Raikantopinoy

Glocalization of the Boys’ Love Genre in the Philippines

Abstract

During the community quarantine in the Philippines, numerous trends arose online and one of those was the Thai Boys’ Love (BL) series. Its popularity grew exponentially a few months after the start of the lockdown, leading to independent studios producing the first Pinoy BL series or what I term the First Wave Pinoy BL. This paper aims to investigate how the Pinoy BL genre differentiated itself when it glocalized Thai BL. Through conducting content analysis of the first five Pinoy BL series, namely Hello, Stranger (2020), Gameboys (2020), Gaya Sa Pelikula (2020), Quaranthings (2020), and In Between (2020), it was found that Pinoy BL removed and rejected some crucial tropes of Thai BL such as putting a villain edit on women, trivializing the act of coming out, and featuring the seme-uke dynamic. It is argued that these differences were attributed to queer creators and actors being primarily involved in the production, the rise initiated by non- major production studios, and an absence of productions’ linkage to the book industry. This is an initial, yet crucial, research project as Pinoy BL is still a relatively new phenomenon worthy of future studies.