Some say it's the same. For me, I thought BL as the main genre and yaoi and shounen ai is the sub genre of BL. So it is BL as a whole, then yaoi and shounen ai are classifications of BL. reply
imo they're the same. bl is just a newer term. but yaoi usually always include mature content (cause there's a separate term for non mature one which is shoinen ai) while bl can include mature content or not at all. reply
'BL' is anything with 'boy's love' so it includes both yaoi and shounen-ai, while 'yaoi' should technically only be used if there's mature content in it (but I think readers call it yaoi either way even if it's shounen ai) reply
Basically, BL is just a broad term for male-to-male romance.
Yaoi is actually a genre that includes sexually content and a lot of sexual content than story, this actually more focus on female audience.
Shounen ai is just the opposite of yaoi that focuses more on relationship and development.
And there's Bara that full off buff men that caters mal...... 1 reply
The term BL is an umbrella for anything boys' love, media originating in Japan depicting mlm relationships written majorly by women for women
OG BL was actually a subgenre of shoujo manga, which grew to form it's own genre, it wasn't called BL initially tho, "Boys' love" was a term coined in the 1990s.
Before that, as shounen was getting popular in...... reply
