snowprincess_23:
I like men like romantically but I really love love watching BL dramas and movies. 🎥 I guess for me they’re just people in love. I look at their romance and chemistry more than the gender I think.
As follow up questions then, and by saying you look more to the romance and chemistry in BLs, does that mean you don't see the same kind of chemistry in het dramas? Or do you watch an equal amount of het dramas? Do you think romance and chemistry and just better portrayed in BLs? How do you feel about LGBTQ+ portrayals of relationships and romance?
I personally don't enjoy most het dramas because I feel the female characters are almost always flat and uninteresting or predictable, just letting you know soy you don't think I'm judging you for whether you watch or don't watch het dramas XD
for me personally ...yeah i'm attracted to men , i just happen to be attracted enough to men that i enjoy just watching men together sometimes. i'm not against hetero stuff by any means but sometimes i'm just not in the mood for watching women emote if that makes sense? ...styx971:
The former part of this response is probably the one that has come closest to the reasoning for my own interests in BL in this thread so far. And as for the latter, I do understand what you mean, I think. I feel they're poorly written, their scenes and characterizations are often unlikable, the emotional scenes notwithstanding. Personally, I can 100% support a fictional het couple as long as the female character is someone I find likeable, which doesn't happen often for me.
I was one of those people who wanted to riot (online) when they killed off Letty in Fast & the Furious because I was invested in her and Dom being together until the end 😂 Dom/Letty fans got what we wanted!
i originally got into BL thanks to a female buddy in highschool lending me her mangas,
Honestly, most of the OG yaoi/slash/BL fans started from anime/manga. Myself included. I am from the time when we shipped totally not gay characters in any anime as much as we wanted and it was great fun. Some of my fave 'pairs' are still manga/anime characters to this day, even though I don't watch anime and only rarely read one or two updating mangas occasionally nowadays.
honestly tho theres just something about the way 2 guys express emotions together in media that hits differently than straight stuff.
Thanks for sharing :)
jazme:
There's no definitive black and white in real life. In the same sense women are different within a country or location, moreso since worldwide. Fujoshi or women who loves watching/reading BLs can be straight, bi, lesb, etc. I'm straight and I watch BLs mostly out of story. I enjoy the friction/teasing/bromance part. Secondary the actors leading the story, then the production (I love works from Mandee/Domundi).
At one time, I was impressed that Yuri Hime, the main yuri manga magazine, was read by an equal number of queer and straight women. Or that many gay women enjoy BL fiction, and vice versa. I understand why the stereotype of a direct connection between tastes and identity exists, but it's not that straightforward (no pun intended) and it's not always black and white.
DonaldPool:
Some het female BL viewers watch for:
Attraction to men (obvious)
Emotional intimacy and relationships between male characters
Aesthetic or idealized male forms rather than “real-life” men
Fantasy or escapism—stories they wouldn’t experience themselves
It’s often more about fantasy and dynamics than actual sexual attraction to real men.
I've always been intrigued by how many women criticize men for watching content featuring idealized women, but at the same time openly admit to looking for content featuring idealized men themselves.
Some het female BL viewers watch for:
Attraction to men (obvious)
Emotional intimacy and relationships between male characters
Aesthetic or idealized male forms rather than “real-life” men
Fantasy or escapism—stories they wouldn’t experience themselves
It’s often more about fantasy and dynamics than actual sexual attraction to real men.
Can confirm I've come across these points in conversations here and elsewhere on this topic, so yeah, these probably cover the majority reasons. Although, number 1, while you've listed it as the first one, surprisingly seems to be the least common of these four, even though it technically would seem like the most obvious reason women might watch two guys together. heh
RobertBobert:
I've always been intrigued by how many women criticize men for watching content featuring idealized women, but at the same time openly admit to looking for content featuring idealized men themselves.
Yeah, hypocrites, hypocrites everywhere. lol
I think both men and women should be allowed to fantasize about whatever they idealize in a partner, so long as they stay in touch with reality about people in everyday life.
Lyson:
Yeah, hypocrites, hypocrites everywhere. lol
I think both men and women should be allowed to fantasize about whatever they idealize in a partner, so long as they stay in touch with reality about people in everyday life.
You can't separate fantasy from reality, but overall, I don't see a problem with it. The shit starts when people lose sight of the boundaries or start promoting double standards between genders.
I've always been intrigued by how many women criticize men for watching content featuring idealized women, but at the same time openly admit to looking for content featuring idealized men themselves.
Some people are just being hypocritical, yeah. People should watch whatever they want to watch. But I think maybe the difference some of them are seeing is the difference between 'idealized' and 'objectified', which is at least an interesting thing to think about. I wish all of this didn't come with so much moralizing and judgement attached, because that makes it a lot harder to talk openly about.
'Objectifying' means not giving a character agency (the ability to make decisions that influence the plot, including for the worse), and not giving them the full range of human emotions. It's portraying them as an 'object' to be acted upon, rather than a full character who the audience is invited to empathize with, and who is acting in their own right. Idealized men in media aimed at women are still always portrayed as people with their own story arcs and emotions, while idealized women in media aimed at men are often not, instead serving as 'sexy lamps', background eye candy, prizes to be won, fridged tragic backstories, mere plot devices in stories that revolve around men, without their own internal motivations. Even female main characters sometimes have zero influence over the plot, that's called a 'hood ornament'.
You can often see the difference in what the camera focuses on. In media aimed at women it usually focuses on faces and hands, the things we use to show emotions and the things we use to perform actions. BL, especially during NC scenes, sticks remarkably close to that. Pretty much every shot is about what faces express and where hands go, or about revealing a chest (omg scandalous) so that the other character can react to it. In some media aimed at men you sometimes get random out of context boobshots, which tells the audience nothing about the character's emotions or intentions and is just 'fanservice', not part of the story, but candy for the viewer. That's an easy to spot difference between what academics call the 'male gaze' and 'female gaze'; whether the camera focuses on emotion/action/intention or on appearance. The 'female gaze' is supposed to be about agency, in opposition to the male gaze's objectification. (So to be clear it's about camera movement and what that implies about an intended audience, not about who's actually watching.)
Some BLs have extended introductory shower scenes for the main protagonist or love interest. Those are objectification, because they say exactly nothing about what the character's personality or goals are, and everything about what they look like without clothes on. When a scene like that happens, especially if it's long and in the first episode, to me that's a clue that this piece of media is maybe not intended for me, but for someone who's actually attracted to men, and is probably a man themselves, because to me that's just boring wasted screentime.
Of course if you want to watch media that objectifies its characters, then yeah that's what you should do. I would watch a show that objectifies its male characters, just to see what that's like for a change, especially one that's aimed at a female audience. Not even Magic Mike does it (based on the 10 minutes I watched of that). Yeah he's sexualized for sure, but he gets shown having all sorts of emotions, and his actions are the main driver of plot. I think maybe some of those really bad Chinese gender role reversal microdramas come close, like this one (link), but honestly in most of them the guy turns out to have only been pretending to be meek and opinionless and is actually doublecrossing the female protagonist or something. There's no shows about a woman who's got stuff to deal with, enemies to defeat, mysteries to unravel, and also a score of personality-less and available pretty boys flocking around her in the background, or just one goal-less pretty boy to 'get' at the end as a reward for completing her mission.
It seems that the idea of a man that's just kinda there looking pretty without doing anything to affect the plot or having any ideas or goals of his own is not enticing to women. (And maybe always needing a man to be driven is its own kind of sexism? I'm reaching, I know.)
This guy has a lot of super interesting things to say about how to actually sexualize a male character: link. Apparently whether it counts as 'sexualization' or 'oversexualization' has a lot to do with whether it makes sense for the character in context. Like is it a choice the character is reasonably making and does that choice say something about their personality? Magic Mike is sexualized in a way that makes sense within the plot. Anime girls are often oversexualized, because their giant swaying tits are in focus while they're just like, busy being professional nurses or something.
Anyways that was fun for me, thanks for sparking the train of thought.
