#Peaceful Property the series

[khaopybara]

❝Since when did you start liking me?❞

FORCE JIRATCHAPONG as PHOOM and BOOK KASIDET as VICHA KANNULA episode 7 of PEACEFUL PROPERTY

[namchyoon]

Peach. I'm sorry. You don’t have to say anything.

PEACEFUL PROPERTY (2024) dir. Dome Jarupat Kannula

[gawin]

You’re back. Sorry to keep you waiting.

FORCE JIRATCHAPONG & BOOK KASIDET in PEACEFUL PROPERTY THE SERIES | episode seven

[pigglepiephi]

ForceBook managed to deliver one of the best BL GMMTV storylines this year with only about 10 minutes of screen time 👏👏👏

Imagine what they could do if they led a series with a good script, and got to play more complex characters with this kind of depth!

[danielsarmand]

just peach dragging home away like an exasperated mother

[heretherebedork]

If I had two nickels for boys in thai dramas eating noodles with tears in their eyes and joy in their hearts because they found families that accepted them unconditionally and got to come home... I'd have two nickels. It's not a lot, but it's weird that it happened twice.

[riggerbison]

silly little ghost show putting me in my feelings in ep. 6 & 7

[athousandbyeol]

"and they move like two lonesome shadows on the wooden floor. two tired bodies becoming one with the tune playing from a distance, under the warm amber lights of this room, the safest place in the world. two torn souls mending each other's broken pieces, glueing those bits back together, imperfect yet pretty. the prettiest. two faithful lovers having only love and love and nothing more or less than love for each other." (x)

[maybe-boys-do-love]

Peaceful Property went ahead and picked one of my special interests to explore this week. For queer history nerds like me, some of the most prominent questions in the field are whether and how to connect to those in the past who did not have the same conditions and language for queerness as we do in the present.* Forcebook gave us two characters, Phoom and Vicha, who failed to name or live their queer feelings in the past. Instead, they had queer gestures to offer across time. What do these queer gestures and failures offer to the main conflict between Peach and Home, and what do they offer to us as an audience debating whether Peaceful Property is a BL or queer-baiting?

That ghost story spanned and blurred time into a time immemorial. Using the venue of Thai traditional dancing gave the story a sense of deep Thai history and traditions that are kept up to the present, while Phoom's home indicated early twentieth century Western influences, and a television (alongside Phoom's age in the modern-day setting) suggested the beginning of the global information age of the 80s or 90s. Then Force and Book, finally getting the opportunity to show their true acting capacities (let Force be as queer, emotive, and silly as he is in his interviews, GMMTV!!!), took us on a heart-shattering journey that blended those eras together.

In front of the TV, Vicha teaches Phoom the gesture for love before they kiss. It's not a pronouncement, and no one's recording. It's just a movement between two men tucked away in a private place. Vicha records later, but he doesn't put it into words. He carves tallies into a tree waiting for Phoom to return. Then Phoom does, but he's so cold toward Vicha that the latter can't even bear to look as Phoom tries to explain his sadness through dance. Phoom's mother is looking on as Phoom repeats the the move to signify "saddened," in the face of the instructor's demands for "happy."

The dance is interspersed with scenes of Phoom's mother berating him for being "gay"--she uses the English word! and as @absolutebl explains that's important!--across a locked palatial door as Phoom collapses in tears. Edit: @lurkingteapot giving me the Thai language lesson in the notes to explain, “Phoom's mother does not use the English word for gay. she says มีลูกผิดเพศอย่างแก mii lûuk pìt pêet yâang gɛɛ, where the gɛɛ is a familiar term for "you" -- "to have a child who gets gender wrong, like you!" ("gets gender wrong" as in, directs affections/attraction at the wrong gender).”

With just one chance to return to the dance studio that she believes to be the cause of his queerness, all Phoom can do is subtly cue Vicha about his queer experiences through dance. Jose Esteban Munoz says in Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity,

"Queer dance is hard to catch, and it is meant to be hard to catch--it is supposed to slip through the fingers and comprehension of those who would use knowledge against us. But it matters and takes on a vast material weight for those of us who perform or draw important sustenance from performance. Rather than dematerialize, dance rematerializes. Dance, like energy, never disappears; it is simply transformed. Queer dance, after the live act, does not just expire. The ephemeral does not equal unmateriality. It is more nearly about another understanding of what matters. It matters to get lost in dance or to use dance to get lost: lost from the evidentiary logic of heterosexuality.

Phoom's mom, the representative of compulsory heterosexuality, watches on, but she either can't see the coded evidence, or she recognizes its ephemerality and bears it knowing its lack of impact. Even then, she ends Phoom's dance before Vicha can look up and see the queerness that might affirm his own queer feelings. Phoom fails to live as a representative of queerness, unable to resist the pressures of heterosexuality.

With Phoom locked away, Vicha can't bear the loneliness. Queer suicidality has been haunting Peaceful Properties since the first episode, and the reason Peach keeps his blinds closed in his apartment returned this episode if we didn't recall. But we've had other subtle references, too. Vicha's death, though, was visceral and vivid as he slit his wrists with the same tool he used to count down the days until the return of the person who could affirm his queer feelings. Then, he documented his feeling in poetry with blood. While, Phoom failed to materialize his queerness for others, Vicha could only materialize his queerness through tragedy.

Much of queer history and fiction has focused on these tragic queer figures. In fact, they've been quite productive political tools for advancing queer goals. In the past ten years or so, the culture has turned on tragic queer figures and their narratives, though. Emotionally, I feel like that's for the better, but there's a fine line I'm always attentive to between welcoming empowering histories and turning our backs on those who don't or can't achieve them. It's also a fine line between welcoming ensured happy endings for queer characters and refusing to engage with those creators past and present who use other narrative tools to explore queer themes.

Relatedly, using a branded pairing for Peaceful Property while not advertising it as a BL, nor committing to that status even by episode 7, seems intentionally designed to invite the conversations about whether its queer-baiting or a BL. It feels so old-school to engage in the kind of queer subtext reading that much of the fandom is doing currently. Sure, people do fantastically detailed metas about body language, color theory, and everything else you can think of for BL series. When queerness is not a given, however, the analysis of queer subtext serves the purpose of liberating the characters and the text from the binds and blinds of an otherwise heterosexual context.

There's a generosity in that work. It certainly can't erase the failures to fully live-out one's queerness, nor the problems and behavior that suffering and suppression can lead one to commit. However, sometimes you absolve people out of empathy rather than anything they do to make-up for their harm and futility. Sometimes people are transformed by that initial love, mercy, or understanding, whatever you want to call it, like the ghosts in the series finally being seen. The basic tenets of humanism, a philosophy so disruptive to the rigid class structures the show's simultaneously exploring, and Buddhism, the Thai beliefs which the show's been explicitly exorcising the ghosts with, depend on understanding people at that level, beneath the trappings of social status, symbols of wealth, and even language.

Peaceful Property has taken us on the journey for Home and Peach to understand each other at this level. They, like the audience, have been looking beneath the cloaks of class and patriarchal defensiveness that separate them for the meaningful ephemeral queer gestures that can offer them release from the endless cycles of grief and guilt they're stuck in. That the series keeps finding ways to find peace for these ghosts suggests that the we'll also find peace and love from the alienation haunting Peach and Home. They just need each other to perform that exorcism on their hearts.

*Thailand, specifically, is unique site for queer historians and anthropologists--like director P'Jojo!--because of this question. Its one of the few places that maintained a non-binary gender system into the present, whereas many others were suppressed by Christian colonial law or influence.

[adorablesunshinefour]

I can’t 😂😂 not New asking everyone to report the gmmtv account 😂

[khaopybara]

love how they made phoom look at peach and home as he reminisced about his long lost dead boyfriend.

episode 7 of PEACEFUL PROPERTY

[namchyoon]

home and peach stealing the blanket 🫶

[gawin]

If you don’t want him to go, why did you lie to him?

Kan, if it were you, wouldn’t you have let your best friend go and follow his life-long dream? Would it be right for me to tell him I don’t want him to go? Would it be right to say I want him to stay with me, that it’d be just us ghost-hunting?

Would it be right to say any of that?

[pointlesscandies]

“Kudos to the power of friendship” is actually the best reaction to a failed murder I’ve ever seen

[danielsarmand]

Peaceful Property 1.07 | 1.10

[doublel27]

What am I supposed to do with the fact that Home moved Peach and Pang into the first (and only) property Home wanted for himself? What am I supposed to do with the fact he dreamed of filling it with friends so he wouldn’t be lonely?

What am I supposed to do with the fact that this place that has “reserved for Home” written by the bed where Peach and Pang sleep is the only place Peach feels the ghosts won’t find him?!

If not BL, why so BL shaped?!