(she/her)
Examples have been restored per this thread
and the page is now unlocked.
I have to ask, why exactly is this page locked, and examples aren't allowed? It seems a bit like a double standard, especially when both yaoi and yuri (which are made for straight audiences) have their pages open. By contrast, bara, which is explicitly made for a gay audience, does not.
From the little research I've done, part of the reason this was locked years ago is because people where unsure of what "bara" exactly meant. I think part of the confusion came from people including things that just happened to feature muscular (gay) men, such as American comics.
While it is true that bara is often used in online circles in such a manner, the same can be said of yaoi and yuri. The page could be opened with examples allowed, and a clarification added somewhere on the page.
Moreover, I also understand that for some reason, things that are entirely pornographic are usually not allowed on TV Tropes. While bara manga do often tend to be pornographic, there are also some works that are not at all pornographic, such as My Brother's Husband.
Moreover, you also have various video games from the past few years, like Tokyo Afterschool Summoners and Live a Hero that, while definitely fanservicey, are not pornographic.
For these reasons, I believe the page should be unlocked, and these examples added in. I'm sure there's more.
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Opened a discussion about the page
Can someone explain to me why you cant list examples for the bara genre but yuri and yaoi are ok ?
It's easy, mmkay?
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/family_friendly.php
Are we really sure that the picture here fulfills this requirement?
At first I didn't realize I needed all this stuff... Hide / Show Replies
We had an Image Pickin Discussion here. The current image was a compromise to have a relatively tame top picture. It looks like two shirtless men kissing. They're hunky and manly and they're two guys, but we don't demand anyone be ugly or Get Back in the Closet.
In the old version of this remark, I was a bit miffed about taking someone's art without a source but then when I took it back to Image Pickin', I realized that it DOES name the artist and it's cropped. Not one of my smarter moments, so I'm just editing this comment because people might try to continue the conversation not knowing it's over. (Because it ended in the forums)
Edited by 216.15.113.220
Why are examples on this page closed, but not on the Yuri page?
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It's pretty rediculous. It would be nice if a mod could actually explain why this is, or allow examples on here again.
Anyone else notice recently a sort of, half-bara, half-yaoi art style coming up a lot of places? A lot of fanart for shows like Free and Kuroko's Basketball that are pretty true to the bishounen style of the series, but done from a more bara angle, emphasizing the muscles and things like that. They're also usually a more solid CG style, rather than yaoi art that's more airy and cloudy. And these are more, uh, graphic. But it's not limited to athlete characters - I've even seen characters as bishounen as Yamanbagiri from Touken Ranbu done in this style. So... a possible bridge forming between yaoi and bara? I also have no idea of where these artists are, Japan or elsewhere... so that might be a thing. But they're on Pixiv.
I made this Idolized Julius Kingsley icon back when Akito first came out, and now that the crossover is actually happening, I don't care.
{{Tsundere}} pet.
Cleanup pursuant to new stricter standards:
The associated-tropes list currently unduly emphasizes sexual and/or pornographic topics, if someone wants to tweak it to emphasize more general tropes such as art and characterization tropes, please do:
- All Gays are Promiscuous: Always played dead straight along with...
- Badass Beard: Optional.
- The Bear: Optional.
- Big Beautiful Man: Optional, though there is a particular fetish for "muscle gut" — a muscular but flabby gut.
- Bi The Way: In quite a number of stories, men have revealed they have interest in or have had long-term relationships with women prior to them hooking up with their present male love interest. A similar situation exists in conventional Yaoi; bisexual inclinations of any degree are often portrayed as the 'default' situation.
- Carpet of Virility: Although it is optional.
- Downer Ending: Gengoroh Tagame is (in)famous for this approach. Some stories of his contain a Bitter Sweet Ending, but Your Mileage May Vary on what you consider to be bittersweet.
- Kemono/Furry Fandom: A lot of Bara works are also Kemono, or contain Kemono characters. This is by no means universal though.
- Leatherman: Though by no means required.
- Manly Gay: Bara is no country for effeminate pretty boys.
- Periphery Demographic: Female fans do exist, to the point where a couple short-lived manga anthologies catered to both male and female Bara fans. In Western countries, sometimes the female fans run to Bara to escape the oft-unrealistic depictions of men in yaoi. A handful of female artists draw bara too, such as Dragmire and Ivy Beth Gladstone.
- Plot With Porn: Done very well in most stories.
- Rated M for Manly: Fuck, yeah.
- (Walking) Shirtless Scene: Sometimes this occurs even before intercourse is engaged
- STD Immunity: As all the stories are fictitious, condoms don't really matter...not that they would hurt either.
Also, the following examples are neither Asian nor do they appear on a quick look to be Asian-influenced, and thus don't actually belong here; anyone who wants to make a Gay Comics index, knock yourself out:
Outside of Japan, there is also Braford (Argentina), Captain Ger Bear (Canada), Forge the Wielder (USA), Furry Revolution (Italy), Galen (Spain), Grisser (Thailand), Gez Tank Skunkrat (Mexico), Ralf König (Germany), Kupopo (USA), Kyuuhari (Malaysia), Rrowdy Beast (USA), and Tom Of Finland (Finland).
A handful of female artists draw bara too, such as Dragmire and Ivy Beth Gladstone.
- Cable And Deadpool comes damn close. In fact this could be combined with Naughty Tentacles in that one scene.
- Many muscular superheros who get slashed with each other in fandom could fall under this as well.
- Tom Of Finland's comics can be seen as an early Western version of bara, as sexually oriented comics by and for gay men with a strong Bear or Leatherman aesthetic.
- J. Bone's pin up work definitely counts.
- Ralf König's comics are basically German bara. The film version of his Killer Condom series delights in the trope.
Video Games
- Chub Pan
- Meat Log Mountain: A Dating Sim game with phallic & homoerotic imagery and manly men literally everywhere.
- Sugar Shooter: An erotic, bullet hell shmup.
Web Original
- A new Tom Of Finland, Israeli Deviant ARTist David Kawena, is infamous around the internet for making extremely well done and detailed drawings of muscular "Disney Princes" in speedos, also giving them extra packages. Please keep your inner childhoods in check. You will either be inherently aroused or scarred for life, as Rule 34 is wont to do.
- Captain Ger Bear.
Webcomics
- Blur The Lines is all about chubby chasing and bears. Completely runs on Author Appeal, showing lots and lots of plumber's cracks (he describes it as the gay version of cleavage).
Other
- George Quaintance, who is also known for his homoerotic art and was an inspiration to Tom of Finland.
- Rammstein's song "Mann Gegen Mann" is an ironic ode to this, especially the video thereof. Highly NSFW.
The Trope Repair Discussion for Fan Yay already brings up many unresolved issues in Bara Genre. The issue being that, two continents can't agree on what bara is. In the West, online, it's almost always a porn trope or at least an erotica trope. In Japan, it's just homoeroticism. We've been toying with the idea of disbanding the Bara Genre trope altogether, and migrating its examples to one or more homoeroticism-related tropes. Bara Genre in the West describes a legitimate trope, but it's more about Manly Gay homoeroticism — stuff by men for men and is manly. It's usually porn, but can also simply be erotica. But yes, this page is written first and foremost with a homoerotic understanding.
Edited by Gilgameshkun
Insofar as Bara is used in the West to describe "gei comi" / "manga gei" / "menslove", that is more of a demographic category; it isn't necessarily erotic at all (although most is). The broad Western use of "manly gay porn" is something different. Perhaps a rename to Manga Gei or something might help dissociate the two meanings?
Calling someone a pedant is an automatic Insult Backfire. Real pedants will be flattered.
I just caught up on the recent policy changes. Good grief...this reminds me of when my high school film literature class was declawed and forbidden from studying films with anything that someone's grandmother could remotely consider edgy — including most of the epic classic films on its curriculum. The new level of no-porn scrutiny being applied (even things that sorta-kinda resemble porn) has left me feeling rather queasy. I've written multiple articles about mature works on this very level, and I always considered them serious works first and foremost, with their level of safety strictly being a question of adequate individual maturity.
Right now the site seems to be in chaos trying to deal with this new situation, and I'm not certain I can be objective with the "no porn anywhere" policy change, when my entire fundamental definition of pornography seems to be so different from many Americans'. Culturally, it's a definition that sways in the wind of societal change, involving a great deal of social prejudice and stigma, and I'm more of an independent international thinker.
I think I'm taking a sabbatical from these discussions until everything cools down and the situation has firmly stabilized.
I've come months late to this but I think I can still comment....? Well, I'll put my two cents in anyway and if it turns out it's not allowed I'll delete it.
Anyway, I would like to second Gilgameshkun. I think it's very worrying where tvtropes is now. I was in and out of hospital for 8 months so I missed all the changes (I used to lurk under a different name), so I don't know why it happened but it doesn't really make a lot of sense to me. I liked a lot of pages that were about mature works that may now be coming under fire. I think it leans towards a Moral Guardians attitude a bit, which is worrying.
Edited by Laudanum
Ah. Sorry I seemed to have saved incidentally. Anyway I'll just leave what I want to say in this reply.
Here's where I think the problem lies with the Bara and Boys' Love pages. In Japan Boys' Love - most commonly known as yaoi in the west - is a huge umbrella supergenre. It includes effiminate pretty boys and melodrama, shonen-ai, shotacon, transgender couplings, manly men having one night stands, reversible positions of all descriptions, in-detail mature stories, realism and Wish Fufillment, Plot With Porn, fetishes... can I go on? In the West, Yaoi = effeminate pretty boys and melodrama. Bara = manly men and the 'realistic' alternative to Yaoi. There is a slight problem with this, first of all Bara (as the west understand it) is mostly porn. Why the hell would you want your porn to be realistic? (i.e. have realistic situations and realistic expectations, obviously a certain amount of base realism is absolutely necessary in any porn, but professional Yaoi (as the west understand it) porn seems to cater for a similar degree of base realism for the greater part). No, this is what people in the west try to call Bara in order to escape the stigma of liking what might be called Yaoi (I know people who say they read Bara for this exact purpose, and even on certain discussion boards I tend to conveniently leave out the fact that I read "Yaoi" as often as I read Bara (as I've come to understand it from a western perspective)). Works about male homoeroticism come from different roots (Bara from gay porn (appealing for gay men), Yaoi from shoujo (of all places) (appealing to straight women)) but it ends up under the same supergenre in the end. At least, that's how I understand it works in Japan and should probably work in the west.
I have to say that my understanding of Bara and Yaoi comes from reading it and what I've gathered from translated authors notes and fan dialogue. So I may be completely off (I'm sorry if I am). Honestly, when I came onto this site and found them divided in such a way I was confused, because I'd come across them only under the umbrella of Boys' Love or Yaoi and didn't know the extra category existed (I still don't know if some of the works I like would be called Yaoi or Bara).
One thing I have noticed in western culture that is shockingly prevalent is the feeling of being ashamed of liking Yaoi. Because in the west, liking Yaoi makes you a Yaoi Fangirl, with the mental age of a 13 year-old and no understanding of how men act or sex works. Who the hell would want to be known as liking Yaoi when you get laughed off the discussion boards for it? It happens on this site too. A lot. Yaoi Fangirl is a byword on tvtropes for a condemnation of common sense or an idea of reality.
What I think would be the most effective thing would be to list "Yaoi" and "Bara" under one title, merge the two, explain the different styles and origins and then leave it so we can just have fun with the works without picking and choosing categorization.
Okay, I don't think anyone will read this (it is horribly long, for which I apologise) but I thought I'd put my thoughts here where maybe the idea of restructuring the pages would still be open anyway.
Edited by Laudanum
Um... *scratches head* I see that on the main page Bara is described as being a genre which began in and still continues to be published in Japan. While knowing the origin is important, isn't it a bit limiting to say that something must be published in Japan or be published by a Japanese writer/artist for it to be considered Bara, even if it otherwise uses the same style, character appearance, and tropes? Specifically, it seems wrong to me to cut out those artists Lebrel singled out as "not being Asian"—I wasn't aware one had to live in a particular country or have a particular nationality to have one's work be considered part of a particular genre. A lot of High Fantasy is based off of medieval European values and tropes, but we don't say modern writers from non-European countries who use the same values and tropes in their stories aren't writing High Fantasy. And the artists listed above (from Braford onward) most certainly do use the style, character appearance, and tropes of Bara, and self-identify as Bara artists. So unless you're going to tell them they're wrong just because they aren't Asian...
Edited by 69.172.221.8
Page locked per CV Policy
just wondering was the addition of genre really necessary? seems somewhat needless.
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Ohhhhhhhhh yes. The genre is quite vibrantly active, both in publication and online.
yeah i was talking about the name. while it isnt really that big of deal i was wondering if that many people really thought it necessary
Rodent Ringleader
Thank you. I didn't make it, but I very, very carefully selected it. I wanted to find a picture that captured the essence of bara and was universally pleasing to the bara eye, but not too explicit. Though this image is cropped, it was largely cropped for dimensions limits—in the full image they're not wearing clothes, but nothing's showing.
It's not online anymore, that I know of. I have it on file though. Anyway, unless you wanted to be assured of the reference, this is not tvtropeschan.
Edited by Gilgameshkun
Would it be possible to ask for a copy of the image and/or a tip on how to find similar images?
Thank you muchly, Gilgameshkun.
Trying to find that exact image still, though. If it's not too much trouble, would you mind furnishing us with a direct link?
Here
◊. There wasn't much more to the picture anyway. And don't count on that link to always be there.
GAH! Damn it TV Tropes, why is whenever I open a page, you either have Rule 34 or something incredibly terrifying waiting for me?
Didn't want to start editing war, but I should remind the troupers that not everyone is familiar with the ins and outs of the topic an entry is dedicated to. I notified readers that "Kuso Miso Technique" has scat and watersports, things that vast majority of people (yes, even gay people) find disagreeable. It is information that would be helpful to know beforehand. I then got nagged by someone for not knowing the latest Japanese slang and that this info is something "every weeaboo knows."
Not everyone reading these entrys is a weeaboo, much less knows what one is. This trouper is guessing that a majority of people visit this page because they are only slightly familiar with bara or never heard about it at all. And yes, some of those people don't know a lot about the names of gross fetishes in foreign languages. If they did they would go be on a forum for people who know about the topic, not some page on a site deditated to informing newcomers. This just reinforces every stereotype about the closed-off, snobbish, no-outsiders-allowed manga/anime fan.
Someone more experienced then me is in a better position to know if it fits with the page or not, so I didn't change it. Just a suggestion, but the line could inform the reader what the terms in question mean and and how they are used in anime/manga without being a snob about it.
Edited by 76.205.115.211 Hide / Show Replies
Yeah, sure go ahead and warn readers of the content. It's a mature comic with things some people think are icky, nothing wrong with warning them beforehand.
When I asked if "it fits with the page or not" I was reffering to the catty comment below the warning, not the warning itself.
Edited by 76.205.117.9
[-TallDarkAndBishoujo-]
Some visual novels / games that could be included but may need some discussion first.
- Management
- Paradiso Guardian
- To Trust an Incubus
- Mister Versatile
- End of Dreams
- Worst Dating Sim: https://www.siliconera.com/worst-dating-sim-growing-fond-thugs/
- Another Eidos of Dragon Vein R
- Dragon Island
- Ero Condo
- Demon's Dream
- Gachi-Natsu: https://skskdan.com/gachi-natsu/en
(Also on Steam)
Edited by PanagiotisZois