#do i even tag this as bl?

[pharawee]

A new instalment of Club Friday: Hot Love Issue just dropped and I'm watching the trailer like... Oh. Oh no. No no no. Oh nooooo! 🤣

So about the usual when it comes to Club Friday.

There's another, shorter trailer for it on youtube but it doesn't quite convey the whole fucked-up-ness of the situation:

So yeah, thanks Change2561, I'll be adding this to my BL calendar. 🤡

[shijiujun]

HOW IT WENT (IN 2012 - K.WILL's "Please Don't"):

HOW IT'S GOING (IN 2024 - K.WILL'S "No Songs Can Express Me"):

FULL MV BY KWILL RELEASING ON JUNE 20, 2024!!!!!!!! IT IS A DAMN CONTINUATION - KPOP'S BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN HOPEFULLY NO LONGER BROKEN

THIS IS GOING DOWN IN HISTORY, ESP. OMG LOOK AT THE 2024 TEASER - I NEED THIS TO BE A FULL BLOWN BL DRAMA

[starryalpacasstuff]

The Absence of India in Discussions on Queer Asian Media

So, yesterday @lurkingshan tagged me in an ask she got from @impala124 about the absence of India when we're talking about queer Asian media. I was intially just going to reblog it with my thought, but as it kept growing I figured it'd be best to just make my own post. Please read the ask linked above first so this makes sense.

*cracks knuckles* this is going to be the most fun I've had writing a post in ages. (For a little background, I'm a queer Indian, born and raised)

So, this is a very interesting question on a subject I've been rotating in my head for the past several months. There's a lot of different variables that contribute to the noticeable lack of discussion on Indian and South Asian queer media in general, so I'm just going to talk through the ones I've noticed a little randomly.

Talking about Asian media in general, it's well known that the mass popularity of kpop and anime has contributed massively to the increase in popularity of Asian media. If you've been in the Asian media fandom for any amount of time at all, you'll have noticed that media from Korea, Japan, and China gets by far the most attention from international audiences; all East Asian countries. There may be several reasons for this, but in particular, it's no secret that the fetishization of East Asians is a massive proponent in the popularity of media from these countries, while there's no such interest in South Asians. If we shift our focus to queer media specifically, media from these three countries is still extremely popular, with the addition of Thailand and the Philippines to some extent; both South East Asian countries. From what I've seen, there's very little international interest in media from South Asian countries (although, if we're talking about India specifically, I can't exactly say anything. Bollywood has not been good lately). If we talk about queer South Asian media, the scope of interest falls even further. If you'll notice, MyDramaList, one of the most commonly used websites for finding and tracking Asian shows only allows for East and South-East Asian shows. So, that's one reason—there's just not much international interest in Indian media in general. As Shan said in the initial post, it's partially because of a difference in priorities. Korea is notorious for using media to gain global standing, the role of the 'soft power' of Thai bls in the recent bills for equal marriage in Thailand has been widely discussed, the list goes on. Could racism also play a part in the massive gulf of interest in media from East Asian versus South Asian countries? Probably. But I'm not going to get into that too much.

Moving on, there's obviously a massive lack of queer media in India. I think this is greatly exacerbated by the fact that it's very hard to support the people making queer media beyond buying and/or streaming their work. The majority of people engaging with Indian queer media are queer Indians, and a lot of us have to do so in secret because of the society we live in. This means that creators that have to push through several obstacles to publish their work often receive little incentive to continue doing so because of the lack of engagement. Because of the lack of media, international fans are less likely to become interested in queer Indian media, and the cycle continues.

I will say though, contrary to what Shan said, I think Indian media, particularly anything that came out post 2019 might actually be on the easier end of the spectrum when it comes to access. This may simply be bias, so forgive me if I'm wrong here, but from what I've seen, a lot of queer Indian shows are in fact available on streaming sites, and at most you'd need a vpn to access them. I think the two main things that actually hold back queer Indian media from becoming more popular are a lack of noise and it's relatively lower quality.

The main way we find out about new shows in this space is through either word of mouth (well actually, post) or because we follow production houses known for producing media. Because of the sparse nature of both the media and the consumers, there's very few people who learn enough about the media to want to give it a shot. For example, there's a film on netflix called Badhaai Do (hindi for Congratulate Us) that I've been meaning to watch for a while. It centers around a lavender marriage and I've heard a lot of good things about it, so I was slightly surprised to see that most of the people on tumblr I interact with who have been engaging with queer media for far longer than me had never heard of it. There's also a, Indian BL from 2017 called Romil and Jugal that I've written about before here, and I would've never learned of it's existence if not for a friend hearing about it from another friend of hers.

Because there's so little queer indian media, it's natural that the quality leaves much to be desired. The main issue is, because the queer asian media market has become so saturated lately people are becoming a lot more selective with what they watch, and for good reason. This means that queer media from india is simply unable to grow and improve over time, leaving it stagnant. Back in 2016-2018, the overall dearth of queer media from Asia meant that a lot of people were willing to watch shows that were average or even worse. Thailand particularly seems to have benefitted from this, being able to grow and evolve its queer media due to the successes of shows like SOTUS, 2gehter, TharnType and more even recently, KinnPorsche. Queer Indian media will have a much, much harder time with this because of all of the factors I've talked about and more, meaning that it is much harder for queer media to evolve. Honestly, though I haven't been able to watch/read much queer media from India, the stuff I have seen is really quite decent, it's just that it tends to fail in comparison to some of the brilliant stuff we're seeing from other countries. A while a ago, I bought four queer books by Indian authors, and of the three I've read so far, I'd genuinely recommend two, albeit one with quite a few reservations (I'll be writing about them sometime in the future, just haven't found the time yet). While talking about this with @neuroticbookworm, she brought up the excellent point of how Indian media in general has just been of fairly poor quality lately. It seems to me that a lot of it is catered to more conservative audiences, which results in people like me becoming disillusioned with Indian media and simply moving onto things from other countries. It has been a long time since I've watched anything worthwhile come out of Bollywood. So, it becomes even harder for queer Indian shows to be found at all; a majority of their target audience has already forsaken Indian media as a lost cause.

So, those are a bunch of reasons because of which there's not a lot of discussion about queer Indian media in fandom spaces like Tumblr. Something else I'd like to point out is, it's very hard for queer shows in India to gain much traction whatsoever. Live television slots are ruled by the infamous Indian serials, the majority of the audience being people in their late thirties and older, particularly women. And while homophobia is just as prevalent amongst the youth of India as it is amongst older generations, younger people are far more likely to be engaging with queer media, in India at least. This means that it would be near impossible for queer shows to air on live television the way they do in countries like Thailand and Japan. The majority of Indian youth use global streaming services to watch shows, hence the greater concentration of queer shows on service platforms. (Romil and Jugal is something of a dark horse here—I don't believe it was ever aired, but it was produced by a producer who has a few decently popular serials under her belt and is available on an Indian steaming service—another reason I'm determined to research how tf this show ever came into existence) If we talk of movies, the industry is limited by the iron fist of Bollywood, another reason it's very hard for queer movies to be produced and why they're generally found on streaming sites.

There's just not a lot of people who have the balls it would take to make a queer Indian show/movie and push it to the Indian public beyond a streaming service. I mean, we're all seeing what's happening with the Love in The Big City drama right now, and believe me, public backlash in India would be the same, if not much worse. And if no one in India is watching these shows, why would anyone in any other part of the world? There's barely any public figures that would be willing to participate in such a project, so queer media stays underground. Currently, Karan Johar is the most popular—and one of the only—out celebrities in Bollywood, and, well, he's treated as something of a laughing stock by the public. He has one or two queer adjacent shows under his belt as a producer, but once again, they're barely known and available only on Netflix. There was a movie called Dostana in which he played a straight guy pretending to be gay but, well, that speaks for itself. And well, I can't exactly blame him for it, knowing how the Indian entertainment industry is.

To talk a little more about the specific comparison between India and Korea, I think you're fairly accurate in saying that the two countries seem to be roughly on par in terms of homophobia, although that's an extremely vague statement that's rather hard to either prove or disprove. While the difference in international attention towards Korean and Indian media is certainly a major component of the difference in discussion about the queer media from these countries, there's obviously other things that go into it as well. There's this video I watched some time ago on the progression of queer representation in K-dramas that's quite well researched. It's an hour and a half long, so in case you don't have the time to watch it (though I do recommend it), it basically talks about some of the dramas with queer rep that have aired on Korean television and their impact. While it's hard to gauge the level of impact of these shows on the availability of bls and gls in Korea, they certainly had an effect, if only telling the queer population of Korea that they are seen and heard. To my knowledge (although I may be mistaken), no such queer rep has ever aired on Indian television, meaning that there's nothing to push creators to put queer media out there. There have been old movies and shows that depict queerness, but none of them ever reached the sort of the scale where they may have some sort of impact on the industry. As I mentioned earlier, the widespread popularity of K-dramas (and k-pop) does make it easier for creators to make queer media since there's a much higher chance of the shows being successful thanks to the international audience. Bringing back Love In The Big City, the success of the book abroad and the high probability of the show being well received internationally is probably one of the reasons it was able to be produced amongst domestic backlash.

Now, I've been talking a lot about how it's difficult for queer Indian media to gain any sort of international recognition with domestic attention. However, it's not necessarily the case. Here's where I start rambling (I say, as if this post isn't verging on 2k words). It's been proven that the presence of the international market allows for greater creative freedom in spaces beyond television. The best example comes from Korea's very own 'soft power'; K-pop. There's a K-pop group called Dreamcatcher that debuted in 2017 with a rock sound and horror concept that was extremely rare in kpop at the time. They succeeded mainly by focusing most of their promotions to the foreign market, knowing that their concept would not be well liked in Korea. And they succeeded. Today, Dreamcatcher has a sizeable fandom and has even been growing in popularity in Korea, with the Korean public warming up to their genre and having influenced other girl groups to try out similar sounds. We've already talked about the lack of international attention for Indian media, but there's also the issue that the producers of queer Indian media aren't marketing to foreign audiences, which remain ignorant.

That's all I have, this is so long good lord. All in all, there's a bunch of factors that feed into each other creating a cycle which means that, unless there's a break somewhere, queer Indian media will remain unrecognized. I'm excited to see what other people have to say, because this is a topic close to my heart and I'd definitely enjoy seeing more discussions around it.

[snarkspawn]

go home losers you're drunk

[spicyvampire]

MANNER OF DEATH (2020) EP.7

LAWS OF ATTRACTION (2023) EP.6

[blmpff]

Korea will literally release anything and everything BUT a 12 x 45 min series huh

50 x 1ish min? Really??

24.02.24

[wasabijean]

why did drix do this? what is he stupid? gay? both?

[tortibomb]

Note to self:

Don’t hit “reveal spoiler” if you can’t actually handle the spoiler.

[visualtaehyun]

Today on- Random new Thai expressions I stumble upon:

ฟ้ารักพ่อ

So, the other day while swiping through some YT shorts, the algorithm presented me with a recent BossNoeul clip of one of those product endorsement livestreams which คู่จิ้น /koo jin/ do all the time and which I think are fun linguistically - because they're so fast-paced, there's often a lot of wordplay going on. BossNoeul are good at this, they're both quick on their feet and play into each other, but Boss especially. It shows that he used to be a VJ/streamer on Vibie Live!

So I'm watching this subbed clip and I can't hear shit because the op put loud music over their voices (here's a short subbed compilation without bg music) but I wanna know what 'I' pronoun Noeul used for this sugar daddy bit 😂 Naturally, I go searching for an upload of the entire livestream and watch way more of it than I have time for only to be stumped once I do find that section:

ฟ้ารักพ่อ /faa rak por/ = Fah loves daddy/father.

Eh? That's not a pronoun, that's a name? Did I miss a series announcement and that's Noeul's character's name?

Turns out it's a meme! It goes back to a drama called ดอกส้มสีทอง /daawk sohm see taawng/ (=gold-colored orange blossom) where a character called Fah ฟ้า famously said that line to a way older married man she's having an affair with whom she calls พ่อ /por/.

...and I found this out through a Workpoint clip explaining why tweets about ธนาธร จึงรุ่งเรืองกิจ, aka former Future Forward Party leader Thanathorn Juangroongruangkit, often got tagged #ฟ้ารักพ่อ 😂

In short, it's a DILF or sugar daddy thing lmao and I guess it gained traction again recently because of this song with the same name by Badmixy that Noeul even references in the upper clip when he sings the line My sugar daddy~ And what an incredible MV omg WHO does it like Thai queers 👏

[dribs-and-drabbles]

The Thai Communal Wardrobe item #86

Be My Favourite ep 7:

Only Friends ep 6:

for @brazilian-whalien52 💙

[ripgray-moved]

        EVERY LITTLE MOMENT SPELLS REGRET.

[snarkspawn]

KP ANNIVERSARY week 3: Favourite Outfit(s)

Tankhun's entire wardrobe

[neon-moon-beam]

After an unusually warm early evening in Washington Square Park, Ingo and Chandelure found some omurice (fried rice omelet)!

(Ingo plush belongs @1863-project, Chandelure belongs to me)

[hyp3rfixation-h3ll]

i may be a bajillion years late to this trend but autism be DAMNED i will carry this ot4 fanbase with my bare hands and all of you Will be subjected to it. you are not immune to sapphic propaganda 💚🧡❤🩷 (og image in the middle!!!)

[aylinaliens]

hi everyone!! i know i haven’t been on here in forever but i miss you all and hope you still remember me! im so behind in watching stuff because i got sucked into danmei but im hoping to get started on my backlog of bl/gl dramas,,,23.5 really reawakened my need for frigays 🥹

[dropthedemiurge]

I must admit something... I can't help it, I love First and Khao dearly but I'm finding myself not being even as 1/10 hyped for The Hearts Killer as I was for Not Me, Eclipse or even Only Friends. Like, idk what's that, the casting actors are good, the premise is interesting, some good effort put by prop department - and yet when I see bts pics, I just feel nothing (beside general Omg First with Tattoos, hot)

I guess I've been way too burned by GMM and specificslly Jojo stories D: Like, I want something good! But good and tight until the very end. And it most likely won't be, we all know what a mess OF was.

And it's another rom-com :') Like, all bts pics are just so obviously rom com with a sprinkle of action just for cool points, and there's nothing wrong with it, Jojo deserves to make the guys play out his AU fantasies and fans deserve to have fun and see firstkhao be all hearty eyes at each other, but...

I was raised with Not Me and Eclipse, both of which had really meaningful, strong political and society messages, morally gray characters fighting for freedom and equal rights, having emotional and strong chatacter growth with nice landing, and the execution held us all clenched until the very end ㅠㅠ I miss that experimental and bold era, and kinda afraid FirstKhao are gonna just get stuck into that cute-and-high-heat branded pair limbo...

You know, I secretly hope one day they'll have a project with P'Aof (but yeah he needs to rest so he can come back with a blast) and P'Waa (I only saw one-two series dorected by him and I almost have no questions, I need more amazingly executed BL projects by him). And imagine them working again with P'Golf 🥺

Anyway. Just a rant. I really miss watching Thai BL shows but I can't seem to find what I love anymore.