2024 BL/GL/QL Round-Up Post
Since I did this last year, I thought for posterity I'd post another reflection on everything I watched that completed in 2024. For me, that means anything that started in 2023 but the last episode was in 2024 is on this list, but anything that was still be airing after 31 December 2024 11:59 my time (EST) is not on this list, even if the bulk of the show did air in 2024.
A few stats:
[The image is TL;DR for what follows lol]
I watched ~150 discrete pieces of new QL content in 2024 (series/films) that I tracked [It gets complicated with specials and split seasons but I did my best to be consistent]; plus 10 things that I would consider "adjacent". For contrast, I listed 110 pieces of discrete content in 2023; that's a 45% increase year over year!
This clocked in at an est. 900 hours of new BL/GL and adjacent content (up from ~600 in 2023--which also tells us that the content I tracked was a little longer overall because that's a full 50% increase in terms of hours spent).
The new content I watched came from 9 different countries [same as 2023]: (Cambodia [1], Philippines [2, down from 3], Hong Kong [1], Japan [32, up from 18 in 2023], Korea [20; was 19], Myanmar [2, up from 1], Taiwan [12, up from 6], Thailand [75; up from 56], Vietnam [4, down from 7]), China [5], and then 3 joint effort productions from Thailand/Korea [2] and Thailand/Taiwan [1]
This means just under ~47% of the content I watched on this list is from Thailand [close to the 50% in 2023]
So many more shows had multiple or varied distributions this year, but like last year ~85% of my content was on 3 platforms: YouTube [38%; down from 40%], GaGaOoLaLa [30%; up from 23%] and iQIYI [17%; down from 21%] Note: I'm in Canada and my access routes are sometimes affected by that.
As unbelievable as it sounds with all that, I did actually drop shows this year! I dropped 9 shows, which is I think more than I've dropped in my entire previous 20+ years watching queer asian media combined (that might be an exaggeration but I do really hate dropping shows); 4 Thai, 3 Filipino, 1 Taiwanese and 1 Japanese (listed at the very bottom of this post if you want to be messy). I didn't track any dropped shows in 2023.
And if you're wondering how many shows there are in the world in total, I am aware of an additional 11 shows I just did not have time to even start (2 from Cambodia, 4 from the Philippines, 3 from Thailand, and 1 each from Korea and Myanmar). That does not include the vertical short reels that I didn't track this year--see @ellsieee 's tracking post for these--as well as several GL shorts from JPC media YouTube channel and Sastra film app YouTube channel that I just have not had time to try or even keep track of, though I do peek in on them to see if there's anything that looks particularly good, and I do always link these folks in my GL round-ups.
All of this doesn't include re-watches or catching up on old shows, or non-QL queer media, or non-queer media (the hets sometimes do deserve rights); but does include films as well as shows.
I hope you all appreciate that with this much content, and with my general brand of being unable to make decisions, I really struggled to narrow down a top 10 list. What follows is the best I could do lol
Top 25 QLs I'd Recommend From This Year:
[Links are self-indulgently to what I thought was the most relevant post I'd made this year relevant to that series/media, mostly spoiler-free pitches]
She Loves to Cook and She Loves to Eat S2 (Tsukutabe) [GL]
Love in the Big City
Love For Love's Sake
Tadaima Okaeri [anime]
Ossan no pantsu ga nandatte ii janai ka (Oppan)
Marahuyo Project
Knock Knock Boys
Let Free the Curse of Taekwondo
Love is Like a Poison (Doku koi)
Ossan's Love Returns
Twilight out of Focus [anime]
At 25:00 in Akasaka
Cooking Crush
Cherry Magic [anime]
Cherry Magic Thailand
Takara no Vidro
Soul Sisters / Twin Rabbits [GL]
Perfect Propose
Unknown the series
Paradise of Thorns [film]
Blue Canvas of Youthful Days
The Secret of Us [GL]
Mr Mitsuya's Planned Feeding (Mitsuya-Sensei)
The Time of Fever
A Man Who Defies the World of BL S3
I tried to put these in some kind of order but honestly if you asked me to rank them the numbering would change all the time and I would combust. The ones I liked best are closer to the top of this list. I also debated back and forth on whether Paradise of Thorns counts as QL so many times. But in the end I decided the main character was queer and queer romance of a sort was at the heart of the drama, so I've left it in this list even though technically it should probably sit with the 'adjacent's.
Worth noting that though only ~20% of the content I watched was from Japan, ~45% of my favourites were from Japan.
+5 notable pulp offerings worth mentioning:
Bagan Beginning (Myanmar)
City of Stars (Thailand)
Gym Affairs (China)
To the Ex Who Hated Me (Korea, GL)
Under the Oak Tree (Vietnam)
I think I'll do a top 10 GL post separately since we had enough content to warrant a top 10 (yay!) but this is already long enough. I just want to take a second to acknowledge that this year was so much better than in 2023 when I didn't feel like I could recommend any of the new GL shows. Thank you content creators for better and more GL in 2024, please keep that energy for 2025!
Bonus: Not a QL but worth calling out:
How to Make Millions Before Grandma Dies (Thai film)
I saw both this and Paradise of Thorns in theatres during the Toronto International Film Festival and they were both so powerful! Extremely different tones but they surprisingly hit on similar themes, and very beautifully filmed. HTMMBGD was a complicated film filled with very rounded and complex characters, and I still think about it all the time. Very excited for more folks to have access to both of these soon.
Sidenote: The fact that I watched 45% more shows in 2024 than I did in 2023 and still managed to keep my rec list to 30 (*cough1cough*) does seem to back up the general feeling that though we had more content, we didn't have a proportional rise in good content. I do want to crunch those numbers in another post.
Double Plus Bonus: Best Older QL Content I watched for the first time in 2024:
Life as a Girl / Joshi-teki Seikatsu (Japan, 2018; I'm so sad I missed out on this one for so long due to misinfo, it is fantastic! Thanks to @so-much-yet-to-learn for helping propel me to this one)
Iron Ladies (Thailand, 2000; thank you for the rec, @happypotato48)
Nacchan's Secret / Himitsu no Nacchan (Japan, 2023; thank you @furritsubs for making this watch possible)
Can I Buy Your Love From a Vending Machine / Sono Koi, Jihanki de Kaemasuka? (Japan, 2023; thanks to @nicks-den for making this watch possible)
I Fell In Love with the Villainness (Japan, 2023; watched because of a convo with @pilanthitasanilaphat)
Doi Boy (Thailand, 2023; this one I had on my list and just had to work up the energy to watch, but it was a beautiful film and I'm glad I did)
BL Metamorphosis (Japan, 2022; another thank you to @furritsubs)
Dear Dad (India, 2016; thanks to @neuroticbookworm for the rec!)
Salty Blue / Kakenuketara, Umi (Japan, 2023, thank you again @nicks-den!)
[I can't believe I forgot this at first] The Miracle of Teddy Bear (Thailand, 2022, thanks for going on that journey and writing great meta with me and for calling me out for forgetting @lurkingshan!)
There is so much good content in the world and despite my best efforts I haven't seen everything! So grateful to the fansubbers and people who write about past shows so that those of us who missed them the first time still get a chance to see them.
In terms of my output based on all this input, I continued not lurking this year, and have enjoyed it very much; see my Top 10 posts from 2024 here as well as the content I linked in my recommended shows above--going through the process of adding those links really highlighted to me how much more I've written this year, and how much more motivated I am to write about shows I love. It's no surprise I had dedicated posts for most of my top shows! To highlight a few specific projects this year that I'm proud of, I participated in the Love in the Big City Book Club read and watch-alongs organized by @lurkingshan, which was such a fun project that I am grateful for, and I started my GL Odds and Ends posts (tagged with #gl recs) that I am still feeling out but am really enjoying seeing the impact whenever someone watches a show because they found out about it through one of my posts. I also made an appearance on several episodes of @the-conversation-pod and had an incredible time trying out different things in a quarterly 'Dispatch' and having some really rich conversations with @bengiyo and @shortpplfedup. I love this corner of tumblr that we've carved out for ourselves as a QL watching community, and I just want to say to everyone I've interacted with in 2024: Thank you, and wish good things for you all in 2025!
Full list of 2024 shows under the cut for anyone curious! [Mostly in order it completed but may be slightly off--if a special aired immediately after the final episode I only list them as one thing and count the airing of the special as the end date, for example].
