#Dean and Pharm - Manaow and Pruek have the perfect amount of time and as established partners in the university I was cool with what we got

[chibipandaao3]

Yes yes yes!

I absolutely love Between Us - but my biggest issue? Not enough WinTeam and WAY too much side couples (mostly B Prince).

They had so much f-Ing time in this show it’s stupid. They had 15 minutes in a single episode….

Why does that matter? WinTeam had 30 in ALL of UWMA…and that show is longer.

Plus…B’s character is so over acted….and he and Prince have no chemistry on TOP of having such a disconnected uninteresting story.

You can like them, that’s totally fine, but if you remove it from BUs NOTHING CHANGES. They add nothing. All their scenes do is take away from everything else.

AND Prince doesn’t exist in the novel at all. Certainly not as a love interest so why waste so much time with his character?

I just need a cut without B and Prince, without the flashbacks, so that I can binge it over and over and not have to fast forward so much.

Listen, Between Us is my child. My joy. My raison d’être.

But I do kind of have separate ratings for the series as a whole vs. WinTeam’s part in it. WinTeam Rating: 12/10, perfect my babies miraculous string music. The series…has a different rating. Undisclosed. Unimportant. New and Sheep did their best under extraordinary circumstances and I will defend their series to my last breath.

That said, I want to make a WinTeam supercut for myself.

‘Cos as far as I know, New didn’t just direct the series—he edited it as well, and I understand that he had a lot on his plate. But I do…kind of wish he’d delegated the editing to someone else. The mic noises, the music crowding some scenes, the flashbacks that go on for a really long time—much longer than they had to—presumably to pad out an episode, etc. Plus, well. BeePrince should have had their own series. Bee is already a side character, and Prince only has Bee and his manager to flesh him out. I think Tae did a fantastic job as Bee, but Benz as Prince never really grabbed me emotionally. Their plot felt sort of sped-run to me, and I started fast-forwarding past them in later episodes. I don’t dislike them, to be clear, I just didn’t feel much of anything in any direction. Love Bee, neutral on BeePrince.

I wish I could fix all the muffled noises from the actors squishing their body mics during hugs and oh my god New kept playing the instrumental version of Prem’s song in a painfully sharp/high-pitched key that felt more like a horror soundtrack than the uplifting/happy instrumental they played in the locker room scene of episode two. But I can’t fix those issues because I’d probably need the original high quality dialogue tracks in order to isolate and remove parts of them. And aaahh, more than anything I wish I could remove the music from some scenes—the late-night “if I asked you, would you have an answer for me” conversation has, like, four or five music cues in it and it’s ONE SCENE, NEW. I’m a huge champion of sound engineering as an art form that should be respected, and so a lot of scenes genuinely felt to me like wasted opportunities. Sound and music aren’t supposed to hammer viewers in the face with the mood of a scene. And BounPrem were at top form in this series, so I wish they had had more scenes where they aren’t interrupted by a song in the middle. Where they just got to have quiet and New let their acting carry the scene.

(This is something New also did in UWMA. Like, as much as I enjoy the cabin scene and the dorm room scene, neither of them needed that song blasted over them. Let the actors carry the scene!!!)

Basically, my only major issues with Between Us were editing-based. Hence why I wish New had let someone else do it. Maybe he didn’t have the money to spare. Maybe he just didn’t want to. No idea.

But that’s why I want to make my own WinTeam cut so I can binge their storyline when I’m having a rough day and I don’t want to fast-forward to get to them. (That’s not to say I didn’t like everyone else! I did! But y’know. WinTeam. My babies.) I’ll include some of the other pairings when their scenes are relevant to WinTeam’s story, but mostly I just want to zero in on WinTeam. (I’ll keep all of WanTul since they’re the pairing with the closest storyline to WinTeam, and the two pairs converge later in the series, but I’m tempted to play with the timeline and see if I can’t blend them in elsewhere.)

I know why BeePrince didn’t have their own series. Side pairings are a profitable and inevitable marketing element of the BL industry, and I don’t begrudge New for trying to advertise some of his actor stable in a highly anticipated series that was guaranteed to have thousands of potential fans watching it. It’s tough out there, and New’s got a purebred cat family to feed and Boun’s salary to provide. Sell what you gotta sell, babe.

(I’m actually a little tempted to do this same thing for SOTUS S because HOO boy do I not care about the side couples in Arthit’s office. KongArt + TewDae + seven seconds of sapphics is all I want.)

Anyway! I’m gonna make this my li’l project. I’m not sure I’ll post it publicly because I don’t want to step on the official versions, but I’ll probably post some isolated scenes while I experiment with editing. For my first step I’ll try to cut down some of those flashback scenes. Like Win in the shower remembering his entire conversation with Dean and Pruk? For multiple minutes? Win might have relived the entire thing, but we shouldn’t. The series is only twelve episodes, New, and that conversation wasn’t that long ago even for those of us who watched it live. We remember. We got it.

If New needed more footage to pad out the episode, just have Boun do his hair and skin care routines. Literally who would complain? “Look, a beautiful human being. Stare.” WITH PLEASURE.

“Oh no the episode is short. Prem, pout for thirty seconds.” I WILL TAKE A THOUSAND SCREENSHOTS.

“Ohm, do some push-ups.” I’m sure he does those!

“Prem, Sammy, ad-lib an argument.” More Team and Manaow bickering! Grand!

“Fluke, be perfect.” PHARM’S APPEARANCES IN THIS SERIES WERE FLAWLESS I HOPE HE GETS THE RESPECT HE DESERVED THE FIRST TIME AROUND.

So you see, there are workarounds when you need to pad out time. No need to show us the same scenes again.

Anyway, in addition to writing fic, this is how I’m coping with our collective loss.