🏖️ A BOYS’ LOVE TOURISM BOOM  

Regular readers will be familiar with the success of Boys’ Love (BL) genre that shows no sign of waning. Just a few weeks back, we wrote about KinnPorsche The Series – which topped iQiyi’s streaming charts in 191 territories, spawned a sold-out pan-Asian tour (with a world tour in the works) and generated over 10M Tweets across SEA in November. Thailand – the country responsible for this phenomena – is now capitalizing on BL to boost tourism, which makes up 12% of the economy and was hard-hit by the pandemic. The Tourism Authority of Thailand is looking to attract BL fans to drive tourism recovery starting this year, and will increase their targets by 5X next year.

💡 Our take

BL seems like an overnight success story,  but it’s actually rooted in a subgenre of Japanese manga that dates back to the 1970s. Although it gained some traction, the audience remained fairly small until Thai series 2gether, which was released in 2020. What else happened then? That’s right, a global pandemic. Millions of people had time to look for and binge watch new content, and 2gether – a college freshman story – offered just the right level of escapism. It also helped that it was widely accessible, available on multiple platforms, and subtitled (sometimes by the fans themselves). Suddenly, BL was everywhere. 

This crossover also maps to a bigger trend in Asia, where once-niche cultures now have far-reaching influences. Take anime. It has had a strong foothold in Asia and inspired homages beyond (did someone say Akira Slide?), but it’s now gaining even more mainstream popularity. Studio Ghibli has partnerships with Uniqlo and LOEWE; more recently Japan’s football team pulled off a World Cup upset wearing a kit designed by creators of the popular Blue Lock and Giant Killing mangas (more on that here).

The biggest takeaway here? If you still think niche cultures are confined to Reddit r/ channels, think again. Everyone is familiar with how popular culture is an economic powerhouse – K-pop, anyone? But now, niche cultures can also command sizable communities of heavily-invested fans, becoming an important driver of economic growth in their own right. Our friends at WARC, whom we recently did a joint webinar with, call this Bubble-up Culture. The organic, fan-driven nature of niche pop cultures like BL and other genres is an opportunity – fans that aren’t currently being catered to will jump at the chance to get even more immersed in their fandom, which means topline growth for brands!

* Editor’s Note: From your friendly Culture Group anime nerd enthusiast – we have seen a lot of variations on “Boys’ Love” floating across the internet, from ‘Boy Love’ to ‘Boy’s Love’. Based on its original manga inspiration, the genre is now called ボーイズ ラブ [bōizu rabu], which translates to Boys’ Love. This is the terminology we will be using going forward to describe the genre of romance between two men.

For those of you born before 1997, ‘fax, no printer‘ is Gen Z speak for ‘undeniable facts I agree with’