jsut that there are people that are ignorant of the real definition of yaoi or too lazy to read around and just pull their definition from air. wikipedia speaks of how people just don't care about the term. it's true tho.
and yes, yaoi is gay smut for women that has considerable less censors than shounen-ai.
Boy's Love is the real correct term for the whole category/genre.
I had this very argument with a whole bunch of stupid people a few months back. Can't blame them for being ignorant cause they are stupid after all. Always reading stupid Yaoi manga for the fan service and the porn and never the story. No wonder they just assume that Yaoi is porn.
First and for most, Yaoi and Shounen Ai are only subcategories of gay manga and not gay manga itself. The correct term that encompass all gay manga is coin by the term BL short for Boy's Love. Yaoi and Shounen Ai are subcategories within BL that cater towards women. The BL manga that caters towards actual gay men are call Bara which is also a subcategory of BL. These are the three subcategories known to BL. Although there are talk about including Traps and whatnot in BL as well.
Now, the difference between Shounen Ai and Yaoi is similar to the difference between Shounen and Seinen. Like Seinen to Shounen, Yaoi is the adult counterpart of Shounen Ai. Yaoi is cater towards an older audience and the content is more mature where as Shounen Ai is cater towards a younger audience and the content is less mature. This is not to mistake that all Yaoi contains sex because that is not true. There are Yaoi out there that doesn't have a sex scene and there are Shounen Ai out there that does.
For example, A Night of a Thousand Dreams have sex in it and it is not a Yaoi. Venus Kiss and 2-14 Jiken are Yaoi and they don't have a sex scene.
╮(￣▽￣)╭ i got so tired of correcting people i just let if be.
anyway, your definition of bara is wrong. BL is mostly a "fujoshi thing" so majority if not all of the creators were female. meanwhile, bara is a separate category of it's own from bl since it's an actual comic for gay men.
and when i say bara is for gay men, they are people that are not necessarily otaku. it's laymen gay. similar to how seinen is targeted for adult men, mostly office workers.
Yes. I forgot that Bara falls into the caterogry of ML short for Men's Love.
By definition, people who are obsess with any kind of Japanese anime and manga popular culture are Otaku.
i said that because fujoshis are comparable to otakus though otakus are a general term but it's mostly synonymous to male manga/anime nerds.
manga is read by every people and not everyone who reads it are otaku. that is why i said "laymen".
See, these definitions are basically how I have always understood it, too!
...Which makes the borderline between SA and yaoi less clear in certain cases, I believe (just like how you can get shounen and seinen manga that are borderline).
But it also makes me wonder on what "authority" we understand the terms this way. I always assumed it was commonly understood in Japan (the same way that we have genres or labels in English such as "fantasy" or "chick lit" that are commonly understood).
Boy's love or BL for short
by "authority" it should be the manga publishing houses and ofc how the japanese define it since they basically created the whole thing and the terms already existed even way before westeners try to "define" or make opinions of what does it mean.
this should be an easier read http://japanese-hobby.blogspot.com/2017/11/yaoi-meaning-in-japanese.html
and when you say borderline it is because it's how much a seinen or a shounen magazine can be flexible in its limits. still, there is still a defining difference between them which is the target market. as for shounen ai and yaoi digests, it's about the censorship and also age target.
That's because Yaoi and Shounen ai are genre while Shounen and Seinen are demographics.
BL is a demography and yaoi/shounen-ai is under it's umbrella.
Exactly
I've been pondering this lately, as I've seen an increasing number of outraged or frustrated comments complaining that this or that manga is incorrectly labelled as yaoi. In all of the cases I've seen, the point has been that the manga in question does not contain explicit sex scenes.
While I agree that, if your understanding of yaoi has grown up from communities like this, seeing yaoi would raise the expectation of an explicit sex scene somewhere, I'd always thought yaoi as a genre was more than just the explicit sex, but was instead about the more mature/less innocent relationships or content (and therefore generally included sex). Which made me wonder - where is the borderline for yaoi, how do they decide yaoi/not yaoi in Japan?
I toddled over to the wikipedia page to see if it had anything useful to add:
"While yaoi has become an umbrella term in the West for women's manga or Japanese-influenced comics with male-male relationships, and it is the term preferentially used by American manga publishers for works of this kind, Japan uses the term yaoi to denote dōjinshi and works that focus on sex scenes...The use of yaoi to denote those works with explicit scenes sometimes clashes with use of the word to describe the genre as a whole, creating confusion between Japanese and Western writers or between Western fans who insist on proper usage of the Japanese terms and those who use the Westernized versions."
Interestingly, it seems that a different shared understanding of the terms yaoi and shounen ai is developing in Western culture compared to Japan's usage, and even perhaps a different usage between fans and publishers in the West. (The article goes on to discuss SA briefly, also.)
Is there anyone who has experience of Japanese and Western culture who has also found this difference, or are the two more reconciled than this? How would you define yaoi?
(EDIT: Forgot to leave the link to the Wikipedia article so people can read it properly, sorry:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yaoi )