Tasogare Out Focus

School boys in love, making music or movies. Popular blonde x plain brunette starting off as classmates/roommates and becoming a couple. Enough fluff to give a fujoshi diabetes. 

Are you a Fujin who loves contrasting aesthetics? Banana fish and Tasogare out of focus have main couples with very similar styles. Plus both couples are hair contrast duos. Despite the series's differences in tones and themes, if you like your bad boys with blonde hair and slightly better boys with dark hair, this is for you. Also Uchida Yuuma plays the blonde boy in both of these series. Note: if you intend to watch bf please take my note that its VERY tonally different seriously. I believe there's a good tw list for it on tumblr you should read before watching if certain things get under ur skin. read more 

BL focused on acting with a blonde x black hair relationship. 

Both are BL with movie/acting topic. Tasogare is more about filming club, also more mature, and Love Stage is about getting into the world of cinematography and more cute and silly. As a huge fan of Love Stage, I really liked the other one. Highly recommend to check both! 

It's the same school setting. Less anxiety-inducing and more butterflies and heart flutters. Great friend circle. A very calming atmosphere. Just that high-school romance that pulls you in and makes you want to stay in that atmosphere for a little while longer. Also doesn't have any of those shit BL tropes. 

Given and Twilight Out of Focus are both modern BL which break some of the more disturbing tropes of yesteryear involving a high school boy and an older man becoming, erm, involved. They also cast aside the trope of one half of the couple tripping and falling into some seductress waifu for added drama. These shows keep the relationships age appropriate and occasionally the relationships even feel genuine and well written, as if the writers were interested in character building and not rushing a relationship onto the screen for the sake of reminding the audience that the BL anime that they are watching is in fact a BL anime. Given is the better of the two anime, but Twilight Out of Focus breaks some additional tropes with one character who plainly states that they are gay and another character loudly proclaims that he is on the prowl for a boyfriend and is stereotypically flamboyant enough to leave nothing to the imagination. Twilight Out of Focus also has Whoo-Hoo scenes. 😈 Twilight Out of Focus is the stronger of these two anime with the first 4 episodes doing the bulk of that lifting, despite Given being the better anime overall. Neither show is perfect, they still fall into familiar tropes – all the guys are eventually dating each other for seemingly no reason, some stuff happens which makes no sense, there’s drama for drama’s sake, the writing wavers at times… but these anime are a fresh break from the likes of Junjou Romantica and Love Stage!! which demonstrates the growing comfort the anime and manga industries with same-sex couples being the focus of a story rather than being a punchline or a bad trope. We’re still a long way from having an LGBT Cowboy Bebop or Nana, but when that does eventually happen, look back on these two anime as trailblazers for that moment.  read more 

Both are BL, but Stranger by the Shore is definitely the more mature title of the two. Stranger, like Twilight, shakes off a lot of negative tropes from other BL media.