This Comic About Two Nerdy, Gay Roomies Is Geeky Love at Its Finest

Meeting your first roommate in college is pretty much never fun. Even if they turn out to be a cool, normal person, you're still living with a stranger in a single room through some of the most stressful times in your life. (Fun times!) So when Chris and Leo meet for the first time in the webcomic Friki Romance, it’s not a shock that things don’t go well.

What is a shock, however, is that the two find this isn't the first time they've met. In fact, they're both huge nerds who have already crossed paths at the great nerdy coming-of-age event: a local comic convention. While this new-found bond helps ease the roommate tension, friends and personalities (and maybe a growing attraction) keep this roller coaster ride going.

Sometimes life imitates art. When Friki authors Yren and Stefan met at a geeky Pride event when they were 15, they had no idea what was in store. The two men, currently living in Germany and now married, had very different lives then.

"…this story is deeply related to ourselves. It's one of the first we created together, not much after our first meeting," they said. "At that time we didn't really know about the existence of trans* people. This story was an attempt to imagine ourselves being males, something that we thought at the moment was only possible if you were assigned male at birth. It helped us deeply to overcome some frustrations we had. Nowadays the characters are not such a direct representations of ourselves, but of course they still have a lot from us and we try to reflect our experiences in them."

The comic is highly influenced by the yaoi (or "Boys Love") comic genre from Japan, but the authors aren’t blindly publishing Friki without looking at the world with a critical eye.

"At the beginning, on the first stage of the comic, Friki Romance was more just about entertaining. Nowadays we keep that idea in our minds, but we wanted to do more," Yren and Stefan said. "We wanted to give representation to other LGBTQ+ [people] that aren't usually reflected in the genre."

They continued:

"With that intention, the comic started evolving with us and it began to show other aspects of the LGBTQ+ community. For example, we show that even though Chris usually uses masculine [pronouns], he considers any pronoun fine for him. Or that he's demisexual. Many people asked about information about what demisexual is, and that is, precisely, what we want. We want people to see that there's way more to learn about the LGBTQ+ community."

While yaoi comics were, and continue to be, a wonderful outlet for queer nerds, they aren’t without their problematic elements, especially with treatment towards woman. This was something they wanted to change.

"Another big aspect that we changed for people to take something else from our work was Leo's ex-girlfriend. At early stages of the comic she was there just to make trouble. But then we realized that women in Boys Love are (not always, but mostly) there just to be hated by the reader. We didn't want Helena to end up like that, so we ended up giving her a real personality and an important place in the story. We want people to understand that in these kinds of stories, women also can be good and likable. And looking at the comments from the readers we receive, it looks like its working!"

Check out Friki Romance on Tapatastic and on Line Webtoon for free! And keep up with Yren and Stephan at on their official website, cereal-hunters.com, and support them on their Patreon!