Boys Love (BL) might be a popular category of manga, but it looks like working on a yaoi piece just brought a mangaka in China some pretty serious trouble.
As per Anime News Network, China has just sentenced a female Boys Love (BL) mangaka to prison for her yaoi series. The author Liu, who popularly goes by the name Tianyi, was working on a popular Boys Love series titled Attack and Occupy with the manhua becoming a popular item in Chinese shopping websites like Taobao. Selling more than 7,000 copies between November 17 to May 2018, Liu's Attack and Occupy caught the attention of Chinese authorities which soon began investigating the author's work.
Arrested on the grounds of the country's strict obscenity laws, Liu was accused by authorities of "obscenely describing male and female homosexuals" and detailing "violence, abuse, vulgarity, and other behaviors related to sexual perversion."
The author was first put under investigation in November last year and was arrested by the end of the month together with several of Liu's publishing contacts. Now, according to the publication, the author Liu and her team have been given a ten year and six-month-long sentence by the Chinese government after she was found guilty of breaking the country's laws on obscenity. Her proofreader Lin was also given the same sentence.
With both women working on an appeal, Liu and her team have gained the support of manga readers and netizens around the globe with many Chinese and Japanese fans using social media to protest the sentence.
There hasn't been any update on the sentence just yet, but so far Liu's arrest and sentence have sparked outrage in the BL community with creators in China taking down their own stories to stand in solidarity with Liu. Hopefully, the verdict against the author will be overturned.
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