In the English-speaking communityīoth fan spaces and the commercial industry have used the word yaoi for decades after it was exported to the English speaking community.
It should also be noted that in Japan, yaoi is not the term used for original commercial work, unlike its foreign counterpart. This term basically means that there is no actual plot in the work and usually has two men getting together, mostly in an erotic manner. Yaoi is an abbreviation of yama nashi, ochi nashi, imi nashi (no climax, no anti-climax, no meaning). In 1979, a doujinka group released an amateur anthology Rapori which used the “yaoi” term for the first time. Yaoi came from a slightly different environment as compared to shounen-ai and later, BL. Initially, it was not even limited to male/male relationships as we commonly see “yaoi” being used among English-speaking fans now. However, that does not mean shounen-ai was initially used as the term for milder male/male fiction. Therefore, it is not surprising that many shounen-ai manga ended up not including erotic scenes like “yaoi” works. Shounen-ai is heavily based on shoujo manga and was developed in the time where explicit sexual scenes were not the norm in girl-targeted work. It was never really specified what kind of love it was, but it certainly was not limited to the mainstream heteronormative relationship at that time. Shounen-ai’s narration revolved around a shounen (in this context, a bishounen, a beautiful adolescent boy) protagonist and his struggles with ai (love). Shounen-ai literally means “the love of young boy.” The term was mainly used to refer to some works by 24-Nen-Gumi shoujo mangaka such as Moto Hagio and Keiko Takemiya in the 1970-80s Japan. This time, we are going to briefly go through the differences between shounen-ai, yaoi, and boys’ love, and how they are perceived both in Japan and in the English-speaking community. However, it is always better to understand the historical context and relationship between these words. What we should understand first is that language is always evolving, and, understandably, people from different times and regions might have different perceptions of the same word. Even the researchers still have varied opinions. It is not unusual to encounter debates on how to use these terms correctly.
They might be words such as Boys’ Love (hereafter BL), yaoi, shounen-ai, and many other terms emerging from different languages. Nowadays, you might have heard a lot of different terms used to explain male/male romantic fiction.
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