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Queer Roleplaying Practices in Russian Female BL Fandom

2020; University of Minnesota Press; Volume: 13; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5749/mech.13.1.0163

2152-6648

Tarasyuk,

Japanese History and Culture

Queer Roleplaying Practices in Russian Female BL Fandom Yuliya Tarasyuk (bio) The Russian female boys love (BL) fan community took shape in the early 2000s with the spread of internet service in Russia. The community was heavily influenced by popular anime like Sailor Moon, Ai no Kusabi, Weiss Kreuz, and Yami no matsuei—titles usually downloaded from various pirating websites and circulated on data CDs and DVDs within the fanbase. The community has been always seen as a sort of an underground group, with its own rules and activities, not understood by the people outside the fandom and even by most anime fans, who are not themselves fans of BL, also called "yaoi." This Japanese term was adapted into Russian to form the local term yaoichitsa, that is, a female yaoi-ist, or fan of BL. One of the main distinctive features of female BL fans in Russia during the first decade of the 2000s, a community I myself was involved in, was the type of speech they used to communicate with other fans online. In the Russian language there is a difference between the verb endings used in female and male speech, meaning you can ascertain a speaker or writer's sex by the type of ending they use for verbs in the past tense. Female BL fans usually use "male" endings, which makes them seem male when communicating online. After joining the broad anime fan community, individuals often choose a special nickname for online communication, and in the first decade of the 2000s this nickname was commonly the name of the individual's favorite anime character—a phenomenon found in other fan communities around the world. Most popular works had many fans with the same or similar nicknames: hundreds of Usagis and Narutos, for example, appeared in online forums and chats with avatars of the lead characters from Sailor Moon and Naruto, respectively. In the case of BL fans, however, the "chosen characters" were usually "beautiful boys" (bishōnen). That is, women used names of male characters from BL and shōjo works as nicknames, like Zoisite, Shuldig, Aya, Shuichi, Tsuzuki, and so forth. Herein lies the foundation of another gender-bending feature of this fandom: not only did female fans usually choose their favorite male character's name and "face" for online communication but they [End Page 163] also usually pretended they were the character. This practice functioned as a kind of roleplaying game but in everyday life. Indeed, this practice extended beyond roleplay with friends only online, into real life. During local meetings of anime fans, which most of the time took place in parks or squares, it was not unusual to see women addressing each other as if they were not women but men. The center of the Russian BL community in the first decade of the 2000s was the popular blog site Diary.ru. In contrast with other blog services popular among Russian fans, such as the global portal LiveJournal and the Russian portal LiveInternet, Diary.ru primarily consisted of fans, nearly 95 percent of whom were women. There is a well-known joke that this blog service did not have male users and that the only "men" on the site were in fact women. Indeed, this site was, and has continued to be, quite popular among BL fans, who used to use their own blogs to roleplay as their favorite character. The main aspect of this roleplaying was to write about yourself, but as if you were your favorite male character. For example, a woman might have been known as Naruto within the fandom. On her blog, she might have described her thoughts on "his" everyday life, including studying at university and meeting "his" friends, who also had male nicknames based on the Naruto franchise. While playing the character, each fan combined three layers: her own real life, canonical facts about a fictional character who is male in the original story, and facts and features about the character invented by the fandom within fanfiction and fanart, such as Naruto as a uke (bottom) who is madly in love with Sasuke, as a seme (top). While regular users of Diary.ru understood the people...