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I can take or leave the plot BUT THOSE MAKE OUT SCENES ARE INSANE!!!! Were the censors dead?

And then he removes his shirt and literally hoists her up MY GOD.

My God.

Or this scene where it starts out with his falling on his knees literally begging her...

And then it progresses to...

I genuinely did not know this was allowed outside of minis!

(This is a younger man - older woman romance to boot; the actors are 12 years apart in RL and their age difference in the drama is not made clear but it's clear he's younger than she is...)

The story itself is nothing to write home about but the chemistry is out of the world and the performances are stellar (I have not seen Deng Jia Jia since Infernal Lover over a decade ago but she's great and Zhang Xincheng has never given a bad performance in his life and he's his usual amazing self here. Supportings are all so solid too!)

Anyway, would I recommend? No, the script is mid at best. Did I enjoy the hell out of it? You bet.

[ginnymoonbeam]

FTH, 2025 and You

Sign-ups are opening soon! But before they do, can we slow down for a second?

It's so hard to place yourself in the future. It's clear that this year is going to put us all through the wringer emotionally, but it's hard to be sure of more than that. We have so many hopes and fears that may or may not be realized over the course of the year. For some of us--the most privileged--tough emotions will be the worst of it, as we extend our empathy to those in harm's way. Others will be affected directly and materially. This moment feels like the edge of a deeply unknowable precipice.

So, when it comes to signing up for FTH, what we want to say is this:

Be kind to yourself.

The point of this event is to take a positive action and do some good in the world. But we don't want that good to come at the cost of distress in our own community. When you sign up, please only offer what it will feel good for you to create. Remember that the point of fandom is still to have fun and to form positive connections with your fellow humans. We don't want you to sign up for the auction if doing so will take a toll on your health in what is certainly going to be a mentally and emotionally taxing year.

So, please, before you sign up, check in with yourself compassionately. Is offering an FTH fanwork going to energize, inspire, and comfort you? If so, sign up! If not, it's okay. There are still lots of ways to help, including promoting FTH and bidding in the auction. You can also join us at FTH Action, where we have many plans for connecting fans with activism.

We love running this event. We are so inspired by the outpouring of generosity and creativity that we see every year. We want it to be a positive experience for you, too.

[ginnymoonbeam]

Ossan’s Love Thailand รักนี้ให้ “นาย” | Heng & Mo | Episode 3

[ginnymoonbeam]

I've realized the beauty of sign language. We can communicate even like this. I've never needed to hear you say you love me. Everything you've done for me makes me know you love me deeply.

Me too. I can't hear, but I can see. Thank you for loving me.

See Your Love Episode 13

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Signups Are Open!

That's right, creator signups for the 2025 Fandom Trumps Hate charity auction are now open! You can sign up to auction off your skills as a writer, artist, giffer, podcaster, beta or sensitivity reader, and more! Please see the official post for more info and the link to the signup form. Signups are open until Feb 2.

Thai BL umbrella fandom

For the first time this year, Thai BL is an umbrella fandom, which means you can offer more than the normal 3-fandom limit. This was important for getting BL fandom involved in a bigger way, because the fandom is such a constellation of individual shows. There are 9 shows listed in the dropdown, but that "other" option at the bottom is key... you can write in any other BL (or BL-adjacent*) shows you want!

You can offer as many shows as will fit in the character limit, but make sure you think about what you can really commit to writing for your winning bidder. I'm still narrowing down my own offers list.

Feel free to DM me with any questions, or reach out to the official FTH blog. I can't wait to see what everyone offers and to bid on some delicious fanworks!

[ginnymoonbeam]

This is the last time I will do this to you. After this, you won’t see this version of me again.

Ossan’s Love Thailand | Ep.03

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สายรหัสเทวดา Perfect 10 Liners | Faifa | Episode 13

Faifa is giving me life in this episode.

[ginnymoonbeam]

Best Polyamorous Ship Final Round

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I want to stay here with Faifa. Hey. Tell the truth. Beagle. I’m telling the truth. I’ll stay here.

PERFECT 10 LINERS | EP13

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drunk dorks

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Let me take a shower first. I stink.

[ginnymoonbeam]

I think pretty regularly about the claim against the queerness of BL that BL was originally constructed for and by women, especially straight cis women. To begin, the last clause of that statement frankly has no possibility for legitimate measurement. Even without the problems of queer identity formation and identification that might prevent people from identifying themselves as such, publishers and marketing analysts haven't actually been going out surveying sexualities. My bigger issue with the claim, however, lies in the implication that women ought to have no voice in the creation and depiction of queer male characters, when the relationship between women and queer men has been foundational for both at a broad level (and for many queer men like me, personally).

On my bookshelf, I have a collection of personal essays titled "Girls Who Like Boys Who Like Girls: true tales of love, lust, and friendship between straight women and gay men." I've had a preoccupation long preceding my engagement with BL with those types of relationships. I looked for it in media to feel represented. The ending of My Best Friend's Wedding where Julia Roberts character ends the movie dancing with her gay best friend was an even happier ending in my mind than romance. Then, there were the women who had their hearts broken by a gay protagonists coming-out narrative like Abby in Love, Simon only to reassemble it with a deep friendship. I had to adjust my ideas of queerness when viewing stories from cultures with gender segregation in schooling or more broadly. For me, gay male identity had a relationship to women (all shapes, sizes, and sexualities) at its core. We all lay distanced from macho masculinity and its orientations.

Queer men had a role in constructing many revolutionary female personas and characters that influenced women's self-perceptions and societal roles, for better and for worse. Think of the Euro-American fashion designers, the hair and make-up artists, the writers and directors who collaborated and/or shaped the great models, divas, and icons of the twentieth century, and likely prior (although the concept of queerness becomes a very different beast beyond Euro-America in the past 100 years). Behind the Screen: How Gays and Lesbians Shaped Hollywood, 1910-1969 by William J. Mann provides a wonderfully intricate and well-researched history about that work. Both women's rights and women's wrongs: queer men created them and queer men celebrated them, ideologically and in the marketplace, in a partnership that had a purpose for mutual freedom from puritanical laws and social expectations.

Did they always hone in on the realities of women's experience? Certainly not. Realism, as we know it, was neither in-line with the genre expectations at the time nor a fully-realizable possibility for men who only bore passing witness to their female allies. Witness always comes with its limits on perspective, but those limits are the forges of storytelling. Instead, these men, despite the areas of ignorance, designed complex and empathetic portraits of power, faltering, suffering, and striving, across the spectrum of feminine to butch.

I will forever kick myself for forgetting the book or article or post I read where a gay-identified man discusses how women might not have insight into all the aspects of every day gay life, but they see and create a version of gay men that's devoid of the self-pity and self-effacing irony gay men have portrayed themselves with historically, which somehow arrives at an emotional reality that feels more honest to his experience. That's the essence of BL for me. The queerness lies not in the accuracy of anal sex depictions or relationship dynamics--some reflect reality and some don't, so what? The creators of BL as a genre develop queer male characters that are soft, sensitive, and often without the artifices gay men have had to put on to endure. To quote a Carly Rae song, they 'Cut to the Feeling.'

Women's fictional prowess in writing queer men isn't novel to BL. One of the most notable examples is Mary Renault, a prominent queer English author in the mid-twentieth century of especially historical fiction, like The Charioteer, The Last of the Wine, and her Alexander the Great trilogy, among others. Enjoy here a elder gay man's engagement with her fiction for The Guardian. It's not simply that her books struck a chord with some gay men, they influenced their self-perceptions, influenced the genre of gay fiction, and garnered an even broader audience of support for queer characters, holding bestseller status prior to the legalization of homosexuality.

What's so noxious and ignorant about the criticism with which I started, even as some people bring it up with good intent, is the idea that an identity is created in isolation. Our experiences are not ours alone. We impact other people, and other people are watching us with care. Women have long had an outsized role in producing influential fiction and circulating it with joy over its observations about people and their social dynamics. Why set a boundary for them around queer men, when in fact we have a whole history of reasons to understand one another? Not all women will get it because they're not a monolith, and not all queer men will vibe with each or even any of the stories because neither are they. Still, BLs' observations might hold truths about queerness for some that other genres don't offer.

We actually have a few scholars offering evidence of BLs' influence, if so far limited, in queer self-concepts. In "Faen of Gay Faen: Realizing Boys Love in Thailand betwixt Imagination and Existence" by Kang-Nguyen Byung'chu Dredge, the author describes how in Thailand "gay couples recreate Japanese bishonen (beautiful boy) and BL imagery in their own photos." That essay's alongside many others that detail the relationship of BL to fan identities across East and South Asian nations in a collection, Queer Transfigurations: Boys Love Media, edited by James Welker, with the input of many Asian scholars (2022). I'd recommend it to people interested with the caveat that there's been massive political and cultural shifts regarding these topics in those regions since even 2022. Thailand's marriage equality law wasn't initially submitted until 2023! And the BL industry has grown dramatically.

Women and queer men and, in fact, plenty of people with gender identities outside of the western binary have built up these stories and this industry together. Women's contributions or exclusions of certain gay male practices don't necessarily make a work less gay. I probably sound like a broken record at this point trying to widen the breadth of queer inclusion on my blog.

Is there even a possibility for something not to be queer in my book? Well, yes. Boys kissing boys won't fall into that category, though, unless its played to disgust the audience and discourage queer relationships. And there are instances in many queer works, Western and BL alike, including media by queer-identified individuals, that disparage specific queer relational dynamics or behaviors or simply fail to evoke the full-force of queer desire. Of course, we all fail on these fronts sometimes, allies and queers alike.

What I will say is that many women were and continue to be as much as a part of my queer development as queer men, if not more than. I value their insights. I value how they have listened to me. I value their observations about what they see in me. I value their vision for my feelings and future even if it's not always what I have in mind for myself. They have an important place in my life and have every right to have an important place in queerly crafting BL. If we have an issue, let's do our best to name the actual issue rather than revert to over-generalizations about someone's identity.

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My favorite thing about making my way through a cdrama is the gradually increasing amount of emotional injury I take from the clips in the intro

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Being 30 is fun. I was discussing anime with a teen at work and asked her how much of bnha she had watched. She had trouble answering and wasn't sure how to approach it. I said "better question was who was your husbando" and she turned bright red before mumbling an answer. They never expect me to know how deep their love of anime boys runs....

[ginnymoonbeam]

So… I got a notification from the State Department at like 8 PM Pacific that my passport was approved, and I was quietly thankful and stunned bc my legal gender in Oregon is listed as X, or undeclared, and that's what's on my passport. I'm pretty sure someone(s) worked late to get the X passports done today.

I was already really grateful to whoever in the Seattle Passport Office worked late to get these things processed on the last Friday before That Man gets back into office... and then I got a notification that my passport shipped at fucking midnight Pacific and whoever got that shit out the door so it couldn't be picked up on Monday and like, denied and shredded?

They're my fucking hero.

[ginnymoonbeam]

We are only on ep 2 and demon lord is already photogenically writhing in agony on his giant bed with shirt strategically unbuttoned...