#Man suang spoilers

[mileapo]

CHATRA & KHEM ManSuang (2023)

[workinclass]

I leave Ruang in your care, Maestro.

And I leave the country in your care, Khun Luang.

[womanonthehill]

Apo Nattawin as Khem in Man Suang

[nuwildcat]

Okay, so I noticed something in Man Suang that got me really excited. First and foremost here there be spoilers so if you haven't seen it you should not read under the cut.

Let's talk about how they managed to make Hong appear dead, cause it got my nerdy self excited.

So we start with our ill fated dinner and we see Khem pouring tea for both Khun Wichiendej and Hong. On the first watch through this kinda gets lost in all the drama but I did note it going, wait he poured for both of them.

Weirdly, noticing that made my brain more convinced that Hong actually died for a smidge longer than I would like to admit, but I had hopes. And luckily enough I was mistaken.

Toward the end of the film we get an awesome stitching together of past events that steps us through the shenanigans that were pulled to make sure that Hong came out of that dinner alive.

But as much as I love the kitchen aunties uniting to save their young master, that's not the part that got me all excited, it was this moment:

Khem pours the teapot and magically we get two teas. This is where on my rewatch I sat up and went:

I KNOW WHAT THAT IS! It's an assassin's teapot!

What's that you ask? OH JUST THE COOLEST TEAPOT EVER. (I assume my Irish ancestors would have loved to pull this one out if they ever got their hands on one).

Basically the teapot literally contains two teas, that with skill and precision you can pour one after the other, allowing you to poison someone and not another.

There's a youtube video on this if you would like to watch it here.

So what does that mean? Well, Khem had to train with the teapot, which we saw in the flashback explanations. (I cannot gif team, it's not a skill I have).

BUT THIS MOMENT HERE, like there are wild amounts of trust happening between Hong and Khem here that make me feel all the things. These boys get thrown together by circumstances and Hong trusts Khem to not fuck this up in the moment.

AND I REALLY ENCOURAGE YOU TO WATCH THE VIDEO CAUSE FUCKING THIS UP WOULD BE EASY.

These pots aren't easy to use and they take skill. If they had fucked up they would have imitated death for one of the most powerful men in the country at that moment.

WOW, just wow.

Anyway that's the Irish lady ranting about cool teapots in a Thai historical movie.

💜'Cat out

[morose-marble]

I can't stop thinking about Khem and his relationship to sex as power and where it lies in relation to his own experience of sexuality. I also can't stop writing rambly, unstructured nonsense.

As we know, there's no explicit indication as to how Khem identifies sexuality-wise, other than subtle hints that Chatra's positive attention pleases him somehow (the repeating of 'you did a good job today', the very slight smile and perplexed pause at Chatra's admission that he just wanted to spend time with him, and finally, his frankly reckless trust in Chatra in the tree). And of course, 19th century understanding of 'sexual identity' as a character trait was different from the present.

I would have been interested in seeing more of Khem's perspective of his own sexual identity, considering that there was a scene that addressed homophobia directly. The fight that broke out was essentially used as a plot device to get him alone with Chatra, so I'm intrigued as to why they chose to emphasise homophobic rhetoric, when it seems that it isn't really presented as the issue. In Khem's case, class always trumps everything else.

All instances of Khem's sexuality we see are completely predicated on exploitation, with no suggestion at all as to what Khem's experience is beyond that. He has sympathy for the courtesans, because he understands what it is like to be reduced to the value of the pleasure to be derived from one's body. The first encounter with Phraya Wichiendej and the Inao performance, combined with the opening scene of the film, establish (to me at least) that he is practiced at recognising men's desire to 'have' him in a sexual sense, but perhaps more importantly, to exact class-facilitated power over him (he isn't really in a position to refuse). The way he smiles up at Wichiendej upon greeting him, the tone of voice he uses, come off as deliberately deferential in a way he has learned strokes the egos of men who see him as lesser. He recognises that it is the only tool for security or potential advancement he has in that particular kind of social situation. Tragically, the delivery of his lines during their meeting also holds a sliver of tenacious hope for the compliments to really only be for his efforts and not a veiled assertion of dominance ("you please me and I have all the power I need to make you do what I want"). And who knows, this may well have been the case, as we aren't shown Wichiendej pursuing Khem in any way after the Inao performance. We get the flashback montage of Khem's history of being sexually exploited by what appear to be men and a woman. So, again, the sex part of this exploitation is primarily about power, to reaally drive home that Khem has never had agency over his body or in his life. It is his base trauma.

The fight is Khem being slut shamed to compound on the humiliation he already feels from having received a thorough and public dressing down from Kru Phikun. And to add insult to injury, not only is he a slut, he's potentially 'a gay slut' (D.E.B.S? anyone?). He's understandably frustrated and angry, because he has had no choice in the matter, like, ever. What we don't know, is how he feels about the accusation regarding the gay part.

We don't get to see him as a sexual being on his own terms, he doesn't do any explicit desiring at any point in the narrative. So, the question is, how are we to interpret Khem's reaction to the disparaging of sexual conduct between men specifically? That's a big part of the argument, even to the point of surpassing the accusation that he is performing sexual favours in general. In fact, his assailant makes sure to let him know that he thinks performing gay sex acts for profit is worse than being a female sex worker in man suang, because gayness is particularly disgusting. Khem demands to know who presented the claim and whether they have proof, and he does it in a defensive, aggressive manner, and understandably so. Rather than commenting on the gay part of the accusation further than denying it, he chooses to openly defend the courtesans, effectively aligning himself with them, negating any discussion of the gender specificity of the accusation, but implicitly confirming the sexual favours part.

Does he recognise himself as experiencing desire for men? Or anyone, for that matter? Can he, when the primary association he is shown to have with sex is power-driven transactionality, instead of pleasure? Clearly this has been going on for a long time, but how long exactly? How has this impacted his perspective on sex and sexuality?

I was actually quite surprised how much time they devoted to establishing this part of Khem's character, without it playing a more pivotal role in the plot as the story advanced. I was sure at the Inao performance that Wichiendej would be built up as some kind of lech whose downfall would lie in his classist underestimation of Khem as a person, clouded as he would have been, with lust and a sense of superiority.

That leaves it to be simply a building block of Khem's character background, with the purpose to elicit sympathy in the viewer and contribute to world-building. But how does he feel? What does he think??

I know that Apo mentioned in an interview that Khem is some flavour of alphabet soup (not sure how specific he was tho), but within the narrative, they leave us guessing on multiple levels.

My fanfic fantasy for this whole thing is Khem finally being given a chance to get to know himself and have agency in choosing what he wants. Emancipate the lad!!!

[heaven-is-in-your-arms-series]

Khem sleeping with his hands bound and pulled back to try and make up for the the years of proper training he never got 😭😭

[chatrakhem]

chatkhem + ruang 💖

[auseyre]

Halfway through Man Suang and just in awe of Tong serving

every

single

outfit

[fromperdition4]

Three lads, working together to solve mysteries 🥰

But why does this feel familia—

Oh

[crystallinemoonlight]

some thoughts about wan and his sister, and his relationship towards khem based on that trauma

this might sound very morbid, but i wonder if part of what further drove wan to his eventual breakdown was seeing his (only) friend be used and assaulted in a similar way his sister was? because the first panic attack/episode that we see wan experience happens when khem is being sexually exploited in the room right next to him.

i don't know if it was intentional or not, but i just think it must have been awful, to know that his friend is being used in such a similar way, to be directly in the other room from where it's happening but not being able to do anything because you've been taught that that's just how the world works and you can't intervene, because intervening will only make it worse for you both. i wonder if it might have contributed to his hatred and need for revenge, that it filled his head with conviction that certain groups of people were just bad and evil and were always gonna be, until he became convinced everyone had to die.

i do think the cigarettes had something to do with it (opium? maybe?) because it seemed to trigger his panic attacks when he smoked, but there was always something else too that set it off (blood, firework, screaming), and maybe it was the thought that after the man was done, he could walk in and find khem like he found his sister, and that makes me so so sad that he never found peace to the moment he died (by his friend's own hand).

[artpo]

Another Man Suang | KinnPorsche parallelism

Porsche laughing at Kinn singing 🤝🏻 Khem laughing at Chat's treasure trove story

[mileapo]

CHATRA & KHEM ManSuang (2023)

[workinclass]

When your crush compliments you 🥰✨

[womanonthehill]

Apo Nattawin as Khem

[nuwildcat]

Well I thought I was going to do a one and done meta for Man Suang but it turns out that I was wrong. Let's talk about ships and metaphors team.

Water first comes into play right in the thick of our trouble. Khem has just threatened to go to Bodisorn with the documents incriminating Chat's father. He gives Chat two days to do something and then we get this delicious angsty moment:

Chat in full existential crisis thinking back on a conversation with his father where he tells Chat that it's good that he doesn't want to be a civil servant.

And then he says this: But you must remember my words. It is ill striving against the stream. You will be ruined.

Luckily for Chat he gets a proper application of cat before having to deal with more drama when the fireworks explode.

Shout out to Ruang for his stellar acting when that goes down.

But that's not the last time that we hear about a stream and when we get it again, we add boats.

I really like the way they chose to reveal information at the end of the movie, cutting between different scenes to give us the whole picture of what happens to our characters after Hong's dramatic reveal and our conflict resolution.

There are two distinct conversations that bring up the stream, one with Chat and Bodisorn and the other with Chat and Khem.

Chat and Bodisorn's conversation is threaded through from start to finish at the ending scenes of the movie. Starting with Chat trying to turn over the incriminating documents.

There's a lot to unpack in that conversation but for now let's focus on the streams/boats.

Before this conversation is resolved we get Khem saying this:

A steamboat is made for the sea. A sailboat follows the wind. And a row boat can plough through every canal and river.

Here Khem is calling himself a rowboat. The Phrai status he has chosen to keep, turning down the offer of a title and land, is no longer a symbol of his powerlessness, but instead how he plans to leverage and change his circumstances. As a dancer at Man Suang, he is going to build his own form of power instead of having it given to him.

Adorably Chat shoots him some serious heart eyes at this statement but our boy is more than just smitten, he's charmed how they both think so similarly.

BECAUSE HERE IS THE THING. The conversation with Bodisorn that we start the end of the movie with? It happened before Chat and Khem have this talk.

Which means that Chat has already said this:

My father always told me that it's ill striving against the stream. But I don't think so. Now Siam has steamboats that can strike against the stream, wave, and wind, right?

And then we cut directly to credits.

To the best of our knowledge, Chat and Khem don't discuss the warning that Chat's father gives him, which means Khem's use of the boat metaphor comes naturally.

If you're wondering where the relationship that Khem and Chat have post Man Suang stems from, I would argue that this moment, this conversation is one of the key sparks that could lead to the presumably romantic feelings we are being promised in Shine.

Two men, from completely different worlds, meeting due to circumstances and despite their differences, sharing a mindset. A core understanding, that with the right position and power, you can change the world.

Whether you are a steamboat or a row boat.

[morose-marble]

Ah and the tragedy in Khem is really heartbreaking in the tree scene because of how subdued Apo's performance is

Here's a man with ambition and dreams, who knows that the two defining facets of his identity are his beauty and his social class, regardless of how talented or hardworking he might be. His humanity will always come second to those above him, and he is so jaded to this reality that stating it is a numb thing for him to do. He's acutely aware of the transactional value of his existence.