A Look at LGBTQ Manga with Thally Fel

Thally Fel does monthly hauls and reviews on her YouTube channel (as well as making recommendations on her TikTok page) on a variety of mangas. Most of the manga and manhwa she mentions are centered around LGBTQ stories, primarily BL stories. “The reason I am mainly doing the LGBT spectrum ones is because there’s been a lot of bad rep in that type of genre” says Thally as she goes into detail on the genres she favors and why. 

Her main goal behind her reviews and haul videos is for “other people who are part of that [LGBTQ] community to be able to see themselves represented in a better way versus what we were seeing, say, 10 years ago.” While LGBTQ manga and manhwa have been in circulation since at least the 1920s, in recent years there has been a jump in the amount of LGBTQ content available. More importantly, there’s been better representation through this new flood of content. In some cases, when censorship law is not in play, there is no queerbaiting present. 

Finding these titles has also become that much easier and bigger platforms are circulating LGBTQ content. The more readers there are for it, the more the distributors will continue to push it. 

In her hauls and video essays, she points out the best sites for legally reading and buying either physical or digital copies of manga/manhwa. One of the sites she frequents for her hauls is the online store Right Stuf Anime. This is the largest independent seller in North America when it comes to anime, manga, and Japanese collectibles. Outside of Right Stuf Anime, there’s quite a few more options available when it comes to supporting authors. There’s a variety of options for digital readers as well, the big name distributors have their own digital platforms.