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the-conversation-pod · 3 months ago

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Summer 2024 Lagniappe (A Minisode)

AND WE'RE BACK!

Summer didn’t give us a lot to say, but we ALWAYS got something to say. Ben, NiNi and Shan talk a highlight of the season, Twig reports from the field, and we award summer’s Girl Who Tried.

Timestamps

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

00:00:00 - Welcome 00:01:15 - Introduction 00:02:21 - Twig’s Dispatch 00:14:24 - Spotlight: Tadaima, Okaeri 00:20:34 - Girl, You Tried 00:27:08 - Celebrating 50 Episodes

The Conversation Transcripts!

Thanks to the continued efforts of @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.

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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 Introduction and Summer Season Recap

Ben

And we're back. We have reached the end of the summer season. It is hot as hell and hurricane season is active, but we at least still have our shows to watch.

Shan

Wow, what a way to set the mood.

NiNi

That is [laughs] one way to start, for sure. [NiNi and Shan laugh]

Ben

Girl, I’m stressed! [laughs]

NiNi

I feel you. I feel you. I feel you. We are here. The summer has been… it's been a lot.

Let's just dive right into what we came here to discuss. Shan is here. Say hi, Shan.

Shan

Hi!

NiNi

We're going to talk a few things that we didn't talk through this season. Twig’s gonna come in and leave us her dispatch, and then we're gonna round it up and award the Girl, You Tried. There are a lot of girls who tried this season. [laughs]

00:02:20 Twig’s Dispatch

DISPATCH! Thank you for having me back. [music]

While folks were lamenting having nothing to watch this quarter, I was as busy as ever!

In the skip section: Sadly, Korea really dominated this category last season, starting with Blossom Campus. Honestly, this was the biggest disappointment this season for me. This was my–the Korean independent team Strongberry, who I normally love—they released a full length Kdrama that, I don’t understand how it went so wrong. The story is about a university transfer student who works at the library and ends up in a few interactions with a taekwondo major and they fall for each other. It was boring, the story didn’t really flow, the chemistry was flat.The only good thing I can say for it is that when they do kiss, they kiss well. But it was not worth watching to get there.This was the least queer Strongberry has ever felt, and to add insult to injury it ends on a cliffhanger. This is a pass from me, friends.

Love is Like a Cat. Mew of the newly public MewTul relationship stars in this hybrid Thai/Korean production that did not manage to retain the good qualities of either country. It is bad. And not even in a fun way. The premise is a famous Thai actor is blackmailed into doing a Korean reality series in which he has to work in a dog cafe, despite being afraid of dogs. That sounds like it would be cute and fun, and somehow it was neither. Poor acting, cinematography, chemistry, story, everything was mid. Also, content warning for animal death—way to alienate your target audience.

Gray Shelter was a Korean short series that barely felt like BL? Honestly, it was trying to walk a trauma narrative and BL line and I don’t think it did that successfully. The romance felt rushed and the trauma part felt like it was being sad for the sake of sad rather than having anything to actually say about trauma. Also had another cliffhanger ending. Not my fav.

Moving away from Korea, Lady Boy Friends is a show that has a high barrier to enjoyment, so judge for yourself. It’s a remake from 2015 and the premise is an ensemble show in an all boys high school in which a good percentage of the cast are actually trans girls in an all boys school. There is a lot of infighting amongst the trans women, they are extremely catty and mean and clique-y to each other. That part I honestly found kind of fun, and I did enjoy them banding together against a common enemy. Unfortunately that common enemy is another trans girl who is looked down on for transitioning “late” which calls her authenticity into question. This show also has sexual assault played as comedy which is honestly the main reason why it’s in this section; there was also a gay couple who got the bulk of the focus in the last few episodes, and while that storyline will likely be the most appealing to this audience, I didn’t particularly like that the trans characters got short shrift in their own show, so. I didn’t fully love it.

Kiseki Chapter 2. This was a production by 9NAA. They have a history of not paying and exploiting their actors, and they’ve done it too many times, so I didn’t watch this one. Pay your actors and hire intimacy coaches and then I’ll talk about your shows.

The last one in this section is actually a GL Thai channel that I wanted to shout out. It’s just not to my taste, but I don’t like gatekeeping GL ‘cause there’s so little of it and it’s so hard to find. So, if you’re a fan of the melodrama and older, toxic relationship type tropes, give these guys a try. Last quarter they put out “Friend with Benefits the series” and “Sea [as in S-E-A] you soon”, and my favorite of the three was “You Are My Star the series” which I enjoyed because it retread a lot of BL tropes so I watched it and played, sort of, spot the BL parallels. JPC Media Channel on YouTube.

Now onto the shows that you might actually want to consider. There were a few genre BLs this season that were varying degrees of hit or miss so I’ve grouped them together. I love genre stories, so I don’t want to be too harsh on shows that push the boundaries of the BL genre, but all of these had at least one fatal flaw that makes me not able to recommend them without caveats.

Memory in the Letter is a Thai BL sci-fi/fantasy in which a student falls in love with a stranger in the mirror. This is a short series that had real high highs and low lows for me, including some of the best chemistry across a pane of glass I’ve ever seen. But also, the ending was so poorly handled that I had to call poor Ben to watch with me just so that I’d have someone to share my psychic damage with. Without spoiling anything, this show involves an age gap with actors not age-appropriately cast to hide the fact that the age gap is so large? It also doesn’t treat the age gap seriously or engage with the very serious problems that it raises in its own plot, and I found that very frustrating. So. Make your own choices on that one.

1000 Years Old the series. This show is a Thai vampire show that spends the first three quarters being an extremely low stakes series in which a vampire owns a pork blood soup stand and a glorious umbrella collection, and is in love with a man obsessed with searching for alien life. It is exactly as silly as it sounds. But then the last few episodes everything turns into intense melodrama, and I’m going to spoil this because I don’t know how not to: We find out that the vampire stays friendly with another vampire who murdered his human lover across multiple lifetimes. I was vibing and then I was really not.

Two Worlds is another Thai series, and a MaxNat vehicle. The premise of this one is as it says on the tin: There are two parallel universes connected by a glowing body of water. Our protagonist loses his love interest and travels to the parallel universe accidentally while grieving, to realize he has the chance to save his boyfriend’s doppelganger in this new world. While he does that, he finds himself falling for someone else instead. This series is a relatively slow burn show. Whoever made this show, they did the most bewilderingly good job of undercutting every dramatic moment so that it had no stakes or impact that I’ve ever seen. This show was almost impressively boring considering how much was happening at any given moment. I liked that it seemed to be saying people weren’t interchangeable, but then in the end the show undermined its own message. Watching this show was informative for learning about pacing and how narrative tension works or doesn’t in shows.

Last in this section is The Spirealm. This is a chinese danmei adaptation that we almost didn’t get because of censorship; it was heavily adapted so that rather than magic, the core of the unnatural happenings are a Virtual Reality video game in which our leads have to puzzle through dangerous mysteries to figure out the secrets of each level. It’s fun in an “oh this does feel like a video game” kinda way, and I enjoyed puzzling through the mysteries alongside the leads. But the mysteries drag on too long and they’re repetitive, and the ending of the book is actually really undermined from the adaptation choices. Also, if you’re watching for romance subtext, this is a VERY tame story even for censored cdrama. They barely touch, the shipping moments are few and far between in a long series. So, be forewarned.

Moving away from the supernatural and back to more standard QL fare, A Secretly Love. This felt like a very old-school Thai series, a feeling that was helped by the horrifically bad subtitles; about an engineering student who has been in love with this senior for years and watched him fail miserably at romance over and over. This heavily relies on the viewer enjoying the lead pining over someone who treats him badly for most of the series. So, in order to enjoy this, you have to find someone showing affection by being grumpy, rude, jealous, and demanding cute. No judgment, just giving you the information you need to no. Worth watching if you’re nostalgic for 2020s Thai BL.

Please Teach Me This is a vertical-format microseries from Korea about an aspiring idol trying to attend college that you have to grind through ads in order to watch. Honestly the series was fine, very middle-of-the-road KBL, but the microseries format and the barriers to watching make it not worth sitting through, in my opinion.

Blank the Series is a Thai GL is in the same universe as GAP, so if you miss Sam and Mon the characters, they do appear, though portrayed by different actresses. The main couple in this story have a 16-year age gap and the romance starts when the younger one is in high school, though due to plot reasons she’s of age. I know that’s a barrier for some, so I wanted to mention it off the jump, especially because she acts young. That’s the part that I actually struggled with most. This story is very lakorn-like in terms of it being very high melodrama; it also, especially in part two, gets quite sexy. The height difference is also really something. It’s in two parts and both are complete, it does have a happy ending with a cute timeskip. So, you know, manage yourselves on that one.

Jazz For Two. High school Korean music BL in which the main couple really fell flat for me and the side couple were a bully-turned-love-interest that I also really did not enjoy. This show tried to incorporate internalized homophobia as part of its main storyline but didn’t engage with characters overcoming it, so everyone feels kind of like they suddenly switch from being in a drama to a romance and it was both jarring and honestly, a little offensive. Trigger warnings are also important for this one, so take care of yourselves if you’re deciding to watch it.

Boys Be Brave. Another KBL in which a man who can’t say no tries to get the person with a crush on him to ask him out, to no avail. This felt like it was trying to be a manic pixie dream boy meets an autistic-coded grump, but they didn’t quite calibrate either of those characters right. The side couple also ended up landing kind of badly in terms of class politics. But it was pretty, and they were cute. I actually had fun with this one despite everything I just said.

Deep Night is a Thai BL in which the son of a club owner is against the host/club business model until he falls for one of his mother’s hosts. He decides to start working there to get closer to him. You might imagine that a setup like that would involve class and power politics, but you would be wrong! That being said, this show has a lot to recommend it: The main couple has great chemistry and the side couple is a canonical throuple, and there is another side couple of older sapphics to enjoy, as well. It is also very prettily shot.

Lastly, Close Friend 3: Soju Bomb is a beautifully shot and cute friendship drama, another Thai/Korean joint series this time about Thai boys in a Korean band who go on a bender in Korea after their contract is canceled. Honestly, my only caveat about this show is that it is absolutely not a BL. There isn’t a romance subplot at all in this show. I spent the entire time it aired so confused waiting for the romance to appear! It does not. If it hadn’t been advertised as Close Friend 3–a series which was previously all BL shorts–I would have enjoyed this for what it was. As it stands, I hold a grudge for being misled. Go in knowing what you’re getting and you’ll be fine.

Finally, let’s get to the shows that you might have missed that I actually recommend. To Be Continued, a Thai second chance romance of a famous person and a doctor who were friends when they were in high school. This one tells a lot of the story in flashbacks that are poorly paced at the beginning, so the start of the show really drags. But the reveal for why they broke up was satisfying. The pacing is the barrier in this one–if you can power through the first few episodes it ends up being a good little show. They have great chemistry, the story holds together, and I had fun.

Gym Affairs is an absolutely bonkers but cute mainland China BL in which a guy gets a personal trainer and sparks fly. This show is a silly comedy that is also surprisingly earnest. It goes by extremely fast and I really enjoyed the ride. That one’s on YouTube.

Blue Boys/Lonely Girl. SUKFilm is a Korean YouTube channel putting out short series. Blue Boys was a little disappointing, the couple had too many issues that they cycled through so fast. The GL though, Lonely Girl, was much more focused with a single main problem between the couple and so it worked much better. And both are really beautifully shot and have some great kisses.

Fake Buddies is another YouTube miniseries. It’s a 7 episode Korean series about a girl and guy who are dating, ostensibly, but really both using the other as a beard because they’re both in a gay relationship. The first few episodes are very funny comedy as the two of them try to make the other realize what’s happening; and then we get prequel episodes for how the gay couple and the lesbian couple both came to be. It’s a fun use of 45 minutes on the guynextdoor YouTube channel if you’re bored.

To the X Who Hated Me is a Korean GL produced by Red Q. It’s a series of microseries, there’s two out so far with 2-3 episodes each. They’re both GL and solid short second chance romances that are very fun.

City of Stars is the last one I’ll be talking about. It’s, in my opinion, the best hidden gem QL from this quarter. A charming celebrity/regular guy romance that tackles shipping, toxic fans, and the unreasonable expectations on people in the spotlight. Acting is a little rough, and it’s not perfect, but it had some really good things to say and it very smartly sandwiches those things among some pretty good sex scenes. The two leads are my communication kings. And there’s some decent trans side rep as well. This show really uses BL as a vehicle for having something to say and I appreciate it. And the story really holds together in a way that’s a little refreshing in Thai BL, too, so I really liked it.

And that’s the dispatch for this quarter! Thanks again for having me.

00:14:25 Spotlight: Tadaima Okaeri

Ben

It's time to talk about my favorite show of the season that no one else watched except for Twig. [NiNi laughs] We're going to talk about an animated BL from Japan called Tadaima, Okaeri. It is the best show of the season and I'm begging you, please, to go watch this show.

Tadaima, Okaeri is a 12 episode BL from Studio Deen that aired on Crunchyroll. Studio Deen is actually fairly important in the BL space. Pretty much all of the BL anime that we're probably going to recommend to you offhand was produced by the studio. In this particular one, they're adapting a manga series about a gay couple in the omegaverse that is trying to raise their kid in the suburbs. Our protagonist's name Fujiyoshi Masaki, that is actually his name, and his husband, Hiromu. Masaki is an omega, his husband is an alpha, and they have a son named Hikari together. He is a little baby and they are living in the burbs away from everybody else because they had a very difficult time getting together.

The show was not so much about the difficulties these two had getting together, it's about them building a life that they love and are happy with after going through what they did. So, like, this is your favorite leads, married and trying to raise their family now and working on healing some of the relationships that were damaged over the course of them getting together. There's a great deal of healing and growth in this. There's healing between Hiromu and his dad, who was not keen on their romance in the first place. There's the fact that these two guys love each other and love being parents. I am very often amused by how much my dad is still obsessed with my mom. And I really liked seeing that in a gay couple here. It was really restorative in a lot of ways, ‘cause we don't ever really see dads in BL.

This show was so healing. This was such a peaceful experience of a show to watch. What I like the most out of fluffy shows like this is for there to be a nice arc about what life we’re building for our family and a strong thematic thrust of, we're not trying to get back at anybody who hurt us. We just want our kid to grow up in a world where he—and eventually their daughter too—are loved by the people around them. Each episode was about a specific sort of challenge that the family was facing, and some of them were really huge. Like, how are we going to reconcile with the kids’ grandfather who wants to be part of his grandson's life? Even if it's something as small as, Hikaru is getting older and he wants to run an errand. Okay, we're going to let him deliver a letter to his grandfather to the mailbox, and getting a two year old to deliver something [laughs] successfully to a mailbox was a production unto itself, because he kept getting distracted.

It was genuinely one of the most delightful and wholesome experiences I have ever had in the genre. I have said for a long time that I've wanted a married gay dads show. I was not expecting it to come from the omegaverse of all places, but this was everything I ever hoped it could be and honestly, so much more. If you can handle omegaverse nonsense, including mpreg and the alpha omega pheromone shit, and rutting behavior. This is one of the best shows I have ever seen.

Shan

Oof. [Ben laughs] You just said so many words that upset me.

Ben

I know. I know!

[all laugh]

NiNi

I was like, “if you can handle” I can handle none of those things. I'm sorry.

Ben

If you're gonna be in genre, you gotta take your shit seriously, and I think that's why it worked. This show was not embarrassed about being an omegaverse show. It's not like [funny voice] we're going to do this in omegaverse because we know the girls will fucking show up for it. It took the conceits of its own genre seriously and incorporated it into the emotional context of their characters.

And so like I totally get it, mpreg is not easy for a lot of people. The rutting behavior stuff, it's not easy for some people. The way that omegaverse is used to perpetuate some of the heteronormative kinds of misogyny that women face is not for everyone, truly and sincerely. When I say that these are caveats to watching this, I am not being funny. These are real things that are being dealt with in this show, but they're not half-assing it. These are not normally things I enjoy. Tell a good story and take your shit seriously and we can show up for it. And that's what happened for me here.

So, I wholeheartedly recommend this show, but I do think it's important to not downplay that this is very legitimately an omegaverse story.

Shan

I appreciate that.

Ben

It's a 10, baby! Perfect execution of its own premise, and genuinely, it's the kinda show that was so fun to watch with other people.

Shan

I have been so intrigued by the conversation around this show and I really regret that it has so many of my hard lines in it [laughs[ because I would like to see it. I don't think I'll be able to, but I have heard nothing but praise and love from the people who've watched it.

Ben

I love the show with my whole heart. I do not recommend it at all. [Ben and NiNi laugh] This show had really strong ideas and it wore its whole heart on its sleeves the whole time. Mm mm mm. What an experience. Great show.

00:20:32 Girl, You Tried

Ben

Let's hand out our favorite award on the show: Girl, You Tried.

NiNi

Our nominees this season for a Girl, You Tried are Unknown the series from Taiwan, Love is Better the Second Time Around from Japan, and Living With Him from Japan. Does anybody wanna do propaganda here?

Ben

Ooh…

Shan

Let's start with reminding folks how we think about Girl, You Tried.

Ben

The Girl, You Tried for me is meant to reflect on a production that missed the mark, but we felt like the core work and the intent was there to actually do something good, and for whatever reason stumbled.

Shan

There's different ways that shows can stumble. There are shows that can be very well told and very confident up to a point, and then a mistake is made that is hard to recover from. There are shows that never quite nailed what they were trying to do, but did clearly have aspirations. There are shows that have a solid idea of at least the beginning and endpoints and something in the middle just got messy. So, those are different categories of ways that shows can go sideways. And all of these different ways came up in this season.

For me, a show like Unknown is not a Girl, You Tried because they actually did succeed at what they were doing for the vast majority of their run. So I wouldn't call that a Girl, You Tried. They made a mistake right at the end—and it was a big mistake—but their level of execution was so good through most of the show that I can't really consider that a Girl, You Tried.

For our two Japanese BLs here, Love is Better was really solid through about the first four episodes, and then it kind of veered off in a very strange direction that I still don't really understand why that happened. Versus Living With Him had a solid start, had a pretty decent end point that it was trying to get towards, and then got kind of messed up along the way trying to stretch out the story.

So for me I think I would want to give the Girl, You Tried to Living With Him out of these three, because I do think they had the bones of a good story. They executed parts of it really well. But in their effort to stretch it out into a longer format than the story really supported, they kind of lost track of some of their threads and got a little confused in the way that they landed at the end. So for me that one makes more sense as a Girl, You Tried because I see what they were trying to do. And I think that they just made some execution errors that got in the way.

Ben

An interesting analysis; one I will be pondering. It feels mean to say that Unknown is a Girl, You Tried because they rushed to their sex scene. It ignores how good the family story was around all of that, but I am also torn now if I'm going to choose between Love is Better and Living With Him because I feel like my angst for Living With Him is it doesn't release the implied sexual tension that really irritated me more than anything else, which Love is Better absolutely did.

Man, this is hard.

Shan

Have we ever had a Girl, You Tried tie?

Ben

We have not.

NiNi

There's usually a fairly clear cut winner once we talk about it, but I think part of the problem is that Love is Better and Living With Him sort of failed in similar ways, so it's hard to choose.

Ben

If I have to choose between the two of them, Love is Better the Second Time Around knew exactly what it was doing and it made very bad choices, and there's a difference between making stupid choices and struggling against something you couldn't do, in my opinion. I will give it to Living With Him because there's so much hang time, it's overly reliant on actor charm to hold itself together, and I do like how well the cast was able to hold this flimsy project together.

I think weaker actors would have made this a more irritating experience than it was, as opposed to just being kind of disappointing. So if I'm backed into a corner and have to choose [Shan laughs], it's going to be Living With Him.

Shan

[laughs] You do. Good job.

NiNi

Oh no, I'm about to throw a spanner in the works because I'm going to go for Love Is Better. [laughs]

Shan

This is very exciting! This is Conversation pod history!

Ben

Go ahead, give us your reasoning.

NiNi

For me, the original premise of Girl, You Tried was always ‘a strong idea that failed in the execution,’ and I feel like the ideas from Love is Better were stronger to me than the ideas in Living With Him, just in terms of, A, what I was interested in seeing and, B, what they wanted to do. I feel like those ideas were stronger in Love is Better. So the failure of the execution part is not the part that I'm looking at in terms of comparing the two, but the strength of the premise part.

Ben

Because both of these shows had really strong gay themes in them that I was really compelled by, I am going to allow them to tie and both get a Girl, You Tried, because I think both these shows were trying to do something really cool. I think by episode 3 and 4 both of these shows, I was like, “This show's got something in it. This is a real contender!” And then it was like, “Oh no, what happened, girl? Come on.” [laughs]

NiNi

So our first ever Girl, You Tried tie! Girls, you both tried.

Ben

Congratulations to Japan for getting your first Girl, You Tried awards.

NiNi

Is it?

Shan

And the double at that! Japan, always overachieving.

[Ben and NiNi laugh]

00:27:02 Celebrating 50 Episodes

NiNi

I think we have exorcized the demon of the summer, so let's wrap this up. We are wrapping our summer lagniappe and wrapping our summer season. See you in dot-dot-dot weeks for our fall season beginning as soon as I can get my shit together and edit.

Shan

NiNi, should we shout out that this is the 50th episode of the podcast?

Ben

Oh shit!

NiNi

[gasp] Oh my God, we didn't even talk about that! Yes, congratulate us, guys. This is episode number 50 for The Conversation!

Ben

Oh my God. [air horn sound]

Shan

There ya go.

Ben

If you are one of our listeners who has listened to us talk for all 50 episodes, please—

Shan

Wow.

Ben

—shout us out on Tumblr. I would love to talk to you and see how you're feeling about what we're doing after all this time.

Shan

You're a trooper if you actually did that.

NiNi

[laughs] Please, please, please. If you love us and you're hearing this, we are 50 episodes old today. Send us a note. Either send us a note on Tumblr if you know how to do that, or send us something in the Spotify down below—whatever…answer the thing thing.

Ben

[laughs] In the doobly-doo.

NiNi

Listen, okay? Auntie's old, okay? She don't remember what things are called.

We out! Say bye to the people, Shan.

Shan

Bye, people!

NiNi

Ben, say bye to the people.

Ben

Peace.