#bl before 2022

[gay-meowmeow]

me opening and immediately closing any app that isnt tumblr or youtube becuz all they have is ql discourse against nc scenes and fanservice, insane hate for qls that are thai, and racism against south east asian actors/media

[clairedaring]

We got beef, Dee Hup!

This is about I Still Feel You Linger in the Air, but it's going to take a minute to hop on that flight.

Because I just finished watching the Hidden Agenda finale, and . . .

Dee Hup House, we have a problem.

I love you. Your shows are gorgeous. You frame them so beautifully. The main pair's chemistry is always amazing. The conflicts are based in reality. The situations feel serious. Director Tee and Cinematographer Jim are excellent visual storytellers, and it shows in every single shot of their work. To be honest, I'm obsessed.

But then there is the pacing.

Every one of your shows has at least three screenwriters: Tan, Somchai, and Jungjing, with even more added sometimes like in Step by Step and Hidden Agenda. Having several screenwriters is the norm, but . . .

The shows include so much story that by time we get to the end, chunks of the narrative are left behind while trivial components get the spotlight. What should be important isn't, and what doesn't feel meaningful turns into the biggest theme.

Oh, and the second pairs always get shafted.

All of your work is adapted from novels that are pretty convoluted, so finding a coherent story that can be squished into twelve episodes must be difficult, which is why I'm worried about I Feel You Linger in the Air.

We already have a lot of meaty plot: social hierarchy, historical oppression, family dynamics, time travel, Thai politics, burning houses, and pig races just to name a few.

So are the ladies going to get the Dee Hup House second pair treatment?

Are we waiting until the end to flesh out some part of the main lead's character that would have helped us understand why he behaved the way he did for most of the series?

Are we getting a lot of plot that won't mean much at the end?

I don't feel like we are, but then again, I never feel like we are until it's over.

Like I wrote, I'm obsessed with your work, Dee Hup. I'm standing outside of your office building with homemade sparkly posters shouting how much I love you, and I'm being relentlessly intense about it.

I don't want to have beef with you. I'm a lover, not a fighter, so quit playing games. Someone walk into that writers' room and tell them to all get on the same page, literally, and give us a solid story until the very end because a wondrous queer story of timeless love and endless commitment regardless of society is right there.

I see it. It's beautiful.

So could you NOT hurt me with I Feel You Linger in the Air? Could you give the ladies the spotlight they deserve? Could you give both main leads equal characterization? Could you make the pig race meaningful?

And could you not wait until the last damn minute to give me a crumb?!

I'm begging you! Let me love you! Don't have me out here looking like Only Friends' Sand, Nick, and Top, just coming back for more punishment like a pendeja. Treat me better. No! Treat this story better.

It deserves it.

[clairedaring]

GelBoys, an upcoming iQIYI original - a Masterpost

Series Title: GELBOYS สถานะกั๊กใจ

Director: Boss Naruebet Kuno (I Told Sunset About You, The Paradise of Thorns)

Director of Photography: Tang Tawanwad Wanavit (I Told Sunset About You, The Paradise of Thorns)

Screenwriters: Boss Naruebet Kuno, Kate Karakade Norasethaporn, Junior Naron Cherdsoongnern (I Told Sunset About You, The Paradise of Thorns) (TBC)

Airing: 8 February 2025 - ? (Every Saturday at 8:30 PM (THA) on ONE31 Channel and 11:00 PM on iQIYI online)

Original Network: iQIYI

Official Synopsis: FOURMOD (NEW Chayaphak), a high schooler yearning for a romantic relationship, finds himself being hit on by CHIAN (PIDE Monthapoom), a gel-nails guy who casually invites him to get their nails done together at SIAM SQUARE.

FOURMOD falls for him but soon realizes he's being put 'on hold' when he discovers that CHIAN is inviting BUA (Leon Brocco), a half-Thai TikToker, for gel nail sessions as well. FOURMOD decides to get even by asking for help from his close friend BABIN (PJ Mahidol), to get their nails done together in an attempt to make CHIAN jealous and experience being in the 'on-hold' status himself.

GELBOYS, a story of relationships of youth in modern era in the vibrant atmosphere full of Pop culture at SIAM SQUARE.

GelBoys stars brand new faces whom you may or may not be familiar with. (source)

1. PJ Mahidol Pibulsonggram

Previously more known to the public as JJ Krissanapoom's little brother, PJ has recently gotten more public attention after starring in Good Doctor TH. He's also starred in PBS Thailand's Eightraordinary.

2. New Chayapak Tunprayoon

Thai QL audience may be more familiar with New Chayapak through projects like Netflix's Ready, Set, Love or I Promised You The Moon (the sequel series to I Told Sunset About You).

Fun fact: New Chayapak is actually a trainee under Nadao Academy before Nadao Bangkok got dissolved in 2022.

3. Pide Monthapoom Sumonvarangkul

If you've watched sports themed BL series Our Days before, you may remember Pide Monthapoom who plays Q.

4. Leon Brocco

GelBoys is Leon Brocco's series debut.

OFFICIAL MOOD TONE TEASER

As first announced in November 2024, GelBoys is iQIYI Thailand's third original series after Petrichor. GelBoys have been teasing the series through various social medias such as X, Tiktok and Youtube. You can watch the actors' short vlogs below.

[jeonscatalyst]

Being part of the biggest clown shippers of the k-pop and calling others idiots is a joke a phunnyyy one at that lol.

Like you jeonscatalyst even i thought this blogger was somewhat a normal tkkr because i once got recommended their post when i was searching something, they said jikook are good friends (bare minimum) so i was like damn that's the most intellectual thing i have ever seen a tkkr say. But then i once read there clownery in jkk tag and i had to block them because i don't have patients to see the stupidity in jkk tag. they had written a whole ass Thai bl script in that post and i was like the most reaction you're getting out of me for that post is a block. i genuinely thought this one was normal and doesn't ship taekook because jikook is a company ship but of course what do we expect from sheeps? to follow one another with a blind fold on.

Taekookers should be glad that jimin isn't what they want him to be (leaning more into fanservice lol) because Who jk asked to do a live with him? To jm and what did jm do? declined the offer. now WHO asked jk to do a live with him? tae. jm said he still remembers how bam used to sleep on his arm when he was baby but who has a pic posted with bam from company? tae with a caption "I raised bam" when not even jk was able to do that given his busy schedule so bam has spent most of his time in training center he still does. so jm and other members also knew bam way before ITS 2 and given that one pic of tae and bam seems like jk took bam to the comp and jm has known bam to say how he used to sleep in his arms but did he post anything? No. when jk was happy that he'll get his first boxing partner who was he talking about? JM. who does boxing together at the same centre? jm but who has posted a video of some regular boxing practice saying jk thought him even tho jk said he was just having fun with him? Tae.

Who has been with jk on his b'day (confirmed) multiple times? Jm but has he ever posted their pictures celebrating jk's b'day ever despite jm being physically present there? Never. even when in 2022 he posted jk's pic from his home jm literally zoomed in and cropped hell out of it and if it wasn't for jin asking jk we wouldn't even know jm was there and only AFTER jk confirmed jm being there, jm posted the pic so he doesn't care what shippers wants because if he did he would be doing that but i do remember tae posting a full pic of tae and jk on his b'day even tho jk posted the cropped one. Who was it who started live when vmin were outside jk's house? tae and who asked to cut the live and not bother jk who was doing live on his own? Jimin. who was who started live at jk's home when vhopekook were there? tae but i do remember jk saying he wasn't planning on starting any live but tae did so himself and did jm start any live when he was at jk's home? never. Jm was with jk when jk did live after his GMA perfomance yet jm didn't involve himself in jk's live and let hi do his own live even though we all already knew jm was in NYC itself cause even the host of the had asked jk. but i do remember Tae entering a suchwita episode of jk even when jk went "Can you leave we're filming something important?". it wouldn't have taken much from jm to get in jk's live but both lives jk did in NYC jm never once interfered or asked jk to start a live when they were together in NYC.

Who was it that went on live talking about calling jk and about the food? but when fans asked jm if he went to eat that dish he asked for jk and jm said no mind you he could have skipped the question not choosing to say it in the first place but he chose the question and answered honestly because he quite literally doesn't give a fk about what shippers want to hear and what not. How many times has tae gone live and mentioned ONLY jk and the deep the live? too many that everyone in the fandom was making a joke about it as to how tae's always talking about jk. But i do remember jm asking jk why was he even watching his videos (jm's videos in that 1.5 hrs live jk did) and that he should have slept.

Jimin is serving with jk for more than a year now and not even a single picture he's posted of him with jk and i can guarantee them that had it been any other pair serving in military together (pair excluding jm because he wouldn't have posted with anyone but maybe that other member have posted with jm who knows but never jm) we would have seen their pics together from military. we have all members posting their pics in uniform except jm, jk and yg. if jm actually leans into FS he would have posted once every now n then but guess what? he doesn't give a shit about that.

Also they should be glad that it's jm who gives updates of him and jk from MS (tho it's nothing much that we're doing well and talking) because if we leave it upto jk then man gives updates like "As soon as i finish my work i go to jimin hyung, we go a little away from other soldiers and sing out loud ", "me and jimin hyung sang this song almost Daily while showering together". they said jm saying he talks to jk before going to bed is somehow him sexualizing so what does jk saying all that says about him if jm was sexualizing? lol. they should be glad jm doens't give updates like jk because it's easy for him to say that jk comes to me after he finishes his duty but he never said like that when jk himself said it. they should decide who's updates they prefer then because jk has a habit of telling things in detail.

Saying jm leans more into fanservice and jk is considerate of tae's feelings when jk himself has described jm's charm is him being "considerate" like?? jk himself thinks jm is the most considerate. he literally said smth like being on his own is tae's charm (something like that) while jm's charm is being considerate when asked about member's charms. so if jk thinks jm is very considerate how is he the one leaning in FS while jk is setting boundries? Literally contradicting members' own words. mind you jk himself thinks that jm's Actions is something he takes from jm as in that part of jm is seen in jk. when someone asks jk why he's so considerate he says it's because he's following jm meaning he follows jm's consideration. The man who links all of his good doings immediately to jm, how are they claiming that same person doesn't know boundries? again contradicting with what jk actually says and thinks about jm.

By making these comparisons I'm not accusing tae of doing anything but I'm just showing them that if we sit here and start using their logic maybe before jm they'd have to start question tae IF they wanna go with their logic. They should be glad jm ain't what they project onto him.

Wow anon,

When you lay everything out like this, it becomes quite clear who could actually be considered to be “catering” to shippers…if we were to follow their own logic, that is.

I’ve always believed that the members have every right to mention, post about, or visit each other as much as they please. No part of me would ever see that as catering to shippers because, at the end of the day, they know each other intimately, and we, as outsiders, do not.

Given the way you’ve outlined things in your ask, it’s almost unbelievable that Tae does all of this, yet these same people still insist that Jimin is the one pandering to shippers. It’s even more absurd when you realize that the very people accusing Jimin of catering to shippers are the same ones who have Tae as their favorite and actively ship him with Jungkook. Can you imagine the uproar if Jimin had done even a fraction of what Tae has?

From the way they talk, it’s clear that they’ve never truly listened to what the members say. Actually, scratch that—they do listen, but only when they can twist the members’ words to fit their own narrative.

It’s funny what you uncover when you take a closer look at their history.

Here, we can all clearly see and hear Jungkook explaining that Jimin is good at leaving him alone after he asks once or twice, whereas Tae will come back about thirty times. The members all agree with him on this. Based on that, who seems to struggle with respecting boundaries? Who appears more inconsiderate of Jungkook’s feelings?

Absolutely nothing Jungkook said here or anywhere else implies that Jimin disregards boundaries or is some insensitive, selfish person who ignores the emotions of his friends. But I can bet most Taekookers haven’t even seen this and those who have, have likely convinced themselves that the members only said it because it was their “job.”

You know, because apparently, it was all part of some grand plan. According to them, the members were tasked with portraying Bang PD’s favorite, “Mimi,” as an angel. Cite anything from the members own words that contradicts their beliefs, and they’ll immediately claim the boys were lying, following a script, or just “doing their jobs.” Because, of course, Bang PD founded BigHit not to create music or cultivate artists but to sign idols into contracts that require them to spend their careers propping up Jimin’s image. Forget singing, dancing, and performing…their real job, apparently, is to sit down and say the nicest things about Jimin so the world can view him as an angel🙄

[impromptu-sketches]

𝔹𝕃 𝟚𝟘𝟚𝟜 ✦ 𝕎ℝ𝔸ℙ-𝕌ℙ

happy new year!! ✨ °˖✧🥂✧˖° ✨

I enjoyed so much BL this year ⸜(｡˃ ᵕ ˂ )⸝ thank you to all of the authors, artists, & creators for your hard work and dedication. I promise every little detail you include we see and appreciate ♡♡

For all of the BL stories I’ve read this past year, I have a winner in 13 categories and 5 overall 2024 winners.

Enjoy!

.

.

✰ FUNNIEST

And the nominees are…

Punch Drunk Love (2023 winner)

Killer Crush (2022 winner)

Sekai-ichi Hatsukoi / The World's Greatest First Love: The Case of Ritsu Onodera

Lucky Paradise

Happy Crappy Life

And the winner is…

LUCKY PARADISE

I re-read this one this year and despite some emotional moments in the series, I laugh out loud every single chapter!! This one has ~layers~ to it, it hits so many different types of humor for me. Ho-in and Woojin are absolute clowns (bffs ♡) and Chunwoo is always so deadpan... I love them so much ٩( ᗒᗨᗕ )۶ Idc how many side chapters there are, I'll be reading them all ♡

.

✰ MOST INTRIGUING

And the nominees are…

Night Fragments

Gig of the Day

Liveta

Dawn of the Dragon

Scent and Sensibility

And the winner is…

LIVETA

Ahhhhhh ♡ I love Liveta ♡ Despite this one being ongoing since 2021 and being on hiatus a lot of this year, when it comes back -and honestly every single chapter- I'm pulled into this unique world all over again.

I'll definitely be re-reading this series before it ends. I feel like it's one of those where we don't register certain information the first time or understand the meaning of things, like the side characters, characters' history or traumas, context as to what happened when. I've already re-read it twice? three times? and I feel like there's more I missed! I love the complex characters, the inner & outer conflicts, I love the overall tone and balance of soft and dark scenes. This author can do it all!

We're on chapter 76 and I want to see so much more of their world and their stories. I can't wait to keep reading and I hope we still have a long way to go ♡

.

✰ BEST SEX SCENES

And the nominees are…

Coyote (2023 winner)

Honey Bear

4 Week Lovers

Pearl Boy

The Ghost's Nocturne

And the winner is…

HONEY BEAR

A very difficult choice... but this year specifically I was drooling over the spicy scenes in Honey Bear ʕ >ᴥ<ʔ

After that amazing author's note at the end of season 1, I knew. (If you haven't read the author's note, please do! These creators are hilarious, I love them so much ♡♡) They teased us a bit in the beginning and then fed us so well!! We got the BAKERY scene! And then they topped that ;) with the dom/sub scene - THE FREAKING BREATHE PLAY!!!! The hot springs scene... literally every single sex scene \(0_0)/

I love when the bottom is so horny, enthusiastic, and desperate for their (future) bf!! And what makes it even better is that they're so cute together and so sweet to each other ♡♡ I love them so much ♡♡

.

✰ FAVORITE FLUFF

And the nominees are…

Our Sunny Days

Boyfriends

To the Stars and Back

Sasaki and Miyano

Hirano and Kagiura

And the winner is…

SASASKI AND MIYANO

THE SLOW BURN IS KILLING ME!! I really just melt reading about these two ♡ they're so soft and sweet to each other ♡ I'm obsessed ♡

I want to see them continue to grow on their own and together, I want to see them bond over more BL (specifially I want Sasaki fudanshi moments haha), I want to see more of them happy and in love, and seeing each other's family & friends. I want them to go on a double date with Hirano and Kagiura hahaha ٩(ˊᗜˋ*)و

.

✰ FAVORITE BOTTOM

And the nominees are…

Park Seon-Woo | Punch Drunk Love (2023 winner)

Victor Luna | Liveta (2021 winner)

Shin | Shutline

Yeomin | Gig of the Day

Dohu | Between the Lines

And the winner is…

YEOMIN | GIG OF THE DAY

Yeomin!! Oh my god, he's so cute!!

The thing I love about Yeomin is that his character is set up as a stereotypical bottom we see often where he's poor, in debt, has no family/the family he does have is awful and takes advantage of him, and he must work hard just to survive. But unlike other characters, Yeomin is outgoing, cheerful, and surprisingly positive. Even after scary moments, he bounces back pretty fast. We see him smiling a lot with friends, and of course, with Tae-seo.

One of my favorite parts in the beginning of the story that made me fall for this little cutie was when Tae-seo took him out to eat for the first time and Yeomin talked his ear off about school, and other random things in his life (,,>﹏<,,) he's so precious we must protect him (งᓀ‸ᓂ)ง Tae-seo, you better step up and be nice. (I trust this author to do him right ♡)

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✰ FAVORITE TOP

And the nominees are…

Juwon | High Clear

Minwoo | Topsy Turvy

Dooshik | Pearl Boy

Kahyeok | Killer Crush

Jae-hee | 4 Week Lovers

And the winner is…

DOOSHIK | PEARL BOY

I love Dooshik so much ♡ always have, always will. This year he's been suffering... as have I while reading Pearl Boy... but I hope he gets his happy ending ♡

I want to see him carefree dancing in the club again ♡ I want to see him being silly and dorky and singing in the car with Jooha ♡ I want to see him being submissive (haha, just me? I liked seeing him cry tho)

The way this man hasn't wavered one bit and tried to be so strong for Jooha ♡o(╥﹏╥)o♡ he deserves all of the happiness.

.

✰ FAVORITE COUPLE

And the nominees are…

Dooshik & Jooha | Pearl Boy (2021, 2022, & 2023 winner)

Skylar & Cirrus | Lost in the Cloud

Sasaki & Miyano | Sasaki and Miyano

Taeman & Kahyeok | Killer Crush

Suyong & Jaehyun | Topsy Turvy

And the winner is…

DOOSHIK & JOOHA | PEARL BOY

4th year in a row ♡♡ I JUST LOVE THEM YOUR HONOR!!!

。゜゜(´Ｏ`) ゜゜。I love them both so much - as individual characters and especially together ♡♡ The way they've both had their own and intertwined character development that continues even now, the way they're so ride-or-die serious about each other but also silly stupid in love. They really saw each other at their lowest rock-bottom moment in life and said... 'yup, he's mine'

I don't know how much longer we have left of their story but I hope we get to see them going about their new life together ♡♡

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✰ FAVORITE SIDE COUPLE

And the nominees are…

Sys & Randolph | King's Maker: Triple Crown

Ichikawa & Kikuchihara | Twilight Out of Focus

Minwoo & Norman | Topsy Turvy

Seolho & Hyunshik/boss | Killer Crush

Mi-Rye & Kyungbin | Merry Marbling

And the winner is…

MI-RYE & KYUNBIN | MERRY MARBLING

I don't even know where to start with these two... this author really fleshes out their characters and these two are no exception. It's so interesting to see them from their first interactions together up until now. They're so high school shy silly cute!! The time when Mi-Rye secretly followed Kyungbin to his away practice camp thing (˃ ▿ ˂) Mi-Rye is a fool for him HAHA

One thing I'm dying to know even though we may never find out... is who's top and who's the bottom!! I can't figure these two out. If it was up to me, I would definitely make them vers, pretty equally. That's how I see them right now anyway.

Looking forward to reading more of their story ♡♡

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✰ COUPLE I MOST WANT TO BE IN A THROUPLE WITH

And the nominees are…

Karlyle & Ash | Define the Relationship (2023 winner)

Ye-gyum & Jooin | Lovesick Dog

Taeman & Kahyeok | Killer Crush

Deisel & Ein | Wolf in the House: Nightfall

Joowon & Aiden | Bend over Backwards

And the winner is…

YE-GYUM & JOOIN | LOVESICK DOG

Them ゜・。。・゜゜・。。・゜♡

First, they're so cute and domestic ♡♡ can't beat being lazy at home together. Another couple who are so sweet to each other and care about each other so much ♡♡

Second, the switch vibes are immaculate. They don't actually switch :/ sadly, because I know this author has done that in their past work, but there are side chapters coming out! So maybe there's hope?

Regardless, I've loved these two from the beginning and I would be so happy in this relationship ♡

.

✰ FAVORITE MAIN CHARACTER

And the nominees are…

Taeman | Killers Crush (2023 winner)

Park Seon-Woo | Punch Drunk Love

Shin | Shutline

Juwon | High Clear

Yeomin | Gig of the Day

And the winner is…

SHIN | SHUTLINE

I love all of these characters so much (>ω<) but Shin... he just cracks me up. Tough-guy mechanic, smarter than he looks, vers king, self-proclaimed lowlife, and in too deep... I mean, he recognized Jake from his -footsteps- alone. He's so funny without even trying. And these overalls (●//▽//●) finally we get to see him in sexy overalls!!

I love Shin's smile ♡ I hope we get to see more of him smiling ♡

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✰ FAVORITE SIDE CHARACTER

And the nominees are…

Sys | King's Maker: Triple Crown (2023 winner)

Seolho | Killer Crush

Woojin | Lucky Paradise

"the kid" | Our Sunny Days

Kyungbin | Merry Marbling

And the winner is…

SYS | KING'S MAKER: TRIPLE CROWN

I didn't even read any of Kings Maker this year (/ω＼) (I'm waiting for the mature version to be complete and then I plan to re-read the entire series) but Sys is such an icon ♡ I haven't read any of season 3 yet but I'm so freaking excited!!!! I want to see him and Randolph, I want to see more of him and his two guards ♡♡ and just Sys being his badass fashionable self ♡♡♡

.

✰ FAVORITE BOY

And the nominees are…

Juwon | High Clear (2023 winner)

Sasaki | Sasaki and Miyano

Cirrus | Lost in the Cloud

Yeomin | Gig of the Day

Minwoo | Topsy Turvy

And the winner is…

CIRRUS | LOST IN THE CLOUD

Oh my god Cirrus... I don't know what to say. Honestly, I love how messy this boy is. I love his regular high schooler side, his flirty side, when he was begging for Skylar's attention and was pouty when he didn't get it. I love his silly and innocent side. I love his dark side and his anger. I love everything about him ♡♡

This poor boy has gone through so much. He really went through hell as a child and -then- had to deal with psychological warfare in his own home for years :( I want to see him living on his own with Candy (his dog) again. I want to see him happy and silly with Skylar ♡♡

Despite everything lol I think they're so good for each other.

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✰ FAVORITE TOXIC BL

And the nominees are…

Twittering Birds Never Fly (2023 winner)

Lost in the Cloud

Boss Bitch Baby

Gig of the Day

Jinx

And the winner is…

GIG OF THE DAY

Yay!! Even though Gig of the Day doesn't have a very unique plot, I loved this one from the very first chapter!! It felt refreshing, I think because of Yeomin's character but also because of the overall tone.

When I first started it, I thought that it was going in a slightly different direction... I thought Tae-seo would basically be one of those 'I'm an asshole to everyone but you' characters and Yeomin wouldn't know about his other side as a director (or as an asshole lol) until much later. I thought Tae-seo would fall for him and get swept up in his feelings - even if he didn't realize them yet - and not be able to treat him poorly. Like, he would want to because that's typically what he does, but he would just give in to whatever Yeomin wanted. I got that vibe (just like Yeomin lol) when he stayed the night, took him out for food, etc. in the beginning. But despite doing those things that could be seen as caring, he didn't treat Yeomin the best... haha (although he was honest & upfront about what he wanted so it wasn't completely awful).

Even though it didn't go like how I was imagining, I trust this author with the redemption arc and turning him into a simp (ㅅ´ ˘ `) we're seeing glimpses of that already haha I love it. Plus, I LOVE how Tae-seo is always there at the right moment for Yeomin and is his protector. Idc about practicality, I love all of those scenes.

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✰ SUING FOR EMOTIONAL DAMAGE

And the winner is…

PEARL BOY

... again. I'll stop choosing Pearl Boy when it stops giving me anxiety!! Even though I didn't sob like last year, I'm always on edge reading this one because when they're happy I think something bad is coming and we're already on the side chapters so I don't know how much longer we have until the end! One chapter? Thirty?? They're still crying it can't end yet!! (つ﹏⊂)

Some lucky bastards will discover this a year or two from now and have a whole completed work to enjoy while we suffered and stressed since 2021!!

Worth it tho ♡♡♡

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✰ FAVORITE NEW BL

And the winner is…

A FIRST OF SUMMERS

Oh my god, y'all, I just started this like last month and it's so freaking cute (●//▽//●)

The art is amazing & original, these two are adorable!! An age gap where they both question the age gap?? Unheard of. Younger top x older bottom, younger guitar teacher x older guitar student ♡♡♡ fluffy & smutty (˵ᵕ̴᷄ ˶̫ ˶ᵕ̴᷅˵) my heart is so full ♡♡

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✰ FAVORITE ONGOING BL

And the winner is…

TOPSY-TURVY

AHHHHHHHHH!!!! Okay, if you're not reading Topsy-Turvy or you tried it and you didn't like it in the first few chapters, I'd give it another try if I were you!!!

Starting this, I didn't take it too seriously and thought it was just going to be another little goofy college story. BUT NO. It's a glorious mess of love triangles that I can't get enough of!!! I've already read it twice!!

First, the main couple is FREAKING ADORABLE!!! They're hilarious frenemies? in the beginning and then super sweet ♡♡ switch energy but don't switch (yet. I swear the author is teasing us) I love their dynamic so much ♡♡

One love triangle turns into another ~ it's driving me crazy!!! I ship Minwoo & Norman but I don't know if they're endgame (☍﹏⁰)｡ Norman's friend/fwb gives off creepy vibes to me (not in a good way) and now this new guy from the past just showed up in season 3!?! :/

I'm open to the author changing my mind. Whatever they give us I'm thankful for ♡♡ We're getting at least 50 more chapters from here (the korean is at ch. 152 and ongoing, we're currently at ch. 103). I'm happy we still have a long way to go (≧◡≦)

I've had so much fun reading this one so far!! ♡♡♡

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✰ FAVORITE BL THAT ENDED THIS YEAR

And the winner is…

UNDER THE GREEN LIGHT

I'm sad to see this one end, but it was time for them to get their happy ending ♡ Under the Green Light has been consistently amazing since the very beginning and I've had such a great time reading it over the years.

The ending was amazing in my opinion ♡ I would have liked to see a bit more of them happy & living together & obsessed with each other... but that's how I always feel lol

The REVEAL at the end... got me so emotional and when I inevitably re-read it again, it'll make the story even better ♡♡

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✰ FAVORITE BL OF 2024

And the winner is…

CHERRY MAGIC! THIRTY YEARS OF VIRGINITY CAN MAKE YOU A WIZARD?!

I can't stop looking at this volume 11 cover art (⊃//˶̫ //⊂)

Okay, I've loved Cherry Magic for a few years now but this year we got three volumes of them being newlyweds & living their happy life together ♡♡♡

We got the anime series!!! (loved it!!)

And we got the thai live action series (I'm currently watching and will be posting my thoughts later)

♡:.。ღ˘◡˘ற.。.:♡

Watching their story in all of these adaptations just makes me love them more ♡♡ and honestly makes me want to re-read the manga again. We get so many more small insights and moments in the original that I want to see again... one of my favorites is Kurosawa remembering that he wrote 30 songs about Adachi before they got together when he was crushing on him HAHAHA (✿>ꇴ<) omg I will never get over that.

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Thank you for reading!

[waitmyturtles]

Final Thoughts on Spare Me Your Mercy, Thailand's Biggest Queer Show of 2024*

(*domestically!)

Due to the holidays, I was behind on watching last week's finale of Spare Me Your Mercy, but I got it in, and I'm glad I did.

I am mucho on the record that I thought, throughout this series, that the romance portion of this series was done weakly. I throughly enjoyed and appreciated @clairedaring's objective and appreciative commentary throughout the airing of this drama to provide all of us with context about novel!SMYM versus series!SMYM, helping us to understand what of the many bits were missing between the two versions of this story.

There has been a nice lot of debate online about the ultimate success of the telling of the SMYM story in drama format, both pro and not so pro regarding the script. There was also quite the revealing interview with the screenwriter Lux Sirilux, who revealed that the show's design purposely excluded NC scenes to favor more time being spent on the euthanasia ethics debate (thank you so much to @clairedaring for reblogging so much, I wouldn't have these references without you!).

I want to note that even despite the recent holidays, that the heightened online burble of debate around SMYM indicates to me -- like the ensuing debates after the airing of the 4 Minutes finale -- that the story of the SMYM drama format didn't land for everyone. If it was universally successful in its storytelling from all the classic narrative markers, then much of this debate would not be happening.

I first entered the SMYM world understanding that it was a part of a storytelling trilogy of sorts, connecting Sammon's previously adapted stories in 2020's Manner of Death and 2022's Triage (I haven't reviewed Triage yet, but I watched it in 2024 and it is absolutely one of the five best Thai BLs I have ever watched.)

To go back to the Lux interview quickly, and to note fan commentary in defense of Lux's position: what Lux Sirilux posits is that the show essentially decentralized NC scenes and intimacy in favor of giving the script more time to dwell on a debate about euthanasia -- the ethics and morality of being a part of a person's death, and the ethics of a person deciding to die in the first place. The defense of this position essentially stated: well, because the show wasn't intended to be about romance, then why criticize it on its romantic context?

When I think back to the show's original positioning as a part of the MoD/Triage trilogy, I think to myself: the couples of TanBun and TinTol were absolutely central, as romantic pairs, to the success of those two stories, and both shows absolutely balanced their mystery elements so as to leave us fully satisfied on two (!!) genre fronts. At least, before SMYM premiered, to be excited about the TorJJ/KanTew coupling was therefore a reasonable expectation.

As well: there was a lot of implied attraction and romance in SMYM. A lot!

All these scenes! And we had more.

As soon as this show started airing, I was pulling for it to work as well as Manner of Death and Triage had. And I was side-eyeing to my drama homies about what I was smelling, when I started to feel like SMYM was NOT working. While a defense that the show was never meant to be a romance is... an interesting postscript to ponder: I don't buy it, because many elements that were clearly designed to otherwise communicate romance actually failed. I squinted heavily at the middle episodes of this series, really wondering, ".....so......are these guys.... DATING? Just feeling things out?!"

If these elements weren't actually intended to be in the show, the attraction between Kan and Tew, then -- why did we get them?

What was missing, narratively, for me? It was emotional context based in the reality of how I understand intimacy to function between two humans -- an understanding that, in the very best of art, I don't need to suspend in order to make a narratively unsuccessful show otherwise work.

The progression of emotional (let alone physical) intimacy was choppy in this series, to say the least. @clairedaring gave us the very important context early on that the novel version of SMYM had two volumes -- the first of which focused on KanTew's dating, before the ethical clashes of euthanasia entered the picture. If we had had that narrative context in the drama, the drama would have worked wonders, and I believe the crew was working throughout this debate in the writing process, from how the script turned out.

The script here did not work, because even if romance was intentionally deprioritized to focus on the euthanasia debate -- many episodes still spent too much time on KanTew, without giving us viewers an emotional journey for us to understand where they were in their emotional intimacy. And I posit, because the script seemed to be so indecisive, that the euthanasia debate got lost for much of the show as well. Up until the end, in the final episode, with that utterly fabulous attic scene.

If only the show had the strength of dialogue and conflict as that attic scene! I wrote yesterday that Tor and JJ will win awards for the whole series, based on that scene alone. That scene finally held the full and holistic scope of the tension between Kan and Tew totally bursting out in all its glory.

Let me just note, though, that we had to get through the first half of the episode to get to that scene -- a first half that really, REALLY made Kan look like an AWFUL LYING SCUMBAG to Tew (HOW COULD YOU LIE TO TEW LIKE THAT IN YOUR HOSPITAL BED, KAN, AND TELL HIM THAT HIS PAIN HE WAS FEELING WAS GUILT, YOU MF'ING ASSHOLE, okay I got it out of my system). Really, with all the lying Kan was doing to Tew about Tew's mom, I was praying that Tew would do the full COPS treatment on Kan, "Bad Boys" and all.

Kan was, in my absolutely personal opinion, ultimately rendered unforgivable during that first half of the finale (regardless of my personal thoughts on the ethics of euthanasia) simply because of his disingenuousness to Tew. The penultimate conversation in attic between Kan and Tew was a phenomenal encapsulation to the ethical conflict that Kan and Tew had danced around for the entire series -- and it highlighted, to me, again, where the script had failed the show, because it actually put a spotlight on moments when the EXCELLENT and FASCINATING nuances of the euthanasia debate in Thailand were sidelined for weak attempts at romantic development. (The socioeconomic nuances, the inequity in health care nuances, the impact that terminal illness has on caretakers, all of them! GAH!)

My takeaway from all of this is that the crew of this show did not hit the exact and delicate formula of deciding what the crux of this show should have been about, despite the commentary we received posthaste from the screenwriter. While the intention of that commentary indicated that the euthanasia debate was supposed to be the only center of the show -- too much time was spent showing us KanTew moments, and those moments lacked context and clarity to give us viewers an understanding of where they stood in their engagement or relationship at any one time. Thus, I do think the postscript commentary from the crew was also a touch disingenuous, regarding the success of the narrative itself as art.

And — I believe it was also disingenuous to the two previously adapted Sammon stories of Manner of Death and Triage as well, as both of those dramas were able to hold both mystery and romantic storylines to excellent ends, with wonderful touches of intimacy along the way (MaxTul couch scene, my beloved). There's more to say, as other people have noted, about writers deprioritizing intimacy to tell "another" story, as it were, but that's a debate for another time, that I think speaks to where Thai BL is going in general.

But otherwise, while I think SMYM was ultimately narratively unsuccessful (that last "I love you" and the rushed close were just brutal), I'm not surprised about how well it did in Thailand. No one can argue with the star power that Tor and JJ hold in Asia — the show was always going to do well, no matter the artistic success of its narrative. I just wish the show had lived up to the caliber of acting and writing that Tor and JJ got to display in that attic at the end.

[emotionallychargedtowel]

Kaito x Stacey: being seen authentically & the value of consent

A little background: Last February, I heard that Sekoguchi Ryo was going to have a significant role on Zettai BL 3 and I got really excited but had nowhere to channel that energy, so I decided to start a sideblog where I’d post one screenshot per day of Stacey, his character from Kikai Sentai Zenkaiger. To keep up my screenshot supply for the blog, I rewatched the series a lot, which led to thinking about the show in a deeper way than I had before. I'd already known I was a fan of the Stacey and Kaito ship, but I hadn’t given much thought to why. All that rewatching helped me develop my thoughts about it more.

I usually write this kind of relationship-focused analysis stuff about BL series. I don’t know if tokusatsu fans want to read this sort of thing about toku shows, or if the folks who read my BL posts would be interested in a relationship analysis about a toku ship. Well, I guess I need to get this out of my system either way, so here goes!

All of the gifs in this post were made by @my-rose-tinted-glasses, who is so generous with her time and considerable skills that, well, I don't know, I'm going to have to knit her a sweater or something. I mean, seriously, how pretty is the gif below? Even if you don't want to read my ramblings, I recommend scrolling through to look at the rest.

Special thanks as well to my sister @porridgefeast for talking through this set of ideas with me.

A very brief overview for the unfamiliar: Kikai Sentai Zenkaiger is a Super Sentai series that ran from early 2021 through early 2022. The lead member of the Zenkaigers—and, as it happens, the only human member—is Goshikida Kaito. (The rest of the team are all Kikainoids, robot-like inorganic beings from a different world that got mixed up with Kaito’s.) Kaito is the quintessential sunshine character. I’ve described him before as “a golden retriever who’s had three espressos," which sums him up fairly well. For my fellow BL-watchers, you'll likely recognize some actors in this post. Kaito is played by Komagine Kiita from 25 ji Akasaka de, and as I mentioned above, the actor who played Stacey, Sekoguchi Ryo, played Hatano in season 3 of Zettai BL. Mashiko Atsuki, of My Personal Weatherman fame, also has a prominent role in this series. But you won't be hearing much about him in this particular discussion.

In the sixth episode of Zenkaiger, an antagonist/antihero character named Stacey is introduced. At first you just know that he’s a hired gun for the Tojitendo (the Zenkaigers’ enemies, a Kikainoid dynasty led by its latest heir, Lord Bokkowaus, which went from being tyrants in their own world to taking over nearly every other world in the multiverse...and in most cases, turning those worlds into small metal gears—but let's not get into that). Stacey turns out to be the half-human son of Barashitara, a senior general in the Tojitendo who Stacey absolutely loathes. We’ll get back to him later on. Instead of being associated with his father, Stacey works for Ijirude, an evil scientist with a senior position in the Tojitendo court.

As the series progresses, Stacey and Kaito get increasingly close and (here comes an incredibly obvious spoiler that anyone could have predicted almost as soon as he was introduced) he eventually becomes one of the good guys. Any sort of romantic relationship between Kaito and Stacey is a matter of subtext during the series itself. (Though the subtext gets pretty strong at times! They even have an angsty heart-to-heart conversation at a playground at night.) In the TV movies and live shows that followed the series, that subtext starts to resemble (and arguably becomes) text. For example, in a DonBrothers movie where they make a (sort of) crossover appearance, Stacey writes Kaito a love letter that gets lost and starts a series of misunderstandings. In one live show, the stage lights go out and then come up again to reveal Kaito lying on the ground with Stacey on top of him. In another, Kaito gives Stacey a butt smack right in front of everybody. But during the series? Their relationship is clearly very important and fraught with emotion, but the show maintains a kind of plausible deniability at all points—there isn’t really anything that happens that the show’s screenwriter, Komura Junko, couldn’t explain by some other means. 

As I said, while I was doing all of that rewatching, I thought a lot about why Kaito’s and Stacey’s relationship meant so much to me despite the fact that it mostly exists as subtext. Part of it is just that I loved Stacey as a character overall and took a liking to both Sekoguchi Ryo, who plays Stacey, and Komagine Kiita, who plays Kaito. But it’s more than that. As I kept going through the rewatch process, I identified some of those reasons—things that make this portrayal of a relationship special. 

It’s a unique take on the time-tested enemies-to-lovers trope (or something like it).

Anyone who has spent any amount of time watching/reading stories that center on love and romance has come across the “enemies to lovers” trope. The relationship between Kaito and Stacey is closely related to the interplay between these two types of relationships, but it’s complicated. If you really want to get specific, it isn’t exactly an enemies-to-lovers story. Rather, I’d describe it as a story about two people, one of whom is trying really hard to be the other’s enemy but failing, and one of whom is trying really hard not to become enemies but keeps getting forced into conflicts with the other. Despite all the pressure he’s under to relate to Stacey as an enemy, Kaito keeps pushing back against taking that role. This pressure not only comes from his friends and compatriots but from Stacey himself. Stacey wants to relate to Kaito as an enemy, but he keeps finding himself helping him, sparing him, even worrying about him in spite of himself. 

Of course, Kaito and Stacey really are enemies in a very real sense. They’re fighting on opposite sides of a war. They try to hurt and/or kill each other on many occasions, including one in which Kaito and his friends succeed and actually kill Stacey. (Soon after, Stacey ends up being revived—an advantage of being half-mechanical is that he can be brought back to life.) 

But when Kaito and Stacey first meet, they don’t know they’re enemies. Even after finding out he works for the Tojitendo, Kaito resists fighting Stacey. In their first battle, he won’t fight or even transform into Zenkaiser (his superpowered suit form) until Stacey gives him no choice. At first, Kaito’s reasons for being friendly to Stacey and holding back from fighting him are a bit superficial. Basically, Stacey looks human, so Kaito is reluctant to do anything that might hurt him, and he keeps thinking that if he talks to him he might be able to get him to come around. (It probably doesn't hurt that he's an adorable twink, either.) Kaito doesn’t usually appear to be biased against Kikainoids, but he does seem to have a bias in favor of Stacey because he’s so human-looking. Thankfully, it isn’t long before his reasons become significantly more complex. For one thing, he starts to find out through stray comments Stacey makes that he's been through a lot of trauma and loss, including the mysterious death of his mother (likely either at the hands of his father or on his orders). 

Stacey also bonds with Kaito’s grandmother Yatsude, who doesn’t realize he’s the Tojitendo soldier who’s been giving her grandson so much trouble (she mishears his name as “Satoshi” when they first meet and he rolls with it). His mom issues draw him to her at first, then her sweet, accepting nature helps them relate to each other in a really meaningful way. Understanding Stacey’s context better and seeing a different side of him through his connection to Yatsude convinces Kaito that Stacey really could be redeemed and brought around to the side of good, and he’s eventually proven right. 

Which brings us to the next thing I appreciate about the relationship between Kaito and Stacey. 

Kaito goes to the trouble of really seeing Stacey, which not only allows him to attend to those times when he shows his authentic self, but also helps him recognize when he's not dealing with the real Stacey.  

Thinking that Stacey is capable of change is a sign that Kaito sees him more clearly than other people do. In this respect, he understands Stacey better than Stacey understands himself, because right up to the point where he switches sides, he sees himself as so irredeemable that joining up with the good guys must be an impossibility. 

But Kaito also has other ways of showing that he really sees Stacey. One of the biggest ways this is shown is through the possession subplot that happens toward the end of the series. A being who claims to be God, the creator of all the parallel worlds, shows up and wants to team up with the Zenkaigers against the Tojitendo. (They eventually admit that they don’t have all that much power beyond the creation and destruction of worlds, hence their need for help from mere mortals.) This God can only communicate with people by possessing someone’s body, and when it’s time to get in contact with the Zenkaigers, they choose Stacey’s. But they don’t identify themselves at first—they just pretend to be Stacey instead. 

When God is pretending to be Stacey, some of the differences in their behavior are obvious to everyone. But Kaito is the most observant by far of the disparity between Stacey’s current behavior (really God’s) and his usual way of acting. 

The most noticeable difference at first is that Stacey is smiling, which is very out of character for him. He’s also acting unusually flirty and cute. “Is it me or is he extra cutesy today?” one of Kaito’s teammates observes. It’s true. He speaks in a slightly higher register than usual, enunciates words differently, and he keeps tilting his head and slowly blinking at Kaito in a flirty way. 

(In an interview with Komagine and Sekoguchi translated by @mirai-e-jump here, Sekoguchi talks about first receiving a script in which he would play God. As his interviewer points out, the stage direction for the script instructed him to read the lines "sweetly." Sekoguchi says that he didn't know what to make of it at first, but it got him thinking about gender presentation and led him to decide to try to portray God in a gender-neutral way.)

In addition to God's flirty, "sweet" manner, Kaito notes that this version of Stacey is too easygoing, too ready to cooperate with others. When God first appears, the villain-of-the-week is called Headwind World. They put a sort of curse on the Zenkaigers that makes it so that no matter which direction they turn, they're always buffeted by a strong headwind. Discussing how different Stacey seems and his claim to want to join the team, Kaito says:

Maybe....If it’s the truth, I’ll be full power* happy! But something seems off to me....Whenever I’ve talked to Stacey, he was never like that. He tends to be more…sorta…Yeah! He’s a lot like this headwind! *Kaito's catchphrase is "zenryoku zenkai," which means "full power" or "full throttle" and is the source of the Zenkaiger's team name.

God-in-Stacey's-body makes things too easy. Trying to work with the real Stacey is like walking against the wind. And as challenging as that is, Kaito would rather work with the real Stacey than this flirty, easygoing impostor.

Later in the episode, when they fight side-by-side against Barashitara, “Stacey” seems to find him entertaining. The real Stacey could never find humor in the things Barashitara does. After all, he’s his abusive father and probably murdered his mother. After this fight, “Stacey” suggests that everyone should trust him now that he’s demonstrated his willingness to fight on their side. Kaito responds:

I still don’t get it. You’re not the Stacey I know. If Stacey was fighting Barashitara, he wouldn’t have been like that. He’d be more prickly and less compromising. He’d say stuff like “Stay out of this!” or “This is my battle!” Stacey’s feelings toward Barashitara aren’t like that. 

“Stacey” tries to play it off, but is clearly frustrated by his skepticism. But Kaito doesn’t waver. His facial expressions and body language in this scene are really noteworthy. His face looks stern. He looks at Stacey fixedly, seldom blinking, and his hands are balled up into fists at his sides. This is really out of the ordinary for him—he's typically friendly to a fault. It's unusual for him to even look this way at an enemy. But it won't be the last time his affect looks this way around God.

Kaito is the first to realize that this person who appears to be Stacey isn’t really him. Explaining to others—both his teammates and God themselves—how he knew this gives him an opportunity to show the audience how well he knows Stacey, how much he has observed about his personality. But that’s not the only way in which the theme of being seen shows up. 

One of the ways Kaito sees Stacey authentically is by noticing and acknowledging his deeply painful experiences with trauma and loss. Despite pressures to the contrary, Stacey eventually does the same for Kaito. 

Stacey goes through quite a process to get to the point where he can acknowledge that Kaito has had his own difficult history and continues to struggle in ways he can relate to. When he first meets Kaito, he fights him but claims it’s “nothing personal"—but that changes quickly. The second time they interact, they have a conversation in which Kaito wrongly assumes that Barashitara is helping Stacey and that he's doing so out of parental concern. Naturally, given how far this is from the truth, this is makes Stacey extremely angry. He retaliates by needling Kaito about his missing parents. He mentions the possibility that, given their apparent involvement with the Tojitendo, they could be “lying dead in a ditch somewhere, just like [his] mother.” Then he decides to twist the knife a bit more. “Maybe they weren’t kidnapped, but they abandoned you! Like Barashitara did to me.”

Kaito responds by passionately defending his parents and insisting that they would never do that to him. Kaito's faith in his parents infuriates Stacey. He feels envious and bitter because the only parent he could believe in is long dead and his father was never worthy of his trust. Kaito’s defense of his parents pushes all of these buttons and more and Stacey becomes enraged. He tells Kaito that fighting him is no longer “nothing personal.”

Later in the series, the shift in how they relate to each other is both illustrated and deepened when Bon World (a villain-of-the-week based on a Japanese holiday) becomes the latest adversary to try to take over Zenkaitopia. Bon World causes characters’ ancestors to return from the dead to visit them. Stacey gets a particularly surprising and poignant visit from his mother, Lise. At first he doesn’t trust that she really is who she purports to be, but eventually he’s convinced. He gets to spend a little bit of time with her after their years apart.  

But like a lot of the Worlds the Zenkaigers fight, Bon World’s powers have a two-step effect. First, they bring back ancestors. After a while, these ancestors snap and start going after their descendants, trying to kill them—including Stacey’s mother.

When the ancestors manifested by Bon World start to turn homicidal, the Zenkaigers have their hands full. Zyuran’s great-grandfather turns on him at the same time the Goldtsuikers are attacked by their grandfather. Kaito’s friends need him! But he leaves, trusting them to handle the situation themselves, so that he can come to Stacey’s aid. Why? Because he has a realization during their fight. One of the people he has to battle is Hakaiser, a Tojitendo “experimental soldier” who Kaito has recently learned is actually his brainwashed and physically altered father, Goshikida Isao. He tells Hakaiser he understands why it’s so upsetting for the others to have to fight their ancestors because he’s being forced to fight his own dad. This causes him to remember that one of the returned ancestors was Stacey’s mother. He asks Hakaiser where Stacey is and they both rush to his aid (with Kaito in Super Zenkaiser mode). 

After he comes to Stacey’s rescue, the rest of the Zenkaigers defeat Bon World and the ancestors all disappear. Stacey asks Kaito why he would come to his rescue. After all, they’re enemies. Kaito tells him, “I knew that you and your mom would both hate this happening.” Here’s what I think he means. It’s obviously a bad thing to be visited by an ancestor who tries to kill you. That was true for everyone who had that experience because of Bon World. But for Stacey, seeing his mother again and then having her attack him involved a whole other level of pain and trauma. It was deeply triggering and a terrible insult not only to Stacey’s memory of his mother but also his mother’s love for him. Kaito could see this from Stacey’s perspective as well as Lise’s. For Kaito, this meant that this particular instance of an ancestor attacking someone was a bigger deal than the others and required a more urgent response. But it wouldn’t have been quite so urgent if it weren't for the fact that Stacey means something to Kaito. 

Stacey is profoundly touched by Kaito’s actions and what he told him about his reasons for helping him. This moment ends up being a big turning point in their relationship. This isn’t just because Kaito helped Stacey (though he did) or because he was kind to him (though he was). It’s also because Kaito showed a remarkable degree of sensitivity and understanding in realizing what this experience meant for Stacey. He showed that he paid close attention to things he had learned from and about Stacey, viewed those things as important, and took them into account. I think it’s also clear that as someone whose parents disappeared when he was a kid, Kaito has a better understanding of the loss Stacey has experienced than other people would. And of course, it matters that Kaito prioritized helping Stacey even though his teammates and allies were facing similar challenges.

Stacey ends up keeping Kaito’s experiences in mind and acting on them in a similar way. The biggest example of this is his decision to stand aside while Kaito deprograms his father, Hakaiser/Goshikida Isao. Hakaiser had been Stacey's friend prior to that point, something exceedingly rare in his experience. In fact, Hakaiser may well be the first friend Stacey has ever had. It helps that despite his brainwashing, Hakaiser retains a lot of Goshikida Isao’s warm, optimistic, Kaito-esque personality. Hakaiser quickly becomes really important to Stacey. So when he learns that Hakaiser is really Goshikida Isao, he feels conflicted because his concern for both Kaito and Yatsude pulls him in one direction while his desire to keep his friend pulls him in the other. At first, Stacey turns his back on the Goshikidas in favor of keeping Hakaiser in his life. But once Kaito protects him from his mother's ghost, Stacey can’t keep that up for long. And he doesn't just stand aside during the Zenkaiger's deprogramming efforts. He also leaks data to the Goldtsuikers that helps the team to safely extricate Hakaiser from a giant mecha superweapon he’s controlling (without which the team would have been forced to either endanger Isao or risk countless human beings getting hurt or killed). Naturally, this also means helping the good guys to take the giant mecha out of commission—a blatant act of treason against the Tojitendo.

Stacey doesn’t say much about why he decides to let Goshikida Isao go. But he makes it clear that he sees how unjust and hypocritical it would be to keep Hakaiser around at Kaito’s expense while decrying the way his father took his mother away from him. It's also apparent that the bond he's formed with Yatsude and Kaito plays a role. 

To go from resenting Kaito's faith in his parents to helping Kaito get his father back involves a lot of growth. Just as earlier, the differences in their respective situations angered Stacey, the similarities between them eventually lead him to shift toward helping Kaito rather than hurting him. 

Now I'm going to circle back to the possession storyline to talk about some of its other implications.

The possession storyline allows Kaito to show how much he values consent and bodily autonomy—particularly Stacey's.

Remember how Kaito suspected immediately that the possessed version of Stacey wasn’t really him? An episode and change later, Kaito and the rest of the Sentai finally find out that Stacey is being possessed by God. Kaito doesn’t say much about this when it's first revealed to him, but his eyes are glued to God-in-Stacey’s-body and he turns stone-faced again. He remains like this for the rest of their conversation, while God aims more head-tilting and slow-blinking his way.

The next time they confer with the Zenkaigers, God is in a hurry to get them to agree to work together. But Kaito says there’s something else he needs them to address before that can happen. He asks God what happens to Stacey when they’re possessing his body. Their answer is disturbingly flippant: “His consciousness takes a little nap.” Then he asks God if they have Stacey’s consent to do this. “Do I really need it? When I’m a God?” they ask contemptuously. That’s when Kaito tells them that he can’t trust someone who would use another person's body without their permission, so they won’t be able to work together—unless God sets Stacey free. He offers to let God possess him instead in order to communicate with the group, and the other Zenkaigers chime in to say they’ll volunteer as well. God agrees to this and leaves Stacey’s body for the last time. 

Consent isn’t a common theme in tokusatsu, at least not in any of the shows I’ve seen so far. I don’t know of another toku show that's had an entirely analogous possession story, but it’s not uncommon to see some kind of variation on this theme. Ankh from Kamen Rider OOO is an ancient supernatural being who possesses the body of a random young man on the verge of death, Ryotaro from Kamen Rider Den-O is possessed by a whole cadre of beings from the future at different points in the series, Wataru from Kamen Rider Kiva is briefly possessed by his own father, Otoya, and I have no doubt that there are other examples I'm not thinking of or just haven't come across yet. I've seen the moral implications of possession get some degree of attention in these shows, but I’ve never seen consent foregrounded in this way. (That said, I haven’t seen the entirety of either Den-O or OOO, and there are plenty of other series I haven’t seen, so there may well be examples I’m not aware of.) 

It helps that consent doesn’t just come up in an implied way, in the background, or on its own. Instead, Kaito brings it up specifically and intentionally. The plot is racing along toward the climax of the series at this point. It would be easier for Kaito to allow God to continue to gloss over the question of Stacey’s consent. It certainly would have been easier for Komura Junko, the show's screenwriter, to skip over this question. She could have just used God as her story’s deus ex machina (no pun intended) without exploring the deeper implications.

It’s fitting that Kaito’s insistence on Stacey’s consent comes up in the form of an interruption that stops the forward momentum of the story, because when people are ignoring important consent issues and someone has to speak up about it, it’s often seen as an unwelcome interruption of things that are viewed as more important. Bringing up consent in those situations means bringing other matters to a halt and raising uncomfortable topics that others have tacitly agreed to ignore. As with so many important issues that we need to speak up about in our daily lives, raising the subject of consent is often intensely awkward. When Kaito brings it up, God is surprised and clearly put out, and it means the story has to take a detour before the Zenkaigers can defeat Bokkowaus with God’s help. Kaito doesn’t let any of this stop him, though. He understands how important it is. Even though collaborating with God is by far the best chance the Zenkaigers have of overthrowing Bokkowaus and saving the multiverse, he holds fast and insists that he’ll only work with God if they stop possessing Stacey without his consent. 

It's worth noting another context in which consent comes up in the series, and that is the portrayal of Stacey's late mother, Lise, and her relationship with his father, Barashitara. Lise was Barashitara's 893rd "wife." I'm using scare quotes here because while we don't know the details of how Lise ended up tied to Barashitara and bearing his child, there's no particular reason to believe she consented to the relationship and a number of indications that she didn't. When she appears again in ghost form, he refers to her having always been "feisty," which seems like code for "didn't just let me do whatever I wanted without any resistance." She, on the other hand, seems to hold him in contempt. In Komura Junko's current series, Kamen Rider Gavv, the protagonist's human mother is kept prisoner by a non-human father who refers to her as if they're in a relationship despite her protests that she never sought or consented to a relationship with him. This seems like a more explicit version of what was implied about Stacey's mother in Zenkaiger.

Stacey obviously has strong feelings about the way his mother was treated. When Barashitara reaches for her, commenting on how he's never been with a ghost before (and implying he'd be up for changing that), Stacey hurries over to pull his hand off of her and rushes her out of the room after yelling at Barashitara to keep his hands off of her. Again, Stacey's human mother and Kikainoid father could have been used as a plot device without digging any deeper into the nature of their relationship, but this series not only doesn't avoid the subject, it makes a point of commenting on it.

The themes of consent and seeing/being seen end up working together in a way that undercuts the ship in some superficial respects but ends up emphasizing what really makes it special. 

I mentioned earlier how one of the first clues that God isn’t really Stacey is their facial expressions, speech, and other ways of communicating with others. Well, they continue smiling, speaking in a cutesy voice, and doing flirty mannerisms—and the biggest recipient of these gestures is Kaito. They also call Kaito by his given name, something Stacey doesn't do until the series' penultimate episode. When you add it all together, they’re pretty clearly flirting with him. 

Some stories would take this as an opportunity to develop the ship between Kaito and Stacey. If God-in-Stacey’s-body flirts with Kaito, you could easily arrange things so that this helps him recognize or develop an attraction to Stacey that continues when the possession has ended. (It’s certainly been done before in other shows.) Any possession or body swap story is going to be partly about contrasts—that’s a big part of their purpose—but they can still foment changes that continue when everyone gets their own bodies back. Basically, if Stacey is too conflicted to flirt with Kaito, well, God can do it for him. It works in the other direction, too. If there are things Kaito would do with Stacey if he weren’t so considerate of his feelings, if someone else is walking around in his body, suddenly different possibilities appear.  (And yes, I think some version of all these possibilities could be done even if the ship remained at a subtext level.)

There’s just one problem: Kaito may not figure out for certain that God isn’t Stacey right away, but within moments of meeting them, he’s 95% there. They can’t make him see Stacey in a different way if he doesn’t believe they’re him at least for a while. He isn't even open to relating to them in a positive way. It really is remarkable just how unfriendly he is to God-in-Stacey’s-body considering how friendly he always is to almost everyone else. And when they flirt with him? He’s not into it in the slightest. In fact, it just pisses him off.

Another thing about possession stories is that they can be a way for writers to cheat to get characters—well, close facsimiles of them who are mistaken for them by other characters—to do things they couldn’t justify otherwise. But Kaito refuses to let this happen. He gets suspicious of God almost as soon as they show up, he begins to grow hostile toward them even before he has fully processed the truth about their identity, and once he’s had a chance to think about the situation, he takes his next opportunity to refuse to work with God unless they set Stacey free as soon as possible. 

By having the hero of the story behave in this way, Zenkaiger prioritizes consent and, by extension, the individual right to bodily autonomy. It prioritizes consent over ship advancement, over plot advancement, even over getting the danged heroes into the evil overlord’s castle so they can have their big showdown. There are moments where it’s on the verge of becoming annoying. As TV viewers, especially if we’re habitual tokusatsu watchers, we’re pretty used to possession plotlines of this type. When they start making things happen, we get caught up in escalating events. Having someone like Kaito suddenly show up and say, “Wait a second, is Stacey OK with this?” feels like a weirdly abrupt interruption. 

It reminds me a bit of something Kathleen Hanna from the band Bikini Kill says in The Punk Singer, a documentary about her life. She says that speaking out about sexual violence often results in a "who farted" moment—one in which a group is collectively uncomfortable and looking for someone to blame, generally the person who mentioned a taboo subject like sexual violence. 

Kaito fearlessly embraces a “who farted” moment when he asks about Stacey’s consent or lack thereof. Of course he does—that’s who he is. A principled, morally rigorous guy who would rather be cringe as fuck than hurt someone unnecessarily. It’s no wonder he’s able to turn the “demon prince of the Tojitendo” to the side of good…and even get him to write him love letters. 

In other words, by refusing to exploit the possession storyline for a cheap version of ship development, Komura Junko develops the Kaito x Stacey ship even more, and more meaningfully. 

Could this storyline have been written by the typical cishet dude tokusatsu screenwriter?

It seems noteworthy that this choice was made by one of the few women to have held a head writer position on a toku series. Of course, women are not the only people who care about consent and bodily autonomy, just as they aren't the only people who are subjected to their bodily autonomy being compromised and their right to refuse consent ignored. But women, people who are perceived as women, and men who don't fit into a normative cishet image are more likely to have such experiences than cishet men and thus more likely to find such themes salient, so it would make sense if a woman writer was more likely to include them in a series than the (ostensibly) cishet men who make up the vast majority of tokusatsu screenwriters.

I would argue that the importance of being authentically seen is also particularly salient for many women and that this may have played into the way Komura weaves that theme into the Kaito and Stacey story. Women and people perceived to be women tend to experience a great deal of objectification, and being authentically seen and acknowledged is basically the opposite of objectification.

I recently ran into Martha Nussbaum's typology of objectification for the first time and it turns out that it applies to God's possession of Stacey remarkably well. In the interest of time and length, I'll leave it at that for now, but I'll probably talk about in a separate post at some point. Suffice it to say that God's treatment of Stacey illustrates a number of the facets of objectification Nussbaum lays out. So what does this have to do with the Kaito and Stacey ship? It comes back to my point about how the show presents the possession storyline with all of its potential for ship development and has Kaito refuse to engage with any of it out of concern for Stacey. This makes God a kind of foil for Kaito that gives him the opportunity to show that his interest in Stacey isn't based on objectification.

So there you have it. There are plenty of reasons to appreciate the Kaito x Stacey ship without digging into issues like these. The characters are interesting, affecting, and fun. Their personalities fit together in a classic cinnamon roll/tsundere way. The actors have great chemistry with each other. But the way the story treats these concerns, which I contend is colored by the different perspective Komura Junko brings to toku based on her gender, is part of what makes it particularly special.

[virtualtadpole]

Thailand's "cute boy" craze: an explainer

Here's another repost from Reddit, originally from 2022. Since Perfect 10 Liners is currently airing with the "cute boy" page as a key plot point, this seems as good a time as any to re-share (remember that the original novel was first released in 2018). Sorry this one is a wall of text, I wasn't sure it'd be a good idea to include example photos involving people who weren't really public figures at the time.

Those of you following Thai BL will probably have come across this concept of "cute boy" social media fan pages, and might have wondered whether they're an actual thing. Or you may have heard of actors being one of their university's cute boys before joining the industry, and wondered what exactly that meant. Here's my attempt at an explanation.

The roots of the phenomenon go back at least to the popular Thai web forums of the 2000s, especially the youth-oriented Dek-D.com, one of Thailand's biggest and oldest web communities (also known as the web fiction platform which launched many BL novels). Dek-D's forums had a picture-sharing section, with a subsection dedicated to photos of cute guys and girls. It was still the early days of digital cameras and camera phones, and these posts were popular among the site's teen users. A few (mostly girls) who became noticed from these posts became Thailand's first "net idols", many of whom went on to join the entertainment industry.

The arrival of social networking sites around 2007 (first Hi5, then Facebook a few years later) helped facilitate these posts, as publicly posted photos became more easily accessible. The issue of privacy wasn't really on most people's minds then, and most of it was done in a light-hearted spirit. Being featured in these posts meant a boost in followers and online popularity, enabling more teens to become recognized as net idols, but it would be a few more years before this really meant anything. On the other hand, the social networking sites themselves would eventually bypass the traditional forums as a central venue for such posts, and an increasing number of Facebook pages (followed by dedicated Instagram and Twitter accounts) would be created to offer a curated experience instead.

The actual trend of "cute boy" pages took off in 2012, around the same time as the explosive growth of Instagram. Teens flocking to the platform (escaping Facebook, which was now full of parents) filled their public profiles with selfies and portraits of themselves, generating a steady stream of material that these pages could pick up to post and promote. This in turn gave the kids likes and followers, a mutually beneficial arrangement for most thanks to the platform's like-seeking culture.

Of course, not all of these proliferating pages featured teen boys. "Cute girl" pages have their share of followers, though they don't seem to be as visible or talked about, perhaps due to a combination of factors including the way society doesn't consider it as creepy for girls to openly ogle after boys compared to the opposite.

As competition grew, these pages diversified into several niches, including those covering specific schools and universities. Most of the school ones aren't that unusual, given that it's quite natural for students to talk about the popular boys and girls at school, and this had been a trend in school forums long before then. Most of them didn't last long though, as page administrators soon graduated and moved on.

However, things were different for certain high-profile schools, particularly the country's four oldest boys' schools, which participate in the biennial Jaturamitr football competition: Suankularb (SK), Debsirin (DS), Assumption (AC) and Bangkok Christian (BCC). The schools had always been well known, but the Instagram era launched an unprecedented wave of interest in their good-looking students, many of whom attracted huge numbers of followers just by being on Instagram. AC especially stands out in this regard, as Instagram allowed outsiders to glimpse into this exclusive boys' world that served as the basis of Love Sick, the source novel of which was begun in 2008.

Not only were cute boy pages created dedicated to these schools (some by outsiders), some of the boys became minor celebrities in their own right, with fans (mostly sao Y (the Thai term for fujoshi), and also some queer folk) meeting up with and photographing them in real life, especially at school events such as AC's Christmas fair and the Jaturamitr competition. And they were serious about it, coming equipped with professional DLSR cameras and huge telephoto lenses. The schools' student bodies leaned into this popularity, having the popular boys promote fundraising events and selling merchandise to their fans.

The relationship between the boys and their fans seemed to be mostly good, the boys appreciating the positive attention and the fans getting to stan someone much more accessible than the mainstream celebrity. And if they later became famous, then there's the pride of having known them before everyone else. These being sao Y, there sometimes is a bit of shipping, though mostly jokingly. Of course, this was not limited to boys from AC and the other Jaturamitr schools, but they were much more prominent.

This was the backdrop against which Love Sick launched its casting calls in 2014, which generated a huge amount of online buzz throughout the cute boy pages and fan Twitter. There's a reason the series featured such a huge cast with so many minor roles - to provide ample opportunity for fans to latch onto the actors and the show.

In some ways, the cute boy label served as a distancing from the previous term net idol, which by 2014 had begun to develop into a negative stereotype of people using their online fame to sell beauty products for easy profit, especially those livestreaming on emerging platforms such as Socialcam and Bigo Live and whose followers tended to be less sophisticated as opposed to the urban middle-class. Which is why most people appearing on cute boy pages tended to come from higher socioeconomic backgrounds, and much more attention was given to those focusing on elite schools and universities.

At the university level, cute boy (or other similarly named) pages associated with the country's top universities became very prominent online and also offline, often collaborating with the universities' student bodies to promote events and sometimes also assisting in the universities' PR for prospective students. Many universities already had a pageant culture in one form or another, with which these pages tied in well. Most prominent among the pages were Chula Cute Boy and TU Sexy Boy of Chulalongkorn and Thammasat, the country's two oldest universities. The two universities have an annual traditional football match, which the Cute Boy and Sexy Boy pages played large parts promoting in recent years, and is another event that attracts many fangirls.

Some have argued that the net idol phenomenon serves as a democratization of the entertainment industry, opening up opportunities for aspirants to directly connect to audiences as opposed to the traditional model where everything depended on one being picked up by an agency. But it benefits the traditional model as well. While in the old days talent scouts would look for teens hanging out at Siam Square, today they only have to scan the cute boy pages. Many BL actors were discovered this way. Inn Sarin was a long-time favourite of Chula Cute Boy, and Up and Mix first became widely known from there as well. Many others have likewise previously been featured in various cute boy pages, and practically all of the younger actors who joined the industry more recently probably had strong followings before their debut.

But the craze might be coming to an end. While there have long been concerns over today's youth's obsession with looks, and the university cute boy pages have from the beginning been criticized for promoting shallow images of their universities at the expense of academic aspects, they didn't really have any effect on the trend. But this began to change in 2020, when a widespread youth protest movement swept through school and university campuses and liberal progressive ideas rose to the fore. The issue of "beauty privilege" became one of many perpetual topics of discussion, and many began calling for an end to university cute boy pages. Thammasat, long regarded as the university with the strongest student activism, saw the TU Sexy Boy page shutting down (though the admin cited personal reasons and it was never confirmed whether this was in response to the criticism). Many people seem to have stopped tweeting cute boy pictures since then.

On top of the political mood, the pandemic's disruption of normal school life also interrupted the cute boy momentum, as many photo opportunities dried up. Long-time page admins and fans outgrowing the topic and losing interest might also be a factor. The Chula Cute Boy page has also been inactive since late 2020, for undisclosed reasons.

The future seems at best unclear for now. There are still many active pages out there, but on the whole, from what I've seen, there does seem to be a loss of interest. If younger netizens are indeed disinclined to craze after them the same way, the era of cute boy pages might very well soon be over.

Or maybe they've just moved onto TikTok, and I haven't found out how.

----

In the above original post, I neglected to go into the phenomenon of real-people shipping, so I'm attaching this comment from later as an addendum:

Regarding real-people shipping, there are probably two lines of origin that influenced the practice. First is the rise of K-pop and the shipping culture that came with it, which led to a proliferation of online fanfiction in dedicated Thai web communities and a shipping culture forming around the reality singing competitions which were the talk-of-the-town entertainment programs in the 2000s. One of the first really famous shipped pairs was Nat and Tol from Academy Fantasia season 4 in 2007. (That is Nat Sakdatorn, whom you may recognize as the uncle from Never Let Me Go, among many other roles.)

The other origin is the rise of "net idols", which followed the arrival of social media sites (in Thailand this was led by Hi5 in 2006). I covered this in more detail in my post on Thailand's "cute boy" craze, but didn't really touch upon the shipping aspect. Indeed, a significant shipping culture did form (a few years later) around net idols/cute boys. At first this focused more on (people who were believed to be) real-life couples, like Both and Newyear, who became famous in 2012. From there, manufactured/imaginary couples naturally followed in hopes of cashing in on the popularity of such shipped pairs.

I'm a bit hazy on when the shipping of actors as couples actually became a regular thing in the BL industry. While the practice of fanservice moments on the promotion circuit go back at least to The Love of Siam, I don't think there was significant shipping of the actors' real-life persona, and the same seemed to be the case with Love Sick, especially after the series ended. The first actor pair to become shipped as such was probably Krist and Singto from SOTUS, and the practice quite definitely became a thing after that.

----

Postscript: Thanks for reading, and sorry the writing in this one isn't as good as the other posts I've shared. If you're interested in further reading on the topic, I can recommend the article The Yaoi Phenomenon in Thailand and Fan/Industry Interaction. (2019). Plaridel, 16(2), 63–89 by Assoc. Prof. Natthanai Prasannam, one of the leading Thai academics on BL/Y culture in Thailand.

[bengiyo]

I Hear the Sunspot Wasted Taichi As a Character

I went off a bit in the tags of @lurkingshan's Japanese QL Corner earlier, but I’m still annoyed enough about this to make a proper post. I wanted to leave this show alone because I liked Kohei and Taichi in the early episodes enough, but this show wasted our time for 6-8 weeks in a way that I find unforgivable. They took a loudmouthed, forthright, and well-intentioned character and made him stare blandly for almost two months while actively avoiding his and Taichi’s feelings. I’m so disappointed.

I’m glad @twig-tea has been covering some of what she remembers from the source material, because her added context has kept me from feeling so confused about this show. It feels rather insidious that this show would cut out any of Taichi’s struggles with Kohei’s queerness, and what reciprocity within himself means in favor of Taichi just looking confused at the camera for two months. It feels like a cowardly choice, because they didn’t want their main character to be unlikeable. It’s like they knew, like many J-BL recently, that they would not spend time in what becoming a couple for these two friends would mean. They also got so precious about the physical intimacy at the end in a way that just doesn’t work for me. Substituting food for intimacy doesn’t always work. I don’t even think ending on a kiss fixes this, because no amount of soft intimacy fixes the years of avoidance Taichi subjected Kohei to. 

It really bothers me how this show was so much longer than the film adaptation we got years ago only to be fundamentally worse because it refused to complete the full arc of their story. With the entire story available, why focus only on this initial getting together portion, strip out characterization, and also merge two female characters to create a worse one as a result? This ended up making both Taichi and Maya so unlikeable. Taichi went from demanding that Kohei speak up for himself and make sure people hear him, to someone who actively avoided Kohei’s clear confessions multiple times for two years! This is terrible!

Maya was such a frustrating character, especially because I’d spent time with Nana in Silent (2022). Nana presented a far more nuanced set of grief about hearing people engaging in hard of hearing and deaf people that Maya sorely lacked. Beyond that, her personality shifted with each episode to suit whatever needs the narrative suddenly asked of her. It was not fair to her actress, who never feels like she’s dialed in properly, and it’s unfair to both characters she’s asked to cover. Moreover, it’s unfair to the Taichi character, because so much of his stilted characterization ends up blamed on her entry into the story when it’s not her fault. It’s the writers’ fault for abandoning anything resembling an arc for Taichi.

This really was just such a waste. I really liked the building relationship between our leads in the early episodes, and I thought the actors had good working chemistry. I did not enjoy the entire back half of this show, and it was so annoying to see this show spin its wheels until the very last minute, before changing a key reunion scene for a half-hearted hug to conclude this wobbly narrative. These characters deserved a better adaptation than this, and it’s yet another strange adaptation this year afraid of the story they’re telling. I’m over it.

[ppeonppeonhan]

Thai BL Rooftop Kisses

I feel like Deep Night's daytime rooftop sex scene was only made possible by the countless rooftop kisses that came before it.

Twins (2023)

Never Let Me Go (2022)

KinnPorsche (2022)

Not Me (2021)

And, of course, the most epic of them all:

Bad Buddy (2021)

But let's not forget, the Love Mechanics (2020) duo was one of the first.

And they did a whole lot more...

Gif by caedi

[absolutebl]

BLs with Strong Historical Elements

Costume dramas, historical BLs, and BLs with time travel or flashbacks to historical locations & times.

These are in order of my personal preference, best at the top.

I Feel You Linger in the Air

2023 Thailand

IFYLITA is an exquisite BL, from filming techniques to narrative framework (much like Until We Meet Again). It's about a gay man from our time who falls into the past, becomes a servant to a noble house, and falls in love with the heir. It turns out this has all happened several times before. Steeped in history and family drama it edges into lakorn (but not as much as To Sir With Love and with way less scenery chewing). This is an elegant and classy soulmates BL... from Thailand which normally doesn't even try for classy. The main couple (both as a pair and as individuals) were excellent, particularly Bright (Yai) whose eye-work acting style is a personal favorite of mine. Pity about the ending. Oh it wasn’t that sad but it wasn’t good either. This show could easily have earned a 10/10 from me except that it fumbled the… erm… balls in the final quarter. Argh. Whatever.

Nobleman Ryu's Wedding

2021 Korea - WeTV

A boy cross-dresses to take his runaway sister's place as a bride to a shy scholar, turns out they like being married. A historical setting allowed this BL to use some seriously old fashioned romance tropes (arranged marriage, evil step-sisters, Cinderfella) but also modern BL stylings like fake relationship & secret identity (drag) plus some cute gay panic. It reminded me of 12th Night more than anything else which just happens to be my favorite Shakespeare play. For all these reasons, I adored it.

(the ghat kiss!)

Tinted With You

2022 Korea - Viki

Fun stylish time travel meets portal fantasy with a likable cast, historical setting, and two actual kisses that mitigate the rough plot and issues around anachronisms.

Word of Honor

2021 China (censored) - Viki/YouTube?

I don’t rec Chinese stuff often, because I believe in censoring the censors, but this show is one of my favorites of the post 2016 censored bromances. It’s two murder-gay assassins (pining sunshine/tsundere), and they are so insanely gay for two boys who will never be allowed to kiss. Tropes include: wuxia, soulmates, paranormal, historical, and fantasy elements.

To Sir, With Love AKA Khun Chai

2022 Thailand - YouTube?

This is a true lakorn (basically Thai tellenovella or soap opera) with scenery chewing performances, especially from the mother characters. Gone With the Wind + Days of Our Lives but gay. That said? I loved it: A glorious central brother relationship (the best, made me cry), het romances, class divide + gay *gasp* main romance - oh my word, the campy drama of it all! Arranged marriage, rebellion, cut sleeves, over-the-top death with curses and regrets, beautiful if inaccurate costumes, secrets unraveling, cover ups, sparkle murder, sex herbs, coils within coils including snakes and murderous green metallic sequins (is anything gayer on this earth?). It’s a WILD ride but it does end happy for our gay boys. A man cries when he finds DEATH GLITTER. Come on! You haffa watch it. That said, like Manner of Death I struggle to rate something on a BL scale when it patently isn’t a BL. So I ended up giving this exactly what I gave that show, 7/10 I enjoyed it a whole lot, but not as a BL.

The Untamed (Special BL Edition)

2020 China (censored) - YouTube

Censored wuxia bromance, amorphous ending. Probubly the best known BL of its kind out of China and responsible for bring many fans to the BL side.

Our Skyy 2: Never Let Me Go

2023 Thailand - YouTube

I was nervous to watch this PondPhuwin vehicle but I liked it a lot! Doomed soulmates + paranormal time travel to fix the past. I’m happy for the outfits and the dancing (if not the singing). It’s not a bad premise and it’s nice to see GMMTV lean into its high production values for a change. I'd adore a full historical starring these two and this was definitely the best of the second series of Our Skyy. I don't think you have to have watched the original Never Let Me Go to enjoy this.

Legend of Long Yang: Rebirth

2017 China

Gaga

Whipping boy trope... literally, servant character takes the strap for the prince, who then makes him his bodyguard and lover when he becomes king. Low budget historical, comes off as kind of cosplay wuxia version of Irresistible Love, but we get (in the credits) an actual kiss, and they both live. So yay for small mercies.

The Director Who Buys Me Dinner

2023 Korea (historical flash backs)

iQIYI

A new employee at a film company encounters a director who claims to have lived 300 years and insists that they have to date (eat, hug & kiss) if baby doesn't want to die. It has a lot of Japanese elements, not the least of which are: an office setting, the fact that every character in this show is unhinged, and a killing of the gays. Featuring a gorgeous & stellar cast, TDWBMD should have utilized them less for melodrama and more for chemistry. This BL surprised me by going there with a lipstick mark AND an actually gay idol. But (you knew there was a but) while it's a unique twist on an office romance it is NOT a unique twist on the doomed red thread trope, resulting in it feeling less than the sum of its parts and ultimately unsatisfying. This might have also had to do with the fact that this was one of those KBLs where I felt how very short it was the whole time I was watching, like I was missing something constantly, in every episode. Worth watching for some but seriously flawed.

First Love Again

2022 Korea (historical flash backs) - Viki

A popular novelist who remembers his past lives meets his soulmate for the third time, only to find she has been reincarnated into the body of a man. This one started out a touch mean-spirited, but we eventually got a good kiss. The confession/rejection scene was justified and the reconciliation and ending was... fine. All in all, the pacing felt rushed and the romantic arc was underdeveloped. They go from like to love to boyfriends in a red hot minute. But that’s par for the course with Korea’s short form. If you don’t mind a heavy does of melodrama in your BL this one has a solid story with a strong concept that’s well acted and produced, making it a classic KBL with better than average chemistry but ultimately a touch forgettable.

Love in Spring AKA Spring of Crush

2022 Korea

This show was all over the place with uneven acting, narrative, and focus (sometimes it wanted to be a slapstick comedy, sometimes a depressing melodrama) which meant no one, actors or viewers, took anyone or anything seriously.... AND it’s a bromance. I was left wondering if SalHyung is now code for “they were roommates” in Kdrama historicals but otherwise largely apathetic and unimpressed. Korea, I now know you can do better. Do better.

Mermaid's Jade

2019 China (censored-esk) - Gaga

Kills the gay.

The Male Queen: Han Zi Gao

2016 China - Gaga

Kills the gay. Schrodinger's BL, both a BL and entirely not one at the same time.

Diary of Heong Yeong Dang

2014 Korea

Kills the Gay

I was gonna do a top 10 list, but there aren't enough by my metrics, so many end sadly.

This post at the behest of @verymuchof thank you for the idea!

Dated April 2023, includes only BLs that had finished their run by that date. Not responsible for cool costume flix that come after that. But you should check the comments to see if any have been added by others!

I might have missed a few that only have time historical elements since I don't always track those.

Also I would like to point out a decided lack of Japan on this list. My ninja yaoi consuming tiny past self is VERY upset about this void.

WHERE ARE MY GAY NINJAS??!!!

(source)

[ineffable-opinions]

Top 20 BL Live-action of 2024

20. Love Is a Poison - This series made my wish to see Hama Shogo in a BL come true. I loved his character in Koisenu Futari (2022) and wanted more of his character’s interaction with Takahashi Issei’s character. Also, the series leaned into the surreal with the squealing, sparkling succulents. While the legal drama part of the series was light, it was the first time I was invested in the character’s careers since Beloved Enemy (2017) [which is going to have a Thai remake/adaptation]. I absolutely enjoyed the dynamics of a neo-super-darling seme paired with a devoted, kuudere uke. But, I wish there were fewer flashback/compilation scenes.

19. Unknown - I never thought Priest’s Da Ge will become something like this. I am impressed by the meticulous cultivation that source material underwent. That little carp really crossed the gate to become a dragon. The Unknown managed to tone down the golden finger bits and keep things realistic to an extent, fit the whole business venture arc neatly into Taiwan’s SME-heavy capitalism. It fleshed out Le ge, and his relationship with both his underlings and his junior and made him interesting. It gave me one of my favorite mob characters in a BL – an ex-gangster with his blacked-out tattoos running a street food stall. In line with Taiwanese tradition, this series not only employed high BL literacy but also dedicated time to educate. (more on it here)

18. Cosmetic Playlover - I was hesitant to watch this show since I had enjoyed the first few volumes of manga and lost interest in later volumes. I knew they were going to censor the hell out of the first volume. While I am still bitter about that fact, I still enjoyed the series.

17. Love is Better the Second Time Around - this had some of my favorite moments from a BL - two-faced seme employing all sorts of methods to seduce and ensnare the uke, return of the alone-at-the-railway-station trope, seme using helpless, feverish face and acting coquettish (some seriously charming gap moe), teasing a seme's seme (this one did it better than At 25:00 in Akasaka which fumbled it by choice) and kishōtenketsu - 4 part traditional East Asian narrative structure (which appeared in many series this year and the last) with family negotiation aiming at adoption reversal. (I wanted seme to recommend uke in his place to his native household - that way they can also get married, if and when it gets legalized.)

16. Living with Him – The reason why this series is on this list is pretty unique. I never understood Japanese focus and fetish of nape (the way navel is in south India) before this series. The camera managed to capture the uke's neck, especially when he had his head bent slightly, in a stunning manner. Overall, the camera language was very intimate without being bawdy, perfectly suitable for the domestic setting of this BL. I loved the series more than I did the manga.

15. Century of Love - Gave me Hindi serial style BL complete with a red cloth enveloping the main couple during their fated encounter. It is a lakorn, so that's to be expected. I felt that the pair's romance progressed at an uncharacteristically fast pace given the initial resistance. (In other words, I wanted their romance to progress slowly, like over 400 episodes.) I thoroughly enjoyed the characters including the villains.

14. Healing Thingyan – this BL from Myanmar is no longer available at SKY Production’s YouTube channel. I had a good time watching this BL set in a village in the context of New Year where friends become lovers after much hesitation and an interrupted confession from the year before. My heart was pounding when the couple poured water over the left side because that's where their hearts are at. Also, the religious restriction (I am a little weak to this trope) to physical intimacy as a tactic to skip kiss scene - I would have been irked if it wasn't for the execution - the couple standing under arching bamboo, wearing sarong and acting all sweet. It is set in 2019. Later, I came to know that allegedly (I would appreciate if someone can help me gain more clarity on this matter), SKY production could be a proxy of 7th Sense Creation, an entertainment company cofounded by Kin Thiri Thet, daughter of Senior General Min Aung Hlaing (Commander-in-Chief of Myanmar’s armed forces and Acting President against whom the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court has filed an application for an arrest warrant, alleging his involvement in crimes against humanity targeting the Rohingya population. (source))

13. The Time of Fever - I'm not very sure if this one can be considered a complete story in itself but even if not, it is immensely satisfying. Age-blind casting shouldn't have worked so well but it did. 

12. Gray Shelter - this one made me feel as though I read a nice short story or a novel. It was viscous like honey, the way such types of Korean BL novels (like Picked Up In Winter) tend to be. It had a very masculine vibe with underlying unease of depending and being depended on. 

11. Hitochigai kara Hajimaru Koi mo Aru aka Love Can Sometimes Start with the Wrong Person [fansubs available at Drama Otaku] - substitute lover trope but this time the substitute is two-faced. Everyone has their own agenda but this love is a zero-sum game. (I wanted 3p ending though – not possible since one actor is playing both the twins). I loved all the scheming and all those little lies. This one had explicit use of BL terms like seme and uke by a main character.

10. Perfect Propose - workplace that brings workers to tears, corporate slave uke who decides to quit (without starting a job hunt 😔) and an untethered seme who grows hydroponics tomatoes in their balcony. It is adapted from a single volume manga and not a novel, yet it uses every minute it's got to make you feel ALL THAT. 

9. High School Return of a Gangster - I was sad that they meant it as a bromance and worried for the future of BL creation in South Korea since it was Number Three Pictures, the company that created popular BL Unintentional Love Story and The Time of Fever, by its own admission struggling financially with limited recovery of production costs (more on this here). When I started watching, I couldn't care any less about their intentions. It was an absolute delight. I was still immersed in the exhilaration of Aavesham (2024) and had wished to see such things in the context of a BL. And this one delivered. I was shipping the underboss with his main lackey (they have history between them and reminded me of the relationship between Ranga and Ambaan) at one point and the next moment, shipping him with his foxy classmate. The series toned down the bully-loves-bullied aspect in the novel, and humanized and contextualized the main bully with his life in the underbelly of the economy, so much so that I felt bad when the bullies were prosecuted (what will happen to Hong Jae-min's sister😟) while gangsters and the rich who hire them went scot-free in the live action. The face-slapping part left a bitter taste in my mouth with the secretary facing the brunt (and the misogyny embedded in the socio-economic fabric that breeds such hatred) while the father isn't retaliated against enough. I read and enjoyed the novel, but face-slapping was even more makjang. It is tough to get accepted in live action form as it is, in South Korea, since the gangster is middle-aged and it is only towards the end of the novel that the characters are finally out of high school, unlike in Mr. Mitsuya's Planned Feeding [fansubs by @isaksbestpillow] with a significant age gap but both are adults and are in a Japanese BL. Gong (공, Korean for seme) (a suspected psychopath, raised under constant surveillance by his father) consciously falls in love with the middle-aged su (수, Korean for uke) inhabiting the body of a high schooler, going as far as visiting his previous residence and pursuing him as one would an old person. 

8. My Damn Business - From the first episode, this one had me hooked. Week after week, I was eagerly waiting for those 8 minute long episodes. It acknowledged the manhwa side of BL and hinted at their iconic smut pages (in a way New Employee live action couldn't). It executed stalking horse trope, with Park Min-jae (R. I. P) playing the stalking horse, in a manner that had me giddy with excitement. I also appreciate GND STUDIO for casting darker-skinned actors – in this one and in Fake Buddies. GND studio also has decent BL literacy as is evident from the above-mentioned series. In the third episode, Fake Buddies used the East Asian tradition of representing gay and lesbian relationships through rose (from barazoku (薔薇族)) and lily (from yurizoku (百合族)) respectively to hint at the BL and GL couple.

7. Boku to Boku ga Sukina Kare to, Kimi to aka Me, Him, and You [fansubs available at Drama Otaku]- Honestly, I didn't expect to be this impressed by this one going in. I had such low expectations. I absolutely love the pairing between Higashi Keisuke and Hiroki Iijima, much more than Higashi Keisuke and Nakajima Sota in Ossan no Pants ga Nandatte Ii Janai ka! [fansubs by @isaksbestpillow] and Hiroki Iijima and Inukai Atsuhiro in Our Dining Table. The series played with my heartstrings a lot. I fondly remember several of the scenes and all the emotions they evoked in me. At the end, there was a longing for something, maybe some more time with those characters, especially the model and his uncle. 

6. Pit Babe (2023) - omegaverse with enigma - Japan has like 1 manga but through PitBabe I discovered that enigma has become a popular secondary gender in Thai BL space. I love buff uke and I got one paired with a two-faced, loyal loser seme in this one. Super pretty villain, Tony, had me wishing for him to be an omega (I love megalomaniac omegas). I also enjoyed reading the book – every time it rained, that silent phone call, Babe's jealousy towards omegas, the suspense and the pregnancy scare.

5. Love Sea - MAME lifted me out of a BL slump with this one. I also enjoyed the GL pair a lot - there is nothing I like more than performative cuteness/winsomeness (കൊഞ്ചൽ konjal, aegyo, sajiao, kawaii) and benevolent sexism weaponized and employed for emotional manipulation. High EQ manipulators are so rare, my favourite type of yandere (especially when paired perfectly with someone who gets swept up in the moment easily, like Techno). I wonder why MAME doesn't write Janus-faced men that way too. And the men who perform winsomeness such as Tongrak, Kengkla and Tharn, when they do so, have motivations that aren’t Machiavellian enough.

4. Heavens x Candy - OP Pictures is bringing to screens BL that are otherwise tough to get made. This one explored otaku culture, loneliness, family and love through fan pilgrimages, cute and horrifying family dynamics, adult entertainment avenues and love hotels with those transparent walls of bathrooms. It healed my heart after the blow dealt by I Became the Main Role of a BL Drama. 

3. Love Syndrome: The Beginning – I didn't expect this but I'm glad to have received it. I want more but now that the director, F Nontapat Sriwichai, has passed away, I don't expect anything anymore. If only his legacy would inspire someone with the ability and mettle. I prefer meriba endings over happy endings. So, when Love Syndrome III was the first to get an adaptation, I was drawn into Yeonim’s universe. The movie focuses on Gear and Night’s relationship and spends relatively less time on Day and Itt. Yet, it is not hesitant to portray the beginning of their relationships, especially the eroticized violence and the morbid conditioning (調教), showcasing exceptional BL literacy.

2. Kubi (2023) – [Fan-subs] I must praise the excellent production quality before anything else. It is about multiple legendary figures in Japanese history such as Oda Nobunaga, Araki Murashige, Akechi Mitsuhide, Mori Ranmaru and Yasuke. The movie has historically accurate ending with specifics changed to fit the narrative. It is based on Honno-ji Incident and Battle of Yamazaki. Those who died then, dies in the movie too but who killed who and why are fictional. (meta here)

1. Takumi-kun Series 6: Nagai Nagai Monogatari no Hajimari no Asa (2023) – this one and Kubi came out last year but I got the chance to watch them only this year. Thanks to fan subs by @furritsubs. I read and re-read those chapters from the novel and I'm still basking in the magic of Shinobu Gotoh's storytelling. First time since Unni R's story and screenplay for Charlie (2015), I got immersed in a love story where the couple barely even interact and the romance unfolds in a thriller-like fashion. While a lot of character motivation gets lost on the way in this live action, most important of them were impossible to miss when snow fluttered around in a bottle, when a delirious Takumi sought Gii in a crowded stairway landing and when Yoshizawa jumped out to stop Takabayashi from hurting. (ongoing meta series here)

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Here are the top 20 of 2024: live-action BL that I watched and enjoyed this year. I haven't watched everything that came out this year (I'm saving up some for the upcoming year) and did revisit a lot of older stuff (not listed) when there was nothing enjoyable to watch. This year, I realized that I am able to tolerate, if not enjoy, when I'm not too familiar with the content it is adapted from with some exceptions. I don't treat BL like fables or life lessons. I don't bother with moral validation from the choice of media I consume either. But there are certain real-world killjoys in media that may affect my enjoyment, like what happened with The Sign. Please feel free to ask for content warnings.

[ikeoji-subs]

Zettai BL Ni Naru Sekai VS Zettai BL Ni Naritakunai Otoko 2024 - Episode 5 Eng Sub

VS THE START OF A ROMANCE and VS HELPING

For downloading instructions and where to find the raw files, please check our masterpost.

[Subs link]

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translation notes:

About “naresome”

As tends to happen when translating Japanese, this is one of those words that don’t exist in English. Its literal translation is “the start of a romance.” So, while we’ve chosen to translate it as “get together,” it would be more accurate to give a more extensive explanation. It is a noun that specifically refers to the moment that love begins. So when we’re talking about “naresome” we’re talking about the thing or situation that triggered the romantic relationship or romantic feelings.–Snow

about casting Tominaga Yuya as a guy who gets busy when it rains

I think this is another tokusatsu Easter egg. Tominaga Yuya, who plays Jouji in the “Vs. The Start of a Relationship” chapter, was also on Avataro Sentai DonBrothers, a Super Sentai series that ran from 2022 to 2023. His character, Sonoi, was the agent of a culture from another plane of existence whose members feed off of the brainwaves of human beings. At first, he and his associates Sonoza and Sononi were enemies of the DonBrothers, but they eventually joined forces with the Sentai. A big reason this happened was that Sonoi had a special connection to the leader of the DonBrothers, Momoi Tarou. Their relationship reads as pretty darned queer to a lot of viewers, myself included.

Momoi Tarou and Sonoi bonding, before they found out they were nemeses

Many JBL fans know Higuchi Kouhei from My Personal Weatherman/Taikan Yoho, in which he played the titular meteorologist, Segasaki. Part of the premise of that series is that at the start of the story, Higuchi’s character only has sex with his partner on sunny days. Jouji, Tominaga’s Zettai BL character, does the opposite: he and his “sex friend” only do it on rainy days. 

Basically, the writers of Zettai BL 3 have made Higuchi’s toku boyfriend’s story into a reverse Taikan Yoho situation. What are the odds that’s just a coincidence?–Towel

Also, he gets his own “Zettai BL” title card moment (and he’s the only one out of the secondary cast who get to have that).–Snow

That’s right!

I’m going to put this in context a little because I’ve given a lot of thought (probably too much) to who’s been featured in the opening credits of the different Zettai BL seasons. For every season of the show so far, Inukai Atsuhiro has had four other actors perform with him in the opening theme dance number. (All of whom also get a crack at some of those title card moments.) For two seasons, three of the four spots were taken up by Yutaro (Ayato), Shiono Akihisa (Toujou), and Itou Asahi (Kikuchi). The fourth spot was taken up by different actors in the first two seasons. It was the guy who played the attractive dude from the goukon in the first season, and it was Izuka Kenta, who played Kikuchi’s ex Igarashi, in the second. 

This time around, I had hoped that Sekoguchi Ryo would take the fourth spot, because he’s my blorbo and of course I wanted to see him in a retro dance number (boy was that wish ever granted!). But I hadn’t expected Shiono not to appear this time. Maybe there were specific reasons for this, like a scheduling conflict or an injury. It’s not like Shiono appears less in season 3 than he did in the others, so that’s not the reason. It’s hard to say. But in that context, it seems even more significant that they gave a spot to Tominaga Yuya. We don’t know the reasons for this. But it’s possible they featured him more heavily in this way because of his tokusatsu backstory and the inside joke it allowed them to make.–Towel

about “pudding relationship” and “prince and princess”

This part was tricky to translate. As you might have noticed by this point, Mob likes to make puns. In Japanese, pudding is written as “purin” and it is used to refer to pudding as well as custard. Mob goes on to follow with “prince and princess”, which in Japanese are pronounced as “purinsu” and “purinsesu”. In here, there’s wordplay with these similar sounding words and the image of the ToujouAyato couple.–Snow  

about “cuteness overload”

Japanese is a language that uses a lot of onomatopoeia. There’s 4 types, iirc: animal sounds, object sounds (like rain, creaking and the like), things that don’t make noise (smiles, stares, silence, etc), verbs turned onomatopoeia (I unfortunately cannot remember this properly but it was something like that). In this case, Mob says “Kyun ga tomaranai” (which literally means “the kyun can’t be stopped”). “Kyun” is an onomatopoeic word to refer to a “momentary tightening of one's chest caused by powerful feelings,” usually tied to a romantic context but not exclusively. Taking this into account, we thought “cuteness overload” might be the closest expression in English.–Snow

It’s worth noting that Mob is also saying “kyun” right after the “cuteness overload” line. I really thought at first that he was saying “cute,” since it sounds so similar, it would make a lot of sense contextually, and English loan words are so common in Japanese. But no, it was “kyun.” There was no way we could get across the meaning of “kyun” in one or two syllables of English, so we went with “adorbs,” which is just another word for “cute,” but at least it has a cutesy pronunciation that steps it up a notch.–Towel

about bouhan buzzers (16:06)

The translation note shown onscreen during this scene reads: “a bouhan buzzer is a security gadget carried by Japanese schoolchildren.” We did our best to summarize the meaning of this term briefly, so that it would be readable in the amount of time it was possible for us to keep that caption onscreen. But here’s a longer explanation for those who might be curious. 

It took a while for me to understand what these things were. At first I pictured something like a hand buzzer–the kind that people used to use to prank people. But it’s nothing like that. They’re sometimes referred to as “personal security alarms.” They’re little doodads that you can clip onto a backpack or carry in your pocket, and if you activate them (the most common mechanism for which seems to be pulling some kind of tab or string), they make some form of alarm-type sound. I found a video, below, that shows someone activating two different types of buzzers, showing the sound they make. 

These two make the same sort of beeping/chirping noises you’d associate with an alarm protecting a car or the entrance to a building–not really a “buzzing” sound, or anything that resembles the sound Mr. Cheerleader makes in this scene. But maybe there are other types that are more buzz-like, or sound more like the sound our buddy is imitating. 

According to some things I read when I looked these up, children often play with their bouhan buzzers, making it somewhat less likely that people will be on alert when they hear them go off. I don’t think I could have resisted setting off a gadget like this if I’d had one as a child. They seem to be available with all sorts of characters on them and in all sorts of colors and shapes, which is cool but might make them seem even more toy-like. 

From what I’ve seen, these things are most commonly used by children, but adults sometimes use them too. If you look for them for sale online, there are more adult-looking versions available (say, a rose-gold blob instead of something with cute characters on it–though of course, adults might want those too). One listing I saw advertised that they’re useful for kids, women, and the elderly.–Towel

Tag list: @absolutebl @bengiyo @c1nto @come-back-serotonin @lurkingshan @my-rose-tinted-glasses @porridgefeast @sorry-bonebag @twig-tea @wen-kexing-apologist

[ranchthoughts]

inspired by everyone's 2023 wrapped posts I have a question for all of you...

options chosen based on my anecdotal experiences - feels like a lot of people first watched at the start of the pandemic and afterwards. Those who began watching before Jan 2020, feel free to indicate a specific time frame in the tags.

And please check out the companion polls - when did you join BL Tumblr, when did you stop lurking on BL Tumblr, what BL did you first write meta for

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The REAL AI automation threat to workers

I'm Kickstarting the audiobook for The Bezzle, the sequel to Red Team Blues, narrated by @wilwheaton! You can pre-order the audiobook and ebook, DRM free, as well as the hardcover, signed or unsigned. There's also bundles with Red Team Blues in ebook, audio or paperback.

Long before the current wave of AI hype, we were being groomed for automation panics with misleading stories. Remember this one? "'Truck driver' is the most common job in America. Self-driving trucks are just around the corner. How can we prevent America's army of truckers from turning into a howling mob when the robots steal their jobs?"

https://futurism.com/millions-of-jobs-are-at-risk-but-their-loss-could-be-for-the-greater-good

It was absolute nonsense. First of all, "truck driver" isn't a particularly common job in America! The BLS lumps together all cargo vehicle drivers under a single classification. The category error here was thinking that every delivery van driver, furniture mover, and courier is behind the wheel of a big rig, cracking wise on a CB radio as they tear up the interstate.

But what about automation threats? It's possible that if we redesigned the interstates to give 16 wheelers their own separated lanes, and then set them to following one another, that they could traverse long distances in that way. Congratulations, you've just invented a shitty, failure-prone train.

"Shitty train AI" does not threaten the job of the vast number of people the BLS classifies as "truck drivers." For one thing, "shitty train AI" isn't going to pilot a UPS van around the streets of a busy city with other road users. Sure, a few robotaxi companies have bamboozled city governments into conscripting the city's residents into an uncontrolled murderbot experiment. These are not going well:

https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/9-key-leaders-depart-gms-cruise-amid-ongoing-investigation-into-san-francisco-incident/

More than $100b has been set on fire chasing the robotaxi dream, and the result is most charitably described as a technological curiosity, requiring 1.5 high-waged remote technicians to replace each low-waged driver:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/09/herbies-revenge/#100-billion-here-100-billion-there-pretty-soon-youre-talking-real-money

But even if we could perfect this technology, robots still wouldn't replace all those "truckers" who drive delivery vans (to say nothing of moving vans!). The hard part of driving a UPS van isn't just getting it from place to place – it's getting the parcel into the place. The robo-van would still need at least one person to get the parcel from the back of the van and into the reception desk, porch, or other delivery zone. It's not going to fire those parcels at your door with a catapult. It's also not going to deliver them by drones. Drone delivery is another one of those historical curiosities, capable of delivering a very narrow range of parcels, under even narrower circumstances:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/05/comprehensive-sex-ed/#droned

If all UPS delivered was lightweight, non-fragile rectangular parcels ordered by people with large, unobstructed back yards, then sure. Congrats, you've just created the world's least-useful parcel delivery service!

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/06/amazon-drone-delivery-service-seeks-faa-approval-to-launch-in-2022/

All that said, the big rig drivers probably don't need to worry about robots stealing their jobs. It's not even clear that "shitty train" is within our technological grasp, but even if it is, there's yet another problem with the AI automation trucker jobpocalypse: "trucker" is already one of the worst jobs in America:

https://www.usatoday.com/pages/interactives/news/rigged-forced-into-debt-worked-past-exhaustion-left-with-nothing/

It's hard to overstate just how fucking terrible it is to be a trucker. Truckers are trapped in abusive debt holes by their employers – who misclassify their workforce as "contractors" in a bid to sidestep labor law. Shriven of any labor rights, truckers are forced into the most ghastly, body-destroying, family-wrcking, financially precarious existence imaginable.

You can drive a truck for years, give almost all of the money you earn back to your employer (who denies that you're their employee) to pay back the usurious loan for your truck. Then, your employer can underschedule for shifts so that you miss a loan payment, and they can repo your truck and keep the six-figure repayment you've already made to them, leaving you destitute.

They can force you to work for hours – days! – without pay while you wait for loading and dispatch. They can make you drive long past the point of safety, then, if (when) you get into a wreck, they can fine you for not taking the mandated rest breaks.

Now, these drivers aren't about to be replaced by AI – but that doesn't mean that AI won't affect their jobs. Commercial drivers are among the most heavily surveilled workers in the country. Amazon's drivers (whom Amazon misclassifies as subcontractors) have their eyeballs monitored by AI;

https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/17/revenge-of-the-chickenized-reverse-centaurs/

AIs monitor the voices of the (primarily Black, primarily female) workforce at Arise – homeworkers who field customer service calls for blue-chip companies like Carnival Cruises and Disney. They're listening for unruly children or pets in the background, and workers who fail to muffle these dependents lose the contracts they have to pay to train for:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/22/paperback-writer/#toothless

And AI monitors the conduct of workers on temp-work apps. If a worker is dispatched to a struck workplace and refuses to cross the picket-line, the AI boss fires you and blacklists you from future jobs for refusing to robo-scab:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/30/computer-says-scab/#instawork

Writing in The Guardian, Steven Greenhouse describes the AI-enabled workplace, where precarious, often misclassified workers are monitored, judged, and fined by algorithms:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/jan/07/artificial-intelligence-surveillance-workers

Whether it's the robot that gets you disciplined for sending an email with the word "union" in it or the robot that takes money out of your paycheck if you take a bathroom break, AI has come for the workplace with a vengeance.

Here's a supreme irony: nearly all of the beneficial applications for AI require that AI be used to help workers, not replace them, which is absolutely not how AI is used in the workplace. An AI that helps radiologists by giving them a second opinion might help them find tumors on x-rays, but that's a tool that reduces the number of scans a radiologist processes in a shift, by making them go back and reconsider the scans they've already processed:

https://locusmag.com/2023/12/commentary-cory-doctorow-what-kind-of-bubble-is-ai/

But AI's sales pitch is not "Buy an AI tool and increase your costs while increasing your accuracy." The pitch for AI is "buy and AI and save money by firing workers." Given how bad AIs are at replacing humans, this is a bad deal all around, both for the worker who loses their job and the customer who gets the substandard product the AI makes.

There is a very limited slice of applications where an AI could make a lot of money for a company that deploys it, without costing that company anything when the AI screws up. For example, AI is a really good tool for fraud! Rather than paying people to churn out millions of variations on a phishing email, you can get an AI to do it. If the AI writes a bad phishing email, it's OK, since nearly all recipients of even good phishing emails delete them. What's more, no one will fine you or publish an op-ed demanding that your board of directors fire you if you buy an incompetent AI to commit fraud. Fraud is a high-value, low-consequence environment for using AI.

Another one of those applications is managing precarious workers who don't have labor rights. If the AI unfairly docks your worker's wages, or forces them to work until they injure themselves or others, or decides that their eyeball movements justify firing them, those workers have no recourse. That's the whole point of pretending that your employees are contractors: so you can violate labor law with impunity!

But that's not the ironic part. The ironic part is that "being a shitty boss" is the one AI application that companies are willing to increase their net spending on. No one buys an eyeball-monitoring AI so they can fire a manager. This is the one place where AI is there to augment, rather than replace, an employee.

This makes AI-based bossware subtly different from other forms of Taylorism, the "scientific management" fad of the early 20th century that saw management consultants choreographing the postures and movements of workers to satisfy the aesthetic fetishes of their employers:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/24/gwb-rumsfeld-monsters/#bossware

The pseudoscientific cod-ergonomics of the 1900s was demeaning and even dangerous, but it wasn't automated, and if it increased worker output, this was incidental to the real purpose of making workers move like the machine-cogs their bosses reassured themselves they were:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/21/great-taylors-ghost/#solidarity-or-bust

Every AI panic is a way of deflecting attention from the real, grimy, here-and-now ways that AI is destroying our lives by demanding that we entertain nonsensical science fiction claims about large, shiny existential risks that AI might present in the future.

The "X-risk" of the spicy autocomplete chatbot waking up and using its newfound sentience to turn us all into paperclips is nonsense. Adding words to the plausible sentence generator doesn't turn it into a superintelligence for the same reason that selectively breeding faster horses doesn't lead to locomotives:

https://locusmag.com/2020/07/cory-doctorow-full-employment/

But there is a way that AI could destroy the human race! The carbon footprint and water consumption associated with training and operating large-scale models are significant contributors to the climate emergency, which threatens the habitability of the only planet in the known universe capable of sustaining human life:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/federicoguerrini/2023/04/14/ais-unsustainable-water-use-how-tech-giants-contribute-to-global-water-shortages/

Likewise, AI isn't going to replace you at work. But it's already augmenting your shitty boss's ability to rip you off, torment you, maim you and even kill you in order to eke out a few more basis points for the next shareholder report.

Science fiction is a fun and useful way to tell parables about our current technologies. But it's not a roadmap for the future. The fact that sf writers like me found AIs as useful measures to describe Earth's dominant artificial life form – the limited liability corporation – doesn't mean that superhuman AIs should – or can – be created.

Back the Kickstarter for the DRM-free audiobook of The Bezzle, read by Tumblr's own @wilwheaton!

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/11/robots-stole-my-jerb/#computer-says-no

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

[talkingbl]

Thai BL Companies: A Brief Guide

My guide to the major Thai BL companies for the BL newbie. I've not included defunct companies (Nadao Bangkok, Studio Wabi Sabi), companies that produce BLs but don't sign actors or companies I'm not as familiar with (Copy A Bangkok, Dee Hup House, iQiyi).

Be On Cloud (BOC)

Production Value: A- | Talent: B+ | Story Variety: C | Writing: B

Notable Series: KinnPorsche (2022), The Hidden Character (2023 Reality TV Series), Dead Friend Forever (2023), 4Minutes (2024)

Notable Actors: Apo Nattawin, Bas Asavapatr, Bible Wichapas, Fuaiz Thanawat, Jes Jespipat, Mile Phakphum

My Thoughts: As a heads up, I did not finish Dead Friend Forever ("DFF"), so please take this into account when reading my thoughts below.

BOC is the place to go for decently high production values, heavier themes, and acting that's a slight cut above the rest. BOC will bring lots of action and sex, with stories that tend to explore the more base sides of humanity.

The company's flagship series, KinnPorsche, is often cited as a good starting point into Thai BL for the average joe, however, I actually think 4Minutes is a better starting point as it takes all of the better qualities of BOC and leaves out the camp you get with KinnPorsche, which I believe is more of an acquired taste for folks who are new to Thai BL. I also think that KinnPorsche, while decent for a first production for a company, has lots of questionable directing/acting/and even writing choices that are largely eliminated in 4Minutes.

To me, the biggest issue for BOC from an artistic standpoint is the way some of their series tend to meander for awhile before getting to the point. KinnPorsche suffers from this in the middle of the series, and DFF also has this problem after the first 2 or 3 episodes. 4Minutes has sort of the opposite problem where it moves a little too quickly because of its short 8-episode run. Still, BOC's storytelling is made more interesting because of the subject matter of its series (KinnPorsche's mafia-bodyguard trope, DFF's...whatever the fuck they were doing in that scary ass show..., 4Minutes' psychological-sci-fi thriller elements).

Business-wise, BOC is a bit controversial to say the least. Their talent pool has been a bit of a mess what with Build Jakapan being forced out after being outed as the worst type of asshole and Barcode Tinnasit leaving for somewhat mysterious reasons, some of the company's key writers and producers turning out to be on a constant power trip, and even controversies surrounding the talent that haven't even had their first roles yet.

Additionally, their promotion tactics have likewise been polarizing. While they don't go full-throttle with their shipped-pair promotions, they do put on these elaborate events complete with fansigns, meet and greets, actor performances, etc. At first, it was a little flimsy (KinnPorsche cast humping the air and singing offkey in front of thousands of people), but I do think it's improving (4Minutes cast actually getting into character to perform songs (still offkey) like a stage musical of sorts, instead of singing/dancing as themselves). So, if you're wanting to get into Thai BL fandom culture, I'd say BOC has more opportunities for you to be part of that community in a way that doesn't ship you straight into delulu land.

Lastly, while I think BOC has a bright future ahead given the success of literally everything they do, I feel like a lot will ride on if they're able to keep Jes Jespipat (who was a known actor in the Thai lakorn scene before joining BOC) and attract more big-name talent. Barcode jumping over to GMMTV after alluding that he didn't want to be signed to a company again after leaving BOC is a bit of a bad look to me and I can imagine other industry talent is keeping an eye on things like that.

Change2561 (Change)

Production Value: C | Talent: C | Story Variety: B- | Writing: C

Notable Series: PitBabe (2023), This Love Doesn't Have Long Beans (2024)

Notable Actors: Nut Supanut, Pavel Naret, Pooh Krittin, Pon Thanapon, Sailub Hemmawich

My Thoughts: Before you read the below, I've only watched about half of PitBabe and clips of This Love Doesn't Have Long Beans ("TLDHLB"), so many of my thoughts are colored by brief experiences.

Change is one of the newer companies to pop up on the Thai Queer Love scene. So far, their productions have been received relatively well and their upcoming series have garnered overwhelming support. Because Change is so new and both of their leading BL productions are so different, it's difficult to really point in the direction of a true identity. That said, there is an inkling that Change will be more of a novel adaptation company rather than an original content company. Additionally, Change has adapted/is adapting books that have hooks to them (Pitbabe with the omegaverse theme, their upcoming series The Most Beautiful Count and its strong identity/politics themes, etc.).

I can't really recommend a series for Change since I haven't finished the ones I've started from the company. I do think that Pitbabe is much riskier than TLDHLB, given that it does have an omegaverse element and it switches the typical seme/uke dynamic on its head.

Artistically, Change's direction looks promising, but I do warn that, likely because the company is so new, the talent pool is a bit shallow (same few actors star in each series) and the production quality varies drastically from work to work.

Business-wise, Change seems to be doing the typical Thai BL promotion tactics of fansigns, brand events, and social media fanservice, with their pairs having slightly more distance between them than shipped pairs from other companies.

Overall, I think if Change delivers on the lineup it announced in 2024, it has the potential to shake up the top players in the industry.

Domundi/Mandee (DMD)

Production Value: B+ | Talent: C | Story Variety: B | Writing: C

Notable Series: Why R U? (2020), Cutie Pie (2022), DMD Friendship The Reality (2023-, Reality TV Series), Bed Friend (2023), Your Sky (2024)

Notable Actors: Kong Kongpob, Max Kornthas, Nat Natasit, Nunew Chawarin, Thomas Teetut, Zee Pruk

My Thoughts: Warning that I have never finished a DMD show lmao (but Your Sky looks promising).

Ah, DMD...the long-touted GMMTV dethroner. DMD is a go-to for slice-of-life series that have NC elements but not at the level of BOC. Most of the series produced at DMD are straight up romantic comedies with no other themes explored at all. But within the romantic comedy genre, DMD series explore many common romance tropes (Cutie Pie with arranged marriage trope, Bed Friend with enemies to lovers trope, Your Sky with fake dating trope, etc.). Even with its upcoming series like The Next Prince and Love Upon A Time, we're getting a european royalty AU and period piece. It's truly like if AO3 had its own BL production company.

The company's flagship series is probably Cutie Pie. Though some might argue Why R U? put DMD/Mandee on the map (a la SOTUS and GMMTV). But, really, Cutie Pie was like the 2gether of DMD. It launched the company and its shipped pair, ZeeNunew, into the GMMTV-competitor conversation. That said, Your Sky is the best show I've seen from DMD and it's not even finished yet lol.

Artistically, DMD suffers from incoherent storytelling and mid-acting syndrome. Like Cutie Pie started off okay but I couldn't move past the terribly uninspired acting and all over the place plot. That said, a lot of their actors fit perfectly into established character tropes (tall/older confident and masculine seme/top, shorter/younger shy and feminine uke/bottom), which I think is a huge draw for lots of people. This is not something that affects my viewing experience, however, so I don't count this as a plus.

Business-wise DMD is a shipper's paradise. A lot of the shipped pairs act like real couples even outside of their shows, with some even being suspected of actually dating. They have all the typical shipped pair events but combine it with content out of the ass of the actors flirting, etc. DMD actors seem to have a much more international reach than, say, Idol Factory actors. While both have similar outreach in Asia, I think DMD tries to get their actors and works in western markets, which is a huge plus for western BL newbies. Additionally, DMD actors tend to not really be actors... I mean, they act, but most of them actually want to sing (and some can). This means that shipped couple birthday events are just concerts, fansigns are just concerts, extra video content is just music videos, etc. So, you will not run out of opportunities to see your favorite actors in the flesh in a manner that's (arguably) worth the money if you go down the DMD actor stan rabbithole.

Still, DMD is slightly controversial with allegations of sexism from its actors (stemming from a video released some years ago) and inappropriate pairings. With the rising conversations surrounding age gaps in pairings lately, DMD has come under fire for MaxNat in particular. For those who don't know, Max and Nat have been paired together since Nat was 17 (Max was 26 at that time). Though they were first paired before joining DMD, so most of their critics don't call out DMD for that. Still, some feel that even though Nat is now 22, DMD is wrong for keeping him in a pair with an actor 9 years his senior. The conversation is similar with ZeeNunew. Zee has been under particular scrutiny because of a comment he made about wanting to be paired with Nunew since Nunew first joined DMD at age 19 (Zee would've been 28 at the time).

Personally, I think DMD can't be blamed from MaxNat's pairing before they joined DMD. I also don't think it was necessarily wrong to keep them paired after they joined since, by then, Nat was a grown man. While MaxNat are not my cup of tea, at this point, Nat is 22, and I'm not in the business of trying to tell a grown man what to do with his career. Same with ZeeNunew. I like Nunew a lot and feel he is one of the most talented singers who also acts in BLs. But I never felt like he was showing signs of being exploited. At this point, as long as Nat and Nunew feel safe, that's all that matters to me. Additionally, new DMD pairings do not have these problems, so it's hard for me to call it a company issue.

Ultimately, DMD will likely continue to be successful for as long as ZeeNunew have stans lmao. But, on a serious note, I think the smartest thing this company ever did was DMD Friendship The Reality because it was a great way to introduce fans to new acting talent, build fanbases for the shipped pairs that came out of the show, and get money in the process. Now, ZeeNunew and MaxNat have pairs like ThomasKong and KengNamping who have skyrocketed in popularity to pass the torch to.

GMMTV

Production Value: B- | Talent: B+ | Story Variety: A | Writing: B-

Notable Series: SOTUS (2016), The Gifted (2018), Dark Blue Kiss (2019), Theory of Love (2019), 2gether (2020), A Tale of a Thousand Stars (2021), Not Me (2021), Bad Buddy (2021), My School President (2022), Only Friends (2023), High School Frenemy (2024)

Notable Actors: Barcode Tinnasit, Est Supha, First Kanaphan, Fourth Nattawat, Gun Atthaphan, Inn Sarin, Jennie Panhan, Krist Perawat, Mark Pakin, Mix Sahaphap, Nani Hirunkit, Ohm Pawat, Perth Thanapon, Sky Wongravee, Tay Tawan, Tu Tontawan, William Jakarapatr, Win Metawin

My Thoughts: GMMTV is probably the most prolific production company in Thailand when it comes to producing BL series. They have the most series, the most actors, the most events, the most money, etc. The company's identity is rooted in the schoolboy BL. Regardless of if we're talking high school boys or university men, get used to Thai uniforms if you're going to watch damn near any GMMTV BL produced before 2021, thanks to the SOTUS effect. It's not until the company enters the BL stratosphere in 2020 that we start getting a significant uptick in BLs that don't revolve around doing everything in a school building except learning.

Beyond the school settings, GMMTV is known for romantic comedies, slice of life stories, camp elements, terrible audio quality, empty sets, and 'we definitely shot this on a $2 budget' aesthetics. In fact, it wasn't until about 2021 that GMMTV production quality shot up after the explosion in popularity of 2gether. Suddenly, post-2020, Never Let Me Go was being shot in 4K, ThamePo had boom mics that worked and not just wireless mics that brushed up against the actors' clothes and picked up every sound but the actors' voices, and Sky Wongravee was signing to this broke ass company!!! And at this point, GMMTV's identity is less in its art and more in its business.

But first, the art. GMMTV, by far, has the most variety in its BL lineup. And while they don't push the envelope as much as, say, BOC, they're starting to add in mature themes at a reasonable pace. GMMTV's talent pool has shifted dramatically with so many basement dwellers leaving and very well-known actors signing (Sky, Barcode, Boun, Prem, etc.). This means that while you will occasionally see some of the most struggle acting you've ever seen from Dunk Natachai (love u, Dunk), you will see some of the most moving performances from your Gun Atthaphans. It's honestly a somewhat strange thing to experience in real-time.

Additionally, GMMTV's stories are largely adaptations of popular Thai and Japanese works (think SOTUS, Cherry Magic TH, etc.). But occasionally you will get original series that hit just right (Moonlight Chicken).

Artistically, the biggest issues with GMMTV include the weakest actors getting the most work and the most interesting stories, the inconsistent production quality, the clear favoritism, the focus on money over art, the way many of the most popular pairs clearly hate kissing boys lmfao, and, most starkly, the episode 5 drop off.

The episode 5 drop off is a series KILLER. What this refers to is how GMMTV series are almost always good, sometimes even GREAT for the first 4ish episodes. But by the time episode 5/6 comes around (or whenever the couple actually gets together in the series), we go from really good storytelling to leaning on the shittiest cliches you can imagine, the characters becoming straight up stupid, or random things happening for literally no reason with no context at all and a resolution that comes out of actual nowhere. Like there will legit be episodes of a series where one of our leading men gets shot or hit by a car or whatever, his boyfriend is like super scared and worried he's going to die and it's this big traumatic event. No less than 15 minutes later and it's like nothing happened. The shooting/car accident was literally just there to artificially raise the stakes and waste your damn time. This happens in almost EVERY GMMTV BL. Either that or the characters fake-out kiss like 30 times after they get together until there's 2 minutes left in the season finale when they finally kiss.

Regarding the other points, for example, the company treats Gen 2 (in particular, JoongDunk, PondPhuwin, ForceBook) like they are untouchable gods despite most of the talent residing with the pillars, company-switchers, het series actors, and even Gen 3 actors. Don't get me wrong, I understand those 3 pairs are stan attractors, but I feel like GMMTV is not taken super seriously as a company because the actors in these pairs get like 2-3 series per year while some of the company's best actors don't see the light of day.

Business-wise, if you're a kpop or jpop fan or otherwise into idol culture, GMMTV is probably the most comfortable transition for you. GMMTV treats its "artists" like idols (complete with "triple threat" allegations (LMFAO)); every actor getting their own song that they also struggle to dance to; every pair getting their own official mascot, logo, fandom name, and lightstick; concerts; shipped pair reality shows; etc. Hell, even the non-BL pairs get some of these things so long as they look good together and have chemistry (looking at you, Sky-Nani imina). It's like a fanservice paradise over there (except it's not billed as the pairs are actually dating, but that they're all in the will they-won't they, phi-nong, more than friends but less than lovers, stage). And if you pay close enough attention to the GMMTV pairs, you will notice common trends of how they interact/promote that will quickly unravel any delulu thoughts that you might have at the outset of seeing them together.

But to me, the best parts about GMMTV's business strategy, however, are their international focus and the novelty in their company promotions.

As for their international focus, most of their content is freely available on YouTube and subbed in English. Many of their artists are bilingual. And they're starting to produce events overseas at a high clip (e.g., TayNew recently in Rome, JimmySea in LA last year, GMMTV Fan Fest 2025 in Japan, etc.).

Novelty-wise, they've got several things going for them. They're the ones that started the annual lineup shows where they drop trailers for series coming out in the next year, have performances from their in-house T-Pop groups, and interview the casts and crews of upcoming series. They also have unique events like GMMTV Starlympics (if you're a kpop fan, it's like ISAC but only one company's idols participate against each other and there's musical performances), and GMMTV Company Outing (which is their annual company trip and isn't officially televised, but the artists and their managers always upload videos in real time of the shenanigans that occur at these outings). GMMTV even spearheaded the shipped-pair variety show content mill with mainstay pairs getting their own shows themed after either the actors' names (think EarthMix Space) or their interests (think TayNew Meal Date). These are all pioneering promotional tactics that make GMMTV series and shipped pairs even more entertaining.

Besides the money-making genius at GMMTV, however, there have been so many scandals with this company's actors it's hard to keep track. Everything from misogyny allegations, to homophobia, to people criticizing them for largely platforming straight-presenting (?) actors over out actors, to racism, to abuse (Pawin Thanik, Foei Pattara), to inappropriate behavior with children (think Prom Teepakron), etc.

Despite the scandals above, GMMTV is going nowhere. Having so many artists signed to one company, content where there's something for everyone, and an international focus with a parasocial lens is helping GMMTV maintain its status as the premier producer of BL content in Thailand.

Idol Factory (IDF)

Production Value: A- | Talent: B- | Story Variety: B- | Writing: B

Notable Series: Secret Crush on You (2022), GAP (2022), The Sign (2024)

Notable Actors: Babe Tanatat, Becky Rebecca, Freen Sarocha

My Thoughts: Disclaimer: I've only watched Secret Crush on You (SCOY) from Idol Factory.

IDF is the first company to be spearheaded by a former BL actor (Saint Suppapong). It's a newer company with an uncertain identity as of yet (though, I'd say that they're wanting to be known as an all-things queer love (QL) company rather than one focused on BLs or het dramas).

I don't have much to say about IDF artistically except that it's being well-received by BL audiences. Most of the people who like their dramas like the chemistry between the shipped pairs as well as how seriously the company takes queer stories. At IDF, you'll not only find BLs and GLs, but also stories involving trans characters seeking acceptance (see SCOY), for example.

Business-wise, there's a risk here. While the pairs in these shows are lauded for their chemistry, there's not a lot of variety and some pairs have been entrenched in controversy regarding their offscreen activities. Personally, I don't agree with all the folks making a big deal out of some of the actors dating each other in heterosexual relationships. I just hope it doesn't affect IDF's ability to thrive as a company since they're one of the few taking real chances in their content. Additionally, it's not lost on me that more of their stans hate the fact that the actors are in straight relationships than the fact that Billy Patchanon (leading man in The Sign and SCOY) unabashedly said the n-word...

I think that if IDF can expand its talent pool, it'll continue to find success in the BL world.

Jinloe

Production Value: F | Talent: C | Story Variety: D | Writing: F

Notable Series: Hit, Bite, Love (2023), Addicted Heroin TH (2024)

Notable Actors: August Vachiravit, Jur Vasin, Newyear Nawaphat

My Thoughts: Didn't watch Hit, Bite, Love (HBL) (actually dropped the trailer like 2 seconds in lmao) nor did I have any interest in Addicted Heroin TH (though I've seen many clips on the internet).

Jinloe should probably close and all its actors sign to Tia51. Their company identity is making people as uncomfortable as humanly possible by casting children to do questionable things on TV. I don't think that company is a safe place for kids and I think the content they produce is targeted toward...a specific kind of reprehensible person. If you want to see what I mean, just take a gander at the MDL pages for HBL and Addicted Heroin TH.

I can't really speak on their art because I don't watch their shows.

Business-wise, they seem to make dumb decision after dumb decision. From casting a 15 year old to play the love interest of a 27 year old, to NC scenes involving minors, to not even attempting to build out their repertoire of dramas, this company has no vision nor any direction. They're trying to market NewyearJur as a shipped pair with music videos together and social media posts (since those two are the only ones who seemingly have age-appropriate interactions in Jinloe series), but it's all failing miserably since: 1) people familiar with Jinloe's shady business run when they see that name; 2) neither Jur nor Newyear are particularly talented in a sea of similarly-aged actors actually showing potential; and 3) neither Jur nor Newyear have the clout of others in their age range since they started with Jinloe (as opposed to, say, Mick Metas at GMMTV who got clout from being related to Win Metawin).

Jinloe will probably be the next company to close but I also don't doubt that creeps will keep them open.

MeMindY

Production Value: D | Talent: C | Story Variety: D- | Writing: D

Notable Series: Love By Chance (2018), TharnType (2019), Don't Say No (2021), Love In The Air (2022), Love Sea (2024)

Notable Actors: Boss Chaikamon, Fort Thitipong, Noeul Nuttarat, Peat Wasuthorn

My Thoughts: MeMindY is known for its CEO (?), Mame. Anyone who is familiar with Mame's work knows they're going to get dicey romance stories often centering around university students with at least one scene of romanticized abuse for good measure. Now, I do think the abuse stuff is changing (Love In The Air (LITA) didn't really have any of that), but I can understand why MeMindY has that reputation. Either way, every MeMindY show will have engineering/med school/architecture/some other type of professional school students, actors folks consider conventionally attractive, reluctant bottoms that don't know they're gay, somewhat aggressive tops who are always physically bigger than the bottoms, strict heteronormative dynamics, and sometimes literally insane plot elements (like the Tor plotline that came up in TharnType (TTTS))...

Artistically, MeMindY needs to take a step away from university BLs. While TTTS and LITA kept my interest for a bit, I do think Don't Say No (DSN) felt a bit stale. But I'd say it's likely because DSN didn't have the best acting and its episodic structure made it difficult for me to connect with the underlying story. Particularly, the episodic structure in DSN didn't work as well as it does in GMMTV's ThamePo. Still, I appreciate the fact that MeMindY picks actors that do not seem bothered at all about kissing and portraying sex with other men. It's what makes MeMindY series more dynamic than series from other companies despite the laundry list of issues they tend to have.

Business-wise, MeMindY leans HEAVILY into the shipped-pair dynamic. It's less commercial than GMMTV and, these days, less 'we're actually dating' than DMD, but somehow it comes off as just as in-your-face as DMD and GMMTV. I'd even say that I consider MeMindY a peer company to DMD and GMMTV based on the popularity of its shipped pairs alone. Like MewGulf (RIP), BossNoeul, and FortPeat are all booked and busy. MewGulf did for Mew Suppasit and Gulf Kanawut what BrightWin did for Bright Vachirawit and Win Metawin. Mew and Gulf never have to act in BLs ever again to have success and can solely focus on their het careers and terrible singing. I'd even go as far as to say MewGulf is often considered the blueprint for what a shipped couple can be with folks (not me--zonzons leave me alone) often comparing ZeeNunew and the like to MewGulf. BossNoeul is similar to a JoongDunk/PondPhuwin level of noteriety without nearly the same level of dramas to their name, which speaks volumes.

Because MeMindY can produce 1-2 series per year with the same 4 actors and have people shipping them to the high heavens, I think we can consider it an established company that will continue to thrive barring bankruptcy lol.

Open Label

Production Value: C- | Talent: B | Story Variety: -- | Writing: B

Notable Series: Century of Love (2024)

Notable Actors: Daou Pittaya, Offroad Kantapon

My Thoughts: Open Label is the new company on the block. From my understanding, Daou and Offroad actually formed the company themselves (a la YinWar with YWPB or Saint with IDF). Open Label does not have an established identity because they've produced approximately one show. BUT, they did tell us about DaouOffroad's new series The Wicked Game, which looks to be a bodyguard romance that takes on some of the more mature themes we typically see at BOC.

Artistically, all I can say is that they're off to a great start with story selection. Century of Love (COL) was a good first entry as it has a fantasy/supernatural element that blends Thai folklore and religious practices with its romance. There's also the level of comfortability and chemistry between its key actors (Daou and Offroad) that is hard to come by. Hopefully as the company produces more successful series, budgets can increase and they can attract even more talent.

Business-wise, there is no business. There is only DaouOffroad and a slew of pretty faces we have yet to see in anything. This is a good starting point for any company, however, so we shall see how things continue to progress from here.

Ultimately, I'm optimistic that Open Label will see success.

Tia51

Production Value: C- | Talent: C+ | Story Variety: D | Writing: C-

Notable Series: My Universe (2023), LoveSick 2024 (2024)

Notable Actors: Almond Poomsuwan, Bew Busaya, Krit Ngamtanakijja, NJ Deeprompt, Progress Passawich, Shane Thanatpong, Sky Phasith, Toto Thayawat, Yeepun Purichaya

My Thoughts: I've only watched LoveSick 2024.

Tia51 is not exactly new but, from what I know, they've only produced 2 series. Because of this, they don't have an identity yet.

Artistically, so far, so good. It's definitely interesting to have one of your first series be a remake of an iconic series, and it seems to have been a genius decision by the folks over at Tia51. But, because the flagship series is a remake, the only thing to discuss artistically is the talent pool. The directing in Love Sick 2024 was, at times, very inspired. The actors were nearly all rookies and a good 75% of the cast were under 18 at the time of filming--2 things which do come through quite a bit in the finished product. Still, I found that the lead role was very strong, all things considered, and the changes made from the original to this remake seemingly made a lot of sense. Going forward, it's really just about staying at this level of quality or better.

Now, out of all the companies in this space, Tia51 is the only one I have personal experience with when it comes to the business/fan side of things. While in Thailand, I stumbled upon the premiere of LoveSick 2024. While the event itself could've used a little more logistics planning (though part of the problem here is that my Thai isn't very advanced so I had a little more difficulty getting around the venue), it was overall pretty well-organized, which left a good impression on me.

Additionally, the actors are all hella clouted in Thailand (from my understanding, many of the actors cast in the show actually had fanbases through things like music and social media prior to being cast), which adds to the business potential of Tia51. It also helps that, from my experience meeting the crew and cast, they are all very charismatic and are quickly learning how to be good entertainers. Because of this, I think the business of Tia51 has potential to expand. They just need to not waste Progress's acting talent, Chok and Toto's singing talent, and the rest of the cast's social media clout in order to succeed. This means picking tasteful stories to tell and actually nurturing their musical talent in a natural way (unlike GMMTV platforming non-singers).

Conclusion

If you're coming from western media, I'd say the best place to start is either BOC (they have the more serious vibes you get in western media with few quirks) or GMMTV (they're the most accessible).

If you're coming from eastern media (particularly kpop), GMMTV is probably the best place to start, closely followed by DMD. The fandom experience that is a huge part of kpop, is very similar here. In fact, for kpop fans, it might even be helpful to think of the BL companies in kpop company terms. GMMTV/DMD/BOC = SM Entertainment/JYP Entertainment/YG Entertainment, respectively. MeMindY & IDF are like the smaller companies that still have popular groups like WakeOne and KQ Entertainment.

If you're coming from other BL industries (Taiwan, Japan, Korea), I'd say start with Change or DMD for Taiwan and Tia51 or BOC for Korea. If you're coming from Japanese BL, I don't know what to tell you because jbl stans almost always think jbl is superior to everything else and won't given] anything else a chance. Plus, production quality-wise, jbl productions are very dissimilar to Thai productions in almost every conceivable way lmao so I can't really make any good comparisons.