I thought the author was trying to get rid of any shounen ai/yaoi stuff, especially with t...

from what i know, it was never actually marketed as a BL in japan but it was over here because of the heavy implications of yoshiki's feelings towards hikaru. you could even interpret their relationship as a unrequited love straight away in the first few chapters so it made sense to advertise it as such even when it wasn't the intention for it to be a BL outright

Wait so it's not a bl and won't be a bl??

an anime adaptation is still the same story as the manga. so you should go off of what u think it is. but yes, it was never marketed as a BL in japan. i mean something can have a gay character without making it a BL

correct, this isn't a BL. you could call it a queer/gay story but primarily it's a supernatural horror mystery! it's just that yoshiki happens to be gay (implied but... c'mon lol we all know)

Except the artist made art if hikaru and yoshiki kissing. Then the day the bl tag was removed, she proceeded to delete all the arts from her twt

actually, it never had a BL tag on the official website. so the story in specific isnt a BL. its still obvious that yoshiki had feelings for hikaru, but that doesn't make it a BL story. we can only hope that the adaptation doesn't take away yoshiki's queerness. and i mean, hikaru was dead from the beginning, so theres no actual BL story between the two. just yoshiki reminiscing his unrequited love. only unofficial websites took away the BL tag so thats where everyone gets confuses or unknowingly spreads misinfo

Obviously if the bl tag is taken away the author doesn't want us to take it as bl. But the reason all queerness was stripped away in a matter of days is because she received backlash after it was published in a magazine (a few months ago around the time the anime adaptation was to be announced). And she deleted her arts of them kissing.

We can't just ignore that

yeah, but the BL tag never existed in the first place. so that cant be an example of the queerness being "taken" away if it was never there. the story still has its queerness and its not like it was removed or censored. the art of them kissing wasn't in the actual story so it supposedly being deleted didnt remove anything. the kissing scene is from a oneshot that came before the story, so its likely the idea was scrapped or something similar. maybe the author wasnt sure whether they wanted it to be a BL or not. i mean the manga was going on for a long time before the announcement so i dont think the art being deleted effected the story. the art being deleted could effect the outcome of the anime so we can only hope that the backlash wasnt bad enough to remove all queerness from the anime entirely

A manga can have queer characters without being a bl/yaoi

I think that art was of what could have been between Yoshiki and Hikaru not ‘Hikaru’, I don’t think anything was ever going to happen between Yoshiki and ‘Hikaru’, it could never be a BL because Hikaru has died, it’s more about a queer/gay kid grappling with the grief and loss of his best friend, his love that could never begin, and the homophobia, internalized or otherwise around him. How could he sincerely, or possibly, fall in love with the entity that’s a walking reanimated corpse of his love and best friend and it not be him trying to be in denial and get through his grief to some extent? Of course, the author has been consistent with reminding us, since the beginning, that ‘Hikaru’ is an incomprehensible entity that literally cannot fully relate to or be on the same page on death, love, or intimacy as humans, because it does not have the same concept of those things, it might not even have a concept of those things. And that’s not wrong or sad, it’s just different, humans aren’t the epitome. It sucks she had to remove that art though because of the backlash.

Also, how can the queerness be stripped away when Yoshiki is literally still queer and his grappling with the acceptance of his sexuality still? Just because we aren’t going to see romance doesn’t take the queerness away from the story

Queerness now is only implied. Regardless of whether or not the story has romance, it is not bl although the author hinted it at the start. That's what I meant by the statement not that yoshiki is now straight or anything because he might still be gay.

But yes, because of the backlash, it is sad that the author stripped away the bl-ness from her story. That's what I'm saying.