/bl/ - General BL

I think everyone here provided good points and I don't have much to add on it. But I will say that I prefer to call it shipping, and I dislike that my OTPs are not canon and I need to rely on fanfic and fan art for them. I wish actual canon BL had a quality as good as my favorite OTPs and their series.

When I was a kid, and I first got into shipping and yaoi, looking up quality fan art and fanfics of your ships was easier and lots of the fan art looked good and the fanfics were alright. Although it could also be that kid me simply had shit taste, hence perceiving these fan works as good lol.

Now as an adult, looking at fan art and fanfics of my ships is disappointing at best, enraging and upsetting at worst thanks to all the ameritard political discourse getting in the way of fandom. All fan arts and fanfics have to be annoying gendie slop now and extremely ugly and low quality. I'm not even kidding when I say all the fan art of my childhood ships on Tumblr was deleted!!! I remember some of it vividly and it's not there anymore. There's still some on Twitter though but untagged and hidden so you gotta dig for it. Or archived on Pinterest.

The plague also hit real BL and now it's all cringe woke shit about coming out and old moid yaoi and ✨ realistic✨ art styles and designs (read sterilized) and even MORE boring slice of life stories.

Another annoying thing is all the fan artists and fanfic writers stopped doing it for the love of the game but instead do it for money or going viral and the chance to publish their own work one day, which killed their passion. Everything is tropey and safe AU bullshit now.

I still prefer shipping despite the negatives because as others said, the characters are written better with more interesting crazy stories around their bond to justify it and give it more weight, something about them being in danger and caring for each other's lives, or having positive impact on each other's lives in serious situations makes it more interesting and addictive.

I like Hikaru ga shinda natsu, but the childhood friends thing to justify their crushes is kinda boring since the supernatural stuff doesn't push them together. The real Hikaru died and now Yoshiki sees the monster as a mere replacement to cope. I like the monster falling in love with a human for treating him nicely thing, but it's still underwhelming and pales in comparison to my favorite OTPs now and from my childhood who had bigPost too long. Click here to view the full text.

>>6334
Some examples, prepare to cringe:

I used to love Ninjago when I was a kid and would ship many characters together, my favorite was Kai x Lloyd despite the age gap. I didn't realize the older brother younger brother dynamic back then but still liked it anyways. Finding fan art for it was so easy back then and nobody cared that you shipped it that much. Nowadays it's all "um this is pedophilia!!!" moralfagging so the fan arts were wiped off the face of the internet or just hidden because of this. And are all replaced by quirk chungus family dynamic tumblr shit.

I used to ship Eli x Junjie from Slugterra because I liked their plot and dynamic. Basically Junjie was mind controlled by a zombie slug for 20 years since he was 16-18, and Eli freed him from it and helped him get back home. Junjie waa grateful to Eli and bonded with him over this and their shared love of slugs and the sport around it. And the two would have training scenes together and had a special move where they shoot together at the same time to merge their attacks. I was obsessed with them and browsing fan art back in the day was so easy. Now it's all deleted and Eli is either shipped with the new Mary Sue and Gary Stue characters, or with the designated female love interest, or worse, poly shipping bullshit. All because Junjie is physically 30 something while Eli is 15-16 and age gap bad. Even though mentally he's still a teenager and didn't get to actually properly grow up anyways. Found the only surviving fan art on Pinterest thankfully but in potato quality.

Another ship I enjoyed was Hawkeye x Hulk/Clint x Bruce, specifically the Avengers: Earth mightiest heros adaptation where the former is the latter's tardwrangler. They had a cute dynamic teasing and annoying each other while also caring for and helping each other and being glued to each other. I vividly remember some pencil and paper drawing from Tumblr of them on a fishing trip having sex in a boat but of course it's probably gone now. Sad times.

Point is all BL, whether original or shipping, became boring unfortunately. Things changed to the worst. It's especially painful that my current OTP is obscure. Was obscure when the show aired, sitll obscure now years later because nobody cares about this show. So I'm all alone in my autism.

>>6334
>even MORE boring slice of life stories
I don't know whether these are more prevalent than in the past, but my tolerance for them sure is lower than when I was younger.

>Another annoying thing is all the fan artists and fanfic writers stopped doing it for the love of the game but instead do it for money or going viral and the chance to publish their own work one day
Yeah, I hate the drive to monetise EVERYTHING in nerd/niche spaces. For example, Youtube was better when it wasn't offering content makers money.

The accidental size difference, the hand holding, their faces being too close and staring each other in the eyes, the armors, the dialog during the scene being
>this is not you
>you don't know anything about who I am [paraphrased]
Chef kiss.

Kintoki x Buddha

Surprisingly, there are yaoi ocxcanon included Poseidon getting shipped with Mayan/Aztec god which is…..based and wholesome.

I actually shipped Apollo with his myth boyfriend Hyacinth. I'm actually glad he isn't included in canon, had he been included, his personality & relationship with Apollo would get screwed by author (Japanese male authors tend to be homophobic but gushing over yuri).

Some Apollo yaoi ships included Beelzebub, Simo and few male ocs. He's also get yume-d a lot. Smh I don't feel like posting Apollo with Hyacinth whenever I see ApoLeo tweets, complicated feeling.

Ngl this is my favorite Ror ocxcanon ship, so far I found Apollo x Hyacinth fanart, wish it'd get more recognizable.

>>6011
based, a fan of it.

>>6012
It's objectively the best pairing in the show.

Is Ahiru no Sora worth watching?

With the continued popularity of things like Country Humans and other attempts to bishie-fy countries do you think Hetalia is to blame or is there just something innately appealing about humanized countries?

>>2080
Well drawings of humanized countries have always been a thing. Like all those old political cartoons.

I love amecan!

>>5869
I think tagging it as ABA or BAB should be fine
>>5870
>I really like how western fandoms are much more lax around tops or bottoms personally
I hate it lmao. if you have an unpopular fixed dynamic it makes finding them so difficult. I also hate it when they specifically tag a ship as having top A/bottom B only to randomly mention top B out of nowhere

>>5878
>tag a ship as having top A/bottom B only to randomly mention top B out of nowhere
I'm a fan of an unpopular dynamic and this happens 8/10 times I read an explicit fic of them, it annoys me so much. Idk if the authors just do it to throw a crumb to the (few) AB fans reading their fic but it needs to stop. Also hate it when an AB shipper writes a BA fic for fun/variety and they always make a big show about a character bottoming for the first time and how it's not their usual arrangement.

>>5867
>that said, i think in cases where people feel "lied to" for reading a 700k fic with the wrong dynamic because t/b wasn't tagged, idk it's pretty easy to skim through for a sex scene and see how it's being written
This is what they mean by empathy. Mfs who refuse to tag properly just because "it's the year 2025" or something like that instead of creating a comfortable space for everyone. I don't want to sound like one of those Japan suckers, but in some ways, it's clear that eastern fandoms are ahead of us. Of course, it's a more polite, civic-minded, and considerate culture.

>>5188
>>5189
>>5190
>>5355
In a sort of seemingly unrelated way, these remind me of Narcissus, the youth that is traditionally said he fell for his own reflection.
>He had a cruel heart, and hated all of them, till he conceived a love for his own form: He wailed, seeing his face, delightful as a dream, within a spring; he wept for his beauty. Then the boy shed his blood and gave it to the earth… to bear.

An excerpt I read on the wiki for Cyparissus:
>The myth of Cyparissus, like that of Hyacinthus, has often been interpreted as reflecting the social custom of pederasty in ancient Greece, with the boy the beloved (eromenos) of Apollo. Pederastic myth represents the process of initiation into adult male life,[3] with a "death" and transfiguration for the eromenos. "In all these tales", notes Karl Kerényi, "the beautiful boys are doubles of [Apollo] himself."[4]

The myth of Narcissus reflects back to Apollo that ties some of these together for me in a poetic way at least.

Yes, I did crop out Echo. The only references to "echo" I want to read about are the ones Hylas left behind calling out to Hercules.

>>5440
I forgot to mention another common thread is the disappearance close to bodies of water.

Achilles x Patroclus gay claymation sex.

>>5266
It's the general aesthetic of the game, fits the tone well imo
With that being said I wouldn't mind a BLge that looks like diabolik lovers

Been busy, but I'm still playing Animamundi and I love Gemant's sprites, easily the cutest of the game. Mikhail is also tsun as fuck and the first thing he does upon reuniting with you is give you a hug in front of a confused royal guard.
The game right now is very plot heavy and any romance will certainly be a secondary element; it does have a lot of underlying homo tension though lots of sprites of men touching each other and getting handsy when they don't need to. The story right now is MC dealing with his sister being attacked and a mysterious doctor who he will be working under who was there at the scene of the attack.

To those asking the game gives you a ton of questions right at the beginning like you're playing Pokemon Mystery Dungeon, it's a personality test of sorts and one of them is specially if you would prefer the company of a man, woman, or both; I assume this removes any het right from the game.

>>5268
They can look dark and gloomy without every single guy having the same exact hair and eye color combo.

Kamen Teacher, a teacher is secretly into little boys and needs to hide his shameful affection. Another teacher is hired who looks like an elementary student but is really an adult and the two start a relationship. Not good, but very bizarre, it's aiming for comedy but nothing quite lands.

The manga itself isn't that weird, but the English title is funny.

>>5138
Hell yeah, based taste. Megane Otoko are so sexy (○´ ་།｀)ﾉ

>>5140
IKR?! You should def replay it! It's not a favorite game of mine, but if Sakuma is in it, I have to play it all the time.

>>5141
RIGHT?! Tell me he isn't the hottest?!