“Who wants to die for art?!?” [waving a handgun wildly and firing real bullets into a crowd]
Divine and her henchwomen
Oh, sorry, that’s from the 1974 film by John Waters, an entirely different Female Trouble than what we’ll be discussing today. But if you haven’t ever seen it, you owe it to yourself to indulge in Divine’s immortal fabulousness.
So let’s talk about Boys’ Love media and the other kind of female trouble: toxicity in sundry forms. Odd, isn’t it, to find that in a genre that is overwhelmingly about guys and their relationships with other guys?
Volumes have been written about gendered toxicity within heteronormative movies. Indeed, it seems like half the works I have ever seen that deal with a straight couple in any way suffer from some unhealthy attitudes and behaviors between the sexes; if it was removed from the script, the film could be over in half the time!
You would think that boy-boy romances would eliminate all of that. After all, the lads are the same gender, had similar formative experiences growing up, innately understand the body, hormonal urges, and so on of their partner. So how does female-related toxicity slip into the mix?
Stick around and we’ll find out below the break.
Our mission statement
The Trump regime wants to erase LGBQT people from public life in the US and eliminate access to information, resources, and cultural heritage for our youth. Most LGBQT adolescents never see stories about people like themselves enjoying love and romance. In our current reality, watching a Boys’ Love or Girls’ Love series or movie might be the only means for young people to see models of how their own relationships could start, develop, and successfully grow.
It’s also an act of subversion … so watch an episode, share it with others, and resist!
Yaoi, the Japanese foundation of Boys’ Love media
Yaoi style artwork
Let’s rewind time and start with the birth of the Boys’ Love genre decades ago in Japan. Long before the live-action BL movies and series we watch today, some Japanese women and adolescent girls created fiction about male-male romance (and lust!). Known as yaoi, these short stories and novels weren’t really about gay relationships but instead centered on anomalous “special” relationships between two otherwise heterosexual guys.
The premise was usually that both of them felt an overpowering, uncontrollable attraction to their fictional male partner … but only to him, not to any other guys. There’s an abundance of analyses of what this means in terms of the psyches of the yaoi authors but most of them boil down to this: the authors (and fans) could imagine intense emotional bonding and lustful passions by their protagonists but stripped of the patriarchal rules, roles, and restraints normally imposed by Japanese society on romantic (heterosexual) relationships.
That’s in theory, at least.
In actuality, yaoi authors brought their own rules and restraints into their works. It’s almost as though it was impossible to fully conceive relationships that were between true co-equals. Thus, most yaoi start right off by slotting their two lead characters into pre-defined roles of seme and uke — top and bottom, sexually — as though these same-sex relationships must be viewed through the lens of heterosexual roles and norms.
This is problematic because it isn’t realistic: penetrative sex doesn’t even make it into the top three most frequent bedroom activities of gay men. Moreover, even those partners who do enjoy it are quite often versatile in their behavior.
Movies and TV shows, more often than not, depict life unrealistically so this merely shows us that yaoi is similar, based on fantasy and internal world-building rather than trying to show us a snapshot of real life. It’s problematic but I wouldn’t go so far as to label it toxic.
But this story is about toxicity involving females so let’s move on from background to foreground focus.
Fujoshis
Fujoshis, or BL fangirls, have evolved in three different stages of the genre. They are one entry point for introducing female-related toxicity into the genre.
1st iteration
Mari Mori may appear traditional here but she was a pioneer whose early yaoi novel, A Lover’s Forest, launched a daring new genre
Fans of yaoi novels and mangas were primarily women (who still are a majority but there are now plenty of gay and straight guys who enjoy them). Because the stories upended Japanese cultural norms, they were pejoratively called fujoshis, a play on words. It means “rotten girls” and is contrasted with a word that is almost the same but means “respectable women.”
The fans took to wearing it as a badge of honor, proud to be the somewhat rebellious “rotten girls” who dared to think outside of the social box.
Rather than being toxic, these fangirls advocated for dismantling patriarchal, discriminatory social attitudes. Their visions of same-sex relationships were focused through their own lens — not that of actual gay men — but they nevertheless celebrated male-male romance.
2nd iteration
The original real-life fujoshis were such an important element for the success of yaoi that they were transformed into in-story characters themselves. This second iteration featured teen girls (and some adult women) as enthusiastic fangirls within the story; they became fans not of the genre itself but of the male-male couples.
For some reason, they were usually depicted as a trio and blatantly obvious while making ridiculous efforts to be covert in their monitoring of their favored “ship” (relationship). So we would see three schoolgirls tittering and giggling while observing their chosen couple; their presence typically would not be noticed, regardless of the noise they made nor of the visual absurdity of three girls “hiding” behind a skinny potted plant.
Three fujoshis giggling as they watch a couple of guys whom they have “shipped” as a fantasy couple (My Engineer)
Generally, fujoshis were somewhat annoying, taking us out of the story by behaving in unbelievable ways and situations. Their cheering for the couple generally was a mere sideshow that had zero effect on the guys. Annoying, but not toxic.
On occasion, however, fujoshi behavior strayed into the toxic. By definition, a fujoshi should find joy through witnessing the romantic love and happiness of her chosen shipped couple. But if she “shipped” the wrong two individuals, she might find that one of the guys ends up with the “wrong” guy according to the fujoshi. It’s happened in some stories that the fujoshi then went beyond observing to scheming to break up the “wrong” couple in order to reopen the possibility of her original fantasized couple getting together.
That’s toxic. It isn’t good behavior to model by viewers. Thinking that other people’s happiness is merely an obstacle to one’s own happiness leads to manipulation. Coercing others to be together despite not having reciprocal romantic feelings crosses a line but, fortunately, instances like this are pretty rare in BLs.
Other toxic behavior by truly rotten “rotten girls” has included surreptitiously taking pics or videos of a couple and sharing them on social media platforms, without regard to the impact on the couple. Some get outed as gay and others have a private relationship blown up as a public affair, putting great strain on the couple.
In the series My Engineer, one memorable fujoshi even bribed children to stage an incident in order to capture a photo of her shipped couple kissing. Some fans found that character’s behavior to be cute and endearing [eye roll].
3rd iteration
In the past five or six years, I have noticed a sharp decline in the appearances of these classic fujoshis, good or bad. Instead, we more typically get the third iteration of fujoshis.
These modern fangirls are often integral to the story’s development. As enthusiastic but responsible supporters of their shipped couple, they don’t scheme and interfere … except when asked to by one of the guys.
Pai is overjoyed when she learns that her fave ship, Achi and Karan, are finally a couple
Then they will offer 100% support. That could be a shoulder to cry on, words of encouragement to be bold in the quest for love, or something way beyond expectations. For example, Pai in Cherry Magic ships two of her work colleagues, Achi and Karan. When a misunderstanding compromises their relationship and Achi is desperate to get to the airport to see Karan before it’s too late, Pai abandons work, more or less hijacks a motor scooter, and drives like a maniac through Bangkok to get Achi there in time.
Third-iteration fujoshis aren’t toxic; they’re green flags who do everything they can to support and cheer on the guys they adore as a couple, always with awareness that both of the guys love each other and truly want to be together.
Villains
Fujoshis are always side characters so even when they behave badly, they seldom have a huge impact on the storyline or the characters. On the other hand, villains — male or female — are typically central to the progress of the plot and can potentially break a couple’s romance.
Classic Villains are not toxic
Thara, an archfiend in My Golden Blood
If a female villain is just carrying out her nefarious plans that are not based on loathing the boy-boy romance, I don’t consider her toxic. Guy or gal, many dramas need a baddie to give urgency and direction to the plot. If she isn’t carrying out a million-dollar heist, the detective couple won’t have anything to do except stare lovingly at each other for hours on end.
An example of this kind of neutral villain is Thara, a powerful vampire in My Golden Blood. She manipulates our heroic hotties, Mark and Tong, and interferes in their relationship but only in pursuit of her real goal, to seize the magical “golden blood” and make herself the undisputed ruler of the vampire world. If she could accomplish it while Mark and Tong enjoyed a deep and loving romance, she wouldn’t bother with them at all: they and their relationship are unimportant details to her.
So I don’t consider her toxic. I consider her a classic villain, operating in pursuit of her own malevolent objectives.
True rotten girls
These female villains don’t have a primary objective other than disrupting the romance of the male couple. Sometimes they’re motivated by homophobia — although I don’t like the false implication of fear (phobia) so I prefer to call it homo-contempt — but other times the motive is to gain or regain what they consider to be their right: a romantic relationship with one of the guys in the male couple.
Perhaps they had dated previously and the guy broke it off to pursue his new male love interest. Or maybe she grew up close to him and his family and, like others around them, assumed that one day they would naturally become husband and wife.
Whatever the original cause, the story erupts with flaming jealousy and hatred. Destroying the male couple’s relationship becomes the dominant arc in the plot, usually accruing a tremendous cost that eventually must be paid by the villain.
Linh is so driven to break apart the two boys pictured here that she ends up in Hell
The toxicity can become all-consuming, going so far as to bring the villain to attempt murder, as it did for Jeed of Love Sick The Series, seen in the title image above. Perhaps even worse, Linh — obsessively angry after being politely spurned — actually ends up in Hell for her malicious actions in the Vietnamese series Under The Oak Tree (which I will review in the near future).
I find it interesting that — speaking in broad generalizations here — female and male (presumably gay) BL authors deal with toxic jealousy subplots in completely different ways.
Male screenwriters almost invariably introduce another guy as the trigger or focus of jealousy. Sometimes he’s actively pursuing one of the coupled guys but other times there is just misunderstanding and convoluted circumstances that suggest an intimacy that isn’t actually there. Either way, the two main guys eventually work it out, often after one has tried to “up his game” to keep his boyfriend’s love and loyalty.
The women authors tend to insert a jealous girlfriend, ex-girlfriend, or gal with longstanding expectations into the story. This makes sense when we think of the historical origins of yaoi: it has to be a female because the guy is “gay only for this one guy” so another guy couldn’t be a legitimate love rival. She can tempt him back to her side in a way that no new boy could do.
Interestingly, it never crosses the girls’ minds to inquire if a guy likes girls or guys or both. They have a default view that assumes he likes girls and therefore they can compete for his love.
This plot arc emphasizes the peculiarity of the guy’s homoerotic relationship, that it is rooted in his boyfriend’s unique personality and/or the caprices of destiny; without that, he would passionately embrace her and swear his undying love. She can’t compete on a level field like she would if her rival was another gal so she must do something toxic to effectively destroy her male rival.
I would be curious to find out how two different audiences — straight women and gay men — react to each of these scenarios. My guess is that each group is more likely to think “That makes a lot of sense” when the toxic jealousy arc of their particular group plays out but think “That’s doubtful” when the other variation occurs.
Fakeout villains
It’s fun when the writers cleverly trick us. They introduce what seems to be one of those girl-gone-bad villains who makes plays for one of the guys in a romance. We see her acting badly, disrespecting his relationship, confident that she will lure him to her in time, like a spider toying with something caught in its web. So we hate her, of course!
And then … surprise! We find out that all along, she was actually a good fujoshi, hoping to get her imagined boyfriend together with the other guy, whom she knows is the man he truly loves.
Gigi Jeeraya (Soda in the BL movie Love’s Coming)
A good example of this is in the rom-com Love’s Coming. Soda, the recent girlfriend of Nai, casually and rudely inserts herself into a camping trip where Nai and his new barely budding love, Gump, are spending time with their friends, the Three Amigos. She makes a pest of herself in various ways and pretty much drives Nai to declare his love for Gump just to get her off his back. We find out that she and the Three Amigos had planned out the whole camping trip to nudge Nai and Gump together because they all see how they really love each other but are too shy to admit it.
So, Soda was a fakeout villain. She was really a fangirl doing her best to help the boys’ love blossom and will forever be their dear friend and biggest fan (indeed, in the sequel she is still cheering them on).
Sometimes what appears to be toxic behavior ultimately ends up being a case of taking some unpleasant medicine in order to cure the ailment of unrequited love.
Conclusion
It can be challenging for writers to balance between the need for dramatic tension and inserting toxic behaviors that reflect poorly on the female characters. Boys’ Love celebrates romantic love between guys but that absolutely does not require that women and girls be depicted as malignant or as impediments to male-male relationships.
Authors need to consider their female characters, especially when cast in villainous roles. If she could be swapped out with a man and not lose her motivations that cause her to have a negative impact on the guys, she likely doesn’t have toxicity but rather an objective that is not intrinsic to a desire to harm the couple’s romance.
Sammy (Samantha Melanie Coates) has played side characters in dozens of BLs and every time they are positive role models as valued supporters of the male couple
We can have intriguing, powerful storytelling that upholds even villains as non-toxic in their attitudes toward same-sex relationships. Introducing female side characters solely to put them into stereotyped roles as conniving schemers who want to “win” a male prize, no matter how much emotional harm she does to everyone else, is lazy and unimaginative. Fortunately, that formula for inserting drama seems to be less and less common now.
BL should ideally serve as an inspiration for LGBQT youth, especially gay boys. They should see that women can be generous, supportive friends and allies in their pursuit of love. When a female character acts maliciously, they should see that her motive is not directed at their relationship per se but rather that her goal is something else and their romance, or their selves, are somehow in her way.
Today’s story shouldn’t be taken as saying that there isn’t toxicity involving males in BL series and movies. Ha! There’s enough of it that I felt today’s topic was a much easier starting point before I tackle toxicity with the guys. Stay tuned and one of these days I’ll summon up the energy to start on that as an even bigger project.
Coming up …
Next week, Krotor will discuss a BL series from Cambodia, a nation trying to develop its native BL industry. Join us next Tuesday at Boys’ Love and Girls’ Love.
BoysLove and GirlsLove group publishes stories every Tuesday at 1 pm Eastern / 10 am Pacific. We are looking for authors to join us. Please contact Krotor if you want to write stories for our group!
Watch these videos below before upcoming stories about them so you can avoid spoilers and participate in discussions in the comments section.
When possible, we include links where you can watch the videos for free (click here to read our story all about how and where to watch Boys’ Love and Girls’ Love content).
BL series and movies in upcoming stories
| Story date |
Series or Movie |
Episodes |
Where to watch |
| Nov 11 |
A Blue Sky |
13 + a special episode (note that this will be a negative review so you might not want to spend time watching the series) |
Youtube playlist |
