Yaoi: Redrawing Male Love
Jump to navigation
Jump to search
| News Media Commentary | |
|---|---|
| Title: | Yaoi: Redrawing Male Love |
| Commentator: | Mark McHarry |
| Date(s): | November 2003 |
| Venue: | The Guide |
| Fandom: | anime, manga |
| External Links: | Yaoi: Redrawing Male Love (guidemag.com); WebCite |
| Click here for related articles on Fanlore. | |
Yaoi: Redrawing Male Love is a long article about yaoi. It was printed in the Boston-based gay magazine, The Guide, November, 2003. The article's topic line says:
Some of today's edgiest male homosexual images and stories are being composed by women and girls-- for their own pleasure. Because it's (mostly) young women who've thronged to the burgeoning yaoi underground. What's yaoi? It's homegrown fan fiction based on Japanese cartoon characters. But it's not just Made-in-Japan anymore. Mark McHarry looks at the growing world of yaoi-- and Japan's centuries-old tradition of same-sex love that nourishes its roots. Around the world, millions of girls are conjuring tales of boys in love with each other. What's up with sex and gender in the 21st century?
A few numbers:
Impelled by the Web, yaoi has spread well beyond Japan's borders. Western yaoi fans publish their stories online in several languages. A Google search on 16 November 2003 returned some 770,000 yaoi Web pages, up from 135,000 a year-and-a-half ago. Google searches for an anime title plus a neutral word such as "description" may return yaoi pages in the first ten results. In the last ten months the number of fan-written stories based on anime and manga at the archive FanFiction.net grew by more than four times to nearly 200,000 works; yaoi stories appeared on the first page of results for fandoms searched.
The article gives many examples and links to several fanfiction sites. It also has a long section on the Why Yaoi question.