puppyshipping_fan_of_doom
Is Yaoi
really a proper name for this type of manga/ anime in the west?
Or the genre in general?
What do you all think??
Yea and no. Yaoi is not the proper name for the genre,
in Japan. The most correct way to refer to the genre would be to call it
Boy(s) Love or
BL. The term yaoi was previously used to refer to smutty doujinshi, or doujinshi that was basically pointless outside of the naughty content. Thus many professional BL mangaka may actually get hurt or insulted when they are referred to as yaoi mangaka, because yaoi is like the tabloid of manga if you will.
When yaoi doujinshika began creating original works with hot man action, they wanted to distinguish it from yaoi and dubbed it June. June and BL are the same thing, June just happens to be an older term.
As for "shounen ai", that term came about to refer to some of the earliest titles that involved boys in love with other boys. Obviously, shounen ai means boy love. It referred to angsty romantic stories with young prepubescent boys. However, over time the term has come to mean something else. It is outdated in reference to the genre of boy love and instead refers to older people who have a little boy fetish. ***** really.
So the current term for hot man on man stories is Boy Love or BL. Japanese people use the English, thus differentiating it from shounen ai. Of course, many publishers and just about everybody else still clings to the word yaoi because that is how they first encountered the genre. To us it's yaoi, even if that's no longer, or rather never has been, the term that was actually used in Japan. It's hard to just flush something out of popular culture like that. Besides, is it really such a bad thing that we don't use the word exactly like the Japanese do? Language gets exchanged and highjacked all the time. I wouldn't worry too much about calling it the "wrong" thing. It's all a matter of how you look at it.
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