The last five years has seen C-dramas turn BL novels (danmei) into adaptations (dangai) that soften the same-sex romance into bromance for mainstream television airing, with a few streaming C-dramas that hew to the original BL storyline directly. That was halted late last year as part of the government crackdown on cultural excess and deviation which was hard for what was a big genre suddenly getting slammed shut. Over in K-ent, the hasn’t been a broader BL drama or BL-tangential drama push the same way as in C-drama land but this month a recently premiered streaming drama on small platform Watcha is getting notice because it’s going up and up on the viewership tracking across all streaming platforms. The K-drama is called Semantic Error and stars fresh faces Park Seo Ham and Park Jae Chan as students in an opposites attract college romance. Last week it hit number 2 on the streaming rank just below hit drama Twenty Five, Twenty One which is number 1. Viewers of the drama are giving it good reviews and the mainstream K-media is taking note and wondering if the BL genre is possibly heading towards mainstream in the coming future.
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