Hey there! I’m usually one to pick my battles, but this error here is so egregious I felt a need to speak up about it. You don’t have to read this if you don’t want to, but, in fact, yaoi does not mean Boy’s Love. It is inherently sexual and it is not a “goddamn term for gay,” as we will see subsequently.
“The term yaoi is an acronym created in the late 1970s[1] by Yasuko Sakata and Akiko Hatsu[8] from the words Yama nashi, ochi nashi, imi nashi (山[場]なし、落ちなし、意味なし) “No peak (climax), no fall (punch line/denouement), no meaning”. This phrase was first used as a “euphemism for the content”[9] and refers to how yaoi, as opposed to the “difficult to understand” shōnen-ai being produced by the Year 24 Group female manga authors,[10] focused on “the yummy parts”.“
Tl;dr: Yaoi is a Japanese word about equivalent to our phrase “porn without plot.” Of course, porn is necessarily inherently sexual–a genre that serves only to objectify the characters portrayed in it for the gratification of the consumer. It is not a term for gay. To my knowledge, in Japanese, that would be “gei,” which… literally is just the English word “gay” written in katakana. Additionally, according to Wikipedia, gay comics produced by mlm are literally called “gay comics (gei comi)” or bara. So your post is wrong on two points here.
BL and yaoi are also not synonymous terms. BL, or Boy’s Love, is an umbrella term encompassing genres such as yaoi and shounen-ai (another similar genre that is essentially softcore yaoi, focusing more on fluff than sexual activity but always in a more-or-less objectifying manner.) It does not include gay comics. Why? Because while the target audience of gay comics are actual real-live gay people (shocker), the target audience of BL is cishet girls and women.
Originally branded disparagingly as “fujoshi” (rotten girls) for “corrupting” pure friendships between male characters, this subset of people now wear the label as a badge of pride, in the same way that cishet girls in Western fanfiction circles often refer to themselves as “dirty sinners” for drawing two men kissing or holding hands. Why the motif of corruption? Because this consumer base sees same-sex interaction beyond the purely platonic as inherently dirty, sinful, shameful, and kinky. (This can be seen not only in the community’s moniker but in the genre’s conventions as well, as it relies heavily on tropes of rape, abuse, manipulation, etc, and essentially zero genuine depictions of earnest love.) This is denotatively and inarguably homophobia.
Thus, this is why you cannot call “In a Heartbeat” yaoi:
Its producers are all Western. It doesn’t even use an anime art style.
It is not sexual, or PWP. Its characters are not only children, but characters developed as people with which the viewer may empathize, and absolutely not objects for the viewer’s gratification.
It was a short produced by and for LGBT people.
Now I may be a little out of my lane because I am not Japanese–I just consume a lot of anime and manga and read a lot. But I believe the information I have presented to be factually correct and I hope it is clear now why one cannot refer to this short or any other LGBT productions as yaoi, not only for reasons of social justice, but sheer linguistics as well.
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