Why a big industry in many Asian countries for gay romance shows but none in the US, Canada, or UK?
In the West this has to do with the rise of industrialism and literacy in women. The 1800s Gothics were mostly written by and for women. They were one of the first forms of mass produced popular fiction (see Yellowbacks and the Penny Dreadfuls.) At the time these books were lampooned by male critics.
Look up Marie Corelli when you have a mo. She outsold the COMBINED sales of Arthur Conan Doyle +H. G. Wells + Rudyard Kipling.
Why Romance is Ignored in the West
Anyway, the Gothics were the forerunners of commercial genre fiction of which the mainstay is romance (still the #1 most read and most popular fiction genre in the English language world by a landslide, in 2020 romance clocked in at 1.44 billion while the next most popular genre, mystery/crime/thriller comes in at about half that). The fact that romance as a literary movement is ignored, abused, vilified, mocked, and pillorized is one of the brightest persistent markers of rampant misogyny in the pop culture of the West to this day. (Name a romance novel, movie, or TV show that has won major awards or critical acclaim. Go on, I’ll wait… And NO they aren’t less well written, made, or acted than any other reps of pop culture, that idea is ALSO a marker of misogyny.)
It’s been going on since women could read en masse - for hundreds of years.
Incidentally romance = narratives driven by the relationship between two (or more) people that end happily & together.
So in Hollywood while a lot of TV and movies have romance threads, the only actual romances we really ever get are a few rom com movies or some sitcoms or soap operas. And not many of those anymore.
On the other hand, Asian countries have recognized the market for romance for a while now, and produced long running series specifically to fill that market gap. Especially Korea (waves at Hallyu action).
Why so much BL AKA gay romance?
The rise of BL in Asia has to do with the massive popularity of yaoi manga (and its various offshoots) out of Japan, which has been going on since the 1970s, became super popular in the 90s, and started getting anime and live action adaptations in the early 2000s into today.
The rising obsession since 2016 is a combination of Thailand turning BL into a soft power + rise in globalization of pop culture + younger audiences willingness to read captions + streaming services + people trapped in lockdown. Also I think slash fic audiences specifically embrace the m/m pairing for various fantasy, fetish, and psychological reasons. (And that’s someone else’s PhD.)
Again, yaoi, gay manhwa, y-novels (Thailands version) the BL source code basically belongs to the romance genre, certainly shares the audience and so is primarily written by and for women, thus ignored by critics.
Asian production houses recognize and cater to the female gaze and have done so for a lot longer than the West - especially the English language speaking western countries like the USA, Canada, UK, and Au. (Which is not to say Asian romance dramas don’t have a massive problem with benevolent sexism but that’s a whole other essay.)
Hollywood is particularly egregious in ignoring this demographic (women ages 25-65). They analyzed and dismissed the “Apple pie” demographic as not lucrative in the late 1980s and then simply decided to ignore it. (If you’re old enough, you might have noticed the MARKED decline in romcoms in favor of tent poll action adventure movies?) You can read about that in the book Sleepless in Hollywood. If you want more on the whole history of how and why this all happened to romance from the literary side, even before the 1800s, that’s in the book The Heroine’s Journey.
I talk about why this is all such a big problem for GL to find a market in this post. (Also there’s a lot more about queer demographics and why we queers are generally a neglected market share. We v small. Sadly, size matters.)*
So basically Asian production houses saw, noticed, and grabbed onto a hungry market and noted gap in the industry that the Western world has systemically ignored for generations.
And we all got addicted to Asian dramas.
<end graduate school ranting>
* As has been pointed out in comments, I should note that this post is not a queer analysis, just a critical historical overview. BL is not necessarily queer friendly, and it mostly is NOT queer cinema (a narrative produced via a queer lens/gaze for a queer audience), although it can qualify as gay romance (especially some of the ones from Taiwan).
Someone asked how this bisects with fanfic so I blogged a bit about that too.
And someone asked how this bisects with the queer community, so I sum that up here.
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