BL (Boy’s Love) and yaoi — two of my favorite manga genres. You could probably tell by the manga reviews I post. I do also read shoujo, but those series tend to last a lot longer than BL/yaoi series. Since I don’t write a review until the series is over, the BL/yaoi reviews will show up faster and more often.
While most people use BL/yaoi interchangeably, they really aren’t. The relationship male-male relationship dynamic is still the same, but BL is more focused about the emotion of the relationship while yaoi is more focused on the physical side of the relationship. It’s like the difference between mainstream romance and erotic romance.
So long as the art is pretty and the storyline is good, I’ll read either. Until I started writing my manga reviews, I didn’t realize I had favorite authors. Manga is organized by title not author in bookstores. One author’s works are sometimes imported by different manga companies. Because of that, I didn’t really pay attention to who was writing it.
Now that I am paying attention, I actively look for manga written by my favorites:
– Hinako Takanaga
– Makoto Tateno
– Eiki Eiki
– Taishi Zaou/Mikiyo Tsuda
Of course, my number one is Makoto Tateno simply because she wrote Jazz. I can go back to each of her manga and enjoy them without fail. There is, so far, one book by Hinako Takanaga that I didn’t enjoy. Other than that one, her books always have me laughing my ass off. And while I haven’t read as much of Eiki Eiki and Mikiyo Tsuda, I have found their works to be entertaining and worth re-reading.