Ridley

Cover image for the BL manga Hibana. A teenage boy with blond hair in a white button down shirt looks intense as he grabs the white button down shirt of a dark haired boy with a bloodied lip and a pained expression, and possibly goes in for a kiss.

69. Hibana - licensed - Tomori's boyfriend Inukai has always been a lot, but the way his fixation on the new transfer student Minato turns to violent bullying shocks her. It's the story of a toxic relationship, from teens to adults, through the eyes of a third party. Interesting, but felt incomplete

Screenshot from the anime The Other World's Books Depend on the Bean Counter showing two men talking in an empty dorm room with sunlight coming through large, multi paned glass windows. The taller man in a blue robe over a white tunic holds a pink pillow under his arm and says to a dark haired man in glasses and a white shirt, "You're in dire need of my care since you'd die the moment you leave my sight."

The same scene continues, "So there's nothing to worry about if we live together."

Oh Aresh. You're so romantic, lol.

Cover image for the BL manhwa Semantic Error, Vol. 5. A young man with short black styled wearing a white button down shirt looks at the camera in a photo displayed on a cellphone in a man's hand. The cover is then decorated with a variety of faux warning stickers.

68. Semantic Error, Vol. 5 - licensed - Jaeyoung's graduation and departure for the US draws near, and neither he nor Sangwoo are taking it well. Instead of spending time together and talking about what's next, they crawl into their own heads to stew in insecurity. Very satisfying to see it resolve.

I really liked Black and White, so I'm looking forward to this one.

"What pre-2000 shoujo do you you want to get an anime?"

Call me Grumpy McGrumpyface, but I don't. I desperately want people to stop clinging to 90s shoujo manga.

Sal Jiang yuri, come on down!

a teenage girl and an older woman stand and look at each other. The girl wears a plaid blue shirt, while the woman wears a yellow top and long pink skirt.

For Crunchyroll News, I wrote about the genius of Journal with Witch: it's not just a story of adolescence or adult life, but both! www.crunchyroll.com/news/feature...

I'm seeing it come up so in this so called algorithm so it helps to bring this up: BL is considered queer media, but not all MLM/queer media is BL.

TSHD is queer media, not BL. BL is specific but also growing in what it can be. That's how I'd start to differentiate it.

Cover image for the josei manga Since I Could Die Tomorrow, Vol. 3. A watercolor painting of a woman in a belted red dress with long wavy hair floating horizontally above a man in glasses, wearing jeans and a tan sweater over a white button down shirt, who looks up at her from the desk he sits at with a laptop. The background behind them looks like a city park with a pond and trees.

67. Since I Could Die Tomorrow, Vol. 3 - licensed - One of the trio is left shocked when her mother has a stroke, reversing their dynamic. Another is resisting the urge to cheat on her absent husband by reading her daughter's BL collection. And our MC leaves her job and falls in something like love.

If I was a rights holder in Japan, those tweets would make me question their commitment. That's not how you talk about a product you believe has potential for growth.

He *is* voiced by Kenjuro Tsuda, though, so you lose some, you win some.

Cover image for the BL manga Ripples in the River, Vol. 2. Two men dressed for late summer weather walk together through a field of two meter tall sunflowers in full bloom. The brown haired one in jeans and a black t-shirt smiles while holding a baseball cap, and the light haired man in the blue Hawaiian shirt and straw hat adjusts his shoulder bag as he smiles back.

66. Ripples in the River, Vol. 2 - licensed - We head back to high school for some vignettes of Tamba and Utagawa from when they first started hanging out together. Whether it was studying, hanging with the baby sister, or hitting a festival, the two just fit together. A nice romantic slice of life.

Yes, but you see, I grew up in Lowell, going to see the UML men's hockey team play in the old rink next to a UPS warehouse, and this is a daydream where everything works out for me, lol.

One of my winning the Powerball daydreams is to establish a D1 women's hockey program at UMass-Lowell, and sponsor girls hockey programs in Massachusetts cities. I really wanted to play hockey as a kid, but we couldn't afford it.

Happy birthday! How nice and neat to basically get a double new year.

Josei yuri is the best yuri.

It's embarrassing. They just look unserious.

Here's the now-deleted exchange. The context makes it even worse. Like, you can't talk like that on a brand account!

People are way too harsh on the visuals for In the Clear Moonlit Dusk. It's not only not particularly bad looking, it's not even the worst looking anime on Sundays.

The only thing it's really bad at is compositing. HanaKimi, Adored Villainess, and Part-Time Torturer all look way worse.

My timeline is half leftists complaining about Gavin Newsom and half liberals complaining about Graham Platner and I'd like to propose that we launch both of them into the sun together.

Maybe you need to embrace the ancient art of being a bum, lol.

Booo, that sucks. Hope it magically resolves.

Describing a shoujo cover in alt text takes on a slightly different flavor with Vampire Dormitory. What gender is Mito this time?

Cover image for the shoujo manga Vampire Dormitory, Vol. 6. Boymode Mito, with short pink hair and a choker necklace, wearing only a white button down shirt, sits in the lap of a young man with silver, wearing a purple lined black tail coat, who embraces her and runs his fingers across her face.

65. Vampire Dormitory, Vol. 6 - licensed - Just before Mito's about to say "I do," Ruka shows up and breaks Ren's hypnosis on her. Now back in her right mind and body, Ruka acknowledges her as his destined partner, prompting a reaction from the vampire world. Hope this next arc is good dumb fun too.

Man, I really wanted to love Koi to Shinzou, because he gave fantastic yandere, but it just never really came together for me.

Happy birthday! I hope you get to enjoy the day.

Let it not be forgotten as we roast Viz for Sublime's anemic license announcements yesterday, that Viz also recently announced a collaboration with Mr. Beast for a line of merch and clothes. This is not a smart company.

Shojo Beat and Sublime used to make up the majority of my shoujo and BL manga reading, but every year I read more and more from other publishers.

Like, their licenses aren't happening in a vacuum. We have eyes that see we're getting a growing number of new BL titles from multiple other publishers. What market pressure is leading them to retreat from a sector other publishers are saying they're getting good numbers from?

I think there's saying you're filling a niche in a way that acknowledges its dedicated fans, and there's saying something is niche, so its fans should be grateful to get anything at all. If this editor was going for the first option, they overshot it and ended up doing the second.