Unpopular Opinion

Here's the thing. I understand that a lot of yall are understandably angry about the amount of rape and lack of consent portrayed in the yaoi/BL genre. However, I feel like you all are coming at it from the wrong angle. Instead of attacking readers, who are most likely very young and do not have enough sense or media literacy, what you need to do is attack and question the industry enabling this.

Like every burgeoning industry, the webtoon industry is hyper-capitalist and hyper consumerist as fuck. I'm sure there is exploitation of writers going on behind the scene. However, more concerning than that is the fact that they have enough control over writers to make sure that certain tropes that they deem are popular are repeated over and over again.

Lezhin is the main culprit in my eyes. They capitalize very heavily on the BL genre. The Lezhin KR website proudly promotes BL over any other genre. Most of the popular toxic BLs are all fruits of Lezhin. However, if you look at some of Lezhin's BL from 2019, for example, Bongchun Bride, they're very unproblematic and often feature unconventional couples. Lately, however, all they promote and publish are all toxic BLs. In my opinion, after BJ Alex and Painter of the Night became mega popular, Lezhin decided that it has stumbled across a golden goose and probably made sure that its contracted writers follow a certain set of tropes. This is somewhat clear through the storylines of recent BLs like Night Song, where rape is completely unnecessary to the plot but feels as if it had been shoehorned in.

So why are Lezhin stuff so popular? Simple. It's one of the bigger and older webtoon publishers and have enough money and influence to promote the shitfuck out of its upcoming works. There are plenty of non-problematic BLs featured in TappyToon and Bilibili, but they never get as popular, most likely because they do not have as much budget. Its also because I think Lezhin is trying to monopolize the webtoon industry and trying to push out any competition.

So, instead of attacking readers who probably dont know any better, start questioning why certain decisions are made from the top. Perhaps reaching out to the authors and expressing how these tropes are problamtic, or holding a boycott of Lezhin are better ways to go about solving these problems.