In the summer of 2003, much like the summer before, I took an anime class at Portland State University. The theme this time around was women and families, and our final paper had to be connected to that. Hence, I picked something I know quite a bit about, which is female fandom ^_^ I got to write about stuff I enjoy like fanficion and yaoi, so this was a pretty fun essay to write and research ^o^

As long as entertainment has existed, there have been people who are considered to be fans of certain works, genres and authors. Though some forms of entertainment are pretty universal, there are still genres that exist which target specific audiences, such as children, teenagers, or adults. Many titles that exist in the world of anime and manga are also gender specific. Yet even though there are large quantities of titles made specifically for women, female fans in both Japan and America (and presumably all around the world) will often take characters from existing stories and write them into their own situations. This often includes taking canonically heterosexual male characters and pairing them up with each other, often with little regard to the actual relationships in the show. With genres such as shoujo and boy’s love being extremely successful in Japan, it seems that these types of series are gaining popularity in America, and, though the type of fandom perpetuated by women is similar in both countries, there are key differences between them.

As manga have been around since a time when women were generally expected to be nothing more than housewives, early manga series were predominantly written by men. Even early shoujo (girls, approximately ages 6-16) manga were written by males, one of the early ones being “Princess Knight” by Tezuka Osamu about a princess who is made to cross-dress so people will believe she is a prince. As shoujo stories are usually romances that rely heavily on character development and emotions, many women weren’t satisfied with these stories written by men trying to portray female emotions. In the 1960’s, the women who had been raised reading these types of stories finally managed to take over the genre (Levi). These stories often featured strong women who often cross-dressed to get ahead, enforcing the idea that women still didn’t see themselves as being very powerful in a male dominant society. In addition, the men in these stories often looked very feminine, and were sensitive and caring individuals. Whereas shoujo stories written by male authors had shown idealized female imagery, shoujo stories written by women were doing the same thing to men, portraying something that was more of a fantasy than a representation of a real person. Another element thought to influence the male characters in these stories was the male impersonators of the all-female acting troupe known as the Takarazuka Theater (Levi). Takarazuka and manga were heavily intertwined in the days before anime became popular, and shoujo series would often be adapted to the stage. Since the Takarazuka Theater still held performances of traditional beautiful warrior stories, shoujo began to pick up more heroic elements as well, and the plotlines began to closely resemble those of shounen manga (Levi). Today, the market for shoujo seems to be a mix of flowery love stories that almost definitely will never make it into (official) translation in America to female superhero stories, which generally have a much better chance of being brought over. Another category of women’s manga exists for audiences slightly older than the shoujo crowd known as Lady’s manga (“Definitions...”). Like shoujo, they feature bishounen (beautiful boy) characters, but since the audience is older (20s and up), they’re more likely to have actual sex (both heterosexual and male/male homosexual) than shoujo. Both shoujo and Lady’s manga often have homoerotic overtones, but they are not considered to fit under the categories of boy’s love or yaoi like many Americans tend to categorize them. “Yami no Matsuei,” for example, is considered to be a shoujo title in Japan but is referred to as yaoi in the West (“Definitions...”).

Aside from the overtones and occasional romances in shoujo and Lady’s manga, there are actual genres devoted to the female fantasy of male homosexual relationships. These genres are thought to have stemmed from Japan’s long standing tradition of admiration of male beauty, and the samurai warrior society emphasizing strong but unspoken emotional attachments between men (Johnson, “What...”). Though these traditions were originally focused on males and appeared often in shounen manga, around the 1970s women began using these themes and putting them into stories for women. This new genre was called tanbi (aestheticism) and focused on all things beautiful, decadent, perverse and erotic (Johnson, “What...”). The earliest known manga magazine dedicated to publishing these romantic male stories was called June. The whole genre of male/male relationships was referred to as june for a while, but since it was the name of a magazine/production company the term has fallen out of common use. The style known as tanbi that started off the whole genre is also no longer in use, as stories written with flowery language and difficult kanji purely for “the worship and pursuit of beauty” fell out of favor as faster paced male/male romance series began showing up (“Definitions...”). A subsection of shoujo manga known as shounen ai (boy’s love) became popular during the late 1970s, a trend that continued through the 1980s. These stories often featured young teenaged boys and were more about love than sex, and they focused heavily on emotions and angst (Johnson, “Aestheticism’s...”). This term is also now obsolete in Japan, though Westerners still tend to use it in reference to things that seem similar to the original genre, i.e., a fan-fiction author might refer to their story as being shounen ai because it features young boys in love but not necessarily having sex.

The word that came to be the umbrella term in the late 1990s in Japan to refer to works featuring male/male relationships marketed to females is boy’s love (written in katakana, not as a translation of shounen ai), often abbreviated as BL. This term is incredibly broad, and can be used to refer to just about any category of male/male relationship found in anime, manga, live action TV and video games (excluding actual gay publications) including both professional and amateur works, stories with or without sex, stories with characters of all ages (not just boys), and the word covers related terms such as yaoi, shounen ai, tanbi and june (“Definitions...”). BL is a very popular genre in Japan; over a hundred works are published every month, more than two-thirds of them novels, the rest being manga (“Definitions...”).

Even with BL abundant, many people (mostly female) will take the characters from various series and write their own stories about them. This is called fan-fiction when referring to written stories and doujinshi in reference to fan comics (though the word doujinshi can also refer to original manga works by a person or group who is self publishing). Though these works are still considered to be a part of the BL genre, there are separate terms for these types of stories. Many Westerners refer to all Japanese works featuring male/male relationships as yaoi, an acronym that stands for “yama nashi, ochi nashi, imi nashi,” which translates roughly to “no peak, no point, no meaning,” essentially the Japanese equivalent of the American acronym PWP (Plot? What Plot?), or stories that are just about sex with nothing of substance. However, this term was created to specifically reference doujinshi that featured almost nothing but badly drawn sex, and Japanese mangaka who write serious BL stories would find it quite offensive to have their works referred to as yaoi (“Definitions...”). This could be equated with how American authors would certainly be offended if someone referred to their greatest novels as fan-fiction. Though the term yaoi is not as negative as it once was, it still refers to sexually explicit material, in either doujinshi or BL manga (“Definitions...”). The category known in Japan as yaoi began with females writing doujinshi about male/male pairings taken mostly from shounen manga. This was done because many shounen series had broad appeal and, since shounen stories often feature little to no romance, they contained a lot of young men without girlfriends who could easily be paired together at random (since canon matters little in yaoi, even if a guy did have a girlfriend or wife he could still be paired up with his best friend/worst enemy/brother and no one really cared). Though some doujinshika have created serious stories about already existing characters, the majority of yaoi doujinshi focus on non-canon male/male homosexual relationships.

In America, the genre of male/male relationship stories marketed to young women is virtually nonexistent. However, women did manage to create the genre known as slash, referring to fan works featuring homosexuality. Fan-fiction and slash appeared almost simultaneously in the U.S. when fans began creating stories about Star Trek in the late 1960s, many of them featuring homosexual pairings such as Kirk/Spock (“Destina’s...”). The word slash came from the “/” symbol used between the two names. While the Japanese seem to have no problem with these types of fan works in Japan (or at least they see no point in trying to put a stop to it), American creators have had mixed reactions to this phenomenon. Gene Roddenberry (the creator of Star Trek) was delighted by fan creativity so much that he wrote an introduction to the first official volume of fan-fiction stories published by an authorized publishing house, and in it he praised fans for keeping Star Trek alive with their pens and imaginations (“Destina’s...”). On the other hand, some authors such as Anne Rice have forbidden that any fan-fiction be written about their stories. In general, though, American creators tend to tolerate the existence of fan-fiction as long as the writers of these fan works make no money from them and it’s clearly stated that they don’t own the characters in a disclaimer (“Destina’s...”).

There are several key differences between the genres of slash in America and BL in Japan. As stated before, BL is a big business in Japan, while America tends to shy away from producing works featuring prominent homosexuality. As for fan works, yaoi is based almost entirely on anime, video games and manga, while slash stems mostly from live action TV shows (Johnson, “Aestheticism’s...”). Slash authors will usually look for evidence of a relationship before writing a story about two characters, often by looking for unresolved sexual tension (UST), while yaoi writers are often willing to put any two good looking male characters in bed together without any regard to their feelings for each other (Johnson, “Aestheticism’s...”). The formats in which these two genres have flourished is also different: slash has been estimated to be 98% text stories, while yaoi is up to 90% doujinshi comics, though there has been a slight increase in the number of text-based doujinshi (Johnson, “Aestheticism’s...”). Yaoi seems to have stricter rules as a genre: rather than a “/”, the Japanese use an “x” to separate the names of the two males, and the seme (top) is always listed before the uke (bottom), i.e., Seme x Uke. These roles are strictly defined and are often dictated by the height of the character, the taller one always being the seme. Some doujinshika will even go so far as to draw one character as being taller than the other even if they were originally the same height or if that character should be shorter than the other just to ensure that he is a “proper seme” (Johnson, “Aestheticism’s...”). Many yaoi stories also contain what Americans would refer to as “disturbing themes” such as incest and stories featuring prepubescent boys called shotacon (there are a couple of different theories on the origin of this word, one them being that it’s derived from the boy’s name “Shotarou” and “Complex”, much like lolicon is an abbreviation of “Lolita Complex”) (Johnson, “Aestheticism’s...”). Stories with these types of themes are not uncommon in doujinshi, and it seems that Japanese people generally don’t find them to be disturbing; they’re just accepted as another element of fantasy.

It’s been estimated that up to 95% of fan-fiction authors in America are female, and it’s likely that the percentage of doujinshika is similar in Japan (“Destina’s...”). So why do women have such a burning need to “mess with” the stories they see and turn them all into adventures in homoeroticism? It’s somewhat understandable in America, since male/male homosexual stories (or even just regular comics, for that matter) made for women are extremely rare, and even if young women get into shows made for homosexuals such as “Queer as Folk,” no one seems to be willing to go that extra step and actually create something for these women (at best, they’ll just bring over something from Japan). In Japan, even though comics made for women like shoujo and BL are thoroughly accepted as being a huge money making market, women still create mass quantities of fan works. Some have speculated that women want to add a female voice to the entertainment they consume, but even works made by women for women are subject to being made into doujinshi. Perhaps it comes from some of the unique aspects of anime and manga: due to the seeming UST (originally meant to be the “strong, silent bonds between men” that resulted in tanbi) and often ambiguous endings of series, females, caring strongly about the characters, make up their own stories for these men to experience. It’s a fascinating aspect of female fandom, and it really says a lot about the ways the different sexes experience entertainment.

Works Cited

“Definitions From Japan: BL, Yaoi, June”

“Destina's Fan Fiction FAQ”

Johnson, Jeanne. “Aestheticism's Yaoi/Slash Glossary” compiled from AMLA, 1998.

Johnson, Jeanne. “What is Yaoi?”

Levi, Antonia. Samurai from Outer Space. Open Court Publishing. Chicago and La Salle, Illinois, 1996.