Given– tag –

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...

This article contains spoilers through Given: Hiragi Mix (2024). Some characters take up space loudly. Shizusumi Yagi does the opposite. He is quiet. Unobtrusive. Easy to overlook. For a long time in Given, he exists mostly as the person standing next to Hiiragi — present, but not quite visible. And then Hiragi Mix arrives. And everything you assumed about him turns out to have been the surface of something much deeper. He wasn't thin. He wasn't absent. He w...

This article contains spoilers through Given: Hiragi Mix (2024). Hiiragi Kashima is easy to misread. He's Yuki's childhood friend. He's close to Mafuyu. He carries himself with a kind of loose confidence that makes him hard to pin down. For a long time, he reads as a secondary character. Someone who exists at the edges of the main story, showing up when the plot needs him. Then Hiragi Mix arrives. And suddenly, Hiiragi has a story of his own. A complicated one. A...

This article contains spoilers through Given: The Movie (2020). Some people move through the world putting others first. Not because they have no feelings of their own. Not because they don't know what they want. But because receiving other people's feelings before their own has simply become the way they exist. Haruki Nakayama is that person. And watching him finally be received — after so long spent doing all the receiving — is one of the most quietly emotional moments i...