Unspoken Pacts: BL Stories of Falsehoods and Forgetfulness
These short BL stories are narrative snapshots, presenting moments captured mid-scene or pages torn from an expansive narrative. They are fragments designed to ignite the imagination, inviting readers to consider what came before each encounter and what destinies lie ahead for the characters. This format encourages a deeper engagement, transforming reading into an act of co-creation.
Boy’s Love, or BL, encompasses a diverse genre celebrating romantic relationships between male characters. Known as Yaoi or Shōnen-ai in its earlier forms, BL originated in Japan and has grown into a global phenomenon, appreciated for its rich character development and emotional depth. It serves as a powerful medium for exploring themes of acceptance, identity, and love, resonating with a vast international audience across various countries.
This collection is part of an experimental research and storytelling program operating at the intersection of human creativity, interdisciplinary arts, and applied artificial intelligence research. The project explores how digital tools can support writing and publishing processes, shaping new forms of storytelling and scriptwriting while enhancing digital literacy skills and workflows. It also comes from a sincere love of BL stories.
This collection weaves together the deceptive charm of Fake Relationship BL with the poignant challenges of Amnesia/Memory Loss BL, often with elements of Hurt/Comfort and set in a Modern Office. These emotional stories, from Jamie F. Bell and Leaf Richards, explore identity and connection.
We invite you to explore these short BL stories. Engage with the characters, ponder their fates, and allow your imagination to complete the narratives, making each reading a unique, personal experience.
Today’s BL Short Stories
The Performance
Author: Jamie F. Bell | Category: Boys Love (BL) | Genre: Fake Relationship BL
In the dusty, stifling heat of the school’s prop storage under the stage, Steve hides from his tormentors, nursing a fresh injury. The atmosphere is heavy with humidity and impending storms.
Just Stay Here
Author: Jamie F. Bell | Category: Coming-of-Age | Genre: Hurt/Comfort BL
Satoru sits alone in a hospital waiting room, consumed by paralyzing anxiety as he awaits news of his hospitalized friend, Haruki. His fear is a raw, open wound, dredging up memories of a past attack. Yuma arrives, silent and watchful, and without words, begins to offer a profound, physical comfort.
Frozen Lakes and Failed Spreadsheets
Author: Leaf Richards | Category: Boys Love (BL) | Genre: Modern Office BL
Centennial Park in the dead of winter, adjacent to the towering glass obelisk of Halloway & Prynne. The setting is stark, frozen, and painfully cold, serving as a backdrop for Joey’s melodramatic exit from the professional world.
The Broken Sandal
Author: Jamie F. Bell | Category: Espionage / Spy Fiction | Genre: Amnesia/Memory Loss BL
A desolate strip of coastline near a safe house facility. It is late evening, the air is cooling, and the tide is coming in.
A Ghost at the Hardware Store
Author: Leaf Richards | Category: Fast-Paced / Pulpy | Genre: Fluffy Romance BL
Inside a bustling home improvement store, Rory and Julian are locked in a tedious discussion over paint colors. The air is thick with the smell of chemicals and the hum of fluorescent lights, a backdrop to Rory’s growing internal frustration. Suddenly, a familiar face appears, stirring forgotten feelings and disrupting the beige monotony.
BL Storytelling and the Arts, Skills Development and Digital Transformation
AI-Assisted Storytelling and Automation: Our research at the incubator actively explores AI’s transformative role in creative development, particularly within the dynamic landscape of BL storytelling. These case studies, spanning genres like Fake Relationship BL, Hurt/Comfort BL, Modern Office BL, Amnesia/Memory Loss BL, and Fluffy Romance BL, exemplify how AI tools are being studied to address unique BL-specific challenges. We investigate AI’s capacity to assist in intricate world-building, craft compelling suspense in Amnesia scenarios, generate nuanced dialogue in Modern Office settings, and streamline the overall scriptwriting process, pushing the boundaries of what’s possible in narrative creation.
Creative Talent Development and Training: Beyond technological integration, our project examines the evolving skill sets crucial for creative professionals in an AI-augmented future. The iterative process of developing these BL short stories and chapters offers invaluable insights into the future of digital publishing, narrative design, and film production workflows. We emphasize the critical importance of digital literacy, advanced storytelling techniques, understanding process automation, and developing proficiency in managing diverse AI tools, ensuring artists remain at the forefront of innovation.
We’re excited to learn about these new technologies and how they can be applied to expand the boundaries of human storytelling. We encourage you to keep reading, keep imagining, and keep exploring the incredible potential that opens up when creativity meets technology.
About the Project
By design, these stories have no beginning and no end. Many stories are fictional, but many others are not. They are snapshots from worlds that never fully exist, inviting you to imagine what comes before and what happens next. We had fun exploring this project, and hope you will too.
The BL Stories. Unbound. collection is an interdisciplinary arts and narrative storytelling experiment. It is part of a creative arts and research program by The Arts Incubator Winnipeg and the Art Borups Corners collectives. This project focuses on two key areas: AI-Assisted Scriptwriting, exploring AI for generating ideas, plot structures, and alternative story arcs; and Talent Development and Training, studying the skills and training needs for creative professionals managing AI and immersive technologies to inform future training curricula. Funding and support were generously provided by the Ontario Arts Council Multi and Inter-Arts Projects program and the Government of Ontario. We thank them for supporting the arts, digital transformation, and applied Artificial Intelligence (AI) research for northern innovation in Ontario.
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