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No Black Men in BL?

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-oh and FYI, I ain’t just some white yaoi fan. :)

~ by gynocrat on September 18, 2007.

4 Responses to “No Black Men in BL?”

  1. There’s one black guy in it. He has one speech balloon, and guess what it is? “Hey, where the hell you think you’re going? Fuckin’ punkass?”

    Fictional land transported into fictional time-slot on the FX network??

    You know Tina I hadn’t thought about it until you mentioned it but racial diversity is something that really isn’t touched much in manga, BL or otherwise. You might get the occasional black character in a story like Street Fighter where they are caricatured like cute athletic Brazilian Sean or calypso loving big smile sporting DeeJay. And Crying Freeman had to conquer a lady of color when he took on that group from South Africa. But unless its for comedic relief you rarely see people of color, even when the manga is not set in Asia.

    Maybe the downlow has hit the manga community?

    ed said this on September 18, 2007 at 1:09 pm

  2. I’ve not read many GNs from Tokyo Pop, but I got an email today extolling some of their titles as being ethnically diverse. Mind you, I don’t go looking for titles thinking–’hmm, are there black folks in them, I should buy!’, the same way I do with titles featuring Jewish subjects–those I do buy in principle.

    Now there’s been BL manga from Japan that’s pissed me off with ‘wrong’ depictions of Jews, and Eastern Europeans–what bugged me about this one? It’s GloBL. I guess I didn’t appreciate the humor…but I guess I can’t complain much until I start seeing more Hasidim portrayed inaccurately. (^_^) I just feel that more research should go down, beyond what creators unfamiliar with a culture, just sees on t.v.

    gynocrat said this on September 18, 2007 at 3:16 pm

  3. …either Japan isn’t really that much into racial diversity in media or the artists are too lazy putting tones to their characters. :D

    Some artists do tend to be more open minded on black characters like on Tagame’s recent works. Nonetheless, I think there’s a low chance that the main character or a supporting character with decent “airtime” will be black any time soon.

    Jeremy said this on September 24, 2007 at 10:04 pm

  4. I’ve yet to read any of Tagame’s comics, I resign myself to look only at his illustration work, and tend to avoid his stories because of it. :(

    I know in BL there’s been an occasional ‘man of color’, I think I can count 3. ^_^

    gynocrat said this on September 24, 2007 at 10:15 pm

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