#homepeach

[danielsarmand]

just peach dragging home away like an exasperated mother

[maybe-boys-do-love]

Peaceful Property went ahead and picked one of my special interests to explore this week. For queer history nerds like me, some of the most prominent questions in the field are whether and how to connect to those in the past who did not have the same conditions and language for queerness as we do in the present.* Forcebook gave us two characters, Phoom and Vicha, who failed to name or live their queer feelings in the past. Instead, they had queer gestures to offer across time. What do these queer gestures and failures offer to the main conflict between Peach and Home, and what do they offer to us as an audience debating whether Peaceful Property is a BL or queer-baiting?

That ghost story spanned and blurred time into a time immemorial. Using the venue of Thai traditional dancing gave the story a sense of deep Thai history and traditions that are kept up to the present, while Phoom's home indicated early twentieth century Western influences, and a television (alongside Phoom's age in the modern-day setting) suggested the beginning of the global information age of the 80s or 90s. Then Force and Book, finally getting the opportunity to show their true acting capacities (let Force be as queer, emotive, and silly as he is in his interviews, GMMTV!!!), took us on a heart-shattering journey that blended those eras together.

In front of the TV, Vicha teaches Phoom the gesture for love before they kiss. It's not a pronouncement, and no one's recording. It's just a movement between two men tucked away in a private place. Vicha records later, but he doesn't put it into words. He carves tallies into a tree waiting for Phoom to return. Then Phoom does, but he's so cold toward Vicha that the latter can't even bear to look as Phoom tries to explain his sadness through dance. Phoom's mother is looking on as Phoom repeats the the move to signify "saddened," in the face of the instructor's demands for "happy."

The dance is interspersed with scenes of Phoom's mother berating him for being "gay"--she uses the English word! and as @absolutebl explains that's important!--across a locked palatial door as Phoom collapses in tears. Edit: @lurkingteapot giving me the Thai language lesson in the notes to explain, “Phoom's mother does not use the English word for gay. she says มีลูกผิดเพศอย่างแก mii lûuk pìt pêet yâang gɛɛ, where the gɛɛ is a familiar term for "you" -- "to have a child who gets gender wrong, like you!" ("gets gender wrong" as in, directs affections/attraction at the wrong gender).”

With just one chance to return to the dance studio that she believes to be the cause of his queerness, all Phoom can do is subtly cue Vicha about his queer experiences through dance. Jose Esteban Munoz says in Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity,

"Queer dance is hard to catch, and it is meant to be hard to catch--it is supposed to slip through the fingers and comprehension of those who would use knowledge against us. But it matters and takes on a vast material weight for those of us who perform or draw important sustenance from performance. Rather than dematerialize, dance rematerializes. Dance, like energy, never disappears; it is simply transformed. Queer dance, after the live act, does not just expire. The ephemeral does not equal unmateriality. It is more nearly about another understanding of what matters. It matters to get lost in dance or to use dance to get lost: lost from the evidentiary logic of heterosexuality.

Phoom's mom, the representative of compulsory heterosexuality, watches on, but she either can't see the coded evidence, or she recognizes its ephemerality and bears it knowing its lack of impact. Even then, she ends Phoom's dance before Vicha can look up and see the queerness that might affirm his own queer feelings. Phoom fails to live as a representative of queerness, unable to resist the pressures of heterosexuality.

With Phoom locked away, Vicha can't bear the loneliness. Queer suicidality has been haunting Peaceful Properties since the first episode, and the reason Peach keeps his blinds closed in his apartment returned this episode if we didn't recall. But we've had other subtle references, too. Vicha's death, though, was visceral and vivid as he slit his wrists with the same tool he used to count down the days until the return of the person who could affirm his queer feelings. Then, he documented his feeling in poetry with blood. While, Phoom failed to materialize his queerness for others, Vicha could only materialize his queerness through tragedy.

Much of queer history and fiction has focused on these tragic queer figures. In fact, they've been quite productive political tools for advancing queer goals. In the past ten years or so, the culture has turned on tragic queer figures and their narratives, though. Emotionally, I feel like that's for the better, but there's a fine line I'm always attentive to between welcoming empowering histories and turning our backs on those who don't or can't achieve them. It's also a fine line between welcoming ensured happy endings for queer characters and refusing to engage with those creators past and present who use other narrative tools to explore queer themes.

Relatedly, using a branded pairing for Peaceful Property while not advertising it as a BL, nor committing to that status even by episode 7, seems intentionally designed to invite the conversations about whether its queer-baiting or a BL. It feels so old-school to engage in the kind of queer subtext reading that much of the fandom is doing currently. Sure, people do fantastically detailed metas about body language, color theory, and everything else you can think of for BL series. When queerness is not a given, however, the analysis of queer subtext serves the purpose of liberating the characters and the text from the binds and blinds of an otherwise heterosexual context.

There's a generosity in that work. It certainly can't erase the failures to fully live-out one's queerness, nor the problems and behavior that suffering and suppression can lead one to commit. However, sometimes you absolve people out of empathy rather than anything they do to make-up for their harm and futility. Sometimes people are transformed by that initial love, mercy, or understanding, whatever you want to call it, like the ghosts in the series finally being seen. The basic tenets of humanism, a philosophy so disruptive to the rigid class structures the show's simultaneously exploring, and Buddhism, the Thai beliefs which the show's been explicitly exorcising the ghosts with, depend on understanding people at that level, beneath the trappings of social status, symbols of wealth, and even language.

Peaceful Property has taken us on the journey for Home and Peach to understand each other at this level. They, like the audience, have been looking beneath the cloaks of class and patriarchal defensiveness that separate them for the meaningful ephemeral queer gestures that can offer them release from the endless cycles of grief and guilt they're stuck in. That the series keeps finding ways to find peace for these ghosts suggests that the we'll also find peace and love from the alienation haunting Peach and Home. They just need each other to perform that exorcism on their hearts.

*Thailand, specifically, is unique site for queer historians and anthropologists--like director P'Jojo!--because of this question. Its one of the few places that maintained a non-binary gender system into the present, whereas many others were suppressed by Christian colonial law or influence.

[doublel27]

What am I supposed to do with the fact that Home moved Peach and Pang into the first (and only) property Home wanted for himself? What am I supposed to do with the fact he dreamed of filling it with friends so he wouldn’t be lonely?

What am I supposed to do with the fact that this place that has “reserved for Home” written by the bed where Peach and Pang sleep is the only place Peach feels the ghosts won’t find him?!

If not BL, why so BL shaped?!

[heretherebedork]

The hug when Home came back to life, his soul found his body, he found his Home and it's not his name or a place but it's Peach and Pang and Suradech but most of all it's gonna be Peach's arms, that is quite a good home for him.

[pigglepiephi]

Honestly, their breakup was gayer than 70% of the BLs out there!!!

And of course Home’s soul would immediately go to Peach. He’s his unfinished business 😭😭😭

[hotasfahrenheit]

all the shots of Peach clutching Home's arm because he's scared and looking like he's about to snuggle into his shoulder

[Peaceful Property, ep 3, 2024]

[hughungrybear]

So, I guess the series became BL by the sheer power of TayNew 😂😂😂

Source: Reddit

[karebear923]

Home literally kicking his feet as he talks to Peach

And them smiling at each other 🥰

[theflagscene]

So a new interview with P’Dome and crew talking about Peaceful Property, it’s super cute. He’s like: I swear I’m not queerbaiting, the show was pitched to me and TayNew wanted to act alongside one another in a non-BL show, but I cannot control them! It’s not us, it’s them! They have the chemistry, it was supposed to be a bromance, but they are them! They just act like that, it’s impossible to stop them!

So what the director of Peaceful Property is basically saying is that TayNew act like an old married couple so much at this point they can’t turn it off and they naturally flirt on screen, hmm, good to know.

Makes me wonder if he just tossed his hands up and told them to kiss in the last episode just for the fuck of it? Cause that would be very on brand for them lol.

Check the interview here - audio only - in English.

[mephistopheleswasrobbed]

What if we cooked together underneath the Cok Long sign 🥺👉👈

[stormyoceans]

"YOU SAID IT WAS A GHOST STORY. IT ISN'T. IT'S A LOVE STORY."

"SAME THING, REALLY."

[danielsarmand]

Peaceful Property 1.07 | 1.10

[maybe-boys-do-love]

Ugh! Peaceful Property! You wanted a cross-class romance!? How about we actually dive into the full-on physical and spiritual oppression that produces those classes?? How about we actually depict capitalist systems as literally horrific?? But let's not stop there!! How about we show the wealthy protagonist as directly complicit in those horrors?? Not enough?? How about we make him literally kill the poorer romantic lead?? How about we actually explore what it would mean for someone whose wealth is built on nepotism and a history of exploited labor to recognize what that means about their relationships to other people in the world?? What kinds of compassion do the wealthy need to ask for and what practices and mindsets do they need to change before those they've hurt can even begin to live life unafraid of financial ruin, let alone actually caring for the wealthy love-interest?? What ghosts haunt a cross-class romance and how can we truly exorcise them????

[oyeixcher]

HomePeach Scenes because I love them (6 ¦ ??)

"P-Peach? Is Pangpang being possessed or something?"

[heretherebedork]

It's just the queer metaphor of it all, the finding of family, the seeing each other, the betrayal, the parallel to a tragic queer love story, the looks over the gesture meaning love, the chance to play hard to get, the cheers to get back together, the silence of a ghost, a lost soul, two men who almost killed someone finding each other in healing the tragedies of what others lost but they did not, not in the end, but now one is a lost soul and the other has to help him find his way back to himself.

[lost-my-sanity1]

so pretty together