Recommendations Why is BL so damn popular here?

The mere thought of having to read a BL, yaoi or smut novel gives me all kinds of creeps. The only time I was able to sit through and somewhat like was a manga Hidamari ga Kikoeru.

Convince me with good ones and remember to take it slow with the recommendations. Nothing which is only about two guys whose head is only filled with sex. Maybe where two guys get interested in eachother and get to know eachother without realising they have fallen for eachother. Something which is pure without the pollution of human beings.

 

You can try The Earth is Online. I would recommend to first start with the shounen-ai tag since it's milder.

 

Everyone' gay or girl in here prolly

 

let me get this straight (lol).... you dont know why BL is so popular so you are going to jump in a cliff to find out?... (shakes head)

 

For the plot?
There was this one novel I didn't realize was shounen ai for a long time but it had a consistent plot and an overarching story that didn't balloon itself and start stretching thin (at least when I stopped reading it). Although I did read it a while ago and might have forgotten parts of it. It's title was senior brother has a pit in his head (I think), and I thought the junior sister was going to be the main love interest before it started becoming apparent it was shounen ai. The manhua didn't help either, becoming more shounen ai as the story progressed and the reader understood more of the overarching plot.

 

Its not that prevalient the filthy pervs are just very vocal and stand out.

 

If Soul Land II didn't have the ol' reverse trap FL, that would have been a yaoi I wouldn't mind reading.

 

Agree with this! There's also Laws of the Other World, at least romance is not the focus, takes awhile for ML to be revealed.

 

Stop! NOt all girls like yaoi!

I personally dislike it and avoid it like the plague (along with Yuri). I don't consider myself homophobe as I even have friends that are gay/bi/lesbian, but the yaoi/Yuri genre makes my skin crawl. No offense.

I usually read along with putting myself or someone close to me in the story, especially as the main characters. Sooo reading novels with yaoi/Yuri... it just breaks the experience apart!

 

Haha, no. Before, and even today, most of these novels are just fetish infested stories for women to enjoy

don't get me wrong; I'm sure a lot of them today actually do have more of a focus on the story itself and the characters just happen to be gay. But most are still what ecchi's essentially are. But instead of guys, it's all fan service designed in mind for women.

 

There are good BL novels and bad ones like every other kind of novel. If you tell us what kind of novels you like we might find a shonen ai (BL without sex) that you like but if you really don't like MxM relationship you might as well give up and look for something straight

 

This is why lol

 

Er... why are you doing this? There's more webnovels out there than you could read in any one lifetime anyway. If you've run out of choices on NU, rather than forcing yourself to read genera you don't like why don't you go looking at other sites?

 

I hope people are reading it because there are few here and there which have a plot and has its innocence. I mean the popularity is out of the roof.

And statistically the amount of gays, lesbos and girls surfing through these forums is far less than straight guys. How come the statistics fail here?

 

There's high demand about Yaoi Novel, because many girls already infiltrated NUF

 

It is good to bring another one such as yourself into the light.


I would honestly recommend gender bender stories first to soften you before tossing you into the steamy shounen-ai and the fiery passions of yaoi.
Reborn as My Love Rival’s Wife. Pretty comedic and heartwarming.
If we have brainwashed persuaded you to like the idea of a man inside a woman's body falling in love another man, we can go more serious.
Watashi, Dokidoki Renai Kakumei de Onii-chan Yattemasu. Now a woman inside a man's body. MC explores and questions his/her sexuality and place.
If your mind has completely been fujoshi-fied enlightened to enjoy this, then you are set for most shounen-ai.
Yaoi comes when you have become completely part of the Dao of Fujoshi.

 

To be fair, I did end up dropping the novel when it became apparent that the BL factor was taking over and that it was going into yaoi territory, but the plot before that was interesting.

 

I read it for plot, BL is a bonus but not a must for me.

 

For me : I love all kind of forbidden romance genre, and BL is one of those kind
How pure, how dirty
The thrill feeling, and the I want to hug you but I can't
And because I like the forbidden feeling, I don't like omegaverse BL. The omega and alpha couple. If it's the alpha and alpha couple, I am in!

 

@silentKitten

I second @Siceraria 's recommendation for Reborn as My Love Rival's Wife. It really is a hilarious story with some interesting details about how MC adapts to his new identity as a woman. There were also really nice moments with how MC deals with his original family(when he was a male) and his new family(his new family after he took over the body of a woman). It starts out with the MC hating ML but then the two develop a friendship before moving onto the romance. It's a very romance and comedy heavy story, if you like these two genres you'll probably enjoy this novel.

If you're up for dipping your toes into the deeper end of things, I've got two novel recommendations which really prioritises plot and character development.

1. The Founder of Diabolism (aka Mo Dao Zu Shi)
This is one of the most well reviewed BL novels on this site for its great plot and well developed lead characters. Before I sing praises about what's good about it, I want to recommend the anime(donghua) adaptation first. The donghua keeps all the essential plot points of the novel, but takes out all BL elements(because BL is heavily censored in China). The fact that the story holds up very well even when ALL the BL is removed tells you something. The donghua adaptation will have three seasons in total and is currently in its second season.

I cannot emphasise enough that the story is very good. Heck, the reason I started reading BL was because I watched this donghua, got really invested in the story, then read the novel. Then, I kind of realised it's not a big deal that the two leads in a story are males. It's just romance where two people care for each other ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ It really doesn't matter if a couple is MxM, FxF or MxF as long as the story is good. If you really aren't interested in getting into BL, I would really recommend just watching the donghua, it really is a good story.

Main points about the story/setting:
- Setting: Xianxia
- Genre: comedy, supernatural, action, adventure
- There are some sect politics, and sect wars. The war/politics only take up a small portion of the story, but the impact of the war/politics has a big impact on how the plot plays out.
- The backbone of this story is a murder mystery. There are many seemingly random plot threads which are woven together very well. It all culminates in very nice twists in the reveal of who the real mastermind is. Everything plotwise how been thought out very well, and the twists actually make sense.
- Lead characters are not pure angels, they make can mistakes. Main villains are not pure evil, they have proper motivations(well, some are, but then there are psychopaths in the real world too).
- It's very quite short at only 113 chapters + 13 extras. (Warning, I think the some of the extras are quite heavy on MC and ML being very lovey dovey so decide for yourself if you can stomach that. There are only two points in the main story(very near the end of the novel) where there are short sections of smut but you can very easily skim/skip over those.)
- MC dislikes ML initially, but eventually gets along very well with ML. Slow burn romance.

2. Don't Pick Up Boyfriends from the Trash Bin
Main points about the story/setting:
- Setting: World hopping, so there are many different worlds. The two translated arcs are set in the modern world.
- Genres: comedy, adventure, drama, romance
- In every world that MC goes to, he takes over the body of a man that has been abused in some way. His goal is to make the partner(also male) of the victim regret his actions. MC has to deal with the situations by using critical thinking, and planning strategically - which he is quite good at. What I really appreciate about this story is that it has emotional depth. The situations are serious and frankly depressing, and the story doesn't shy away from that. But it's not all doom and gloom either. There are good moments to balance everything out.
- The ML is the system for MC. The abilities of systems are properly explored and the one who supervises the systems is also considered. Also, ML interacts with other systems!
- There's also a strong sense of mystery in this story. The story makes you think about common tropes for world hopping novels which aren't usually developed properly, such as: Why do systems exist? Why do systems listen to their supervisor? What do systems get out of their job? Why do the supervisors exist? What do they want? Why do people get chosen to travel between the worlds? etc...
- MC and ML are not frivolous characters. There are no silly or ditsy characters that you might find in a lot of BL novels (I seriously suspect that the MCs in a lot of these novels have those characteristics to make them substitutes for actual female MCs). There's no feeling that this story was created simply to pander to a certain type of audience. Instead, it's a serious and genuine look what would actually happen if someone was made to go through many worlds and have to try to solve the difficult problems presented to them.

So far, there is no actual romance between the MC and ML. Instead, they're like good friends.
---
Erm, so that was a bit long. But in the spirit of helping you choose some good BL, I've laid out the good points of the novels so it'll help you decide if they sound like your kind of stories.