A lot of games have a route that's edgier or more brutal than the others. A love interest who pushes the boundaries of 'spicy' into 'generating discourse on a regular basis'. Here are some of the bad boys of BLVNs.
Togainu no Chi - Lost Blood -'s Shiki (yes, I am capable of writing about characters from that game who aren't Rin, I'm surprised too) regularly tops visual novel love interest polls in BL magazines to this day. He's ruthless, implacable and dominant – going so far as to give protagonist Akira a belly button piercing to mark him as owned. In a brutal game, Shiki still manages to stand out as the most sadistic of them all.
Mink of DRAMAtical Murder may be the most infamous visual novel bad boy in the west, as he's often the one that people encountered first in the genre. Driven by revenge, he appears to have cut himself off from any softer or kinder emotions, leaving only a willingness to go to any lengths behind. To achieve his route, protagonist Aoba must make submissive, deferential choices in the common route, which will lead the game down a path where Mink will trigger Aoba's latent powers by any means necessary, no matter how non-consensual.
But DRAMAtical Murder is famous for a number of reasons, and one of those reasons is that it has not one, but three problematic men to throw at Aoba, and that's not even including the bad ends for the other love interests. Virus and Trip are a pair of yakuza thugs who seem to have taken a special interest in Aoba, and their ending – which, let's be clear, is bad, in a sexy way – is so popular with fans that when the DRAMAtical Murder stage play was put on for a second time in Tokyo, it was included as one of the possible endings on offer.
Still within the realms of NITRO CHiRAL, Slow Damage offers Madarame, a character whose route unlocks after the first two love interests have been completed. Some of the motifs that first showed up with with Shiki make their comeback here, such as the bad boy forcing the protagonist under a shower spray against his will. Madarame is possessive and violent, and his dynamic with protagonist Towa sizzles with heat.
Sorcerer's Choice: Angel or Demon? gives us Lobelia, and you can't get much more bad boy than a literal demon, especially one who turns up in in angel route even more troublesome and tempting than he is in his own story. He cares for protagonist Lucil when Lucil falls ill, but make no mistake – any heart of gold this guy might have is buried under several extremely filthy bad ends. What's not to love about a game that has numerous endings where you debauch an angel?
Though he's rough around the edges, Lkyt's Yael is actually the softest bad boy on this list. Cynical to a fault yet brave, the grimmest scene that shows what he's ruthlessly capable of when required actually appears in another character's route, and oh boy it's a doozy.