#Of course its quasi incest romance

[gnometa233]

@lesbianholster

losing my mind at this

[if-i-was-a-cucumber]

gen 4 is literally on our doorstep

I said it! I’m using proper capitalization and everything. As per how the GMMTV generations tend to go, with 2-3 years per generation, Gen-3 has ended and we are now entering Gen-4. (If you have no idea what I’m talking about and would like to know, see this post.)

Here’s a bunch of patterns I’ve noticed! I’m very much a rambler, though, so there will be a TL;DR at the bottom for anyone who doesn’t like long analyses.

Thailand loves Japan!

Checking out Generation 4 so far has been quite the treat. It seems like, at least so far, Japan has completely dominated the Gen-4 series. Not only did we get Cherry Magic (though it’s technically Gen-3), but we’re also getting My Love Mix-Up! and Ossan’s Love. (There’s High School Frenemy too, which I believe is a School 2013 remake, but that’s Korean, not Japanese.)

The casting of these three Japanese shows makes their attempts pretty clear. I think we’ll be seeing more Japanese series in GMMTV 2024 Part 2, with these three as the opening to make the idea more palatable. After all, we’ve been begging for a new TayNew series since Dark Blue Kiss ended four years ago, GeminiFourth are the biggest thing on the planet right now, and EarthMix have a super reliable history of making smash hit after smash hit (Cupid’s Last Wish not included). Using these three to introduce a wave of remakes just makes sense.

It must be kept in mind, though, that the reception of these series probably isn’t what GMMTV was hoping for. Obviously, Ossan’s Love didn’t do well, as they didn’t even present a trailer or a cast for it. Everyone is excited for My Love Mix-Up!, of course, but the whole team is walking on eggshells. They have to be really, really careful not to screw this one up, because Kieta Hatsukoi is a BL classic. The original actors and color coding did the manga so well that this Thai one is going to start off being compared to the best of the best. Plus, it’s a bit of a taboo to mention, but GeminiFourth haven’t had an acting project in a while since they’ve been doing ultra-popular concerts left and right. At least ten people realized that their acting in the trailer was much worse than in My School President and Moonlight Chicken. I’m sure they won’t start filming until those two have gone to the moon and back in acting classes, but still, it’s something to worry about.

Even with Cherry Magic doing as fantastic as it is, with TayNew’s veteran chemistry and popularity only adding to the gorgeous production, planning, and Japanese incorporation of the show, it comes with a caveat: It was recently taken off YouTube everywhere except for Thailand because of copyright purposes. That puts a whole shadow over the series, and over the audience’s trust in the company to do Japanese series right. It also adds to the growing sense of inadequacy inter-fans have felt for a while from the obvious difference in treatment compared to local fans.

Other stuff!

Well, aside from the new Japanese appreciation, it seems like I was correct in that GMMTV is increasing its experimentation. We’ve already got a new CP, JossGawin, and in the boldest choice for a series ever: a vampire BL. The special effects in the trailer were on crack and everyone seems to be into it, but whether it’s ironic or not I don’t actually know.

On Ploy’s Yearbook, while it seems pretty normal, it actually does a lot to break GMMTV status quo. Earth, Joong, Film, Namtan, and Jimmy, all of whom are in committed CPs, now find themselves tied to straight couples for the series, which isn’t that weird. It’s also a more girl-focused series, which we’re getting a lot more of this generation (Pluto, 23.5 whenever that comes out). But it’s also super bold, like JossGawin’s BL, because of the ship Joong and Film are in. Apparently, they’re adopted siblings, but the romance still flourishes. Very choicey. Last I remember, quasi-incest romance is what completely canceled the Fish Upon the Sky spin-off Star in the Water about Muang Nan and his stepbrother Nuer Kinn, but I suppose it’s a new era??

Ploy’s Yearbook isn’t the only show to break up popular CPs, though. Summer Night kicked its trailer off with a kiss from Dunk and Phuwin, and though it ended up not going anywhere between them, it was still a choice they made. They also finally let Ohm get back into the BL game after the death of OhmNanon, and while Leng is super much very cute and I adore how Ohm forgets how to not smile around him, I do hear that Leng has been receiving a lot of really bad hate messages from OhmNanon fans, which is disgusting.

(On a side note, another pretty bold choice GMMTV may not have even noticed they made was in Kidnap. It’s pretty much the perfect set-up for Stockholm syndrome, but I don’t know if they’ll handle it well. But, I think the director of this series also directed Midnight Museum, which was plenty uncomfortable and dealt with a lot of uncomfortable stuff, so I bet it’s in good hands.)

This isn’t everything I’ve noticed (Wandee Goodday’s treatment and casting, the long-awaited shift from putting 30-year-old OffGun in school uniforms and letting them be actual adults, the new ensemble cast series), but it’s all I wanted to shove in one post.

TL;DR: More remakes of Japanese series coming in the future (though whether they’ll hit, we can’t be sure), and a lot more experimentation in the form of breaking up CPs and bolder/racier topics. Plus, I foresee more GLs, or at least girl-focused series.

[frazzledsoul]

Once Upon  A Time, Gilmore Girls, TV show longevity, and Season 6 being the point where it goes horribly, horribly wrong

(Disclaimer: Gilmore Girls content is at the very end, in case you don’t want to hear me go on and on about almost every TV show I’ve ever watched).

Apparently there are some shenanigans afoot in that fairy tale show that somehow has survived long enough on ABC to get to the point where it’s going to need a reset and a massive cast pruning to make it another year.

I won’t comment on the show specifically because I haven’t watched it since the first season. It’s always a little weird to me to see people get so wrapped up in fairy tale characters, but I know it pales in comparison to the ships and fandoms I’ve gotten overinvested in, so I’ll shut up about that now. Apparently the first season villain is now a bona fide protagonist, the initial core couple is getting more or less written off the show, and it appears that a lot of deck chairs are being rearranged to squeeze out one more year of ad revenue.

Whenever a show gets to this point, it’s past time to let go. When a show finds itself in the position of having to toss out its core premise and main character, you guys just need to shut it down before you squeeze out that final season with the inferior replacement character. Everyone always regards that last season as the one that doesn’t count, and yet they always go through with it in the end, no matter what happens. Even if that doesn’t happen, it’s probably wisest to close shop by season five. Because season six is where it all goes horribly wrong, and while the show may remain somewhat watchable after that point if the audience is lucky, it never, ever recovers.

Once Upon A Time is currently in season six. They should be preparing the best way to end the show, not to continue it.

With that in mind, some evidence for and against my theory.

ER

Ah, ER. I’m going to show my age on this one. My first TV fandom, the first angst-filled ship that broke my heart. Yet I feel maybe I shouldn’t include this one, because the cast turned over turned over so many times and people continued to watch the show. Long-running medical shows maybe shouldn’t be included for this reason (I wouldn’t be surprised if Meredith Grey is still soldiering on in Year 20) but for me the year took a sharp turn into melodrama during the fifth season and never recovered. Also, if you are a shipper, you don’t want to see half of the couple you love give birth to their kids alone while the show tries to sell you on who they hope will replace their leading man who became very, very famous and left for notoriety elsewhere. I know the ship got righted at the last minute, but every single second of that season was torture for me and I have no desire to ever relive it. 

Law and Order: Original Recipe

Okay, this is totally cheating, but I don’t care. For the most part, you can pick up a Law and Order episode at any point in its 20 year history, watch for 40 minutes, and you don’t have to know anything about the main characters. It doesn’t matter. However, there were some years the cases and the lineup were better than others, The show’s best season was season five, because you had the dream line-up then. Briscoe. Logan. Mccoy. Kincaid. Nothing better. It stays pretty good in quality until you lose Kincaid after season six, so it’s definitely an exception to the rule. Still, I don’t think it really begins to dip in quality until Elisabeth Rohm shows up in season 12, and it actually gets as good as seasons 7-12 in the last 2 years.

It’s utterly insane to talk about any other show retaining quality with those numbers. Man, I love the Mothership.

And you can’t go really wrong with any episode that has Lenny Briscoe in it.

Castle/Bones

Two lighthearted procedurals/romantic comedies that went on way too long. Brilliant no-nonsense female meets snarky, outmatched man who falls fast and hard. Their fandoms hated each other because the shows were so similar. Which one will be remembered fondly, and which one will be drowned in an avalanche of needless angst?

I’ve only seen the first three seasons of Castle. That said, I always found Castle’s relationship with his daughter and mother to be more interesting than whatever was going on with Beckett. I mean, I enjoy the lead-up to this romance, but I still would have watched a Beckett-less Castle (as bad of an idea as that was) if we had to get to this point. From what I’ve heard, it seems that season six is where things start to get a little complicated, and from then on it gets worse: the missing time, the wedding, the separation, the last-minute reconciliation, the tacked-on happy ending that was still better than the insane plan to kill off Beckett for the last year in order to save money.

Castle may go down as the first show to have its fans beg for its cancellation.

Bones did a lot better, I think. First of all, there were multiple ships and more fleshed-out supporting characters (I actually think I ended up shipping Angela/Hodgins more) and Booth and Brennan were always on a more equal footing, affection-wise. Still, it’s dragged out for way too long, and season six is the point where it begins to get ridiculous. Luckily, Emily Deschanel gets knocked up and we go to instant family the next season and oddly this keeps the ship running smoothly for the rest of the show. Sure, they occasionally have to run away from snipers and maybe-psychotic ex-coworkers, but they don’t need to run into self-made obstacles on the way to domesticity because they’re already there. It’s refreshing.

So, thank you, Emily’s husband, because one can only fathom how much longer it would have taken if the show hadn’t been forced into it. Of course, the show did run too long anyway, but overall I feel content with how things ended. The sixth season wasn’t a curse in this case.

How I Met Your Mother/Friends

I am one of the few people who is actually okay with the HIMYM finale (though they could have pulled it off a million times better) but let’s hold off on that one. The show gets seriously awful in season 5. The writers can’t make Barney and Robin work as a couple for plot reasons, but the the way they choose to have it deteriorate is just terrible. A fat suit and Robin in a hag wardrobe? Um, no. It doesn’t get better when Robin hooks up with the most boring man alive and is willing to cut the rest of the group out for his sake.

The sixth season gets bogged down in that stupid plot about Ted dating the woman who wants to preserve the building he wants to tear down, but we have Barney and his dad and overall it’s not a disastrous season. So it’s an exception to the rule, and I love the seventh season with all of its love polygon shenanigans. I think most of the last two seasons of the show tend to drag because Ted is being very, very selfish with his pining over Robin (especially when Barney had told him earlier that he would give up on Robin if she didn’t want him because he wanted her to be happy most of all and if you’re losing the maturity battle to Barney Stinson, we-el . . .) Given how it all turns out, I think they needed to work those plot twists in earlier on instead of having us mostly listen to Ted whine for a year and a half. So another exception to the rule.

With Friends, the fifth season was the absolute best because it takes the show in a whole new direction and we don’t have to care about Ross and Rachel anymore. The show kind of loses its mojo in the sixth season and never really gets it back. It’s ephemeral and it’s not really something I can put my finger on. But the show was simply never as fun after that. I will say that the Modler proposal really gets to me in a way the show was never able to repeat. So the rule fits, but not in a terribly upsetting fashion.

Dexter

Dexter is a classic case of proving that a shortened season is no guarantee a show won’t still dissolve into chaos because the network refuses to cancel it. I don’t think the show really ever recovered from losing Rita after the fourth season. She grounded Dexter, kept him in the real world, gave him a reason to live up to the code. After she was killed, he got a lot sloppier and it was a lot harder to keep in mind that we’re still supposed to root for him.

Still, the fifth season wasn’t completely terrible, and the sixth season doesn’t begin to go into batshit insane territory until the very end. The show began digging its grave the minute that Debra’s therapist somehow convinces her she is in love with her adoptive brother and it’s a good idea to go chase him down and tell him about it. (Um, seriously? Seriously?) This came way out of left field and made absolutely no sense whatsoever. Knowing how everything ended makes it clear that this was not necessary in any way, shape or form. Debra’s death would have still broken him and sent him off to Lumberjack Purgatory even if they kept the quasi-incest part out of it.

You know you’ve gone too far when a subplot in a show about a serial killer becomes too much to accept. This is definitely one case where the sixth season starts a downward trajectory into something it will never recover from.

Game Of Thrones/The Walking Dead

Both shows are still ongoing, so it’s an open debate as to whether the sixth season will be seen as the season that sinks both shows. However, in this case I think it’s an exception to the rule. 

The fifth season of Game Of Thrones definitely had its worst moments (Sansa’s “marriage”, Shireen’s undeserved burning at the stake, and what they did to my bae Jon Snow) but they all get redeemed in the sixth season, and the show has reached the point where it actually lets our characters um, triumph at certain points? Going beyond the source material actually helped, and I think the sixth season was one of its better seasons.

With The Walking Dead, I don’t think anything in the sixth season was remarkably bad or remarkably good, but the first half of the seventh season was somber and depressing and the show became a chore very, very fast. However, the second half improved things by a lot and the show’s actually become fun again. So again, another exception to the rule.

Buffy The Vampire Slayer

Buffy took a serious turn for the maudlin in season six and it never recovered. You really can’t sink any lower than killing off sweet, generous Tara just so Willow can have an excuse to hit rock bottom and have to go to Magick Crack Rehab. Willow becomes likable in the seventh season but Buffy never really does: she’s bitter and angry to the end and never really comes to grips with the this thing we call adulthood. The show itself recovers a little in terms of watchability, but its central character remains someone we can’t root for anymore, and it’s kind of sad.

(My favorite characters were always Tara and Anya anyway, so I wasn’t that pissed off about it. But Buffy becomes very hard to sympathize with by the end).

Gilmore Girls

(above is a fairly accurate description of what it was like to watch that season)

Man, season six. Where does one begin? Let’s start off easy. How about the part where humble, ambitious Rory becomes a spoiled, entitled brat who seems content to let her grandmother mold her into a society wife? How about the part where the relationship that forms the backbone of the show becomes a stilted estrangement on account of of Rory’s stubbornness and abject brattiness? If that wasn’t fun enough, what about the part midway through the season where we get caught up in the Lane/Zach soap opera? Barrel full of monkeys! How about the absolute best part? The one where the grumpy-but-loveable male lead of the show, the redneck with the heart of gold, who is his typical sweet, supportive self during the first half of the season, discovers he has a secret tween daughter (holy WTF plot twist), hems and haws about whether he is going to live up his responsibilities (you’re killing me here, guys), keeps it a secret from his fiance so long she finds out accidentally (seriously?) agrees to put off the wedding she has been feverishly planning for (more on that in a minute), refuses to let her meet his kid for incredibly stupid reasons (and I cut Rosenthal a lot of slack for what happened the next season, but guys, come on) mostly fails at the parenting thing despite having half-raised two other kids during the course of the show, and essentially becomes an evasive jerk. If that wasn’t bad enough, the show’s spunky, independent, outspoken heroine actually stays silent about all of this bad behavior (since when has Lorelai been quiet about anything?) before she lets it blow up in a massive public confrontation in the middle of the street because she’s become one of those women who has decided that marriage and kids is more important than anything else (WTF? Are you kidding me? Lorelai Gilmore?) and when she doesn’t get exactly the answer she wants (because she has become whipped into a marriage-centered frenzy and refuses to sit down and sensibly discuss her issues like the commitment-focused GROWN UP she claims to be. Yes, things needed to change but she basically handles the situation in the most immature way possible) runs off and sleeps with her ex-boyfriend to destroy her relationship for good.

What a disaster. There is nothing in that season that can sensibly be salvaged.

I’m on record as forgiving the season 7 writers for the stuff they did that was painful. They let Rory be a responsible and rational human being who can fathom reason and accountability. They let Luke redeem himself and show him to be a sweet, loyal, dependable guy again. They let him be a good dad. They also show him in swim trunks and cuddling a baby on several occasions (I am not opposed to blatant fan service in this regard). I hated all the Lorelai/Christopher stuff but I’m sympathetic with the desire to see this plot through and have Lorelai realize that she doesn’t prize being married above everything else. I hated that she was so many girls I know in real life, the girls who will literally take anyone because they just want to be married so bad, but season 6 made her that girl, and season 7 made her not be that girl anymore. Both she and Luke can get to a place where they can realize what went wrong and apologize to each other and finally reconcile at the end. Much of it wasn’t ideal, but they did fix what had been broken before. 

This show definitely is the core example of how badly a sixth season can screw everything up. 

I don’t know what all of this means for Once Upon A Time, but if they do go ahead with the reboot I suspect it will leave a lot of fans unhappy. Sometimes it’s just better to escape with as much dignity as you can manage. I’m not sure if my theory bears any weight here, but I think it’s generally wise to wrap things up as quickly as you can. Sometimes you get a second wind, but it won’t last.