Heat & Angst in BL + Other TERMS EXPLAINED
Q: You use the terms high heat, low heat, high angst, etc. in your posts, what do they mean?
Ah, those are literary terms borrowed from the romance and YA genres. Something like Twilight is low heat but very high angst, for example. My obsession with tropes comes from a literary critic background, so when I don’t know the fan terms I get old school. Literally.
High Heat AKA Explicit AKA Hot AKA Mature
High heat tends to mean more that just kissing is depicted on screen: so most Taiwanese BL, some Thai stuff, and Japan and China’s darker offerings. Publishers and authors will avoid using the term explicit because it red flags algorithms and gets books black listed. In the Hollywood film industry this probably includes NC 17 and definitely R rated moves (on the grounds of sexual content).
I like high heat if it’s done well and the actors can carry it off without making me wince. Some of the best examples of high heat are:
My Day the series - Pinoy (one of my favorite under appreciated high heat dramas)
Why R U? (probably the best high heat to come out of Thailand)
TharnType series - Thai (trigger: rape)
Love By Chance series - Thai (trigger: rape for side characters)
Most stuff with MaxTul in it like Manner of Death
History 3: Make Our Days Count - Taiwan (trigger: death)
HIStory 3 Trapped - Taiwan (HFN ending)
History 4: Close to You - Taiwan (trigger: dub con, stepbrother trope)
Japan’s Pornographer series and The Cornered Mouse Dreams of Cheese (warning very darkly cerebral, not really BL)
China did high heat before censorship but only in their darker stuff.
Vietnam does some high heat but not in any dramas I particularly enjoyed.
The Philippines does high heat too, but I don’t watch much Pinoy stuff (see My Day above).
Korea mostly avoids high heat except for stuff from Strongberry (which is a queer production house that clearly has an axe to grind... or something else to grind). Long Time No See and Sweet Curse and A First Love Story 2 are their higher heat offerings.
I do my heat scale out of 3.
0/3 means no kissing or physical contact beyond tropes, maybe a hand hold.
1/3 for a peck or two.
2/3 for anything in the high school making out at a party range.
3/3 for “well they definitely had sex and we almost got to see it.”
In most BL the main character usually have a higher heat level than the side dishes but occasionally it’s reversed. Cherry Magic for example, the mains don’t kiss but the sides do.
High heat is different than erotica. Erotica means the physical sexual connection of the characters drives the plot. BL is mostly romance (or at least romantic), so the emotional connection of the characters drives the plot. Some of Japan’s stuff (and source yaoi) edges into erotica though because... Japan.
I will say that higher heat BL does often have a weaker plot and story structure than low heat, but that may just be coincidence because there is so little high heat. Out of c.250 BLs I’ve viewed I would qualify only c.30 of them as truly high heat.
Dub Con & Non Con
Dub con (dubious consent) is when the consent is questionable. For example if one character is drunk or otherwise unable to clearly agree to a sexual liaison (this is statutory rape in the USA). This happens a lot in early BL and is still popular in certain countries and with certain authors/directors/producers (Mame).
Non-con (non consent) means no consent is given at all. So straight up romanticization of rape. A lot of early Japanese and Chinese BL used this. What I call “dark BL” because these narratives almost always end with suicide, murder, or dramatic death, for example A Round Trip to Love.
For various psychological reason the rape fantasy is hugely popular, particularly among straight women who are the primary consumers of BL. I don’t kink shame so, you do you, it’s the context of the narrative and (lack of) critical lens that bothers me often with these dramas and their lack of consent. (Here’s an excellent article on the history of consent in the Western romance world.)
Low Heat AKA Sweet AKA Closing the Bedroom Door
Formerly known as “clean romance” this is far more common than high heat for various reasons. Audience expectations, airing times, and expense are probably the most common.
Audiences expect lighter romances to be lower heat levels mostly because the het romcom genre established this precedent. Why make actors kiss if you don’t have to?
A mature rating usually detrimentally impacts distribution (who will take it, who will air it, and in what time slot). It can also loose a show its sponsorship. However, it usually increases international views.
Nudity and kissing and further is expensive, the actors are usually paid more the more explicit they go.
There is in country/culture prudishness to consider.
So most BLs lean towards the low heat side of the equation. Korea, for example, vastly prefers them. They like a slow burn and maybe just a kiss or two. Thailand does as well, probably because GMMTV dominates the field and they have a very specific lower heat criteria. And because the Thai pulps are predominantly set in high school (and are mass produced) they tend to be low heat (age of protagonists) and sway the data. Thailand will do high heat, though it’s not as common.
That said Thailand is getting better and better about their kisses and even in the low heat pulps they tend to have more engaging and physically demonstrative intimacy than most other BL producing countries (with the possible exception of the Philippines and Vietnam).
Chinese post 2016 censored BL (like Guardian, Advance Bravely, Untamed or Word of Honor) does not qualify as sweet romance. Sorry. It’s censored romance or bromance. If the story structure implies that there should be at least kiss, which these shows would have had if they featured heterosexual main couples, that’s censorship. Intent and messaging matters. I’m not attacking the dramas themselves, Word of Honor is a favorite of mine, but that doesn’t mean I can’t be critical of what was done to them. It’s okay to love something and still recognize its flaws, that is not a weakness, that’s life.
In line with that, just as high heat BLs often encounter dub con issues, low heat can have sex negativity issues.
Some of you think I don’t like low heat, but honestly that’s not the case. Some of my favorite BLs of all time fall into this category, like Color Rush, Light On Me, or Love Sick. I just strongly prefer it when heat levels are married to the narrative and the actors are physically comfortable with each other, which brings us to...
Higher Heat AKA Balanced Heat
These are my favorites. They tend to be the ones that use heat levels to serve the story. We, the watchers, never doubt for one moment that the characters want each other badly. Something like We Best Love, To My Star, Addicted, Lovely Writer, or I Told The Sunset About You. There is more than just kissing and it might go right up to the line, even follow the boys into the bedroom, but isn’t gratuitous about it. Taiwan really excels at this and some of the best Thai BLs have it too.
Difficult to define, this is a case of I know it when I see it. Usually with these dramas there is A LOT of emotion in the intimacy and the kisses tend to be really good. I call these higher heat by default since there isn’t really a term for it in the literary world.
SEXY
One note on the term sexy. I tend to think of this as very audience specific so I don’t often use it for analysis. I find something sexy (neck grabs or neck kisses and a hand around the waist, for example). You find something sexy (a person, an action, a gesture, a connection, an image). These may not be the same thing. This can be low or high heat, feature soft boys, domestic intimacy, verbal sparring, eye flirting, or being thrown up against a wall. It’s hugely subjective.
High Angst AKA Drama Llamas AKA Internal Conflict
High angst means the plot driver is miscommunication and/or internal drama over identity and self worth, so like Love Sick or Make it Right or Light on Me. These are often, but not always, set in high school for obvious reasons.
When set in university or older (glares at Ossen’s Love) too high angst can make the characters seem very immature. I happen to be personally over this kind of behavior (too many actor friends) so my preference is for fluffy over angsty.
That said I loved Light On Me, and still adore Love Sick and Make it Right so there is something to be said for very confused boys, disaster gays and panicked bis, and excessive noodling over coming out. On the flip side while I love Why R U? for its chemistry the angst feels very forced and drama comes out of left field impacting the pace, which make the narrative confusing.
Sometimes angst and miscommunication are handled really well, especially when sourced in character personality and understandable confusion, perfect examples of this are His the movie on one end of the spectrum (mature older characters, high cinema) and Seven Days on the other (live action yaoi in its purest form) - both from Japan.
Low Angst AKA Cute AKA External Conflict
This just means that there is very little emotional immaturity or miscommunication driving the plot. Examples include Oxygen, Cherry Magic, Lovely Writer, Color Rush, You Make Me Dance. This is not to say the characters don’t internally agonize over things like self worth, it’s just that the story is being driven by something else. I will often call these “cute” but usually just low angst.
Often these are thought of as fluffy and very light weight (which I also like) but that isn’t always the case.
Sometimes higher concept dramas and more mature characters are dictating the story so it’s not cute or fluffy. Manner of Death, 1000 Stars, Color Rush, and Until We Meet Again are low angst but not at all fluffy or lightweight.
HEA HFN LTR
HEA = happily ever after (think Disney)
HFN = happy for now (think the end of HIStory 3: Trapped or Ingredients)
LTR = long term relationship
Tsundere
Tsundere - (ツンデレ pronounced tsun-der-eh) is a Japanese term for a character who undergoes a development arc moving him (in BL) from a personality that is initially cold, temperamental, hotheaded, competitive, and hostile towards a warmer, friendlier, softer side. (Squishy center.) Sometimes the character will stay grumpy but his disposition is better understood (hello Mr Darcy). Often he will soften only for his other half. Shu Yi in We Best Love is a classic example of a tsundere uke, and Pick in Puppy Honey is the ultimate tsundere seme.
Taiwan in particular LOVES a tsundere character. These characters are often paired with cheerful sunshine or puppy counterparts.
There are also kuudere characters to consider. But they are much rarer in BL. I talk about the few that do exist here.
Seme/uke versus D/s & top/bottom
I tend to use the terms seme/uke because I come from reading yaoi in the early 00s. I like to consider them the following:
seme: the active pursuer of the relationship in the narrative
uke: the passive resistor to the relationship in the narrative
I use seme/uke because it is the established vocab for BL same sex romantic pairings under the context of narrative analysis. (Using hero/hero would get confusing, for example.) Lots more discussion on this and how it relates to the different countries producing BL here.
I think of seme & uke as narrative archetypes (useful only when talking about fiction, not useful when talking about real life). It’s about who is in CONTROL of the relationship’s story.
As opposed to:
top/bottom/verse: terms which come from the gay/queer community and pertain to sexual preference and (should) have nothing to do with narrative power dynamics. To be crass, top/bottom is about who gets penetrated. It’s referencing sexual position and physical acts, not characterization or narrative. The bottom is NOT the weak one or the girl. For heavens sake!
These are generally though of as sexual position preferences, verse just means both or no preference. FighterTutor are one of the few clearly depicted verse boys in BL.
I think casual use of seme/uke as conflated with top/bottom is a PROBLEM with both these narratives and the discussion around them. (I recognize that this originates in yaoi.) Mainly because het consumers conflate (egregiously & incorrectly) top with male/masculine and bottom with female/feminine.
Type in TharnType, for example, is clearly a bottom and tsundere but he is neither a submissive nor really a uke.
D/s or Dom/sub/switch terms come from the kink community and pertain to the power dynamics of a relationship: Dominant vs submissive, (which may include the physical but doesn’t have to). The Dominant is in (nominal) charge and takes responsibility for the emotional/physical action in a given scene or relationship. The submissive acts to endure the Dominant's actions/choices/decisions as well as satisfy their D’s desires/orders/wishes, and is rewarded for their service by having their needs met (whatever form those needs take: care, stewardship, pain, pleasure, freedom of responsibility, etc). A switch can either move from D to s during the course of a scene or (more common) switches depending on the type of scene, mood, or play partner.
A D/s dynamic MUST BE:
understood by both parties,
negotiated ahead of time,
involve a safeword and known limits.
A D/s relationship without the 3 above criteria is not D/s, it is abuse.
For me the language around D/s actually better correlates to seme/uke under the context of modern BL. But I feel compelled to acknowledge that BL never involves adequate communication or negotiation in this regard.
(For the record I belong to both the queer and kink communities.)
If you’re interested in Daddy/boy I talk about that dynamic in this ask. But because it shows up so little in BL I’m not gonna bother to cover it in depth here.
BLs That Overtly Reverence D/s (or BDSM & Kink)
(source kept up to date)
