#bls don't let this flop

[tempppuras]

This yaoi tea☕️☕️

[txrully]

Hi Hi !!! I really love your fics

Can I request a gn reader who loves to manhandle the BL boys (Kinda like aggressive affection).

Thank you, and have a good day :D

CANT ESCAPE MY AFFECTION!

·˚ ༘ ꒱ summary bluelock boys with an s/o who loves aggressive affection

·˚ ༘ ꒱ characters isagi yoichi , bachira meguru , itoshi rin , nagi seishiro , mikage reo , chigiri hyoma , hiori yo , shidou ryusei , itoshi sae , michael kaiser , alexis ness

·˚ ༘ ꒱ warning lowercase intended , gn reader

·˚ ༘ ꒱ a/n idk how - but im pretty sure this flopped :sob: so sorry nonnie :( <3

·˚ ༘ ꒱ isagi yoichi

isagi is kind of taken aback at first, because he’s more used to subtle affection (kinda), but when you pull him into a bear hug and start giving him smothering kisses, he’s so down.

he’s always flustered, trying to return the affection but not quite knowing how to keep up with your energy. when you go in for a kiss, he literally freezes, and you have to drag him in.

"yoichi, c'mere, i don't bite! >:/ "

"w-wait, can’t you, uh, just take it slow- 🥲"

"nope, i'm coming for you whether you like it or not!"

"i... okay? 😅"

·˚ ༘ ꒱ bachira meguru

bachira lives for it. he’s all about that playful, chaotic love. he’ll give you the most dramatic responses and egg you on.

if you get overly affectionate, he’ll tease you by trying to run away and play “catch me if you can,” but then he’ll let you tackle him because he loves the aggressive attention. it’s like his personal sport.

"bachira, i'm not letting you go today!"

"haha, i can totally outrun you! try me!"

"watch me catch you!"

"ah, you did it! but only because i let you."

"you're so annoying, i’m kissing you anyway."

·˚ ༘ ꒱ itoshi rin

to put it simply... rin’s not used to this level of affection ( at all ), but once he realizes you’re serious about it, he melts 🫠. he’ll let you drag him into all the kisses, but he might act like he’s annoyed at first.

he’ll do that thing where he crosses his arms and smirks while you’re all over him, but secretly, he’s a little soft on the inside. once you start kissing his neck or leaning on him aggressively, he’s completely done for.

"ew, stop that."

"i’m literally hugging you wdym. D:"

"do it again."

"i- fine by me."

·˚ ༘ ꒱ nagi seishiro

nagi is lwk confused at first ( :x face and all ), but when you pounce on him and wrap your arms around his neck, he just goes with the flow. he’s so relaxed and chill about the whole thing, and honestly? he really likes being adored.

he might just let you do all the aggressive cuddling, because it’s easier than fighting you. if you push for more, he’ll pretend to be a little annoyed, but in reality, he’s soaking up every moment.

"sei, you’re stuck with me today, deal with it."

"can i, like, not deal with it?"

"nope, too bad."

"…fine. i’ll just enjoy the cuddles."

·˚ ༘ ꒱ mikage reo

reo is the most dramatic when it comes to aggressive affection, but he’s secretly obsessed with it. if you hug him from behind and cover his face in kisses, he’s all “oh no, how will i survive?” but he loves it.

he might complain, but he’s always the first to pull you closer and make sure you’re comfortable. even if he’s acting all sophisticated, he’s a softie for your wild love.

"reo, i’m not done yet!"

"oh nooo, i’m going to be suffocated by love!"

"you’re so dramatic."

·˚ ༘ ꒱ chigiri hyoma

chigiri is a bit flustered at first because he’s not sure how to handle all your aggressive affection, but he’ll warm up to it. he loves being loved—he just needs a moment to process.

if you’re all over him, he’ll take it in stride. he’ll laugh it off and act cool, but you can totally tell he’s enjoying it. maybe he gets a little shy when you shower him with kisses, but he definitely melts into your arms when you do.

"chigiri, you’re not getting away today!"

"what do you mean? i’m always getting away!"

"not today, my love."

"you’re a menace." ( lovingly )

·˚ ༘ ꒱ hiori yo

hiori is soft about it. like- he doesn’t even try to escape. you could probably lift him off the ground with a hug, and he’d just be like “okay, this is happening.”

he loves the attention, and he’s so gentle back, giving you the same level of affection in return. he might blush a bit, but he’s more than happy to let you shower him with attention.

"yo, hiori, you're stuck with me."

"uh-huh, i’m fine with that."

"you’re so cute when you get all shy."

"you’re the cute one here."

·˚ ༘ ꒱ shidou ryusei

shidou absolutely thrives in this environment. he loves being manhandled, basically. if you aggressively kiss his neck or give him a bear hug, he’s probably gonna pretend to act like he’s annoyed, but secretly? he’s loving it.

he might challenge you, though. like, “you think you can take me on?” but deep down, he’s ready to be held, kissed, and adored however you want.

"i’m gonna keep kissing you until you can’t breathe."

"oh? bring it on, i’ll kiss you back harder."

"you’re such a brat."

·˚ ༘ ꒱ itoshi sae

sae acts as cool as ever, but when you pull him into a tight hug and kiss him aggressively, he’s completely unbothered. he won’t show it, but you can tell he really likes it.

he might keep his face neutral, but his hands are definitely moving to pull you in closer, and he’ll even wrap his arm around you to make sure you stay put. he won’t say it, but he’s so happy to be adored by you.

"you’re clingy today .. more than usual."

"you bet i am. deal with it."

"oh well."

·˚ ༘ ꒱ michael kaiser

kaiser is such a dramatic baby. he acts like he’s too important for aggressive affection, but the second you throw yourself at him, he’s all “yes, this is exactly what i wanted.”

he makes a big show of rolling his eyes, but you know he’s loving every second of it. he even tries to one-up you sometimes, like, “you think you’re the only one who can be aggressive with love?” and then he’ll pin you down in return.

"i’m gonna smother you with kisses, just you wait."

"pfft, i dare you."

"watch me."

·˚ ༘ ꒱ alexis ness

ness might seem shy about your affection at first, but he’s totally into it. he doesn’t push you away, but he might give you the sweetest smile when you throw yourself at him.

he’ll pull you in and let you cuddle him as much as you want, and when you kiss him all over his face, he’ll blush like crazy but still hold you tight.

"ness, stop looking so cute while i’m trying to kiss you."

"i can’t help it… :') "

"you’re gonna be the death of me."

© txrully

do not copy/translate/repost/plagiarize my works in any way.

ⁱᵈᵏ ʷʰʸʸʸʸ ᵇᵘᵗ ⁱ ʰᵃᵗᵉ ᵗʰⁱˢ ˢᵐ 🫠

[bengiyo]

Your Sky: It Seems I Wanted a 2gether Retread

I watched this on a whim yesterday evening and enjoyed it immensely. Not to be the Boss Baby tweet, but I enjoyed how this show set up some of the same parameters as 2gether without making key characters unlikable, or relying on mean humor.

Right off the bat they calibrated the Teerak character well. He's essentially an adorable younger brother all the time. He's clearly coddled, and requires a lot of supervision. However, they made sure to confirm that he's actually an extremely kind character, and that most of his adventures result from him maybe going too far to complete an act of kindness. This character has real potential to be annoying, and they're doing a great job with the line.

Additionally, they've given Teerak a great supporting cast around him. I liked the teamwork dynamics between Lee, Joy, and Type. I liked seeing them fulfill different roles in the group, and I'm excited to get to know them more. Teerak's relationship with Babe is also compelling; I'm excited to see what we get from a caring big sister. I especially loved their meeting the laundromat owner. I hope we see more of her, and that they continue the trend of introducing every new character with a beauty zoom.

Thomas Teetut is also doing a great job with Muenfah. He's playing this character so differently from Gun in The Middleman's Love that I didn't even recognize him right away.

Unlike with Sarawat (2gether), they didn't withhold this character's affection for Teerak for multiple episodes. Like Sarawat, they've gone for cool, aloof, and disinterested in women. I'm curious to learn how long he's had this crush, why he hasn't said anything about it, and why his brother (Lee) is keeping the confidence about it.

I also want to know whose ass he kicked years ago that created this reputation about him being leader of a gang. It's intriguing because we watched multiple people running interference on Oh's pursuit of Teerak. I was wondering at first if Teerak needed to properly reject this man, but based on Oh stealing the outdoor reservation at this restaurant, drugging Teerak's friends, and trying to fight Muenfah, I really don't like this man. They did a great job building to the reveal that Oh ain't shit. They made me feel bad for a Mike character at first, and then validated why I instinctively do not like that man's characters.

I really like the impetus for the fake dating in this one. I like that Muenfah pulled Teerak out of a dangerous situation, and also that a drunk Teerak created a major misunderstanding online from people stalking (please stop filming people in public). It's so much better than we know Muenfah has feelings for Teerak already, and has been protective of him. I'm excited to see how Teerak grows into a shared affection, and how the veneer of fake dating complicates the development of their feelings.

Also, this show is beautiful. Sarawut Chuparkpanich shows always look great. However, every single person linked on the crew has been part of projects that I think showed real potential before flopping badly before even the midpoint. I don't want to get my hopes up too much because of the track record, but damn did I really like this first episode. This is the most engaged with initial characterization I've been with a Thai BL in months, so I hope this one works out. I am still fond of 2gether, despite the missteps of that show, so I'd like to have a better version of it.

I'll pick this up as a regular watch and check in after a few weeks to let you know how I'm feeling about it. Thank you to the gifmakers!

[wonderlandisatsomewhere]

It occurred to me that they do served portraying Peem as a warm, likable and grounded Character which I normally don't get this level in Thai bls.

Like he takes things seriously.

Which defly did something to Phum's attitude to the deal and their dynamic.

He forgives people for their sincere apologies.

He is a natural care giver who could assure someone like Phum with his abandonment issues.

He is attentive to people who he cares about.

Like when he keeps asking about Phum's odd behaviour.

He even feels bad for hurting other people even if he couldn't have prevented it from happening anyway.

And this,

Is confident in their own skin. We literally see him walking around the campus with a pigtail and a flip flop like it's nobody's business.

I am not sure if he is that radiating happiness kind of guy but can defly describe him as the logical and sensible friend of the group who you can seek comfort to when you needed it.

And most importantly he believes in the importance of talking things out which is the sole remedy for emotional constipation and maintaining healthy relationships.

I also love that he is not shy about physical touching or being open about his feelings and was really surprised that he is the one to say I love you first.

Not to forget about he takes no bullshit and will keep you in line,

A person like this will make you feel like nothing can go wrong being with them because they won't let the problem grow its roots deeper.

Not without his legendary slipper ofc.

In conclusion, Phum does found his better half. Damn boi hold onto him tight.

Wait he already did lol

Honourable mention: Push over Chain.

My guy barely survived that amusement park.

Jk, he just can't say no to Pun's genius plan his friends' wishes

We are the series (2024)

Phewww it took me 3 days to let it all out. But finally....

[talk-danmei-to-me]

Ranking TGCF books:

(In my opinion)

1. Book 6

Why it's my absolute favourite: The angstiest book of the whole series, it has the gift of the cave of ten thousand gods, Wuming literally being willing to burn down the whole world for Xie Lian, oh and it's the book where finally Xie Lian confesses his feelings.

2. Book 4

The book that turned me into a He Xuan girlie. I love him and I'm sad that he got like 4 sentences after this book.

Shi Wudu be living some game of thrones bullshit and I ate it up. Also home of the angsty Hualian make out and launch of baby Hua Cheng.

3. Book 5

This just had so many of my favourite tropes, my boy Qi Rong was running an inn, Heaven's Eye got introduced and Pei Ming joined the party. I just loved the road tripping vibes.

4/5. Book 3/Book 2

I flip flop on which one I prefer because I like them for the same reasons - shenanigans in ghost city and Xianle Trio flashbacks. The books that convinced me Feng Xin was the second love interest in a bl until Mu Qing showed me the error of my ways. Book 3 loses points for introducing my least favourite plot - the fetus spirit. Book 2 gains points for introducing 2 of my all time faves Qi Rong and Shi Qingxuan.

6. Book 7

I probably have a middling opinion on book 7. It doesn't go as hard as book 6 for me, but it did bring back Shi Qingxuan so I read it super fast. That the only He Xuan/Shi Qingxuan interaction we got was He Xuan punching Shi Qingxuan whilst disguised as Hua Cheng was a travesty tho. Mei Nianqing was serving comedy gold.

7. Book 8

As endings go, it was decent. Loses points on having He Xuan eat all the food but not have any interactions with Shi Qingxuan and also not letting Shi Qingxuan become king of the beggars and ascend again. All it's points come from Hua Cheng breaking Xie Lian's cursed shackles and turning into butterflies and then from the party. Also everyone forgiving Ling Wen so she can do the maths. Relatable as fuck.

8. Book 1

First books are never ever my favourite ones. There's some cute stuff that happens, but I feel like all the other books have way more exciting things going on. Also I don't care for the ghost groom arc at all.

[wanderlust-in-my-soul]

15 Days BL Challenge (Part 1)

You can find the original post here.

Day 5: The biggest Flop

It's hard to get me dislike a series. I usually drop series because I either find them boring or because I can't deal with the storytelling or the writing or the acting. But usually I don't have a strong connection with those series or a strong feeling for them. So for this biggest flop I choose a series, that I had really high hopes for, which started good and just went in the wrong direction for me, that I couldn't stand it anymore. I loved the first season, so I was going into this series with fondness and high hopes. But it made me fall on my face so hard because of the miserable script that I still have bruises on my face.

Some people might not like it, but... for me it's Minato Shouji Coin Laundry Season 2.

There are definitely bad BLs. I think Check Out or Dinosaur Love are great examples of those bad bls, but I had absolutely no expectation of these series. It was different with Minato 2. I loved the first season and was totally excited when we got the second season. And then it wasn't good...

There are two generations that collide in Shin and Akira. Shin is proud of his love and wants to show that they both belong together. He is not afraid of the world because he has not experienced any negative experience because of his sexuality yet. He experiences the world from a not-so-conservative lens, especially since his parents have agreed to let him live with Akira until the apartment is renovated. Akira has grown up in a more conservative world and has always hidden away until now. He is slowly letting himself be carried away by Shin, but it takes time. Such a learned behavior, and especially mindset, can't be changed overnight.

That were my thoughts after episode 3. I was excited to get more of this growth of both of them together. I wanted to see their lives and how they work together with each other, how their love growth and how they overcome their differences and the internal homophobia. But instead we got an amnesia plot…

I am just so exhausted in hoping the story would go in a direction I could at least understand the writers. But I can't anymore... why couldn't we get a story about Shin and Akira living their best life after moving in together. Both dealing with their issues. Some drama at work or jealousy bullshit would have been better than this amnesia-storyline. I would have loved to see Akira finally grow - together with Shin, not because he needs to, because otherwise he might lose him, but because he wants to be with him and he wants to be his partner and because he finally overcame at least the problem with the age difference. I am so not happy with what the writers have done to them. And I still watch it... if it wasn't Minato and my love for the first season, I would have dropped this one a few episodes ago...

And these were my thoughts after episode 11. The writers really did the characters and the story dirty. I have nothing more to say.

Me while watching this show:

So yeah, that was one of the biggest flops for me.

[outofthemouthsof]

15-Day BL Challenge in 1 Night!

I'm more of a lurker than a poster but Tumblr's my fave place to wallow in BLness. My 2nd favorite place is the spreadsheet where I track the shows I've watched (172 completed in just over a year), so @negrowhat 's challenge was irresistible. I'm gonna cram my answers in one post. Here goes!

Fave OG Actor Pairing: Some of the ones I think of as OG are only like 4 years old, so this was tough. And the 18 shows that have gotten my top score aren't very old. But I went through those 18 and picked the oldest, and it was the 2018 Korean microfilm Some More. Because it's so short it's super rewatchable, but even if I wasn't able to watch the whole thing a half dozen times (which I have), I'd still have gone back & watched the sweet moments and sex scene about 25 times (which I have). So I guess my fave OG actor pairing is Park Chan Ung and Kim Joon Bum! How they got me so deeply invested in their love in mere minutes is beyond me, but they did!

Fave Rookie Actor Pairing: Does Japan do the CP thing that Thailand does? I don't think so, but one couple I wish had about a dozen more BL series together lined up are Kouhei Higuchi and Atsuki Mashiko of My Personal Weatherman! Their chemistry was visceral and they're too pretty to be believed.

Side Dish That Should've Been the Main Course: While I enjoyed the main pairing a lot, they were nothing compared to the crazy rollercoaster side plot (how'd it go from so funny to SO dark to so sexy to so sweet and wholesome like that??) of Vegas/Pete from KinnPorsche!

Fave Ship Dynamic: Obvs from answers 2 & 3 I am not against D/s ships at ALL. Also a sucker for tough-but-submissive-bodyguard with mafia-brat-prince. Honestly I like tons of different dynamics from innocent to toxic, but one that gives me major butterflies is a guy who thinks he's straight but when confronted with the idea of liking another guy, doesn't have a macho freakout or run away, just kind of straightforwardly & sincerely searches his feelings until he figures it out. And then takes care of his baby. Why's that so HOT and sweet? Some of my fave examples: Pete/Ae in Love By Chance, Le Jian/Amber from DNA Says Love You, and Ida/Aoki from My Love Mix-Up!

Biggest Flop: This is expectations vs. execution, right? There's loads of shows I've abandoned, some I've stuck with for no good reason, etc., that are way worse than what I consider my personal biggest let-down. I was so enamored of Perth from LBC that I assumed he could do no wrong, and the bully-to-lover, rich/poor pairings often do it for me. So I guess I just assumed Dangerous Romance would be amazing, and it was REALLY good for a couple episodes. It wasn't the worst thing I ever saw, but so much of it just ... felt ... flat. Very surprising.

Fave Line From Your Fave Series: Well I know my fave series--Cherry Magic Thailand was the most perfect, entrancing, heartwarming series EVER, OMG, it was staggeringly good and stuck the landing in a way few shows have managed. I can't really think of one standout line--the script was so on point & there were HUNDREDS of sweet tingly moments. There were some epic ones in ep11 tho: When Achi says "The voice inside your head is so loud" and Karan (the boldest he's ever been) replies "Don't worry; soon you won't be able to read my mind anymore." (But then clearly uses that power one more time to gain the sweetest nonverbal consent EVER.) Then, Karan: "Do you regret losing your power?" Achi: "I'd regret not loving you." (OMG how I squealed.)

Fave Villain: This was so tough. An over-the-top villain I loved to hate (and an actor I loved from his sweetie-pie green-flag role in SCOY) was obvs Heng Asavarid as Chalothon in The Sign. But an actor who was so excellent at being loathsome and malicious toward the main couple, with just enough of a redemption arc that I didn't totally despise the character by the end (but did hate most of the way through): Park Hae In as Eun Ji (Jae Won's ex) in The Eighth Sense. It was a typical "faen fatale" role but so well done. So a tie between 2 totally different takes on the destructive ex.

The Trope You Hate Except When It's "This Series": OK, "hate" is a strong word for how I feel about the drop-of-rain-makes-you-ill so love-interest-takes-care-of-you trope. It's OK. But holy SHIT is it overused. Holy shit. I sigh resignedly when I realize we're going there. EXCEPT. When P'Phayu goes to visit Rain in Love in the Air when he's sick, and his version of caregiving? Forcibly applying medicine in the form of a rectal suppository. It is so funny, weirdly sexy, very in line with their dynamic (doesn't get in the way of their romance moments later at all), & it shoves a big middle finger up the overoveroverused sick-bed trope.

Most Visually Pleasing Love Scene: Okay, THE scene in The Sign is the clear winner in my & many people's books. But there are so many runners-up: the post-race one in Love in the Air. Just about every one in Pit Babe (both couples) & My Personal Weatherman. (A lot of other faves don't quite qualify as visually or emotionally pleasing--lustfully pleasing should be a 3rd category in this challenge!)

Most Emotionally Pleasing Love Scene: Again, I have a clear winner: Cherry Magic Thailand. So full of emotion, so well deserved, so everything. Sigh. But lots of runners-up: same scene in The Sign, both kissing scenes in DNA Says Love You (tame but soo emotionally satisfying), Ray & Sand's camper reunion in Only Friends, the post-prison love scenes for both couples in Kiseki: Dear to Me, the 1st time in I Feel You Linger in the Air ...

Breakup That Should've Stayed Broken Up: Maybe it's because I try to be choosy in what I watch all the way thru or maybe I'm a big softy who tends to root for every couple no matter how lame. In all my completed shows, I could only think of 2 breakups where I wasn't at all invested in them getting back together (and maybe against it): Tian/Poon, What Zabb Man and Top/Mew, Only Friends.

Wedding You Wish You Had an Invite To: If we're talking weddings that actually appeared in the show, Achi and Karan's in Cherry Magic Thailand, obvs! If it's hypothetical weddings, I'd be desperate to go to one of ANY of the characters in Playboyy! I'd wear a bulletproof vest & bring my own flask of booze, but it would be the trashy chaos-filled social event of a lifetime.

Give 5 Good Boys a Gold Star: Just 5? OK, some I haven't mentioned yet. 1. Shin Woo, Light on Me, 2. Palm, Never Let Me Go, 3. Mohk, Last Twilight, 4. Thun, He's Coming to Me, 5. Neua, Secret Crush on You. Best boys!

The Top 5 Most Sad Boys: I'll limit it to ones where the suffering was kinda pretty, not just painful. 1. Way, Pit Babe, 2. Akk, The Eclipse, 3. Kaipa/Gaipa, Moonlight Chicken, 4. Hae Bom, Cherry Blossoms After Winter, 5. Kiyoi, My Beautiful Man

Bestest Besties: Just one? Gah! Fine, Pearl & Gavreel in Gameboys. She got those boys together in quarantine!

[the-conversation-pod]

Tens and Chops, Vol. 1 (A Grab Bag Episode)

We gotta clear the decks ahead of the VIIB Awards, so it’s a grab bag episode! Ben, NiNi, and Shan talk a bunch of shows that we couldn’t NOT talk about, and award the fall’s Girl You Tried.

Grab a drink and a snack and join us for one of the most varied episodes we've had on the show.

Timestamps

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

00:00:00 - Introduction 00:01:15 - Kiseki: Dear To Me 00:12:20 - Dangerous Romance 00:26:05 - Love In Translation 00:41:14 - I Cannot Reach You 00:54:43 - My Personal Weatherman 01:07:01 - If It's With You 01:15:38 - Absolute Zero 01:21:05 - My Dear Gangster Oppa 01:33:32 - Middleman's Love 01:49:07 - Final Thoughts, and Girl, You Tried

The Conversation Transcripts!

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

We will endeavor to make the transcripts available when the episodes launch, and it is our goal to make them available for past episodes (Coming soon thanks to @wen-kexing-apologist). When transcripts are available, we will attach them to the episode post (like this one) and put the transcript behind a Read More cut to cut down on scrolling.

Please send our volunteers your thanks!

00:00:00 - Welcome

NiNi

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

Ben

And there it is. I’m Ben.

NiNi

I’m NiNi.

Ben

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

NiNi

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

Ben

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

NiNi

And I review from a romance and drama lens.

Ben

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

NiNi

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

Ben

And if you generally just love simping…

NiNi

There is a lot of simping on this podcast…

Ben

We are the show for you!

00:01:15 - Tens and Chops

Ben

And we're back! We've made it to the Grab Bag for this season of The Conversation. We've named this one “Tens and Chops: Volume 1.” I really hope we have a collection of these to do a smash cut off in the future.

NiNi

So looking forward to it. Definitely looking forward to it. Absolutely looking forward to it. I named it Volume 1 for a reason.

Ben

We have nine shows to talk about plus a bonus segment. Because there are nine shows to talk about, we have brought in help for this one. We have brought in our drama expert, Shan, who is with us again.

Shan

Hello people.

NiNi

Ah, that sweet, sweet smell of a great guest. I love it. Okay, all right, let's dive in, people.

Ben

All right. So, Shan, we're finally into the winter. Let's discuss the fall shows as an experience. As you know, I was grumpy as hell coming out of the summer through the fall with the state of BL. 

How are you feeling about all these various shows?

Shan

Your grumpiness was not unfounded. I don't think the fall season was particularly strong. We hit a slump. A lot of shows just flopped right at the end after strong starts, a lot of shows just didn't take off. There were some things that we were really excited about and then when we actually got to them it was…just so fucking disappointing. [laughs]

I think the strong start to the year and some of our expectations for these shows maybe set us up to be a little extra disappointed in how the season went.

Ben

Before we get into all of the shows individually, NiNi, for the sake of our audience, who may want to skip around this episode, please read the list of shows we're about to discuss.

NiNi

[clears throat] Don't mind if I do! So, in this episode we shall be discussing Kiseki: Dear To Me from Taiwan, Dangerous Romance from Thailand, Love In Translation also from Thailand, I Cannot Reach You from Japan, My Personal Weatherman also from Japan, If It's With You also from, you guessed it, Japan, Absolute Zero from Thailand, My Dear Gangsta Oppa from Thailand-ish, and Middleman's Love the most Thai thing I have seen. [laughs]

Ben

All right. So we're going to be here for a while. I hope you grabbed your drinks and a snack.

NiNi

Put us on pause. Go pee, come back. Or you could just take your phone to the bathroom. Whatever you're doing, I'm not judging you.

Ben

I am, don't worry.

[NiNi laughs]

00:04:20 - Kiseki: Dear To Me

NiNi

Alright, let's start with Kiseki. Ben, what is Kiseki about?

Ben

It's about how nothing was learned from HIStory 3: Make Our Days Count, and that once again I have been made to suffer for things I did not do. 

Kiseki: Dear to Me is a Taiwanese BL about a well-performing high school student late in his studies who gets wrapped up in the gang politics of his local area, falls in love with a gangster, and complications ensue? There's a side couple that's also a bunch of gangsters who end up stealing the show.

Shan

[laughs] I was going to say, I'm pretty sure this show is actually about Ai Di, but okay.

Ben

It is a Lin Pei Yu joint, and we were expecting so much more from her, and yet here we are talking about it in the Grab Bag.

NiNi

Mm-mm-mm. So, Shan, come on in here. Give me, like, a word or a short phrase—something pithy—for the audience.

Shan

Hmm… The pithy description of this show? “Chaotic, but in an awesome way.”

NiNi

Interesting…

Ben

I will agree with that. This show was fun as hell to watch when it wasn't enraging for me.

NiNi

[laughs] I don't know. I was watching it and literally losing the thread while I was watching it.

Shan

Your mistake was ever trying to grasp the thread in the first place.

NiNi

You right, you're right. I made a mistake. My bad. I shouldn't have tried. But—[laughs]—the show was clearly trying, so I thought I had to try, too. 

Listen, I often find Taiwanese shows hard to follow, personally, and I know that's a me thing. But it's something about where they choose to start and end their episodes, I think. I lose the thread.

Ben

I do agree with that. I don't think that, at least the BL tradition we've been exposed to, values episodic structure in a way that is recognizable to those of us who are probably grounded in the American sitcom tradition. A lot of their shows, we tend to remember as a whole, not as individual parts, and that did not work very well here. 

You were not the only person struggling from episode to episode remembering what the fuck was going on. I struggled as well. It was difficult watching this show because I didn't really know thematically what the show wanted to be about. While I really liked the work everyone did—I think all of the actors at every level were really dialed in and it was fun for some of the cameos. I will never return to this particular show because this show involves Wayne Song and Huang Chun Chih as gangsters who are rivals with the leads we care about. 

They have Wayne playing this super-violent, kind of out-of-control gang leader who has to die, and he does, and this is a bad choice because it's not like the rest of us fucking forgot about HIStory 3: Make Our Days Count, and then they released a special episode that is just, “By the way, Chun Chih's character was mooning after him the whole time and now he's sad.” Why? Why was this the choice? Have you not learned that we don't want you to kill these guys? Shit!

NiNi

I think definitely the cameos across the board lost me—A, because I don't watch that much Taiwanese BL, so a lot of it was like, “Wait, who's this guy? Who's this guy? Who's this guy? Why are they here? What are they doing?” I recognize a couple of faces from a couple of things, but mostly I was just confused.

Shan

This show was like 50% powered by cameos. That is what kept people excited week over week and talking about the show. Spotting the faces was really fun. 

So, NiNi, as the resident Taiwanese BL apologist around here, you are absolutely correct that it is often hard to follow the story. The writing is always the weakest point. What has always been my favorite thing about the shows we get from Taiwan is that there is a real connection, I think, between the physical stuff, the intimacy work, and the emotions of the characters, and they kind of really nail those relationship dynamics and that kind of character work. 

But the stories—the plots—have always been kind of a mess, even in my favorite Taiwanese BLs? And this one really took the cake. It was all over the place. I could not at any point in this show, find my footing in the plot, or what was supposed to be happening, or why I was supposed to care. 

That didn't really bother me because this is definitely a show that encourages you to just be along for the ride, and kind of react to scenes, and not worry too much about the overarching story. And that worked for me in this show enough that I had a good time. Would I say that it's good or well written? Absolutely not. [laughs] 

And Ben's complaints about the way that they used those actors from Make Our Days Count are absolutely valid. I kind of couldn't believe the audacity, putting Wayne Song in the show just to kill him off.

Ben

Audacity is the right call, bestie. Thank you very much.

Shan

Right, the audacity! Like, it was not a cool thing to do, and they shouldn’t have done it. So those criticisms are completely fair about this show.

NiNi

There are things about this that I absolutely liked. I did enjoy the couples. I enjoyed the unhinged-ness of them, but I couldn't follow their story, so I was just kind of vibing—which, totally my style. And when I was just vibing I was havin’ a good time. 

If I had to score Kiseki: Dear to Me. The couples are great, the story’s a mess. I'd give it a 6 ½.

Ben

Shan?

Shan

I gave it a 7.5, which was probably generous because I just had so much fun watching it, but I can't claim that it is structurally sound.

Ben

Shan, like the rest of MDL, rated this show with her coochie.

NiNi

That is staying in.

[all laugh]

Shan

What did you score it, Ben?

Ben

What do you think I scored it, bestie? 

Shan

I feel like you scored it real low, because you were pissed about Wayne Song. [laughs]

Ben

I was pissed.

NiNi

Ben was definitely offended, so it got a 5 or less.

Shan

Oh yeah, for sure.

Ben

What do you think I gave it?

Shan

3.

Ben

NiNi

5.

Ben

I gave it a 5. We're laughing a little bit, but legitimately that was so upsetting. And your show was stupid! There wasn't even a point to it. It was just shock, and it felt mean, like you're still salty with us about the HIStory franchise. You are not getting above a 5 from me, despite the fact that Louis Chang and Nat Chen were so much fun to watch, and how much I enjoyed the work between Taro Lin and Hsu Kai. I had a great time watching all four of these men and all the people who cameoed in this.

NiNi

Why do you think there was no Tang Yi and Shao Fei?

Ben

Because there's a cash grab for doing HIStory 6: Freed.

Shan

I want HIStory 6: Freed, and I want it fucking yesterday. Where is our show? [Ben laughs]

NiNi

Alright, so Ben gave it a 5. I gave it a 6.5. Shan gave it a very generous 7.5. Somebody do math.

Ben

That's a 6. 

Shan

You can call it a 6.

NiNi

It's a 6 for Kiseki: Dear to Me. Shoving it off, let's move on to the next one, which we are about to trash.

00:12:20 - Dangerous Romance

NiNi

Ben, tell the world about Dangerous Romance.

Shan

Oh, ho ho ho! Here we go!

Ben

Dangerous Romance—[sighs]—is about how a windmill… cannot be powered…without the wind.

[all break down for prolonged laughing fit]

NiNi

Please! I can’t stand your ass! 

Shan

Had to be done.

NiNi

Okay, bring it back, guys. Bring it back.

Ben

Dangerous Romance purports to be an inter class romance set in a high school between a very smart scholarship student who's super poor, because his parents are dead and it’s just him and his older brother, who's kind of irresponsible with money; and a rich kid who's kind of a pompous bully in school—has no valuable skills of any sort to bring to the table. The two of them crossed paths and are drawn to each other. There are things that happen in the show, I guess. Soccer is a big deal, at some point in this. There's very much a repeated High School Musical TROYYY bit that happens multiple times over three episodes.

[NiNi and Shan laugh]

NiNi

Oh, God, you shady bitch. Carry on.

Ben

It's trash. This show was fucking horrible. This show started out being so fucking interesting. There was the whole notion about Kanghan being just a stupid as hell bully, who only had money on his side, who was getting wrecked constantly by Sailom, this very smart, poor kid. 

And then after episode 2, it all went away, and it was about how Kanghan is a sad rich boy whose mom is dead. And so because his mom is dead, his dad just spoils him rotten, and he just wants his dad to treat him like a real boy, or whatever. I don't give a fuck. This show was so fucking trash. 

[NiNi laughs]

Shan, you're a fan of Shameless. Please explain to the people why this show was so offensive to you.

Shan

For the record, I think I dropped this show Week 4, because I was just so fucking pissed [laughs] about what they were doing with Sailom. 

A little background here: I grew up as a poor person—lived in poverty for like the first 20 years of my life. And I have always had a big interest in stories about class disparity, stories about surviving poverty, stories about families that get through those kinds of challenges because I lived it. And so I'm always very interested to see how it's depicted in fiction. So when the show started, I was so thrilled to finally see a Thai BL that seemed to be taking class disparity seriously? That seemed to want to explore what it actually means when a wealthy person and a poor person are kind of thrown together and have to figure out how to get on the same page across their differences. 

Sailom had some really serious shit set up for him. Him and his brother are in really hard times. They're in deep, deep debt. He's working multiple jobs to try to pay off this debt that they've inherited, and he has this fucking rich bitch bully on his ass, causing him problems, fucking with his jobs, fucking with his money, spreading rumors about him, costing him work! 

I think a lot of people who fell for this show maybe forgot—but I sure fucking didn't—that Kang spread rumors that Sailom was a fucking pedophile, and cost him all of his tutoring students. This is not minor shit that they set up at the beginning of this show to explain the adversarial relationship between these two characters. So I expected them to take it seriously. I expected this to be a serious narrative about how those two could get past those conflicts and come together in a romance—which obviously they were going to. But, that's not what we got at all. 

We didn't get a realistic look at what it means to be poor and to be living with a crushing debt that weighs you down every single day. We didn't get a realistic look at the dynamics between somebody who's grown up like Sailom with the experiences that he's had and the issues that he has to carry every single day, and how he might think about someone like Kang and how he might view him with disdain, and with resentment. We didn't get any of that. We didn't get a realistic look at how these two could come past the initial bullying and the initial things that Kang did to fuck with his life and his money. 

This is life-or-death stakes. They showed us that. Him and his brother are actually getting beat because of this debt on a regular basis. This is not a light issue. And so to set up all of that in the first two episodes, and then immediately pivot, by the third episode, to a bog-standard BL with these two just kind of flirtin’ with each other, and doing all the classic tropes, and Sailom apparently just fucking forgetting all the things that Kang did to him because of one isolated moment? 

None of it made any sense to me. I felt like they flipped a switch and changed Sailom's character from episode 2 to 3, and he never came back. I stopped watching the show in episode 4, but I continued to follow the discourse, so I know that the real Sailom never came back. 

I just don't understand what happened with this show. I don't understand how the same writers could have written those initial episodes and that set up and then carried out the show in the way that they did. I actually found it offensive. I am still pissed off about it! You can hear it in my voice, I'm sure! This was not a joke to me. I was very upset with what this show did. It's inexcusable.

Ben

Kill ‘em, bestie. [laughs]

NiNi

Murder them.

For me, the problem—the main problem with the show—was that the show was about Kanghan and it should have been about Sailom. That's really it in a nutshell. If the show was about Sailom, if it was about Sailom being the main character and you getting into Sailom’s head, and seeing Sailom’s life through Sailom’s eyes, and seeing how Sailom deals with his life, then that's the show that I wanted to see. 

You're talking about the serious shit that's going down. Kang literally shows up at Sailom’s house with a gun! Have we forgotten about this?

Ben

After his friend said, “Bruh, I think the whole gun thing is maybe going too far.”

NiNi

None of these characters are consistent. The characters that are set up in the beginning, the ones that you are interested in, the stories that you think, “Okay, this is what they're setting up.” None of that happens. Those characters vanish basically overnight. 

Saifah was set up to be this kind of charming, feckless older brother who can't be relied upon, but Sailom really loves him. He works with old people, and he kind of steals from them, and scams them a little bit. That's an interesting character. And then one day his debt collector sends a new guy, and the new guy is somebody he went to high school with. And I was like, “Well, this is about to be interesting!” [buzzer sound], I was wrong. No, it was not interesting.

Ben

It's really frustrating, because there's actually a fairly decent small plot in the middle of the show where Saifah has schemed his way into working for the same family. He's been dealing with a work related injury, and the grandma pays for some expensive European medicine for him. He doesn't realize this is for him, and he thinks about stealing it and replacing it with a generic. There’s a really interesting moment where he chooses not to steal from them and then learns that it was a gift intended for him, that is this really decent moment in the show which only further pisses me off. 

Every now and then, this show seemed to understand some of the complex dynamics it was about, and then went right back to fuckin’ it up for no reason.

Shan

I think NiNi is right that the main problem was that the show should have been Sailom’s show and instead they made it about Kanghan, and I don't know why they did that. The first two episodes were clearly rooted in Sailom’s story, and that's what really, I think, threw me.

Ben

Chimon is also the older, veteran actor. Why didn't they believe in him? Like, he could have carried this show. I do not know why they decided to lean on Perth. This is the second time this year they have tried to lean on Perth and it has not been a good choice.

NiNi

I think that Perth is a good actor but he needs a strong lead. He's a follow, but he's a good follow if he has a strong lead. Trying to put him in the lead position? He works best when he's pulling off of somebody.

Shan

Mhmm. If they had let Chimon anchor this, and him follow, I agree with you, NiNi.

NiNi

And then why did they even bother View and June? Why did they make them get out of bed?

Ben

Ohh, are we talking about the teacher-student line between View and June? I'm not.

Shan

I'm so glad I was already gone for that! Whew! I don't even want to know.

NiNi

It wasn't even a thing, though!

Ben

I'm not discussing it, I will not.

NiNi

Listen, honestly, the best parts of the show were, A, the first two episodes, B, everything that Euro did? Euro was great. I loved Euro.

Ben

Okay. I will say that. Let us not walk away from this without shouting out Euro. They do not give big boys a lot of love and respect in this field and, Euro. You did good work, sir. You should have been allowed to kiss—which of the twins was in this?

NiNi

I think it was JJ.

Ben

JJ! You should have been allowed to kiss JJ in this show!

NiNi

I also did not hate Marc and Pawin in this. They were not bad.

Ben

They were not good. [laughs]

NiNi

I didn't say they—I said I didn't hate them, and they were not bad.

Shan

Damning with faint praise indeed.

NiNi

And you know how I feel about Pawin!

Ben

The problem with this is, again, like the pieces were there. But, did you know that a windmill—[all laugh]—cannot function without the wind? If you're tired of this bit in the podcast, watch the show!

Shan

You can only imagine the horrors awaiting you.

Ben

There's a class difference between Kanghan—did you know his name means ‘windmill’?—anyway. 

And so there's a class difference between the two of them. And there's a class difference between Nawa, Pawin's character who's rich, and Guy, Marc's character who was poor. They're friends with the other leads. There was a real opportunity to tell a story about, how do these dynamics play out where people mix? There's an egalitarian aspect to all going to the same schooling system together, even if some of you are there by scholarship, or because your mom works for the place in the case of Euro's character Auto. Marc's character Guy, he's probably there on a football related scholarship because he's an athlete. 

Like there's an interesting thing to say here, but they did nothing with it. It is such a waste of all the goddamn talent on this show, and it was a waste of 12 weeks of my life. This show was bad. This show was offensive. And this show was stupid.

All right, ratings.

NiNi

I gave it a…5.

Ben

Shan?

Shan

Well, since I didn't actually finish the show, I didn't give it a formal rating, but y'all should know that it's, like, a 2 in my heart.

Ben

It is a 3 formally from me. I watched the whole fucking thing. It was shit and offensive. You get a 3 for that.

NiNi

So with 2, a 3, and a 5, I think that pulls you down towards the end of 3.5. 

Ben

Oh yeah, it's bad. 

NiNi

It's not good.

Ben

It's a 3. 

Shan

Do not watch it.

Ben

Unless you need to understand that windmills require the wind to function.

NiNi

[Laughs] Oh, no.

Ben

And let's talk about the fucking ending of this trash piece of shit. The tag of this show is these two characters engaged in sex work play where the poor kid is playing an escort who has to take care of his rich client. 

What the absolute fuck was this?

NiNi

I wanted to vomit.

Shan

I actually can't believe that happened. I saw it. I saw the GIFs on Tumblr, and I thought I was having a fucking hallucination or something.

NiNi

Sex work role play…Okay, anyway. So, on that note—

Ben

It's a chop!

Shan

Well that was a definite chop.

NiNi

Chop.

Ben

Three chops. [slams desk] It's over.

[NiNi laughs]

00:26:05 - Love In Translation

Ben 

On to the next show—oh, good, it finally gets better. [laughs]

Shan

This is a good one!

Ben

All right, great. 

NiNi 

The next show on the list, now that we've gotten that out of the way, is Love in Translation. Ben, what is Love in Translation about? 

Ben 

Love in Translation is a workplace BL in which two characters from different backgrounds come together to run a convenience store in Bangkok. One of them's name is Phumjai. He is a Thai national who comes from a seemingly well off family, who is obsessed with an idol named Tammy. He learns that Tammy is interested in picking up a potential partner in Thailand, but she wants that partner to be able to speak Mandarin and she would like for that character to also be an entrepreneur. Seeing that there's a chance here with Tammy, he decides he wants to formally learn Chinese and goes to a, like, small business association meeting or whatever, to see about starting something up. 

Meanwhile, we have Yang Yan Feng, who is a Chinese national who is here to open up a shop in a very specific point because of backstory reasons involving his dad, I guess. The two of these characters cross paths and don't end up liking each other at first, but circumstances come together, and the only Black character in Thai BL this year ends up connecting the two of them and they form a little shop together. Yang agrees to also teach Phumjai Mandarin and flirt with Tammy on his behalf. Very many hijinks ensue, but this show ended up being one of my favorites of the year. 

Shan, you ended up really enjoying this show. Tell us the things you liked about the show in the early weeks when we were deciding whether or not we needed to give ourselves La Pluie-level brainrot over it to convince people to watch it. 

Shan 

It ended up being really enjoyable. I was a little bit more skeptical going in than Ben. I'm not as inclined to sitcom style in BL as Ben is. Like, I think you kind of find it very comforting and familiar, whereas I kind of feel it's sometimes an awkward match of styles, and so I wasn't quite as convinced going in that I was gonna love it. But I enjoyed it a lot, and I think what I liked so much about this show is that, at its core, it's really just about kind people who are mostly just doing their best to be decent to each other and do right by each other. And they have misunderstandings. And there's a lot of comedy in those misunderstandings. There's silly stuff. There's fights, including physical fights that get pretty outrageous. There's characters making mistakes, but it feels like everybody's really well-intentioned and really earnestly trying their best. And I just think it's kind of impossible not to like a show like that. 

I also just really appreciated that this show—it had a good cast of characters. There was a lot of quirky folks. When I was watching it, I was reminded of shows like Superstore, where it's a little bit sitcom-y, you're in a store, you've got this big cast of personalities that you can kind of call on for comedy bits, as needed. And I thought it worked really, really well. 

And the romance between Phumjai and Yang, it was really nice. They just kinda liked each other once they got past their initial misunderstandings, and they got more comfortable with each other over time as they worked together on this project—on this store. They really got to know each other. 

Phumjai was fixated with this influencer Tammy originally, and he had a really natural progression away from that crush and toward developing feelings for Yang because of the authentic time that they were spending together and the real bond that they were building. And I always just find those kinds of romances really compelling. They're making something together, and that makes them want to be good to each other, and it makes them see the best in each other, and then become interested in each other. And I just think we don't get enough naturally building romances like that in the genre. 

Ben 

NiNi, since we successfully bullied you into watching this show, what did you think of it? 

[NiNi laughs]

NiNi 

It was deathly cute. I enjoyed every single minute of the show. I liked the internationalist perspective of it because you've got Odo and then one of the workers in the store, I think, is part Thai? And then Yang is Chinese, so there's some fun internationalist stuff happening in the show that you don't always see coming out of Thailand. Ngern was there. 

Ben 

Oh, are we talking about that now? For those of you who give a shit, who have been in the genre before 2gether the series, who were there before even SOTUS, Ngern Anupart, who played Earn in Love Sick the series, and also played the lead role in Waterboyy the movie, and was in a terrible Thai drama called Part Time this series, which we all attempted just for him. 

Shan 

Did you memorize that man's resume? 

Ben 

Of course.

NiNi 

He did. 

Ben

Ngern Anupart is back with us in BL, and he's swole now, girls. You should watch. 

[NiNi laughs]

Shan 

I will say, I'm a Love Sick girlie. I did love Earn, the character in that. I love Ngern, the actor. I was very happy to see him in this. His character was perhaps the most annoying in this show. [laughs] 

NiNi 

I loved it! 

Ben 

It was so funny that he was so annoying! I loved him in this! 

Shan 

He played Phumjai’s brother, Phojai, who was a classic overbearing older sibling who just could not let Phumjai have any space to live and learn and make mistakes. He just was so on top of him all the time and making him lose confidence in a way that I think was well-intentioned, but just extremely wrong-headed. Just getting in the way of his brother's success as he was constantly professing his intention to do the opposite. It was a really good storyline, to be clear, like it was really well done. 

NiNi 

It was really great and the other great part is that the whole time he's dating Phumjai’s good friend who also works at the store, and they're kinda working together to make the store a success in the background but they're doing it all wrong. Phojai and Tag are adorable together, but Phojai’s a little closeted. So it gets a little complicated. But overall, it ended up being real cute. There is a fantastic gag with some disguises that I swear to God was so hilarious. 

Ben 

Highlight of the year for me. [laughs]

NiNi 

This show was funny. It was sweet. It was… pretty hot, actually. 

Shan

Right! High heat.

Ben 

This show does comedy really well. The comedic timing of this show is so intentional. It was intentional when they were filming it, and it was intentional when they were editing it. It isn't perfect, but it's intentional and it lands really well. This show was so funny in the early episodes when it was leaning more into the sitcom bits. 

NiNi 

I found it funny all the way through, because I always find some of the humor in the pathos that comes later down the line. Like it was so funny when Phumjai and Yang went on the practice date because Phumjai is getting ready to go on this date with Tammy. And he's going on this practice date, and all he's thinking about on this practice date is, “What does Yang want to do?” 

So he shows up at the practice date with green bread, a baseball mitt, like. [laughs] That's like, so much going on, and I'm like looking at it like, “Oh, this is so sweet and so funny because of course he would bring a freaking baseball mitt because he thinks that Yang would have a good time. This is adorable.” 

And then the end, when Phojai gets kidnapped—follow us, girlies. Phojai gets kidnapped because Phumjai is paying off this debt—there's a little mafia shit going down in the end. But Phojai gets kidnapped for, like, months, and then when they finally pay off the kidnappers and they've released Phojai, you discover that Phojai has actually been kind of running the shit in the mafia for the last two months! [laughs] He’s become, like, a trusted lieutenant. 

Of course you took over, because you are an elder sibling. This is what you do. You got them organized. You made them respect you. I respect that as an elder sibling myself. I was just like, “That's exactly what I would do.” It was so funny. I enjoyed it entirely all the way through. I did not mind Daou’s wig. 

Shan 

Thank you! Can we talk about the wig? This is very important to me. 

[NiNi laughs]

Ben 

No, because first I have to get very serious about how good the show actually was. We will undercut the seriousness of which I will talk about how good the show was with you talking about how terrible Daou’s wig was. 

[NiNi laughs]

So, for those of you who listen to The Conversation podcast, you know that NiNi and I don't always see eye-to-eye when it comes to really huge power dynamic differentials between characters. This show is one of the very rare examples of a workplace set show where the workplace mattered and also the leads were equal to each other. One of the caveats of Thai economic politics is that foreigners cannot hold majority stake ownership in a Thai corporation. So despite Yang's wealth that he brings to the table and determination to open up a store in Thailand, he cannot have majority stake. 

Phumjai, who doesn't bring any money to the table, brings the fact that he is a Thai national to the table. So the two of them have equal ownership in the store—Phumjai slightly has more. We think Phumjai might be a bumbling idiot, but when asked to hire people because Yang, even though he has business sense, he doesn't know anyone. Phumjai actually hires competent people to help out in the store. Yeah, sure, he hired a bunch of femmes, but he hired really competent people to work in their store, and was actively engaged with trying to make the store successful. He was doing rapid iteration of various marketing strategies to try to get customers to engage with their store. He doesn't use the formal language that Yang does, but he is trying his best, and bringing even his own little money he has to try and make the store’s opening as successful as possible. 

His interest in Tammy is also grounded in something real. We thought he was just lusting after an idol, but he had had a weird meet-cute with her when she had visited Thailand as a tourist. She asked him just to show her around because she was a little bit lost, and he basically went on a date with Tammy when she first came to Thailand. So his crush on her wasn't grounded on just the persona she presents in her show as an idol. He had had a genuine interaction with her and connection with her. And when he finally approaches her properly, Tammy is also receptive to his advances. Sure, they get complicated by the fact that this is a BL and she's a girl—she can't win. But she also takes that in stride. She is a character that is not dismissed along the way despite being a girl in a BL. 

This show was legitimately so good at managing its character dynamics and how the characters played with each other. The growth between Yang and Phumjai together and personally was really well handled. This show struggles a little bit on the back end by getting a little bit silly with Yang's debt and the [sigh] mafia shit, but legitimately, this is one of the better shows that aired this year. 

Now let's talk about Daou's wig. 

Shan

Thank you! I've been holding it in so bravely. 

[NiNi laughs]

Shan 

Listen, listen! This is about respect. I need to pay respect to Daou, because that man had to wear this monstrosity of a bowl cut on his head. This horrible wig. The sideburns looked so fake. Every time you got a slight angle on the wig, you could tell that it was just a mop sitting on his head. Somehow he managed to deliver some of the hottest scenes of the entire year while he had that wig on his head. And you know, I just think that that deserves recognition. 

Ben 

Let's talk about the hottest scene of the year. 

[NiNi laughs] 

These people recognized that this was a show set in a convenience store—

Shan

Mmhmm.

Ben

—and they said, “Offroad and Daou,” and they were like, “Yeah, what's up?” “We need you guys to knock down these fucking shelves in this fucking convenience store, banging it out, because it's definitely a kink thing for Yang.” And they said, “Bet.” 

Shan 

In front of the security camera!

Ben 

Yang absolutely has that footage saved somewhere. 

Shan 

[laughs] 100% he does. 

Ben 

I had an absolute blast with this show. This was legitimately one of my favorite shows of the year. 

NiNi 

I must concur, and I actually scored it a 10. 

Ben 

Holy shit.

NiNi 

And the reason I scored it at 10 was that at the end they turned the store into a workers cooperative. So that gets 10 for me. 

Shan 

Bonus points from NiNi. [Shan and NiNi laugh]

Ben 

All right, Shan, let's give it the real drama rankings. 

Shan

I gave it an 8. I loved the show. I had a great time with it. Is undeniably messy, and the writing really went off the rails in the final couple episodes, and I can't pretend that that didn't happen. But I really loved it. 

Ben 

I gave the show an 8.5. The writing does unfortunately get a little bit messy towards the end. They didn't really know how to do the epilogue episode as cleanly as some of the more experienced teams do. But that's me being, like, fair from the drama ranking scale. In my heart, this show is a 9. 

[Ben and Shan laugh]

This show was really good! It was a lot of fun to watch. People should go watch this show. It's a lot of fun. 

NiNi 

I am calling producer privilege to give the show a 9 from The Conversation. 

Ben 

I'm okay with it. 

Shan 

I'm good with it. 

NiNi 

We have an accord. Love in Translation gets a 9 from The Conversation. Daou and Offroad, thank you so much. 

Ben 

If you are a fan of BL, but you say you've gotten burned out on all of the school-based stuff, this is probably one of the better workplace shows. 

But, at least you know, that a windmill… 

[all laugh]

All right!

NiNi 

Moving on.

00:41:14 - I Cannot Reach You

NiNi

Our next show—we have officially reached the Japanese portion.

Ben

Bangers Only section of this episode!

NiNi

The first show that we're going to talk about is an absolute banger: I Cannot Reach You. Ben, what is I Cannot Reach You about?

Ben

Oh, Shan gets this one. 

NiNi

Shan!

Ben

Oh yeah!

NiNi

What is I Cannot Reach You about?

Shan

I Cannot Reach You Is a friends-to-lovers BL about two childhood friends who are in high school together, one of whom is a long-suffering pining gay boy, and one who is kind of an oblivious little chaos muffin. These character types might sound familiar to you, they are very common in Japanese BL. But what makes this story feel a little different is that it really sets out to deal with the deep angst that really comes in when you take friends to lovers seriously. 

This is not a fluffy show, even though it is light throughout, they're really digging into the pain of being in love with your friend, the confusion of feeling your feelings for your friend start to change, the shock that can come along with it. Kakeru, who is the main character here, learns in episode one that his longtime best friend Yamato is in love with him, and this whole show is about his journey to accept and understand that, and then also figure out how he feels about it and how he might be open to their relationship changing. 

It is, bar none, the best friends-to-lovers drama that I've ever seen in the BL genre. It is one of my absolute favorites of the year and on a short list of perfect shows that we got this year in BL.

Ben

NiNi?

NiNi

Well, damn. I love this unreservedly. I have, seriously, no notes. Actually, I have one note and the note that I wrote—I'm just gonna read it verbatim: I Cannot Reach You, to all of Japan, “Hey, guys, I'd like to introduce you all to this wonderful concept called talking. Please look at this adorable story about how talking can make your life better, and even help you find love.” [laughs] And that's my only note on I Cannot Reach You. 

I agree with Shan. I think it's a perfect show. It's so cute. It's so deeply felt. It is so centrally angsty. It had me deep in my feelings in a way that I have not really felt since His - I Didn't Think I Would Fall in Love, which is another Japanese banger that I love. It's a great show, easy to catch up on. It's not very long. It is so perfect. It's perfectly balanced, perfectly paced, perfectly written, perfectly acted. I love it, unreservedly.

Ben

This was probably one of the best shows that I have ever watched in all of BL. Very few BLs actually properly capture the experience of being closeted as a kid in a way that is not triggering. I was closeted—we talked about this on the show. It sucks. Ohara Yamato was in love with his friend Ashiya Kakeru, and he did not make his attraction to Kakeru something that Kakeru had to deal with. It's other people, who are so irritated watching the two of them interact, who intervene and sort of force them to deal with this issue between them. 

But here's the big thing. We can yell all day long about how characters should talk to each other and all this other stuff, and how communication is really important in romance and all these sorts of things. This is very true, but the thing is: when you're queer and you know the consequences of being publicly queer in this horrible, racist, homophobic hellscape, you don't want to force that on your friend. That's the crux of friends-to-lovers angst that is so critical. 

Yamato really does love Kakeru, and he doesn't want to force Kakeru to deal with being queer. They don't say it directly, but that is a huge part of the hang up here. That is so perfectly captured in a way that is not triggering. It is so hard to be gay and alone when you're a teenager. There is a real complex restraint that grips you when you're 17 and gay and struggling, and in love with your best friend, where you don't want to be alone, and you really want to be with your friend. But being gay hurts, and you don't want to be responsible for inflicting that hurt on them, that I connected to directly in Yamato, that is portrayed so, so well by Maeda Kentaro. 

And this show doesn't just do the whole “I love you” thing and then they make out or whatever. Like, “I liked you the whole time!” We watch Kakeru deal with the reality that he has to reframe his own relationship with one of his closest childhood friends. And he ends up finding attraction in himself as well, and he goes through the difficult process of that. That is not a switch that turns on. It's like, “Oh, shit, I guess I'm gay now because your desire for me is so strong.” What this show gets correct is, when you have a friends-to-lovers story, there's the drama of, “This relationship is really important to me, and most romances fail. Do I want to lose one of my critical relationships that underpins my understanding of who I am as myself for booty?” The answer in a lot of cases is no. That's a scary threshold to cross—your bestie is not your partner. 

He considers what this means for their friendship and their relationship, and how there is a genuine need to respond to someone's feelings. That, even if he is your best friend, the way that he's felt like this about you for a long time means you can't just pretend that that wasn't there the whole time. Just because you were wrong about what you were perceiving in your friend doesn't mean you can just bottle it up and walk that shit back. It's so expertly handled in a way that is adorable. 

Like both of you describe the show as cute, and that's sort of the point. This show managed to make some of the most difficult things about coming of age and being queer kind of palatable, and adorable, and really interesting to engage with. And it's so well done, the way that these boys play out the complexities here. 

And then we get to Episode 6, and Shan will remember when Episode 6 aired, because I almost called her on her personal phone line after I finished Episode 6. 

[NiNi and Shan laugh]

Shan

He was like, “sound the alarm, holy shit!” [laughs]

[NiNi laughs]

Ben

I was like, “Shan, There's a BL emergency! Get home quick!”

Shan

I was waiting to watch it until we had all the episodes and he was like, “Nope, no more waiting! Get on it right now!”

Ben

Episode 6 is probably the best single episode of BL of the whole year. Kakeru has a lot of self doubt as part of his character—really well executed—and he expresses that he can't understand why Yamato might like him, and Yamato gets angry about this, and is like, “Don't you know what you're worth?” and he throws Kakeru on the bed and has this moment where he crosses the line with him. And you can see possibly years of restraint breaking, and he kind of scares Kakeru. When he gets his senses back, he scares himself and flees, and has this whole breakdown where he despairs about this. This is so perfectly executed because that's how it feels when you're in the closet and you make a mistake and reveal yourself.

Shan

What's wild is that, that's just the end scene of episode 6. Episode 6 does so much shit even before that. This is the episode where Kakeru and Yamato have this conversation on the roof, where Yamato confesses. At this point they both kind of know what's going on, but Yamato comes right out and says, “This is how I feel. This is what's going on.” And then he does the classic BL thing of immediately after confessing, he tries to walk away because he doesn't wanna stick around to be rejected. 

And, something amazing happens in that scene, which is that Kakeru is like, “Hey, bitch, get back over here! You gotta listen to what I have to say now. You don't get to just confess and then run away.” And I was, like, fist pumping when that happened because it was, first of all, just a brilliant subversion of a classic trope. And he says, “I wasn't gonna reject you. I am still kind of processing this. I'm not sure how I feel about it yet, but I want to think about it. You're important to me.” And I just love that. 

Like NiNi said earlier, “Wow, the power of talking to each other instead of just having your emotional outburst and then running away—actually trying to communicate.” And that's so much of what this show is about. The moments where these two characters are able to communicate with each other clearly and get their real feelings across, that is when they are able to make progress in their relationship, and there are lots of characters in the show who are reinforcing that along the way. 

Hosaka is probably the fan-favorite character. He's kind of the wise queer kid off to the side. He's got his little barrette in his hair. He's watching, he's perceiving, and he's really pushing—quite forcefully, actually [laughs]—the two lead characters to, like, talk to each other and get their shit together. 

My personal favorite side character is Yamato's sister: Mikoto. She is just this quiet presence who has always had her brother's number on this, and knows exactly what's going on, and really chooses her moments to show up and be a mirror to him of what she's seeing, what he's doing, and make him think, and even give him some courage. She even has a couple scenes where she does the same for Kakeru. She's a great sister character of a type that we don't get to see very much and I really appreciated her.

NiNi

This show’s a banger. There's no reason not to watch it. Watch the damn show.

Ben

This show also released the sexual tension in a way that J-BLs very rarely do, particularly not in this lane of J-BL.

Shan

And it did it beautifully. 

And I feel like we should talk a little bit about the visuals of this show. I'm not someone who normally even notices a lot of visual style. I’m a words person. I really am pretty dialogue-focused, and I don't usually notice a lot that's going on with the visual effects in the show, but this one used them so effectively that even I kind of keyed in.

Ben

So this show uses a bokeh effect, which is this thing where you play with the focus of the camera to make these blurry lights appear. This is very common in anime to show that a character is experiencing heightened emotion. Like the emotions are sparkling out of them, and the show color-coded the boys's visual effect to reflect when they were experiencing intense emotion. It’s very obvious to the audience when the moment turns for Kakeru. Yamato is bursting with emotion from the first goddamn episode, and when it starts to happen for Kakeru, we're finally—“Oh, finally, these bitches are both on the same page.” 

The other fun visual gag in the show is, very early on there’s this moment at, like, an arcade or whatever, where Yamato gets a stuffed animal for Kakeru, which is part of him thinking he wants to be with this girl. He ends up keeping the stuffed animal and the stuffed animal ends up becoming the audience stand in. So, like, whenever a moment happens between the boys, they cut to the stuffed animal whose arms they've moved to create a different expression—him either being, like, overwhelmed with kilig feelings about the boys being cute, or aghast feelings [laughs] about something untoward suddenly going on. It's a great running visual gag.

NiNi

This show is awesome. It gets at 10. What were you guys’ scores?

Shan

Perfect 10, baby!

Ben

For those of you who don't know, NiNi and I are far more loose with our 10s than Shan. Shan is a stingy bitch when it comes to 10s.

[Ben and Shan laugh]

Shan

Understatement. I have watched over 400 dramas. I have given out eleven 10s total, but this show is one of them.

Ben

I also gave this show a 10.

NiNi

Okay, so I Cannot Reach You gets a 10 from The Conversation and we are on to the next one.

00:54:43 - My Personal Weatherman

NiNi

The next show that we're going to talk about on this what is definitely going to be a monster episode is My Personal Weatherman. Who wants to take this one? Ben or Shan, who is telling us what My Personal Weatherman is about?

Shan

Ben’s definitely gotta do this one.

Ben

My Personal Weatherman is a very kinky BL where a local weather forecaster has a live-in boyfriend who is an erotic manga artist. They have a very Dom/sub, and they are not very good at talking to each other. They actually do say a lot to each other in this show. They just constantly misunderstand each other—very refreshing for Japan. Segasaki is the weatherman who provides for them. Yoh is the manga artist who is very much struggling. Yoh sees himself as kind of a slave—he doesn't really necessarily enjoy the sort of housewife role he's been placed into, and resents that they seem to only have sex when it [doesn’t] rains? 

He pretends like he doesn't want to have sex with Segasaki, but then he has a whole blow up because they end up in a sunny [rainy] season where it doesn't rain a lot and has a whole breakdown episode where he just masturbates furiously for a whole afternoon because they haven't had sex in a while. It's a very fun reveal that the reason why they don't have sex is because that's what Segasaki thought they needed to do, which has really good payoff in, like, the next episode or two later. 

This show was a little bit complicated to talk about and watch. This very obvious kink dynamics going on in this, but people who are more familiar with Japanese home dynamics say some of this is actually fairly normal for husband and wife dynamics. And the show ends a little bit abruptly, which is part of my consternation with it. I kind of liked a lot of what the show was doing. I unfortunately watch too much BTS stuff, and it was revealed that some of the things that were going on with Segasaki were kind of improvised by a Higuchi Kohei, who plays Segasaki, which I think muddles some of the messaging of the show. 

But before we get deeper into that sort of stuff, NiNi, I know I bullied you to watch the show, and Japanese BL is not always your forte—reactions and thoughts on this show?

NiNi

So you're right that they are communicating, they're just willfully misunderstanding each other. I found that incredibly frustrating. But I still like the show. I did. I did like the show. I think that the miscommunications that they're having, because they are talking and miscommunicating that way, I am less annoyed by the miscommunication. If they were just not talking, it would be like a completely different thing. 

And then I like the settings. I like the side characters. I like the main characters. I like that Yoh cannot cook and Segasaki loves to eat his food anyway. Yoh’s a terrible cook, like terrible, like— [laughs] it's so bad, and Segasaki literally eats everything that Yoh will make with a smile on his face because he loves him so much.

Shan

He ruined a curry. I don't even know how you do that.

Ben

That's really impressive. Curry’s so easy. His curry was crunchy! Gurl.

NiNi

I think the thing that I'm not sure comes across, but in your description of the show, is that they've been together for a while. This show stretches on a little bit. It shows how they ended up together?

Ben

One of the things we got clarification on is like their cohabitation is fairly recent. The offer was made when they were still students, but the cohabitation is recent.

Shan

Which we didn't find out until almost the end of the show.

NiNi

Segaki thinks that he's being clear with Yoh. Yoh, because of, I guess, self-esteem issues or whatever it is is completely misreading the very direct words I think that Segasaki is using, but Segasaki is also being direct, but not entirely clear. So it's not that it's easy to misunderstand, but you could see how misunderstandings could happen. Yoh is kind of withholding even if he's saying things. 

Segasaki is picking up a completely different kind of thing from what Yoh is saying, because he thinks that they're in a loving relationship, while Yoh thinks that they're in a weird master-servant dynamic. So, they're in a relationship. They're just, they're in two different relationships. And so they're talking past each other. 

Yoh doesn't understand why Segasaki won’t be certain affectionate ways with him, and the minute that it becomes that Yoh actually expresses that in a way that Segasaki understands, he completely changes the way that he behaves towards Yoh. And he does do that softness and affection and stuff with him because he didn't know that that was what Yoh wanted. He thought that what he was doing was what Yoh wanted. It's similar to how Yoh is reading Segasaki. 

I found it interesting. Frustrating, yes, I will not deny that I found it frustrating. But I found the way that they chose to deal with the miscommunication trope, which is a big trope that Japan uses—which is a lot of times why I have trouble with Japanese BL, because miscommunication frustrates the shit out of me—but I think that the way that it was used in this show was very clever, and I liked how they move past it. I think that how they moved past it was also very interesting. 

So yeah, I think the show was pretty good. I would score it highly.

Ben

Shan, thoughts on the show?

Shan

So [sigh], sometimes, in BL fandom, I think that we as an audience latch on to the idea of a show, and then kind of give a show credit for our idea of what it's doing instead of what it's actually doing. And this is one of those shows for me. It's not a fave. 

I liked a lot about the show—a lot of the things that NiNi just mentioned—I thought were interesting. Like, miscommunication trope is not my favorite, but it's hugely Japanese for cultural reasons, for language reasons, so I'm very used to it—and I've seen really good executions of it. This show, I feel, did not have the quality of writing that it needed to support the complexities of what it was trying to do with these characters. And that showed through a lot, there were a lot of cracks in this show. 

You kind of alluded to one earlier, Ben, about how there were—what I perceived while watching—there were some inconsistencies in characterization in Segasaki in particular. And we learned from the BTS that that actually probably was an actual inconsistency, because it wasn't in the writing, these differences in how he was appearing in these different time periods. It was something the actor was just trying out on his own, and they kind of just let him do that. 

There were lots of instances of dropped threads or missing context to understand the characters' reactions and things. I read some awesome gap filler, thoughts, explanations, and interpretations of what we could make of the characters behaving in certain ways. To use an old Internet term: that's called ‘fanwanking,’ and that is when the fans of a thing have to do a lot of extra work to figure it out and explain it because the show has not done that work itself. And that, for me, was kind of the bottom line with this show. It didn't do all of its work, and I think that a lot of us were so intrigued by the premise—were so into the visuals of the show, liked the pair, liked the characters enough, to fill in those gaps and still really enjoy it. But for me, the show didn't get to the level of quality that it was aspiring to, and it didn't quite work for me, in the end. 

On top of some of those gaps that I think were kind of there throughout the show. You said earlier, Ben, I think, that it ended abruptly. It's not just that it ended abruptly, it didn't finish its story. It felt very unfinished. To me it felt like an intentional grab for a season 2—a play to try to get the fans wanting more so that they could maybe get funding for a season 2? And hey, if that's what they're going for, power to them. I hope they get the money. I'd really like to see them finish the story. But, I would have liked more if they would have actually finished the story initially that they were trying to tell. This show for me, it tried some things. It was interesting. It was enjoyable to watch.

Ben

[laughs] She said, “Girl, you tried.”

Shan

It’s a little bit of a Girl, You Tried for me! I'm not gonna lie, it is!

Ben

Here's what I'll say. I don't think all of the pieces of the show work together as seamlessly as they wanted them to. However…I don't care. [laughs] 

I liked what the show is trying to do. I really liked the really messy relationship between them. I like that Drama Shower went with a show about two people who are trying to be together and failing miserably at it. I do like what the show was attempting to do. I find myself far more forgiving to the show because it was trying things that BL doesn't do very often. I also just really liked episode 4, where Man-san comes to their house.

Shan

Yes, let's talk about Man-san, best character in the show. [laughs]

Ben

It was one of my favorite moments of the year, the bit where she knocked at the door and Yoh panics, and Segasaki’s  like, “Oh so she’s here?” and he starts stretching. He's like, “Don’t worry.” Like he’s ready to fight this woman [NiNi laughs] who he believes that Yoh was having a secret romance with on the side, and then the door opens and—she's been a Segasaki stan for a while. And they have this really great comedic overlay of [laughs], “Oh my God. I'm at my idol's house.” And all he does is charm the shit out of her for the whole episode, and piss Yoh off because he thinks Segasaki's flirting with her. 

I had so much fun with this show. This is the closest I come to a vibes rating. I tend to be forgiving with shows that are trying things that are fresh in the genre—or at least underexplored. And so, we’re mostly rating this show on the fact that it executes high heat in a believable way, for the most part, and was generally a really watchable eight weeks. I had a lot of fun with this show.

Shan

Mmhmm. I hope they get their season 2. I wanna see them finish it.

NiNi

I ended up giving this an 8. I think it was pretty good. The parts that I liked I really liked, and the other parts were just kind of a meh for me. ‘Meh’ is always going to be worse than ‘bad,’ for me anyway, unless it's offensive. So it drags it down from what could have been a 9 to an 8 for me. 

Shan, how about you?

Shan

In a shocking twist, I gave it a higher score than NiNi. I gave it an 8.5. Maybe because I, like you, Ben, appreciated what it was trying to do and wanted to give it a little credit for that.

Ben

I gave My Personal Weatherman an 8.5. So it can get an 8 from The Conversation. It's fine.

NiNi

So My Personal Weatherman gets an 8 from The Conversation, and on we go.

01:07:01 - If It's With You

NiNi

Our next show that we're talking about is If It's With You.

Ben

Oh! We're back to bangers! Let's continue!

Shan 

I got it!

If It's With You is about Amane, a high school student who fucks… You want me to say more than that?

Ben

No. You are correct, bestie, and this show is perfect. 

[NiNi laughs]

This show opens up with a high schooler having ill-advised sex with an older character, who's about to move to the countryside with his grandma. And his last hookup is like, “It's been really fun tearing that ass up. But maybe, when you move to this little, small seaside town, you can have a normal high school romance.” And he scoffs at the notion of someone like him ever having a high school romance, but little does he know he's in a five-episode MBS BL, and that's exactly what's in store for him! 

And it's great! He moves to the little seaside town. He immediately runs into a really hot guy who's super sweet, falls for him, and it ends up being mutual.

Shan

I like that this show is a twist on the classic romance trope of goin’ to a little seaside town, meetin’ someone unexpected, fallin’ in love. Like, there's hardly a more classic romance trope—we've all seen it a million times. But what was nice about it is that we had this young character who was already kind of jaded, and just didn't think that love was something he was interested in. And we got to see him form a really genuine connection with somebody—that was initially based on thinking he was hot and wanting to fuck him. Yeah, Amane definitely wanted to have sex with Ryuji. He made it kind of clear. 

One of my favorite things the show did was Amane is not in the closet. He's not ashamed of who he is, and he made sure that Ryuji knew, first that he was gay, and second that he wanted to be physically involved with Ryuji. He told him that straight up, and kind of braced himself for rejection because, as we learned, he had been rejected for that in the past by other friends. And then we get to see Ryuji react to that, and process it, and be like, “Okay, that's cool. I don't know that I can really reciprocate that right now, but I want to keep hanging out. Is that alright with you?” What a cool response to that. What a way to be, Ryuji, I love that! And then we got to just see them build a relationship from there. It felt very genuine.

NiNi

Amane is one of my favorite types, which is a masking sad boy. He's a sad boy who is pretending to be happy, and pretending to not care. Basically, he's putting on this front of being carefree when he's actually a very sad, very hurt boy, and Ryuji clocks that immediately and tells him, “Yo, you don't gotta do all of that around me. It's fine if you’re sad.” At that point I was not only in love with the show, I was in love with Amane. 

In fact, my only critique of the show is, I think, at the very, very end it pulled its punch. But… basically, Amane is one of my favorite characters of the year, and there's so much about Ryuji, too. Ryuji is a kid who's lost his dad, and he works with his mom in the restaurant where his dad used to cook. Literally, his dad is the one who taught him to cook, and now he cooks in the restaurant, and sometimes he doesn't go to school because he has to work in the restaurant, and his house is a little chaotic. But there's one corner where his dad's shrine is, which is spotless. 

Guys, if I start thinking about this show too much, I'm actually gonna cry. I think the show touched me somewhere very deep, and it's a thing that I'm still thinking about, even if, as I said, I think it pulled its punches a little bit at the end, it stayed with me. Also, some of the greatest set design. Y’all know I love Japanese set design. It's a fantastic example of set design.

Ben

Continuing the conversation we had with I Cannot Reach You about how it's very difficult to be gay when you're young. Amane tried to have the youth thing that Heartstopper indicates that we could potentially have, and Amane is crushed for it—the way many of us are crushed—accidentally! The best thing about the way Amane gets crushed is that his friend crushes him without realizing he did—excellent gay angst. Top tier. I feel the old wounds festering. It's great. 

NiNi

[laughs] Why are you like this?

Ben

[laughs]

So Amane is not well, and he's doing what many of us do: he skips it. Gay people who are closeted do not get to have high school romances. We don't get used to people perceiving us and what it means to be a couple. We skip so much of this, and then you become an adult, and these anonymous hookups—that are not very meaningful—and they can feel weird, because you're trying to be vulnerable with someone, and they don't want that. And it sucks to try and have intimate moments with other gay people that feel like transactions. It makes you feel cheap about yourself, and Amane understood that. And he's gorgeous. He's a funny, thoughtful, heartfelt little boy, and he already thinks he is just someone else for other people to hook up with.

Shan

I just want to say NiNi’s right that they pulled their punch at the end, and it's why this show isn't perfect for me. I loved it a lot, but the show started, as we’ve mentioned, with a character for whom sexual intimacy—sexual desire—was a big part of just how he lived, how he thought of himself, what he liked to do. And I don't like it when shows explicitly or implicitly imply that serious relationships, true love, do not have a sexual component. That sex is something salacious and dirty, and that love is something pure. And I think, because the show pulled its punches at the end here on the sexual relationship between Amane and Ryuji, I think that's a little bit of the implicit message that they put out there. And I don't love that. So I do have to ding them for that. They didn't finish strong.

Ben

I do agree in that regard and it was very unfortunate for this show that I Cannot Reach You finished, like, two weeks later. [laughs]

Shan

It really didn't help this show that I Cannot Reach You came up on its tail and did it better.

Ben

I really like the show. I really like the way that it set up a very initial premise of “maybe you should try a real romance, kid.” Like, you're still a kid. You can still have a good romance. It doesn't matter that you failed once: A great message to all the little gays out there, old and young. You can still have worthwhile romance. Shiro got to have a great relationship with Kenji at like 47!

Shan

There it is! I've been waiting for it! It's amazing! You made it two hours without it. Two whole hours before you did it.

Ben

I was trying so hard, bestie. I really was. I was really trying not to mention What Did You Eat Yesterday? in this episode. [laughs]

NiNi

I knew once we hit Japanese BL, it was only a matter of time.

Ben

I was trying so hard, y’all. Like, they were talking about the way this man couldn't cook, and I was like, “Ooh, I can't mention What Did You Eat Yesterday?” 

[Ben and Shan laugh]

Y’all got me so conscious about my favorite show! They dragged me, y'all! They ate me up! They tore me to pieces! 

But seriously, in terms of, like, messaging, I agree. They muddled it a little bit, but I really like Amane's arc. 

It's good! One of my favorites of the year. Let's go around the room. Ratings! NiNi?

NiNi

I give it a 10.

Ben

Shan?

Shan

I gave it a 9.5.

Ben

I also gave it a 9.5. I think it is a Conversation 9.5 because we all agree that it muddled the waters on Amane’s relationship with sex as it pertains to Ryuji.

NiNi

I concur. So, it's a 9.5 from The Conversation for If It's With You.

01:15:38 - Absolute Zero

NiNi

And now we are into the shit. [laughs]

Ben

Oh, oh shit! Oh fuck! It's two hours into this! I have almost finished my daiquiri. I am drunk. 

[NiNi laughs]

Let's talk about Absolute Zero!

NiNi

You're gonna get exactly three minutes on Absolute Zero, okay?

Ben

Oh, sure, that's all I need.

NiNi

I'm not letting you get into another New Siwaj thing. [laughs] Should be easy, because I didn't watch it, and Shan and Ben did not finish it. Ben, tell us what Absolute Zero is about.

Ben

Absolute Zero is a time travel BL in which a gay man in his 30s… No, he's technically 26. Oh my God. A 26 year-old gay man! His partner, who he lives with, has an accident. He's in a coma. He's having a bad time. And then a magic taxi takes him to the past, and then he does nothing for six episodes except date the younger version [laughs] of his boyfriend, and confuse the fuck out of them. And then apparently a bunch of time travel nonsense happens after this, and I had to be forcibly dragged off of this show [Shan laughs] because the clowns were worried for me. 

We don't need to talk about the show. Shan, you don't need to talk about it? NiNi, you don’t need to talk about it. I'm gonna look directly into the camera. 

[NiNi laughs]

New Siwaj, you had multiple opportunities this year to do something meaningful. I have had to sit here across from NiNi for over a year as Tee Bundit has put out three different shows, 2 and one half of which I thought flopped in one way or another. [Shan laughs] You had multiple opportunities to give me something useful to talk about with NiNi on this podcast, and you failed me, sir. 

This was your chance to do Until We Meet Again-style BL again, and you should have given us all something sad and melancholy to reflect over as a real good capstone of this year and you [starts yelling] fucking blew it for all of us! 

I cannot believe you, sir. You've wasted so much of our goddamn time. I cannot believe you embarrassed me on this podcast like this. 

[NiNi laughs]

Shan

New Siwaj is having whatever the opposite of a renaissance year is. 

NiNi

Ooh.

Ben

So bad. Like, you should have thrived under these circumstances. This is your bread and butter: caring way too much about little shit, but you didn't get any of the big shit right. This was a terrible experience. Literally, only two other people we know of finished your goddamn show.

Shan

And they hated it, every minute!

Ben

They had nothing positive to say about it. For over two months, this was horrible. What an absolute waste of genuinely good talent at every level of this production. Reportedly, everyone gave decent performances, and you wasted them on this empty drivel. What the fuck was this? You had four years of having the rights of the story. You had the actual writer of the novel on staff helping you write the goddamn script. And it was still this stupid empty mess, which apparently ends at none of it really occurring, but everyone having some sort of form of temporal PTSD? Like this was a 12 week Star Trek episode? What the absolute fuck was this?

[NiNi laughs]

Shan

I have nothing to add. 

NiNi

Hydrate, baby, hydrate.

Ben

Oh, girl you know I got my water right here. 

This show gets no rating from The Conversation. We DNF’d this show. We will never be going back to this show. 

I will allow the rest of you to offer additional commentary. Proceed.

NiNi

So, Ben, is this breakup gonna stick?

Shan

Yeah, right. 

Ben

We have talked about this girl. 

[NiNi laughs]

He's got a whole college BL with all of the B- and C-listers at GMMTV coming out in the spring. I gotta watch this fucking shithow, don't you worry. 

[Ben and NiNi laugh]

Shan

There never has been a break up, and there never will be a breakup. Let’s just be clear.

NiNi

They’re the couple that fights in the street, and then the next day they're all boo’d up. I hate you so much.

Ben

We are what they thought they were doing with Cher and Top in Only Friends.

Shan

Mew and Top.

NiNi

[laughs] I’m so mad that you called it Cher in Only Friends!

Ben

Oh, Mew and Top. Right, right, right, right, right, right. 

[NiNi laughs]

It gets a 0 from The Conversation!

Shan

An Absolute Zero.

NiNi

An Absolute Zero.

Ben

Oh man, I didn't make another windmill joke during If It's With You—If It's With You is about how— [laughs]

A windmill!

[laughs harder]

NiNi

I am so done with you. I am moving on. We are moving on.

01:21:05 - My Dear Gangster Oppa

NiNi

We're moving on to—I am just calling it ‘the main event.’

Ben

No, no, I'll do it, because you have to describe this one. You're gonna take this L, bestie.

[NiNi laughs]

On to our next show: My Dear Gangster Oppa. NiNi, tell us about [laughs] My Dear Gangster Oppa.

NiNi

My Dear Gangster Oppa is the B-movie’s B-movie. My Dear Gangster Oppa is a Thai BL based on a Korean webtoon that I have not read—because I never read these things—but I do know that it's based on a Korean webtoon, so I get a point for that. It is about the titular gangster oppa, Tew, and the titular dear, Guy. 

They meet playing some kind of mobile game virtually and they somehow become sort of close, or at least close enough that when the gaming team decides that they're going to meet in real life, all the other gamers are like, “Guy, you ask Oppa to come to the meet up, because he'll come if you ask him to.” Well, at that point they thought it was a her because Oppa plays with a female avatar because of reasons.

Ben

Naive assumptions.

NiNi

[laughs] The point of the matter is Oppa’s a gangster, like legit—guns, beatings, stabbings.

Ben

He has murdered people!

NiNi

He has absolutely killed people, and Guy is just a sad gay boy in love with his bestie since high school… 

I'm sorry guys, I'm doing a terrible job of describing the show.

Shan

It's not you, NiNi, it's the show!

Ben

I'll back you up. It starts off as a show about gamers, and two of them falling for each other, and then decides to become a shitty mafia BL.

NiNi

[gasps]

Shan

A boring mafia BL.

Ben

There it is. It becomes a boring mafia BL.

NiNi

Shan and Ben are stabbing me through the heart right now. I just want to let you, the listeners, know.

Ben

Well, how about you climb over the wall wearing your kneepads and drop onto—[Ben and NiNi laughs]—the mattress?

NiNi

That's why it's a B-movie’s B-movie, Ben!

Shan

No, listen. NO!

NiNi

Okay, the show had—the show had ideas.

Ben

Did it?

NiNi

It had ideas. Some of the ideas were really good. The execution of the show is terrible. Some of it is terrible. I—okay, it's all terrible by accident. Like none of this is done on purpose. Do not get me wrong. It is very, very bad.

Ben

They hired the most juiceless boys, and then pretended that they had juice. That was not good. Like if you had— 

Oof. I have my own read. Finish talking about your little show you had fun with before I cut it to pieces.

NiNi

This show is not good. It's not good. I am not defending it on any type of quality grounds. I just enjoyed the fuck out of it. That's all I'm saying. It was trash. You could see all the seams, as Ben has intimated. You can see the stuntee's knee pads and elbow pads. You can see them throwing themselves off of things and falling onto the barely-hidden mats. Oh my God, it's so bad. It's so bad that I laughed my ass off for eight weeks. I'm sorry, I had a good time.

Shan

Let me give NiNi some credit. I just binged this show this week, and I was genuinely having fun with it for the first half—the same vibe that NiNi’s talking about. Like I was, like, “This is hilariously bad, but it's kind of funny.” 

[laughs] We have to talk about the bright orange scar makeup. 

Ben

Do we?

Shan

Did they not have red or black in their makeup kits? They put these fucking neon orange scars on him [laughs], and it was the worst thing I've ever seen. But it’s like, that kind of shit is funny, it was a good time. But the show's biggest sin to me is not that it wasn't good. It was never going to be good. It's that it got so fucking boring, because it abandoned all the funny elements—the fun and silly and wacky things it was doing in the beginning with, like, the gamers—and treating the difference between them in some ways so seriously, and in some ways so deeply unseriously. That dichotomy was kind of fun. 

But then in the second-half of the show, it becomes all about this fucking mafia plot, and it was terrible. Like, it—it was terrible because it was so boring. The energy just sucked straight out of the screen every time I had to sit through these long ass scenes of Oppa talking to these different mafia guys about what they were mad about and why. I never gave a single shit. It was horrible. And that is why the show pissed me off, because it was fun, and then it decided to just be this dull nothing. 

This show, like Oppa, needed to quit the gangster life.

NiNi

[laughs] When I tell you, I actually screamed. Like, my sister had to come check on me.

Shan

It was all downhill from that line. That was the peak of the show.

NiNi

[laughs] How dare you? The show had a budget of $47.18 and it spent all of it on that scar prosthetic.

Ben

I watched this with Aiden, who you may have heard on the I Told Sunset About You episode. Aiden could not remember Tew’s name, and once he started wearing those horrible suspenders [laughs] Aiden just started calling him Urkel for the rest of our watches. 

NiNi

Now you see, that's fun.

Ben

Shan refused to learn his name and just called him ‘Oppa’ the whole time.

Shan

I stand by it.

NiNi

It's the B-movie’s B-movie. It's like B-exponential, like B-to-the-power-of-B. Okay, I'm sorry. I am that girl.

Ben

You heard many a Gay Rant from me over the last year. New rant unlocked for The Conversation: Gamer Rant.

NiNi

Oh, no.

Shan

Oh, boy.

Ben

We don't talk about this on the podcast, but I have a very long history of being very involved with a very specific video game. I have deep and meaningful relationships with other gamers. I was the best man at a gamer wedding where sixteen of us showed up. We were deep at that wedding—we had our own goddamn table. And I showed up as the only representative at a smaller wedding to make sure that one of us was present to witness the event. 

Gaming relationships are so important to me because when you're a weirdo and you don't fit in, It's easy to become close with people very quickly online because you're anonymous. They don't know anything about you. This show ends up abandoning all the interesting things about this weird collection of people who had found each other through this game, and decided to meet up together and extend that relationship into meatspace, to then become the weirdly worst mafia BL we've seen in a while, which was so twisted because the show clearly likes action film, and then embarrassed itself trying to mimic them. And clearly cared about violence, because Tew has a legitimately violent history that is handled with far more seriousness than even something like KinnPorsche did. 

There was so much that was way more interesting than being a shitty action schlock BL that this show could have been by starting with the gaming component, and it was legitimately infuriating for me to see this show use it as a cheap way to say these guys know each other, to then do nothing interesting with the mafia shit. 

I hate this show, so much. This is one of the worst shows we watched this season because this show could have been a fun action schlock B-movie if it was a fucking movie. But it asked for eight fucking weeks from me. I spent eight hours with this motherfucker—I had a lot of time to think about this shit. This show sucks way more than it even realizes that it sucks, and that's really the sad part about it all. This show is one of the worst [laughs] shows I watched in this season and I hate it.

NiNi

Shan, Ben is gamer offended, among other things.

Shan

I do think this show would have been a lot better if it was about the gamers instead of about the mafia.

Ben

There was a real opportunity for them to just only talk about their team stuff and for all of Tew’s gangster shit to be lore going on in the background, cause when you're hanging out with your homies online, their real lives are lore. Like, NiNi is in school. That means nothing to me.

[NiNi laughs]

“Is she gonna be present for this show? Oh, wait. No. She's gotta worry about, like, her real life stuff with her family or her school or our podcast. Well, shit, NiNi's busy. I guess I can't bug her to watch this tiny Taiwanese BL that I really like. It's not that important.” 

Shan does really cool shit in her real life. That means nothing to me! “Shan, are you available to watch this Japanese BL that I really like?” That's all I care about.

Shan

Always bestie, always.

Ben

That's the point. Gaming friendships—we don't really know what people do in their day-to-day lives. Like it would have been legitimately funny if Tew was, like, never lying about shit. Like, “Yeah, we just had a really weird stuff. Like, a guy came into the store. I had to, like, beat the shit out of four guys. I might have killed one of them. Whatever. We got rid of his body.” And they would be like, “Haha! Whatever! It’s time for practice.” If they had legitimately focused on whatever gaming shit they were concerned about and all of Tew’s mafia shit happened in the background as just fan fiction we all made-up, this would have been a fucking excellent show. 

But instead it was this disaster that ended up offending me way more than I expected it to. Fuck this show! 

On to Wahl, who was one of the characters I hate the most this year. Oh, I got words for that motherfucker. Don't think we're getting out of this recording without me going off about Wahl. Fuck that dude. I hate this dude so much. This character is not redeemable to me. Wahl only cares about Guy at the point at which Guy remains under his control. And the grossest thing this show did was have him accept that he can no longer control Guy, and then imply that he ends up with another guy at the end to perpetuate this cycle he has. He is so fucking vile. I hate him so fucking much.

Shan

I would just like to say that I concur on Wahl. That guy fucking sucks, and I hated him from maybe the second episode.

Ben

As soon as he did that stupid seal dance, I was like, “I hate this man!” [laughs]

Shan

You are done.

Ben

I'm like, “That's not even a whale, you stupid son of a bitch! Get outta here!”

Shan

He was a shitty friend, and as always, I got salty about him being forgiven without having to pay any consequences for his shitty behavior.

NiNi

We all agree that Wahl sucks. [laughs] We can agree on that. [laughs]

Ben

Does anyone have anything else to say about this terrible show before we move on?

NiNi

I am continuing to defend it. I will give it a 6.5.

Ben

Shan?

Shan

I gave it a 5.

Ben

I gave it a 4.

NiNi

So, Shan, by The Price is Right rules, you win [laughs] and the show gets a 5.

Shan

Feels right.

01:33:32 - Middleman's Love

NiNi

Moving on to our final show, and the one we all just finished today—well Ben and I finished. Shan watched the beginning and the end, which I think is a delightful way to watch this show.

Shan

I am very happy with my choices.

NiNi

So we all watched Middleman's Love. Yes, you might have heard me say on an earlier episode of this podcast that I would not be watching Middleman's Love. However, you should mind your business, because just because I said it doesn't mean it's happening.

Ben

I say I break up with New Siwaj every single season of the show. [NiNi and Shan laugh] It's whatever. We don't care.

NiNi

So I watched Middleman's Love, and I have actual real thoughts. But first we gotta tell the people what Middleman's Love is about. So, Ben, take it away.

Ben

Middleman's Love is a spin off from Bed Friend. Jade is a middle child and used to being overlooked by his family and his friends. They've got some interns at work. He doesn't realize that his intern has an enormous crush on him, and so is using his fudanshi eyes to try and hook him up with another intern, and slowly comes to realize the intern actually has legitimate feelings for him as we unpack Jade's own hang ups as it comes to love. 

While there are a lot of things I ended up enjoying, the show attempts to be comedic in a way that was really divisive and it ends up being kind of a mixed bag. Bed Friend is a really dramatic show, and while I don't think all of us currently here agree about how well Bed Friend did these things, Middleman's Love as a really comedic tonal shift doesn't always work because they're relying on Yim to be comedic as Jade in a way that makes you ask legitimately as Shan likes to say, “Why would anyone want to fuck this man?”

Shan

[laughs] Well, I did wonder why anyone would want to fuck this guy.

Ben

And that is honestly a legitimate question to ask early on in this. This ends up getting a little bit of Cheewin’s stuff—and I’ll let NiNi have that part—’cause she's much kinder to Cheewin about this than I am. But that's basically the gist of it. Jade is a middle child who's used to being overlooked and playing supporting role to other people who comes to realize that he can have love, too. 

NiNi, your thoughts on the show?

NiNi

That's it in a nutshell. I have a lot of thoughts on this show because it helped me clarify a lot of things about Cheewin. 

Now I get to say some lore and some BTS stuff because I know things too, Ben. This was originally cast with Jimmy and Tommy, with Tommy as Jade and Jimmy as Mai.

Ben

That would have been way better. [laughs] That would have been way better!

NiNi

Hold on. Hold on. Let me finish. While I think that Tommy would have made a better Jade, I actually prefer Tutor’s Mai to what we probably might have gotten out of Jimmy. 

I have a lot of Cheewin feelings about this show, because some of the things that I enjoy about Cheewin is that he likes to examine artifice and performance, and the things that we're hiding when we put on these big personas and personalities. And he explores that through a lot of sometimes-cringey humor, which I really like. It's the Secret Crush on You thing. It's certain parts of Make It Right. It's certain bits of Bed Friend? 

Basically, Cheewin likes to look at artifice and then puncture it. Cheewin likes to look at what makes people present weird and unpack that, and he likes to unpack that using sex because I think that Cheewin thinks—and I kind of agree—that sex is a revelatory experience. I suppose you can hide while you're having sex, but it's incredibly difficult, especially if you feel something for the person that you're having sex with. I personally find it interesting to watch that. 

I think that this show was miscalibrated, and not just in the acting or the tone. Unlike a lot of people, I actually do like cringe humor and some of the slapstick that we get in Thai comedy. I actually enjoy that stuff. It doesn't put me off. I think that the way that Cheewin uses humor in Middleman's Love is way better than how he used it in Bed Friend, and how he built it in Bed Friend. I think that the humor here, the comedy here, has done better. I think that Yim is not great at the comedy, and since Yim's character is the central character of Middleman's Love, it doesn't work. 

Plus, the story doesn't need eight episodes and Ben and I often talk about when something's too long, because I like a long show—Ben does not. This story was eight episodes and I think it could have been done in four. I like parts of the show. I like some of the things that the show is trying to do. I think that it mostly does not succeed.

Ben

Shan, you watched the first episode. [laughs] You were horrified by bobble heads in the intro—

Shan

[moans] I still have nightmares.

Ben

—and the general cringey humor. And then you came back for the finale. How about you talk about your experience with this show?

Shan

Definitely accurate to say that I bounced hard off this show after watching the first episode, and I definitely wasn't alone in that. In talking to other people we know who are watching it, a lot of folks had that reaction. 

NiNi has already touched on why—the humor was not quite calibrated correctly, and the performer who had to hold up the whole show wasn't really up to the task, unfortunately. That's just what happened here. And so, for some of us, I think getting through that super uncomfortable cringe humor with a performer who wasn't quite able to carry it was just really difficult. 

I struggled through the first episode. The bobbleheads really got me off on a terrible start. I hated those fucking things [laughs]—they still haunt me. And just throughout, I didn't really understand what I was supposed to be taking from the way Jade was being presented to me. He didn't feel like a real person. It was way too much. I didn't understand why this hot guy in the office was supposed to be looking at him with interest, given what we had seen of him. It just wasn't computing for me and I wasn't buying it. 

I didn't intend to fully drop the show, but then the following week I left on a long trip. And while I was gone, I missed the next three episodes. By the time I got back, I was just like, “You know what? No, I'm not taking this back up. I'm just gonna wait and see what you all told me after it finished.” And so, I kind of knew the show wasn't for me, but I wasn't opposed to the idea of it. I like an ugly duckling story. I like a story about someone finding their confidence and being able to accept that they are worthy of love. Like, that's a worthwhile story to tell. And so I'm not anti-The Middleman's Love. It just didn't quite work for me. 

The show finished this week. I decided to come back and watch the finale, just to kind of see where it landed, and [laughs] I actually think that was a great way to watch the show. If you, like me, are just not into the show's style and humor, you can watch the first episode and then you can watch the last episode, and you really won't miss any narrative beats—like it's super clear. The plot is very straightforward. You will be able to pick up in the last episode and understand everything important that has happened, and why the characters are where they are now. And you'll get to see Jade and Mai kind of settle into this relationship. 

And I thought that was nice. I enjoyed watching the finale. I liked getting to see a Jade who had seriously toned down some of the quirks of the first episode—a Jade, who seemed a little bit more confident—but still the same character. And I really enjoyed what they did with the physical intimacy in this episode. 

First of all, let me just give a cautionary note. If you are not watching this show on iQIYI, you are not seeing the whole show. I watched the finale on Gaga and got to the end and was like, “Where are these sex scenes that I heard about?”

Ben

The trust that Shan has in me [Shan laughs] she watched the whole show cut and was like, “Ben would never lie to me about sex scenes.”

Shan

You told me there were sex scenes in this!

Ben

“He used the Rihanna GIF. There is sex in the show.” [laughs]

Shan

And I will find it! So I did find it. [NiNi laughs] I went to iQIYI and I found it. So definitely watch it there. 

But I loved what they did with it because they really used the intimacy scenes well to convey these two settling into their relationship to convey Jade over time becoming more comfortable with their physical intimacy—finding his own power in it, finding his own agency in it. The performers did a great job on those scenes. I was incredibly impressed by it, impressed by the show's ability to take those characters from point A to B like that. 

If this show maybe wasn't entirely for you—if you, like me, dropped it in the beginning—I'd say maybe dip back in for the finale and enjoy a good time.

Ben

I like the idea of Jade a lot. I like the idea of a character who's had negative experiences feeling like he doesn't get priority from his family, ‘cause he's not the oldest and he's not the baby, not expecting a whole lot. And I like the idea of Jade having two really fucking hot friends in King and Uea, and just getting used to people being more interested in them, so not really seeing himself as a priority. And then he had like one relationship where he was literally told, “You were so weird and disgusting that no one wants to be with you.” 

I kind of get it with Mai. It structurally works. Mai is very pretty. He's generally very good at his job. He's kind of charming, but not overwhelmingly so. He's just naturally very pretty and nice to people, and fairly amenable and good at what he does. And he's really into Jade because he thought Jade was really kind and competent the first time he saw him. The flavor of this could have been correct, but then, like, they added way too much sugar. It’s just not great as a result. 

It's frustrating because Cheewin's ideas, as they're exemplified through the characters created for this show in Gus and Tong—and what he does with Jade and Mail—work really well. But the show is unfortunately really inessential. The people who watched this show were coming from Bed Friend, and I don't feel like this show really plays well as a Bed Friend extension or side story sort of experience. I think a lot of people brought the wrong energy to this show, and it took us weeks of recalibration to find something meaningful in it. And I don't think it finishes strong, because while I appreciate Cheewin’s giving the gays an extended boyfriend epilogue, an hour of watching people just be kind of cute boyfriends with no real drama on the table is kind of boring to watch in a TV show? And there's way more drama in watching people try to be boyfriends and deal with the consequences of actually being together. 

There's a great moment where they talk about their past exes and what that means for them, what they're bringing to the current relationship. How they want to handle drama going forward. I thought that was really good. I thought the fact that Jade asked for sex was really good, and then he got it. I don't approve of Mai biting that man's motherfucking glasses—

NiNi 

[laughs] I approve!

Ben

—and then tossing them around.

Shan

Ben, he licked his glasses off! Licked! [NiNi laughs] It’s a very important detail! I don't want you to get it wrong!

NiNi

[laughs] Shan, I don't know about you but personally I approve.

Shan

I did approve. I was very into that!

Ben

I actually liked when Mail wore the glasses in the second sex scene we got.

NiNi

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Shan

A lot of good glasses material in these scenes.

NiNi

Top-tier, absolutely no notes, no complaints there, none whatsoever.

Ben

This show was a lot of fun when it wanted to be. And when it wasn't, it kind of sucked. NiNi, you don't spend a lot of time in the pulps, but My Dear Gangster Oppa and Middleman's Love? This is what the pulps are like. There are things that are worth talking about, and then there are things that are not. These shows are almost always kind of bad, but there's kind of something interesting that won't happen in the big network shows.

NiNi

I have been convinced into pulps before. I have enjoyed pulps before. We have discussed this before. I am not opposed to a good pulp, but it's gotta be a good pulp. The flaws of these two shows aside, I had a really good time with them, and I found things not just to enjoy, but also to give me a little bit to think about. Not like a ton to think about, granted, but they give me stuff to think about in both of these shows. And, for me, that's why I landed up more or less in the same place with them. 

I gave Middleman's Love a 7. I think that's a perfectly reasonable score for it.

Ben

I gave this show a 6, not because I think it's bad or necessarily boring, but as I've explained with my rating system before, a 6 means the show is not offensive but I really truly think the only people who gain value from giving this show the eight hours-plus that it asks for is people who really give a shit about BL as a genre.

NiNi

Shan, what about you? How are you rating your short version BL cut?

Shan

I mean, obviously I didn't fully watch the show properly, so take it with a grain of salt, but this feels like a 6 show to me. That's what my heart is telling me it's a six.

NiNi

I will allow y'all to fully average down to 6.5 under protest.

Ben

That's not how math works, but okay.

NiNi

Listen, we gave up on math a long time ago on this show. Okay, just accept it and move on.

Ben

I think 6.5 is fair.

NiNi

If you like cringe comedy, I'm not saying that this show does cringe comedy as well as some other shows have done cringe comedy. And I bring up here Secret Crush on You because it's by the same creator, and it is some pinnacle cringe comedy—like some fantastic cringe comedy—that is just not replicated here. But if you like cringe comedy, there's something in here for you. If you like Thai-style slapstick, there's something in here for you. 

That's all I'll say about it.

01:49:07 - Final Thoughts and Girl, You Tried

Ben

On to the final event: Girl, You Tried Winter 2023.

NiNi

So the Fall shows, there were some that tried and succeeded. They don't count for this award. Bye-bye, two-out-of-three Japanese BLs that we just talked about. So, My Personal Weatherman is in contention for Girl, You Tried.

Ben

Oh, then it wins.

NiNi

[laughs] Let's see what else we have here. We have Kiseki, which didn't try. Shan, do you think that Kiseki tried?

Shan

No, it did not try to be a coherent show. It cannot get the Girl, You Tried.

Ben

Thank you, Shan.

NiNi

So Kiseki is out of contention. Dangerous Romance sucked. It's not in contention for anything. Love in Translation is too good to be in contention for Girl, You Tried—that goes. Absolute Zero? Pfft, forget about it. My Dear Gangster Oppa, it definitely tried something.

Shan

Did it?

NiNi

I think it did. 

Ben

Hmm.

NiNi

Ben really just unmuted just to go “Hmm” and go back on mute. Okay, fine. It's going into contention. And Middleman's Love. I think Middleman's Love did try, and I think that the execution of it was off. Not that it was necessarily bad, but that it was off. So if I had to put a Girl, You Tried contest together right now, it would be between My Personal Weatherman and Middleman's Love. 

So, Shan, for you, very important vote now. My Personal Weatherman versus Middleman's Love for Girl, You Tried.

Shan

Oh, this is a hard one, ‘cause I think of the Girl, You Tried designation as, like, being for a show that got really close to being what it wanted to be—like almost got the execution right and then kind of just missed the mark. So for me, I think I'm going to have to give that to My Personal Weatherman between these two shows. I think it did have ambitions, and I think it did know what it wanted to be with clarity, and it just fell a little short on the execution. Whereas, I think Middleman's Love was a little bit messier and didn't have as clear of a vision of what it was doing?

NiNi

Okay, that's one for My Personal Weatherman. Ben, I already know your answer, but come on. Explain it to the people.

Ben

Hello, people. 

[Ben and NiNi laugh]

So when we were first planning this episode, the Girl, You Tried debate was between My Dear Gangster Oppa and Middleman's Love, but I didn't realize how much I fucking hated My Dear Gangster Oppa until we got here and I was talking about it. And I was, like, “You know what, actually.” 

I would have given it to Middleman's Love because Cheewin was trying to do the things that he likes to do, but now that you put My Personal Weatherman in contention, I gotta give it to that one. I think My Personal Weatherman is trying things that are harder to do than Middleman's Love. I think the ideas of that show are way more cogent, and easier to access and have a conversation about with people than something like Middleman's Love.

NiNi

Okay, so for me, if I had to choose who attempted the higher degree of difficulty, it would be Middleman's Love. It's a high wire act. It's so easy to fall off. If I have to think about who got closer to their intentions, I would say it's My Personal Weatherman. 

Girl, You Tried has a criterion, which is a strong premise with some sort of flaw/failure in the execution. But it has also become somewhat of a personal Rorschach test for us as we go through the shows, and attempt to unpack what it is that we think they did well, what it is we think they did badly, what it is we enjoyed and didn't enjoy. And that enjoyment component does have something to do with how we end up on a Girl, You Tried. 

If they're tied right now based on those other criteria, and I have to think about what I personally enjoyed more, I would have to give it to Middleman's Love. 

Shan and Ben outvote me. Boohoo. I'm gonna go cry about it.

Ben

I don't want to walk away from this particular recording pretending like I don't like Middleman's Love. The spirit inside of it is worth acknowledging.

Shan

I think both of these shows are worthy of talking about as shows that tried to do somethin’. I think for me, My Personal Weatherman just gets a little bit closer there and it's doing a little bit more.

NiNi

I think that's a good place to leave it, so that's going to wrap us up on Tens and Chops, our first ever full grab bag episode. So this is Volume One, hopefully with many more to come. 

Next up, the VIIB Awards. I'm looking forward to that. I'm excited. 

Anyway, we out. Say “bye” to the people, Ben. 

Ben

Peace! 

NiNi

Shan, say “bye” to the people.

Shan

Bye, people.

[miss0atae]

15 Day BL Challenge 2024 (PART 1):

Okay so I don't have 15 days until the end of the year (It took a very long time to convince myself to do this challenge) so I will just do 5 days of them in the same post until it's done. I had a pretty rough days lately so I want to find a little joy in writing these posts. Thanks to @negrowhat for this challenge.

1 - Fave OG Actors Pairing:

My first OG actresses pairing is Aom Sushar and Tina Suppanad. They played in the movie Yes or No and it was my first QL movie. It had a profound impact on me at the time I watched it. So I would say they hold a special place in my heart.

The second OG actors pairing I like is Off Jumpol and Gun Atthaphan. I discovered them in Not Me and this series is so dear to me that it made me want to watch every other series they stared/ would star in.

A special mention to Krist Singto because I discovered them pretty late (this year) and I love how well they work together.

2 - Fave Rookie Actor Pairing:

So many choices possible here, I will say the first pairing that comes to my mind is Marc Natarit and Poon Mitpakdee. I love their dynamic in We Are, but they made me fall in love with their pairing in Perfect 10 Liners. I can't wait to see them again together in A Dog and A Plane.

The second pairing that I think of is Sailub Hemmawich and Pon Thanapon. It's probably thanks to their role in Pit Babe that I like them. I also had a fun time watching them in This Love Doesn't Have Long Beans, and I really want to know how they are going to portray Alan and Jeff again in the upcoming Pite Babe 2.

A special mention to Billy Babe , Li Le Wang Yunkai and Big Park.

3 - Side dish That should have been the main course:

I have nothing against Force Book and their portrayals of Arm and Arc, but I will give this to Pond and Sand. They were the sweetest and I didn't have enough of them in the first arc of Perfect 10 Liners.

A special mention to JJ and Methas in TLDHLB. They didn't get enough screen time (probably because the series may have needed two or three episodes more).

4 - Fave ship dynamic :

Probably because it's too close to home, but I would say Affectionate x Touch-Starved. I always love to see a character who needed love/affection finally getting what he was always looking for. This is the most beautiful thing to me.

A special mention to Toxic Dumpster Fire and no further explanation for this choice.

5 - Biggest Flop:

I'm pretty indulgent towards QL stories (and stories in general) because there is always something that keeps me watching the end of it, but this year I had two biggest flops in mind.

The first one is Love Is Like a Cat. It was a nightmare and I can't even remember the end of the series. All I remember is how stupid everything appeared to me. Don't let me talk about how I hate this idea that one character goes in another country, can't speak the language and fall in love with someone who also doesn't speak his language. It's not working for me. I couldn't suspend judgment concerning the implausibility of the narrative.

The second one is, unfortunately, 1000 years. I wanted to like this show so much. You have no idea how ready I was to love this show... but it never clicked with me and I was really frustrated because it seemed like many people here found something in this series. I read the reviews, I kept watching it, but it didn't work... I found no appeal to the series and I stopped watching it on episode 11. I only read about the end of the series right here.

[inkameswetrust]

The Window Sill

Pairing: James Diamond x Kendall Knight Characters: James Diamond, (The Mention Of) Brooke Diamond, Kendall Knight, Jennifer Knight Content Warnings: Fluff, BL, SFW, James actually kissing someone after successfully flirting with them for once (Except for Big Time Halloween, that episode was peak.)

Word Count: 2,038

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Once again, the sun descends over the horizon—the sky stirring with pinks, purples, and oranges. The faint, yellowing glint of the evening sun shone through Kendall's bedroom window. He flopped onto his bed and laid on his back as boredom swept over his sunken body like a hurricane. The occasional breeze crept in, whistling and whispering to the tune of its own melody.

Kendall turned his head to the side and saw the sun casting its dim glow on the tuning pegs of his acoustic guitar. He knit his brows at the sight of a slip of folded ivory paper subdued within the fretboard. "That's weird..." Kendall mumbled to himself as he rolled out of bed and shuffled toward his guitar.

He carefully retrieved the paper from the fretboard, making sure to not elicit any disruptive sounds from the strings. Kendall unfolded the paper and let his eyes wander from word to word as he skimmed the note addressed to him.

To my favorite songbird,

Don't think I don't hear you

humming Boyquake songs

in second period!

                     —J ♡

Kendall found a solid silver guitar pick attached to the end of the note with the letter K engraved in cornflower blue. A crooked grin accompanied the coo in Kendall's voice as his heart swelled from the sincerity of James' gesture. He hurried to his bedroom door, glancing in both directions before closing it shut. Kendall then took his guitar from its stand and carried it to his bed.

He sat down with the guitar carefully situated atop his lap, twisting the tuning pegs to match his ideal sound. After tuning his guitar to the key of A and fastening a capo onto the second fret, he began strumming with the progression of four chords. The pick in Kendall's hand slid over each string like a sailboat drifting over a passing wave.

"Forgive me, I'm trying to find my calling. I'm calling at night." Kendall began, singing moderately quietly to not alert anyone's attention, "I don't mean to be a bother, but have you seen this girl?"

Kendall continued to strum, the melodic sound of his strings increasing their volume as he tightened his grip on the pick. He nodded his head to the rhythm, his bangs and dolphin gray beanie shifting. Kendall's checkered bracelets circled his wrist and bounced atop his forearm as his hand rose and fell alongside the strings.

"She's been running through my dreams, and it's driving me crazy, it seems." Kendall continued, his voice rising and his eyes fluttering shut while his senses were overcome with symphonic bliss, "I'm gonna ask her to marry me."

Kendall hums the rest of the melody, his voice guiding his guitar to a quiet cadence. He gave a few final strums until the echoing sound of the melody rang through the room like the chime of a bell. Kendall sat there for a moment, his eyes glancing over his guitar as he pondered his thoughts.

"I thought you said you didn't sing." A familiar voice called out from behind.

Kendall's shoulders jolted upward in surprise before he cocked his head back to meet James' gaze. He saw James leaning his elbows onto his window sill, his adoring smile acting as a signal asking for entry.

"James!" Kendall cried out as he hurried over to the window sill, throwing his arms around James' neck and pulling him in for a tight hug. "Careful," James warned as he jolted back, "I haven't made it inside yet."

"Sorry." Kendall chuckled as he loosened his grip on James and stepped back to give him space to enter. James climbed over the window sill and planted his feet on the carpet of Kendall's bedroom.

"So I take it you got my note?" James inquired, dusting himself off and striding toward Kendall, "What do you think? Pretty cool, right?"

"Well..." Kendall began, cocking his brow and wearing a playful grin, "I won't lie, I love it. But how'd you even get that pick for me?"

James scratched the back of his neck, his smile stretching to the right side of his face as he prepared his explanation. "Well, I've been helping my mom at the office for a few nights after school." James began, stuffing his hands into his pockets, "And she so lovingly suggested I use my earnings to get you something nice."

Kendall hummed with a satisfied chuckle accompanying the lift in his voice. Nothing and no one could ever make Kendall's heart sing with such enthusiasm. Before stepping closer to James, Kendall stopped to ponder an alerting thought. "Wait... so all those nights you said you wanted to adopt a better beauty sleep schedule," Kendall wondered, "That's what you were doing?"

"Bingo," James replied heartily, slowly slinking his hands up Kendall's forearms. He'd hoped the time and effort he put into perfecting a romantic gesture for Kendall would, at the very least, impress him.

Kendall's eyes swam downward, relishing in the sight of James inching closer. He followed suit, shuffling closer and holding James' hands in his. "I gotta say, I'm a little shocked," Kendall admitted with bated breath.

"Hmm? Why's that?" James queried, his voice lowering in tone and volume. Kendall reluctantly looked up to meet James' gaze. He chuckled to himself, pondering the thoughts circling his mind in response to James' gift.

"James Diamond working? And putting in the effort to do something nice for someone else?" Kendall teased with a playful grin, "You gotta admit, that's a little strange."

"Oh yeah?" James replied exuberantly. "Then I guess I'll just have to take this back." James hurried to Kendall's bed and swiped the guitar pick from atop his blanket. He ran around the room, avoiding Kendall's grasp and keeping the pick in his hand high above his head.

"James, give that back!" Kendall cried while fruitlessly chasing James around his bedroom, "You gave that to me!"

As James pressed his back into the door of Kendall's wardrobe, he kept his arm raised and his signature cocky grin stretching ever so strongly across his face. "Oh, I'm sorry." James teased in reply, "I thought you said James Diamond doesn't do nice things for other people."

Kendall grunted in frustration as his fingers grazed over James' palm. He mentally reprimanded himself for being unable to retrieve his guitar pick despite their minimal height difference. Just as James' hand was finally starting to open up, a gentle knock was heard at Kendall's bedroom door.

"Kendall, honey!" Jennifer called out, "Are you home?"

Kendall and James both turned their heads in terror, unsure of what move to make or how to combat the possibility of getting caught. "Oh, no..." Kendall croaked breathlessly. His eyes darted across the room, desperately looking for an escape or some kind of coverup. He then noticed the wardrobe door behind James and cocked his brow at the spark of an idea.

"Quickly!" Kendall whispered worriedly, "Hide in the closet!" James swiftly turned around, opening the wardrobe doors and hiding amongst Kendall's miscellaneous clothes. Kendall was quick to shut his closet and answer the door, where he stood awkwardly in front of his mother.

"He-hey, Mom!" Kendall stammered, clumsily changing his leaning position with every fumbling word, "How's it going? How was work? Do you need anything? Did I tell you that I love you?"

Jennifer looked Kendall up and down, gazing at him with a puzzled look as she tried to decipher the nature of his awkward demeanor. "What did you do?" Jennifer questioned with folded arms.

"N-Nothing! Absolutely nothing!" Kendall replied, almost too quickly, "I'm just happy to see you... 'cause I love you so much."

After a final look of indifference, Jennifer lowered her hands to her hips, saying, "Uh-huh." Kendall stood against the doorframe with an awkward smile and an even more awkward stance, hoping and praying his mother would look the other way.

Jennifer rolled her eyes and quietly ignored whatever Kendall desperately tried hiding from her. "Anyway, I just wanted to come check on you before I start making dinner."

"Dinner! Sounds great!" Kendall replied heartily. "Why don't I come downstairs and help you?"

Before Jennifer decided to respond, she contemplated whether or not she had the energy to combat Kendall's defensive exuberance, to which she decided she did not. "Sure, why not? I'll call you downstairs when I'm ready."

"Then I will see you downstairs." Kendall chimed in response, snapping with both of his hands and pointing finger guns in his mother's direction. Jennifer stood there for a second, still stunned by the facade Kendall displayed. "Okay..." Jennifer muttered as she walked back downstairs.

Kendall slowly closed his bedroom door and pressed his back into it with a heavy sigh of relief. "Y'know, you're terrible at playing it cool," James teased as he emerged from Kendall's wardrobe, "You own a lot of flannels, by the way."

"Shut. Up." Kendall groaned as he brought his palms to his face and trudged over the carpet to James. He buried his head in the crook of James' neck and laid his head on James's shoulder, letting the embarrassment consume him entirely.

"Perhaps that was karma for insulting me earlier?" James suggested playfully, the urge to giggle overcoming him.

"I'm going to kill you." Kendall sneered, his face hidden away in the fabric of James's shirt. "Aww, love you too, buddy." James replied, hugging Kendall with one arm, "But I guess I should come back another time."

Kendall propped his head up at the notion of James finally leaving. He didn't want James to leave, but he also knew the circumstances wouldn't allow him to hide James any longer. "Yeah," Kendall sighed, "I'll call you later."

James nodded in response as he began to climb out through Kendall's window. He stuck one leg out past the window sill and ducked to slink the rest of his body out, but looked back at Kendall walking toward the door. James knit his brows, contemplating how to properly say goodbye before he disappeared for the night.

"Kendall!" James cried, second thoughts lacing his tone of voice. Kendall turns his head back and cocks his brow. "Yeah?" He replies while shuffling toward James, "What is it?"

James planted both hands onto the window sill, tucking one knee under his chest and planting the other on the roofing shingles. He gazed up at Kendall, his eyes glimmering in doing so. All he could think while looking at him was how he ended up being lucky enough to have Kendall in his life—to be able to cherish and adore him, even if it wasn't out loud. Just the thought of being near him was enough to make James' heart soar, and he hoped Kendall felt even somewhat similarly.

That familiar, adoring grin stretched its way across James' face, alerting Kendall of another impending romantic gesture. James raised his hand to Kendall's cheek, cupping it and pulling Kendall in for a quick goodbye kiss. The sounds of nightfall accompanied their symphony of blossoming romance with the crescendo of the evening breeze, the staccato of chirping crickets, and the arpeggio of passing vehicles.

Before Kendall could even process being kissed by James for the first time, he'd already pulled away with that stupid grin still flashing before him like the glare of the sun on your windshield.

"Say hi to Mama Knight for me," James remarked, scaling down the roof and rushing to his bike to hurry back home. Kendall stepped back from the window sill, bringing his palms to his lips and standing frozen in place with only one thought on his mind. He couldn't even bring himself to speak, he was petrified and speechless by the flourishing emotions brought about by James' kiss. Though, he'd hoped this meant there was hope for them yet.

Before Kendall could regain his composure, he heard his mother calling him from downstairs, saying, "Kendall!"

Kendall immediately snapped his head in the direction of his mother's voice. There was no way he'd be able to focus on helping her prepare dinner, but he'd be damned if he weaseled out now.

"C-Coming, Mom!" Kendall responded as he rushed out the door to face the fruit of his facade.

[lurkingshan]

Hi! So there have been a lot of top5 asks already done. So I'm giving you 5 slots to talk about a show/scene/character that you didn't get a chance to in other asks because it didn't apply or they didn't make the cut. If you want obviously. Rose💜

Ooh, thanks Rose! Let's see, what have I not talked about yet... I'll do a few additional superlatives for the year that didn't make other lists.

Best (Squandered) Side Character: Max, Be My Favorite

I loved this man and his done-with-your-shit energy. The wise queer elder to a bunch of confused messes. His mix of disdain and patience was absolutely perfect, and one of my biggest beefs with BMF is that it failed to give him a proper story when there was so much ripe material right there on the table.

The Show That Was Way Better Than Expected: Love Class 2

I went into this one with zero expectations and knowing the first Love Class was kind of a flop, and was surprised by how well it worked. All three couples were good, but Joo Hyuk and Sung Min's more mature storyline was definitely my favorite.

Most Surprising Character: Amane, If It's With You

@bengiyo and @ginnymoonbeam can attest that when I watched the first episode of this show I shot straight up and started yelling when I realized our protagonist fucks. We so rarely see school age bls that are honest about the sexual activity of minors, and that don't present early sexual experiences as traumatic. Amane just likes sex, and gets it when he wants it. This show didn't make it onto my all time greats list because they pulled their punches on this at the end, but they still get credit for giving us this character in the first place.

Favorite BL Pairing That Was Not Technically In A BL: Army and Joe, The Warp Effect

These two been living rent free in my head for almost a year now. I found their second chance romance so charming and I loved the push-pull between them as they figured out what they needed from each other. Both hot and a great model of healthy communication.

Best Time Watching an Old Classic: Make It Right

When @waitmyturtles got to this one on her old GMMTV project, I decided to join in, because it was my last remaining gap in my early Thai bl education. And damn did I enjoy it a lot more than expected. As @bengiyo says, this is truly a boy show, with all the mess and frankness about sex that entails, and Frame is one of my favorite characters.

Ask my top 5 anything in bl

[fuck-i-like-too-much-stuff]

15 Day BL Challenge- Day 5

Biggest Flop- I Actually Can't Decide

[Original Challenge Here]

In my definition of flop, it means that the show did not match, let alone exceed, the expectations I had set for it by a huge margin.

When it comes to what I watch, maybe its because I am pretty good at filtering out things that don't match my vibe or maybe I just haven't been here for all that long- but I haven't yet watched a show that hasn't given me what I expected from it by that much.

That being said, there have been shows that are so hyped by everyone, and i found myself never liking them as much as them.

That being said, i am not hating on these shows, and may change my opinion if feel like rewatching

Boss and A Babe: I love Force and Book as actors, and i do think they nailed their roles but the story was sooo weakly built and didn't know how to deal with the themes it touched on at all. The ASMR thing Cher did, which was the premise of this show in the first place wasn't touched beyond bringing them together in the beginning. Tyme's betrayal and the whole stealing of ideas wasn't given half the attention it should've gotten. The discussion of themes about depression, sexual abuse, and homophobia were touched upon in the most speed run way of things, giving nothing enough importance to actually become centric to the story. The couple themselves were okay, and the chemistry was there only because Force and Book had it, but honestly they became borderline weird. I didn't find this series worth remembering, but when i started it, i didn't think i would either.

Love In The Air (but only the PhayuRain episodes): Look. Before anybody comes for me, hear me out. These two have great irl chemistry, and im excited for Boy Next World... but Phayu and Rain are ragingggg red flags and its to the point where I do not care that they can cancel each other out. I just don't. You don't fuck with your crushes car just so they'll ask you for help when they get stuck in the rain. You don't play with consent like that unless you've both pre-agreed to it. Please do not pull the stunts these two decided were okay without a word with each other. Even if you're both into it. CONSENT MATTERS AND DO NOT DAMAGE OTHER PEOPLE'S POSSESSIONS JUST TO HAVE THEM PAY ATTENTION TO YOU. COMMUNICATION EXISTS FOR BOTH OF THOSE.

That being said, Prapai and Sky managed to make it through my criteria and I love them dearly. Just can't ever say the same for Phayu and Rain.

2gether (but not Still 2gether): I can hear my girlfriend fuming as I type this because this is one of her all time favourite shows. And I can agree with what she says, its about the nostalgia of early BL days and the sorta funny jokes that make you roll your eyes but still laugh. That being said, the first season is riddled with the fact that the premise makes zero sense, the bromantic chemistry is questionable at best and the raging question that how the fuck is Tine gonna become a lawyer when he can't even defend himself from a dude hitting on him??

This show definitely does not live up to the name it carries being the most popular Thai BL, but it is not the worst. It is what it is according to the time it was made in, and the second season is actually cute. And of it gave me Drake and Frank, with whom I'm obsessed despite the tragedy.

Middleman's Love: Respectfully- GET A FUCKING GRIP OVER REALITY AND A CONTROL OVER YOUR VOLUME. That's all I have to say here.

[slveepyscwrs]

azmo's intro!! (new 2 tumblr)

hii slayss (engagement lords pls don't let this flop 🧍)!! im terrible at intros sooo this is gonna be a mess but oh well its worth a shot sooo basically im a silly chronically online kid who loves writing especially anything hurt/comfort related because I solve my mental health problems through fan fiction /coping-joke , except the writer's block has permanently blocked me smh 😔 anyways here's some info about me:

name: Azmodeuz (Azmo for short) age: 8teen pronouns: he/they sexuality: pan fandoms: haikyuu, free, bsd, obey me, precure, scp foundation, monster high, ever after high, and a handful of obscure bl dramas/manhwas/mangas etc platforms: ao3 (main), wattpad (for shitposts and stuff), twitter (I don't usually give out), discord interests/: choreography, dancing, music (fav artists: 6arelyhuman, asteria, d3r, hubithekid, kets4eki, pröz, vyzer), writing (duh), chatting, gossiping, floptok, SILLY CATS!! :3, and some other shit that I can't remember atm bc ✨depression brain✨, watching random YouTube vids aesthetics: scenecore, sigilkore, animecore, webcore, nostalgiaore, weirdcore, dreamcore, 2000score, menheracore, traumacore (NOT an aesthetic but still-), sanriocore, kawaiicore, and more!! byf: Im mentally ill and tend to traumadump and vent, im NOT proship and I don't romanticize the stuff I write about but I DO write about darker topics soo 👏 DON'T LIKE? DON'T READ!! 👏, I use tonetags and leetspeek, im clingy, I take time to write because I get overwhelmed easily so be patient !! dni: basic dni other than that just don't be easily triggered!!

thx 4 reading!!

[nabi-unveiled]

15 Day BL Challenge: Days 6 - 12

I'm super late to this party, so I'm doing a speed run. I'm also only hitting the days that I really feel like talking about and can make decisions about quickly. Free time is limited. There are shows to watch.

For those interested in the challenge: Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4

Day 6: Fave Line From Your Fave Series

My favorite lines are not from my favorite series. Unless we're talking about Style's quips about making news headlines. That said - there's plenty of quips and steamy lines I love. I have a whole book of them. But the lines that mean the most are the ones that come back to me in hard times. They are the ones that pop into my head unannounced. They are personal.

From My Love Mix Up (Japan)

I tend to minimize my personal emotions. I might like dramas, but I'm no drama queen. And conflict is tiring, let's just move on. But when I thought my world was falling apart, I kept trying to say "it's not a big deal" in my head. and I kept hearing this line in response. It was oddly comforting.

From Hidamari Ga Kikoeru (2024)

Yes, I said the show flopped. But before it fizzled, it gave me this line. Just include this whole scene. Kohei felt comfortable enough to throw Taichi's words back to him. And although it was an incredibly painful story to retell, Taichi retold it. I could write a whole book on this scene.

Day 7: Fave Villain

I mean he's a villain AND the lead. He really wasn't redeemed. Not really. Sure, he showed growth. But he never really became a "good" person. It's all red flags here, but I was there with popcorn.

Day 8: The Trope You Hate Except When It's "This Series"

Oof. My immediate thought was actually a het romance - A Story To Read When You First Fall in Love. I don't like teacher romances at all. It's NOT the power dynamic I want. Yes, I'm side-eyeing you HARD right now Impressions of Youth. But, it's not a BL. So which other trope do I hate? Amnesia? Noble idiocy? Crossing the street?

In the end, I went with the sleep kiss. Screw the fairy tales, Snow White and Sleeping Beauty needed consent. However, I'll forgive it in Semantic Error. Neurodivergent characters have their own rules - they just do. Well...within limits.

Day 9 & 10 : Skip for Now

There isn't any way I can pick love scenes in the time I have available tonight. I'll circle back around to this at the end of my speed run. Should give me enough time to think.

Day 11: Breakup That Should've Stayed Broken Up

Teh & Oh-aew in I Promised You the Moon. It's one of the few times that the "happy ending" felt like a tragedy to me. I screamed "no". I cried sad tears for the pain this poor man with beautiful hair is going to endure in this relationship. Oh-aew deserved better.

Day 12: Wedding You Wish You Had An Invite To

None. I'm serious. I really hope from the bottom of my heart that they all have their happy endings (except Thiu), and Minase's dream in Miseinen comes true. But I don't want to be at the wedding. In my experience, weddings are either stodgy, rigid affairs that require a lot of small talk or they're chaotic parties that require a lot of small talk. Either way, I'm out. I'll buy you a nice gift. Let's go out for good food and catch up once you're back from the honeymoon.

[mxdimitrescu]

Shy Reunion

Synopsis: Blue is the twin of Dinah, a former member of Fifth Harmony, and was forced to attend to a reunion with Dinah.

Genre: Fluff

Pairing: Lauren Jauregui x Blue Hansen

(Masterlist)

The quiet stillness of the room was abruptly shattered by the insistent ring of a phone, eliciting a groan from beneath the covers of the bed. Slowly, a hand emerged from the depths of the blankets, fumbling until it grasped the phone and brought it to an ear.

"Hello?" a rough, raspy voice mumbled.

"Blue, answer your damn door. Why the hell isn't your doorbell working? I've been knocking for the past 15 minutes," came the irritated voice on the other end.

Startled, Blue peeked out from under the covers, now noticing the persistent knocking in the living room.

'Huh, how did I not hear that?' she wondered.

"I'll be there in a moment," Blue huffed as she sat up in bed, ending the call and swinging her legs over the side of the bed. She grabbed a discarded black shirt from the floor and pulled it on before making her way to the front door.

Opening it revealed her sister, Dinah, standing on the other side.

"Blue Hansen! It's 2 in the afternoon and you're still in bed?" Dinah exclaimed, clearly bewildered.

Blue stepped aside to let Dinah in, closing the door behind her. "I've been up until like 4 working on my book," she explained with a yawn, rubbing her eyes tiredly.

Dinah hummed in understanding as she headed to the kitchen in search of food, while Blue retreated back to her room, slipping back under the cozy blankets. However, her brief respite was interrupted when Dinah barged into her room with a box of Oreos and flopped down on top of her, eliciting a groan of annoyance from Blue.

"What are you doing here?" Blue asked, slightly exasperated.

Dinah took a bite of her Oreo before replying, "Well, my dear twin, today is the Fifth Harmony reunion."

At the mention of the reunion, Blue's interest piqued. "You guys getting back together?" she inquired eagerly.

Dinah chuckled. "No, but we're getting together for old times' sake."

Disappointed by the news, Blue slumped back down. "Then why are you here? Shouldn't you be with the girls?"

Dinah's expression turned pleading. "Actually, can you come with me? I don't want to go by myself."

Blue hesitated for a moment, but Dinah's relentless bouncing on her back convinced her to relent.

"Fine," she finally relented.

Dinah cheered and quickly got Blue ready, instructing her to shower and providing her with an outfit. After a quick shower, Blue emerged from her room dressed in the clothes Dinah had laid out for her—a pair of dark green overalls, a faded black Guns N' Roses shirt, and black Converse shoes. She glanced at herself in the mirror, adjusted her black cap, and nodded in approval before joining Dinah in the living room.

Together, they headed out to Blue's car, a 2024 Jeep Wrangler, and set off to meet the girls at a diner, singing along to their favorite tunes along the way.

Meanwhile, at the diner, Lauren, Ally, and Normani were catching up after five years of hiatus. As they chatted, they were interrupted by the sound of music outside. Peering through the window, they saw a jeep pull into the parking lot, blaring their song "Kings & Queens." To their surprise, Dinah emerged from the vehicle, waving excitedly as she entered the diner.

"Dinah, you really know how to make an entrance," Lauren teased, earning a laugh from Dinah.

"Yeah, blame it on Blue. She insisted on finishing the song," Dinah explained, shrugging as they settled back into their booth.

"Blue?" Ally inquired, her curiosity piqued.

Before Dinah could respond, another voice chimed in, causing Lauren's jaw to drop slightly.

Standing before them was a striking figure—tall, with tan skin, hazel eyes, and a muscular build that was hard to miss. Lauren couldn't help but notice how attractive she was.

"Sorry, I got carried away wanting to see everyone," Dinah apologized sheepishly, drawing attention to the newcomer.

So, this was Blue. Lauren's mind raced with questions—was she Dinah's girlfriend?

Quickly recovering, Dinah introduced her. "Guys, meet my twin, Blue!"

Twin? Lauren's confusion only grew. How had they never heard of her before?

Blue seemed shy, offering a timid wave and a simple greeting. Lauren exchanged glances with Normani and Ally, all equally puzzled by the newcomer.

"How have we never met Blue before?" Ally asked, echoing Lauren's thoughts.

Dinah explained, "She was always traveling whenever you guys were around."

As Blue joined them at the table, the conversation shifted to her work. Normani inquired about her occupation, prompting Blue to reveal she was a writer.

"She's an author, with several published books," Dinah proudly announced, prompting a blush from Blue.

"Any books I might have read?" Ally inquired eagerly, her eyes lighting up with interest.

"The Chronicles of Mythology series," Dinah responded, her words causing Lauren's eyes to widen in surprise.

Ally's eyes widened in recognition. "The Chronicles of Mythology series? I love that!"

"I love that series!" Lauren exclaimed with a wide smile, earning a quizzical eyebrow raise from Blue.

With hope in her voice, Lauren added, "I hope, if you don't mind, signing my books one day?"

Blue, clearly growing more comfortable, nodded warmly. "Of course, anything for my fans. Bring your books next time, and I'll sign them."

She couldn't contain her excitement—Lauren squealed with delight, realizing her favorite author was sitting right next to her. Glancing at Dinah, who seemed puzzled by Lauren reaction, she shot her a glare.

"What did I do?" Dinah asked, genuinely bewildered.

"You knew I love that series and knew she wrote it," Lauren huffed, turning to face Blue. With a mischievous wink, she silently communicated her amusement, causing Blue to stifle her laughter.

As the conversation with Blue flowed effortlessly, Lauren found herself completely engrossed in her company. While the other girls chatted amongst themselves, Lauren couldn't help but be drawn to this captivating woman.

"And then Dinah, being the crackhead she is, ran through the living room and straight into the sliding glass door and fell down. She couldn't tell that the sliding door was there," Blue recounted with a laugh, triggering Lauren's laughter.

"That sounds like Dinah, for sure," She chuckled, shaking her head at the mental image.

Their private moment was interrupted by a voice breaking through the comfortable atmosphere. "Hey Blue, Lauren, it's getting late, we should head home."

They both frowned as they glanced at the time, and Lauren was shocked to see it was already 6 o'clock.

Blue and Lauren had been so engrossed in their conversation that time had flown by without them even realizing it. But Lauren didn't want it to end.

Softly, Lauren frowned, her gaze dropping to the floor until a hand gently lifted my chin. She looked up to meet Blue's eyes, her smile instantly warming her heart.

"Can I have your number? I want to continue our conversation, I really enjoyed it," Blue asked shyly.

Lauren couldn't help but smile widely, nodding in agreement. She retrieved my phone, and so did she, and we exchanged them. Lauren added herself as "Lauren💚" in her phone before handing it back. When she returned my phone, Lauren couldn't help but chuckle at the contact name she'd chosen for herself—"Fav Author📖".

As they all stood up from their seats, they shared hugs and promises to keep in touch and meet up whenever they could. Ally and Normani headed off to their cars, leaving Dinah, Blue, and Lauren behind. Despite wanting to stay, she couldn't help but frown at the thought of leaving Blue's side.

Noticing Lauren's reluctance to leave, Dinah chimed in, "Hey Lauser, Blue lives here, like 15 minutes from here. Y'all can hang out whenever."

Lauren smiled at the thought, glancing up at Blue, who was already looking down at her.

"I don't mind. We should hang out whenever."

Nodding in agreement, Lauren hugged Blue tightly, feeling the warmth of Blue's muscles beneath her clothing as they embraced. Their hug lingered until Dinah's cough broke the moment, leaving Blue blushing as Lauren pulled away.

Giving Dinah a playful glare, Lauren waved at the twins before turning to Blue. "I'll text you later?" She asked, met with a soft nod and a smile from Blue.

As Lauren climbed into her car and drove away, she caught sight of Blue punching Dinah's arm playfully, both of them blushing. With a smile, Lauren left the diner parking lot, already looking forward to seeing Blue again.

[khunvegas]

Have you/could you make a list of your favorite/best bl kisses?

i feel honored that someone asked me this 😩 omg ok. this is gonna be the longest post ever.

here's my list of the best bl kisses with a few of my favorites. in my own personal opinion.

IN NO PARTICULAR ORDER

●dark blue kiss

i think p'aof went very galaxy brain with the idea of an underwater kiss and for that, he is very valid because it's a very iconic kiss. the show itself could have had some work but then again, it was 2018. everything was wrong back then.

● still 2gether

NOW i talk a lot of shit about this one AND WITH GOOD REASONS. HOWEVER, gosh mantype stole the show for me WITH ONE SINGLE KISS. imagine that. it was groundbreaking FOR ME. too bad we will never gonna see them together again.

● 2 moons 2

this was the only time joong knew how to kiss. no further explanation.

● history 2: crossing the line

even though this whole scene was a dream, it was still a marvelous experience and for someone (me) that was just starting into this bl bs, this one sealed the deal for me.

● history 3: make our days count

this whole scene... you just had to be there. also they had the most happiest ending ever. for sure for sure.

● history 3: trapped

what can i say? taiwan always put their money in those workshops. their plots might be a little outta pocket with the incest and the getting killed because of some salt but i can always trust them to put on a show.

● manner of death

i have no explanations WHY this is a favorite. it's just too good. and it's not only their porn-level kisses, the show itself was a masterpiece. if no one got me, i know maxtul got me. manifesting a show with them again.

●lovely writer

the show itself didn't click with me. too many sound effects and some of the characters were very annoying to me. HOWEVER, the food was very tasteful. let's see it again.

● a tale of thousand stars

i really debated between this one and the final kiss but i had to choose this one because i feel this one is more meaningful. it was a promise that they would see each other again and i'm a sucker for promises. still, p'aof lost some points for giving us one single actual kiss for the very last minute.

● like in the movies

picture this. we are in the middle of a pandemic, unemployed, some places are starting to open back up, thailand is in shambles so they can't release anything. enter the philippines with the vision of starting business with the bl industry and they release this masterpiece. it was such a good show and they had the material for a season 2 but sadly, their time is over. 10/10 tho.

● we best love: no.1 for you

gosh, taiwan. you will always be the best.

this was a very emotional scene and they truly deliver with the kiss and the tears and the bridge. it was all 10/10

● bad buddy

I MEAN, DO I EVEN HAVE TO EXPLAIN??? like damn. now i do have some complaints here and there but this kiss right here??? it was such an experience. like the girlies that watched this while it was airing know how it felt because not a lot of people were prepared for how ep 5 would leave the whole fandom in shambles. the confession plus the kiss PLUS how it ended??? emotional damage 100. incredible.

●enchante

LISTEN!!! YOU BETTER LISTEN!!!! because these bitches, as rookies as they were, DELIVERED. see because even though enchante was a flop in terms of views and gmmtv never giving them an inch of promotion, my kings ate each other on camera and gave me the most toe-curling kiss ever. i don't care if you thought the plot was silly or you want to act funny and say forcebook look related, whatever that means, they did what needed to be done. end of discussion.

●not me

"but offgun had better kisses!!!!111!!!" i don't care about any of that. i came here because babygirl first is a homie hopper and he was going to kiss another man on camera.

the show itself was really good, a little bit draggy towards the end (and there were some Things with some characters that the fans weren't that happy with) but overall, they put on a great performance. HOWEVER, danyok will forever be famous. a tragedy too.

●to my star

GOSH. the originals. the men that weren't afraid of success. see because up until this point, kbls were a flop in terms of kisses (some even in plot) and their first kiss was a flop too BUT THEN this final scene came and robbed me at gunpoint. i was so sure we would never get a proper kiss AND THE BITCHES CAME AND SLAYED ME. not only they gave me a proper meal, it lasted for hours. i was left in shambles. 14569722/10.

●to my star 2

i have to put both scenes because what the fuck. I MEAN, WHAT THE FUCK MAN???

there's absolutely nothing i can say but enjoy??? i guess??? they said "oh, the industry is a flop. let us fix it" AND THEY DID... now the show itself had its ups and downs; a lot of people didn't like how it was made and how the plot was going; it was devastation after devastation and no one could see the light at the end of the tunnel. personally, if they had done the plot a little different, a lot more people would have been happier, including me. but that doesn't take away the fact that they killed it, amazing performance and the kisses speak for itself.

● my secret love

now was this show groundbreaking? no. in reality, it was more of the same stuff we all have seen but the catch with this one is that the acting is good enough and the plot is engaging, and you can actually see that some actions lead to repercussions in the show. however, i do have to talk about these two. they stole the show and they weren't even the main couple and my theory is that because they didn't have enough screentime, they decided to go all out with their scenes and god, what a time. this was just the beginning of this scene btw, there's more to it.

● golden blood

this one goes to show that sometimes you just need vibes, exceptionally good chemistry, some silly characters and a small mukbang. golden blood was a disaster in like everything, so when i tell you i stayed for them, i'm serious. they were the only reason i kept watching. the rest? i don't even remember because i skipped most of it.

● cutie pie

see, decisions were made when they filmed this. the show was very silly itself and there were some plotholes that were ultimately overshadowed by zee's tongue. i honestly don't remember much. i just remember the iconic kisses and how tonnam stole every single scene (and that's how he has his lead role now). also perth. but those workshops came through because all four of them ate this (and each other).

● cutie pie 2 you

before anyone says something about zeenunew, save it. i watched this long ass advertisement just to get nuersyn crumbs. that's it. i don't even remember how many episodes it had but it was so unnecessary. HOWEVER, tutoryim came and gave us the performance of their lives. i have absolutely no complaints with those two. would i ever want a special focused on them? yes, 100%. i also have to add maxnat also had a great performance with the little to no screentime they had. we were living off crumbs, for sure.

● you're my sky

oh, bestie. when i tell you this show made me climb my walls every saturday last year, i'm not kidding. THESE TWO, MY GOD. for the girlies that watched this show, you know what i mean. the tension was OFF THE ROOF. THE WORST PART? open ending. the most toe-curling tension right here just to get a drunken kiss and then NOTHING. the most excruciating 12 weeks.

● don't say no

this show was a wild ride. like, the toxicity surrounding leo and fiat? it was too much and the plot was nonexistent, which it was the point. basically, it was "two best friends in a room, they might kiss" and they did, so what happens next? this is the "next". how they actually act now that they are in a relationship. fiat had a lot of baggage plus being horny. those two fucked like rabbits and NOTHING was left to the imagination. the biggest surprise was smartjames. they had an awful ending but at least we got good food.

●blueming

you know what they say, tms walked so that the other kbls could run and this is a prime example. then again, it's the same director, so there's a standard these shows need to have and damn, i think they exceeded. now, the show was very different from the manhwa but it was still a good show enough that there might be season 2.

● kissable lips

compared to some of this list, this kiss is not even that good. HOWEVER, in the context of kbls, it was really memorable, especially when you have watched the show and the only thing that you can remember is that one of them was a vampire and died but died after having a good fuck... honestly, they had $5 and a dream and they made it work.

●cherry blossom after winter

the dream kisses are always the best ones.

this was a very cute show overall and i think it had the first m|m couple that gets engaged with a ring and everything in a kbl. very iconic, if you ask me. very brave too.

●cupid's last wish

listen, i'm not a fan of the body swapping trope but at least they went original with this one (at least no one died... side eyeing the shipper). and i'm pretty sure the director told earthmix to go wild with this one. pretty sure it was the pent up energy from atots. what a performance. a think there are a few kisses from this show. great food.

and that's it because tumblr only allows 30 pictures per post, so if you want part 2, let me know. i still have some that i can add.