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Year in Review 2024

AND WE'RE BACK!

Come join Ben, NiNi, and Shan as we talk about the trends we noticed, air some grievances, hand out some of our favorite fan awards, and make some new resolutions!

Timestamps

The timestamps will now correspond with chapters on Spotify for easier navigation.

00:00:00 - Welcome 00:00:55 - 2024 Headlines: Industry Consolidation 00:06:49 - 2024 Headline: Self-Censorship 00:13:52 - 2024 Headlines: Vertical Format Micro-BLs and Other Shit We're Anti 00:20:14 - Festivus Airing Of The Grievances 00:36:51 - 2024 Fan Awards 00:55:49 - QL Resolutions 01:04:45 - Affirmations and Hopes for the Future

The Conversation Transcripts!

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00:00 - Welcome

NiNi

Welcome to The Conversation, the Queer Media And Brown Liquor Podcast.

Ben

I'm Ben, the media critic

NiNi

I’m NiNi, the vibes queen

Ben

And we are your drunk Caribbean uncle and auntie who are sitting on the porch in the rocking chairs

NiNi

We’re here to talk queer film and dramas, with a special focus on Asian QL

Ben

So if you like to dive deep into queer stories…

NiNi

If you like cracked out takes on art and commerce in queer media…

Ben

If you just enjoy simping for attractive people…

NiNi

We believe in simping!

Ben

Tune in!

00:00:55 - 2024 Headlines: Industry Consolidation

Ben

And we're back. Oh my God, it's time to review 2024 before we get to the VIIB Awards, where it's just nonstop us talking about our faves. Once again, we have brought Shan into the booth because we have too much to discuss. Shan, say hello.

Shan

Hello!

Ben

First, it's time for us to talk about the big ideas of the year. NiNi, as the person who loves Thai BL the most on The Conversation, let's talk about how clearly the money is drying up and everybody is having to shuffle to whoever's got something to offer them.

NiNi

Is the money drying up or is it just being funneled all to the same place? Because it feels like more money is getting spent on fewer things. I don't think that's necessarily a good thing, but I'm not sure that I can put my finger up and say that's a bad thing, either. We have seen some definite dips in quality. We don't have as many faves this year as we did last year, or even the year before. But what we did love, we loved-loved.

So it's a complicated picture, I guess, but definitely there's been a consolidation and we wanted to talk about it a little bit because we predicted this in our very first set of episodes, all those many, many, many moons ago. We predicted that there was a consolidation coming in Thai BL because everything just got so big, so fast, and that usually precedes everything's starting to shrink back down a little bit.

Ben

Big things we noted this year was GMMTV absorbing a bunch of free agents and, in one case, basically the entire staff of a whole studio that they now hire to do production work for them.

Shan

Mmhmm. It's been wild. Like every week, I feel like we've been seeing announcements of new talent acquired by GMMTV.

Ben

Barcode is now at GMMTV.

NiNi

That was a big get.

Shan

All the Wabi Sabi boys this year, too.

NiNi

Yeah, those were the two big headlines, Wabi Sabi getting folded into GMMTV was one and definitely Barcode coming right at the end of the year. That was a big one.

Shan

They also got Dimple Fluke.

NiNi

I mean, we love Dimple Fluke, but I don't know how big Dimple Fluke is in the general fandom—

Shan

—He's big in my heart, NiNi, big in my heart.

Ben

[laughs] We thought this was coming when they got Singto to come back. Clearly trying to do it on his own didn't work and they were able to get him back in their house. I don't know how I feel about it. Wabi Sabi is no longer doing talent management. BOC seems to be shrinking

NiNi

BOC (Be On Cloud) has said that they're backing off of talent management, as well. They dropped most of their roster. I think they only represent Mile, Appo, and Bible now.

Ben

Wow.

Shan

GMMTV is the big studio that seems to want to be in the idol management game. And so that's where a lot of the talent is going. What feels concerning about it to me—we've talked quite a lot on this podcast about the increase in output, but not a commensurate increase in quality from GMMTV.

Out of all of the BLs that they're putting out annually, which is around eight to 10, there may be only a couple that actually have really good scripts behind them. So they're acquiring all this talent, but we know they don't have enough good writing to support shows to support this much talent. They put out, this year, a script writing contest to the plebes to say, “Help us, we need help writing shows.”

NiNi

I was just gonna bring that up.

Ben

With hostile as fuck language, by the way.

Shan

They literally went to the fans and said, “Can you write us some shows? Because we got nothing and we're acquiring all this talent.” That's just on the BL side. They've got this whole side of the house of these great, talented actresses and very few projects to cast them in. So it's concerning to me to see all the talent going to this one place that clearly cannot handle everybody that they're taking on.

Ben

It worries me too, because we've noticed a lot less sponsorship deals in most of their shows. One or two shows per year will get the usual eight- to 10-plus sponsor cards at the beginning, but that number has dropped off overall. It's very clear that there's maybe not as much ad money helping fund the production in the first place.

NiNi

Bestie, I haven't seen an Oishii ad in quite some time.

Shan

Right, where did Oishii go?

Ben

If the juice makers have given up, it's over.

NiNi

It is concerning to see this consolidation happening. There's a few people who are out on their own, who I think might be able to survive on their own. Like Jeff is out on his own, Billkin and PP are out on their own, and they're probably the ones who can sustain. Everybody else is either going to GMMTV or they're getting into the other side of GMM Grammy, like the One31 kind of lakorn side. But even that is shrinking, we're given to understand, people are moving into BL because that's the growing side of the market.

Actors are moving into BL who might not have done BL before. Big names got into BL this year, like Jes Jespipat did 4 Minutes with Bible, a Be On Cloud production. He's a big lakorn actor. And then JJ and Tor did Spare Me Your Mercy at the end of the year. The headline on that really is like these big lakorn actors who nobody would have ever expected to do gay shit are doing the—well, in the case of Spare Me Your Mercy, semi gay shit. But Jes did gay gay shit in 4 Minutes, you know what I mean? So that's one of the big, I think, headlines that we need to be looking at looking at Thai BL in particular going forward.

00:06:49 - 2024 Headlines: Self-Censorship

Ben

We need to talk about Thai BL starting to self-censor, likely to reach specific markets.

Shan

Yeah, it's concerning. I wouldn't call it a trend yet, but we've seen a few examples of it in the last few months and it's making me nervous. What I'm talking about is, productions that are publicly saying, admitting that they are censoring some of the more explicit romantic or sexual content from their BL shows so that they can focus on reaching a wider audience with their message. We've seen statements like that from the Addicted Heroin creator. We've seen recently the screenwriter of Spare Me Your Mercy talk about the decision to remove explicit sexual content from the show for the same reason. We saw some of this related to Love Sick as well. If you're gonna do a Love Sick remake in 2024, the one thing you would expect them to improve on is not having censored kisses, but nope, they didn't do that.

So there's this drive and this stated intention by some of the creators behind these shows to create BL dramas that minimize the actual BL as much as possible. They want to take advantage of the market for BL. They want to take advantage of the fan interest and the fan engagement for BL while also getting away with keeping the actual queer romance in these stories as minimal as possible. That is pretty shitty. They're coming out and they're saying this openly, this is not us just guessing.

NiNi

Just saying that taking the romance out is why I left a lot of Western media. I'm so tired of seeing people say things like, “Well this doesn't have any plot.” The romance is the plot, the relationship is the plot and not recognizing that in a genre that is about romance is the part that kind of makes me go like mmm, okay, like yes—

Ben

The genre is literally called Boy Love. (all) Where is the love?

How old is that song? Hold on, let me Google that real quick.

Shan

Don't look it up. But this is what I mean. Like, NiNi and I are refugees from Western romance. We came over to Asia for kdrama, because we wanted to see a genre of television that respected romance, that took it seriously as its own storytelling, that actually respected romance fans and people who like love stories. That is one of the best and most consistent features of Asian drama. And so to have now this subset of Asian drama creators who are specifically working in a queer love space that is even more hard for people to find, even less accepted by the mainstream, to have them intentionally self-censoring because they are trying to prove some kind of weird point. It just completely misses the point for me of why people are here engaging with these dramas. Certainly it doesn't seem to be helping in terms of pushing forward the social agenda in these countries where they're making these shows.

Ben

This is the part that always stresses me out when we're trying to measure how gay can it be and still get funded because this happens to us repeatedly in queer viewer space. Netflix pulled this shit on us where, when they first wanted to go to digital streaming, they set up deals with all of the gay distribution houses. And we got to watch all of these movies that we had never had access to before. And it was great. And we all were like, hell yeah, I'm going to go on Netflix so can watch my little gay shows.

As soon as they get tastemakers—read: queer and brown people—to pimp their shit, they try and immediately convert and get a bunch of normies in there.

NiNi

Yep, that's basically what happens.

Ben

This, again, this is not shit I'm making up! This is what really happened.

Shan

These are the patterns and we've seen them play out so many times in so many places and it's the pattern we're starting to see play out in BL and it's alarming.

NiNi

I mean! It played out on Tumblr. The platform that we spend so much of our time on, this is exactly what happened. The people who built the ship got kicked out of the ship.

Ben

It's been an actually horrible year on Tumblr for queer people, especially trans people. It's a bad look that the gays who make the shit who seem like they're in an accepted enough space are either choosing to or being pressured to straighten up their act so that they can continue to get fed and make stuff. That doesn't feel great. It feels really worrisome as a sign about what may or may not be going on. Like it's only a few things right now, but we're seeing this everywhere else.

NiNi

What we're basically saying is support GagaOOLala

Shan

Please! If you're gonna spend money on any of these platforms, spend your money on the queer platform hosted in Taiwan that actually cares about queer people.

Ben

If you have spent significant sums of money on iQIYI in the last year for two shows and you haven't spent money on Gaga, reflect and then message us. [all laugh]

NiNi

And I mean if you need yet another reason to subscribe to Gaga, their social media manager is like the greatest person in the world.

Ben

They're my favorite person. They made fun of Kidnap. They were like, Kidnap, the show that's probably poorly named, is back on this week.

Shan

Let's just get on our soapbox about Gaga for a minute, okay? They are the only platform that streams the vast majority of Japanese QL, period. They bring us Taiwanese BL. They bring us Thai BL in increasing volume.

Ben

The WeTV shows have been consistently airing on Gaga lately. GMMTV is also clearly trying to consolidate and are starting to put their shows behind the Gaga and iQIYI paywall.

Shan

It's a good platform that is worth supporting and it's far cheaper than any other streaming you're paying for. You should have it. You should subscribe.

NiNi

This is not an ad.

Ben

They do. We are not being paid. But if you guys want to hang out—I'm just kidding. Don't put that in there, NiNi. [laughs]

NiNi

Yeah, but yeah, support Gaga. That's the only platform that when Park Seo Ham came out of the military, sent out a tweet saying, “Tell the world the bitch is back.”

Ben

I love her!

Shan

They deserve it.

NiNi

She is us, we are her, and this is a non-binary she. We don't know the gender of the GagaOOLala social media manager, but she's one of the girls.

Ben

I'm using ‘she’ in a gay way. It's very affectionate.

NiNi

She, non-gender specific.

00:13:52 - 2024 Headlines: Vertical Format Micro-BLs and Other Shit We're Anti

Ben

While we're bitching about things, let's talk about all these stupid vertical TV shows that keep coming out and how we must continue to refuse to watch them. We have already seen one of the shows that [Iijima] was in is going to apparently be put on TV properly.

Good job, everybody, in not watching that. [NiNi and Shan laugh]

Do not let this become a thing. We cannot tell them that we are willing to watch shows two minutes at a time on our phones only. Unacceptable.

Shan

Not only two minutes at a time on our phones only, but only after burning through a huge number of ads. That's how you get to the shows.

Ben

Gross.

NiNi

This is like Ben's whole conversation in one of our more recent episodes about the BL TikTok filter. They're trying to get you used to the BL TikTok filter in like a million ways.

Ben

I won't. I will NOT accept this!

Shan

Because the aim of this is to stop making actual dramas and just get us to watch a version of TikTok on our phones and call that BL. That's the end game here, guys. Don't fall for it.

NiNi

Do not fall for it.

Ben

We are here to support storytellers only. We are not here to make ad guys happy.

NiNi

I think that's a good segue.

Ben

Speaking of ad guys who clearly don't like us, Korea is not interested in BL right now. [laughs]

NiNi

Oh my God.

Ben

We got three good Korean BLs this year.

Shan

At least they were all excellent. I know we talked about it on our recent Hallyu episode but now that the year is complete and the data has been crunched, I just want to underline this. We got, not necessarily fewer shows total from Korea, but we got fewer shows of a decent length. We got fewer shows of quality. A lot of what Korea put out this year was junk, frankly. These little vertical series, these small little web series that are really short episodes and very lacking in narrative. And then they also put out three of the very best things of the year.

So it was a real dichotomy. In years previous Korea was putting out a more steady run of quality shows. We saw a real drop off of that this year.

Ben

Oh shit, did Strongberry even make anything this year?

NiNi

I was just about to say this is the year that Strongberry pissed me off because they made that Happy Ending thing that was neither happy nor an ending.

Shan

And they made Blossom Campus, which was terrible.

Ben

Ew…

Shan

Strongberry let us down this year for the first time ever.

NiNi

I kind of feel it for them because the CEO of Strongberry has spent so much time telling us how hard it is to get shit made and to get money to get shit made. So I was just like, ooh, things must be getting, like, real rough if they couldn't put out anything good.

Shan

Can we though just take a moment to shout out the CEO of Strongberry for putting out his own little story about what happened with that show and basically being like, I told the writer not to fucking do that and he didn't listen to me.

Ben

I did love that. I love that he just said, I told her she ain't let one listen.

Shan

He was like, this is not on me. Do not associate this with me. You love Strongberry. You will continue to love Strongberry. [NiNi laughs]

Ben

He basically did say it like that. We were like, all right, girl. [laughs]

Shan

We'll let you have this one.

NiNi

Yeah, but I mean it's a year in which we had nothing good from Strongberry, and that to me is like, wow. We got other really good stuff, some of it came out of absolutely nowhere. And I think that it had to come out of absolutely nowhere to get aired, because, as we saw when things are in the pipeline and they know about it, they're going to try to kill it.

Ben

Our last big highlight of the year we want to point out is that there was a Japanese BL airing almost every week this year. That is unprecedented. Usually, even if stuff gets made, we barely know about it, it gets no distribution, and the fansubbers are having people show up at their houses over. [NiNi laughs]

So we almost never get a lot of the Japanese BL, but there was a significant amount that was just handed to us on legal platforms for us to support, most notably GagaOOLala.

Shan

GagaOOLala! I started Japanese QL Corner in January of 2024 on Tumblr. It's just a weekly post that I do that tracks the Japanese QL that's out. And I had things to write about every single week for the entire year. And we weren't always having to chase things down in the dark corners of the internet. We had things that we could watch on a regular streaming platform every week from Japan, And there were weeks when I was writing about six or seven shows at a time. That's how much was airing.

NiNi

Now were those six or seven shows great?

Ben

Not always.

NiNi

I would say no, not always, but in terms of batting average, I think Japan did pretty well this year.

Shan

I'd say still about half of the shows that aired from Japan this year were good to fantastic. And the other half were problematic here and there. There were only a handful that I thought were, like, bad bad.

Ben

My favorite thing about watching Japanese BL is that I am never mid about it. I either really liked it or I was like, who is this for? [Shan and NiNi laugh]

I love that there's not all this wishy washy shit about like, oh, maybe it's kind of okay if I squint this direction. I'd be like, no, fuck that show. A 4 for you, a 3 for you, a 4 for you. Stay away from the shows I love. All of you over here, my 9s and 10s. Don't look at them. They're not worth it. Averages are not the most useful metric but I really like that when I'm recommending or not recommending Japanese BL, I feel very firm about how I feel about these shows.

Shan

I do think that there has been a lot more variation in quality with the high uptick in volume of shows. But the batting average is still pretty damn high.

We've got two new Japanese QL productions starting this week. So I'm excited that it's gonna keep going.

Ben

That's it for the big highlights.

00:20:14 - Festivus Airing Of The Grievances

Ben

Before we close out this year, we need to vent a little bit of grief. We need to talk about the things that we were super hype about that made us look like clowns. We're gonna start with our biggest disappointments in no particular order. Starting with the worst.

NiNi, Wandee Gooday!

NiNi

[laughs] The absolute worst. I am so pissed off at this show. I talked a little bit about how pissed off I was with this show in our mailbag episode, but friends, I still have more ire in me about the show. I was so stoked, and the show dragged me along for a solid five to six episodes and then literally dropped me on my face. And that's something that I do not forgive in any way. I will remain pissed off forever.

This is not The Shipper level, but damn close and I can't do it.

Ben

If you want to feel a little solidarity, David was actually bitching about this at brunch earlier this weekend. He said, I can't believe I wrote a whole post for the first time on Tumblr about this show only to be made to look like a clown like this. He said he's never writing anything ever again.

NiNi

[laughs] David's like, how dare you embarrass me?

Shan

How dare you? It sucked, man. It was a huge letdown.

NiNi

And the thing is that it could have been so good.

Shan

Could’ve had it all.

NiNi

I'm convinced that the first half and the second half were written by two different people. That's the only thing that makes any sense to me.

Ben

Yes, let's start talking about BL like Star Wars fans. STAR WARS COULD BE SO GOOD IF IT WAS GOOD. Before you bitches come after me, my very first email address I made is a Star Wars email. Don't come for me.

NiNi

Don't come for him, period. Okay?

Shan

Leave us alone, it's been a long year.

Ben

Speaking of a long year of disappointments, Shan, I'm letting you have the entire disappointment that was all of Sammon’s collected works this year.

NiNi

Oh God, here we go.

Shan

We're calling this the Sammon Omnibus entry in the disappointment list. This year there were four different projects associated with Dr. Sammon. She screen wrote three out of four, and was the original writer for one: these shows were Dead Friend Forever, 4 Minutes, Spare Me Your Mercy, and Petrichor. All QLs, all with her attached, all very heavily promoted and very buzzy.

I'm not gonna say that none of these shows were good at all or had any artistic merit. I actually really liked Dead Friend Forever until it fucked up the ending. 4 Minutes I found to be a very beautiful but ultimately incoherent mess. Spare Me Your Mercy was just a flop for all of us, none of us finished the show after all of us putting it on our list of the most anticipated of the year.

Ben

After JJ put his whole ass into Great Men Academy, I can't believe they embarrassed him like this.

[NiNi laughs]

Shan

We have all seen Tor and JJ in other projects. You are lying if you claim that they were on their game in this show. I'm sorry. They have both done better with other people with better material. This show did not live up to the hype. I did not even finish it because I was so disappointed.

Ben

I can't believe we're saying that Tor was better in fucking Midnight Museum.

NiNi

He was! He was absolutely better in Midnight Museum.

Shan

He was better in Midnight Museum! And he had better chemistry with Gun than he did with JJ in this BL. JJ was light yards better in Great Men Academy than he was here. I'm not trying to shade the actors. It's not their fault. It's the material. The writing was bad. The show was flat. They seemed not at all dialed into their characters. They seemed confused about what they were supposed to be conveying, probably because their relationship development arc didn't make any fucking sense. It's not the actor's fault. They are very good actors and this show did not give them what they needed to succeed. I cannot believe what a letdown this show was after all that hype. There's also Petrichor, which is the first GL that has her attached to it. And I had to drop that one, too. It was hard to watch.

Sammon is kind of considered one of the best screenwriters in the QL industry in Thailand. She wrote Triage. She was attached to Manner of Death. She has a track record. She has all these novels that are very popular and well liked. So there's a certain level of expectation that comes with her shows. But this year, her big year of four QLs, this was not it. Not a single one of these projects left me satisfied. I started the year as such a strong fan of her work, and I'm ending the year kind of throwing my hands up like, well, girl, guess Triage was a fluke. I don't know what's been going on, but you have not even come close to meeting that standard again.

NiNi

I liked DFF and 4 Minutes more than you guys did. We've talked about this already. But I will say that these are shows that they spent money on. I have no complaints about production quality on any of these shows. They pulled up some quality actors. They got Engfah in Petrichor. They got JJ and Tor for, as you mentioned, Spare Me Your Mercy. Bible and Jes put on a clinic in 4 Minutes. And the DFF boys, they put their whole pussy in. They acted these shows, and they produced these shows. They look great, they sound great, but the writing just didn't hold up to everything else that they were putting in.

And they got progressively worse because the one that I enjoyed the most was Dead Friend Forever, that was the first one. And the one that I enjoyed the least was Spare Me and Mercy. Like, we all dropped it. For different reasons, I think, but we all dropped it.

Shan

I mean, it was not working on any level. So no matter what you were there for, there was just nothing to hold on to. If you were there for the romance, if you were there for the mystery, if you were there for the euthanasia discussion, it didn't really succeed at any of those.

NiNi

Let's move on. Because we could talk about this forever.

Ben

Oh, that's fine. It's time for me to go the fuck off. I've been holding this in for months. [NiNi] It's time to talk about My Love Mix Up.

NiNi

God, here we go.

Ben

Before I hurt people's feelings about this, I like Fourth and Gemini a lot. I think they're both very charming. I think they are both real talents and I am very much looking forward to seeing how they mature over the next decade, the way we got to experience with the original GMMTV BL boys. That being said, part about supporting your faves, for me, is wanting them to get work that uses them well. And I do not believe that My Love Mix Up used anyone well. It's extremely disappointing to me that after doing such a good job on Cherry Magic Thailand, that GMMTV released a show that did everything I was afraid would go wrong with Cherry Magic Thailand.

Cherry Magic Thailand managed to make the Cherry Magic story applicable to the Thai context in a way that we all loved. My Love Mix Up was not a Thai adaptation of Kieta Hatsukoi. It was My School President in a terrible Halloween costume, clearly trying to sell more tickets for concerts for these boys. It was embarrassing and it was a waste of everyone's time. I am so mad about this because I had doubts about this the whole way into it, but really hoped that after the strong showing in Cherry Magic, that there was gonna be something really cool here. I had a lot of hopes about this. This sucked.

And so much of it comes down to casting. As much as I like Forth and Gemini, I like them as individual actors, not as a branded pair. I think they work just fine together, but they were not the correct boys to play these characters together.

NiNi

It's especially noteworthy because there were other boys in My Love Mix Up who I think would have done a better job.

Ben

[performately coughing] Aungpao!

NiNi

They put Aungpao in this show and they didn't make him one of the leads. Aungpao would have killed Atom.

Ben

Yeah, Aungpao would have done a way better job.

Shan

Yeah, he would have been perfect.

Ben

And I think Fourth should have played Ida's character.

Shan

I watched one or two episodes of this before I dropped it. And to me, it was just such an obvious case of miscasting. They cast it based on wanting to shove a pre-existing branded pair into a set of characters that did not fit them. And so from the start, the whole production betrayed the story. That's just frustrating.

Ben

And they clearly did not understand the major themes either. They really fucked it up.

NiNi

I came at it from a different perspective than you guys, because you guys had watched Kieta Hatsukoi, and I deliberately did not watch Kieta Hatsukoi until after I had watched My Love Mix Up, because I wanted to be sort of a control, and I ended up in the same place on the whole thing that you guys did, watching Kieta Hatsukoi afterward.

They did not get this right at all. They didn't have the spirit of it.

Ben

I'm really glad you were able to arrive at this conclusion with us. Kieta Hatsukoi is really solid and I do not understand how they fucked that up that badly. It pissed me off. It was disappointing. Chop!

Speaking of chops, how dare they reboot Love Sick in 2024 and then fuck it up this badly. I loved Love Sick as what felt like the Thai Degrassi. How do you make a worse version of that? In 2014 Love Sick was absolutely insane. They had girls two-timing dudes in the same bed with them in their own apartment complex. They have motherfuckers trying to drown each other in the pools and shit. [NiNi laughs]

Shan

And they had sex. They didn't show it on screen, but those characters had sex.

Ben

I get much of the stuff that we saw in 2014. Love Sick may have been adding stuff and they may have been trying to be more true to the book by just making it into this boring ass GL and BL experience, but it just wasn't good. And I was pissed because they went in a cool direction by making Aim queer that was really good, but it doesn't save the show.

Shan

That was the only interesting thing I heard about this remake, is that they made Aim a lesbian which added a little bit of a layer to her desire to cling on to her boyfriend. But everything else they did worse on than the original show.

Ben

I don't want to be super mean to these boys because everybody was new in Love Sick and everybody's clearly new here. But goddamn, the new kid does not match Captain. And the way that they went so hard in making him look like Captain undercuts him constantly because he's just not as good as Captain.

Shan

You know, Ben, the moment I saw that buzzcut is when I knew that this production was doomed. [NiNi laughs] Because that is so not the fucking point. That's not the part of him you have to get right!

NiNi

My whole thing about this is that to be disappointed you have to have expectations. I was not disappointed in Love Sick 2024 because I had no expectations. I did not watch it. From the time I saw that they were remaking Love Sick, I remember, I think we said on this podcast, “Who needs it? Nobody.”

Nobody needs a Love Sick remake in 2024.

Ben

We were correct. We asked why it was made and they had no answer.

Speaking of why was this made, Yin and War had a great deal of fun with their friends in the show that they produced, Jack and Joker. I ended up dropping it because they killed Jennie and I refused to accept that and I left.

NiNi

Jennie Panhan is a goddess and you cannot kill her on your show. I'm sorry, you just can't.

Shan

They really shouldn't have. It was pointless and gratuitous and disgusting.

But let me just say, I did finish this show and I don't wanna be super mean to Jack and Joker because here's the thing: it's not a real show. It is a self-funded vanity project from Yin and War so that they could hang out on a set with their friends.

Ben

And Tee Bundit was there.

Shan

And Tee Bundit was also there. I went into the show and I was like, I know this is not a real story. They cobbled this script together themselves. We're just having a good time here. That was my only expectation: this will be fun. It'll be entertaining. I have no expectations for a coherent story, for themes, anything like that. And even with that bar, the lowest bar I can possibly grant to a show, somehow this show disappointed me.

It was a mess, but not a fun mess. It was boring. It was mostly sexless, which was the most shocking part to me. They had three pairings in this show, only one of whom actually kissed on screen.

Ben

They had our boy Pee in this show.

Shan

They put Pee fucking Peerawich in this show and they didn't let him kiss anybody! I was pissed.

I'm livid, still. They had this great side couple that the fandom was super into. They never actually let them get together on screen. They did not become an actual romance.

Ben

The most useful thing about that side pair is that Shan recognizes Mark Siwat about 30% of the time now.

Shan

I know what his face looks like now!

Hi, Mark Siwat, this is my letter of apology to you.

NiNi

Shan has a very specific Mark Siwat face blindness.

Shan

It's Mark Siwat-only face blindness. And I'm sorry, Mark Siwat, you don't deserve that from me. You were a delight in this show. And I'm so mad that your character did not get a proper story.

The thing that frustrated me about this show is it's a fucking fan service project. So why aren't you serving the fucking fans? We spent 16 hours in this show and it was mostly boring nonsense. They stopped doing the capers halfway through for some reason and just made us sit in these endless plots about this stupid fucking mafia whatever, rich families playing squid games. It was stupid. It was boring.

Meanwhile, they didn't deliver on most of the things that the fans wanted. What a pointless use of so much money. Why, Yin and War? Why?!

Ben

We hadn't seen Mark properly in BL since Bite Me, so I was especially disappointed. I'm still mad about that, too! Don't you worry! I'm still mad!

NiNi

God, I'm still mad about Bite Me.

Shan

This should have been the funnest thing that happened this year. And instead, it was boring and sad.

Ben

I'm so sorry that you were on two of our disappointments, Jennie. You didn't deserve that, either.

NiNi

That's an important thing to bring up. Like, where's the fun? I feel like there were things that should have been fun that were just a slog. Where did the fun go? If this is gonna be a caper BL, then be a caper BL. You know that it's bad if you can't get me to watch a Tee Bundit show. I have not watched a minute of it. You know I feel about Tee Bundit. I love him even when everybody else hates him. Except for Hidden Agenda, which we will never talk about again. But this show didn't even compel me to watch it, which is saddening.

Shan

Yeah, it was lackluster and it was truly only the fan sentiment for Yin and War that made it popular. It was just fans supporting actors that they like, and there's nothing wrong with that. But there's no there there with this show.

NiNi

Shout out to War’s pottery videos. Sir, you are hyper competent and I find that very attractive.

Shan

And I really recommend just watching his pottery videos instead of this show.

Ben

That's right, just head to IG instead. War did good work in Love Mechanics. That's why he's a fave. That doesn't mean I have to applaud everything he does after that, especially when it's not that good.

I did like all of his outfits, though. Clearly he had a great time.

NiNi

Okay, so now that we have completed our Festivus airing of the grievances…

Ben

I feel better. I really do.

Shan

I'm happy we got that off our chests.

NiNi

Let's move into our fan awards.

00:36:51 - 2024 Fan Awards

NiNi

In advance of our Very Important Internet BL awards, VIIB Awards that are coming up later this month for you guys, we just wanted to have a few awards that are just us having fun. And so we put the call out and we got some feedback.

Ben, take us into it.

Ben

We are finally awarding the Girl, You Tried winner of the year. Girl, You Tried, for those of you who have been with us, is something we like to award every season to shows that we think had really good ideas that maybe weren't executed as well as they could have been. We handed out quite a few awards this year. I don't remember all of them right now, but we have selected a winner.

Shan, would you like to announce the winner?

Shan

Ooh, do I get to announce? How exciting. Okay.

The 2024 Girl, You Tried Award goes to Love Is Better The Second Time Around from Japan. [air horn]

Ben

We've already covered this. I'm very happy about the yukata sex, but not about episodes 5 and 6.

Shan

So close to being one of our favorite shows of the year. And that is why it gets this award.

NiNi

Agreed. I am in 100% agreement.

Ben

Other shows that were up for consideration included The Sign, Living With Him, Ayaka Is in Love with Hiroko, I Hear the Sunspot—oof I got beef with that show—and The On1y One, Shan got beef with that one.

Shan

I got beef with that show!

NiNi

I think we made the right choice in terms of the final winner, though. I think of all of those the one that was closest to actually making it.

Ben

A bunch of those guys are in another MBS not-BL right now where they're all playing boxers, hugging each other without their shirts on, and sweatin’ and shit.

NiNi

Yes, more information? You're burying the lede here. Like, I need to know where I can find it.

Ben

[laughs] Nowhere, man. It's not in the Western circles right now.

NiNi

The fan subbers are letting me down.

Ben

I got a couple of Japanese fans keeping me in the loop. They send me little clips and it's all my favorite boys wrestling on the ground and shit in dark gyms.

NiNi

Why don't they make more shows like that?

Shan

This is what I'm saying!

Ben

Let me tell you, Petty's been demanding this BL for like four years.

Shan

It's true.

NiNi

I think we are actually getting a boxing BL next year.

Ben

We are. [everyone laughs]

Onto our next award. It's time to award our Trash Fave of the year.

NiNi, please describe the award.

NiNi

Trash Fave is basically my favorite award. I cannot defend any of these shows, but I had such a good fucking time with them.

Shan

Our Trash Fave winner of the year is Gym Affairs from, wait for it, China! Did you all know that China put out a real modern BL with kissing on screen in it this year? Well, they did, and it's called Gym Affairs, and it's winning the Trash Fave award because, listen. This show is not a quality production. It was clearly filmed on some iPhones with just whatever guys they could find around. But you know what? I respect it because it had a narrative, it had a clear story, and they are doing what they can in China to get these queer stories out, one way or another.

Ben

It really spoke to guerrilla filmmaking, like they just really popped up somewhere, filmed what they needed to and got the fuck out of there.

Shan

And it's a cute little show. It goes quick. Watch it on YouTube, it's free. It's a fast binge. It's charming. The actors are cute. It's a good time. We can't really call it a good show because the production quality is so low, but it's a fave. All of our friends who have seen it had a great time watching it. You should join in.

(Transcript note: The show has since been pulled from YouTube.)

Ben

Our other two shows for consideration were Kidnap and OMG!Vampire. [NiNi laughs]

NiNi

Yup.

Shan

O-M-G Exclamation Point Vampire.

NiNi

I was gonna say that y'all have very different definitions of trash than I do because even though I haven't seen Gym Affairs yet, from what I've heard about it, it is not trash it is just produced on a shoestring. Whereas Kidnap was actual trash.

Shan

Yeah, Kidnap is super trashy. Like, trashy in the sense of, like, pulp novels.

NiNi

It's called Kidnap, but there's only half a kidnapping, maybe.

Shan

Did anyone actually get kidnapped in Kidnap? That was a Gaga joke.

Ben

This show was so stupid.

NiNi

At one point the guy kidnapped himself. Like, there was a lot going on.

Ben

This show was so stupid that I got bored with Ohm Pawat, and was like I can’t do this anymore.

Shan

I could only sustain myself by looking at Ohm's arms for so long.

NiNi

This is what makes it my Trash Fave. I watched it till the very end because my favorite two things were in it, Ohm Pawat and being babygirl.

Shan

You know what I think this is, NiNi? I think it's like when you open the trash can and you look inside, you sometimes find, like, this gem of a thing that someone threw in the trash. And that's what Gym Affairs is. And Kidnap is all the actual nasty, dirty trash around it.

NiN

Ohm, we love you on this podcast, sir. We love you so much and that's all we're gonna say.

Shan

Free Ohm from this trash. That's what I want to say.

Ben

We love you, even though all of Tumblr celebrated your character getting shot again, just like a few weeks ago.

Shan

And I don't think any of us actually watched OMG!Vampire.

Ben

Our friends loved it. They had a great time with Lee and Frank's final show together.

Shan

Several of our friends submitted it and they had a great time watching it. They highly recommend it if you're into vampires that are, apparently, very bad at being vampires. [NiNi laughs] You know, you should check that out if that's your thing.

Ben

Onto my favorite award, it's time to award the BEST BOY!

NiNi

The Namgoong Best Boy Award, which I promise I'm gonna watch Light On Me this year. I promise, I promise.

Ben

NiNi, I swear to God.

All right. Shan, I'm putting this in my resolutions at the end of this. If NiNi does not watch Light On Me, we are not doing this show next year. [NiNi laughs] I've had enough. I have a list of shows that are non-negotiable for the next awards show. Light On Me and Rainbow Prince.

NiNi

Okay, I will. I absolutely will.

Ben

You will watch them. There will be no more arguing about this!

NiNi

Okay, we're not arguing. It was never an argument. It's just more kind of, it always gets pushed down to the bottom of the list, but I promise you this year, bestie, this year.

Ben

Namgoong is the best boy and is the reason why we have this award. And this year, the award for Best Boy who did everything he could for the gays goes to Yai from The Sign. [air horn]

Congratulations, sir. We loved everything about you. We loved your arms. We loved your heart. We loved your wife.

Shan

Mostly loved the wife the most.

NiNi

I definitely had a lot to say about those arms. I'm sorry, I'm spacing out thinking about them now.

Shan

This award is for the best supporting male friend who is all about helping the couple get together.

Ben

He was so great. Good job, Yai.

NiNi

Yai absolutely did that.

Ben

What a mess of a show, but you had a clear throughline.

NiNi

I just loved him saying, “Where were you discussing the problem? The bed or the sofa?” I think that was one of my favorite lines.

Shan

He was mischievous.

Ben

Other boys in consideration were Ryoga from I Became the Main Role of a BL Drama for his feathers and his support of his friends by tricking them into having a date and also telling Akafuji he was aggravating and then giving him useful advice.

Shan

He was a real one. He was helpful.

NiNi

He was the realest.

Ben

Our last boy is Ryosuke from The Fragrance You Inherit, a last minute addition to this list.

Shan

The drama did technically end right before the end of 2024. Ryosuke is the lead’s, Sakura, of the show, he's her bestie. He's been supporting her since college. He's the person who knows her and who props her up through all the hard things in her life, including her gay disappointment, her crushed, unrequited love, and parenting her son who is a perfect angel boy. He's there for it all. He is there to help her out. We love him.

Ben

He is also played by Takeda Kouhei.

Shan

He sure is! Looking excellent. Sir, I salute you.

Ben

If you don't know who that is, you better ask somebody.

Shan

You better not come ask me, because I'll get mad at you.

Ben

On to my second favorite award. The Yiwha Best Girl Award!

NiNi

Yiwha! We love her over here!

Ben

I absolutely love Yiwha. I love that that show, all these years later, spawned the best girl and worst girls award. The Best Girl, like the Best Boy, goes to the girl who supports the boys the right way and is there for them and willing to scrap for them.

NiNi, please hand out the award to our Best Girl.

NiNi

Best Girl for 2024 is Lukpeach from Knock Knock Boys!. [air horn] All she wanted in life was to spread good information about sexual health and behavioral practices, to support her boys and to write non-creepy fan fiction about them. I salute you, Miss Mama. You are the best.

Shan

Yes, support her in all her endeavors.

Ben

She was a great character. I really like her as part of the evolution of the shipper character. I'm okay with them finding a way to write girls that really love gay boys and want them to have a good time without it being creepy.

Beyond Lukpeach, we also had Jane from Knock Knock Boys!, Ju from Century of Love, and Pai from Cherry Magic Thailand on this list.

I liked Pai a lot and she was a strong contender for this award, particularly because she stole a motorcycle to make sure those boys had the scene they needed to have. And then she left. She explicitly said, “That scene is for them. I got what I needed. I know my boys are going to make this happen.”

Shan

Pai was great at knowing the line between supporting and inserting herself where she didn't belong, and she never crossed the line.

Ben

What a great character. This was a pretty decent year for fujo characters in the genre. That is one of the positive things I can say about this year in terms of trope-related stuff.

We have introduced a new award this year.

Shan

What exciting stuff.

Ben

I'm gonna let you award this one, Shan. This is our Bridesmaid Award. This goes to…

Shan

Hyunho from Let Free the Curse of Taekwondo. [air horn] Oh, I love it. This award is for the second leads. The character that can never win, but that still manages to make you kind of want them to and who makes you sympathetic for them when they inevitably lose. I think Hyunho was the platonic ideal of the kdrama second lead in Let Free the Curse of Taekwondo. He is definitely a deserving winner of this Bridesmaid Award.

Ben

Our other two people in consideration were Sangwon for Love for Love's Sake, because he got into a whole fight for the gays and then got mad that they kept asking him for help for the rest of the show. And Kurosawa from Ossan's Love Returns, because this man has not won five times now. Incredible.

Shan

He will always be the Bridesmaid eternally. But yeah, this is really Korea's category to lose, because this is what they do. Second leads are specifically a Korean trope.

NiNi

Good job, Korea.

Ben

We are once again awarding our favorite version of BGP!

Shan

Ben, remind the people what BGP means.

Ben

BGP is a term that we got from Bump Up Business, a terrible BL from the boys of OnlyOneOf, a Korean kpop group whose entire business model is pretending to be gay, and they made a whole show about idols who had to work together in a what they called a business gay performance to sell records, and wanted us to pretend that it was a real romance. Absolutely insane behavior. The audacity!

Shan

I can't believe this show happened.

NiNi

I'm sorry! “Is our business gay performance over before it began?” [everyone laughs]

Ben

Oh my god!

NiNi

I watched that entire show specifically because they told me that line was in it.

Ben

She, NiNi was like, Shan and Ben are just cackling. This has to be ridiculous if the two of them have completely lost composure over it. And she was not let down.

We love the term BGP because it's about the performance of the relationship for consumption. Shan, please announce our winners.

Shan

This year's BGP award goes to Daou and Offroad, the only potential winners of our hearts.

NiNi

I have to agree, there wasn't even a question. This was definitely Daou and Offroad’s to lose this year because, sir, the performance is performance-ing.

Ben

They got a really solid outing with Century of Love despite everything that we now know was happening on that set and around that production. And they have continued to make their music and handle their performances, and they're coming to America this year. That's a huge deal.

Shan

They have a fan meet in the United States that is already sold out. These boys are making moves.

Ben

I'm very excited for them. Also up for consideration were Chris Chiu, aka Modi, and Kurt Huang for Unknown the series, because they went way hard on their Taiwanese BGP. Tumblr may not have been paying that much attention to it, but those boys were working very hard. And of course, we're going to acknowledge Yin and War, who got a whole show financed on BGP alone.

NiNi

That is impressive.

Shan

Pretty impressive.

Ben

All right, our final award, our most fun award. We are handing out the Blorbo of the Year Award. This is for the character that took over your brain and you just could not let them go. Every time someone tried to take it from you, you just bit down harder and shook.

Shan

Ben, would you like to announce the winner?

Ben

The winner of the Blorbo of the Year award goes to Go Young from Love in the Big City. [air horn] What a great year for us and that character.

NiNi and Shan in unison

He is the moment. [all laugh]

NiNi

Oh my gosh, I can't get it out of my head. You owe me a coke.

Ben

Yeah, it's gotta be a coke because you guys can't have any more drinks after Friday night. [laughs]

NiNi

Oh my god, no more, no more, no more drinks, no more.

Shan

Keep it, keep it to soda, non-alcoholic. Nope.

Ben

Go Young was so important to us. He is one of the most dynamic and complicated queer characters we got to experience this year. I am so thankful that despite all of the drama, we were able to get Nam Yoon Su and friends’ version of these characters. My goodness.

Shan

I feel unbelievably blessed that they got an actor of Nam Yoon Su’s caliber to play him in the drama. I never in my wildest dreams could have expected that.

NiNi

And he put his neck, his back, his pussy, and his crack into that.

Shan

Holy shit. Me and NiNi are kdrama watchers. We have seen him in other work. He transformed himself for this role. It was impressive shit.

Ben

Our runner up, who we had a great deal of discussion about and who almost won this award until like five minutes before this recording, was Dynamite from Cooking Crush, another complicated queer character with a ton of heart that we deeply loved. I've been thinking about this boy all year.

Shan

As often is the case when a character you love is misunderstood by others, it makes you love them even more fiercely. That definitely came up with Dynamite.

Ben

A lot of you don't watch anime, but Twig and I were not gonna let this go unremarked. We wanted to acknowledge Hisashi from Twilight Out of Focus, along with Shion, who was my favorite boy from that show. I love that pink Twig so much! He said, I'm going to high school and I'm gonna get me a motherfucking boyfriend. And he did.

Shan

The pink twink!

Ben

I love that pink twink so much! He said, I'm going to high school and I'm gonna get me a motherfucking boyfriend. And he did.

Shan

He did. He did it all.

NiNi

Good job, anime twink. I think there is a missing person here. I can't believe that Ben left this one out considering how he started the year. Aoyanagi Hajime?

Ben

He's not on my Blorbo list. I think about that boy a lot. But does he take over my whole soul like these boys? He does not.

NiNi

Mmm, interesting.

Ben

I admire him deeply, and I think Nachika did a great job with him, but they're getting the sequel, so. It ain't over yet! [laughs]

Shan

We'll get to talk about him again.

NiNi

We're gonna talk about them in 2024 and 2025. Fantastic.

Ben

I'm winning. I might not see Go Young ever again, but I'ma see my boy again this year. A win for me.

NiNi

Excellent, good job.

Congratulations to the winners of all of our fan awards and our runners-up. These are not VIIBs so you do not get a plate but we will figure out something, I don't know.

Ben

I'm gonna send you a cup.

Shan

Souvenir mug!

NiNi

At least it's not a koozie. A koozie is just disrespectful. We discussed this before.

Ben

I know that if we sent Gap Jakarin a mug that said Best Boy, he would absolutely show it on the IG.

Shan

He totally would and he’d pose with it!

NiNi

I believe that. 100% he would totally do it. Maybe, maybe he would even put it next to his bicep.

Shan

Maybe we should consider sending it.

[Ben laughs]

NiNi

And I would have a plotz moment. He's large, people, you know how I feel about the large ones.

00:55:49 QL Resolutions

Ben

It's time for our QL resolutions. Shan has pulled up the record on the things we said we would do for this year. It's time for the call-outs. We'll start with me.

Shan, proceed.

Shan

All right, so Ben stated a couple resolutions last year. His kind of not that serious one was he said he will watch 100 shows in 2024. And his second, which he was more serious about, is that he would be backing off of shows when he's getting aggravated with them sooner than he used to and just being more willing to stop watching shows.

So Ben, you've definitely failed the first goal, but I think you did good on the second one.

Ben

I did great. I engaged with 75 Asian QLs this year, but I dropped 26.

Shan

That's big for you. That was a big mental wall that you had to move through this year and you did a great job, bestie.

NiNi

Four for you again, Glen Coco. Four for you.

[Ben laughs]

Shan

Are you feeling better now that you started backing off shows you're not liking?

Ben

Honestly, yeah, I feel way better that I'm recognizing when a show is irritating me and I'm not forcing myself to watch it for this weird sense of ego. Like, “It's really important that I say something about this.” I don't care anymore. Who cares? It sucks. I'm not writing about this.

The core of what I want to do is, I want to convince uninitiated BL viewers to watch BL. There is no value for me in watching a show that I despise or just isn't working for me, because I'm not using it as a reference to try and get people who might like BL to watch BL. I'm not gonna ask them to watch a mid-tier BL. So it gets dropped.

Shan

All right, NiNi, in January, 2024, you said your resolution for the year was that you were gonna stop picking on New Siwaj. Let's check in on that, how you feeling?

NiNi

I definitely had a great time with a New Siwaj show this year and talked about it on the show. These resolutions do have power so you gotta be real careful when you make them. I won't say entirely that I have stopped picking on New Siwaj. I'm still gonna pick on him if he deserves it. But I liked something that he did this year.

Ben

Don't worry. He definitely deserves it.

Shan

But you found something nice to say about him this year. You did.

NiNi

I did find nice things to say about him this year. So I think that I have kept that resolution.

Shan

We did great this year guys, because my resolution from last year was to be more aware of when I'm getting no joy out of a show and cut it off and not feel bad about not finishing it. And I did that this year. I also got better at not starting shows I didn't think I was going to like. And I think that that was a good and healthy choice and I'm glad that I did it because as we've been talking about, the genre just keeps getting bigger. There are so many shows. We can't watch everything and we can't make ourselves miserable trying to force ourselves to watch the things we're not enjoying.

I'm real proud of us. I think we did good on our resolutions this year.

NiNi

Excellent, good job. So let's look ahead. What are the resolutions that we're all making this year 2025?

Ben?

Ben

I have no fucking idea. What should I do?

Shan

Do you have something about how you wanna write or how you wanna engage on Tumblr?

Ben

I'm probably going to focus on writing more reviews this year. I stopped doing Stray Thoughts but I don't want to stop writing about things I loved. I think I'm gonna push myself to write more reviews and stuff. I think I'm going to start writing on Tumblr more about Western stuff. I think I'm going to start writing more reviews about more generalized queer work that I'm engaged with. That'll probably be my thing this year, writing more thoughtful pieces about work after it's done instead of yapping about it in real time.

NiNi

Okay, Shan, how about you? What are you resolving to do this year?

Shan

I was thinking about this a bit. I think there's a couple things on my mind. I want to continue quitting shows if I'm really just getting no joy out of them. I want to continue being more selective about what I start in the first place. Another thing I've been doing more of lately that I think is working for me and that I want to continue is waiting to binge shows that I suspect I will not enjoy very much week to week. For me, it makes a real difference how I watch a show, because if I'm watching weekly and participating in a weekly discussion, I'm going to naturally think more about the show, I'm gonna dig into it more. And when these shows are kind of weak or mediocre, I'm spending an awful lot of time thinking about what isn't working. So, I'm trying to identify those shows where I just can tell I'm gonna have a better time if I get it over with quick instead of stretching it out.

I also wanna stay committed to continuing to have variety in my media diet. I want to continue to watch things outside of QL, want to be better about continuing to mix in Western shows here and there. If you just watch too much of the same thing all the time, you really lose perspective. So I wanna be attentive to that this year and make sure I'm changing it up.

Ben

You heard it here, friends. Shan is joining me in watching over 200 movies a year!

NiNi

I'm not sure that's exactly what she said, bestie. [laughs]

Ben

She said she wants to mix it up! I got a great Indonesian film for you to watch.

Shan

I will say this. This is my big gap. I just don't watch many movies. I like long-form stories.

Ben

Mm-mm. I’m challenging you, Shan. It's not like I hate movies. You’re gonna watch some movies with me, Shan. I watched a great Chinese film from 2015 last night!

Shan

Ben’s resolution is to force Shan to watch movies. I don’t hate movies. They just don't fill my soul the same way, you know? They're just here and gone so quick.

NiNi

Yeah, if I really love something, I definitely need to sit in it for a while. So I am definitely more on the long-form storytelling side of things, as well.

Ben

A great film just stays with you forever. All right, we're starting with Ghost Dog.

Shan

All right, you can make your list. NiNi, what’s yours?

NiNi

My resolution this year is to finally watch some of the shit I have been meaning to watch. My watch lists keep growing and growing and growing and I need to put some time and effort into actually watching some of this shit. Some of it because Ben is going to stop talking to me if I don't watch it. And we can't have that.

Ben

It's true! I'm glad you recognized that that is a real outcome!

NiNi

There's definitely some things that are on the list I gotta get past. I think I've finally gotten past the uncanny valley effect so that I can watch Light On Me. And I'm gonna watch Eternal Yesterday. Finally, I am gonna watch Rainbow Prince.

Shan

I forgot you haven't watched Eternal Yesterday?!

Ben

I haven’t!

Shan

Oh my god.

NiNi

To be fair to me, I do not think that is the thing for me to have watched when I was in the mental state that I was in for most of last year.

Shan

It's very true. You need to wait for the right moment, but I'm excited for you to watch it.

NiNi

I am looking forward now that I'm feeling mentally better to getting into some of the things that I have meant to watch, but just not been able to hit play on. Like I said, these resolutions have power, so It's definitely happening this year.

Ben

I'm excited. My resolution is to torment Shan into watching movies. That's great. I feel good about this one.

Shan

He's getting revenge because I have forced him to like kdramas and he's mad.

NiNi

You have gotten Ben to watch kdramas, cdramas.

Ben

I have watched Goblin, I watched The Rebel Princess. What else did you fucking force me to watch? School 2013. That is like 6,000 hours of TV. You owe me a few movies.

Shan

I sure did! School 2013. He's starting Healer again. Listen, the truth is that Ben likes the kdramas. He hates that he likes them, but he likes them.

Ben

They're just so fucking long. I just spent two hours on a fucking episode of a kdrama. I could have watched one of my fucking movies during this time.

NiNi

Speaking of movies, y’all have got to watch Paradise of Thorns as soon as you're able.

Shan

As soon as it's out.

Ben

I believe it becomes available very soon after we finish recording this.

Shan

Yeah, I'm excited to watch that one. And I still need to watch How to Make Millions When Grandma Dies.

NiNi

Have you not watched that yet?

Shan

No, it was only on New York screens for like a few days and I didn't make it during.

Ben

We have literally not had access in the US, girl! Like this, it's one of those things where like I've been intentionally waiting because we know it's coming to American distro.

NiNi

It's on that Oscar shortlist, so it's definitely coming.

Shan

Yeah, we need it. It's gonna come for sure. It'll be in theaters and I'll go watch it.

01:04:45 - Affirmations and Hopes for the Future

Ben

Okay, affirmations for the year. Things that we really liked that we would like to see more of. Number one, Kongthup Productions. Good job this year, guys.

Shan

We love them.

NiNi

We do. This is the studio that produced Knock Knock Boys!, Monster Next Door. There was a GL.

Ben

Apple My Love.

NiNi

Apple My Love, yeah.

Ben

They have been a really fun breath of fresh air in the genre this year, and I really hope that whoever is having fun funding them is getting returns so that they can keep doing that.

Shan

They are out here producing original scripts that are interesting and that have things to say.

Ben

Next, despite how much I deeply despised My Love Mix Up Thailand, I would like to continue to see more of these cross-country collaborations. There were a lot of interesting results we got from that this year. We got Unknown the series out of it. We got Love in the Air: Koi No Yokan.

Shan

I loved it.

Ben

We got Cherry Magic Thailand. And we got a couple of interesting projects where it was kind of funded in both places. Like Eccentric Romance, Meet You at the Blossom, Battle of the Writers. There may have been Chinese money involved in that one.

NiNi

There definitely was.

Ben

It's very interesting seeing these sort of cross-cultural collaborations. And even within the countries, Oxin Films and, what is the other group's name? They teamed up and made Haunted Hearts. It wasn't good, but they worked with someone else.

Shan

I'm interested in these productions adapting works from other countries in these kind of joint funding models. Love in the Air Koi was great because the MeMindY team was deeply involved in that production and there was a lot of cross marketing. They had actors from the original Love in the Air Thailand cameo on the Japanese show. It was cool to see that kind of cooperation going on.

Ben

Lastly, and we say this every year, more GLs. There needs to be way more lesbians in this genre than there are.

Shan

And we need to give them good stories.

NiNi

And even though there was a ramp up this year, because there was actually quite a bit of GL this year, I can't point to one GL that I saw or was truly that interested in this year that really hooked me.

Ben

She Loves to Cook happened this year.

NiNi

I mean, yes, yes, okay. She Loves to Cook, She Loves to Eat, but that goes in the category, the same category as What Did You Eat Yesterday? It's eternal, it's everlasting.

Ben

I'm sorry, you didn't think Chaser Game W changed the face of the game?

NiNi

No.

Shan

There were a lot of GLs this year, but most of them had, like, really terrible writing. What's wild to me, and this has been a really interesting thing that we've started seeing in the recent months. These shows, even when they're not very good in terms of the quality of the story, they're really popular because the fans are so thirsty for this content. The QL viewership wants GL and these studios need to put some real resources behind making these shows and making them good because there is a lot of potential there.

NiNi

I think GL's kind of following the trajectory that BL followed, which is a shame because BL sort of set the trajectory already, so they could have shortcutted all of that.

Shan

Can we not just skip to the good content part?

Ben

Well, they did try to make GL SOTUS, so hang in there, girls. [everyone laughs]

That's going to end it for us. We will see you all in the coming weeks as we make our way through the VIIB Awards. I'm very excited.

NiNi

And a little super special little treat for you before we get to the VIIBs, which I will not spoil but it's gonna be fun.

That is going to wrap us up on our Year In Review. Oh my god guys, another year. This is our third Year In Review.

Ben

My goodness.

NiNi

Absolutely wild. This is our 50-something episode. We're getting up to 60. We're about to be retirees up in here. We love it.

See you guys next time, we out. Say bye to the people, Shan.

Shan

Bye people!

NiNi

Say bye to the people, Ben.

Ben

Peace!

#ben and nini's conversations #podcast #the conversation #on art #lgbtq #bl series #thai bl #winter series #japanese bl #taiwanese bl #korean bl #filipino bl #Spotify

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the-conversation-pod · 11 days ago

Text

Hallyu: Let Free the Curse of Taekwondo and Love in the Big City

AND WE'RE BACK!

Come join Ben, NiNi, and Shan as we talk about two of our favorite three Korean projects of the year. First we discuss Hwang Da Seul delivering a masterpiece in breaking up and bringing back a couple in Let Free the Curse of Taekwondo, and then we unpack all of the complexities in the relationships of Go Yeong in Love in the Big City.

Timestamps

The timestamps will now correspond with chapters on Spotify for easier navigation.

00:00:00 - Welcome 00:01:15 - Introduction: Let's Talk Hallyu 00:06:01 - Let Free The Curse of Taekwondo 00:12:36 - Taekwondo: Themes and Patterns In Hwang Da Seul's Work 00:21:54 - Taekwondo: The Separation 00:33:28 - Taekwondo: The Reunion 00:38:22 - Taekwondo: On Hyeon Ho 00:44:57 - Taekwondo: Final Thoughts and Ratings 00:52:33 - Love In The Big City 00:58:46 - Love In The Big City Part 1: Mi Ae and the Film Adaptation 01:06:50 - Love In The Big City Part 2: Umma and Young Soo 01:17:05 - Love In The Big City Part 3: Gyu Ho and Kylie 01:28:31 - Love In The Big City Part 4: Habibi and the T-aras 01:40:28 - Love In The Big City: Final Thoughts and Ratings 01:48:25 - Outro

The Conversation Transcripts!

Thanks to the continued efforts of @lurkingshan as an editor and proofreader, we are able to bring you transcripts of the episodes.

Please send our volunteers your thanks!

00:00:00 - Welcome

NiNi

Welcome to The Conversation About BL, aka The Brown Liquor Podcast.

Ben

And there it is. I’m Ben.

NiNi

I’m NiNi.

Ben

And we’re you’re drunk Caribbean uncle and auntie here sitting on the porch in the rocking chairs.

NiNi

Four times a year we pop in to talk about what’s going on in the BL world.

Ben

We shoot the shit about stories and all the drama going into them. I review from a queer media lens.

NiNi

And I review from a romance and drama lens.

Ben

So if you like cracked-out takes and really intense emotional analysis…

NiNi

If you like talking about artistry, industry, and the discourse…

Ben

And if you generally just love simping…

NiNi

There is a lot of simping on this podcast…

Ben

We are the show for you!

00:01:15 - Introduction: Let's Talk Hallyu

Ben

And we're back. This time we're in for a winners only discussion. We will be discussing two Korean projects that we all loved: Let Free the Curse of Taekwondo by the Hwang Da Seul team, and the drama adaptation of Love in the Big City—screenwritten by the author Sang Young Park.

We have brought Shan back with us. Shan, say hello.

Shan

Hello!

Ben

We want to discuss the Hallyu Wave, what that means and how we feel about it.

Shan, why don't you walk us through the last couple of decades of what Korea's been up to with their media?

Shan

Essentially, when we talk about the Hallyu Wave, what we're referencing is a very intentional plan by the Korean government in the wake of the 1997 financial crisis to start exporting their culture as a means of improving their economy, getting the rest of the world to see Korea as a place where they wanna spend their dollars. And so starting in the late 90s, they started very intentionally exporting music, drama, film—a very intentional inviting in of the international audience for Korean media—that really picked up steam in the early 2000s and accelerated pretty steadily into the early 2020s. With the pandemic, Korean media kind of globally exploded and they started dominating the global conversation on media. So that was through music, through very popular Korean pop groups that everybody now knows and also through dramas. In 2019, Netflix started producing Korean dramas and hosting them on their platform, bringing that content to new audiences.

And then on the heels of that, we started to get Korean BL entering the BL space later than some of the other countries like Japan and Thailand, who had already been in the game for a while. Korea kind of showed up on the stage during those early pandemic years and started producing QL. It wasn't the very first QL they had ever produced—there are queer films and queer dramas from Korea earlier on—but that is when Korean BL as it exists in its current state really picked up, and it is definitely part of that explosion of the Hallyu Wave.

NiNi

I kinda came in on in that real wave because my first kdrama I watched in 2019, and it was Pretty Noona Who Buys Me Food. That's the first ever kdrama I watched and I was hooked. I am not a kpop girl, but I'm most definitely a kdrama girl and I am most definitely a Korean QL girl for sure.

Shan

One of the reasons that kdrama is so appealing, I think, to a Western audience as well as to their home audience is because the Korean stories really respect romance. They prioritize it in a way that we don't get in Western media. It’s serving a slice of the Western audience that the West has kind of let go of and has diminished and belittled. For people who love romance, for people who love romantic comedies and romantic melodramas, you can't top Korean content. It's not surprising that on the heels of huge success of their exporting of heterosexual romance media, they started getting into the BL game.

Ben

Do you both remember the early kdramas you watched that really hooked you into it?

Shan

I didn't start consistently watching kdrama as my main venue for het media until around the same time as you, NiNi, about 2019. But before that, I had seen them here and there. I think Coffee Prince might have actually been my first kdrama, which, wow, what a way to start. Good for you, Shan. And then when I came in in 2019 it just became easier to access these shows, like everything was going up on Netflix, Viki became bigger, it was hosting more things. That's when I started going really deep and I went back and watched a lot of dramas that predated that.

Ben

So when we're talking about Korean projects, we're engaging from the perspective of Korea really wanted us to engage with this. And so we want to engage as earnestly as we can with it. These two shows stand out for us because Hwang Da Seul has made it abundantly clear that she cares a lot about telling queer stories well in her interviews and in the work she does. And based upon our interactions with Anton Hur, who translated Love in the Big City, we feel very strongly that they also wanted us to experience this too.

So with that in mind, get your snacks, get your drinks. We gonna be here for a while.

00:06:01 - Let Free The Curse of Taekwondo

Ben

NiNi, let's get going on Let Free the Curse of Taekwondo.

NiNi

Once again, you keep asking me to jump into the things I don't know nothing about. How about you tell us what Let Free the Curse of Taekwondo is about?

Ben Let Free the Curse of Taekwondo is a Korean BL from the Hwang Da Seul team. This is, I think, her second or third full original project.

Shan

Hwang Da Seul has made several projects in BL, either as just a director or as a screenwriter and director. She began in 2020 with Where Your Eyes Linger. She wrote and directed that as a short film that was also cut as a show. From there, she directed, but did not write To My Star, then directed but did not write Blueming, then directed but did not write To My Star 2. And then she came back as a writer and director on Let Free the Curse of Taekwondo.

That's her resume within the BL space. She has only actually written two of these works, but there are very similar themes across all of them. She clearly brings a strong point of view.

Ben

You have a really good read on one of the themes she really loves and I want to get to that. Let's start with the basics. Let Free the Curse of Taekwondo is about the teenage and then second chance romance between…

NiNi

Lee Dohoe and Shin Juyoung, can't forget it ever.

Ben

Thank you. Shin Juyoung is sent to the Korean countryside to straighten him out, literally, by having him get his ass beat every single day by his taekwondo teacher. While there, he ends up bonding with the teacher's son, who is a star student and very much a standoffish type. Their relationship develops but is then severed by horrible consequences of police being involved because they kept beating the shit out of our boy. The two separate for 12 years—a brutal amount of time—before running into each other again in the same neighborhood and having to unpack this huge mess between them.

There's a lot to unpack in this show, so I think we will go through this piece by piece. Shan, walk us through the first half of the show with their relationship as teenagers.

Shan

God, this show. I'm going to get emotional just thinking about it. So this is kind of a classic second chance romance. And the first half of the show is about the first chance when they first met, the first iteration of their relationship that inevitably ended horribly. We had Juyoung who was coming to the town basically because he was banished from his own family. His parents were aware that he is queer. He's been sent here, basically handed over to Dohoe's father who runs the dojo to, as Ben said, get straightened out—to have the gay beat out of him, essentially. He, though, is a very optimistic person. That's just who he is at his core. So despite this horrific backstory and the trauma that he must have experienced, he presents this very sunny face to the world, which is not fake. It's not a facade. It's just, he's a very optimistic person at heart.

He meets Dohoe, who is a very serious kid, who has grown up with this abusive father, who is like many abused and lower class children, trying to earn his way out of this horrible life circumstance that he's in by performing well academically. He wants to get into college. He wants to make something of himself. He wants to leave his father and this town behind. And he wants to do that by acing tests, by getting into a good school and by getting a degree that he can use to make money and support himself.

So these two meet, they initially have a lot of antagonism. Dohoe is a bit threatened by Juyoung when he comes into the dojo, but they also have a really clear spark together. Juyoung is immediately fascinated by Dohoe and wants to get close to him. Juyoung's persistent optimism eventually breaks through, they bond and they start seeing each other in a way that kind of surprised me. We were all pretty impressed, happy, amazed that they actually got into their relationship pretty quickly once they realized that their feelings were mutual. They started looking for places to spend time alone together to make out and do horny teenage boy stuff. They were sneaking around town knowing that this was not actually going to be acceptable to anybody and they always had to be on alert for Dohoe's father.

Juyoung is really trying to support Dohoe through his academic studies because he understands how important it is to him to get into college. And because of that, Juyoung is hiding things from him about what his father is doing. The thing that the show did really beautifully was that they showed that Dohoe wasn't actually oblivious to the things that his father was doing to Juyoung. He just didn't want to deal with them. He didn't know how to deal with them. It's kind of heartbreaking. They were grabbing these moments of happiness together, but always, always knowing how fragile it was and always on guard for something to go wrong.

And then of course it did. It all converged with Juyoung getting beat by Dohoe's father on the day that Dohoe had to take a very important test. Dohoe seeing the altercation going down and deciding to do something about it, getting distracted, failing his test. And then, you know, the police who were supposed to come and intervene to protect Juyoung, of course, siding with the abuser and not protecting him at all.

That's how their teenage relationship ended. Dohoe disappeared. And then they were separated for quite a long time.

Ben

Complications in the teeny-bop section of this come from another boy named Hyunho, who was at one time a student of the dojo, and he and Dohoe were clearly vibing at some point before both of them backed off of it. Hyunho ends up clearly jealous about Juyoung and Dohoe. This is something I really want to return to when we start talking about Hwang De Seul's themes.

00:12:36 - Taekwondo: Themes and Patterns In Hwang Da Seul's Work

Ben

As I'm listening to you go back through the details of what happened in the youth section, it strikes me that at no point in Hwang De Seul's work does any character have an awakening moment. It's really fascinating how often her characters seem to be aware of this thing about them, and they're having to deal with the reality of someone else knowing about that and what it might mean to pursue that. I think that's why I connected so deeply with both of these characters. The uncertainty that exists between them is about is he actually vibing with me or not? And if so, what do I do with that? Not what is this in me? It's nice to watch work from someone who understands that that's how it is for a lot of us. We are not oblivious to what we've been feeling the whole time.

NiNi

Hwang Da Seul definitely deals in The Knowing. That's the lane that she's playing in with her characters. It's all about the knowing. It's never about the finding out.

Ben

She is the queen of the knowing. Every time she shows up, I'm like, who's about to be on my list, girl? Show me the new boys.

Shan

That's right.

NiNi

Hahaha!

Shan

One, like, line or scene that I remember in this show that really lamp shaded this that I loved was when Dohoe asks Juyoung if he was his first kiss and his first love. And Juyoung was like, “Are you fucking kidding? Look at me. Of course I had already kissed people before I met you. Of course I had already had relationships before I met you.” I just love that this is not about a discovery of queerness. This is not about the very first time of having feelings. It's about the first time having feelings this deep in an impossible situation. That's more what she's interested in.

Ben

NiNi, as our resident vibes expert, why don't you take us through your highlight scenes that captured that for you in the youth section?

NiNi

Before I get into the specific scenes I gotta just talk about Hwang Da Seul and the things that she does in general. Hwang Da Seul, she's not just the queen of the knowing, she's the queen of depression romance because the other thing that she likes to do is to get a character who is hard to love and give them somebody who can only love them. I keep thinking about how Dohoe treats Juyoung both in the teenage section and when they come back together in the adult section. Dohoe is just really standoffish, he's very arms length, not talking about anything, And then how basically the relentlessness of Juyoung's positivity, of his attention, breaks through every single time. As somebody who suffers from depression it feels very healing to see characters who have the patience to shove through something that you are trying to work through but in some ways can't control.

Ben

All right, so let's talk about the snow scene.

NiNi

That's definitely part of that for sure. Because let me tell you, if somebody made me snow, it would be a wrap. Ring!

Shan

It's done. It's over.

Here’s a thing that I love about Hwang Da Seul is that her work in the QL space is very referential to the mainstream kdrama space and to its tropes. She's clearly based in Korean media. So if you know kdrama romance tropes, they are everywhere in her works.

Shan

And the snow is a great example of that. There is no greater signal of true love in kdrama than kissing in the first snow. [NiNi laughs] What's great about this one is Juyoung made the snow to make it happen.

NiNi

I can't stop thinking about it.

Ben

I'm getting fucking goosebumps right now thinking about it right now. That boy is everything to me!

Shan

What a man.

NiNi

The way I came into the chat screaming I was just like, “He made him snow,” I was like sobbing.

Shan

It was really beautiful. The part that really feels consistent across the show is how much Juyoung saw Dohoe needed him and just found ways to show up for him even when it was hard.

NiNi

Sorry, I'm very emotional about the show. I can't get over it. I thought that I had gotten past my initial reactions, but now talking about it again, I feel all the exact same things. It's amazing how it just came back just like that.

Ben

Something fun: Hwang Da Seul has made enough work now that she can make references to her own work and make fun of it. [NiNi laughs]

Shan

Yes! My god! It was so good!

NiNi

Outside, trying to find a place to kiss and then saying, “Who would kiss at an underpass? [Ben laughs] I’m like, let me tell you who would kiss at an underpass.

Shan

We know exactly who would do it.

Ben

How about you dare not disrespect your seniors like that? [Everyone laughs]

Shan

I love everything about that whole sequence because it was so real. Like two horny teenage boys, they really want to make out, but they know they're not safe to do it at home. So they're just wandering around outside. Like, where can we sit and make out where we won't be seen, where we won't be disturbed?

Who hasn't been there as a teenager? It was such a good moment.

Ben

Now for something really emotional. When Juyoung removed that cross from around his neck and then confessed his feelings to Dohoe through the fucking wall.

Shan

With his forehead on the confessional wall.

Ben

Every lapsed Catholic on Tumblr was activated at once, found each other on the same post, held each other by the shoulders, and screamed.

NiNi

I felt that deep in my soul, I was just like, no he didn't, no he didn't. He's taking it off, he's taking it off. What is he gonna say? He's taking it off, oh my God. And then he put his head against the wall and I was like, no, I can't do this. I actually cannot do this.

Ben

When he put his head on that wall and treated it like a confessional, I was like, somewhere Oscar Wilde is shaking about how love is a sacrament that should be taken on the knees.

Shan

Oh my God. It was so good. There were so many little moments like that. And there's no monologue where Juyoung talks about his mother's faith and what it means to him. This is not that kind of show where they're gonna look into the camera and tell you what things mean and explain the themes. You really have to pay attention. You have to be present in this story to notice the things that are happening and what they mean. It's such an immersive drama experience.

NiNi

I feel like it's equal parts immersive and voyeuristic, because they're parts of it that feel like you are in there with them, and there’s parts of it that feel almost like you shouldn't be watching, like their first kiss in the van.

Shan

It feels very intimate.

Ben

Hwang Da Seul is really good at making emotional intimacy come through without asking her actors to make softcore porn with her.

NiNi

This is not to say that we do not enjoy the softcore—

Shan

—We do enjoy the softcore. Please do keep making it.

Ben

—Make sure that makes the edit! Don't stop doing that too. Just make sure that you get the emotions right.

Shan

Get the emotions right.

NiNi

The other thing that Hwang Da Seul likes to do is she likes to film in winter and I think that's one of the differences that we've often discussed between Chinese, Japanese, and Korean BL, and Southeast Asian BL. That difference between the intimacy of cold weather, the moodiness of winter, and what you get in terms of mood coming out of places that are hot and tropical. It's not that the angst isn't there if it's tropical. It's not that the moodiness can't be there if it's tropical. But there's a different sort of melancholy that comes with the winter stuff. And Hwang Da Seul really likes to sink into that stuff.

Shan

She likes to put her characters in these really, cold, dark scenes, situations, settings, and then she likes to allow them to find the warmth and find the light together. That is the narrative that she's always pursuing.

NiNi

You mentioned that she both wrote and directed Where Your Eyes Linger and this. This feels like an escalation and evolution from Where Your Eyes Linger. Where Your Eyes Linger was actually one of my first QLs. So this is kind of a full circle moment for me.

Shan

It was my very first QL. I was intro'd to BL by Hwang Da Seul.

00:21:54 - Taekwondo: The Separation

Ben

So after going through all of this and making us really believe in the youth romance between these boys, Hwang Da Seul did her favorite thing. She broke these boys up for an unreasonable amount of time.

Shan

Unreasonable. [NiNi laughs] When that chyron came up and we realized it was a 12 year time skip, my—

Ben

We're calling the Koreans. Can y'all verify this?

Shan

—My heart sunk into my stomach. I was like, not 12 fucking years. That's horrific.

Ben

I want you to know that Twig and I are not well. That chyron said 12 years and I DM'd her and I was like, 12 years? Hell yeah, girl. She was like, it's about to be a mess.

Shan

You are not well. We knew that.

Ben

You've talked about this before, Shan, that she really likes to take audiences well beyond the acceptable point with the separation. So Juyoung ends up separated from Dohoe and is unable to reconnect with him. For the next 12 years, he seems kind of lost. Like, he ends up not really pursuing much for himself in an aspirational way. He ends up working in someone else's taekwondo dojo. He ends up continuing to maintain a relationship with Dohoe's father and was offered the dojo from him before he passes away.

There's a lot here in the separation that was really difficult to sort of absorb. Not only was there this gap where Dohoe and he weren't seeing each other at all, I felt a whole lot of angst and stress about Juyoung having a relationship with the man who beat him like a drum.

Shan

Mhmm.

Ben

I knew that when Lee Dohoe rejoined the narrative, it would be a huge pain point between them.

I want to go to NiNi first this time because this is probably the most emotionally difficult section of it. And we hadn't had a chance to talk too much about this section while you were watching. I want you to unpack how you felt during this period and what sort of threads you were most holding onto.

NiNi

Man, watching Juyoung just sort of shuffle through life just kind of sleepwalk through it. The first time we see him at the end of that 12 year break, he does not look well. He just looks like all the life and optimism have gone out of him. For somebody who was such a sunshine in the teenage section, who was so focused and dedicated and smiley and happy and just a ball of energy, to watch him just sort of sloughing away. It was heartbreaking. You could see the pain that he was holding in and the whole thing where he's maintaining contact with Dohoe's father it's in the hope that at some point he will get some news about Dohoe. He just has not left this behind. He has not moved on from anything that happened. He is completely stuck in place, can't move forward.

Meanwhile Dohoe has basically run away run as fast and as far as he could get but as fast and as far as far as he could get ended up being in Shin Juyoung's hometown, close to a place that he remembered as making him happy. Because there was this whole sequence in the teenage years where they basically ran away from home for a day. They went to Shin Juyoung's old hometown and they couldn’t find anywhere to sleep because no hotels would take them because they were minors, and they couldn't stay in the sauna overnight. And so they basically snuck into some kind of school building or whatever and slept on some seats. But it was such a moment that belonged to them and it was such a happy moment for both of them having that experience together. That happy moment is what Dohoe is drawn to and how he ends up being drawn back into Juyoung's orbit. He goes to his old neighborhood in some way, I think, knowing that at some point he's going to run into Shin Juyoung, even as he's avoiding it.

Ben

Shan, you're the most powerful hater I know.

Shan

Mhmm.

Ben

You are very specific in your gripes when people hurt one another in dramas.

Shan

Sure am.

Ben

Go in and let have.

Shan

First of all, I really like the very complex decision to have Juyoung stay close to Dohoe's father. The way that this all fell apart is that Juyoung had an altercation with Dohoe's father that ended up interrupting Dohoe's exam. It is the reason Dohoe failed, lost his chance to go to college in the way that he intended to. Juyoung has a lot of guilt about that situation. And he also, as NiNi said, is kind of emotionally stuck in that moment where everything went sideways. So not only does he not leave, not only does he try to maintain some connection with the places and the people that he had when he was with Dohoe, not only does he keep trying to find Dohoe, he maintains a very close relationship and even grows much closer to Dohoe's father in his absence and takes care of him and acts the part of the filial son in a way that Dohoe is no longer doing.

That's a really interesting choice I think is in part very much driven by his guilt that he has for messing up Dohoe's life. I think he is in a way trying to do penance for his role in what went wrong. But for Dohoe, that choice looks hurtful and absurd, that Juyoung would stay and take care of his abuser and be filial to the man who Dohoe has been afraid of and running from for his entire life. Dohoe has a lot of valid anger, I think, about Juyoung making that choice.

At the same time, Dohoe really was cruel in the way that he ghosted Juyoung. And he was certainly cruel when he met him again 12 years later. It's something that you really have to give some time and space to think about, like, what is motivating him here? Because again, this is not a show that looks into the camera and tells you everything the characters are thinking. Why, when he saw Juyoung again, was he so mean to him, so belittling? He used Hyunho against him to imply things about their relationship that were not true just to hurt Juyoung. He put on this front, pretending to be this very successful, haughty guy who didn't care about Juyoung, who hadn't thought about him in years. He made some really cruel choices, but you can kind of understand why he feels so complicated about Juyoung. Juyoung is tied to all of these horrible things that he has tried to move beyond, that he is trying to let go of. He wants to get free of this curse on his life that is his father, and Juyoung is so wrapped up in those things.

When we talk about Hwang Da Seul’s patterns, this is a pattern that she has across her shows. She likes to take a character to the limits, really push on how cruel she will let them behave in the name of whatever psychological shit they're dealing with and try to find a way to redeem them. What really worked with the way that she set up this conflict with Dohoe and Juyoung is that even though it was really hard to watch him be awful to Juyoung, a character that we all feel protective of, you could really understand why he was feeling that way, why he was acting that way. We knew enough about Dohoe. We saw enough of what he experienced to be able to extend that empathy to him and forgive him for the way that he was behaving just as Juyoung did. I thought that was just so well done in this show in a way that frankly it has not been in her previous attempts at this dynamic.

Ben

Ha!As a regular defender of Hwang Da Seul’s wrong boys—

NiNi

Mmhmm. Mmhmm. I'm not even gonna, I'm letting that go.

Shan

Listen, we've talked about this. Let Free the Curse of Taekwondo is the culmination of everything that Hwang Da Seul has been trying to do across all these different shows. And she finally got it exactly right.

NiNi

I don't disagree but I also don't 100% agree.

One of the things that I want to talk about that we haven't really delved into, we haven't delved into the violence as a motivating factor for why Dohoe was so cruel to Juyoung when he ghosted him, and when he's coming back to him. Because of Dohoe's experience with his father, Dohoe abhors violence. There is a scene where after he realizes that Juyoung has been sent away because of the fight he goes into the kitchen and he picks up a knife, and he gets really close to honestly stabbing his father and he looks at his reflection and he's horrified by what he sees there, because he has defined himself and everything that he's trying to do by being the opposite of his father—by refusing violence. He won't even do taekwondo anymore because he has decided against violence so deeply. And so to see that connection between his father and himself, to see that the violence could also be in him too, and that the violence and the rage could come from the way that he cares about Juyoung, freaked him the fuck out.

That's a big chunk of why he ran away and why when he does come back, he's so cruel because he's terrified of that part of himself. And so the whole thing where Juyoung is now close to his father, there's another layer to that now of, I have removed myself from this situation because I was afraid of who I would become, and here you are not having that problem.

Ben

I think about what was different on the day that Dohoe called the police, and I think the difference is that I think Juyoung fought back that day. I think there's a difference between accepting the beating and fighting back, and what Dohoe was afraid would happen once they both started fighting and it wasn't just beating him.

Shan

Yeah. A really good layer there is that Dohoe knew all along that his father was beating up Juyoung. There were a lot of moments where we would see Dohoe notice bruises on Juyoung and look away from them and not ask the question. He has definitely seen them and he just kept his mouth shut. But on that day, he saw something that scared him. I think Ben is right, he saw Juyoung fighting back and he really worried about what the consequences of that could be. And that is why he finally intervened.

00:33:28 - Taekwondo: The Reunion

Ben

Let's talk about the second chance! Shan, as somebody who has been a Hwang Da Seul critic in terms of how she's handled the reconciliation between couples when they break, I would like you to walk us through this one and why this one worked for you.

Shan

I think what worked so well in this is that we were given enough of Dohoe's experiences and his background to understand where he was coming from, even without it being very explicitly spelled out. We were able to watch the whole process of him putting up this front for Juyoung, pushing him away, finally breaking down, admitting the truth of what his life had become, the truth of how he felt. We got to see them really take time on fighting through all of that. And then really importantly, we got to see them work together to figure out how to repair their relationship and to build a new life for themselves that worked for them and to see how it worked. We got to see that whole journey for them. We got to see Dohoe admit and explain why he had been behaving the way that he was, what he was afraid of. We got to see him own the things that he had done wrong or that he had been hiding and be honest with Juyoung and really drop his shield, and also be the one to reach out and start making some amends.

Some of these aspects were missing in other shows, which is why I criticized them. Here, we see the whole arc of that. We got to really believe in their new start and why it works. I did not end this drama feeling like they're gonna have this problem again. I felt like they really moved past these childhood traumas that had been weighing them down and found a way forward together. And we got to see them experiencing not just a happy epilogue of cutesy moments, but an epilogue where they lived life day to day together and they had disappointments and they realized some things weren't going to work the way they thought. And they worked through that and they found a new way to be content. And so I really left the show feeling like I got to see Dohoe heal in a way that made me think he was gonna be okay fully.

NiNi

The flip side of that is that you got to see Juyoung get angry and really push about what had happened. They had a little bit of a false start reunion in the middle, things seem like they're going okay, but Juyoung wants to unpack what happened so that it doesn't happen again. And Dohoe is resistant to that because he's still hiding so many things. So part of the reason that all of that works is because like you said, there is the discussion, there is the amends, there is the coming clean, there is the fighting through it that you get to see. Like, Dohoe goes to jail!

Shan

Yes!

Ben

That man went to jail and got out of jail so fast! [laughs]

Shan

I wanna go back to what NiNi said, because one of the things I love the most in this show is that in this adult reconciliation arc, they have the big dramatic reunion moment, they have sex, and it doesn't fix fucking anything. We got to see them have the initial reunion euphoria and then realize they still had to deal with all their shit and then watch them deal with it. It was fucking awesome. This is what I want from a drama about a relationship.

Ben

Their particular sex scene is probably one of my favorites of the year. Because they intercut the current sex scene with a sex scene we didn't get before, when they were kids. And I really like the framing of it because the youth one is as furtive and uncertain, but excited about it as two young people are going to be when they're getting away with something that's really important to them and they're happy about it, but it didn't fix the issues that were gonna show up then and the sex they're having doesn't fix their issues now. And it was interesting seeing them have sex as adults where they know their bodies a lot more, but the emotions are just so off in that moment. It was so clever to mirror that moment with a moment we hadn't seen where their emotions were better aligned. There's more activity in the adult section, but the emotions are more enjoyable in the youth section. That was such an excellent choice.

NiNi

I Promised You the Moon, episode 3. It's the same thing.

The use of the cross-cutting technique to show you two things being true while they're doing the same activity.

00:38:22 - Taekwondo: On Hyunho

Ben

I loved the use of Hyunho in this show because he lets us know that Dohoe knows exactly who the fuck he is at both stages of the show, and that he is a shit to everyone that he interacts with when it comes to his queerness and all of the issues that he's hanging on. Hyunho is not blameless in this, he ends up bullying Doheo. And that has to be resolved. He's hanging around Dohoe, trying to make amends for what happened between them. And Dohoe is not giving this man what he wants. This man is desperate. He wants Dohoe to fuck him so bad it makes him look stupid. And Dohoe will not give it to him. This role that Hyunho has about how he probably should have had a shot in here at some point, but can't, works so well. Particularly because that character is given closure in the story as well.

Hwang De Seul is really good at dealing with the trauma of someone ghosting you when you were really important to them and they were important to you. One of things I love about her work is that she doesn't think it's wrong for characters to break up. But she does think it's wrong for characters to not communicate properly with the other person. That person needs to be given the closure. They need to be given permission to mourn the end of something that was important to them. But by denying the other party the closure they need, neither of you is allowed to move on and it becomes this festering wound that both of you are forced to carry. I think that's probably why I've enjoyed her work so much. Because, for a lot of us, queerness complicates how you can handle many of these relationships. In some cases with guys I've cared a lot about life just snatched us from each other and we never got to conclude anything that we were going through and I'm just required to keep living after that.

I really like how very clear it is in this that Dohoe's primary mistake he makes with all three of the men he has relationships with in this is that he never gave himself or them closure about anything that happened between them. That's why none of them can heal and none of them can get well until he's able to give that to at least two of them.

Shan

I have to say, as someone who is usually a second lead hater, I really like Hyunho. When I say second lead, that's a reference to a very common character archetype in kdrama. Every kdrama romance, just about, has a second lead character who is the person who is vying for the protagonist's romantic attention, not necessarily in a love triangle way because it's often not actually a triangle. It's often that the second lead is just holding a one-sided candle, which is definitely the case for Hyunho.

His inclusion in the story complicated things in a really nice way in the teenage years. He was there as a signal that Dohoe already knew himself. Hyunho was struggling with his own internalized homophobia in high school and so was really awful to Dohoe. And then as an adult, he really tried to make that up to him by doing what he thought was the right thing in helping Dohoe to run away from his trauma and helping him to build this new life, which turned out to be fraudulent. By helping him to perpetuate the fraud, by helping him to keep his secrets, by helping him to cover up his lies. He thought—incorrectly—that being Dohoe's conspirator in that way was going to bring them closer and going to make him the person who knew Dohoe best. And I really felt a lot of sympathy for him in the end, because it's not his fault that he didn't actually know Dohoe and didn't know that that wasn’t what was good for him.

Dohoe never let him know him. He never let Hyunho really know him in the way that he let Juyoung. And so Hyunho didn't realize that the things he was doing because he thought they were what Dohoe wanted and needed were actually the things that were weighing Dohoe down. It wasn't his fault that he had it wrong and that he couldn't understand Dohoe in the way that Juyoung did. And it wasn't his fault that Dohoe used him quite knowingly as a lifeline, as a way to protect himself, as a way to dig at Juyoung. That was very wrong of Dohoe to use him and his feelings for him that way. And to Dohoe's credit, he realized that in the end and he apologized. That was one of my favorite scenes in the show, was Dohoe really owning that he had not done Hyunho right and that his behavior toward him was not okay. And apologizing for that to the point where they could move past it and become genuine friends.

I really loved that arc and I really ended up respecting Hyunho. I respected that he still got his moment to share his feelings honestly and ask the question, why it wasn't him, and to take a moment to understand that and to mourn what he thought he could have had with Dohoe. It's so sad to think about him hanging on to this for so long—12 years of this separation, Hyunho was there as Dohoe's friend waiting for his moment that never came.

Because of the way that it was presented and the way that he handled himself, I didn't end up thinking anything negative about him for that. I just felt sympathy for the situation he was in and I was happy for him that he was able to finally be free of it.

Ben

I'm glad he was let go because the fundamental reason why Dohoe can never let him smash is that Hyunho lives an existence that is inherently closeted, and Dohoe doesn't want that. And he doesn't know how to say that properly to Hyunho. I'm very glad that there was a very gentle release of that for Hyunho. I really hope that Hyunho is able to reckon with the way his help of Dohoe inherently closeted him, trapping them in a lie that both of them are holding together. And I really hope that Hyunho is able to find his own ability to have a relationship that doesn't require him to hide so much all the time.

00:44:57 - Let Free the Curse of Taekwondo: Final Thoughts and Ratings

Ben

Let's talk about that child!

NiNi

Why would you say it like that? [Ben laughs]

Shan

I think you're right though, Ben, to call this out as another one of the common themes that she revisits. There's a tiny child and they help to bridge the gap in the separated couple. In this show, we got Gwangmo.

Ben

Gwangmo represents for them this cycle that they're stuck in that they would like to see broken. I really love that they're able to do that for that kid, but in a way that further sets them back personally and professionally. The world can be made better by brave people putting themselves on the line. And a lot of the people who are first, they're going to get slapped down for it.

Dohoe can't remain a teacher because he's not technically qualified. And he embarrassed someone with money. Even if he's right, the powers that be are going to slap him down for what he did. Juyoung is still struggling to try and make something of himself that he has independent control over. I love that they were willing to accept that loss to make sure that a kid they cared about was safe.

NiNi

One time that the couple moving into the smaller house made sense.

Ben

Why are you trying to make me mad again? Don't think I forgot!

NiNi

Such a good show so much to it.

Ben

Let's talk about that epilogue, because you brought up the house, the ending of this show, that little happy epilogue we get, is the best happy epilogue we have gotten in a long time. Because everything we saw in that was perfectly calibrated for where these two are realistically, what sort of difficulties they're going to be facing personally and financially, what their lives are going to look like socially. They confirm that they are having the sex on the reg and finally Dohoe got to see all of that boys Yahoo! Answers. [NiNi laughs]

Shan

Yes, we need to talk about those forum posts at the end. It was such a lovely little button on the show. we've seen their domestic life. They're making it work. They are compromising together. They are happy and content in what they have. And Dohoe has let go of some of his huge aspirations for himself that were really just pressure. One of the things I love about the epilogue is this message that actually having a loving partnership that you care about and that you're committed to is a life achievement that you can stand up next to anything else that you do. And so just because he didn't have a fancy degree or a high paying job didn't mean that he had achieved nothing in life, because he had this beautiful relationship that he cared so much about.

And then we see Dohoe looking through something on Juyoung's computer and stumbling upon his forum history where we learned that Juyoung has for years been posting questions for advice. And they're nearly all about things he wanted to do to help Dohoe. That forum is where he went to learn how to make snow when they were teenagers. As he read through the questions, you could see him connecting them back to memories of their time together. He has always, always cared about Dohoe. And he has always been willing to show up and put in the effort for him. It was really beautiful.

Ben

NiNi, reset the clock. I'm going to mention What Did You Eat Yesterday? [NiNi laughs]

Dohoe got to have the moment that Kenji got to have when he opened that refrigerator and saw that there were peaches waiting for him.

NiNi

Mmhmm!

Ben

The last thing I want to say about this is I really love the way Hwang Da Seul uses the bed in this show. That we can see Dohoe's current demeanor shifting by how he shares a bed with Juyoung. I love that by the end he is a sloppy sleeper, hanging on top of that poor man.

NiNi

Yeah, because the first time that they sleep in the bed together that we see in the second half of their relationship, he says he doesn't remember the last time that he slept properly. And Juyoung is just like, just lying down and shutting your eyes gives you the same kind of thing. So there's this whole thing where he's slowly relaxing back into himself so that by the time you see him in the epilogue he's basically sleeping spread out all over the bed. It's just joyous to watch it happen.

Shan

He's so comfortable.

Ben

I would like to end this section by giving thanks. Everybody go around and say things they're thankful for. I’m thankful for quite a few things. I'm thankful that we ended on the shot of that cross being thrown away.

Shan

Mmm, yes!

NiNi

Amen and hallelu.

Ben

And I would like to thank Lee Seon for his face. [Shan laughs] Congratulations, sir.

NiNi

The Koreans have a term: face genius. He is one.

Shan

He's definitely a face genius! I would like to offer thanks to Hwang Da Seul for continuing to perfect this story until she fucking nailed it and delivered the perfect version of it. Hats off to you, ma'am. You did it.

NiNi

I would like to thank Hwang Da Seul for Lee Dohoe. I think the Lee Dohoe character is one of the best things I've ever seen anywhere in drama. Not just BL, not just kdrama, anywhere in drama.

Ben

Let’s rate!

Shan

He's maybe my favorite character of the year. I gotta think about that. He's definitely one of them. The other one might be the one we're about to talk about.

NiNi

The VIIBs are coming, girls. Just think about it, okay?

Ben

I love these boys, but I already have my favorite boy of the year.

Alright, let's rate this bad boy. Tens or chops, everybody. Shan.

Shan

As if it would be a chop. I'm actually trying to remind myself what score I gave it.

NiNi

Do you gotta think about this?

Shan

I'm just double checking. I gave it a perfect 10, baby!

Ben

Very rare, congratulations. Golf clap for this show.

Shan

The first, the first and only 10 that I gave to any BL this year.

NiNi

I mean, y'all know how stingy Shan is with these 10s. Shan is not me. Shan never gives shit a 10.

Shan

It's so true. A Shan 10 is quite a momentous event. This is the only BL this year that's getting one from me. I love this show. I think it is one of the best BLs ever made. It's beautiful. Everyone should watch it.

NiNi

It's a motherfucking 10 from me. I don't think I need to explain that anymore than I already have. Hwang Da Seul is my queen and this is a fucking 10.

Ben

This is a 10. It got everything right. It got the romance right. It got the gay shit right on multiple fronts. It got the gay shit right with the leads and the guy who can't win, because we do need to accept that the world does not perfectly align for everybody to have the first person they like and you gotta move on.

Great job, everybody!

Shan

Great job!

NiNi

It will be a 10 from The Conversation. Go watch it. It is the greatest thing that happened this year, except for this next thing that we're gonna talk about now.

Shan

Mmhmm.

00:52:33 - Love In The Big City

NiNi

Let's move on to the drama adaptation of Love in the Big City.

Ben

Love in the Big City is the second adaptation this year of a book by Korean author Sang Young Park, which was translated by Anton Hur and pushed into international distribution. The book became very popular internationally, which rebounded domestically to get more views there. Sang Young Park was not involved with the movie adaptation, which NiNi did watch earlier this year. He was involved with the drama adaptation and was the lead screenwriter for this.

The story is about the narrator who we just refer to as Young. It's about four different periods in his life. The original book premise treats these periods as semi-distinct from each other, whereas the drama presents them as a more linear story. In the first part, we focus heavily on our narrator's college relationship with his best girl friend, Miae, and how their relationship eventually comes to an end as the pressures of heteronormativity and long-term survival requires certain concessions. The second part of the story is when Young is a little bit more mature, he's dealing with the impending death of his mother and he meets this somewhat older man, and it's about the complex relationship he has with his homophobic mother and this homophobic boyfriend. The third part has our narrator with probably the best boyfriend he has, and how their relationship was not one that our narrator was able to make succeed in the long term. And the fourth part is him recognizing that he fucked up pretty badly in the third part and having to reckon with a life after his big love had come to an end.

I want Shan to talk about why we were so excited about this drama, and why Shan approached me about organizing a book club on Tumblr.

Shan

Maybe my favorite thing that we did this year was Love in the Big City Book Club. So in January of 2024, we got news that Love in the Big City was going to get two adaptations, a drama adaptation and a film adaptation. I had read the book, Ben had not. And I was like, what would be very cool would be to try to encourage some of our friends, some of the folks that we are in community with on Tumblr to read the book together. And so we decided we were going to spend the month of February 2024 reading the book together with anyone who wanted to join us in this book club, with the intention of getting excited about a queer story that was gonna be coming to our screens.

We talked earlier about the Hallyu Wave and how BL started to come into that. I think a piece that we didn't really address was that queer representation in mainstream kdrama is still incredibly rare. There have been isolated characters and storylines in mainstream kdrama that are gay, usually very small side roles, usually not depicted as having full lives, usually don't get to have romance on screen. We knew that Love in the Big City was a big, messy gay story. And we knew that with Sang Young Park involved in the drama adaptation, there was no way that this was going to be some sanitized version, and that this would be a landmark queer media event for Korea. So there were a few dozen of us that read the book, that really were engaged in participating in the book club posting every week. And we knew that when the drama adaptations were released later in the year, we would be ready to come back to those discussions.

A really cool thing that happened while we were doing our book club is that one of our members reached out to Anton Hur, who did the English translation of the book. Anton Hur is a Korean gay man. He had a lot of personal feelings about working on this project, he chose it as a passion project. When he heard from our book clubber that there was a group of us who were doing a book club together on Tumblr, he showed up on Tumblr. He made an account and he posted in our tag to say hello to us and to invite us to ask him any questions that we wanted about his translation work. It was, like, one of the coolest things ever. He opened himself up, he answered dozens of questions for us about how he thought about the translation, why he chose to work on this project, what the story meant to him in his context. And it just really enriched the story for us, really brought it to life, really helped us think about a lot of these questions about, when you're trying to translate Korean content for our global audience, what are the things that you're thinking about?

When we found out that the film would be premiering at the Toronto International Film Festival in September and that the drama would then be dropping in October, we were ready. We had all really grown to love this story. We were deep in the weeds on its themes, on what Sang Young Park was trying to say with this work. And we were just so excited to get to see it on screen.

Ben

I was really thankful that Anton was willing to talk to us. I think few things are more validating for the way you try to show respect to the work that you're engaging with—by taking it as seriously as you can and respectfully as you can—is to have somebody who is closely involved with it acknowledge what you're trying to do and allow you to engage with them. I really appreciate the time that Anton took out for us on that. That was probably one of my most memorable things that happened this year.

00:58:46 - LITBC Part 1: Miae, Namgyu, and the Film Adaptation

Ben

Now, getting into the drama itself. NiNi, you watched ahead of us because we were intentionally pacing the drama. Let's break down some of our big reactions to each part. So, quick feelings that you felt about the first part, particularly about his relationship with Miae. I'm curious about your reactions to the relationship he had with her because you also watched the movie which is, if I understand correctly, primarily from her perspective and focuses on that part of the story.

NiNi

So that's, I think, a misconception. It's not really from her perspective. The film adaptation covers the first part of the book. So it is about that relationship between the, well—I'm just going to use the drama characters names because they have different names in the film—between Young and Miae. And it really is a two-hander but is not really from Miae's perspective. You actually see Miae mostly from Young's perspective. The film is a different story from what I gathered the book story is, because I haven't read the novel, and it’s definitely different from the drama story.

The film is more traditionally what you would expect coming out of kdrama. It starred some really big names who are winning some really big awards now. The film's enjoyable, Kim Go Eun is fantastic in it. I think that the drama is more grounded and more focused on the things that maybe the audience who is here for queer drama would like to see.

For me, because I had seen the film first, I had a little bit of a disconnect trying to get through it because I was mentally placing things that were happening in the drama next to things that were happening in the film. And…while I enjoyed it, there were parts that I was missing and looking forward to that ended up being in later parts of the drama. So I kind of had to watch it twice.

The main thing that stood out for me about the first part of the drama was that part you said, Ben, about how Miae in the end slips away from Young, and it's because heteronormativity and misogyny and conservatism of Korean society are forcing Miae down a path that Young cannot follow and does not want to follow. Whereas in the film they have more of a rupture, in the drama it's more of a gentle slipping away. It's not that they're not still friends, but Miae's priorities change in a way that Young can't follow her into. That was probably the biggest difference.

Because Korea is such a conservative society and such an ambitious, capitalistic society as well, I think people make compromises. They compromise and they compromise to have the life that they think that they should have or they're a little bit beaten down into the life that the society expects them to have, I'm always fascinated to watching that trajectory happen when it does in dramas. That's the part that I really latched into there, the fact that the reason that they came away from each other is because literally, Miae is able to do that and Young is not.

Ben

Shan, quick reactions to Part 1?

Shan

It’s so interesting to me that we had such different trajectories. For me, one of the most surprising and wonderful things about the drama is how close it was to the book. There are changes and they start to become more pronounced as we go through, but I was so happy about how close this felt to the story that was originally intended to be told.

I really loved that in part one, Miae and Young, we got to really see their relationship and it was paired in the drama with a relationship with Kim Namgyu, who was a boyfriend of Young's that just was kind of out of step with him. They were not looking for the same things. Young was very young and he was kind of cruel to Namgyu about some of their differences. I thought that was a really nice parallel that he had these two relationships where he just wasn't really on the same page with the people that he was engaging with. And he didn't, I think, realize that Miae ultimately wanted to conform in a way that he did not. And that became a fracture in their relationship.

They didn't have a big dramatic blow up in the drama version. It was a much gentler kind of drifting away that happens a lot with people that you're very intensely in relationship with in your early 20s. As life goes on, you make different choices and you kind of realize that you're not each other's confidant anymore. You're not the person who can understand each other best anymore. It was sad, but it felt real. It felt true to the choices that they both made in their lives. But it was also a really big heartbreak for him, I think his first big heartbreak in terms of having someone that he really let in and then having that person disappoint him and not stick around. That started a pattern for him of behavior and the way that he engaged in his relationships.

I really liked the depiction of Miae. I thought the actress that played her, Lee Soo Kyung, really embodied the spirit of that character. Her and Nam Yoon Su had great platonic chemistry as friends. And I really enjoyed all of their scenes together.

I also want to shout out Kwon Hyuk, who played Namgyu. He is a BL guy. We've seen him before.

Ben

Yeah, he's my man Jong Chan! Don't think I forgot about my man!

Shan

One of the cool things that Love in the Big City did was it cast quite a few people who have done BL before, which was pretty fun. And he was great too, as this older love interest that was more traditional and out of step with bratty little Young.

The piece that really resonated for me when thinking about how it compared to the book in this first part was that the fracture between Miae and Young didn't feel as harsh. The choice that she made, we had more context for her decision in the drama than we did in the book. The most common thing that you'll hear us say is that the book was extremely interior. We were sitting with Young in his older age as he was looking back with regret and narrating to us what happened. The drama has a wider point of view. It takes us into the perspectives of the other characters. And so it just naturally lightens things up a little bit, because we're not so stuck in one person's very cynical perspective.

Ben

The series being kinder to the supporting characters in Young's life makes the book much sadder because he was not accepting of all the love people were trying to give him. My favorite thing about the first part is about how in both major relationships Young has, he's struggling with their connection to traditional feelings about romance. Like, Kwon Hyuk is so perfectly cast because he fit this very specific ideal, a man who is kind of caught up in the whole kdramafication of love. And Young is like, I get called slurs, I am not about that.

The great thing about Miae, and why this particular presentation is so important to me is because, despite how people who aren't connected to queer people might think gay men don't have relationships with women, every gay man has had an extremely painful breakup with a woman who was super important to him. Every gay man I know has a woman who was their rock in their early twenties that for whatever reason it did not work out with. None of us gets over that. And I really loved seeing that represented.

01:06:50 - LITBC Part 2: Umma and Youngsoo

Ben

On to Part 2! Let's talk about the worst man ever.

[Ben and Shan laugh]

In Part 2, Young is a little bit older, and Nam Yoon Su and the director of Part 2—they were fucking dialed in on how heavy that man's life was in part two.

Shan

It was Hur Jin Ho.

Ben

Hur Jin Ho uses long shots and wide shots so well in this section to communicate how stuck Young is. Young is dealing with his mother who is in the hospital because she is dealing with cancer and is not going that great and his mom is working his damn nerves with her Christianity. At the same time, he is caught up in this new relationship with a man named Noh Youngsoo. And it is difficult because as hot and smart and mysterious as he finds this guy, this man is super closeted and high-key homophobic. It is difficult to watch him dealing with his mom's version of homophobia and then trying to love a man with his own version of homophobia.

I want NiNi to go first because I don't want Shan and I's book experience to color your reactions.

NiNi

This is actually my favorite part of the drama. There's something about the relationship that Young has with his mother that puts me in mind of something that I've seen with other people whose parents know but won't acknowledge what they know about their kids. He's constantly running away from his mother. He goes to the hospital to see her because he's a good son and he goes to take care of her and all of that. He loves her, but he also can't wait to get away from her. And as you go along, you see there's a kind of a brightness and a brittleness in their relationship that feels like they're dancing around something that they both know is there, but will not speak about.

That comes to a head at the end of this section, what it culminates in is as his mom is getting closer to the end, he wants to be real with her. He doesn't want to have this false, brittle relationship that they have where they joke around and play and they don't talk about anything real. He wants to show her his life and who he is and he wants her to see him before she dies. So he is in this relationship with this horrible man and he knows that this man is horrible. But he is holding onto it because he wants to show his mother, look mom, this is who I am and I can be happy like this. I can have a life like this. And then this man bails on him in the moment where he needs him to be able to show that to his mother. I'm kind of glad that he bails on him because that wasn't the one. That wasn't the person who made him happy. And if his mother had seen that, I think she would have picked up on that as well.

So it's this terrible, bittersweet thing where it feels like his mom dies without ever really knowing her son and that haunts him in a lot of ways, it feels like. It's probably the thing I related the most to in the entire drama. Despite the fact that this is low key the worst person that Young dates in the whole thing, the worst relationship, the worst everything, to me, this is the part, the part with his mother and everything that's going on there that really sunk into me.

Shan

The book is much darker than what we got in the drama. And actually, that's the reason this is not my favorite part of the drama, because the book version is my favorite part of the entire story. I don't think that that's a bad adaptation choice, though. I think it was appropriate for the drama they were making. But I already have the book Part 2 in my heart, and it didn't really match up to that.

The juxtaposition of Young's mother, her homophobia and the way that it had hurt him, against the relationship that he was having with Noh Youngsoo, who is very much hiding who he is, who also has a very complicated relationship with a difficult mother. It really felt like Young was kind of burying himself a little bit in this relationship that he knew on some level was not good, but he needed the distraction. He needed somewhere to take all of these emotions that he could not unleash on his mother. And he sublimated them into this relationship that was ultimately quite toxic. That just rang so true to me. This is exactly who I would expect Young to be dating in this dark period of his life where he is trying to work through all of his guilt and all of his shame and all of his extremely complicated feelings about his mother. But I thought that the way it was depicted and the way that he was allowed to take a little bit of power back from Youngsoo at the end of this section, the way that even though he was never able to fully express himself to his mother, he did get to have some moments with her, at the end, of peace. I thought that was really beautiful.

NiNi

I have a book question before we go on to Ben. You said the drama is more linear, puts these stories sort of in sequence in time, whereas the book is more vignette-y. One of the things that came to mind in his relationship with Youngsoo is all the stuff that's going on with his brother, yes, but also, this is after Namgyu has died and he's been pondering all these questions about how he treated him and whether it's that he didn't even try to love him. And so part of it is yes, everything that's going on with his mother and him sublimating himself in this dark relationship. But the other part of it is him pushing through to try to make it work because he thinks that he didn't do that with Namgyu and he feels a lot of guilt about it.

Ben

I really love that as a drama read because in the book Namgyu is just Kia Guy to us.

Shan

He's not even a real character in the book. So It's hard, as someone who read the book first and knows the quote-unquote true version of the story, to read it that way, because he just wasn't someone with that kind of importance in the original telling of this story. But I do think it's a layer that the drama added and that could certainly be read that way.

Ben

I don't think there's anything wrong with your reading connecting those two things. It's just when we read the book, Young is so distinct in each section that he almost feels like a different character.

Shan

Yeah, it's very intentional, the book not drawing those lines of connection between the parts. Which definitely informs the way that we think about and interpret the beats of the story.

Ben

No, it's a good thing to point out. Because the same author is telling this story. I think your read on that and connecting those two things is 100% valid and likely intentional.

Shan

It’s a cool thing to mention. This is an autobiographical story that became a novel that became a drama and the same man is the one who authored all of these versions of it. I think that that's really interesting that he came back to his own life experiences and added layers to them for a television drama version of the story. I'm sure that just like he did when he wrote the novel, he drew from things that felt real and authentic to him.

Ben

I got a couple of things to say about Part 2 before we move on. To all of the baby gays out there, if you're gonna fuck a guy with this much internalized homophobia, don't fall for him because they are not well. You cannot fuck the homophobia out of him.

I also will say this section has one of my favorite moments. The final scene in the park with his mom, to me, hearkened back to the very complicated feelings I had during part three of Moonlight, where Chiron is seeing his mom for the last time in the film and he says, “I hate you, mama.” And he cries and she cries, but then he still lights a cigarette for her. That's the exact same place I went emotionally in that scene in the park.

My big thing about this section and how they lighten some of this: in the book, Young doesn't have his blow up with Hyung, as we called him in the book, in public. He has this in private in his apartment and he legit tries to kill that man. I appreciate the drama's choice, but let me tell you, I really was hoping we get the intensity that he really, really wanted to kill that man.

Shan

The whole nature of the scene is different in the book. He really could have killed him and he wanted to.

NiNi

I wanted him to kill him. When they're sitting in that restaurant and he's saying all the things that he's saying about leaving and going to America and I know what Young is going through in that moment and that he basically left Young hanging out to dry when he really needed him. He turns to go and I see Young launch himself away from that table. I was like, “Yes, baby, kill him!” That man needs to be stabbed.

Ben

I think because of the medium, I liked the choice to have Hyung writing like a shitty research paper about how gay people are fucked in the head and then send that shitty paper to Young for him to throw away. In the book, he sends Young his own diary back to him with edits! That is the most insane thing I have ever read! And I will always hate that man with a fiery passion.

Shan

He literally took a red pen to that man's diary and sent him notes. Despicable man! [Ben laughs] We can talk about murdering that man all night.

01:17:05 - LITBC Part 3: Gyu Ho and Kylie

Ben

In Part 3, Young buries his mother, and when he's hanging out with his friends to try and blow off some steam, he has a connection with one of the bartenders at the club. The two of them start hanging out and this grows into something really important for them. They try to do cohabitation and make their relationship work, but unfortunately Young's brain does not allow him to have the relationship he wants to have with Gyuho.

We learn in this section that Young has been sick with HIV for quite some time and he can't even say it. He calls it Kylie after one of his favorite singers. This becomes an insurmountable struggle eventually in their relationship. This section is about a really good relationship that just wasn't enough. Like I was saying to the gays in the last part, you can't fuck these problems out of people. Gyuho couldn't either.

Reactions to Part 3. NiNi, how you feeling?

NiNi

Once the whole Kylie thing comes to the fore, it completely re-jiggers how I think about everything else that's been happening. The first question that I'm asking in my head is, when did this happen? Because it's not really clear in this part, when he found out about Kylie. Is it before he meets Miae? Is it before he meets Hyung? When did he change?

Ben

I think it's after he meets Miae, but it's before the T-aras go off to their military service.

NiNi

I gotta think about that because that just recasts everything.

Ben

It does, like the fight that he has with her where she outs him to her fiance, the reason why he's so mad there is he almost trusted her with that. And he almost made, in his mind, a mistake doing that.

NiNi

Because this is not part of the film and I had not read the book, this came out of nowhere for me.

Shan

He does the same thing in the book. You don't know anything about it until Part 3. Each part has two relationships that it focuses on. Part 1 is Miae and Namgyu and Part 2 is his mother and Youngsoo and Part 3 is Gyuho and Kylie. I still think about that, that choice to pair who he considers at this point when he's writing this story to be the love of his life and the companion that he did not choose, that he can't get rid of, who haunts his life. I think that's such an interesting thing, particularly in the context of the way that Gyuho ends up kind of haunting the narrative after this relationship fails.

These are the two relationships that really stick with Young and change him. The thing to know about Gyuho is he is the only named love interest in the entire book. Everyone else is referred to by vague descriptors.

Ben

Like Noh Youngsoo, he is just Hyung to us. And Kia Guy is just Kia Guy. Young doesn't even tell us his name. That's why Gyuho was so important to a lot of us from the book reader perspective because this is our guy. And we were really excited to see our guy!

Shan

We were so excited to get to him. This is Young's most important relationship as he sees it, in terms of romance. This is the one. This is the one that he was happiest with. This is the one that almost worked. This is the one that got away. This is the one that haunts him still. And so it was really important that they got him right.

And they did. They really, really did. That is why for me as a book reader, Part 3 is actually my favorite. I think that it is the most successful in translating exactly what this part of the book was trying to do and living up to the exact same standard of it. It was perfect.

Ben

In this section for me, a couple of things really come to fruition in a way that I thought were perfect. Like the fact that they kept Miae's apartment as a character in the drama in a way that the book doesn't. It really works here because Young has stripped sociability from the apartment at this point. Like he's gotten rid of the TV. Clearly he doesn't invite people over except to fuck. He's got books all over the place. Gyuho moves in and they have to purge some of his shit. He has to reorganize things in the place. He's managed to contain his writing to one table they've put up against the window.

But you can see him struggling in this section. He knows what Kylie is costing him. And he wants to succeed as a writer because he wants to be independently wealthy in a way that can supersede the barriers that Kylie genuinely presents to his life in terms of professional and personal advancement. He's trying to make this work, but he's so fucking mad because he can't. He and Gyuho are not great and they keep having the same fights over and over again. They really figured out how to show how difficult gay domesticity is.

This pairs so well with all of the heteronormative pressures from the first two parts. For a lot of hetero people there are all of these expectations about marriage and child rearing that help them prioritize their relationship in such a way they can make it work. For a lot of queer people, those structures are not there to support a long-term romance. This is such a difficult section because Young is not wrong about how Kylie is going to hold them back. It's just so sad that he was unwilling to accept Gyuho's willingness to deal with that.

Shan

I think that's one of the things I really love about this story. Young letting go of this relationship doesn't feel like a wrong choice or a choice that I couldn't understand. I wish he'd chosen differently. I wish that he had tried to talk with Gyuho about what happened in terms of his Kylie getting in the way of their plans to go to China. I wish that he had tried to work it out. But I really understand why he didn't. Even if Gyuho was obviously willing to sacrifice things for him, he didn't want Gyuho to sacrifice things for him. He didn't want Gyuho to be held back by his disease. He had a lot of really understandable shame and guilt about that. He just couldn't cope with the idea that his Kylie would be the reason why Gyuho did not get the things that he wanted, and so he ended it.

A lot of times in dramas you'll get a scenario like this where you have what we call a noble idiocy breakup where a character is being stupid for the benefit of the other person. This didn't feel like that. It didn't feel like he was being stupid. It felt like he was recognizing a very real limitation on his life that he did not want to pass on to someone he loved.

NiNi

I want to talk about depression for a minute. Fatalistic sabotage: it's this idea that no matter what you do, it's going to suck. So let's burn it all down now because at least that I have control over. The trajectory of Young's relationship with Gyuho, that's what I was thinking about. The decision that he makes to not go to China and why he's not gonna try to work it out and not mention to Gyuho why he's not gonna try to work it out. That's sort of the end of the trajectory. But along the way you see him, like you said, pull further and further away from Gyuho throughout the relationship. Part of that, I think, is that idea of burning it down before it can burn him down.

It's very much a depression thing. Kylie completely depresses him. And I think he's probably at the end of the story just starting to dig himself back out. There's a thing that he does in Part 4 that makes me think that okay, he's going to start digging himself out.

Shan

I think that's very real. And I think we actually saw an explicit acknowledgement of one of his depressive periods in this part. The whole segment where he was really struggling with his writing and he couldn't focus and he and Gyuho kept fighting and he was being really snippy with him.

We saw Gyuho come find him at the cafe where he was working and say to him, “What can I do for you? Please tell me how I can help you.” Young told him, “You can't. The things going on with me are not things that you can fix by loving me.” And that's such a fucking hard thing to accept.

Ben

Let's get into the Thailand trip and how this doesn't fix their relationship. And then he throws that shirt away. My feelings were hurt.

Shan

It hurt me so bad.

NiNi

I feel like talking about the Thailand trip in Part 3 almost feels preemptive. We understand that it happened and we get a little bit of it in Part 3 but we really delve into it in Part 4.

Ben

We’re running into the book stuff now, NiNi, because we don't go back to Thailand in Part 4 in the book, all of it happens in Part 3.

Shan

Apparently for many of the people who watched the show without having read the book, they interpreted these two versions that we saw of the Thailand trip in some wild ways. Because of the way Parts 3 and 4 are structured, we see this Thailand trip through two different lenses. We see it through this Part 3 segment that is about primarily Gyuho's relationship with Young and Young's relationship with his Kylie. We see this Thailand trip in the context of them going through a rough patch, taking this trip as a chance to reconnect with each other. We see it as part of Young's commitment to trying to make things work with Gyuho. He makes time for this trip, even though he is stressed and trying to write and lacking in funds. He makes time for this because he cares about Gyuho and he cares about their relationship. We see them go to Thailand. We see them have that reconnection that is probably really familiar for anyone who's ever been in a long-term couple and has taken a trip that's meant to be a reset. We see them be happy and content together in their time in Thailand.

And then we see them come back and have it not fix anything. They come back and all their problems are still waiting for them and they have not addressed them adequately. That's the context of Thailand in Part 3. It was a little bit of a Hail Mary on trying to get them back on the same page and it worked to an extent, but it didn't address the underlying issues. So it didn't ultimately fix things, but it was still this really lovely memory for them as a couple, this time that they spent together in Thailand.

01:28:31 - LITBC Part 4: Habibi and the T-aras

Ben

Now let's talk about Habibi!

Shan

So in Part 4, we then revisit this drama, this Thailand trip through the lens of a Young who is mourning his relationship with Gyuho, who's looking back and remembering it a little bit differently, remembering different parts of it.

Now, nothing in the two presentations of this trip in Parts 3 and 4 actually contradicts each other in terms of the sequence of events and what happened. Some of the shots contradict each other, some of the tone of the scenes feel different. And that was very intentional. There were different directors shooting these scenes in each part. There were different moods and different perspectives from Young that they were trying to get across in each sequence. It's not that, as some people apparently interpreted it, one of these trips was real and one was fake. There's not some alternate reality thing going on here. We're just seeing the same trip first through the experience of Young in the present with Gyuho as he's trying to repair their relationship, and then later in retrospect as he's thinking back and remembering it through a haze of regret and melancholy.

NiNi

It would not have ever occurred to me that one was real and one was fake.

Shan

Bestie, same!

Ben

I'm about to get re-triggered about The Eighth Sense all over again.

Shan

So in Part 4, Young has achieved some measure of success in his career, but he's feeling very personally unfulfilled. He is very sad about the end of his relationship with Gyuho. He seeks solace in this weirdo that he meets, Habibi, which of course is not his real name. He's just this older guy that Young meets through an app. I really liked the drama's adaptation of this dynamic between them. I really like how deranged it feels.

These are two men who are kinda in a super low point. They are looking to each other for distraction more than anything else. They're playing these weird power games with each other. They're fucking with each other. It's a very strange energy that has nothing to do with romance, and honestly didn't even seem like it had much to do with sex. It was really just about distracting each other. He's the only love interest, quote-unquote, that we saw in the show that didn't have a sex scene. It wasn't even clear if he and Young were having sex.

It was a really interesting thing to pair this haunted man who is struggling in his life, with basically this mourning for Gyuho and the relationship that Young let go of. I also thought it was a really interesting choice in the drama to tell us that Gyuho is still kind of lurking in the atmosphere. He left messages to Young. He left that order at the bar where he used to work that Young always gets a drink on his tab when he comes in. Through their networks of people it became clear that Gyuho is coming back to Korea. None of that stuff is in the book. And I was very curious about the decision to include those details. I wondered if it was maybe intended to set up the possibility of a continuation of this story. I would have a lot of mixed feelings about that.

We haven't talked about the T-aras much, this group of queer men that he is friends with throughout the story. They are probably the biggest change and they really change the feeling of the entire story from the book by making all of it feel lighter, making it feel like Young always has support, that he wasn't so isolated and alone through all of these things that happened to him. In this Part 4, we actually get to learn more about one of the T-aras, Eunsoo—who has his own plot that was invented entirely for the drama—about getting engaged to his long-term boyfriend and then realizing that he didn't actually want that marriage and turning to Young for solace and for understanding as he was struggling through that. So that's what's going on in this part. It was a really interesting mix of stuff and I wasn't entirely sure how I felt about some of the changes.

NiNi

I like the word that Shan used, deranged, because that really is how the relationship feels between Young and Habibi.

Bringing up the T-aras, to me, the T-aras don't feel as close to Young. To me, they sort of emphasize some parts of his isolation. There's two things that really came up with the T-aras that make me feel that way about them. The first one is that Young does not tell them about Kylie and will not tell them about Kylie because of the reaction that they had to this other kid at the club who it's the rumor has HIV, how they were covering their glasses at the club and Young sees that and that he doesn't feel like he can tell them about Kylie. The thing that really got me was when he gets to the end of story and we see that Eunsoo is getting closer to Young. That also makes me feel like actually the T-aras, they're close for a certain value of close, but they aren't actually that close because now Eunsoo and Young actually are becoming close in Part 4.

They clearly care about him, everything that happens at the end of Part 2 when he tries to end his life and they come to the hospital and they're basically fighting the nurses to be able to visit him. And after Gyuho leaves and they bang down his door to make sure that he hasn't done something again, it's clear that they have a close friendship, but it still feels at a distance for me. One of the things that really came across to me in the whole drama is that Young keeps people at a distance, even the people that he is close to or supposedly close to.

Shan

It's so fun to talk to you about this, NiNi, because it's all relative, right? The book is so, so, so much darker than this show that to us, this show feels super light, but you aren't coming in with that book context. So you feel the dark elements of the show that felt very suppressed to us.

Ben

The T-aras did not exist for the book readers until Part 4. And the way that they were presented in Part 4, I actually thought they were a lot younger than young.

Shan

It was in Part 3 that we met them in the book. They're basically presented as his club friends. They are not necessarily close personal friends. They had a much bigger role in the drama. I think it was implied that they were a little bit younger, but I don't remember the exact details of that.

Ben

What works for me about the T-aras is it feels like in some ways Sang Young Park was apologizing to his friends who read his book. [Shan and NiNi laugh] He wrote them out of the story for most of it and I'm imagining somebody called him onto the floor and they were like bitch, we broke into your house for you!

I get what you mean, NiNi. They highlight how isolated he is. But what I love about them is that this shows that despite his isolation, he was not as alone as he thought he was. There were people around him that cared about him, that stuck by him, that listened to his bullshit, that supported him, really wanted to be there. That dark moment where he hurts himself, and his friends are fighting hospital staff just so they can make eye contact with him and know that he's alive and let him know that they're there too. That had me and Twig sobbing in our DMs for two days.

Their initial reaction to someone else who was rumored to be positive influenced Young's inability to be as open with them about that, because when you're in your early 20s you make goofy foolish mistakes like that because you're not thinking that one of yours could be sick. You hurt people and they don't trust you at that point with something really important.

I don't know that Young ever reaches a point where he can tell them about that and that's kind of sad, but I just loved that they were also one of the throughlines of his story along with the apartment. And I love that when he leaves the apartment, he brings them with him. That felt so much better than the very difficult place the book left me. When we finished reading the book, Shan was like, “I'm feeling kind of optimistic about that.” Meanwhile, me and Bookworm were like, “No, we're not. We're going to need to sit with this for a bit.”

Shan

I was very intrigued by NiNi's mention earlier that at the end of the show, she felt like Young was starting to come out of it. That is exactly the feeling I got at the end of the book. And the way we got there was a little different, but I felt like what I saw in Part 4 reading the novel was not a Young that was healed, but a Young that was starting to figure out how to be better, how to heal himself. And I felt hope for his future.

Ben, on the other hand, was really caught up in the bleakness of where we left him, that we didn't get to see him get over that mountain. It felt right to me that we didn't because this is a story that is frozen in a moment in time, that was written at, like, the end of this man's 20s when he was looking back at his young life and the mistakes that he had made. He hadn't yet figured out how to get himself together. He hadn't gotten over that mountain yet. And so neither did Young in the story. It felt appropriate.

I think that feeling of hope was present in both versions of the story. And I think it did come through stronger in the drama.

NiNi

The thing that I was alluding to earlier is Young moving out of the apartment. That makes me feel like he's about to dig out because that apartment was such a part of him throughout the story. It became this constant in his life. And in the end, I think it was a little bit of a stone around his neck that he needed to get rid of; he needed to make a break with some aspects of the past in order to move forward. And part of that was moving out of that apartment, moving into the new place.

The person who's there with him is Eunsoo, who he is becoming closer to because the two of them are having, I think, a different experience from the other T-aras and they are connecting over that experience. Eunsoo has been in this long, very serious relationship that was going to lead towards marriage and Young had this relationship with Gyuho that was incredibly serious and really defining and I don't feel necessarily like the other T-aras had something like that, but for the two of them it was a thing that they connected over, that they understood essentially why they left those relationships. They didn't have to explain it to each other, they were just able to be. So watching him leave the apartment, watching him get closer to Eunsoo, those two things are the things that made me feel like Young's gonna be okay, he's gonna dig his way out of this.

Ben

I'm glad that we all got there in the drama. I think that's the most important thing that he got right in this adaptation, after taking us on this long journey with Young, he doesn't give us any bullshit answers at the end of it. But at least he showed us that Young is not destined to suffer and spiral for the rest of his life. And I think that's a good place to leave someone after giving us their tumultuous twenties.

01:40:28 - Love In The Big City: Final Thoughts and Ratings

Ben

Before we get into ratings, I think we should talk about the production of this show and the distribution drama around it. First, let's talk about Nam Yoon Su. Nam Yoon Su is a phenomenal actor.

NiNi

Amazing.

Ben

It is very clear that a lot of very careful decisions went into his casting because he has, as of this recording, a very clean public record. Everybody loves this man. He's a favorite of a lot of people. I think it was really clever of them to cast an actor that had such a good reputation to play such a complex character.

Shan

He has mostly played a lot of side roles in mainstream kdramas. So he's a very well-known face to kdrama viewers.

Ben

What a beautiful face. Look at those dimples.

Shan

Nam Yoon Su doesn't have the visuals of a heterosexual kdrama lead, but he is perfect as Young. He has always been really captivating in every role that he's had. He's a phenomenal actor who, because of the very narrow standards of what is perceived to be the ideal masculine model for heterosexual kdramas, has not had the chance to lead a show. So I loved seeing him get that chance here and he ran with it.

Ben

More important, I loved that he embraced this character so much. That gay little run that man executed? I will give that man every award that this silly little podcast is able to offer him.

Shan

Body language, his expressions, the inflections that he used in his voice. I've seen him in other stuff. This was all brand new.

Ben

I really love that he and all of his co-stars were able to get to where they needed with these characters and I really love the way they clearly coordinated for their press tour for this show. Half the guys were like, I am in love with Nam Yoon Su now. They're like, don't you think that sounds kind of gay? Well, I guess that's who I am now. [NiNi and Shan laugh]

Shan

I guess that's what it is.

NiNi

Who is the actor who played Gyuho?

Shan

Gyuho's actor is Jin Ho Eun. He was so honored to be part of this project. He was so excited to play Gyuho. Seems like such a nice dude. The guy who played Youngsoo, Na Hyun Woo is his name. He gave interviews where he basically admitted to falling in love with Nam Yoon Su while filming this show and becoming a little bit obsessed with him. Relatable!

Ben

In the interview, they're like, “Have you met any of the other actors that he worked with?” “Not yet. I don't know if I should.”

Shan

Gonna have some jealousy issues, was the implication.

NiNi

The reason that I was asking about the actor who played Gyuho is because I did see something about how he had wanted to work with Nam Yoon Su for a really long time and when it came up the chance to work with him he accepted before he even knew what it was and when he found out what it was he was just like, “Okay yes let's do this” and he went full pussy in because he wanted to impress Nam Yoon Su. I thought that was a great story.

Shan

Everyone in the production had nothing but wonderful things to say about Nam Yoon Su. He seems quite beloved.

Ben

He talked about how this was one of the most difficult projects he was in, because he's present in every part. He has to work with these different directors who have different styles. He talked about, there was a little bit of a melancholy for him about how right as he was developing a rhythm with one director and their team, he would have to start that over again with another director with each part.

Shan

He basically made four different dramas inside this drama. He played Young differently in each part.

Ben

Part of why they were able to cast Nam Yoon Su is they got two huge grants which helped make this possible. A lot of these KBLs we watch are made on really tiny budgets and a lot of heart. This is one of the few projects we get to see where a significant amount of money was brought to bear to make the drama happen. The fact that they were able to afford someone like Nam Yoon Su is telling about this.

And this led to a bunch of drama right before the series released where conservative groups were gathering to protest the drama to try and keep it from being aired. It led to the network choosing to just dump the show onto the internet instead of airing it properly. And I am frustrated because I do not think this drama was meant to be binged.

Shan

That's the way that it got distributed, so of course that's the way that some people watched it, but it only got distributed that way because it had to, to make sure that it could all be released into the world. It was a choice that was made out of necessity and not because it was what was ideal for the story. Which is why Ben and I and some of our friends who were in the book club together intentionally paced it and only watched two episodes a week, which is how it was meant to air.

Ben

I remember in 2016 when we watched Moonlight feeling like something has shifted in me as a viewer, and it's been so disappointing almost a decade later that it does not feel like the artistic impact that I felt in Moonlight has reached a lot of the follow-up media that I thought would speak to it. I really hope that Love in the Big City reaches a lot of people. Because this drama is special.

Shan

Sang Young Park shared that Love in the Big City is getting additional distribution after a really positive reception from the international audience. It aired on Netflix late in December, on Wave and Watcha, and it's going to be going to 15 additional Southeast Asian countries. So, despite the protest, despite the difficulty in getting funding and getting this made, it has reached an audience and that audience has returned love back to it. It has been heard and more people are gonna get to see this show.

Ben

That's beautiful news. I also heard that he may have gotten tapped for another project.

Shan

I think that's right. Sang Young Park is continuing to get work. He's still writing books. He's going to be making other shows. I'm very excited to see what else he puts out.

Ben

This was a really special experience. This is probably my favorite experience of the year. I really, really loved the book club experience. And I'm so glad that we were able to carry that forward into the show.

On that note, let's rate this bad boy! Tens or chops, NiN!

NiNi

It’s a 10.

Ben

Shan?

Shan

I gave it, in my actual rating, a 9.5, because, you know, I'm me and I had some notes, but I loved it. Loved it so much.

Ben

Goddamn it, Shan! [laughs]

Shan

Come on, you know me. But it’s a beautiful, beautiful drama. One of my very favorite things that I watched this year and honestly going on my list of all-time favorites.

Ben

This gets a 10 from me because it's a show that I wish everyone would watch slowly and then talk to me about it.

Shan

Slowly! Please do not binge it and then come talk to us. We're just gonna get mad.

Ben

Please, at most, watch two episodes a day and give your brain a chance to absorb what you experienced?

Shan

Somebody on Tumblr said today that they needed five to seven business days to process every section of Love in the Big City, and that is correct, that is the right way to watch it.

01:48:25 - Outro

Ben

On that note, let's wrap up this discussion of two of our three favorite Korean projects of the year.

Shan

While there is less Korean content overall in BL and in queer drama this year, they gave us some of the best stuff of the year.

Ben

Thank you all for spending time with us on this. Please share with us your reactions, especially if you were in the book club. I'd love to hear how you're feeling about the show, the book, the movie after we're a couple of weeks and now maybe months removed from it.

NiNi

That is going to wrap us up on Hallyu, our Korean Wave episode. We out.

Say bye to the people, Shan.

Shan

Bye people!

NiNi

Say bye to the people, Ben.

Ben

Peace!

#ben and nini's conversations #podcast #the conversation #lgbtq #let free the curse of taekwondo #love in the big city #litbc book club #winter series #on art #winter 2025 #korean bl #bl series #Spotify

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