Webtoons

[Let’s Talk Tropes] Breaking The Genre Rules in BL

Stitch

Trope: Breaking BL Series

Trope Symptoms: bisexuals don’t exist, binaries abound, gay dudes in canon are now heterosexual in the transmigrator’s real life, tragic backstory as a reason for being gay, female transmigrator, stolen capture targets, a series so homophobic and gay at the same time,

Genre/Sub-genre: Boys Love (sort of), romantic fantasy

As Seen In: I Ran Away From the Hunter, I’m Engaged to an Obsessive Male Lead, Taming My Villainous Brother, Surviving As A Maid, Touch My Brother and You Die, The Princess of Convenient Plot Devices, Let’s Hide My Little Brother, I Became the Younger Sister of the Regretful Obsessive Male Lead, I Became The Servant Who Received The Crown Prince’s Obsession, This BL Novel Is Ruined Now

Actually…I was supposed to be reborn into a much crueler world, but according to my bad memories, luckily (though that’s up for debate) I escaped that fate and was reborn into the world of The Noble King, the series Maki Tazawa so dearly loved…

…as the main character’s boyfriend’s little sister.

Little sister…or Sister-dearest. In my past life, that’s what I used to call Sirius’s younger sister: Sister-dearest. Whatever the medium, the treatment of female characters in the Boys Love, or BL, genre was often a delicate issue. They were either villains who tried to separate the hero from his love interest, or they were the lovers’ confidants.

But in either case, girls were always side characters. So how were girls treated in The Noble King, you may ask?

It was the latter!

Mamecyoro. The Princess of Convenient Plot Devices, Vol. 1 (light novel) (The Princess of Convenient Plot Devices (light novel)) (p. 5). Yen Press. Kindle Edition.

Usually, when readers or players are transmigrated into a world after death, it’s in a genre they’re familiar with. That’s why the vast majority of Reader Transmigration stories tend to be romantic or action fantasy series… the most popular genre of webnovel worldwide, apparently.

So what happens when a fujoshi – Japanese slang for a very intense Boys Love fan (more on that subculture here) – takes a one way trip in front of Truck-kun that sends them to a new world?

They usually get dropped head first into their genre of choice.

For Maki, a fujoshi newly transmigrated into the world of her favorite series The Noble King as the top’s younger sister Ophelia, things wouldn’t be so bad except… the ship she stans just happens to contain her older brother. What was once a hot ship just right up her alley is now… an uncomfortable constant glimpse at sibling-focused PDA.

Because while Ophelia is a pervert through and through… she’s not that kind of pervert.

The Princess of Convenient Plot Devices is also one of the rare “transmigrated into a BL” series that doesn’t break the series by making everyone heterosexual.

Half of the men in the original series were gay and half weren’t… and even with the introduction of the transmigrator lead, that doesn’t change. Which is again incredibly rare as most “transmigrated into a BL” series break the canon of the original work by making the capture targets heterosexual and interested in the female lead. It’s like the direct opposite of something like Scum Villain where someone from our world gets transmigrated into a novel… and makes it a BL where everyone seems a little bit gay (and a lot into the transmigrator-as-OG!Villain).

Unfortunately, that is a norm of the genre and so in series like I’m Engaged To a Villainous Male Lead, the female lead who’s transmigrated changes the story by linking up with the original BL love interest.  

It’s often revealed that the male lead of the original BL was actually only incidentally into the male lead. In Let’s Hide My Little Brother, the original male lead Franz Vesta (the webtoon protagonist’s younger brother) is forced into gay relationships in the original canon and kept captive by the mad villain, Aster. In the webtoon, his sister Kyla’s interference in the original plot saves his life and he winds up… married to a woman and expecting their first child. Aster, the villain that kept Franz as a pet in the original series and destroyed his family in order to keep him close? Is revealed to not be gay – and the crossdressing component in his youth is because he’s forced into that to save his life from a curse – and winds up obsessed with Kyla. One of the other love interests that’s supposed to be a BL capture target? Doesn’t even look twice at Franz and risks his own life to save Kyla’s.

Similarly, in I Became the Younger Sister of a Regretful Obsessive Male Lead, the transmigrator that becomes the minor villainess Rachel was once a huge fan of the BL novel she now lives in. The tragic second male lead Lucian is being abused by his father – who is a closeted gay man mourning the loss of his youthful relationship with Rachel’s late father.

It’s explicit that Lucian’s father has obsessed over Rachel’s father to the point of taking in his daughter after his death… and prioritizing her over the son he viciously abuses and isolates. There’s also, very early on, the reveal that Lucian’s dad was abused for his sexuality and sees Lucian as the reincarnation of said abusive father… so he abuses him in retaliation. (Oh, and Rachel becomes the romantic object for Lucian… even though Lucian was gay in the original BL series… and also she is his adoptive sister.)

Being gay in these transmigration stories tends to be something bad. It’s something linked with societal ruin and trauma and madness. It’s really rare to have a transmigration series where a character is dropped into a BL world… and queerness is normalized.

Instead, what we constantly get is the reminder that being gay is tragic. No one ever gets dropped into a world like Kyou Kara Maoh where queerness and gender fluidity are somewhat normalized and it’s fine to love who you love. They’re transmigrated into worlds where the queer male characters only like men because they’re traumatized by women, because they have some attachment to the male lead they keep captive, because they’re abused and were groomed into it. In few of these stories are the gay characters gay because they just are. The only one I can think of Surviving As a Maid, suffers from different issues – as the gay emperor and his beloved are major misogynists and the beloved is also a major manipulator who may have drugged lots of people to get his way.

I see these series as suffering from genre collapse. They want to be BL series and M/F romantic fantasy at the same time, but the tropes don’t mesh. Tropes that are common in BL – like, I don’t know, the casual queerness of most BL works – are absolutely at odds with the romantic fantasy genre’s focus on female fantasies.

Part of this is because, even though Korea and Japan have a huge corner of the BL market… the people who write BL and can at least spin a queer story… aren’t generally the ones writing M/F romantic fantasies? So they’re unfamiliar with the genre as creators… and they don’t have incentive to give a gay happy ending or any major gay characters in their non-BL series.

The other part of the reason for this? The point of transmigration stories is to become the center of the story.

Kind of hard to do that if you’re in a BL world and play it “straight”. While BL series genuinely aren’t actively misogynistic, one thing that is really rare? Finding a heterosexual female lead even in the side stories of a series. So for the transmigrator to take center stage in a BL series… the genre has to change to center women directly, not just in the fantasy of the romance layered onto the male characters of BL.

But the sad fact is that these genre changes require really frustrating choices.

Namely to make everyone straight and obsessed with the female lead at the direct expense of the original gay characters in the series.

Semi-jokingly, I call this offshoot of romantic fantasy “gay and homophobic” (sung in the tune of “Gay or European” from the Legally Blonde musical) because there are gay characters… it’s just that the ultimate plot is deeply homophobic in the erasure of these characters and the purposeful link between gayness/depravity/tragedy. I’m still reading these books, but… I’m absolutely making a face as I do.

So… what are your thoughts on the trope?