When Mon Meets Sam: Language, Toxicity, and Disputes in Brazilian Fans‘ Appropriations of Gap: The Series

Abstract

The contemporary phenomenon of Thai Boys Love (BL) has come to the attention of the academic community regarding issues related to LGBTQIAPN+ visibility and representations. After almost a decade of the genre’s ongoing popularity in different media, the first TV series of Girls Love (GL) aired in Thailand in 2022. There are several studies related to BL fandoms, however, no research was conducted so far that addresses the relationship between both BL and GL fandoms. Therefore, the main objective of our paper is to verify if toxic attitudes in/between both fandoms generate disputes or if disputes generate toxic attitudes. In order to accomplish our goal, we sought to analyze the shared language and the use of the same jargon by Brazilian BL and GL fans, using qualitative content analysis, inspired by the KDD method (Knowledge Discovery in Databases). Further, we present a virtual ethnography of Twitter/X to select and analyze posts about the GL program GAP: The Series (2022) by Brazilian fans. In doing so, we were able to identify three types of Brazilians fans: The ones that are simultaneously fans of BL and GL, and those who are only fans of BL or GL, respectively. The data indicates that there are polarizations revealing a certain toxicity within the disputes between these fandoms.