What is GL (Girls' Love) in Manhwa and what categories is it applied to?

Baekhap: Exploring the Girls' Love (GL) Genre in Manhwa

The vibrant world of South Korean digital comics, or manhwa, features a thriving genre dedicated to romantic and intimate relationships between female characters. Globally known as Girls' Love (GL), this genre is specifically referred to in Korean media as baekhap (백합).

Defining the Terminology

The term baekhap is the accepted Korean word for the genre. It is a direct semantic loan from the Japanese term yuri (百合), which literally translates to "lily."

While GL, baekhap, and yuri are often used interchangeably across global media platforms to denote stories with female-female romance, baekhap is the established norm among Korean fans for domestic media like webtoons and web novels.

Scope and Themes

The Girls' Love genre is expansive and not confined to manhwa, appearing across manga, anime, novels, and web series. GL stories span a wide spectrum of tones and narratives:

1. Stories often explore complex emotional connections, romantic conflicts, and profound character development.
2. Many works focus on lighthearted, straightforward, and affectionate romantic narratives.
3. Baekhap frequently serves as a subgenre combined with other categories, leading to hybrid narratives such as "GL / Fantasy," "GL / School Life," or "GL / Action." The genre also includes stories that focus on explicit content.

The Rise of Baekhap in the Webtoon Era

The genre flourished on digital platforms that offered creators space to publish content with fewer traditional censorship restrictions. One of the most important of these platforms was Lezhin Comics, which established a reward program for authors when many others uploaded their work for free (these authors never received any kind of compensation other than exposure).

In the mid-to-late 2000s, Korean online communities adopted the term baekhap from the Japanese word yuri, thereby facilitating access to and understanding of this well-established term, all while keeping the core concept as simple as possible.

This early foundation led to a crucial Mainstream Push in the early 2010s. Webtoon platforms expanded, and the growing interest in niche genres paved the way for professional and serious publication. By the mid-2010s, this legitimization allowed a distinct group to create their own narratives, solidifying baekhap as a staple genre in the vibrant webtoon landscape.

Categorization and Influential Titles

Industry Categorization

On South Korean webtoon and web novel platforms, baekhap manhwa are primarily categorized under the umbrella term BL / GL (Boys' Love / Girls' Love). Within this grouping, the specific tag GL (Girls' Love) is used to narrow the focus to female-female relationships.

Used as a Subgenre

While Baekhap (Girls' Love / GL) is a specific genre of romance, its function in modern webtoon tagging is often as a subgenre or descriptive label. This is particularly true when the relationship between the female characters isn't the sole focus of the work, allowing it to be combined with a broader narrative category, such as "GL / Action" or "GL / Sci-Fi." This usage specifies the romantic pairing while the other tag denotes the primary plot and setting.

Landmark Baekhap Titles

Several influential series helped define and popularize the baekhap genre in Korean webtoons:

1. What Does the Fox Say?: Considered a landmark GL webtoon, this series by Team Gaji explores the mature office romance between a new employee and her prickly boss.
2. Fluttering Feelings: A highly praised classic that was instrumental in building the GL fanbase, revolving around the developing relationship between two roommates.
3. Her Tale of Shim Chong: An award-winning historical drama celebrated for its powerful storytelling and beautiful art, reimagining a classic Korean folk tale as a romance between a queen and her handmaiden.

Why doesn't the male-male romance genre in Korean manhwa have a distinct Korean term like baekhap?

Boys' Love (BL) was adopted as a universal English abbreviation that gained traction from its Japanese origins, which Korean platforms readily embraced for marketing reasons and recognition. The reasoning was simple: If it works, why change it? In contrast, baekhap (백합) was an intentional Korean semantic translation of the Japanese yuri ("lily"). This step was taken to provide the female-female romance genre (also known as GL) with its own distinct, recognizable identity and cultural marker within the burgeoning Korean digital comics scene.