Japanese BL is still the best.

I have to agree with you so much!!! I've always said this and even mentioned to my old comments especially when BL boomed and became popular (though mostly are because of manhwas)

Japanese manga can have darker themes than SA Korean manhwas stories can make. Those red or black flags in manhwas, bruh, in manga worst ml are the literal little demon or dark forest... I've even read the most disturbing thing, for example some of Harada-sensei's work. My fav work of her; "Color Recipe" I just like whatever the fucks wrong with the story.

But on the brighter side, Japanese BL manga can make such a wholesome stories you would either cry or punch your pillow flustered because of how sweet the story is. Korean manhwa can do that but as it goes on for long, it becomes boring for some reason... so the authors would tweak the story a little bit, like put some drama, or the unnecessary SA out of nowhere. I don't know, some authors can't stay consistent with the wholesome story. But they're so game on with toxic ones. I'm not saying all Korean manhwas can't, I mean "Hosik's Story" was wholesome and stayed like that even though there was a bit of drama, but it was still good.

I like to also include "brother without a tomorrow" (author) all her work are very well respected by both international and Korean fans from what I heard. And I agree, because all her work have PLOT. Not just random SA for a plot.

So true, idk what it is about manhwa that somehow makes even the fluffiest stories read like noncon when the sex scene arrives. It's like they don't know how to draw bottoms having a good time. I'm not bothered by dark romance, but if the story is supposed to be sweet then why are the sex scenes still copy pasted from bdsm kink porn lmao? Sometimes it actively hurts the story's character development because manhwa artists don't keep character or plot in mind at all in the bedroom.

I feel like some manhwas are all about the art and face cards of characters. Because 99% of the fans I would encounter are all in for the art. I mean nothings wrong if you're admiring because the art is good, I would too. But if some of those fans would only care for the art and not the plot. Doesn't matter how shitty or fucked and toxic it is, as long as the art is good people would keep eating it up. For instance Jinx. No hate to Jinx but the ending was kind of underwhelming for some reason, some argued that Dan doesn't deserve that kind of ending because what about all the hell he went through being with Jaekyung??


And this is just not in Jinx, it's actually a repeated ending in any toxic manhwa. The plot would literally be all fucked up, mc abused in the most unimaginable thing a human could do, and the ending would be them together with their abuser/gr@pist. Nonzero sum (I think that'sthe title) is also one of the example of those stories, and Crack (alt. Barge in)... like all the trauma and hellish life was all ignored and forgiven??? How about a revenge of the mc for a change??

The sad thing is Japanese BL is rare and hard to find in this site nowadays, and they are usually rated low, way lower than the Korean counterpart. Not saying there isn't good Korean BL, but 90% of them are slop. It's hard to find good ones, and their ratings tend to be inflated and not trustworthy.

So true. It's kind of sad, because there'll be good Japanese BL mangas in here and a lot of them actually but only has low rating. Only a few of them has high ratings. While Korean manhwas would have very high ratings on the bad ones and low also low rating on the good ones. But I also some manhwas, most are underrated, have lower ratings because the plot was a whole flop apparently.

Best BL manhwas stay mostly Shounen-ai level and that is so rare nowadays.
That was the thing also when Japanese BL was on it's peak rape culture, at leas shounen-ai ones were actually good queer stories and there was plenty of them counter the yaoi ones. Now it's mostly abusive manhwa yaoi BL smut and even shounen-ai novel stories get SA written into it when it's made into manhwa.

That been said... I still think the real reason why Korean BL authors and audience in Korea love rape etc. is because that is only way they get to see me abusing men. It's their only outlet. And it was a bit similar in peak manga BL rape era too, but not as bad - and partly why in Japan yaoi was shown as abusive was also that culturally there seem to be more of a rule that you can't show most of gay stuff as a good thing.

Whole thing leveled out and got a bit more relaxed overall, ironically more hetero stories stayed abusive than many of the manga BLs are now. And in many of those stories FL are still underage (in western standards) even if it's not as common it was before.
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Also... I can't be too angry at younger people that think Manhwa BL is the normal idea, rating those high, because for many of them their first series was Killing Stalking... Meanwhile I thought that first Yaoi being Viewfiender was already bad enough. But like with everything... South-Korea and the internet said, hold my sake, and made it worse.
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Many of them don't know what they missed out before all of that mess. Even when it comes to manhwa, before it become webtoons, it was way more mellow and really interesting stories.

Honestly brother without a tomorrow is quite a low par. It's still mostly just baseball dicks and constant lust almost every chapter. Penetration sex is still most what matters.
Granted it's not rape and there are actually some plot in between, but that is like bare minimum.
That been said, author probably have to please the company (I think they had problems with that) and the Korean audience - I suspect that they have to make it more smuthy while trying to write the actual plot, so it would sell enough.
I'm not sure about it, but it always felt like all the horniness that was written in that authors stories only partially fit all the other plots. (Of course I haven't read everything.)

I'm pretty sure if they were mangaka in Japan, they probably would have really deep BL stories that wouldn't be demanded to be overshadowed by constant horniness and hard dicks. And those constantly horny stories would probably be one-shot or sorter series. A bit more separated from each others.(But still is still speculation.)

I don't know about that considering BL is primarily written by women for women, and in general most main characters is the bottom, a replacement for female characters. Considering how many women love rape fantasy, I see this as an extension of why it's so prominent in BL in general. Simply put, when there is demand, there is supply. Many women love this stuff, and they are willing to pay for it.

I personally hated it, and despite how many people in this site claimed to hate it, one look at the top rated and viewed BL, and they are usually the ones filled with rapes and abuse.

I've started mostly ignoring the front page and instead using the genre browser. I select 'Yaoi' while excluding 'Webtoon,' sorting by "recently updated." It's not 100% but it filters out most KBL, and leaves in most manga. I thought I was getting sick of BL but I immediately started enjoying it again when I did this, it was actually just the webtoon slop I was sick of lol.

I think another reason is the manga industry is pretty competitive and it takes a lot for people to get published, so the mangaka are professionals. And magazines won't let them keep running their stories forever so they're forced to get to the point. Webtoons just have these 200 chapter slogs made by people who don't seem to have any storyboarding experience.

Yeah, I did that as well. It was how I managed to find this series.

That's a good point. Japanese BL are usually curated. They have editors that can help to maintain their quality. In contrast, Korean BL are more like a wild west. You think this would encourage more experimentation, yet we see the same ideas and tropes being used over and over again. The novelty has long expired.

All of this, in both replies.

I also nowadays sometimes just go and try to sort out webtoons, wanting something actually good to read. I do that more with yaoi, but also with other genres - because korean webtoons have so many problems even outside yaoi, especially the story boarding one affect all the series. Many clearly don't have any or the storyboard person have to change the board all the time, so they can't plan far.

Also, partial reason why manga is past worse rape etc. arcs because they have had longer time fine tune the rules and make a working system. Korean side just disrespected all that learned effort, didn't even care about minor rules about tags, just basically broke everything - and almost everything started from the bottom. It will take decades again to find well working system and balance of the rules, if they even want that.

Korean companies mostly love to drag out chapters, because people pay one chapter at the time. So they might intentionally keep also rules and other things messy, so people have to pay for worthless chapters.

(Sidenote: I already forgot what manhwa series it was, but it went hiatus because main storyboard person was ill. I was surprised they had one, but also had been noticing that story wasn't flowing right for a little while, so that person had been ill for some time. It showed how important good storyboard editor really is.)

I agree with this whole reply section. I've been using the search bar to find new stuff for ages now, since manhwa has basically taken over mangago front page. You used to see more variety, some fluff here, some smut here, some romance, some slice of life. Now its just basically dark smut manha. Which i can enjoy on occasion, but like yall I grew up on manga and we've been past the phase where dark and abusive stories with sex are popular in manga, now its more variety and each manga brings smth new(with more cute stories with couples that love each other).

The manga that got rlly popular in recent years (Given, Life on the Line etc) were all thought provoking and genuinely good. Prob bc of the short length the authors put more thought into each chapter and there is little lazy writing that manhwas have. Dont get me wrong, there is some great authors that utilize the many chapters manhwa style to their advantage and make a good story with 50+ chapters and little filler. These stories make you feel that there is a good thing about having unlimited chapters to tell a story. But thats rare unfortunately. 90% of mangwa authors need editors who cut out more content or remove unnecessary plot lines that end up ruining characters(cough..Cherry Blossoms After Spring..cough).

And if they have editors or the storyboarder they almost always get overruled by corporation that needs more chapters, so people pay more - because it's pay by chapter system and not pay by volume.
Who knows... Maybe everyone's pay is also somehow tied to how many chapters they will sell in a story. Those companies being so black in Korea that it wouldn't surprise me if there are some contracts like that.

I really dislike this system, because unlike Japanese manga, Korean webtoon has no real page count, hence the length for each chapter would vary. Yet, we still pay the same amount per chapter regardless. This is the main reason why I'm more willing to pay for Japanese manga than Korean webtoon. Quality aside, I often feel cheated by the length of each chapter.

Makes a lot of sense. Thats sad. I just wish that since that the case, knowing they need 100+ chapters for money, they need to plan for plots that NEED alot of chapters and not just simple rehashing the same plot that could honestly wrap up in less than 30 chapters. It is possible to write a good story with this many chapters(100+), manhuas(chinese comics) i feel do it pretty well, with them often having even 200+ chapters but there is contingency and an overarching plot that make them so long. Korea should take note from them.

Especially since the actual content of the chapter is padded out so much with whitespace. A chapter might be 30 "pages" but half of them are just blank space or have a couple words of dialogue and nothing else.
That's my other big pet peeve with webtoons, it feels like the comic equivalent of playing a video game that's trying too hard to boost metrics by adding a bunch of grinding. I'm willing to skim through a mediocre story if it doesn't take me eons to do so, but the padded format makes even relatively short webtoons take forever.

I only remember one manga that ever put an entire page of nothing but blank space, and it became a laughing stock, but it's a common practice in Korean webtoon as a way to give an illusion of length. I understand that it takes more time because of the colors, but if they are going to charge per chapter, then I expect it to have good amount of length to justify the purchase. This is on top of them having the tendency of dragging the story, making buying Korean webtoon some of the worse investment buying comic wise. That isn't even considering how much of a slop most of their stories are.

It's ironic for me to discuss about this in an illegal site such as this, but it's also true that I have grown to avoid Korean webtoon even if I could read them for free. It has become exceedingly rare for me to actually enjoy them, let alone wanting to actually purchase them. I haven't felt this way with manga even though I have been reading them far longer than Korean webtoon. I'm also more likely to spend money on them without feeling I'm wasting my money.

Colors, yes, but same time... Manga doesn't use ready-made horror horses, and items that are barely rendered right... Most of the manhwas already cut corners a lot.
Never mind that you don't really own the thing if it's not a hard copy (same problem as we have with games right now). Especially Korean companies might just some day decide that series isn't available even if you paid for it. I trust more Japan with this one, even if they could do the same thing with manga that is nowadays sold as access via internet.

They will not take a note. They seem to intentionally and aggressive go the opposite and disregard all the learning curves that manga and manhua has learned decades before. About rape culture, about how to take care the workers, etc.

Mangakas also had it really bad, but while Japan at least slowly tried to make those work environment better, Korea was, "Hold the sake." and went full on worse working environment and Japan maybe ever had.
And this is what I mean that Korea is aggressive against anything what two other countries have shown that works and should be done right.
Like it's another stupid level national pride thing.