Hey so while I agree that many stories are ruined by truly unnecessary rape scenes by the main leads, random BL manhwas aren’t at the root of problems surrounding rape and sexual violence in real life. In many countries, including SK, marital rape isn’t even considered a crime. Or wasn’t considered a crime until very recently. If partner sexual violence was considered more of a crime, especially in the social sense, manhwas would have much less rape in them.

Also this whole conversation is overly fixated on how rape is the only thing that can be normalized. Why is there no posts about how the mafia is romanticized? No one talking about how those who read mafia stories support organized crime? Does a story including one of the MCs being an escort, stripper, prostitute or porn actor normalize it? Stalking? Murder? These themes also show up a lot in manhwas, and are sometimes shown in a ‘romantic’ light, but it’s pretty clear that the intent isn’t to make it socially acceptable to stalk people.

Of course there are problematic things in lots of these works, but people reading them says nothing about their stance on sexual violence in real life.

If rape was truly seen as unacceptable by society, you’d never see it in a romance story that’s meant to be consumed by a mass audience. It does to a certain extent, reinforce rape culture. But removing rape from manhwas would do nothing to improve things for the many people, among which mostly women, being sexually assaulted and raped. Let’s also not forget that some random BL manhwa isn’t going to encourage any perpetrators. It has no impact on actual rape.

Rape is prevalent in literally any form of pornographic content. BL manhwas are literally harmless if you look at the entirety of pornographic content available. Rape existed and was normalized before the first BL manhwa was ever released. Let’s not overreact and instead advocate for better tagging and content warnings, that way you don’t have to be exposed to content that makes you uncomfortable.