the tag??

It labelled BL because it runs in Gangan Comic Bliss, but because it's published by Square Enix, there will be no romance. So rest assured...it will stay a slice of life series.

oooh yes I freaking love you

Shounen ai is lighter than yaoi. Usually with this tag, the most that could happen is hand-holding and a few kisses

The tag shounen ai/BL is to kinda sort works without and with porn, which is the good ol' yaoi we know.

So this would be better tagged as shota ai, but Shonen ai is also OK bc it means this work doesn't contain sex scenes and indeed it doesn't.

Shounen ai and brotherly love doesn't go hand in hand.

but is it ok though? they make it seem as if they will like each other and ik that’s not on the same basis and intensity level yaoi but it’s still very predatory

This is rightly tagged as shounen ai(boy love), shota is just sub-genera.
There's nothing that's called 'shota ai'

Bit off topic, but kind of a cultural clarification here: In Japan, we don't have a Shounen-Ai/Yaoi category or intensity specification or anything. That's purely a western categorization. Although we do have kink tags.

It mostly has to do with the print house. The magazine or the comic is "BL" and sometimes does or doesn't have an R18 tag on it (it's even not rigidly assigned, or even assigned sometimes unless it's a doujin or something). In some small occasions there can be non-BL works in BL magazines, and there also can be BL content in non-BL magazines.

And the term boys-love is all encompassing, it doesn't necessarily mean the main characters in the story are in love or will get together; but that it simply explores and talks about such feelings between the same-sex.
We also don't consider a work to be BL/GL just because it contains same-sex relationships if the main focus of the series is not actually romance. Sometimes genre-specification is simply understood subtly.

...I hope that gives people a better understanding?

:O that was a bit of cultural shock