So the more I read yaoi, the more I have a serious issue. Quite often anymore it doesn't feel like yaoi at all. They make the guys characteristics just like a girl: slight stature, beautiful, weak, etc. Then quite a few of them add male pregnancies. I won't even go into the physical relationship (where guy gets treated just like a girl). Why write it as a male romance if you're going to make one of them just like a woman?
Well iirc girls are by far yaoi's biggest audience Kind of like how most men can't relate to the male love interests in romance even when it's a 50/50 pov. Those stories are mostly aimed at girls and the guy's thoughts are just meant to reaffirm what the reader wishes their perfect guy was thinking, not to be a realistic guy Same applies to guys' pov - how many girls are that desperate from some mediocre looking guy to give them headpats? lolll
Oh, yeah, I feel like most do this. Thankfully, there are still some other ones around. Have you tried looking for some with the "manly gay couple" tag? I looked it up just now and while there isn't that much but we have at least 5 pages of stories here on NU. Also, if you don't mind original stories (so not translated), then there are another 2 pages over on ScribbleHub for that tag as well. I hope that helps a bit with finding better stuff to read!
Cuz gay dudes don't read BL. And women do. Gotta adapt your material to the audience and all that rot.
I understand what the OP is trying to say... But I also want to point out that there isn't just one set of characteristics that make up the male population. It's not nonexistent. I just feel like there's some undertone implying there's only one acceptable/"realistic" way to being male, which is concerning and not true.
That's not the case at all. I'm talking about when they give the male character female female characteristics. I've literally seen several books where it's even described as they "got wet". In omegaverse, that's understandable. But when you have regular guys getting wet ( if you're backhole is getting wet you've got a medical problem), getting pregnant, etc. Why can't they just be realistic is what I'm saying. Give some lubes. Why get mad if a guy has a kid with a woman, but is later on with a guy? (Yes, that's happened). It's ok to have girly looking guys, but like I said before, it is OVERWHELMINGLY majority look like girls. They don't need to be macho men, but there is no problem with describing a regular guy.
Leaving the "wet" aside for +18 purposes, mpreg falls under worldbuilding - if you don't like it just don't read it. I don't quite understand why you would find it acceptable under omegaverse but not otherwise. Creative freedom, I think encompasses all "why not..." Is any fiction completely realistic? Skipping lube. As for the latter, the realistic answer, and most common in plot, is that the man usually already knew they were homosexual but chose to marry and have a child with a woman while hiding the fact. It is when pretense is introduced into the original (marriage) relationship that was otherwise assumed to be a true, "heartfelt" relationship. Or maybe I'm not understanding what you meant by this correctly. I'm not sure whether your luck is just low or your choices in stories lean towards a particular subset but.. what I can agree with is that most MCs are described to be "beautiful." This might at times be a sort of beauty that transcends gender and sex or even to the point that at first glance, they're so beautiful that one can't determine their gender right away, along with various other confounding traits such as a smaller stature. This is the population base of BL that I'm working with, which is why I'm suspicious of just your luck.. Or maybe we're actually reading the same thing but getting a different interpretation. Which is also fine(?) But I really haven't seen someone be described as "looks just like a girl" and that's all the description available. Spoiler: To OP The more I stare at this the more I feel you just seem to have a problem with men being described with terms not historically used to describe men, or what men are historically disdained for being. To me, it felt boiled down to being... Historically, men are not supposed to cry. And you came and said, all these guys are crying in BL.
I think the problem might just be that there is a bit of a lack of diversity or at least it's not easy to find diverse stories. That isn't a problem just unique to BL but it can be especially aggravating there if what you want are representative stories of something and have a hard time finding it. It's not even just in terms of "girly" MCs or similar. For example, you can easily find BL with gay main characters and you can also find those with "straight"-but-actually-gay main characters but there isn't even a whole page of BL stories with bisexual MCs on here (according to tags), not to mention that we don't even have tags for pan, ace or aro characters so can't go to look for those explicitly. In the same vein, it's difficult to find novels with characters that are older. There is an "older love interests" tag but none for the protagonist or the whole couple and an older love interest can also be in their late twenties if the MC is just young enough. A "fat protagonist"? Exactly two stories and I've read one of them and the guy turns into a slender beauty soon enough (that's tagged as well though so no surprise there). Disabilities being included is slightly better with two pages full of stories but we don't know who is disabled there (might be protagonist, might be the love interest, might be another character). We don't have a tag for biracial couples, for transgender or intersex characters, and hardly any stories with a lesbian subplot. In short: Finding stories that represent something we'd like to see is often incredibly difficult. We can't rely much on the series finder and can only hope to either get recommendations for things that weren't tagged (because of the non-existent tags for whatever we're searching for) or go and look for original stories on other sites instead. Girly MCs are really just one variation on this. It's not bad to have them but if you are looking for something else, it can be difficult to find that. E.g. I would love to see more stories with manly men that still show a wide range of emotions, why are those usually the girly men while the manly love interest is the guy with the facial paralysis? (Yeah, it's a trope but still, it's difficult to find the other side.) I just want more diversity there, all kinds of couple constellations but I have trouble finding that. And this isn't just about looks. "Looks like a girl" is definitely on the nose and can't be missed but the treatment of the MCs in BL is very often (aggravatingly) similar to the treatment of female MCs in hetero romances: the constantly needing to be saved because they get weak and lose brain cells as soon as the ML is around no matter how badass they otherwise are, the toxic jealousy regarding any guy they hang out with (in BL sometimes with a side of everyone he hangs out with even if it's women), etc. Bad human anatomy is really just the cherry on top and that is what it looks like in many cases if everything else in the story is 100% realistic but then they get to anal sex and suddenly it's creative freedom instead of bad research or pandering to a certain audience. Like, in a story where characters aren't human (like in ABO-stories or Ger or whatnot) or if we are shown that the world of the story diverges from ours in other places as well, nobody minds mpreg or different physiology in humanoid characters because it's been established they aren't like us. It makes sense. If that isn't the case though, it often just looks like bad writing. Not bashing the authors for that, btw. It can be a conscious choice which, well, is their prerogative or it could just be that they don't know. The latter isn't that strange either if we consider that some of this information probably isn't that easy to come by in countries that heavily censor anything queer even online and where queer people in your social circle might not be willing to come out so you can't quite ask them. So they might often not have another choice because there are no sources for them to go off. But that doesn't mean that readers can't want to see more realistic depictions (strictly speaking in terms of physiology here, the rest is really just subjective opinion).