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Concept
Yaoi
Summary
Yaoi (ˈjaʊi ; やおい jaꜜo.i), also known as boys' love and its abbreviation BL, is a genre of fictional media originating in Japan that features homoerotic relationships between male characters. It is typically created by women for women and is thus distinct from bara (gay manga), a genre of homoerotic media marketed to gay men, though does also attract a male audience and can be produced by male creators. spans a wide range of media, including manga, anime, drama CDs, novels, video games, television series, films, and fan works. While "" is commonly used in the west as an umbrella term for Japanese-influenced media with male-male relationships, "boys' love" and "BL" are the generic terms for this kind of media in Japan and much of Asia.
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, tanbi, and June. The term yaoi emerged in the late 1970s and early 1980s in the context of dōjinshi 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" 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 yaoi 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 yaoi is the practice of pairing characters in relationships according to the roles of seme, the sexual top or active pursuer, and uke, the sexual bottom or passive pursued. Yaoi has a robust global presence, having spread since the 1990s through international licensing and distribution, as well as through unlicensed circulation of works by yaoi fans online.
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