 Although shōjo manga stories featuring romances between boys or young men were commercially published in Japan from the mid-1970s, and soon became a genre in their own right, the spread of yaoi though the Western fan community is generally linked to the pre-existing Western slash fiction community.In the mid-1980s, fan translations of the shōjo manga series "From Eroica with Love" began to circulate through the slash community via amateur press associations, creating a "tenuous link" between slash and yaoi.Although the English-speaking online yaoi fandom is observed to increasingly overlap with online slash fandom, slash fiction has portrayed adult males, whereas yaoi follows the aesthetic of the beautiful boy, often highlighting their youth.