#Writers of Color Series

[mochiiniko]

day 4: old cocole art dump because its about time i posted these 💀

essay in the tags youve been warned lmao

[sleepynegress]

So, this discourse is the main character moment of twitter right now...

And I have thoughts. First of all, the rise of anti-sex discourse in media is firmly based in white supremacist puritanical bullshit. The Hays Code was all about enforcing heteronormative lily-white "wholesome". LGBTQ folk and people of color, and women's pleasure(!) ALWAYS were disproportionately struck with harsher ratings. Second, film/tv/streaming has actually trended towards less sexuality recently? To the detriment of the quality of media that does center it, IMO (or why 50 Shades & 365 were oddly popular, despite being trash)....

Third, and thankfully, even more recently, I'm seeing the turn back towards sexuality in narratives but handled more thoughtfully than in the days of white male directors putting their kinks and fetishes on film (or why Bridgerton and it's spin-off is popular). Thanks to Intimacy coordinators and a broader gaze steering the proceedings. I really think a revolution is coming and all it will take is one big mainstream hit that is thoroughly sexy and undeniably good to critics and audiences. Preferrably *not* with het white leads.

[absolutebl]

Hey ABL. Just sent my doctorate for examination and for the first time since 2019 I have WAY too much time on hands. Can you suggest some binge watches? Got into bl last Feb so stuff before that would be great. Warmly, M

CONGRATZ!!!

10 Older BLs Worthy of a Binge Watch!

(in no particular order, prior to 2022)

1 Seven Days: Monday-Thursday & Seven Days: Friday-Sunday

Japan 2015 (grey)

Never doubt my ability to recommend this show. One of the best live action yaois ever made, with perfectly structured angst, fantastic characters and acting, and no problematic tropes (rare in Japanese BL). The leads have excellent chemistry although it’s low heat there’s still some really cute mutual kisses.

2 To My Star

Korea 2021 (Viki)

In the mood for something more grown up? TMS is a touch quirky to get into, but utterly charming once it hits its stride. This is the ultimate grumpy/sunshine pairing plus the most appealing light-filled kitchen of our dreams.

I don't like season 2 but others do. It is very clever.

3 We Best Love: No. 1 For You & Fighting Mr. 2nd

Taiwan 2021 (WeTV)

How about a uni + office BL? Brilliant acting saved this show from a messy (pretty classically manga) narrative with a lot of angst. You have to buy in to a yaoi aesthetic with this one, accept that things move fast and occasionally confuse, but that everything will be okay. It’s the ultimate pining seme meets the ultimate tsundere uke. WBL successfully manages to combine the best elements of Korean, Thai, and Japanese BL as it exists right now. Couple that to the insane chemistry from the leads, and we have one of the greatest BLs of all time, cooking higher heat to a recipe I doubt anyone else will ever be able to replicate since only Taiwan is this flexible.

4 He's Coming to Me

Thailand 2019 (YouTube)

With only 8 8 eps and from GMMTV this is short, high quality and bingable for Thailand. Boy and ghost boy fall in love, must solve ghost’s murder. Peak pining but also pretty tame, features my favorite sweet but important coming out sequence in all BL. The third in my precious triumvirate of unbeatable Thai BLs, that are only nominally BL because the story, acting, and production values are so good.

(Together with Until We Meet Again & A Tale of Thousand Stars - those 2 are longer so I don't consider them as bingable, but if you want something to get really stuck into? Go to town.).

5 Color Rush

Korea 2021 (Viki)

A unique paranormal twist elevates this classic high school drama into a pitch-perfect allegory for the queer coming out experience and one of the best BLs of all time (I will fight you on this). Here's my battle essay.

Original trigger.

(Don't bother with season 2.)

6 HIStory 2: Crossing the Line

Taiwan 2018 (Viki)

Lin Pei Yu directs this sports romance (volleyball) with a good boy/bad boy pairing, and my hands-down favorite of the HIStory franchise. There is no clear seme/uke. Ostensibly it's high school set but Taiwan doesn't care about age appropriate actors. It's a very soft sweet romance with some ridiculously easily overcome conflict. There's great kisses but it's medium heat. The side dishes are the stepbrother trope but they’re very tame, and there’s no other triggers. It's not just my favorite of the franchise, it’s one of my favorite BLs with a perfect happy ending.

(The second H2 is also pretty good.)

7 Cherry Magic

30-sai made Dotei Da to Mahotsukai ni Nareru rashii AKA Cheri Maho

Japan 2020 (indie subs)

The sweetest fluffiest magical realism BL, packaged as a pinning office romance, very low heat (practically chaste) but the cutest. It’s truly great.

8 Light On Me

Korea 2021 (Viki)

Korea does an elegant pastiche of traditional live action yaoi but all tropes are cleverly deployed to bolster one of the most riveting love triangles ever put on screen… and I don’t like love triangles. LoM strategically tailors classic BL tropes to 2 different semes resulting in pristine pacing, plot, and character development, explicitly serving narrative (not just to tick boxes). LoM is a master class in trope drops. (If you write fanfic or romance you should study this show.) Full review.

9 Be Loved In House: I Do

Taiwan 2021 Viki

A cute classy office set BL with a few plot raised eyebrows, but no other concerns. ALL THE TROPES plus a general sweet softness that’s pretty rare from Taiwan, who usually prefer to go hard, but all their signature domesticity.

10 Lovely Writer

Thailand 2021 (YouTube)

Thailand criticizes itself and the BL industry while simultaneously giving us classic seme/uke with great chemistry in a one-two punch of “we love it, but are we supposed to? and must we think this hard, yet enjoy it SO MUCH?” This show won’t appeal or make sense to those who don’t already have at least some Thai BL watching experience. What Lovely Writer does, at heart, is reexamine Thai BL has done to queerness, but in a very gentle way that has more to do with Thai BL growing up than any actual queer authenticity. It’s not parody or pastiche, but it is self reflective and trying to correct for some chronic mistakes. Whether it is ultimately successful in this matter is going to depend on the watcher’s relationship to BL and queer identity. But that’s what makes this show beautiful, interesting, and thought provoking. And I, for one, applaud the effort even if I didn’t personally connect to the characters.

If you wanted 2022 included here's my top 10 from 2022:

[shedontlovehuhself]

Just more reasons why I've been supporting this show. Looking at the creators behind it. Having seen some of the people in the writers room posting on twitter.

[aq2003]

series 3 is so frustrating because there is like a shining core of pure diamond underneath the problems . like conceptually it rocks so incredibly hard. but the problems

[scarefox]

my playlists so far:

Huaien x Xiaobao [Meet you at the Blossom]

Playboyy the Series

Charlie x Babe [Pit Babe]

Laws of Attraction (all couples)

Tinn x Charn [Laws of Attraction]

Methee x Tanthai [Laws of Attraction]

Uea x King [Bed Friend]

Kinn x Porsche [KinnPorsche]

Vegas x Pete [KinnPorsche]

Kim x Chay [KinnPorsche]

Chan x Big [KinnPorsche]

Hira x Kiyoi [Utsukushii Kare]

Jongwoo x Moonjo 1, 2, 3 [Strangers From Hell]

Inwoo x Dongsik [Psychopath Diary]

Yoohan x Yeonwoo [Color Rush]

Gene x Nubsib [Lovely Writer]

Kylo Ren x General Hux [Star Wars]

slutty Villain playlist

[kazz-brekker]

until season 2 of shadow and bone comes out i am going to entertain a pleasant daydream where alina’s interactions with tolya and tamar give the show a chance to explore her shu heritage in a way other than having characters be racist to her

[marklikely]

take me back to 2016 when i could enjoy a star wars without remembering rian johnsons garbage movie and getting mad

[shironezuninja]

I almost couldn’t relocate these 2 layouts/collages earlier. I re-edited the original twice to remind myself why I can’t hashtag my written stories on Instagram.

[cagedcats]

Going on a weird-ish tangent for some reason about the newest arc-

I feel like the main issue with the writing and characters is quite literally how many people are involved in the writing aaaaand that the editing team doesn’t… or never seemed to learn the characters from before them.

Such as characters we’ve known to be chill being uncharacteristically aggressive and characters flipping personality/opinions every book or so and just. Idk

Tho having multiple people writing one series isn’t a whole issue tho. It’s mostly the lack of communication between them. Which is the biggest fault in the writing process.

Finchlight supporting Nightheart in one book and in the very next book was treating him as a traitor for the very thing she supported him on. Having StarClan encouraging Leafpool to have a relationship, then treating her like an actual criminal that could be sentenced to the Dark Forest.

[loveshotzz]

When we gonna meet older steve honey its been too long

soon baby! yesterday was the first time I wrote in like over a week so I’m hoping now that I’ve ripped the bandaid off I can start working on my wips again 🥹

[icamefromadream]

So I saw your art apps post and writing apps so I was hoping you could help me out. So I'm really I to collages, collages are beautiful and I love how different interests cna be added to show the personality of a person. I was hoping for a website or app that could help me make them faster? Cause using canvas is hard and I have to go back and forth trying to remove the backround of an image from lintrest to put into canva. Thanks♥️

Ok so I hear you, collages are BEAUTIFUL.

There is an app made for this purpose actually, and it's directly linked to pintrest, so you can instantly add pictures from pintrest with the backround removed. I'm not sure if they have a website, I haven't checked, but there should most likely be one.

So the name of the app is

Shuffle.

You can even post your collages and add tags, and even download other collages made, it's a pretty decent app and honestly I love it.

You can even upload your own pictures!

It has many features that you can still check out, since I haven't figures it all out, but I do know that you can add filters to some pictures and even organize what picture you want on top or under, you can even lock a picture so you don't move it on accident.

Ask @paranoia-art for anymore questions!

[chiinferno]

On May 5th, I was invited to participate in a Reading for Literary Bridges at Next Chapter Booksellers in St. Paul, Minnesota. There I read an excerpt from the first chapter of my upcoming novel Trial by Fire Academy. I was also surrounded by several other great writers and poets who provided readings for the event, and this video is a compilation of those who participated!

[bemusedlybespectacled]

proposing what I'm going to call Gaylor's Razor, which is: never explain normal shit as being part of a secret message that can only be decoded by over-analysis.

"These Taylor Swift lyrics are actually coded messages saying that she's a lesbian and is forced to stay in the closet! Any lyrics that are clearly about being attracted to a man are just to throw us off the scent!" Sometimes people, like Taylor Swift, are straight and write about being straight, because they are straight.

"The fourth series of Sherlock was deliberately bad because it was actually a coded message to us fans that there is a secret fourth episode that will make Johnlock canon and will actually be good!" Sometimes writers (even experienced writers who are normally good at their jobs) will write something that's not good, because no one is perfect. They're not going to waste everyone's time and money and energy creating something terrible on purpose as part of a grand master plan.

"Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir, the Canadian Olympic ice dancers, are secretly married (with kids)! Their public relationships with people who are not each other and them repeatedly saying 'we dated as kids and now we're just friends' are just to hide the truth! Which they need to hide for some reason! Their relationship is obvious just from their physical chemistry when competing! JUST LOOK AT THIS TWO SECOND CLIP OF HIM BLINKING AT HER!" It seems counterproductive to put all that thought into hiding a relationship that doesn't need to be hidden but then also telegraph that same relationship in front of millions of people through planned choreography.

"But BB, what about times that people really are speaking in code or hiding something due to outside influences?"

If it requires huge leaps in logic, like adding all the letters in a sentence together and dividing by seventeen and that number matches the binary sequence for the color yellow so YELLOW MUST BE SIGNIFICANT, it's not a secret code.

If it requires focusing on teeny tiny details but discards huge ones, like analyzing someone's micro-expressions but handwaving away what the person is actually saying out loud with their mouth, or focusing on one specific line instead of the entire scene or song or whatever, it's not a secret code.

If both supporting and contradictory evidence are used to come to the same conclusion (ex: when Taylor says something that I interpret as gay, that means she's gay, and when she says something that I interpret as straight, that still means she's gay and just hiding it), it's not a secret code.

Trying to apply fandom meta analysis techniques to real life is a really good way of fall into conspiratorial thinking that can be easily exploited. You can totally try to predict what's going to happen in a story or choose to interpret a scene in a specific way; you can't do that in real life with real people. That way lies the kind of nonsense that leads to shit like "this image of pizza on a children's toy is actually subliminal messaging by The Cabal™ that proves that Pizzagate is real."

[sirendabbles]

Screw it this is an everything blog now — if people get confused I’ll just start linking (🧝🏼‍♂️) stuff

Anywho these are two ocs of mine cuz it’s antagonist appreciation week I have declared it and these two are both technically antagonists of their own happiness :D