👨‍❤️‍👨 BL Book Club 🎓 BL University 📚 Next: こいものがたり

I was editing the info in the top post, in particular putting up the info of the last poll.
Did we cut out any nomination? According to the stated rules, the last 3 (including ties) should get excluded, but that removes 6 this time, and we only have 16 anyway.
I mean… 10 is a nice round number, though.

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Mm, yeah, thank you for reminding me; I forgot about the cutting rule. Yeah, go ahead and list out the ones cut, I say.

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Alright, here’s the current nomination list, then:

Nominations for the 7th BLBC Read

(Stolen from @eefara’s post)

As a side note, here are the cut nominations from the first cycle that can be nominated again:

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Thank you, Naphthalene! :slight_smile:

Ugh, it always gets me that we’ve only done two polls, despite having read four (and soon to be five) books so far…

And is anyone would like to nominate now, feel free! Our next read should be fairly short.

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Oddly enough, BL is an area where my library is sorely lacking. :cry:
Need to try and rectify this on my next Japan visit. I wonder… do BL novels count as pornography? :thinking:

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I’ve brought/gotten them mailed to multiple countries that ostensibly had porn laws so I’d still check your local laws but potentially no, especially if the cover is tame. I mean, depending on what you read that is…

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Yeah, though so… what are the odds a custom’s clerk can read Japanese and understand what they are looking at. :sweat_smile: and afaik, here only pornography of the not-adult kind is prohibited.

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I wouldn’t think that simply being BL would be an automatic qualifier for being porn; is there a reason you think BL in particular could be an issue?

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Because BW keeps hiding it from me without VPN. :sweat_smile: It seems like most BL is cateogized as R18 even if it doesn’t contain smut.

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Ah, I see; odd. But no, I’ve never had any issues importing physical BL stuff. Granted, none of it ever had any wild covers, so I suppose I’ve never thoroughly tested it, but regular stuff has been fine for me.

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I read the first volume of 炎の蜃気楼シリーズ 1 炎の蜃気楼 | L30?? while I was away on holiday this week and enjoyed it!

There should be no spoilers in here but there is a very vague description. Hidden in case people prefer not to read even that.

It’s very campy (I might be misapplying this word) early 90’s light fiction with trippy (somewhat trope-y) but likeable characters and a crazy setting. I’m not sure if this needs to be a caveat, but there’s next to no BL in the first volume. There’s some very subtle hints in some character interactions, but they’re so subtle I might be imagining them since I know it’s a BL series. :joy:

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Oh, thank you for the report! I’ve been curious about this series for a while; do you think you’d continue to read more?

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That kinda reminds me of BANANA FISH. Arguably, I didn’t finish the series, but up to half the series it was like “if I squint so hard I close my eyes and use make believe instead, I can see it, maybe”. Yet everyone familiar with the series both on this forum and real life tell me it is BL, so either that’s the way BL was back in the days (sad, but likely; I’ve been slacking on the BLU curriculum so I don’t know much of the period) or something happens in the later volumes…

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I read maybe…half the series in the English and flagged it as BL. (Caveat: I walked into the series hearing it would be BL, so I was already primed for a certain outcome.) It definitely felt like an older one, though: all subtext, nothing really ever outright stated.

That’s why it gets so difficult labeling stuff as “this is definitely BL”, because the definition can shift so much even over a short period of time…

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Yes, I think a large part of me not seeing it is because my spouse brought that series home, and they usually bring back shonen/seinen series (e.g. 鬼滅の刃, 超人X, …) with lot of fighting (check) and at least one female character with ginormous boobs (err not check, I guess; Wong’s sister maybe?).
Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for them bringing back BL instead (insert “a surprise to be sure, but a welcome one” meme), but I’m having trouble seeing it happening.

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I will for sure! I got the whole of the main series (that’s like 40 some volumes) for 50€ on eBay, shipping included. The premise sounded fun, so I couldn’t not get it. It’s been living rent free on my shelf since then… Well, not anymore! :triumph: :joy:

The set up in the first volume is on a pretty big scale, I can easily see how the series got so long. Some of what I know from the premise also promises a lot of fun possibilities later on, so I’m probably actually going to prioritize it.

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If you go in, expecting full on romance and smut - no it’s not BL. It’s basically 70s BL in a 90s coat. Essentially it was marketed as shoujo and had homosexuality in it… make of that what you will. :sweat_smile:

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just realized while reading the synopsis that that’s Mirage of Blaze. Wow, nostalgia.

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But the marketing is just because the author exclusively published in a shoujo magazine and the only explicitly gay characters are cartoonishly evil… if anything, the BL vibes come from the main characters instead, but, as @eefara said it’s way more in the implied than anything.
My first experience with BL was in the late 00’s and I never checked anything older, which is probably the problem. :sweat_smile:

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Retagging @bibliothecary since you’re back in the forum. Did you want to keep this as a nomination? We totally can, but just wanted to bring it to your attention since it got a spin-off club after the fact. And while I have you…

Would you happen to know anything helpful with searching for used Chinese books? I’ve poked around since said post and found a potential lead or two, but I’m either looking in the wrong places or the books are waaaaaaaay out of print and memory.

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