That is a map of known boylove short dramas. Every dot is a series, and the lines between them are their relationships.

It is computed based on their dialogues from episode 1 to the last one.

What do the colours mean

  • Purple = similar plot. The two titles tell the same story: the same central setup and the same main beats, even when the names, the sport or the setting differ. The dialogues are too similar.
  • Blue = same formula. They run on the same story engine (rivals + forced cohabitation, mafia + captive, pregnancy + billionaire reveal), without being the same plot.

Exact duplicates = the same show exists twice with different name.

How each link is proven

Similar plot is the strict one. Each series is first reduced to a generic template: every character name, species and place is stripped and replaced with a role, so what remains is only the causal shape of the story. A language model is then shown that template next to its dozen closest candidates and asked one question — do these share the premise and the beats, or only a genre? Sharing “both are hockey” is explicitly not enough. It is why a hockey drama can sit next to a mafia one when the trap and the payoff are the same, and why two hockey dramas can stay apart when they are not.

Same formula is the opposite: deterministic, no model, no judgement. Every title carries a handful of archetype codes, and two titles link when they share three of them, or two, when one of those is an identity trope such as ice-hockey, mafia, omegaverse or pregnancy.

The names over the clusters

Each island is labelled with the two tropes most of its members share: something like MEDICAL-DEBT / DEBT-BONDAGE or ENEMIES-TO-LOVERS / ICE-HOCKEY.

Genres are deliberately not used for this because “Fantasy” or “Angst” describes a shelf, not the shape of a story. Tropes that appear in more than a fifth of the library are skipped too, because a label every title carries distinguishes nothing.

Islands are placed so that neighbouring clusters share a theme: the mafia ones sit together, the time-travel ones next to each other.

The ring around the outside

The dots in the outer ring are the titles that have no relative at all in this library. They are not broken: they are the genuinely one-of-a-kind ones, and the ring is the honest answer to “is everything connected?”. Sometimes they are there because the dialogues are hard to transcribe. Sometimes the algorithm to classify these all requires fine tuning or hand-holding so I tend to watch the “rim of loneliness” a lot.

How to use it

  • Click a dot to select it and light up its connections.
  • Double-click a dot (or long-press on a phone) to open its card: poster, description, tags, its spoiler digest behind a toggle, and everything it is connected to.
  • Inside the card, clicking any related title moves the map to it and opens its card in turn — you can walk the whole constellation that way.
  • The address bar follows you. Every card has its own link, so you can share “look at everything similar to this”.
  • Double-click empty space to zoom in, Fit to see the whole thing again, and the search box to jump to a title.

What it does not do

It is not perfect. The model judges a shortlist of twelve candidates, so an occasional near-miss gets linked and an occasional real pair is missed. Categories are re-done as the knowledge of new series grows.

Posters belong to the series themselves; the descriptions are written from their own dialogue.

Keeping it current

New titles are transcribed, tagged, described and fitted into the map automatically as I know about their existence. The page you are reading a map from may be up to fifteen minutes behind the my own knowledge; reload and it catches up.

If you enjoy the map, or it saved you from starting a drama you had already seen: buy me a coffee ☕. No account, no subscription.