Does anyone else wonder why us girls like reading BL? Like it’s not like I wanna be a gu...

For me it’s personally because I just can’t read straight stuff cause I just can’t make myself like it. Like, reading about a girl and a boy is just really hard for me, though there are definitely exceptions. It also seems a little more realistic to me idk.

INCOMING LONG ASS RANT.
TL;DR: On average, people sucked major ASS at writing female characters, but were okay at writing male characters, and therefore male ships and BL works became more popular because their characters were literally just better written with more than 2 defining character traits.

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You can argue that there's a fetishy aspect for some people, but a lot of female fans of BL are actually part of the LGBTQ+ community themselves. The actual reason (well, history) is misogyny.

Female characters are usually written as extensions of their love interests, with no real character traits other than "in love." They are also objectified to an extent in straight smut since it's mostly targeted towards men.

Male characters are often written as actual characters, even if that characterisation is the bare minimum of core personality trait and backstory. That makes the story more interesting, even just by a little.

Basically back in the good ol' days: Women hated how smut was only targeted towards men and objectified women, so they wrote stuff where there was no woman to objectify. The dynamic between the characters back then was actually pretty equal, and often featured both characters being pretty, feminine men. But then it kinda of became like straight stuff soon after...

Now there's a shit tonne of straight smut that actually targets women. Both genres have a fair amount of power play (where one party has an advantage) but in BL it's usually something monetary related, or blackmail; basically something tangible, preventable and situational. But with a lot of straight smut I've tried to read, it's basically "um, because she's a woman " which doesn't sit right with a lot of people.

My reason is I like seeing men being submissive lmaoo . It's hard to find that in straight stories

for me I love how bl authors portray chemistry between the leads in their works. Bls never fail to give me butterflies(plus so many other emotions all at once), which i don't really feel while reading most of the straight romance. Tbh i was never a romance genre fan until i discovered bl. They are just built different i guess

for me it all started when I got tired of how women are portrayed in media. I can't explain it but it's easy to find a well written man as to a well written women. these days they seem to be doing a better job at it but back in my days the majority of anime/manga girls were just empty archetype with little to no development

REAL LOL