Culture Essays– category –

If you have spent any time watching Japanese anime or reading manga, you may have noticed something. The words I love you almost never appear. Characters fall for each other. Deeply, painfully, completely. They carry feelings for years. They make enormous sacrifices for the people they love. And they almost never say it out loud. In Western fiction, I love you is often the emotional climax — the moment everything has been building toward. In Japanese fi...

You may have come across the term Boys' Love somewhere. Or maybe you watched Given and thought: so this is what BL is. Either way, you're in the right place. This is a gentle introduction to the Boys' Love genre — what it is, where it came from, why it travelled so far from Japan, and why Given is one of the best places to start. What Is Boys' Love? Boys' Love — usually shortened to BL — is a genre of fiction that centres on romantic relationships betwe...

This article contains spoilers through Given: To the Sea (2024). There is a difference between loving someone who has an ex, and loving someone who has lost someone. It is not a small difference. An ex is an ending. A relationship that finished — through distance, through incompatibility, through the slow erosion of something that once worked. Painful, sometimes. But finished. Death is not an ending. Death is a stopping. Right in the middle of something. Before the argumen...