people were voting for the seme/uke in their favorite series, rather than selecting seme/uke independently of most-loved titles
Actually, I would argue the inverse: BL is character-driven, so readers tend to favor series with appealing characters, but when asked to choose the best titles of the year, they try to look past "who's my favorite seme/uke?" and evaluate the quality of the storytelling.
Which is to say, if we did our own raking of best semes, ukes, and titles based on our complete collections (rather than a single year), Masa would totally make the list of 5 best semes but Kizuna would either not make the list of best titles or would rank extremely low if the best titles extended to 20.
(And, yes, I was totally going to propose a Unibrain KBLY vote, until I realized that talking about favorite titles and characters is what we do all the time. D'oh!)
no subject
Actually, I would argue the inverse: BL is character-driven, so readers tend to favor series with appealing characters, but when asked to choose the best titles of the year, they try to look past "who's my favorite seme/uke?" and evaluate the quality of the storytelling.
Which is to say, if we did our own raking of best semes, ukes, and titles based on our complete collections (rather than a single year), Masa would totally make the list of 5 best semes but Kizuna would either not make the list of best titles or would rank extremely low if the best titles extended to 20.
(And, yes, I was totally going to propose a Unibrain KBLY vote, until I realized that talking about favorite titles and characters is what we do all the time. D'oh!)