: stories could include branching story lines, links, collages, song mixes, and other innovations. The Internet increased slash visibility and the number of readers, as readers were now able to access the stories from their own home at a much lower cost, since zines cost more than an Internet connection. The number of fandoms represented increased dramatically, especially those devoted to science fiction, fantasy, and police dramas. The Internet also increased

3780-479: A listener depending on the listener's relative social position and the degree of familiarity between the speaker and the listener. When used in different social relationships, the same word may have positive (intimate or respectful) or negative (distant or disrespectful) connotations. Japanese often use titles of the person referred to where pronouns would be used in English. For example, when speaking to one's teacher, it

3969-417: A low-risk chance to explore who they are. They can stay anonymous while creating a world in which they can express themselves creatively and freely. However, slash fiction has also been criticized as being unrepresentative of the gay community as a whole, and as being used as a medium to express feminist frustration with popular and speculative fiction. The predominant demographic among slash fiction readers

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4158-593: A male audience and can be produced by male creators. BL spans a wide range of media, including manga , anime , drama CDs , novels, video games, television series, films, and fan works . The genre originated in the 1970s as a subgenre of shōjo manga , or comics for girls. Several terms were used for the new genre, including shōnen-ai ( 少年愛 , lit. "boy love") , tanbi ( 耽美 , lit. "aesthete" or "aesthetic") , and June ( ジュネ , [dʑɯne] ) . The term yaoi ( / ˈ j aʊ i / YOW -ee ; Japanese : やおい [jaꜜo.i] ) emerged as

4347-499: A name for the genre in the late 1970s and early 1980s in the context of dōjinshi ( self-published works) culture as a portmanteau of yama nashi, ochi nashi, imi nashi ("no climax, no point, no meaning"), where it was used in a self-deprecating manner to refer to amateur fan works that focused on sex to the exclusion of plot and character development, and that often parodied mainstream manga and anime by depicting male characters from popular series in sexual scenarios. "Boys' love"

4536-518: A negative light; she suggests this is because the character and reader alike are seeking to substitute the absence of unconditional maternal love with the "forbidden" all-consuming love presented in BL. In dōjinshi parodies based on existing works that include female characters, the female's role is typically either minimized or the character is killed off; Yukari Fujimoto noted that in these parodies, "it seems that yaoi readings and likeable female characters are mutually exclusive." Nariko Enomoto ,

4725-561: A result of the global financial crisis of 2007–2008 , but continued to grow slowly in the following years. South Korea saw the development of BL in the form of manhwa , notably Martin and John (2006) by Park Hee-jung and Crush on You (2006) by Lee Kyung-ha. The 2010s and 2020s saw an increase in the popularity of yaoi and BL media in China and Thailand in the form of web novels , live-action films, and live-action television dramas (see Media below). Though "boys' love" and "BL" have become

4914-488: A result of the influence of Fire! ; yaoi dōjinshi were also more sexually explicit than shōnen-ai . In reaction to the success of shōnen-ai and early yaoi , publishers sought to exploit the market by creating magazines devoted to the genre. Young female illustrators cemented themselves in the manga industry by publishing yaoi works, with this genre later becoming "a transnational subculture." Publishing house Magazine Magazine  [ ja ] , which published

5103-445: A romantic focus). The slash mark itself (/), when put between character's names, has come to mean a shorthand label for a romantic relationship, regardless of whether the pairing is heterosexual or homosexual, romantic or erotic. For many people, slash is a controversial subject. In addition to the legal issues associated with traditional fan fiction, some people believe that it tarnishes established media characters to portray them in

5292-408: A sentence need not be stated and pronouns may be omitted if they can be inferred from context. In the example above, hana ga nagai would mean "[their] noses are long", while nagai by itself would mean "[they] are long." A single verb can be a complete sentence: Yatta! ( やった! ) "[I / we / they / etc] did [it]!". In addition, since adjectives can form the predicate in a Japanese sentence (below),

5481-428: A single adjective can be a complete sentence: Urayamashii! ( 羨ましい! ) "[I'm] jealous [about it]!". While the language has some words that are typically translated as pronouns, these are not used as frequently as pronouns in some Indo-European languages, and function differently. In some cases, Japanese relies on special verb forms and auxiliary verbs to indicate the direction of benefit of an action: "down" to indicate

5670-587: A slash relationship on screen. Vidding used to be very guarded within the slash community, among other reasons, because the songs used in videos are copyrighted. When vidders started putting their videos online, their sites were routinely password protected, etc. Today, there are thousands of vids, and vid-like projects, available on YouTube and other video sites. Many of these vids are made by slash (and gen) fans, but enormous numbers of them are made by people who have never heard of media fandom. The previous secrecy of vidding fans has come to seem unnecessary, but there

5859-576: A subgenre of slash fiction. In Omegaverse works, humans are either dominant "alphas", neutral "betas" or submissive "omegas", and they exhibit sexual traits and behaviors based on those of wolves or other wild animals. The first Omegaverse slash fiction was written about the TV series Supernatural in the 2010s. The subgenre has become so popular that it evolved into a genre of original erotic fiction in its own right, independent from its roots in fan fiction. The earliest commercial publication using omegaverse tropes

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6048-515: A tolerance of homosexuality amid Westernization during the Meiji Era (1868-1912), and moved towards hostile social attitudes towards homosexuality and the implementation of anti-sodomy laws . In the face of this legal and cultural shift, artists who depicted male homosexuality in their work typically did so through subtext . Illustrations by Kashō Takabatake  [ ja ] in the shōnen manga (boys' comics) magazine Nihon Shōnen formed

6237-642: A way which was never illustrated canonically. But official disapproval of slash, specifically, is hard to find. As early as 1981, Lucasfilm has issued legal notices to fans who wrote sexually explicit stories. J. K. Rowling / Warner Brothers have sent cease and desist letters referencing "sexually explicit" writings on the web, though Rowling approves the writing of fan fiction in general, posting links to fan fiction on her website and openly acknowledging slash fiction while maintaining that pairings such as those between Harry/Draco and Harry/Snape are non-canonical. Some media creators seem downright slash friendly. In

6426-498: A work's canon , and the characters are usually not engaged in such relationships in their respective fictional universes. It is commonly believed that slash fan fiction originated during the late 1960s, within the Star Trek: The Original Series fan fiction fandom , starting with " Kirk/Spock " stories generally authored by female fans of the series and distributed privately among friends. The name arises from

6615-528: Is With Caution by J.L. Langley. The trope gained rapid popularity in Japan in the mid-2010s through fan dōjinshi and has become a subgenre of yaoi works. In Japanese works, Omegaverse also introduces a caste system, where Alphas are depicted as the upper class elites while Omegas are at the bottom tier and face discrimination. Omegas can get pregnant in spite of being male. In addition to fiction, fans also create artwork depicting media characters in same-sex relationship contexts. Initially, slash art

6804-624: Is compressed rather than protruded , or simply unrounded. Some Japanese consonants have several allophones , which may give the impression of a larger inventory of sounds. However, some of these allophones have since become phonemic. For example, in the Japanese language up to and including the first half of the 20th century, the phonemic sequence /ti/ was palatalized and realized phonetically as [tɕi] , approximately chi ( listen ) ; however, now [ti] and [tɕi] are distinct, as evidenced by words like tī [tiː] "Western-style tea" and chii [tɕii] "social status". The "r" of

6993-987: Is "pre-slashed", sometimes "pre-slashed for your convenience". Several slash conventions run throughout the year and across the globe, mostly in the United States, including Escapade in California, REVELcon in Texas, Connexions in Maryland, MediaWest*Con in Michigan, CON.TXT in Washington, D.C., Con*Strict in Nevada, Connotations in England, Zebracon in Illinois, Yaoi-Con in California, Bascon in California, and others. Slash fiction has created and appropriated words to denote peculiarities found within

7182-486: Is a genre that depicts prepubescent or pubescent boys in a romantic or pornographic context. Originating as an offshoot of yaoi in the early 1980s, the subgenre was later adopted by male readers and became influenced by lolicon (works depicting prepubescent or pubescent girls); the conflation of shotacon in its contemporary usage with BL is thus not universally accepted, as the genre constitutes material that marketed to both male and female audiences. Omegaverse

7371-606: Is a male-male romance subgenre that originated from the American series Supernatural and in the 2010s became a subgenre of both commercial and non-commercial BL. Stories in the genre are premised on societies wherein humans are divided into a dominance hierarchy of dominant "alphas", neutral "betas", and submissive "omegas". These terms are derived from those used in ethology to describe social hierarchies in animals . The " dom/sub universe" subgenre emerged in 2017 and gained popularity in 2021. The subgenre uses BDSM elements and also draws influences from Omegaverse, particularly

7560-491: Is a subgenre of slash fiction which focuses on romantic and/or sexual relationships between female fictional characters. Typically, characters featured in femslash are heterosexual in the canonical universe; however, similar fan fiction about lesbian characters are commonly labeled as femslash for convenience. The term is generally applied only to fanworks based on Western fandoms ; the nearest anime/manga equivalents are more often called yuri and shōjo-ai fanfiction. Femslash

7749-591: Is also known as "f/f slash", "femmeslash", and "saffic", the last term blending the words Sapphic and fiction . There is less femslash than there is slash based on male couples – it has been suggested that heterosexual female slash authors generally do not write femslash, and that it is rare to find a fandom with two sufficiently engaging female characters. Janeway/Seven is the main Star Trek femslash pairing, as only they have "an on-screen relationship fraught with deep emotional connection and conflict". Although it

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7938-445: Is also seen in o-medetō "congratulations", from medetaku ). Late Middle Japanese has the first loanwords from European languages – now-common words borrowed into Japanese in this period include pan ("bread") and tabako ("tobacco", now "cigarette"), both from Portuguese . Modern Japanese is considered to begin with the Edo period (which spanned from 1603 to 1867). Since Old Japanese,

8127-519: Is also used in a limited fashion (such as for imported acronyms) in Japanese writing. The numeral system uses mostly Arabic numerals , but also traditional Chinese numerals . Proto-Japonic , the common ancestor of the Japanese and Ryukyuan languages , is thought to have been brought to Japan by settlers coming from the Korean peninsula sometime in the early- to mid-4th century BC (the Yayoi period ), replacing

8316-643: Is an agglutinative , mora -timed language with relatively simple phonotactics , a pure vowel system, phonemic vowel and consonant length, and a lexically significant pitch-accent . Word order is normally subject–object–verb with particles marking the grammatical function of words, and sentence structure is topic–comment . Sentence-final particles are used to add emotional or emphatic impact, or form questions. Nouns have no grammatical number or gender , and there are no articles . Verbs are conjugated , primarily for tense and voice , but not person . Japanese adjectives are also conjugated. Japanese has

8505-440: Is appropriate to use sensei ( 先生 , "teacher"), but inappropriate to use anata . This is because anata is used to refer to people of equal or lower status, and one's teacher has higher status. Japanese nouns have no grammatical number, gender or article aspect. The noun hon ( 本 ) may refer to a single book or several books; hito ( 人 ) can mean "person" or "people", and ki ( 木 ) can be "tree" or "trees". Where number

8694-684: Is associated with comedy (see Kansai dialect ). Dialects of Tōhoku and North Kantō are associated with typical farmers. The Ryūkyūan languages, spoken in Okinawa and the Amami Islands (administratively part of Kagoshima ), are distinct enough to be considered a separate branch of the Japonic family; not only is each language unintelligible to Japanese speakers, but most are unintelligible to those who speak other Ryūkyūan languages. However, in contrast to linguists, many ordinary Japanese people tend to consider

8883-462: Is better documentation of Late Middle Japanese phonology than for previous forms (for instance, the Arte da Lingoa de Iapam ). Among other sound changes, the sequence /au/ merges to /ɔː/ , in contrast with /oː/ ; /p/ is reintroduced from Chinese; and /we/ merges with /je/ . Some forms rather more familiar to Modern Japanese speakers begin to appear – the continuative ending - te begins to reduce onto

9072-509: Is correlated with the sex of the speaker and the social situation in which they are spoken: men and women alike in a formal situation generally refer to themselves as watashi ( 私 , literally "private") or watakushi (also 私 , hyper-polite form), while men in rougher or intimate conversation are much more likely to use the word ore ( 俺 "oneself", "myself") or boku . Similarly, different words such as anata , kimi , and omae ( お前 , more formally 御前 "the one before me") may refer to

9261-472: Is debated whether fanfiction about canonical lesbians such as Willow and Tara of Buffy the Vampire Slayer counts as "slash", their relationship storylines are more coy than heterosexual ones, which entices Willow/Tara femslash authors to fill in the gaps in the known relationship storyline. It is "relatively recently" that male writers have begun writing femslash. Another suggestion in which there

9450-533: Is depicted as overcoming the male-female gender hierarchy . As is typical in romance fiction, couples depicted in these stories often must overcome obstacles that are emotional or psychological rather than physical. Akiko Mizoguchi notes that while early stories depicted homosexuality as a source of shame to heighten dramatic tension in this regard, beginning in the mid-2000s the genre began to depict gay identity with greater sensitivity and nuance, with series such as Brilliant Blue featuring stories of coming out and

9639-608: Is female, the majority of whom identify as other than heterosexual. Science fiction writer Joanna Russ (herself a lesbian), author of How to Suppress Women's Writing , is one of the first major science fiction writers to take slash fiction and its cultural and literary implications seriously. In her essay "Pornography by Women for Women, with Love," Russ argues that, in regard to the Kirk/Spock relationship, slash fiction combines both masculine and feminine traits of emotional vulnerability. Such an equal relationship, she contends, negates

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9828-417: Is important, it can be indicated by providing a quantity (often with a counter word ) or (rarely) by adding a suffix, or sometimes by duplication (e.g. 人人 , hitobito , usually written with an iteration mark as 人々 ). Words for people are usually understood as singular. Thus Tanaka-san usually means Mx Tanaka . Words that refer to people and animals can be made to indicate a group of individuals through

10017-500: Is known of the language's prehistory, or when it first appeared in Japan. Chinese documents from the 3rd century AD recorded a few Japanese words, but substantial Old Japanese texts did not appear until the 8th century. From the Heian period (794–1185), extensive waves of Sino-Japanese vocabulary entered the language, affecting the phonology of Early Middle Japanese . Late Middle Japanese (1185–1600) saw extensive grammatical changes and

10206-722: Is less common. In terms of mutual intelligibility , a survey in 1967 found that the four most unintelligible dialects (excluding Ryūkyūan languages and Tōhoku dialects ) to students from Greater Tokyo were the Kiso dialect (in the deep mountains of Nagano Prefecture ), the Himi dialect (in Toyama Prefecture ), the Kagoshima dialect and the Maniwa dialect (in Okayama Prefecture ). The survey

10395-546: Is less femslash is its lack of strong female characters in media. TV shows are heavily skewed toward the portrayal of men, with only two notable predominant female TV shows: Xena: Warrior Princess and Orange is the New Black . In these two cases, because there is an overwhelming number of strong female characters, femslash is much more popular. Otherwise, shows with a skew towards men are more popular, as women portrayed in these shows are weaker supporting characters. Chanslash

10584-872: Is much harder for slash writers to achieve." The first officially-licensed English-language translations of yaoi manga were published in the North American market in 2003; by 2006, there were roughly 130 English-translated yaoi works commercially available, and by 2007, over 10 publishers in North America published yaoi . Notable English-language publishers of BL include Viz Media under their SuBLime imprint, Digital Manga Publishing under their 801 Media and Juné imprints, Media Blasters under their Kitty Media imprint, Seven Seas Entertainment , and Tokyopop . Notable defunct English-language publishers of BL include Central Park Media under their Be Beautiful imprint, Broccoli under their Boysenberry imprint, and Aurora Publishing under their Deux Press imprint. Among

10773-526: Is not, by definition, so, and that defining all erotic fiction as slash makes such fiction unsuitable for potential underage readers of homoromantic fan fiction. In addition, a number of journalists writing about the fan fiction phenomenon in general seem to believe that all fan fiction is slash, or at least erotic in character. Such definitions fail to distinguish between erotic and romantic slash, and between slash, het (works focusing primarily on heterosexual relationships) and gen (works which do not include

10962-452: Is noted as crucial to the development of Western BL fan works, particularly fan fiction . As BL fan fiction is often compared to the Western fan practice of slash , it is important to understand the subtle differences between them. Levi notes that "the youthful teen look that so easily translates into androgyny in boys' love manga, and allows for so many layered interpretations of sex and gender,

11151-420: Is often called a topic-prominent language , which means it has a strong tendency to indicate the topic separately from the subject, and that the two do not always coincide. The sentence Zō wa hana ga nagai ( 象は鼻が長い ) literally means, "As for elephant(s), (the) nose(s) (is/are) long". The topic is zō "elephant", and the subject is hana "nose". Japanese grammar tends toward brevity; the subject or object of

11340-466: Is original yaoi, from the manga / anime genre yaoi (boy-love), popularized in the West by subbers and scanlations . Both (original slash and original yaoi) are terms that are considered somewhat controversial by some slash fans since they feel that the term 'slash' can only refer to works of fan fiction and not original works. Omegaverse is a subgenre of speculative erotic fiction that originated as

11529-489: Is preserved in words such as matsuge ("eyelash", lit. "hair of the eye"); modern mieru ("to be visible") and kikoeru ("to be audible") retain a mediopassive suffix - yu(ru) ( kikoyu → kikoyuru (the attributive form, which slowly replaced the plain form starting in the late Heian period) → kikoeru (all verbs with the shimo-nidan conjugation pattern underwent this same shift in Early Modern Japanese )); and

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11718-479: Is primarily an expression of gay male identity. The early 2000s saw a degree of overlap between BL and gay manga in BDSM -themed publications: the yaoi BDSM anthology magazine Zettai Reido ( 絶対零度 ) had several male contributors, while several female BL authors have contributed stories to BDSM-themed gay manga anthologies or special issues, occasionally under male pen names . Shotacon ( ショタコン , shotakon )

11907-462: Is some correlation between the popularity and activity of each variety of slash fiction and those of the source of the material. Some slash fiction readers and writers tend to adhere closely to the canonical source of their fiction, while other participants may follow the slash content without being fans of the original source material itself. Until the Internet became accessible to the general public in

12096-482: Is sometimes the only space where young members of the LGBTQ community can be out. Young members of the community all go through a time in which they are still exploring their identity, labels, and pronouns. By writing slash fiction, queer youth can use their favorite characters and stories in order to create scenarios that allow them to explore their feelings, thoughts, and selves. Slash fiction, in this sense, offers queer youth

12285-457: Is still a community ethos of not freely giving out a vidder's URL. Sometimes referred to as yaoi (male/male) or yuri (female/female), roleplay involving same-sex characters in relationships can be either with canonical or original character creations. There are slash roleplaying based on Dungeons & Dragons , Supernatural , Naruto , World of Warcraft and Dragon Age , among others. There are many mediums used to approach

12474-415: Is the portrayal of underage characters in sexual situations in slash fiction. The prefix chan most likely comes from the Japanese name suffix used as a term of endearment toward children or women. It may be a nod towards yaoi fandoms, in which underage pairings are more commonplace. Owners of the intellectual property rights to characters in this type of slash are often unhappy with chanslash because of

12663-402: Is the version of Japanese discussed in this article. Formerly, standard Japanese in writing ( 文語 , bungo , "literary language") was different from colloquial language ( 口語 , kōgo ) . The two systems have different rules of grammar and some variance in vocabulary. Bungo was the main method of writing Japanese until about 1900; since then kōgo gradually extended its influence and

12852-522: Is therefore not slash. The recent appearance on screen of openly gay and bisexual characters, such as Willow and Tara in the television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer , the characters of Queer as Folk , Jack Harkness in Doctor Who , and numerous characters in Torchwood , has occasioned much additional discussion of this problem. Abiding by the aforementioned definition leaves such stories without

13041-431: Is ubiquitous in BL, and is typically rendered explicitly and not merely implied; Zanghellini notes that illustrations of anal sex almost always position the characters to face each other rather than " doggy style ", and that the uke rarely fellates the seme , but instead receives the sexual and romantic attentions of the seme . Though McLelland notes that authors are typically "interested in exploring, not repudiating"

13230-402: Is understood as a means of expressing commitment to a partner, and in BL, the "apparent violence" of rape is transformed into a "measure of passion". Rape scenes in BL are rarely presented as crimes with an assaulter and a victim: scenes where a seme rapes an uke are not depicted as symptomatic of the violent desires of the seme , but rather as evidence of the uncontrollable attraction felt by

13419-471: Is used for the present and the future. For verbs that represent an ongoing process, the -te iru form indicates a continuous (or progressive) aspect , similar to the suffix ing in English. For others that represent a change of state, the -te iru form indicates a perfect aspect. For example, kite iru means "They have come (and are still here)", but tabete iru means "They are eating". Questions (both with an interrogative pronoun and yes/no questions) have

13608-405: Is why some linguists do not classify Japanese "pronouns" as pronouns, but rather as referential nouns, much like Spanish usted (contracted from vuestra merced , "your ( majestic plural ) grace") or Portuguese você (from vossa mercê ). Japanese personal pronouns are generally used only in situations requiring special emphasis as to who is doing what to whom. The choice of words used as pronouns

13797-781: The Angel DVD commentary for " A Hole in the World ", Joss Whedon , the creator of Angel , said, "Spike and Angel...they were hanging out for years and years and years. They were all kinds of deviant. Are people thinking they never...? Come on, people! They're open-minded guys!" as well as Spike saying, "Angel and me have never been intimate. Except that one..." to Illyria in the episode " Power Play ." Renaissance Pictures invited femslash author Melissa Good to pen scripts for Xena: Warrior Princess . Some people say they see similar evidence of such relationships in other shows such as Smallville , Supernatural and Due South . Due South's fandom

13986-521: The Anita Blake series began to circulate. Fanfic without sexual content can also be referred to as 'genfic', short for general fiction, non-romantic in nature. Original slash stories are those that contain male/male content, based on perceived homoerotic subtext between fictitious characters. This can be sourced from a variety of media content, such as manga, TV shows, movies and books amongst others. These works are now generally published online and use

14175-505: The Japonic language family, which also includes the Ryukyuan languages spoken in the Ryukyu Islands . As these closely related languages are commonly treated as dialects of the same language, Japanese is sometimes called a language isolate . According to Martine Irma Robbeets , Japanese has been subject to more attempts to show its relation to other languages than any other language in

14364-504: The Philippines , and various Pacific islands, locals in those countries learned Japanese as the language of the empire. As a result, many elderly people in these countries can still speak Japanese. Japanese emigrant communities (the largest of which are to be found in Brazil , with 1.4 million to 1.5 million Japanese immigrants and descendants, according to Brazilian IBGE data, more than

14553-716: The United States (notably in Hawaii , where 16.7% of the population has Japanese ancestry, and California ), and the Philippines (particularly in Davao Region and the Province of Laguna ). Japanese has no official status in Japan, but is the de facto national language of the country. There is a form of the language considered standard : hyōjungo ( 標準語 ) , meaning "standard Japanese", or kyōtsūgo ( 共通語 ) , "common language", or even "Tokyo dialect" at times. The meanings of

14742-502: The Usenet newsgroup alt.sex.bondage in 1991. Squicks are often listed as a warning in the header of a fanfiction story. The term "slasher" is used for someone who creates slash fiction, and the term "slashy" is used to mean "homoerotic". "Slashy moments" are those events in the canonical storyline which slashers interpret as homoerotic, which in turn form the slashers' depiction of the characters in slash fiction. Femslash or femmeslash

14931-702: The androgyny of bishōnen is often exploited to explore notions of sexuality and gender in BL works. The late 2010s saw the increasing popularity of masculine men in BL that are reminiscent of the body types typical in gay manga , with growing emphasis on stories featuring muscular bodies and older characters. A 2017 survey by BL publisher Juné Manga found that while over 80% of their readership previously preferred bishōnen body types exclusively, 65% now enjoy both bishōnen and muscular body types. Critics and commentators have noted that this shift in preferences among BL readers, and subsequent creation of works that feature characteristics of both BL and gay manga, represents

15120-403: The anime / yaoi fandoms, referring to a hentai anime series, Cream Lemon . The term squick is most often used as a warning to refer to a reader's possible negative reaction to scenes in the text (often sexual) that some might find offensive or distressing, such as those including incest , BDSM , rape , " mpreg " (male pregnancy), gender swapping, and torture . The term originated in

15309-794: The de facto standard Japanese had been the Kansai dialect , especially that of Kyoto . However, during the Edo period, Edo (now Tokyo) developed into the largest city in Japan, and the Edo-area dialect became standard Japanese. Since the end of Japan's self-imposed isolation in 1853, the flow of loanwords from European languages has increased significantly. The period since 1945 has seen many words borrowed from other languages—such as German, Portuguese and English. Many English loan words especially relate to technology—for example, pasokon (short for "personal computer"), intānetto ("internet"), and kamera ("camera"). Due to

15498-435: The ichidan verb "to receive") . These terms originated in martial arts , and were later appropriated as Japanese LGBT slang to refer to the insertive and receptive partners in anal sex . Aleardo Zanghellini suggests that the martial arts terms have special significance to a Japanese audience, as an archetype of the gay male relationship in Japan includes same-sex love between samurai and their companions . He suggests that

15687-564: The internalized misogyny of the genre's largely female readership. He suggests that the decline of these misogynistic representations over time is evidence that authors and readers "overcame this hate, possibly thanks to their involvement with yaoi ." BL stories are often strongly homosocial , giving men freedom to bond and pursue shared goals together (as in dojinshi adaptations of shōnen manga), or to rival each other (as in Embracing Love ). This spiritual bond and equal partnership

15876-418: The seme recognizing, and taking responsibility for, his sexual desires. Where the uke is raped by a third party, the relationship is shown to be emotionally supportive. Conversely, some stories such as Under Grand Hotel subvert the rape fantasy trope entirely by presenting rape as a negative and traumatic act. A 2012 survey of English-language BL fans found that just 15 percent of respondents reported that

16065-418: The seme towards the uke . Such scenes are often a plot device used to make the uke see the seme as more than just a good friend, and typically result in the uke falling in love with the seme . While Japanese society often shuns or looks down upon women who are raped in reality, the BL genre depicts men who are raped as still "imbued with innocence" and are typically still loved by their rapists after

16254-521: The shōnen-ai genre. Mori's works were influenced by European literature , particularly Gothic literature , and laid the foundation for many of the common tropes of shōnen-ai , yaoi , and BL: western exoticism, educated and wealthy characters, significant age differences among couples, and fanciful or even surreal settings. In manga , the concept of gekiga ( 劇画 ) emerged in the late 1950s, which sought to use manga to tell serious and grounded stories aimed at adult audiences. Gekiga inspired

16443-429: The uke , who often has softer, androgynous, feminine features with bigger eyes and a smaller build, and is often physically weaker than the seme . The roles of seme and uke can alternatively be established by who is dominant in the relationship; a character can take the uke role even if he is not presented as feminine, simply by being juxtaposed against and pursued by a more dominant and masculine character. Anal sex

16632-422: The yaoi ronsō engendered led to the formation of the field of "BL studies", which focus on the study of BL and the relationship between women and BL. It additionally impacted creators of yaoi : author Chiyo Kurihara abandoned yaoi to focus on heterosexual pornography as a result of the yaoi ronsō , while Hisako Takamatsu took into account the arguments of the genre's critics to create works more accommodating of

16821-518: The 1.2 million of the United States ) sometimes employ Japanese as their primary language. Approximately 12% of Hawaii residents speak Japanese, with an estimated 12.6% of the population of Japanese ancestry in 2008. Japanese emigrants can also be found in Peru , Argentina , Australia (especially in the eastern states), Canada (especially in Vancouver , where 1.4% of the population has Japanese ancestry),

17010-451: The 135 yaoi manga published in North America between 2003 and 2006, 14% were rated for readers aged 13 years or over, 39% were rated for readers aged 15 or older, and 47% were rated for readers age 18 and up. Restrictions among American booksellers often led publishers to label books conservatively, often rating books originally intended for a mid-teen readership as 18+ and distributing them in shrinkwrap. Diamond Comic Distributors valued

17199-462: The 1970s as a subgenre of shōjo manga. The decade saw the arrival of a new generation of shōjo manga artists, most notable among them the Year 24 Group . The Year 24 Group contributed significantly to the development of the shōjo manga, introducing a greater diversity of themes and subject material to the genre that drew inspiration from by Japanese and European literature, cinema, and history. Members of

17388-559: The 1970s contemporaneously with BL subculture and Western fan fiction culture. Characteristic similarities of fan works in both Japan and the West include non-adherence to a standard narrative structures and a particular popularity of science fiction themes. Early BL dōjinshi were amateur publications that were not controlled by media restrictions, were typically derivative works based on existing manga and anime, and were often written by teenagers for an adolescent audience. Several legitimate manga artists produce or produced dōjinshi :

17577-468: The 1982 anime adaptation of Patalliro! was the first television anime to depict shōnen-ai themes, while Kaze to Ki no Uta and Earthian were adapted into anime in the original video animation ( home video ) format in 1987 and 1989, respectively. The growing popularity of yaoi attracted the attention of manga magazine editors, many of whom recruited yaoi dōjinshi authors to their publications; Zetsuai 1989 (1989–1991) by Minami Ozaki ,

17766-483: The 2010s as a "'missing link' to bridge the gap between BL fiction and gay people," arguing that when BL narratives are presented using human actors, it produces a "subconscious change in the perception of viewers" towards acceptance of homosexuality. Although gay male characters are empowered in BL, the genre frequently does not address the reality of socio-cultural homophobia . According to Hisako Miyoshi, vice editor-in-chief for Libre Publishing , while earlier works in

17955-434: The 2010s is regarded as a driving force behind the production of BL dramas across Asia, as online distribution provides a platform for media containing non-heterosexual material, which is frequently not permitted on broadcast television . The protagonists of BL are often bishōnen ( 美少年 , lit. "beautiful boy") , "highly idealised" boys and young men who blend both masculine and feminine qualities. Bishōnen as

18144-528: The Japanese BL market was worth approximately ¥21.3 billion in both 2009 and 2010. In 2019, editors from Lynx , Magazine Be × Boy , and On BLUE have stated that, with the growth of BL artists in Taiwan and South Korea, they have recruited and published several of their works in Japan with expectations that the BL manga industry will diversify. The dōjinshi (self-published fan works ) subculture emerged in

18333-482: The Japanese language is of particular interest, ranging between an apical central tap and a lateral approximant . The "g" is also notable; unless it starts a sentence, it may be pronounced [ ŋ ] , in the Kanto prestige dialect and in other eastern dialects. The phonotactics of Japanese are relatively simple. The syllable structure is (C)(G)V(C), that is, a core vowel surrounded by an optional onset consonant,

18522-700: The Master says to the Doctor "I like it when you use my name", and in a Children in Need special , the Tenth Doctor tells the Fifth, after being asked whether the Master still has "that rubbish beard", "No, no beard this time. Well, a wife." – which fans point to as a reference to gay men marrying a woman for public respectability, the wife being referred to as "a beard". The term for shows that seem to be giving material for slash writers to use

18711-724: The Old Japanese sections are written in Man'yōgana , which uses kanji for their phonetic as well as semantic values. Based on the Man'yōgana system, Old Japanese can be reconstructed as having 88 distinct morae . Texts written with Man'yōgana use two different sets of kanji for each of the morae now pronounced き (ki), ひ (hi), み (mi), け (ke), へ (he), め (me), こ (ko), そ (so), と (to), の (no), も (mo), よ (yo) and ろ (ro). (The Kojiki has 88, but all later texts have 87. The distinction between mo 1 and mo 2 apparently

18900-488: The Ryūkyūan languages as dialects of Japanese. The imperial court also seems to have spoken an unusual variant of the Japanese of the time, most likely the spoken form of Classical Japanese , a writing style that was prevalent during the Heian period , but began to decline during the late Meiji period . The Ryūkyūan languages are classified by UNESCO as 'endangered', as young people mostly use Japanese and cannot understand

19089-423: The TV show Supernatural , the main characters encounter fictional representations of themselves in a series of books. They find the online fandom, and comment about their activities including the writing of slash fanfiction. This is often referred to by fans of Supernatural as Wincest, based on the characters' surname (Winchester) and the fact that they are brothers (incest). The revival of Doctor Who led by

19278-512: The United States in the early 2000s, several American artists began creating original English-language manga for female readers featuring male-male couples referred to as "American yaoi ". The first known commercially published original English-language yaoi comic is Sexual Espionage #1 by Daria McGrain, published by Sin Factory in May 2002. As international artists began creating yaoi works,

19467-454: The United States, German publisher Carlsen Manga also published original yaoi works. BL audio dramas , occasionally referred to as "drama CDs", "sound dramas", or "BLCDs", are recorded voice performances of male-male romance scenarios performed by primarily male voice actors. They are typically adaptations of original BL manga and novels. The first BL audio dramas were released in the 1980s, beginning with Tsuzumigafuchi in 1988, which

19656-414: The West, the term shōnen-ai is sometimes used to describe titles that focus on romance over explicit sexual content, while yaoi is used to describe titles that primarily feature sexually explicit themes and subject material. Yaoi can also be used by Western fans as a label for anime or manga-based slash fiction . The Japanese use of yaoi to denote only works with explicit scenes sometimes clashes with

19845-419: The Western use of the word to describe the genre as a whole, creating confusion between Japanese and Western audiences. Homosexuality and androgyny have a history in Japan dating to ancient times , as seen in practices such as shudō ( 衆道 , same-sex love between samurai and their companions) and kagema ( 陰間 , male sex workers who served as apprentice kabuki actors) . The country shifted away from

20034-528: The YouTubers Daniel Howell and Phil Lester (Daniel Howell and amazingphil) are well known for being very accepting of slash fiction and even wrote some fanfiction about themselves, which was featured in their book The Amazing Book is Not on Fire . In addition, their stage show, The Amazing Tour is Not on Fire, included a section called Fanfiction Live. In the episode " The Monster at the End of This Book " of

20223-404: The act of internet roleplaying including message boards, AIM, IRC and specially created chatrooms on servers. Some roleplay is very strict and requires players to be able to type a paragraph or two per each turn, some use strict guidelines involving roleplay dice and some are combinations of all of the above. Not every roleplay community accepts slash, however, and some people specifically disallow

20412-399: The act, a trope that may have originated with Kaze to Ki no Uta . Kristy Valenti of The Comics Journal notes that rape narratives typically focus on how "irresistible" the uke is and how the seme "cannot control himself" in his presence, thus absolving the seme of responsibility for his rape of the uke . She notes this is likely why the narrative climax of many BL stories depicts

20601-543: The addition of a collective suffix (a noun suffix that indicates a group), such as -tachi , but this is not a true plural: the meaning is closer to the English phrase "and company". A group described as Tanaka-san-tachi may include people not named Tanaka. Some Japanese nouns are effectively plural, such as hitobito "people" and wareware "we/us", while the word tomodachi "friend" is considered singular, although plural in form. Verbs are conjugated to show tenses, of which there are two: past and present (or non-past) which

20790-611: The characters' gradual acceptance within the wider community. BL typically depicts Japanese society as more accepting of LGBT people than it is in reality , which Mizoguchi contends is a form of activism among BL authors. Some longer-form stories such as Fake and Kizuna: Bonds of Love have the couple form a family unit, depicting them cohabiting and adopting children. It is also possible that they marry and have children, as in Omegaverse publications. Fujimoto cites Ossan's Love (2016–2018) and other BL television dramas that emerged in

20979-435: The couple, but "the cruel and intrusive demands of an uncompromising outside world". Thorn theorizes that depictions of tragedy and abuse in BL exist to allow the audience "to come to terms in some way with their own experiences of abuse." Bara ( 薔薇 , "rose") , also known as gay manga ( ゲイ漫画 ) or gei komi ( ゲイコミ , "gay comics") is a genre focused on male same-sex love , as created primarily by gay men for

21168-460: The creation of manga that depicted realistic human relationships, and opened the way for manga that explored human sexuality in a non-pornographic context. Hideko Mizuno 's 1969 shōjo manga (girls' comics) series Fire! (1969–1971), which eroticized its male protagonists and depicted male homosexuality in American rock and roll culture, is noted as an influential work in this regard. Contemporary Japanese homoerotic romance manga originated in

21357-499: The development of its own style of idols known as khu jin (imaginary couples) who are designed to be paired together by Thai BL's predominantly female fans. For cultural anthropologist Thomas Baudinette, BL series produced in Thailand represent the next stage in the historic development of BL, which is increasingly becoming "dislocated" from Japan among international fans' understanding of the genre. While BL fandom in China traces back to

21546-448: The differences between them are ill-defined and that even when differentiated, the subgenres "remain thematically intertwined." In Suzuki's investigation of these subgenres, she notes that "there is no appropriate and convenient Japanese shorthand term to embrace all subgenres of male-male love fiction by and for women." Yaoi has been used as an umbrella term in the West for Japanese-influenced comics with male-male relationships, and

21735-485: The dynamics between the seme and uke , not all works adhere to seme and uke tropes. The possibility of switching roles is often a source of playful teasing and sexual excitement for the characters, indicating an interest among many genre authors in exploring the performative nature of the roles. Riba ( リバ ) , a shorthand for "reversible" (リバーシブル), is used to describe couples where the seme and uke roles are not strictly defined. Occasionally, authors will forego

21924-462: The early 1990s, slash was hard to find. It was published only in fan-edited non-profit fanzines (often called only "zines"), which were usually priced just high enough to recoup printing costs, and were sold via adzines or at conventions. With the advent of the Internet, slash fiction writers created mailing lists which gradually took the place of amateur press associations (APA), and websites such as FanFiction.Net (which gradually started taking

22113-564: The effect of changing Japanese into a mora-timed language. Late Middle Japanese covers the years from 1185 to 1600, and is normally divided into two sections, roughly equivalent to the Kamakura period and the Muromachi period , respectively. The later forms of Late Middle Japanese are the first to be described by non-native sources, in this case the Jesuit and Franciscan missionaries; and thus there

22302-594: The evolution of the term femslash . Slash-like fiction is also written in various Japanese anime or manga fandoms but is commonly referred to as shōnen-ai or yaoi for relationships between male characters, and shōjo-ai or yuri between female characters, respectively. Due to the increasing popularity and prevalence of slash on the Internet in recent years, some use slash as a generic term for any erotic fan fiction, whether it depicts heterosexual or homosexual relationships. This has caused concern for other slash writers, who believe that, while it can be erotic, slash

22491-521: The fandom. "Gayfic" is sometimes used to refer to stories focusing on gay male relationships, and "femslash" or "f/f" used to indicate that a work features female characters in slash relationships. Slash fiction, like other fan fiction, sometimes borrows the MPAA film rating system to indicate the amount of sexual content in the story. Not all slash fiction has explicit sexual content – the interaction between two characters can be as innocent as holding hands or

22680-823: The first gay manga magazines were published: Barazoku , the first commercially circulated gay men's magazine in Japan, was published in 1971, and served as a major influence on Takemiya and the development of shōnen-ai . The dōjinshi (self-published works) subculture emerged contemporaneously in the 1970s (see Media below), and in 1975, the first Comiket was held as a gathering of amateur artists who produce dōjinshi . The term yaoi , initially used by some creators of male-male romance dōjinshi to describe their creations ironically, emerged to describe amateur works that were influenced by shōnen-ai and gay manga. Early yaoi dōjinshi produced for Comiket were typically derivative works , with glam rock artists such as David Bowie and Queen as popular subjects as

22869-464: The first yaoi -influenced media to be encountered by Western audiences. BL gained popularity in mainland China in the late 1990s; the country subsequently outlawed the publishing and distribution of BL works. The mid-1990s saw the so-called " yaoi debate" or yaoi ronsō (や お い 論争), a debate held primarily in a series of essays published in the feminist magazine Choisir from 1992 to 1997. In an open letter , Japanese gay writer Masaki Satō criticized

23058-423: The first appearance of European loanwords . The basis of the standard dialect moved from the Kansai region to the Edo region (modern Tokyo ) in the Early Modern Japanese period (early 17th century–mid 19th century). Following the end of Japan's self-imposed isolation in 1853, the flow of loanwords from European languages increased significantly, and words from English roots have proliferated. Japanese

23247-409: The foundation of what would become the aesthetic of bishōnen : boys and young men, often in homosocial or homoerotic contexts, who are defined by their "ambivalent passivity, fragility, ephemerality, and softness." The 1961 novel A Lovers' Forest by tanbi writer Mari Mori , which follows the relationship between a professor and his younger male lover, is regarded as an influential precursor to

23436-435: The gay manga magazine Sabu  [ ja ] , launched the magazine June in 1978, while Minori Shobo  [ ja ] launched Allan in 1980. Both magazines initially specialized in shōnen-ai , which Magazine Magazine described as "halfway between tanbi literature and pornography," and also published articles on homosexuality, literary fiction, illustrations, and amateur yaoi works. The success of June

23625-488: The generic terms for this material across Asia, in Thailand, BL dramas are sometimes referred to as "Y" or "Y series" as a shorthand for yaoi . Thai Series Y explicitly adapts the content of Japanese BL to the Thai local context and in recent years has become increasingly popular with fans around the world who often view Thai BL as separate to its Japanese antecedents. Thai BL also deliberately borrows from K-pop celebrity culture in

23814-609: The genitive particle ga remains in intentionally archaic speech. Early Middle Japanese is the Japanese of the Heian period , from 794 to 1185. It formed the basis for the literary standard of Classical Japanese , which remained in common use until the early 20th century. During this time, Japanese underwent numerous phonological developments, in many cases instigated by an influx of Chinese loanwords . These included phonemic length distinction for both consonants and vowels , palatal consonants (e.g. kya ) and labial consonant clusters (e.g. kwa ), and closed syllables . This had

24003-442: The genre as homophobic for not depicting gay men accurately, and called fans of yaoi "disgusting women" who "have a perverse interest in sexual intercourse between men." A years-long debate ensued, with yaoi fans and artists contending that yaoi is entertainment for women that does not seek to be a realistic depiction of homosexuality, and instead serves as a refuge from the misogyny of Japanese society. The scholarly debate that

24192-431: The genre focused "more on the homosexual way of life from a realistic perspective", over time the genre has become less realistic and more comedic, and the stories are "simply for entertainment". BL manga often have fantastical, historical or futuristic settings, and many fans consider the genre to be escapist fiction . Homophobia, when it is presented as an issue at all, is used as a plot device to heighten drama, or to show

24381-440: The genre increasingly depicted Japanese settings over western settings. Works influenced by shōnen-ai in the 1980s began to depict older protagonists and adopted a realist style in both plot and artwork, as typified by manga such as Banana Fish (1985–1994) by Akimi Yoshida and Tomoi (1986) by Wakuni Akisato  [ ja ] . The 1980s also saw the proliferation of yaoi into anime , drama CDs , and light novels ;

24570-483: The genre—when a character claims that he is 'not gay, but just in love with a man'—has both homophobic (or modern ) temporal undertones but also non-identitarian (postmodern) ones." In 2019, BL manga magazine editors have stated that stories where a man is concerned about coming out as gay have become uncommon and the trope can be seen as outdated if used as a source of conflict between the characters. Eroticized depictions of rape are often associated with BL. Anal sex

24759-823: The group, including Keiko Takemiya and Moto Hagio , created works that depicted male homosexuality: In The Sunroom (1970) by Takemiya is considered the first work of the genre that would become known as shōnen-ai , followed by Hagio's The November Gymnasium (1971). Takemiya, Hagio, Toshie Kihara , Ryoko Yamagishi , and Kaoru Kurimoto were among the most significant shōnen-ai artists of this era; notable works include The Heart of Thomas (1974–1975) by Hagio and Kaze to Ki no Uta (1976-1984) by Takemiya. Works by these artists typically featured tragic romances between androgynous bishōnen in historic European settings. Though these works were nominally aimed at an audience of adolescent girls and young women, they also attracted adult gay and lesbian readers. During this same period,

24948-441: The lack of canonical homosexual relationships in source media at the time that slash fiction began to emerge, some came to see slash fiction stories as being exclusively outside their respective canons and held that the term "slash fiction" applies only when the characters' same-sex romantic or erotic relationship about which an author writes is not part of the source's canon and that fan fiction about canonical same-sex relationships

25137-453: The languages of the original Jōmon inhabitants, including the ancestor of the modern Ainu language . Because writing had yet to be introduced from China, there is no direct evidence, and anything that can be discerned about this period must be based on internal reconstruction from Old Japanese , or comparison with the Ryukyuan languages and Japanese dialects . The Chinese writing system

25326-449: The languages. Okinawan Japanese is a variant of Standard Japanese influenced by the Ryūkyūan languages, and is the primary dialect spoken among young people in the Ryukyu Islands . Modern Japanese has become prevalent nationwide (including the Ryūkyū islands) due to education , mass media , and an increase in mobility within Japan, as well as economic integration. Japanese is a member of

25515-427: The large quantity of English loanwords, modern Japanese has developed a distinction between [tɕi] and [ti] , and [dʑi] and [di] , with the latter in each pair only found in loanwords. Although Japanese is spoken almost exclusively in Japan, it has also been spoken outside of the country. Before and during World War II , through Japanese annexation of Taiwan and Korea , as well as partial occupation of China ,

25704-578: The late 1990s as danmei (the Mandarin reading of the Japanese term tanbi ), state regulations in China made it difficult for danmei writers to publish their works online, with a 2009 ordinance by the National Publishing Administration of China banning most danmei online fiction. In 2015, laws prohibiting depictions of same-sex relationships in television and film were implemented in China. The growth in streaming service providers in

25893-453: The level of reader interaction, making it easier for fans to comment on stories, give episode reviews, and discuss comment on trends in slash fandom itself. Websites and fanzines dedicated to fans of The X-Files , Stargate , Harry Potter , and Buffy the Vampire Slayer became common, with tens of thousands of slash stories available. Slash fiction has received more academic attention than other genres of fan fiction. Slash fiction

26082-516: The manga artist group Clamp began as an amateur dōjinshi circle creating yaoi works based on Saint Seiya , while Kodaka Kazuma and Fumi Yoshinaga have produced dōjinshi concurrently with professionally-published works. Many publishing companies review BL dōjinshi to recruit talented amateurs; this practice has led to careers in mainstream manga for Youka Nitta , Shungiku Nakamura , and others. Typically, BL dōjinshi feature male-male pairings from non-romantic manga and anime. Much of

26271-474: The manipulated photos depict real people instead of media characters, the creation of these images can be as contentious as real person slash, and for many of the same reasons. Vidding has existed in media fandom since the 1980s, and slash vidding is still a popular movement within vidding. Slash vidders take clips of characters (generally ones not written as gay, or in a relationship together), and through juxtaposition, song choice, and other techniques, portray

26460-539: The material derives from male-oriented shōnen and seinen works, which contain close male-male friendships perceived by fans to imply elements of homoeroticism , such as with Captain Tsubasa and Saint Seiya , two titles which popularized yaoi in the 1980s. Weekly Shonen Jump is known to have a large female readership who engage in BL readings; publishers of shōnen manga may create "homoerotic-themed" merchandise as fan service to their BL fans. BL fans may " ship " any male-male pairing, sometimes pairing off

26649-425: The most influential yaoi manga magazines of this era. The manga in these magazines were influenced by realist stories like Banana Fish , and moved away from the shōnen-ai standards of the 1970s and 1980s. Shōnen-ai works that were published during this period were typically comedies rather than melodramas, such as Gravitation (1996–2002) by Maki Murakami . Consequently, yaoi and "boys' love" (BL) came to be

26838-546: The most popular terms to describe works depicting male-male romance, eclipsing shōnen-ai and June . An increasing proportion of shōjo manga in the 1990s began to integrate yaoi elements into their plots. The manga artist group Clamp , which itself began as a group creating yaoi dōjinshi , published multiple works containing yaoi elements during this period, such as RG Veda (1990–1995), Tokyo Babylon (1991–1994), and Cardcaptor Sakura (1996–2000). When these works were released in North America, they were among

27027-552: The obscenity laws there at the time. From its earliest days, slash fiction has been particularly inspired by popular speculative fiction franchises, possibly because speculative fiction may lack well-developed female characters or because the speculative elements allow greater freedom to reinterpret canonical characters. However, other large bodies of slash fiction, such as Starsky and Hutch or The Professionals , are based on non-speculative sources. Slash fiction follows popular media, and new stories are constantly produced. There

27216-595: The only country where it is the national language , and within the Japanese diaspora worldwide. The Japonic family also includes the Ryukyuan languages and the variously classified Hachijō language . There have been many attempts to group the Japonic languages with other families such as the Ainu , Austronesian , Koreanic , and the now-discredited Altaic , but none of these proposals have gained any widespread acceptance. Little

27405-425: The only strict rule of word order is that the verb must be placed at the end of a sentence (possibly followed by sentence-end particles). This is because Japanese sentence elements are marked with particles that identify their grammatical functions. The basic sentence structure is topic–comment . For example, Kochira wa Tanaka-san desu ( こちらは田中さんです ). kochira ("this") is the topic of the sentence, indicated by

27594-506: The openly gay writer Russell T Davies has also seen nods towards the slash fans beyond the omnisexual Captain Jack Harkness and other characters from the spin-off Torchwood . Many fans see exchanges between the Doctor and the Master (played in the new series by John Simm , whose Life On Mars character Sam Tyler is also the subject of a lot of slash fiction) as indicative of a previous relationship, or current attraction. At one point

27783-470: The out-group gives a benefit to the in-group, and "up" to indicate the in-group gives a benefit to the out-group. Here, the in-group includes the speaker and the out-group does not, and their boundary depends on context. For example, oshiete moratta ( 教えてもらった ) (literally, "explaining got" with a benefit from the out-group to the in-group) means "[he/she/they] explained [it] to [me/us]". Similarly, oshiete ageta ( 教えてあげた ) (literally, "explaining gave" with

27972-415: The particle wa . The verb desu is a copula , commonly translated as "to be" or "it is" (though there are other verbs that can be translated as "to be"), though technically it holds no meaning and is used to give a sentence 'politeness'. As a phrase, Tanaka-san desu is the comment. This sentence literally translates to "As for this person, (it) is Mx Tanaka." Thus Japanese, like many other Asian languages,

28161-455: The perception that rape is almost ubiquitous in BL/ yaoi ." Tragic narratives that focused on the suffering of the protagonists were popular early June stories, particularly stories that ended in one or both members of the central couple dying from suicide . By the mid-1990s, happy endings were more common; when tragic endings are shown, the cause is typically not an interpersonal conflict between

28350-402: The personas presented by the common figures of RPS such as boy bands, celebrities, athletes and pro wrestlers are "largely manufactured" for the pleasure of female fans, "so why not just run with them?" Reverse slash is a term used for fanfic without any sexual content, or very little sexual content, compared to the canon . The term is believed to have originated when non-sexual fanfic based on

28539-469: The personification of countries in Hetalia: Axis Powers ) or complementary objects like salt and pepper . In Japan, the labeling of BL dōjinshi is typically composed of the two lead characters' names, separated by a multiplication sign , with the seme being first and the uke being second. Outside of Japan, the 2000 broadcast of Mobile Suit Gundam Wing in North America on Cartoon Network

28728-597: The phenomenon in essays and gave the genre some academic respectability. Greater subsequent tolerance and acceptance of homosexuality and increased frustration with the portrayal of gay relationships in mainstream media fed a growing desire in authors to explore the subjects on their own terms, using established media characters. Star Trek slash fiction remained important to fans, while new slash fiction grew up around other television shows, movies, and books with sci-fi or action-adventure roots. Early slash fans in England feared that they would be arrested, because slash violated

28917-449: The phrase "Supernatural fandom – where RPS is the moral high ground". Though increasingly common, RPS is considered a potential "squick" for slash readers. In addition, the use of celebrities in fictional, sexual stories remains controversial. Journals including RPS often include disclaimers that explain their true fictional nature. Henry Jenkins says that RPS may be "troubling" to the old guard of slash. Fans of real person slash state that

29106-431: The place of zines). Forum boards and message boards were active during the first half of the first decade of the millennium, and sites such as Angelfire , Geocities , and ProBoards were quite successful. Other venues in which slash was, and still is, published are Facebook and private groups. Much later came Archive of Our Own . As slash publishing gradually moved to the Internet, the field opened to more writers, and

29295-438: The potential legal ramifications and concern over negatively affecting the popularity of the character. Some studios owning the rights to slashed characters have issued cease and desist orders in the past as a result of this type of slash. Chanslash is also called shotacon (abbreviated as "shouta" or "shota") when dealing with anime fanfiction. Real person slash (RPS), also a subgenre of real person fiction , involves taking

29484-665: The power imbalance typically seen in regular fan fiction. Slash fiction fandoms tend to be diverse and segregated, and each has its own rules of style, etiquette, history, and favorite stories and authors. Slash cannot be commercially distributed due to copyright laws, and, until the 1990s, it was either undistributed or published in zines . Today, slash fiction is most commonly published on Tumblr , LiveJournal accounts and other websites online, such as Archive Of Our Own . Legal scholars promoting copyright reform sometimes use slash fiction as an example of semiotic democracy . The term slash fiction contains several ambiguities. Due to

29673-457: The presence of rape in BL media made them uncomfortable, as the majority of respondents could distinguish between the "fantasy, genre-driven rape" of BL and rape as a crime in reality. This "surprisingly high tolerance" for depictions of rape is contextualized by a content analysis , which found that just 13 percent of all original Japanese BL available commercially in English contains depictions of rape. These findings are argued as "possibly belying

29862-477: The proposed larger Altaic family, or to various Southeast Asian languages , especially Austronesian . None of these proposals have gained wide acceptance (and the Altaic family itself is now considered controversial). As it stands, only the link to Ryukyuan has wide support. Other theories view the Japanese language as an early creole language formed through inputs from at least two distinct language groups, or as

30051-465: The purity of the leads' love. Rachel Thorn has suggested that as BL is primarily a romance genre, its readers may be turned off by political themes such as homophobia. BL author Makoto Tateno expressed skepticism that realistic depictions of gay men's lives would become common in BL "because girls like fiction more than realism". Alan Williams argues that the lack of a gay identity in BL is due to BL being postmodern , stating that "a common utterance in

30240-490: The roles of seme , the sexual top or active pursuer, and uke , the sexual bottom or passive pursued. BL has a robust global presence, having spread since the 1990s through international licensing and distribution, as well as through unlicensed circulation of works by BL fans online. BL works, culture, and fandom have been studied and discussed by scholars and journalists worldwide. Multiple terms exist to describe Japanese and Japanese-influenced male-male romance fiction as

30429-474: The sales of yaoi manga in the United States at approximately US$ 6 million in 2007. Marketing was significant in the transnational travel of BL from Japan to the United States, and led to BL to attract a following of LGBTQ fans in the United States. The 1994 original video animation adaptation of Kizuna: Bonds of Love was distributed by Ariztical Entertainment, which specializes in LGBT cinema and marketed

30618-402: The same forms of rating, warnings and terminology that is commonly used by slash writers. Slash has a different sensibility to gay fiction, probably because most slash readers are female and in a closed community that shares their tastes, which makes most stories in the genre centered into emotional relationships, even as sex is very prominent. A different variety of homoerotic amateur fiction

30807-459: The same structure as affirmative sentences, but with intonation rising at the end. In the formal register, the question particle -ka is added. For example, ii desu ( いいです ) "It is OK" becomes ii desu-ka ( いいですか。 ) "Is it OK?". In a more informal tone sometimes the particle -no ( の ) is added instead to show a personal interest of the speaker: Dōshite konai-no? "Why aren't (you) coming?". Some simple queries are formed simply by mentioning

30996-403: The samurai archetype is responsible for age differences and hierarchical variations in power of some relationships portrayed in BL. The seme is often depicted as restrained, physically powerful, and protective; he is generally older and taller, with a stronger chin, shorter hair, smaller eyes, and a more stereotypically masculine and " macho " demeanour than the uke . The seme usually pursues

31185-797: The state as at the time the constitution was written, many of the elders participating in the process had been educated in Japanese during the South Seas Mandate over the island shown by the 1958 census of the Trust Territory of the Pacific that found that 89% of Palauans born between 1914 and 1933 could speak and read Japanese, but as of the 2005 Palau census there were no residents of Angaur that spoke Japanese at home. Japanese dialects typically differ in terms of pitch accent , inflectional morphology , vocabulary , and particle usage. Some even differ in vowel and consonant inventories, although this

31374-476: The street. (grammatically incorrect insertion of a pronoun) But one can grammatically say essentially the same thing in Japanese: 驚いた彼は道を走っていった。 Transliteration: Odoroita kare wa michi o hashitte itta. (grammatically correct) This is partly because these words evolved from regular nouns, such as kimi "you" ( 君 "lord"), anata "you" ( あなた "that side, yonder"), and boku "I" ( 僕 "servant"). This

31563-612: The stylisations of the seme and uke to portray both lovers as "equally attractive handsome men", or will subvert expectations of dominance by depicting the active pursuer in the relationship as taking the passive role during sex. In other cases, the uke is presented as more sexually aggressive than the seme ; in these instances, the roles are sometimes referred to as osoi uke ( 襲い受け , "attacking uke ") and hetare seme ( ヘタレ攻め , "wimpy seme ") . Historically, female characters had minor roles in BL, or were absent altogether. Suzuki notes that mothers in particular are often portrayed in

31752-405: The term "American yaoi " fell out of use and was replaced by terms like "original English language yaoi ", "global yaoi ", and "global BL". The majority of publishers creating original English-language yaoi manga are now defunct, including Yaoi Press , DramaQueen , and Iris Print. Digital Manga Publishing last published original English-language yaoi manga in 2012; outside of

31941-448: The textual analysis of slash fiction itself. Slash fiction was often ignored by queer theorists . However, slash fiction has been described as important to the LGBTQ community and to the formation of queer identities, as it represents a resistance to the expectation of heterosexuality. In a society in which heterosexuality is the norm and homosexuality is highly stigmatized, an online forum

32130-618: The title as "the first gay male anime to be released on DVD in the US." The film was reviewed in the American LGBT magazine The Advocate , which compared the film to gay art house cinema . A large portion of Western fans choose to pirate BL material because they are unable or unwilling to obtain it through sanctioned methods. Scanlations and other fan translation efforts of both commercially published Japanese works and amateur dojinshi are common. When yaoi initially gained popularity in

32319-587: The topic with an interrogative intonation to call for the hearer's attention: Kore wa? "(What about) this?"; O-namae wa? ( お名前は？ ) "(What's your) name?". Negatives are formed by inflecting the verb. For example, Pan o taberu ( パンを食べる。 ) "I will eat bread" or "I eat bread" becomes Pan o tabenai ( パンを食べない。 ) "I will not eat bread" or "I do not eat bread". Plain negative forms are i -adjectives (see below) and inflect as such, e.g. Pan o tabenakatta ( パンを食べなかった。 ) "I did not eat bread". Slash fiction These fan-written stories are not often accepted in

32508-419: The two consonants are the moraic nasal followed by a homorganic consonant. Japanese also includes a pitch accent , which is not represented in moraic writing; for example [haꜜ.ɕi] ("chopsticks") and [ha.ɕiꜜ] ("bridge") are both spelled はし ( hashi ) , and are only differentiated by the tone contour. Japanese word order is classified as subject–object–verb . Unlike many Indo-European languages ,

32697-577: The two methods were both used in writing until the 1940s. Bungo still has some relevance for historians, literary scholars, and lawyers (many Japanese laws that survived World War II are still written in bungo , although there are ongoing efforts to modernize their language). Kōgo is the dominant method of both speaking and writing Japanese today, although bungo grammar and vocabulary are occasionally used in modern Japanese for effect. The 1982 state constitution of Angaur , Palau , names Japanese along with Palauan and English as an official language of

32886-472: The two terms (''hyōjungo'' and ''kyōtsūgo'') are almost the same. Hyōjungo or kyōtsūgo is a conception that forms the counterpart of dialect. This normative language was born after the Meiji Restoration ( 明治維新 , meiji ishin , 1868) from the language spoken in the higher-class areas of Tokyo (see Yamanote ). Hyōjungo is taught in schools and used on television and in official communications. It

33075-460: The use of a caste system. In 2003, 3.8% of weekly Japanese manga magazines were dedicated exclusively to BL. Notable ongoing and defunct magazines include Magazine Be × Boy , June , Craft , Chara , Dear+ , Opera , Ciel  [ ja ] , and Gush . Several of these magazines were established as companion publications to shōjo manga magazines, as they include material considered too explicit for an all-ages audience; Ciel

33264-498: The use of the slash symbol (/) in mentions in the late '70s of K/S (meaning stories where Kirk and Spock had a romantic [and often sexual] relationship), as compared to the ampersand (&) conventionally used for K&S or Kirk and Spock friendship fiction. For a time, both slash and K/S (for "Kirk/Spock") were used interchangeably. Slash later spread to other fan groups, first Starsky and Hutch , Blake's 7 , and The Professionals , then many others, eventually creating

33453-407: The verb (e.g. yonde for earlier yomite ), the -k- in the final mora of adjectives drops out ( shiroi for earlier shiroki ); and some forms exist where modern standard Japanese has retained the earlier form (e.g. hayaku > hayau > hayɔɔ , where modern Japanese just has hayaku , though the alternative form is preserved in the standard greeting o-hayō gozaimasu "good morning"; this ending

33642-548: The world. Since Japanese first gained the consideration of linguists in the late 19th century, attempts have been made to show its genealogical relation to languages or language families such as Ainu , Korean , Chinese , Tibeto-Burman , Uralic , Altaic (or Ural-Altaic ), Austroasiatic , Austronesian and Dravidian . At the fringe, some linguists have even suggested a link to Indo-European languages , including Greek , or to Sumerian . Main modern theories try to link Japanese either to northern Asian languages, like Korean or

33831-535: Was based on 12- to 20-second-long recordings of 135 to 244 phonemes , which 42 students listened to and translated word-for-word. The listeners were all Keio University students who grew up in the Kanto region . There are some language islands in mountain villages or isolated islands such as Hachijō-jima island , whose dialects are descended from Eastern Old Japanese . Dialects of the Kansai region are spoken or known by many Japanese, and Osaka dialect in particular

34020-444: Was established as a companion to Monthly Asuka , while Dear+ was established as a companion to Wings . A 2008 assessment estimated that the Japanese commercial BL market grossed approximately ¥12 billion annually, with novel sales generating ¥250 million per month, manga generating ¥400 million per month, CDs generating ¥180 million per month, and video games generating ¥160 million per month. A 2010 report estimated that

34209-718: Was imported to Japan from Baekje around the start of the fifth century, alongside Buddhism. The earliest texts were written in Classical Chinese , although some of these were likely intended to be read as Japanese using the kanbun method, and show influences of Japanese grammar such as Japanese word order. The earliest text, the Kojiki , dates to the early eighth century, and was written entirely in Chinese characters, which are used to represent, at different times, Chinese, kanbun , and Old Japanese. As in other texts from this period,

34398-454: Was later adopted by Japanese publications in the 1990s as an umbrella term for male-male romance media marketed to women. Concepts and themes associated with BL include androgynous men known as bishōnen ; diminished female characters; narratives that emphasize homosociality and de-emphasize socio-cultural homophobia ; and depictions of rape. A defining characteristic of BL is the practice of pairing characters in relationships according to

34587-465: Was lost immediately following its composition.) This set of morae shrank to 67 in Early Middle Japanese , though some were added through Chinese influence. Man'yōgana also has a symbol for /je/ , which merges with /e/ before the end of the period. Several fossilizations of Old Japanese grammatical elements remain in the modern language – the genitive particle tsu (superseded by modern no )

34776-438: Was mostly used in covers and interior pages of fanzines, and sold to other fans at media and slash conventions. In recent years, more slash artwork has used widespread availability of imaging software, like Adobe Photoshop , to manipulate photographs of their subjects to produce romantic or erotic images (often referred to as slash manips ) which imply a homosexual relationship, either as static pictures or animated GIFs. When

34965-524: Was one of the first to go online, after the show debuted in 1994. In 1999 Due South creator Paul Haggis participated in a question-and-answer panel with an online Due South newsgroup. The newsgroup asked Haggis if he had a problem with fans seeing the characters he created (Detective Ray Vecchio and Constable Benton Fraser) as being in love with each other and having a closeted relationship. Haggis replied, "Absolutely no problem at all. If ever two people loved each other, it's Ray and Fraser." Furthermore,

35154-423: Was preferentially used by American manga publishers for works of this kind due to the belief that the term "boys' love" carries the implication of pedophilia . In Japan, yaoi is used to denote dōjinshi and works that focus on sex scenes. In all usages, yaoi and boys' love excludes gay manga ( bara ) , a genre which also depicts gay male sexual relationships, but is written for and mostly by gay men. In

35343-463: Was published as a " June cassette". BL audio dramas proliferated beginning in the 1990s with the rise in popularity of compact discs , peaking at 289 total CDs released in 2008, which dropped to 108 CDs in 2013. Japanese language Japanese ( 日本語 , Nihongo , [ɲihoŋɡo] ) is the principal language of the Japonic language family spoken by the Japanese people . It has around 123 million speakers, primarily in Japan ,

35532-453: Was such that the term June-mono or more simply June began to compete with the term shōnen-ai to describe works depicting male homosexuality. By the late 1980s, the popularity of professionally published shōnen-ai was declining, and yaoi published as dōjinshi was becoming more popular. Mainstream shōnen manga with Japanese settings such as Captain Tsubasa became popular source material for derivative works by yaoi creators, and

35721-485: Was the subject of several notable academic studies in the early 1990s, as part of the cultural studies movement within the humanities: most of these, as is characteristic of cultural studies, approach slash fiction from an ethnographic perspective and talk primarily about the writers of slash fiction and the communities that form around it. Slashers have been configured as fans who resisted culture. Some studies – for example by Italian anthropologist Mirna Ciconi – focus on

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