#<- mostly for bl

[zecoritheweirdone]

[slowly pokes my head inside the tftsmp tag] hullo? hullo hullo? anybody there?

i kept seeing tftsmp posts on my dash occasionally, recently,, and like. i was reminded of this really really old wild west fic idea i made a while back? so long back that i don't actually remember when,, because i only really shared it in a few discord servers, and never got that much of a response from it,,, and so i never did anything with it.

but since the tag is actually, like. sort of being used, now? i figured... i'd give y'all an offering, mayhaps?

n-e-ways,,, hehehehhhhoooo au where john john and the bandits are ghosts, ft. my rushed art.

it's been, like– maybe a year or so since i even thought about this idea,, so i'm afraid i don't have much to share outside of a small handful of snippets,, sksjsksjsk. but like. basically, all four of them become ghosts, and then... ghost shenanigans, basically.

[0yorixu]

love for their partners

[khaopybara]

❝I wish I could stop being such a bad luck, so the people I love don't have to suffer or be sad because of me.❞

YIN ANAN as JACK and WAR WANARAT as JOKER official trailer of JACK&JOKER (premiers september 9th, 2024)

[divineandmajesticinone]

4 MINUTES (2024) GREAT & TYME I Yin & Yang ☯︎

[rayandgay]

But I meant you.

[my-rose-tinted-glasses]

I think... I was too harsh. I'm sorry if I hurt you. It's okay.

Let Free the Curse of Taekwondo Episode 2

[snarkspawn]

some KoD/Spirealm sketches

[fan-fricking-fiction]

We are ft. quotes (1)

[cr: Chloe Liese]

other We are posts <3

[usertoxicyaoi]

mmm getting real sick of these censored purist minded sex repulsive ~fans~ watching asian bls commenting on how sex isn't necessary for a plot/show and that it takes away from the story. that showing feelings of lust and sexual desire and acting upon those feelings isn't right. is it really that incomprehensible that .. you know .. maybe, just maybe, we can also be sexual beings too that get horny and wanna fuck just because, i don't know, we want to? my god, why can't we asians just have nice things without all this nonsense and over the top critical analysis of our sexuality.

my thing with this all, as someone who doesn't watch thai bls as often, if at all, now, compared to jbls is that there are so many mature/high heat jbls out there (the novelist, the end of the world with you and my personal weatherman, just to name a few) that just tend to treat sex as something that's enjoyed. as something that 2 people do as an expression of lust and desire, just because they want to fuck each other, despite how shitty or bad or toxic (or not) one character may be. they allow room for that sexual desire to be explored, bc, you know, we as humans can be reckless like that!!! and recent thai bls are also going about this approach too! and it should be welcomed! and yet .... there are people out there shaming this notion. and if that's still the case, how is progress ever going to be made?

[gunsatthaphan]

something 🏳️‍🌈 is happening..

[pharawee]

"I’ll agree to be your fake boyfriend if you can land a punch on me within the next five minutes."

—WANDEE GOODDAY · วันดีวิทยา · 4 May 2024

[sherrymagic]

Tan/New being iconic in Episode 10 DEAD FRIEND FOREVER (2023-2024)

[lurkingshan]

Thank you for leaving these tags @pharawee! Without getting into any speculation about how Dead Friend Forever will actually end, I do want to address your question and talk about why most of us want to see severe consequences for these boys. The short answer: it's about genre expectations and the psychological catharsis of a good revenge narrative.

To get down to the really basic point: people who love revenge thrillers love them because they are a fantasy construct in which good people survive and bad people get what they deserve. In a world where bad things happen and we rarely have any control, a good revenge story can be exhilarating, giving you the feeling that justice prevailed, villains received appropriate comeuppance for their wrongs, and the protagonist seized control back and experienced much needed catharsis for their suffering. Real life is very much not like this, which is why it's such an appealing genre of fiction.

So how do we calibrate what "appropriate comeuppance" means? This is where genre expectations become really important, because the genre the revenge narrative plays out in sets the terms for where that bar sits. In The Glory, a recent world class revenge drama, we were in the psychological thriller genre, so revenge came in the form of Dong Eun playing mind games with her bullies until they destroyed their own lives. No murder necessary. Dead Friend Forever, however, is in the horror genre, and specifically began its story by planting itself in the slasher subgenre, giving us a masked killer and setting up expectations that these boys are being hunted. When you watch a slasher, you come in with the mindset that most of the characters are going to die and begin rooting for it and looking for reasons why they "deserve" it. And typically, in a slasher, it takes very little for a character to "deserve" a death--you often see people die for the tiniest infractions, like making a rude comment, telling a bad joke, or having sex. But DFF went much farther than that and gave us a multi episode flashback in which we got a detailed accounting of every wrong this group of boys committed against Non, increasing the audience's bloodlust and conviction that these boys needed to pay.

So why do so many of us want the bullies to die? Because the genre demands it, and the story set the audience up to expect it from the outset. I have seen some discussion of the way the show is blending different horror subgenres and not sticking strictly to typical slasher conventions, and that's true, and expected. Slashers are usually two hours max, and this show needed to fill 10+ hours of content, so it's doing a really interesting blend of slasher, mystery, psychological thriller, and other horror subgenres. But the bones of the story still hold, and despite the storytelling choice to give the villains some nuance and fleshed out motivations for their behavior, they are still villains who destroyed Non's life. If you're feeling overly sympathetic to any of these boys at present, I encourage you to go back and remind yourself how they behaved in the early episodes of this story, which took place after the events of the flashbacks. These are not genuinely remorseful kids who made minor mistakes and then got their acts together and became upstanding citizens; they just want to move on and avoid blame and accountability for what they did, while Non's entire family was irrevocably destroyed by their actions.

If this story ends without Por, Tee, Top, Fluke, Jin, and Phee suffering genre appropriate consequences for their choices that harmed and betrayed Non, it will be a letdown and many will feel unsatisfied. In real life, we may believe that forgiveness is the right path, and we know that Buddhism teaches unconditional forgiveness. But this is not real life. This is a fantasy genre that is specifically meant to provide an escape from the constraints of real life morality and obligations. No one wants to show up to a fantasy party only to receive a moral scolding. The most disappointing thing a revenge narrative can do is wimp out on delivering the actual revenge.

[heretherebedork]

Do you know what's wild to think about? It was four years ago that I first talked to someone else about watching The Untamed and tried to convince my friends to watch it and completely failed and came here to start yelling about my newest fandom because I'd seen gifs here and figured it was a good place to share.

Four years ago, I had no idea what BL was and had never watched a show in Thai and was only just starting to watch more subtitled shows after a long break from anime.

And now here I am, in my little corner of this fandom, 500+ shows under my belt, new friends, new issues, a whole boatload of meta, just as many gifs and so much joy that I struggle sometimes not to just tell every person I meet about how great these shows are.

And I love it here. Even with the struggles, even with the people who approach this fandom so, so differently than I do, even with the shows and fandom reactions that have broken my brain... I have found so much joy here. From friends found and kept to friends lost to anons of every flavor to new shows and old shows and all the tropes I've come to love... it's been a fascinating journey and I hope to stay on it for as long as I can.

So what I mean is... thank you. This fandom is big and beautiful and ugly and scary and wonderful and a gift and it has given me so much and I hope I've given just as much back and I wish some people found it easier to disagree but I've also learned just as much from that as I've learned from sharing joy and I love so many of you.

Four years.

Four years.

So many shows, so many boys, so much queer joy, so much queer love and so much more is always coming.

[divineandmajesticinone]

LET FREE THE CURSE OF TAEKWONDO I EP. 04 Are you okay? No, I'm not.

[my-rose-tinted-glasses]

Peaceful property is a bl even if it's not. It's also about so many other things although not really delivering on a consistent message.

I thought about adding my thoughts to this thread but it was getting long and I started to get sidetracked so I decided to just make my own post about it and share my thoughts on it. @lurkingshan @bengiyo and @twig-tea all made good point about why this show is faltering with its own themes, and @respectthepetty made a compelling argument that the show knows what its doing.

I think no one is wrong and I land somewhere in the middle with it. As in, depending on what I choose to care about. Much like @respectthepetty, I am bias about this show. For different reasons tho. I like Tay and New a lot so I lead with that instead of my critical thinking. just as a personal aside, I tend to do this when my brain and heart don't align. I ignore when my brain tells me that the show is doing something wrong so that I can enjoy the rest. This works particularly well with QL for some reason. I am after all a person who liked Dangerous Romance even when my brain kept trying to damper my enjoyment with logic. And also sometimes I'm a hypocrite and there's no reason for why I like a show and not another. Ok, there's usually a reason but it's most often not a good one, or a rational one at least. That's just how it is.

Anyway. Because of all the excellent points made by that post I decided to fully engage my brain and I've been thinking about what this show is trying to say and I agree that unfinished business is the main thing in the ghost stories but I would have to shut off my brain completely to not see how class factors into all of it as well.

The ghosts up until now, except the chef, were all lower class and one can argue that it played a part in how they died or what happened after. I'm not including episode 7 for reasons that I will explain in a bit. Even if Ride's unfinished business was about love, the fact that he was the only rider doing deliveries in the rain, at least to me, read as he was driven by the need to make money in the first place. Even in the chef's case, the customer that Peach basically poisoned was rich and it was a part of the headlines about it and the reason for the restaurant getting shut down. Also most of the individual stories didn't get deep into these issues, case of the week usual issues, but it was always an underlying theme. Also as @twig-tea said all the parallels work even better because this disparity also exists between Home and Peach.

All this gets me to how I started this post. This is a bl even if it isn't. The choice to include the tragic bl storyline in the middle of this, in my own brain, can only be explained if I believe this is a bl. (The tragic bit was thematically consistent with this show.) Specifically a gmmtv bl. Cause ultimately they have a tendency to forsake narrative consistency if it stops serving the main romance. It's also the only way I can explain having a bl pair mirroring the other bl pair on screen. So in that way it's consistent with gmmtv. Just brush aside anything that can get in the way of the couple not having a happy ending. This is also how I explain my biggest issue with it. Pangpang. She's the shipper. She's been the shipper from basically the start.

Home basically killed her brother, why would she be the driving force in getting him forgiven? Because of my previously admitted bias, I forgave Home almost immediately. It's New and he didn't mean it, it was an accident and he wanted to call for help and do the right thing but his family interfered and.... I could come up with a lot of reasons because I want to forgive him. So everything else can be ignored. But all this obviously doesn't apply to Pang. So it can only be the bl in the not a bl show.

Now, on full brainy mode, this last episode makes no sense with everything else this show has been saying until now. They used a branded pair to ignore any class disparity between our mains, since the last ghost story didn't really parallel that, and over the forgiveness part, and jump straight into Peach has forgiven Home and will probably now become his saviour. Don't even get me started on the fact that Peach is still broke but saving the rich dude that turned his life to crap will be the most important thing right now. I wonder if gmmtv has ever ignored class disparity between a main couple and instead focused on the richer dude's drama while ignoring the struggle of the other one, all in favour of the main romance and lovey dovey moments 🤔. But I guess I'll reserve full judgement on that until the next episode.

yeah, so basically this is where I am at with this show. My two sides are fighting but come next wednesday my brain will take the back seat for 45 minutes so I can enjoy Tay and New and after that maybe I'll think about it some more.