What Are The Best BL Arranged Marriage Manga?

I read so much Arranged Marriage BL I could wallpaper my room with all the rejection letters from publishers. There’s The Emperor’s Partner, which is underrated because the emperor marries his rival in order to have someone to share his life with and they go to bed at 3 AM to debate poetry. The dialogue in this book is excellent and crackles like a fireplace on a winter night. Then there’s Tonari no Marriage which is a contemporary novel where childhood friends of the protagonist are matched up by an app and then married. The book is good at swinging between the two men’s acknowledgement that marriage is just a piece of paper, and their feelings of why does his laugh have to make me hurt so much.

As for the others, “I Became the Lousy Side Top” is an interesting read as it reverses the typical married man/image irony. The reluctant groom is a grumpy commoner married off to an aristocrat who seems far too happy to be tied to his duty. Their bickering throughout creates a nice reader interesse and the way in which their bickering develops into the emotional collapse for the main character was great. Many of the other BL in the database are portrayed by the mangaka as playgrounds of emotional constraints. Even the smuttiest of them such as “Contractual Spouse’s Heat” is used to depict scenes of consent and how that can lead to some very heated scenes of physical foreplay. (This was quite read – my Kindle’s screen has been sporting quite a few fingerprints from rereading it).

There’s this one particularly great pialled off at being blackmailed into marrying the school’s mildest/sweetest inheritress by his delinquent self, and that whole “pretending to dislike each other when really you’re just very protectively charged” makes for really great content. Ore ga Ojou-sama Goshujinsama ni Naru Riyuu is really funny, there’s this one panel where he totally randomly accidentally carries her down the street in his arms for everyone to see while having a raging tantrum, and later there’s this really sweet moment when they completely forget to pretend to despise each other for a few seconds. I also loved Yatamomo by the same author–it’s about the marriage of the son of a yakuza boss and a politician’s son, and for the most part it’s a battle of wits, but there’s this one scene where they share an umbrella, and it totally blows their covers. I love these kinds of stories–they’re all about how love happens between a person’s duties and desires, kind of like how ink seeps slowly through the fibers of rice paper.

BL manga often takes a look at the arranged marriage trope in a unique way of depicting tension and tenderness. One of my favorites is ‘Hana no Miyako de’ (Flowers of the Capital) – two noble families agree to a political marriage of their sons, but as the two boys get to know each other, they can’t help but discover some unexpected chemistry beneath their icy exterior. The art is beautiful in this manga, and how the mangaka slowly unravels the armor of both boys to reveal their emotional vulnerability is amazing. The other manga I’d like to recommend is ‘Konya mo Nemurenai’ (Can’t Sleep Tonight) – a pragmatic corporation heir is forced into marriage with a free-spirited artist, and their arguments over tea ceremonies and midnight painting sessions were so compelling that I read the whole manga in one sitting.

Another favorite by the same author is ‘Kashikomarimashita, Destiny’, which is an Edo-period historical marriage-of-convenience story featuring a lovely fox spirit. I really enjoy how these arranged marriage stories use the plot device to explore the characters’ vulnerabilities through forced proximity. The best stories use the trope as a way to examine power dynamics, like in ‘Matched to the Omega’ which is a futuristic, shibari-tinged, corporate marriage-of-convenience story that follows the power struggles between a high-society Omega and his strong, Beta husband. There’s nothing quite as thrilling as watching a character’s emotional walls crumble, sometimes even physically, like when a gentleman storms out of a shared palace room slamming a shoji screen behind him.