BL and GL by Country
Where a series was made explains almost everything about it: how long it runs, who finances it, where it airs and how far it travels. Thai series arrive in long weekly seasons from large studios. Japanese ones come late at night from a manga. Korean BL lives in short web series, and Vietnamese BL is often published by the studio itself. This guide walks through 9 countries and 224 series credits, with the live count for each.
Thailand
Thailand is the largest part of this site and the place where the industry's habits show most clearly. Studios recur, GMMTV above all, and so do the actor pairings that Thai BL markets as couples across successive projects; almost every record on the site that names such a pairing sits here. Source novels are recorded in their own right beside the series drawn from them, so something like Fourever You can be read alongside the web novels behind it. Thailand also carries most of the site's GL, from GAP and The Loyal Pin through to Petrichor and Moonshadow, in print as well as on screen. Domestic broadcast on GMM25, One31 and Channel 3 runs in parallel with international streaming.
Where they are most often named
Japan
Japan is where this site can follow one story through every format it has. Cherry Magic is held here as a manga, a television drama, a live-action film, an anime series, an anime film and a stage musical, each filed as its own record. Unexpectedly Naughty Fukami, Fake Fact Lips and Hold on, Harutora-kun likewise appear as both manga and screen adaptations, so a source and what was made of it can be read side by side. Broadcast still matters here: these dramas air on terrestrial and satellite channels before reaching catch-up services. Tone ranges from office comedy and school romance to yakuza crime, with the workplace recurring often enough to read as a house setting.
Where they are most often named
China
Chinese entries here are shaped by one work above all. Mo Dao Zu Shi appears as a web novel, as a manhua, as two animated series and, through The Untamed, as a live-action drama in which the central relationship is carried as brotherhood rather than romance. That last point is the context for Chinese BL generally: the story moves between forms because some forms can say more than others. Around it sits a run of recent web series, mostly short and mostly reaching viewers through GagaOOLala rather than a domestic platform, ranging from palace fantasy and time travel to a workplace reunion and a youth melodrama. Several are made jointly with Hong Kong, Taiwan or Singapore.
Where they are most often named
South Korea
Korean BL on this site mostly lives outside the mainstream drama industry. Much of it is short web series, six or eight episodes long, made by small studios and released through GagaOOLala, Viki, YouTube or wavve rather than on the big networks. Love Class is the closest thing here to a franchise, running across several seasons. Payback appears twice over, as a web novel and as the webtoon drawn from it. Where the larger companies do turn up, they arrive by a different door: a GL thriller carried by Netflix, a bromance from a major studio on a cable channel. Themes lean towards school, campus and workplace, with a recent entry moving into noir and mystery.
Where they are most often named
Philippines
Almost everything on this page is dated 2020, and that is the whole story of Philippine BL in one column of numbers. When production shut down in March of that year, a set of Manila companies went ahead anyway with whatever could be filmed inside a house or through a laptop camera, and the result was a wave rather than a trickle. Gameboys built an entire romance out of video calls and game lobbies; Hello Stranger set its own inside a university's remote semester; Boys' Lockdown put the condition in its title. Within months the country had a genre it had not had the year before.
The producers are worth reading as a list. Established broadcasters and film companies are here, Black Sheep, Regal, Globe Studios and Dreamscape, alongside The IdeaFirst Company and several smaller houses, which is unusual: elsewhere this material tends to start outside the industry and stay there. Oxin Films is the through-line at the other end of the run, carrying My Day, My Story, Sky Valley and Boyfriend Express across four years and a shared pool of performers.
Two things separate this archive from the Thai one beside it. Distribution began free on YouTube and only later reached Netflix, iWantTFC or the Heart of Asia Channel, so the audience arrived before the licensing did. And the dialogue moves between Tagalog and English mid-sentence, as Manila conversation does, which is worth knowing before starting an episode. Sky Valley, from 2024, is the only record here carrying a girls' love couple alongside its boys' love leads.
Where they are most often named
Taiwan
Taiwanese records here reach back to the HIStory anthology and to Your Name Engraved Herein, set in the months after martial law was lifted, then run forward to a cluster of 2026 series. Two strains recur. One is the gangster romance, in which a detective or a student is pulled into organised crime, as in HIStory3: Trapped and Kiseki: Dear to Me. The other is the school story, worked out through rivalry, bands and friendships nobody quite named. Not all of it is BL: Fragrance of the First Flower returns to a high-school first love years later, against the arrival of same-sex marriage. GagaOOLala, the Taiwan-based streamer, carries much of this archive and appears as a producer as well as a distributor.
Where they are most often named
Vietnam
Two studios account for most of what is filed here. O2 Production and RL Studio make boys' love in Vietnam more or less by themselves, and both work the same way: no broadcaster commissions the series, no channel schedules it, and the company that made it is also the company that publishes it, straight to its own YouTube page for nothing. The comment thread is the ratings panel. A series lives or dies on view counts and on whether the studio decides to come back.
That arrangement shows in the records. Runs are short, credits are thin, and a director is named on some titles and on others simply is not, which this site reports rather than fills in. The same handful of performers recur because the pool is small: Nguyen Ba Vinh appears in four of these, Truong Minh Thao in three, and the Mr. Cinderella pair were brought back together two years after the first season. Very little of it has travelled. Mr. Cinderella reaching GagaOOLala's library is the exception rather than the pattern.
A warning about sources belongs on this page rather than buried in the entries. Vietnamese BL has no Wikipedia coverage and is absent from the large drama databases, so most of what is recorded here rests on a single specialist site. Each record says so in its own text and publishes the URL it depends on. Read these entries knowing that, and treat a blank field as a gap in the public record rather than a gap in the work.
The newest item is the outlier: Sending The Wounds, made jointly with Thailand and listed in both languages, which is the direction the larger industry next door tends to pull a smaller one.
Where they are most often named
Hong Kong
Hong Kong BL on this site is almost all Cantonese-language and almost all locally produced, with only a couple of records shared with partners across the border. What gives the archive its character is the spread of production settings. Independent web series released free on YouTube sit beside Ossan's Love and The Taste of Us, which came from the city's established broadcasters, and Twilight's Kiss, a cinema release about two retired men who meet by chance in a public park. The most recent entries lean towards crime, with undercover police, hidden identities and the Kowloon Walled City recurring, while the earlier ones are quieter stories of flatmates, cafes and feelings left unsaid.
Where they are most often named
Singapore
This archive holds two different things under one country name, and the difference is the most interesting thing on the page.
The first group is genuinely Singaporean and very small. Getaway, billed as the country's first boys' love drama, was made in 2022 by Dear Straight People, an LGBTQ+ media outlet rather than a studio, and shot in Bangkok because Thailand already had the industry and the room. Two Pure Vanilla shorts and Straight Best Friend follow it, all of them self-funded, all of them measured in minutes rather than hours. Straight Best Friend is the strangest entry here: its script was drafted by a language model and then revised by human writers, which its producers said openly at the time.
The second group was not made in Singapore at all. Kill to Love, The Sparkle in Your Eye, Lost to You and Double Helix are Mandarin-language productions with mainland Chinese casts, filed as Singaporean on paper. Chinese regulators have prohibited depictions of same-sex relationships in online drama since 2016, so a Chinese production that intends to keep its romance intact cannot be a Chinese production in the paperwork. A foreign classification and an overseas streaming platform put the work beyond the system that would otherwise require the couple to be written out.
Read correctly, that label means close to the opposite of what it says. These records are classified as Singaporean precisely because they are Chinese. The site files them under both countries and says so on each page rather than letting the country field imply an origin it does not have.
Where they are most often named
Questions about the countries
Which country makes the most BL?
Thailand is the largest part of this site by a wide margin, followed by Japan, China and South Korea. The counts above rebuild whenever a record is added.
Why are some Chinese series filed under Singapore?
Chinese regulators have restricted same-sex storylines in online drama since 2016, so some Mandarin-language productions with mainland casts are classified as foreign co-productions. The site files them under both countries and says so on each page.
Where should I start if I have never watched one?
Pick the country whose pace suits you, then open its archive. The BL hub and GL hub show what is airing now and what is top rated, and the Where to Watch guide shows how to reach each country’s shows legally.
Do all countries make GL?
No. GL is far smaller than BL everywhere, and Thailand carries most of the GL titles on this site. The counts on each card show the BL and GL split.
See also the studios guide, the BL and GL FAQ and the glossary.







































































