#making media queer on the bog

[frogyourbog]

okay here is my (tentative) list of non-mainstream queer media if you want to watch more queer things:

(these are going to be tv shows & movies, books and musicals are a whole other thing)

netflix:

fear street part 1: 1994 (movie)

fear street part 2: 1974 (movie)

fear street part 3: 1666 (movie)

the half of it (movie)

everything sucks! (tv)

one day at a time (tv)

youtube:

the outcoming (short film)

thanks to her (short film)

starburst (short film)

carmilla (tv)

but i’m a cheerleader (movie)

this is just where i watched these things (in the us) no idea if they’re still there sorry

there is so much more that belongs on this list that i will add as i think of them, add your favorites i will try and keep things updated

live laugh love indie queer media thank you for your time

[bengiyo]

An Apology to The Miracle of Teddy Bear

I finally caught up with a show that was inaccessible for a long time, and also bogged down in bad-faith fan reporting, at the insistence of @lurkingshan, @twig-tea, and later @wen-kexing-apologist. A few months ago, Shan and Twig wrote about how The Miracle of Teddy Bear Saved the Gays to push back on the false narrative that the show buried the gays and forced the lead to marry a woman, and also about how it contains incisive social commentary about a Thai gay man. I won't reiterate what they said in their excellent essay, but I do want to pick up from my Apology to Ossan's Love and The Novelist to talk about going back for shows you missed.

When this show first began airing in the spring of 2022, it was completely inaccessible in the West. I remember seeing rumors at the time that the show was withheld from international distribution due to its critical themes about Thai society, and I was curious about how a show about how a guy falls in love with his teddy bear that comes to life could be causing such consternation. After the show ended, I also remember seeing discontented commentary about the end of the show's ending that turned out to be patently false.

Now that I've actually seen the show, I want to briefly gush about the things I loved in this show.

Job Thuchapon Imbues Nut With A Complex Humanity Rarely Afforded Gay Characters in the BL Sphere

As I was finishing the show last night, I commented to my friends that Job might be one of the most beautiful people I've encountered in Thai queer media, and I think it's because his performance as Nut feels recognizably human. I'm convinced it's because this was a drama with humanist goals that was able to avoid prioritizing romance as its key outcome. As such, Nut becomes one of the best expressions of the traumatized artist trying to do something with his pain in his art that I've ever been blessed to see.

Nut is dealing with intense family trauma from his father's homophobia, his mother's silence and impotence on the matter, and the social circumstances around his life. He's a man with deep anger at his mom and father, who is also tasked with being the breadwinner for his household because his mom is mentally ill. Moreover, his hateful aunt lives next door to only make their lives worse. Nut is an extremely lonely but talented writer who wants to make something more than a standard BL prioritizing romance, cuteness, and product placement.

Most importantly for me, Nut is so unabashedly gay in a way that I also found extremely believable. He's the kind of gay that's not exactly hiding who he is, but isn't going to go out of his way to blast it to everyone. He's not afraid to hold a man's hand in public, but he's also just going to ignore the female coworker who can't take a hint. On top of that, the gays have sex in this show! The show uses so many useful tools to show us that Nut and Tofu have sex without needing to do a lot of bed scenes. I deeply appreciated this.

Inn Sarin Makes The Teddy Bear Role Into a Meaningful Exploration of the Nature of Humanity and Kindness

I originally worried that Inn was here just to be beautiful (he is), and that his character would just be a joke (it most certainly wasn't). Instead, what I got was a character whose innocence allowed us as viewers to explore some heavy moral dilemmas that a simple view of human nature could not accommodate. By the end of the show I was screaming into the chat that "He's only a bear!" because none of the problems he faced were simple.

Tofu, through his interactions with the other inanimate objects in the house experiences incredibly growth over the show, and learns that loving a human as a human is far more complicated than loving them as a teddy bear. He's faced with difficult challenges around Nut's mom's health issues, Nut's family troubles, and even his own jealousy of Nut's childhood love. Inn's affect as Tofu matures as Tofu becomes more familiar with human nuance, which is contrasted so well by the flashbacks with his dead human doppelganger.

This Show Completed Every Thread it Established

This may not seem like an important thing to highlight, but it's so rare for shows to actually do this, especially when they're this complex. I have massive respect for screenwriter Prapt and the team around him, because it's so rare that I enjoy a final episode of a Thai drama. I was openly weeping at the resolution of a thread I thought was forgotten in the finale.

This show had much to say about speaking truth to power, and how the powerful wield death as a weapon. It had much to say about how internalized homophobia expresses in gay men in different ways. It took its mental health themes seriously. It also humanized its villains in a way that makes them some of cruelest I've seen on screen in a long time. It also shows how important community support systems are, especially the role elder gays play in your life. Most importantly, I loved that this show didn't insist that everyone has to hang out and be friendly with everyone who ever hurt them, even if it values getting closure from much-needed apologies.

Conclusion: This Show Has Everything

This show really is something special, and I recommend going on YouTube and watching it. It's a long watch, but it's one of the most rewarding viewing experiences I've had from Thailand in the last decade. I'm also convinced that I have to take learning Thai more seriously, because if Prapt's writing is this tight, I have serious doubts about what we got from The Eclipse. Any Thai people following me, please let me know if you get around to reading the book The Eclipse is based on so you can talk to me about what you experienced from Prapt's pen directly.

[olderthannetfic]

the reason bbc sherlock was called queerbaiting was all the jokes in canon they made about the characters being gay. i would personally consider that queerbaiting even if i never thought it was an intentional false promise, because it felt like an intentional bid for queer/shipper attention, or at least exploitation of the existance of the queer headcanons for the source material. and later they were literally baiting in the troll sense by mocking fans. or perhaps i just spent too many years reading this tjlc blog i accidentally followed??? house md had a similar sort of "theyre basically queer but not" thing going but the tone was more oblivious to the idea that actual gay people might be watching. my point is, in my experience, "queerbaiting" doesnt literally mean the producers were definitely trying to get gay money, its more of an exploitative representation thing.

--

LOL.

Dude, that's every show that finds its m/m shippers annoying. Mistaken-for-gay jokes where the "funny" part is "Ha ha, that would never happen" are all over media.

This isn't exploitative representation if you look at it from outside the echo chamber of tjlc land: It is bog standard homophobic jokes that shows for cishet dudes make all the time.

Yes, one of the creators of Sherlock is gay, but this type of humor is so standard that I cannot read it on Sherlock as anything but the usual where the presumed audience of the joke is mostly cishet dudes. I really do not think it makes sense to read it as a bid for queer and/or shipper attention.

Look at how S1 of Sherlock relates to Holmesiana: there's a gag about the nature of Watson's wound. Later, we get Schrodinger's Irene who may or may not be dead. There are tons of these blatant references to older Holmes fandom that were instantly recognizable.

Given that, I would expect a joke aimed more squarely at Holmes/Watson headcanons to make at least some reference to Watson Was a Woman.

I'm sure they were aware of past speculation, but I don't think they were engaging with it all that deeply. The jokes just seemed like the usual Hardy Har Har My Lead Would Never Be Gay stuff.

The problem with TJLC analysis was that it always made me think the blogger's first experience with Holmes—and possibly with any media at all—was BBC Sherlock.

[the-conversation-pod]

Fall and Winter 2024 Mailbag Grab Bag

AND WE'RE BACK!

Because we got bogged down in life stuff for the back half of the year, we built up more than a few questions in our inbox. Come listen to us talk about genre fatigue, our thoughts on the BL Bubble, and an hour-long discussion about sex scenes.

Timestamps

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

00:00:00 - Welcome 00:01:15 - Introduction 00:02:10 - Inbox: Surprises of the Season 00:07:07 - Inbox: Does Categorization Matter? 00:11:42 - Inbox: BL Fatigue? 00:15:51 - Inbox: The BL Bubble 00:30:26 - Inbox: Sex On Screen 00:41:07 - Inbox: Fave Sex Scenes 00:51:24 - Inbox: Worst Sex Scenes 01:04:24 - Bonus Round: Best Sex in a Bad Show 01:06:54 - Inbox: Critical Philosophy 01:18:31 - Outro

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.

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 Introduction

Ben 

And we're back. It has been so long since we've been in the booth together. We are getting to our asks like a regular Tumblr blog—six months late. 

NiNi 

Sounds about right? Yep. 

Ben 

We appreciate all of you for being patient with us. It has been a very difficult half year for me and NiNi, but we did get your questions and we did answer them. So sit back and relax and I think we've got, like, an hour of answers for you guys. 

NiNi 

Almost two hours bestie. 

Ben 

Oh my God! It is what it is. Shan will be joining us for these, so you will get to enjoy her lovely voice and insights. We will see you in the questions. 

00:02:33 - Inbox: Surprises of the Season

NiNi

Let's start with the inbox. Shan, you wanna take us in?

Shan

All right. First question today comes from @wen-kexing-apologist, and they write: “Which show was the biggest surprise, positive or negative, for you this season and what made it surprising?”

Ben

Biggest surprise positive is definitely Tadaima, Okaeri. I was not expecting to love an omegaverse project this much. I was not really expecting to love a show that relied heavily on a toddler to be one of my favorite shows, either. I had such a blast with that. 

My biggest surprise negative… I think it's 23.5. I was not expecting that show to feel as disjointed as it was. I was not expecting Fon’s show to have the problems it was gonna have in it at all. I was not expecting perfect, but I was not expecting the confusion I felt from that show. 

Ben

All right, Shan, biggest surprises of the season for you?

Shan

I'll start positive. I will shout out Unknown. I did not expect a high quality Taiwanese BL to fall out of the sky and it was quite a delight for me. That show gave me some proper brain rot for a while. I immediately went out and read the novel and I was super into the weekly discussions. That was a super positive experience, even though the end of the show was a little bit disappointing. 

On the negative end, it was kind of a rough season [laugh], so there are so many I could talk about, but I wanna give a special spotlight to one of the most baffling shows I've ever seen in my life. It's called Love Is Like A Cat, and—

NiNi

[laughs] You watched that?!

Ben

Man.

Shan

[laughs] I did watch it, bestie! I did, I watched every single episode. 

NiNi

Oh noooo.

Ben

Oh my…

Shan

So, Love Is Like A Cat was this Korean and Thai BL collaboration. It wasn't the first time that happened, but it was promoted as if it was gonna be kind of a big deal. I always watch Korean BL and I'm very interested in these cross-country collaborations so I went in, not necessarily expecting a show of all time, but thinking that it would be an interesting project that would maybe make some [laughs] interesting connections across those cultural traditions. No, that is not what happened. 

I was baffled every single week of that show about what it thought it was doing and why. The basic premise is that this Thai actor is afraid of dogs and he has to, for career reasons, go on this reality show where he works at an animal shelter. 

The thing about this show that is amazing is that they completely neglected the actual romance between the humans. There was never any point where you believed that these two people liked each other. But the love story between this actor and the dog that he was afraid of was [laughs] actually kind of touching?

NiNi

Oh no.

Shan

But also extremely poorly executed. One of the weirdest experiences of my life, I don't understand how that project got made. I can tell that the people who made it were similarly very disappointed with how it turned out because nobody promoted it. They really tried to release it as quietly as possible, and none of the actors in it talked about it. 

One of the weirdest flops I have seen, just kind of a big what the fuck to me, like, how did that happen? How did this get made this way? Why was the story about the dog the best part of the show? It was a strange one.

Ben

I'm just gonna go watch the end of Homeward Bound instead.

[all laugh]

Shan

I do recommend, I think you'll be better off if you're looking for good dog content.

NiNi

Wasn't there a Vietnamese cat BL that like—

Ben

We're not gonna talk about it.

[NiNi laughs]

Shan

That one was also real fuckin’ weird. Choco Milk Shake did something cool, and then a lot of other people thought they could get in on that, and no, they cannot. They need to stop.

Ben

Speaking of Korean BL and surprise disappointments, Boys Be Brave is also my near second disappointment, because that was from the director who did Our Dating Sim. So I went into that one super positively disposed towards it and did not have a great time.

NiNi

Well for me, hmm, in terms of things that surprised me positively, even though Love is Better the Second Time Around did not end well, I still was quite surprised by how well the first two-thirds of it held up. 

Negative surprise. Yeah. I gotta agree with Ben. It's definitely 23.5. I was anticipating this so much and I expected it to be good. And it just wasn't. And I don't want to say much more about it, ‘cause I think I said a lot about it on its own episode.

00:07:07 - Inbox: Does Categorization Matter?

NiNi

Okay, Shan, what's our next question? 

Shan

Next question from @avorbl. How much has the categorization of My Strawberry Film as romance by Gaga, MDL, etc. influenced your reception and rating?

Ben

[laughs] This is such a shady fucking question.

NiNI

I have not watched this one so y'all have to tell me, why is it shady?

Ben

My Strawberry Film is the final outing from Drama Shower. In both seasons of Drama Shower I believe they attempted to do something original. The MBS team decided to do kind of like an indie coming of age type of film, but over the course of eight weeks, 23 minutes at a time… and it was boring as hell. What avor, I believe, is hinting at here is that they released it as a romance. The BL viewing audience is going to be invested in this boy’s closeted crush on his closest male friend and maybe navigating the drama of his friend having a crush on a mysterious girl who shows up. And then there's a second girl who has a crush on our gay boy and they have to sort all of this out. 

There could have been some interesting stuff here, particularly because mystery girl might be queer? But, it's boring and it's moody in ways that film types like me can enjoy at a film festival, but not over the course of eight weeks. I don't mind a moody film that just hangs out in teenage malaise for a good 90 minutes. That can be an interesting emotional experience, but My Strawberry Film, being billed as a romance was extremely frustrating because none of the romances are really compelling and none of them succeed in a way that was interesting. It just was not what we thought we were signing up for, and because we were constantly out of alignment with it, it was a deeply unsatisfying experience. 

I know Shan suffered through this with me. Shan, any commentary you wanna offer here?

Shan

I watch a lot of drama across all different genres. I can get down with a lot of different types of stories. So for me, the main problem with this show is not that it was miscategorized. The main problem with it is that it fucking sucked. 

The entire thing is designed to leave you unsatisfied in a way that I don't actually think supported its themes or ultimately delivered a message that was aligned with it being hosted on a queer platform. There was a backstory with one of the characters’ mothers who had had these feelings for her female best friend that she thought were unrequited. She met a tragic end. She died. Later in the show we find out that her best friend regrets and did return her feelings. 

So, in this show about everybody liking somebody who doesn't like them back and a bunch of one-sided loves that all end in failure, the only requited love story was with the dead person who was not alive to know that her love was requited. I don't know what the show was trying to say with that. But what they communicated with the way that the story played out was that being queer is lonely and miserable and destined to end in despair. And I found that just such an [laughs] offensive message in a show—

Ben

It sucked!

Shan

—that was part of Drama Shower. I was like, what the fuck is this? On top of all of that, it also was just so fucking boring. It was such a slog, but because it was part of Drama Shower, some of us hung in there trying to see what it was trying to do, trying to understand how it belonged in this line up of projects. I do not know what the person who created this was trying to say, or if they thought they were saying something different than what ultimately was communicated by their story, but I hated it. Blech.

Ben

And that's all we're gonna say about that. It was an ignoble end for a very cool project.

00:11:42 - Inbox: BL Fatigue?

Shan

Let me change moods. This is from @mynameisnotthepoint and they write “Hi. First of all, I really enjoyed the spring season of the podcast. My question is: because BL is so big now and many of us are experiencing fatigue with some of the stories being told, is there a type of premise or trope or genre in BL that you find yourself gravitating towards, and if so, why?”

Ben

I'm gonna unpack the question a little bit. I am not experiencing fatigue necessarily, with familiarity with BL, I'm experiencing fatigue with BL consistently ending on a shit note. [laughs] I just desperately need them to just take any premise that they're trying to tackle seriously and complete it within the expectations of the character motivations that they're committed to or, but hopefully and, the narrative that they're trying to set up. I just desperately need the shows to be good more often than they are. It is so frustrating that so many of these shows just veer off of whatever course that they try to set us on. Some of them for commercial reasons, some of them for “look how clever I am reasons.” I don't really know, I just really need these shows to stop shitting the bed and I would be less tired. 

As for what I find myself gravitating towards, I am far more interested in queer life drama that also features romance than I am in queer romance in and of itself. 

Shan, you watch too many dramas!

Shan

Mmm.

Ben

[laughs] What type of premise, trope, or genre are you drawn to in BL currently?

Shan

Similar to you, Ben, it's not really about the genre or the premise for me. I can watch a good story about just about anything. So for me, it's really not about what the concept is, it's about how it's executed. My great frustration right now with a lot of the BL I'm watching is I feel like the story is the lowest priority. So many of these shows are more about promoting something, whether that be an actor or a couple or a brand, more than they're about telling good stories. And that's where my frustration lies. 

I will take anything you wanna throw at me. Give me all of your ideas. Give me all of your concepts. I will watch the same basic formulaic romcom eight billion times if you execute it well. I will also watch your super out there weird idea if you execute it well. For me it's just about the execution, so, I just really wanna see BL that cares about story. I wanna see BLs that understand that you need good writing to have a good story. That's where my hopes are right now for the genre.

Ben

NiNi, where are you sitting on this?

NiNi

I think I'm sittin’ in the corner with Shan. I am not somebody who gets fatigued by watching the same thing over and over if it's done really well. So, it's not a question of premises or tropes or genres fatiguing me. It's a question of things needing to be executed. On some level, I do enjoy rewriting [laughs] some of these shots in my head after the fact, especially if the premise was strong to begin with, but I am also kind of annoyed that I have to do it in my head and I don't get to see it on the screen. 

So, what I find myself gravitating towards? Something that's well done and written all the way to the end. That would be nice. I just wanna tell everybody: stop trying to be surprising or water cooler worthy and just write a solid show. 

00:15:51 - Inbox: The BL Bubble

Shan 

Okay, next question! @troubled-mind writes: “I very much enjoy shows that exist in a so-called bubble, let's say Our Dating Sim, and those that firmly don't, like the brilliant Marahuyo Project. Still, I feel like there are cases of shows that want to have a cake and eat a cake in that regard. Keep things on the lighter side as if in a bubble, but also try tackling queer issues like homophobia and prejudice at the same time. This just doesn't sit right with me sometimes. So my question is: what do you think is the most challenging aspect for creators when they attempt to get outside the bubble? And what potential misdeeds would you still forgive and which are too much to overlook?” 

NiNi 

Ben, you wanna go first or last? 

Ben 

Probably last ‘cause I feel like I'm gonna go on a rant. [all laugh] We talked about this a lot on the show and I'm probably gonna rehash a lot. Before I dominate the conversation on this, I think I wanna get some of your reactions first, NiNi. 

NiNi 

Hmm, let's see, what is the most challenging aspect for creators when they attempt to get outside of the bubble? I think tone is a big part of it. I think that's probably the thing that suffers most with, especially creators who are accustomed to working inside of the bubble, trying to either straddle it or work outside of it. They don't get the tone of what they're doing quite right. And it's not to say that it can't be, you know, light hearted or comedic or all of that. But it does, if you're going outside of the bubble, need to feel queer. And it doesn't always do that. 

What potential misdeeds would I forgive? Ooh [laughs]. 

Ben 

Be honest. Go ahead. You just thought of an answer right there. [Ben and Shan laugh] Just say it. Say it with your chest. 

NiNi 

No, I wouldn't actually forgive that. [laughs] I was thinking of something but then I was like, “No, really would you forgive that?” I'm like, no, no I wouldn’t and no, I haven't in the past. 

What I won't forgive is getting the sex wrong. Like getting how queer people interact in a sexual way. Getting that wrong, I'm just like “Oh, what are you doing, you don't know what you're talking about, or you're trying to appeal to an audience this is not really for. Stop this, I don't like this.” When we're talking about BL in particular. There's a lot of penetrative sex talk and penetrative sex action that goes on and I'm just like, this is not where boys start. And whenever they start that way in a BL, especially one that's trying to be outside of the bubble. I'm like, no, this does not feel right. I don't like this. This is not correct. This is not how it would go. And it can just kind of lose any sense of authenticity that story may have had. I can't suspend my disbelief any longer, I just. I lose it. 

What about you, Shan? What do you think about the challenging aspects and potential misdeeds? 

Shan 

I really agree with the point that you just made. In a narrative that is trying to be authentically queer, to be a little bit more rooted in a real world sensibility, not understanding how queer people actually engage with sex is a big immersion breaker, I guess? It kinda just pulls you out. 

I think it's helpful to give a couple illustrative examples of, like, where we've seen this before. Bad Buddy is the quintessential bubble/not bubble show that actually did it very well. Bad Buddy exists in a world without homophobia, but they layered a very clear allegory for homophobia onto the story. And so you still had Pat and Pran having to deal with a lot of the very same issues that they would have had in a homophobic world because of this rift between their families and the unacceptability of their relationship. That's a very elegant way to tell a story where you don't have to get directly into homophobia, but you are still having the characters kind of experience the beats of homophobia in how it would affect their relationship. 

And then you have a show like Only Boo that tried to also straddle this line and did it very poorly. They struggled with, I think to your earlier point, NiNi, tone a lot in wanting to have this kind of like, shiny, happy, fluffy show, but also have real stakes. And then wanting to just ignore those stakes and not deal with them whenever they got in the way. So there was a lot of conflicting information in the show about what mattered and what didn't. And it got in the way of the story ultimately, and derailed the main narrative. 

When I think about what is challenging when you're trying to get outside the bubble, in Thai BL in particular, there is, I think, a dedication to keeping these stories relatively light and romance focused and wanting to always deliver happy endings. And that can often be very much in tension with trying to engage with the reality of homophobia. There is still a lot of cultural homophobia, and the shows that they make in the BL space have very intentionally skirted that for the most part, and so, trying to venture into that space, into getting a little bit more real, but then also maintaining that tone of the shiny happy place and making sure that everyone gets a happy ending can often be in tension. That's where shows like Only Boo kind of go off the rails and really struggle. If you're going to deal with homophobia, you have to actually deal with it, and it might mean that the authentic ending of your story is not a typical romance ending. And I think that's a really hard thing for most creators to do in a way that feels satisfying. 

I think in terms of what I can forgive or not, I do want to give credit to the shows that try to get outside this bubble more, because they're trying to do something a little bit more difficult. I wanna give credit to these shows for attempting things that have a higher degree of difficulty, attempting to build an authentic romance narrative in a less than ideal world. But, there are certain things that you do have to make sure you get right. And for me it comes back to that narrative integrity piece. It's not that there are specific acts or specific endings that I can never accept under any circumstances. It's more that whatever happens in the story and whatever the resolutions are, they do need to feel like an authentic possibility that springs from the conflicts that the story introduced. And what breaks a show for me is when they introduce conflicts rooted in homophobia, that they then don't take seriously and just brush aside when they get too difficult to deal with. That is what breaks the fictional world immersion for me and makes the show feel like a failure. 

Ben, please start your rant. 

Ben 

The issue when you go outside the bubble is people with money are trying to make money off of BL, which means they're just trying to make money off of romance tropes that they can produce as cheaply as possible to maximize the fan engagement and then monetize the actors into advertising deals and fan events afterwards. That's how the market for this functions. 

The harsh way to say this is the audience is here for gay romance, they’re not here for gay drama. They don't actually care about the lives of queer people. They're just here to enjoy some romance and then go about their lives. This is not meant as a sort of chiding for the people who are in the genre for romance exclusively, but it is one of the major contributing factors for me for why we have this tension between those of us who are here for queer drama and often will bounce from romances that are just kind of schlocky, as a result. 

@troubled-mind brought up Our Dating Sim. Our Dating Sim is what we might call a technically in the bubble show because they don't say the words gay in that show, but it doesn't feel like a bubble show to me because there's no rationale for any of the movements of that story that makes sense if either boy was straight and existed in a world without homophobia. That story only works if you read them as queer. 

Dealing with this tension of, how do we get funding to tell stories? And then how do we balance the goals of the people with money, the audience that they think they're trying to reach, and maybe trying to tell the stories about queerness that matter to us? It's expensive to pay people and hire people to be on these sets, and it's hard to get the distribution deals you need because of some of the rules and such. It's a niche genre. What's, like, a very specific appeal. It does not get a lot of engagement and if the margins are that thin, we're not gonna see bravery that often in this, because how does that translate into dollars for them? Do people who want to sell juice and toothpaste and cars and motorcycles and stickers and chips want to put their products alongside biting social commentary? I don't know. Like, we're in a global backslide into fascism right now, and we can feel money drying up and organizations shutting down and former allies being quiet when we need them. It’s a rough time out here. It's hard when you're trying to juggle the goals of commercializing romance, the goals of commercializing pretty actors, and the goals of telling meaningful queer stories. It's very hard to really serve all of those goals really well. You can usually serve two of them, but not all three. It sucks! 

What misdeeds would I forgive? Bad acting. The first thing I'm willing to forgive in a show that is really compelling is bad acting. Make It Right is the quintessential [laughs] example of that. 

Shan 

[laughs] No, don’t pick on my boys! [NiNi laughs]

Ben 

Look.

Shan

They were so little! Leave them alone!

Ben

They were, they were. 

What is too much for me to overlook? Like a specific blend of sexual violence, I think. It doesn't come up as often these days. But I was here in some of the early days where there was a lot of “I can't hold back anymore” stuff that's not very pleasant to engage with. That's one that I just do not enjoy. 

Shan 

I feel like you also tend to get particularly angry with shows when it feels like they steered away from the more queer direction that they could have headed in. 

Ben 

That's a good point. Let me define that properly 'cause I did get a little bit lost in my rant. There's a couple of key things, I think, that are at the heart of queer storytelling for me. One is being othered and recognizing that in yourself often times before other people, or immediately after someone else clocks it. Like, a big part of being queer is being queer, literally weird! You are not in step with the developmental progression that a lot of other people around you are on. There is something different about you. And it makes you feel separate from others as a result. If I don't feel that from at least one of the characters, I don't always feel like I connect to them. Another thing is if they're not out, why are they not out? Because part of why you stay in the closet is because you are terrified of the massive social and economic changes you're about to face as a result of being out. 

Those are probably the two key things. It has to be the sense of being othered and the real concern about not fitting in and possibly being discarded. 

Shan 

That was a great question. 

Ben 

Thank you for humoring my rant, NiNi and Shan. 

[Ben and Shan laugh]

Shan 

I don't know how much of that you all will get to hear, but it was all amazing. 

NiNi 

One thing that Ben said that actually made me think what I could forgive. He said bad acting. Sometimes?

[Ben and NiNi laugh] 

Shan 

You can’t forgive bad acting, NiNi, I don’t think you ever—

[all laugh]

Ben 

Hold on. Where's the tape? Hold on. Is this you?

[Ben and Shan laugh]

NiNi 

Sometimes I will forgive bad acting. 

Shan 

Under certain conditions. 

NiNi 

Yeah, under certain conditions. Well, one thing I will definitely forgive is a certain level of production quality, I will find a way to enjoy low production quality if the story is good enough. 

Shan 

I agree. We try to meet a show where it's at. We really appreciate that some of these folks are out here tryin’ to make good queer stories on a shoestring budget, and we don't hold that against them. 

Ben 

We hold everything else against them. Looking real hard at you, Oxin Films. 

[all laugh]

Shan 

Oh my god, I don't wanna talk about Oxin Films. 

NiNi 

Yes, but also, My Dear Gangster Oppa. That’s all I'm gonna say. 

Shan 

Don't even try it!

Ben 

Oh lord. Here we go again. 

[all laugh]

NiNi 

I'm sorry, I will be haunted by that orange scar makeup. Haunted. 

Shan 

Ben has quoted “quit the gangster life” at me twice in the last 24 hours. 

Ben 

It’s true.

NiNi 

I mean, he's not wrong. 

00:30:26 - Inbox: Sex On Screen

Shan 

Let's go to the next question, which is quite a humdinger. So, this is long, strap in, folks. I'm going to read it all and then we'll come back and answer it piece by piece. @parralex0889 writes: “I'm reeling from being whelmed by the end of 4 Minutes, so I was thinking about the positives and I really enjoyed how sex was depicted and talked about in the series. Great gets picked up unexpectedly by Tyme, and when they get home, Great very pointedly pauses and says he needs to shower first and they potentially do a redo of that in the finale, as well. Tonkla, a character who openly asks for raw sex twice and eventually gets it. Great having his own condoms and no shame about it. I really enjoyed that these characters are allowed to have ownership and pride and desire and life and characterization through their sex and attraction. Even earlier in the year in Wandee—Wandee Goodday—there's a little moment when Cher exits the bathroom before going to bed with Yei, and to me, I could easily project a certain, ‘the water's running clean and I'm ready for action’ in Cher's movements. So to make this into a question or three, do y’all have any stand out ‘this is how real people engage in sex in reality,’ instead of the perfect TV sex that BL and BL-adjacent shows often lean into? Second, favorite BL sex scenes in general? Third, which sex scenes have been y’alls worst, either in execution or bad chemistry?”

So, that's the full question. Let me take this piece by piece that we can tackle all of. First of all, we haven't talked about 4 Minutes and Wandee Goodday specifically on the pod. So maybe we should just start there. Alex is suggesting that both of those shows were pretty good with their depictions of sex, and so maybe we should just talk a little bit about that first in our impressions. 

NiNi 

I mean, can I start with a liked it, hated it? [laughs]

Ben 

Good. Go for it, girl!

[all laugh]

NiNi 

I liked 4 Minutes more, I think, than you two did. The ending wasn't everything that I wanted, but I was still pretty satisfied with it. Wandee Goodday fell off the rails about, what? Halfway through and never got back on the rails, and I'm still pissed off when I think about it because it could have been so good. What was the reason?! 

I had to get that off my spirit before I actually engaged with the question. 

Ben 

Hydrate, baby. 

[NiNi and Shan laugh]

NiNi 

But in terms of how the sex is depicted in these two, I liked how Wandee Goodday tackled sex in the beginning. How they tackled a friends with benefits relationship and how they tackled them having a sexual relationship and speaking openly about sex and the way that they enjoyed sex and the things that they wanted to do. I liked that they showed them having different kinds of sex. I liked that they joked about sex and they had a good time with it. When things started getting confusing for them emotionally, it still didn't stop them from having sex, which I liked because so often these shows treat sex and romance or sex and love as these separate entities that somehow sex is sex and love is love and somehow love and sex can't be intertwined in that way. And so that was the thing that I did enjoy about Wandee, the fact that they intertwined sex and fun, energetic, engaging sex and love, not just soft focus, tender touching, missionary. [laughs] And then it went off the rails, but not gonna dwell on that too much at this point. 

4 Minutes is a different show. It's not so much about the relationship between these characters, and that's one of the reasons I think that I enjoyed it because I didn't see 4 Minutes as a romance or anything involving a romance. These two characters bumped into each other. They had sex, they got way too entangled because of a host of other reasons. Tonkla and Korn had a very interesting dynamic that involved, like, a lot of power dynamics that I feel like the show didn't entirely engage with and I would have liked to see more of. And then Tonka and Win and the way that they had sex also showed a lot of interesting power dynamics that were flipped from Tonkla and Korn’s, and I liked watching that, I liked seeing the show tackle sex sort of outside of the lens of love. So I did enjoy that about it. But to me, 4 Minutes was not about romance so the conversations about sex were in a completely different direction. 

I am the sex and story girl. I'm the person who wants to see, like, what is the sex telling us about these characters and their relationship and their power dynamics and their, all these different things. And I got, like, a smorgasbord of that, I think in 4 Minutes. So I quite enjoyed how these two shows actually tackle sex. 

Shan 

I agree with that. I have many issues with 4 Minutes but none of them were about the use of sex [laughs] in the show. I thought that the show was very smart in how it used sex to inform character. I really appreciate when a show that is about hot young adult men who have sexual desire lets them actually have sex and doesn't put weird purity principles around the context in which they can do that. And so I just appreciated how real that felt. To Alex's point in the question, that they actually did address in some of those sex scenes actual important stuff like sexual health and the way things actually work and having to clean up and all of that stuff that is normally skipped over in romance. I thought they were pretty good about that and that was one of the aspects of the show that I liked a lot, despite thinking that the whole thing didn't hold together all that well. 

Wandee Goodday I think a little bit less credit there, though I do appreciate that they acknowledged casual sex as a thing. I thought they also got a little weird about it in places where suddenly the two main characters stopped having sex for reasons that never made any sense to me whatsoever, but they eventually skipped over that, there was just a lot of weirdness in that show in general. But I do agree with NiNi's point about the way that they depicted sex as fun, and I think that's something we don't see enough. We don't see enough either of sex between committed couples and I thought that was a really great part of what Wandee Goodday did with Oyei and Cher, showed them as a long term happy couple that had a really active sex life and really enjoyed that aspect of their relationship together. We don't get to see much of that. I really appreciated that aspect of that show, despite really [laughs] sharing NiNi’s ire about the way that the story went. 

NiNi 

Bestie, I'm so mad. 

Shan 

Hee hee we’re gonna be mad forever about that. You have to understand, folks, that NiNi and I were so invested [laughs] in this show being good. 

NiNi 

So invested. 

Shan 

We were so excited for it and then when it went bad, it was just so disappointing. Ugh.

Ben, how about you? 

Ben 

It's difficult. I think I care oftentimes less about the physical mechanics of the sex when there's something interesting happening with the characters in the moment. I feel like I only really get caught up in the mechanics of some of the sexual stuff when they're fuckin’ up the story around it. I do like when the shows represent the kind of sex that guys are probably having with each other. Like I don't mind how much penetrative sex that they want to do if it's like Alex says, where, you see guys dealing with some of the physical preparatory realities of that. 

Shan 

Why don't we get into some of the other questions, ‘cause we're starting to get more into specifics. The next specific question that Alex asked is, “do we have any stand out ‘this is how real people engage in sex in reality,’ instead of the perfect TV sex that BL and BL-adjacent shows often lean into?”

Shout out to Alex for giving us this chance to talk about Knock Knock Boys!

Ben 

Heeeey! 

[all laugh]

Shan 

‘Cause it is definitely the standout Asian BL of this year for what does sex look like in reality. There was an—what I consider iconic and was iconic to the tiny community of us who watched—this sex scene between the characters Almond and Latte, who were having sex for the first time, and it was just a great and funny and compassionate comedy of errors, of them trying to work through the awkwardness and find the right positions and get comfortable with each other. It was a very charming and funny scene. I haven't seen anything like that previously in BL. Usually they're very preoccupied with trying to make things look sexy. This was not sexy, but it was very loving and I thought that was such a great sex scene. 

Ben 

That sequence really does a great job of showing people, like, communing in the act and trying to take care of each other and deal with their nerves and all the other stuff that they bring to the table. I also liked the lead up to that where Almond talked to his friends about how he was feeling. It was nice that Thanwa and Peak also finally let go of a lot of stuff that was hanging over them and they were far more relaxed around each other for the rest of the show, clearly having a good time.

Shan 

And I like the contrast, their characters are older. They're both sexually experienced, so, like, sex for them was a more relaxed affair all around. They weren't confused about what to do. Almond and Latte are younger. It was Almond’s very first time and it was Latte's first time with someone he was in love with, so they were more nervous. 

NiNi 

You know me, I'm always gonna go to the Philippines. The ones that really stand out to me, the Gameboys movie. I think that one felt very real. 

Shan

Perf.

NiNi

The season 2 cut is a better version of the movie. And then there's a lot of these Filipino quarantine dramas that I think did really well. Quaranthings, Meet Me Outside got me into the headspace of yes, this is how something like this would go. 

Ben 

To finish off on Alex's question, none of these shows are ever going to have somebody talking about prep in a meaningful way that isn't like a quick line, like, nobody's going to make a booty water joke in these shows. 

Shan 

[laughs] So yeah, we can only get so close to reality in Asian BL, let’s not get unrealistic with our expectations. 

Ben 

They ain’t making that joke. 

Shan 

No. [laughs]

00:41:07 - Inbox: Fave Sex Scenes

Shan 

All right. So let's transition to the next part of Alex's question, which is what are our favorite BL sex scenes in general? 

NiNi 

It's always gonna be, for me, Kinnporsche Episode 7 in the bathroom. The mutual masturbation scene. That's one of my favorites of all time. 

Shan

Mmm. That’s a good one.

Ben 

That's a good highlight. I have a lot of issues with Be On Cloud, that is not one of them. 

Shan

Yeah, Be On Cloud is good at sex.

NiNi 

I really liked the way that the scene is constructed and what it says about the characters and where they're at in the moment and how it evolves as it goes along emotionally, and then the fact that it is a mutual masturbation scene and not penetrative sex or an oral sex scene. Which is the most give and take that you can do simultaneously as two gay men. I think it was really good and it's one of my favorites. 

Shan 

There's some pretty decent examples of really good sex in the genre. I think in terms of other Thai BL, I would shout out the shows from MeMindY, which are made by a person whose name I will pronounce… May [MAME]. And— 

[Ben and Shan laugh]

NiNi 

Y'all, we got told we've been pronouncing it wrong, but we cannot make the mommy pun. I'm sorry. We just can't do it. 

Shan 

I'm not calling her mommy, I’m not doing it. So you're just gonna have to live with it. 

So, what I love about her shows is, I think that they use sex very well both as part of the narrative and as part of characterization and as legitimately part of the romance arc. Her shows believe that couples who are in love also have hot sex, which might not sound that revolutionary, but is in this genre, believe me, because most shows only allow hot sex scenes between characters who are in a toxic relationship or characters who are about to break up. That is not true in her shows. You see hot, loving sex before and after relationships start. You see casual hot sex, you see committed, loving hot sex in her shows and she really stands apart on that, her shows do, in the genre, so it's something I definitely want to shout out. TharnType, Love in the Air, I thought Wedding Plan’s sex scenes were fantastic. They really allow you to see sex as just a normal part of the romance arc and not something that is separated out and othered in any kind of way. 

Ben 

We cannot overstate when it comes to the work she does, that in most cases her characters have the best sex after they get together. We don't see a sudden drop off after they get together. 

Shan 

Love Sea, which we just finished recently, was a great example of that. The sex got better as they got closer and as they fell more in love. And that's pretty common for the trajectories of her romances. 

Another example that I'll bring up, and I did clear this already with Ben. You know it's coming, Ben, so brace yourself. 

Ben 

Let me just mute now. [Shan laughs]

NiNi 

Oh God. 

Shan 

I think we can't talk about good sex in BL without talking about History 3: Make Our Days Count. Taiwan is known for very good intimacy scenes, and it is the pinnacle of what they can do when all cylinders are firing in terms of having sex scenes that are part of character, that are part of the narrative arc, that are part of the relationship development, and that are very well performed between actors with extremely good chemistry. Just all around fantastic and Make Our Days Count has the best sex scenes in Taiwanese BL. It's just true. There's controversy around that show, understandably. It's one of my favorites. I know a lot of people don't like it for very fair reasons, but the sex scenes in that show and its depiction of intimacy between people who are falling in love is just top notch. 

NiNi 

Man, Sunbo and Zhigang in the gym bathroom. 

Shan 

Hoo! 

NiNi

Quality.

Shan

Bestie, I think about it all the time, still. It just comes into my mind and I'm like, ooh, yes, that happened! 

NiNi 

I mean, it's so much to it as well. The fact that it happens in the gym bathroom after hours, this, like, this feels like something that could really happen. 

Shan 

And we talk about Taiwanese BL and its style with sex scenes. It feels very raw, I think in a way that a lot of the more stylized shows don't. It hits harder because it feels like something that could really be happening, and it feels like it's the way that it would be happening. 

Ben 

There's great examples of that kind of intimacy in History 3: Trapped. There's the bandage kissing scene, which is one of the most intimate scenes we've had in a while. They don't actually have sex in that moment, but man is that one of the most charged scenes in that whole series. And then there's the birthday cake scene after Meng Shaofei’s been gone all day. 

There's the We Best Love 2 scene that everybody has feelings about that I think is great! 

Shan 

I have so many feelings about it and they're all positive. I love that scene. 

NiNi 

I like that it transgresses the line because it's a discussable transgression of the line—

Ben 

Exactly. 

—and people who just dismiss it because of that, I think that you're missing out, honestly. 

Ben 

We’ll try not to spoil it because we know a lot you all haven't seen it. 

Shan 

And you should. 

Ben 

It's good. 

Shan 

You gotta watch We Best Love, both parts. 

Ben 

What are Sam and Yu doing right now, hold on. 

[all laugh]

NiNi 

And then, I'm always gonna have to bring this up. A non sex scene that feels like a sex scene is Teh and Oh-aew on the bedroom floor in I Told Sunset About You Episode 3. 

Shan 

Hoo! Scratching the back! Oooh, I've been transported. I'm gonna need a minute. 

NiNi 

I can't even bring it up without it entering my brain. It is so ingrained in there. 

Ben 

You want to know how good that scene is? I have basically memorized all of the trivia around that scene. 

Shan 

You know everything about how it was made. 

Ben 

Like they had to film it twice. They filmed the show and then during the edit process didn't like the version that they got and brought the boys back. And that was really stressful for them. They had to redo their homework again. There was a ton of pressure on them. 

Shan 

It came out amazing, so thank you for your service, everybody on those creative teams. 

We obviously gotta talk about Japan here, too, because they are often pushing the envelope in BL on what kind of sex can be depicted on screen. Obviously, the Pornographer series is a prime example of using sex to inform character, to move narrative to tell us something about the relationship and where it is at every stage where we're seeing them engage in physical intimacy. The best sex scenes I have ever seen in a romance, still, in that series. 

Ben 

All the sex is complicated in that one too. Except for one that wasn't where I was so relieved. [laughs]

Shan 

Yeah. The one you were waiting for. [laughs]

Ben 

Literally, I watched The Novelist and we did the prequel in Mood Indigo. And I'm like, that's enough. [laughs] I’ve had enough!

[NiNi laughs]

Shan

That’s enough of this dark sex! 

Ben 

I had enough of this! I need Haruhiko to suck Rio’s dick right now. And within 15 minutes of the movie, that's exactly what happened. In a car! [laughs]

Shan 

It was in the special, the 15 minute special. He finished Mood Indigo and he said “he needs to suck his dick right now.” I was like, bestie, hit play. [all laugh] It’s the first thing that happened! 

NiNi 

Oh my God. 

Ben 

I was like, Miki Koichiro understands me. 

Shan 

That series really understands how sex relates to the relationship arc and where the characters are emotionally, and it always got every single beat exactly right. There's a lot of crazy good sex scenes in that series. There’s a lot of wild sex. The one where the chemistry is the most off the charts is maybe one of the ones in Mood Indigo, but my favorite scene in that whole series, my favorite sex scene, is the one at the end of Playback, the movie. 

Ben

Mmhmm.

Shan

It is the culmination of those character arcs, and it is so perfectly executed and they chose to not have it be a penetrative sex act. They chose to have it be a moment of very deep emotional intimacy, where hand jobs were exchanged. Ugh, it was just fucking perfect and I can't believe [voice gets intense] how many of you haven't watched it or haven't finished it because you couldn't find Playback! Please, come tell me if you need help. I will give it to you. You've gotta watch it. 

NiNi 

When Japan is on game, they're on game. 

Shan

Right?

NiNi

I think about things like the Utsukushii Kare movie. I think about things like The End of the World With You. 

Ben 

That has some great scenes. From the same team that did The Novelist and Mood Indigo and Pornographer. 

NiNi 

For, like, a couple that we saw even this year, like, Love is Better the Second Time Around and Perfect Propose, I think also tackled sex really well. I think about The Cornered Mouse Dreams of Cheese all the time, and that is a dark tale. 

[Ben and NiNi laugh]

Shan 

A dark tale that uses sex very well. 

Ben

It does. 

NiNi 

I agree, I agree. 

Ben 

There’s a great one in Jack O’ Frost. The problem with a lot of the Japanese ones is, like, if you're seeing a great Japanese sex scene, the guys are probably about to break up. [Shan laughs] Unfortunately. 

Shan 

Except Pornographer! 

Ben 

Except Pornographer. 

Shan 

Watch. I'm not kidding! 

NiNi 

And not in The End of the World With You either, because the best one is the one in the car, and that's right before they get back together. 

Shan 

We owe him so much. 

[NiNi laughs]

Ben 

Let's put Grand Guignol in the conversation. 

[Ben and Shan laugh]

Shan 

Oh my God! We reality should, though.

Ben 

Issei fucks Mr. Unlucky in that movie! 

Shan 

Oh, we lost it. Grand Guignol, if you don't know, it’s a horror BL movie, it's on GagaOOLala. If you have watched a lot of Japanese BL, you should absolutely watch it because you will be fucking delighted. [laughs] But, you know, all the usual warnings that come with a straight up horror film. 

00:51:24 - Inbox: Worst Sex Scenes

Shan 

Let's get to the last part of Alex's question. Which is, “which sex scenes have been y’all’s worst on execution or bad chemistry?”

NiNi 

Hoo. 

Ben 

We have to acknowledge that despite the sheer volume of BL this current panel has watched, they actually don't have sex on screen in a lot of these shows. And so, there are things that I have, take more umbrage with in shows that didn't even have the sex. Like, as much as I love Make It Right, Peak was not a great actor at the time and was clearly nervous to be around Boom for the intimate scenes they had to do. That stands out. 

NiNi 

I feel like what it comes down to is, do the actors go for it or not, and for what quantity of go for it? There are always actors who’re gonna go for it and go too over the top and it doesn't feel genuine because they're not willing to sit in the moment. So they're goin’ hard, but it just feels like people smashing together. It doesn't feel like it's being acted. 

Ben 

List them, bestie!

Shan 

Name names! 

Ben 

List them, bestie!

Shan 

Name names! 

NiNi 

Let me finish my thought here. And then there are ones where it's too soft. You're telling me that these people have this welling up of emotion or sexual desire, whatever it is, and the way that they touch each other in those moments just does not feel like that. It does not feel desirous, it does not feel overwhelmed, it doesn't feel any of those things. It just feels robotic. Hate that. Basically, anything where I feel like the character of the scene does not match emotionally and physically, where the characters are, I don't enjoy. As actors, you've taken me out of the scene because I can't buy it anymore. I see the actor at that point, I see the actor hesitating. I don't see the character in the moment. 

Shan 

All right, name those names. 

NiNi 

[laughs] I was hoping I could get away from it. 

Ben 

No, no, ma'am. 

Shan 

The question was which scenes, you gotta at least name some shows. 

NiNi 

Y'all go first and I will come back around. 

Shan 

What about Playboyy, NiNi? 

NiNi

[disgusted sound]

Shan

There you go. The gag sound says it all [laughs]. 

NiNi 

There is literally nothing about Playboyy that I ever wanna think about again. Let's forget that that ever happened. And it could have been so good. 

Shan 

You think about your list. I have an answer to this. 

Ben 

Go ahead, bestie. Say what you need to say. 

Shan 

I did not live through Big Dragon and Sunset x Vibes to keep my mouth shut about this issue. I watched both of those shows! 

NiNi 

Why did you watch them, friend? 

Shan 

I'll tell you why. And listen, I have no beef with Mos and Bank. They seem like nice dudes. Great for them. I’m happy for them that they seem like they have good lives. They’re out there doing their thing, cool. 

But I do have beef with their shows and I'll tell you why. Because both of these shows were marketed to me as if they were going to be mature, dark stories that involved a lot of actually sexy sex, and neither of them delivered on that promise! Big Dragon at least had some halfway decent sex scenes when it started, before it suddenly devolved into being random BL fluff right in the middle. It started as enemies hate fucking and then by episode 2 they were like actually, we're in love. And I was like, what the fuck? This is not what I was promised. So anyway, those sex scenes at least had a little bit of verve to them, even though the story was a mess. 

Sunset x Vibes—and I have learned that that's how you're supposed to pronounce it, by the way—

NiNi

Nope. 

Shan

Terrible. Just no, if you haven't watched this show, please don't. It’s not good. It is not worth your time. It is a mess and a half. The sex scenes in particular were so disappointing because first of all, they decided to do some weird blushing maiden stuff that felt like it had no business being in the story. Had no idea why they were doing that. And then on top of that, the sex scenes were not particularly tied to character or story. They didn't tell us anything really about who these people were or anything about their relationship. Were just inserted, almost like they were PPL—product placement—breaks. It's like, ope, time for a sex break! They didn't do anything in the story. They were not narratively important, and they also were just not well performed. 

Again, I have no beef with these actors. There are many reasons why they might not have performed these sex scenes well, even though they have, in the past, done a better, or at least adequate, job at that. But these sex scenes were uncomfortable. They looked like they were filmed in a rush. There were strange edits in a lot of them. The kissing looked awkward, there were awkward angles being used. It was such a strange show, because it didn't deliver on story, it didn't deliver on the romance plot, it didn't deliver on the sex scenes. I had no idea what it was actually trying to do. 

What I'm trying to get at here is that you can't just go out in the world and say, “Sexy BL coming your way, it’s gonna be amazing!” and then deliver this tepid garbage. The audience is not gonna stick around because you say that there are some explicit sex scenes that are poorly executed. 

While we’re on the subject, we should mention that another Thai BL just tried this trick. Battle of the Writers suddenly taking a pause to re-edit their episode and put out the longest, most explicit sex scene by far in the show, in an attempt, it seems, to attract an audience back to the show and get people talking about it again. I think people did watch that sex scene. I don't think they watched the show, though. 

Ben 

We sure did. 

NiNi 

[laughs] With popcorn, rewound it and watched it again. 

Shan 

You can't just expect having NC-17 scenes in your show to carry it anymore. There is too much good content in the genre now. That was a rant, perhaps that you didn't ask for Alex, but that's my answer. Big Dragon and Sunset x Vibes failed on this test. 

Ben 

I am always the worst person to ask about these things, ‘cause if something's not good, I don't catalog it. I don't usually hold grudges against BL for being bad at sex and so, there's a lot of awkward sex scenes that I've forgotten. I don't remember really enjoying the sex scenes in shows like Nitiman because I don't even remember what happened. I remember just going, “hmm, that’s bad.” And I just moved on for my life at that point. 

Of the things we talked about on this show this year, probably the like worst one™ was the one we dialed in on when we talked about Unknown. And that isn't because the actors weren't willing to execute the scene with each other, it's that whatever that they were coached into doing didn't translate well into what was edited together in the scene that we got. They didn't really build towards their sex in a way that completed the narrative arc they were on with the older brother. Those are the ones that I tend to remember more than like, “ooh, those actors were, like, biting each other's lips. What the hell?” None of that ever sticks with me ‘cause I watch too much. I’m just like whatever, shuffle on. Maybe like back in the day, you would probably be like What the Duck? because I do not remember the leads, doing a good job on that show at all. 

NiNi 

Ooh.

Shan 

I still haven't watched that. 

Ben 

[singing cadence] You don't need to! 

Shan

And I never, ever will. 

[all laugh]

NiNi 

I'm gonna go for a quote unquote safe choice ‘cause I just don't feel like having the girls come for me for coming for their boys. 

Ben 

Uh-uh. I wanna hear the answer. Speak the truth on this show. 

Shan 

I just trashed MosBank out loud! 

Ben 

Say what needs to be said. 

NiNi 

I'ma just lay it out here and the girls are gonna have to come for me. I'm sorry. I love First and Khaotung. 

Shan

[excited gasp]

NiNi

They did one good sex scene in Only Friends. I don't think the rest of them were good. 

Shan 

Yes, bestie speak the truth! Let's speak truth to this powerful fan base!

[Shan and Ben laugh] 

Ben 

Yes! Kill ‘em, bestie. 

Shan 

Tell ‘em, say more!

NiNi 

I have never enjoyed a JoongDunk sex scene. 

Ben 

I sure haven't!

NiNi 

Nope.

[Ben and Shan laugh]

Shan 

I still haven't watched any of their shows. I do not care. 

NiNi 

Mmm mm mm. And the third one, the safe one, is none of the sex scenes in Between Us were any good. 

Ben

Mmm.

Shan 

Ooh, okay. Expand on that. I feel like most people think the first couple episodes of that show are its saving grace because of the sex scenes. 

NiNi 

No, because I don't buy [Ben laughs] either of them really. It's the acting, it's the acting for me. 

Shan 

Okay. This is great, NiNi unleashed. I love it. 

NiNi 

Oh my God, I'm gonna get cancelled. 

[Shan laughs]

Ben 

Good, good. We deserve it. 

Shan 

Let’s let them try to cancel you. Let's let them try! 

Ben 

New Siwaj does get lucky sometimes and has actors who do okay together. The couple of times they've had decent bed scenes in his shows, like, I think the My Only 12% one was actually pretty decent. 

NiNi 

That was a decent one. 

Shan 

Santa and Earth have good chemistry. 

NiNi 

I think that the married sex scene in oh, God, what's that ForceBook one? Boss Baby! 

Ben 

A Boss and a Babe?

NiNi 

I always call it Boss Baby. Yeah. 

[all laugh]

Ben 

Where's my Boss Baby tweet?! 

Shan 

[valley girl voice] Force and Book were so good in Boss Baby. 

NiNi 

Let me stop calling this Boss Baby. A Boss and a Babe. New Siwaj hits on one from time to time. Most of the time I don't like the way that he directs sex scenes, but My Only 12% one was good. 

Ben 

I had a lot of beef with Only Friends, but I do think the car scene between Force and Neo’s characters was still a little compelling sequence. 

NiNi 

Oh hell yeah. 

Shan 

In the whole show, that was the best sex scene. People were not ready for that conversation, but it's the truth. 

Ben 

Followed by the Neo and Mark scenes. 

Shan 

Yeah. Neo and Mark were good in that show. 

NiNi 

Because they went for it, but they didn't go for it in like a, “oh, we're going for it” way. They went for it in an actual acting way. 

Ben 

Yes, you can see them fucking with each other the whole time. Each one was trying to outdo the other one in each scene, and I was like all right guys, I get it. You’re both athletes. 

Shan 

It’s rare for GMMTV shows, I think, to deliver truly good sex scenes because there's just too much other nonsense getting in the way. But it does happen. I still think one of the best, it's not really a sex scene, I guess, but a prelude to sex scene is Pat and Pran in Episode 11 of Bad Buddy. They just nail the anticipation and the heat of it to the point you don't even have to see the actual sex to feel like you just saw a really good sex scene. 

NiNi 

That one, and the one night stand in Moonlight Chicken. 

Shan 

Yeah. That's another one where they just nailed the anticipatory tension that can also create a really memorable scene that doesn't actually have to explicitly depict anything. And I think that's maybe the thing to think about here. It's not just the fact of a scene being super explicit that actually makes it sexy, and a lot of times shows are putting out these scenes that, all they have going for them is that they're super explicit, but they're not nailing the emotions, not nailing the characters, they're not getting the chemistry and the movement and the heat right. And so it's all empty. 

Ben 

An example of one that had us in a lot of the early part of the sex scene, but maybe not all of it, is the Episode 4 Ghost Host Ghost House scene. That has really good build up tension. 

Shan 

The legs! 

Ben 

Another example, they don't actually have sex in the show—a lot of that was because of quarantine protocols again, in the Philippines—is the kiss that they have in Boys Lockdown. I think that has really good building tension to it because of the mask mandate at the time. And I think that carries a really specific gay layer to it that I thought was really compelling. 

The problem is, 1, a lot of these shows don't have sex; 2, when they do have sex, a lot of it's kind of bad? The sex being bad isn't so stand out that we keep an ongoing list of grievances. 

Shan 

Speak for yourself, bestie, I got my grudges. 

Ben 

You're better at grudges than me. I'm too busy to be having grudges. 

Shan 

[laughs] I always got time. 

Ben 

Do not ask for my attention! It’s not good for you. 

01:04:24 - Bonus Round: Best Sex in a Bad Show

Shan 

NiNi, what question did you wanna ask? 

NiNi 

What is the best sex scene you've ever seen in a terrible show?

Ben 

Oh, interesting. 

Shan 

Oh. Good sex in a bad show. 

Ben 

Can I be mean and just say Make Our Days Count? [laughs]

NiNi 

[laughs] Oh my god, no you can't. 

Ben 

I’m still mad! I'll never not be mad. 

Shan 

You gotta think about an actual bad, like, a poorly made show that does sex well. 

Ben 

Why r u? 

Shan 

Yeah, I think that's the answer! 

Ben 

Not to be mean to the Why r u? team. Why r u? got crushed by the pandemic. Now, that show was probably not gonna be good anyway. 

Shan

No.

Ben

But, it's not their fault that their set basically got shut down. 

Shan 

Yeah, that's a really good answer to that 'cause Saint and Zee, that was a moment. I still think about Saint sucking on Zee’s Adam’s apple all the time. [NiNi and Shan laugh] It's so memorable, and they had such good chemistry. That show is a trash fire, but boy. 

Ben 

There's also some really goofy montage of sex in Destiny Seeker. Shan got that far in. 

Shan 

I watched the whole thing! I watched all of Destiny Seeker. It was oddly charming. It wasn't a particularly good show, but like, there were aspects of charm to it, and they did well on the sex. 

On that front, I would shout out City of Stars, which a lot of people I don't think have watched. It’s a show from this year, a Thai pulp, and I couldn't really say that it's a good show. The production values are low, it's got some green actors, but the sex was surprisingly great. Really well used in the narrative arc. Really well used in the relationship development and very enthusiastically performed. 

Thank you, Alex, for getting us to rant about sex scenes in BL for over an hour. 

[all laugh]

Ben 

We needed it, get it out of our system. 

Shan 

We needed to get some things off our chest, clearly. 

Ben 

I'm gonna end on this particular note. We need to see more people behaving like the MeMindY team. This trend towards really chaste BL or BL that's only willing to use sex if it feels like it's leading into something negative is not satisfying. Especially when sex is part of your storytelling. Do better! 

01:06:54 - Inbox: Critical Philosophy

NiNi 

We've got a comment, really, that came into our inbox from user @cuntextual. 

Shan 

And I want to be clear that that’s C-U-N-T cuntextual. 

Ben 

Oh, yes. Classic Tumblr name. A+! 

Shan 

Props for a fantastic username. They write: “Just dropping by to say you guys make my life better. [Shan says “Aw”] I listen to all your episodes, even for those shows I haven't watched, and I can't understate how much The Conversation has taught me about media criticism and QL history. So thank you so much for all your hard work.”

Very nice comment. Thank you, cuntextual. 

NiNi 

Thank you so much for the comment, cuntextual, and we wanted to use it as a frame to talk a little bit about media criticism. 

Ben 

This is the first time I feel like the BL bubble has really popped. BL hasn't sucked this hard since 2018. A lot of people weren't in the streets with us in 2018. They have no memory of this. A lot of folks joined during COVID. 2019 was a really good year for BL. A lot of people's favs are from that year. 2020 was a good year despite the lockdown. ‘21 was a solid year. ‘22 was a solid year. I had a great time last year in ‘23 and I do not know [singsong voice] what's going on this year. 

This is a good place for us to talk about, like, what is the role of a critic. For me, a critic is not a shill. It is not my goal or job to cheerlead shitty shows. My goal as a critic is to have a consistent lens and perspective from which I write that the listeners and readers can understand, so that when they're reading my takes they understand why I'm reacting the way I am. There are quite a few critics who I follow, who I often disagree with. But I like to read their perspectives because they're consistent. I know exactly where they're writing from, and that helps inform whether or not I might want to go see a movie in theaters or wait for it to come home. 

So when I'm reacting to shows on this podcast and on my blog, I am not here as a fangirl for BL. I am here as a queer cinephile. And so I'm here reacting because I want more English speaking people to engage with what's happening in these various Asian communities. As a result, when shit is good, you will hear me screaming “this shit is good!” But you will also hear me saying “that shit is bad.” The critic's job is to communicate to the audience who's listening to them hy shit might be good or bad as a means of helping them decide what might be worth their time to engage with. Anything else is just motherfuckers sittin’ around chattin’ about nothing. And that is not what I'm about. 

Shan 

I agree with a lot of what Ben just said. I don't really think about media criticism as clearly as Ben does in terms of bringing people to the genre and trying to recommend shows. I do that sometimes, I definitely like to yell about it when I really like something. But for me, I get a lot of personal enjoyment and pleasure out of breaking down stories. How they work, what makes them good, what makes them not so good. I like to approach media through thinking about what the components of the story are and how they're working together. And I get, honestly, a lot out of thinking about and talking about shows that don't work that well because that helps me learn too. 

So I don't really have stan loyalty to any show. I could start out loving a show, and if it goes off the rails for me, I'm going to say something about that and I'm going to try to unpack why and talk about it. Even if I really like an actor or a pair that's in a show, that doesn't necessarily mean that I'm going to think that their show is great. It’s great when that happens, but it often doesn't. And I really don't agree with the idea that the only way to support something is to cheerlead it uncritically. I've never agreed with that, that's just not how I interact with media. Bringing a lens of critique and taking the shows seriously and talking about them seriously is how I show respect and love to the media that I enjoy. I'm always gonna kind of show up that way when I'm interested in any kind of media that I'm watching. 

We've talked a little bit about the shift that we've been feeling in the genre. This is not new, it's just maybe the level of intensity feels like it's shifting towards commercialization and just selling product as the primary motive for most of these shows. And has very much crowded out the motive around good storytelling in a lot of cases. That has been the shift that I have most keenly felt. And that has particularly been very pronounced for me in Thai BL. I don't know if that's actually a uniquely Thai media thing. It might just be that that's where most BL still sits. Thai production companies produce vastly more BL than any other BL producing countries at present. 

One of the things that I noticed that I was talking with Twig about is that there has been a real dearth of high quality content coming out of other countries besides Thailand. In Korean BL, we have had a significant reduction in output, not necessarily in the number of shows, but in the quality and length of shows that we've been getting, significantly less this year than in the previous couple years. We've gotten fewer good shows from Taiwan. Japan actually, conversely has been producing more BL, but with a steep increase in output there has not been as consistent of a quality, and so we're now getting Japanese BLs that let us down in ways that we're not used to happening with Japan. 

It's felt a little bit like a transitional year to me, and this last few months in particular I think there have been a confluence of shows that have started really strong and then gone off the rails. That always feels really frustrating to me because I hate to get invested in something that then lets me down. That's way worse to me than something being just kind of bad from the start, from the whole way through. I'm still happy to be engaging with the genre so much. I'll keep doing it in the way that I always have, and I'm just hopeful that we'll still get a decent ratio of shows that are interested in storytelling compared to some that are not. 

NiNi 

It's very interesting to hear you all talk about your critical philosophy. I'm kind of all over the map on this stuff. I enjoy watching the shows and talking about the shows and analyzing the shows, and I also enjoy letting some of the shows wash over me. I'm not a consistent critic. Sometimes I do feel like a show is more like me putting on my critical hat and wanting to look at it in terms of, okay, what is this technically doing? What is happening here? And then sometimes I don't want to do that with a show. Either it gets me in the heart place, a place where I don't feel like I either can or want to turn that lens on it. It comes down to me, for me, on what the show is doing for me. There are some shows which I can see are probably objectively not great but I'm enjoying the critical aspect of it because I get to puzzle out in my head. Okay, what exactly is not working here and really get into the integrity of it. There’s stuff that's not great that I don't wanna do that with because I'm just having such a good time. There's stuff that's good that I wanna put my critical hat on and there's stuff that's good that I don't wanna do that either. I'm really all over the map when it comes to the idea of a critical philosophy and it really just depends on the show. 

One of the things about getting all this additional volume, all of these stories upon stories upon stories that are happening, is that the more we get, the more diverse and diffuse the audience gets, and I think that's maybe some of what's being struggled with, as well. There are still shows that we are all watching and all enjoying, but increasingly I feel like there are shows that are sort of, okay, this is speaking to this particular person or these one or two or this group of particular people and not this other group of people. Ben was talking about this when he was talking about Tadaima, Okaeri, that once all the people who weren't going to be interested in it faded away he had such a good time discussing it with the people who were there because they wanted to be there. I feel like this is something we talked about at the end of last year as well. The number of shows that is really a full fandom experience is shrinking every time, every season, every year, and things are getting more stratified, more diffuse, more separate. I don't necessarily know if that's a good thing or a bad thing. It’s just a thing that's happening. 

There's always gonna be, at least I hope that there's always gonna be those shows that we are all really agreeing on. All enjoying all, like, yeah, this is knocking it out of the park on all the quadrants. The various quadrants that we hold there. And we can talk about them from that space of we are enjoying this for very different reasons, but we are all enjoying it. Rather than sort of talking across each other at cross purposes because we are either enjoying it for a reason that is exactly why another person is not enjoying it, if that makes sense? So that's kind of where I'm sitting right now. Yes, the fandom experience is kind of separating into its little nooks, which is in some ways not as fun, 'cause there's not as many people to talk to about the show when you really like something. But, I hope that we're still gonna get stuff that's gonna let us all come together. 

Ben 

The hard part about being a critic this way is you have to be there for a lot of stuff. It's hard to do good critical work behind the zeitgeist. You need to be on the front lines with the viewers reacting in real time, like, that's the experience. And so you really want to be there for the shit that's going on. And it is disheartening as a viewer to start a show having a good time and then have your reactions become grumpier from week to week. It's not fun. It burns out the audience, too, like they're not having fun with that either. I don't want that to be the default expectation of the genre. That is not my goal when I start watching a show to rag on it, it's not how I want to spend my time. 

I want this to be fun. [laughs] Truly. And I'd like for it to start being fun consistently again. 

01:18:31 - Outro

Ben 

Clearly we need to rein in questions from Alex. I feel like we spent 50 minutes talking about Alex.

NiNi 

Alex got us talking about sex work over an hour. This is ridiculous. 

Ben 

I just want you all to know that I was silenced on this podcast and not everything I said was allowed to be aired. 

NiNi 

I mean some of the things that you said, bestie, were a little on the borderline. 

Ben 

Thank you all again for sending us in your questions. We do look forward to them and they often lead to really interesting discussions for us. If you're curious about more, our inbox will be open after we finish this current season. 

NiNi 

I mean, how much after are we talking about? I know I've gotten really bad at this. I gotta get better. Okay, we're gonna try to be better about this. Gonna try. 

Ben 

Like any other blog, we will get to your asks when we get to them. 

NiNi 

And yet we get to them. But we know that you love us and you will stay tuned and wait. 

NiNi 

And with that, we out. Say bye to the people Ben. 

Ben 

Peace! 

[stop-breaking-my-heart-telltale]

A while ago, you wrote that you were planning on writing an essay about the "subtextual queer-coding" of Louis's character... I want it bad, CJ.

I've said that a few times now; to quote myself from my Javier's bisexuality essay, "-one day I'll crawl out of my bog to write my analysis on the queer-coding/subtext of Louis' character because if I read "lmao Louis is such a Straight" one more time, I'm going to let the gators take a bite out of me just so that I can feel something other than irritation for once."

Dramatic, but that's how I felt in the moment of writing that essay.

I have two twdg essays I'm working on with other ideas on the backburners, not to mention essays and other projects for other fandoms on my side blogs, among more personal works... so y'know what, anon? For you, I'll do a impromptu mini-essay right now since I don't know when or if I'll ever have time to dedicate a full-length deep-dive essay to the topic.

Also, big thank you to @pi-creates for once again providing me with screenshots!

Louis is bisexual-coded and CJ's gonna prove it [probably]

First thing's first: queer-coding, what is it?

Just so that we're all on the same page, here's the basic idea: implications that a character is queer through intentional [but not always] subtext, and/or the use of stereotypes to indicate a character's queerness without outright stating it. It's been around forever; look up the history of The Hays Code to learn more, but essentially the film industry was like, "That's it! no swearing! no more blasphemy! no drugs or alcohol! and definitely no homosexuality! good, clean, god-loving movies only!"

So, what were writers and film makers to do? Why, they code their characters, of course.

There's a lot to learn about the history of queer coding, the good, the bad, the in-between--but I'm not here to give you that lecture. I'm here to talk about Louis.

Ah, Louis. My favorite TWDG character. Love him. Adore him. Written countless thought pieces on him. Definitely bisexual.

Well, to me he is, anyway.

It's like a spidey-sense in the back of my head, I look at Louis and I go, "I know what you are."

When it comes to interpreting media, my stance is that while authorial intent is important, it doesn't dictate my interpretation.

I lean more into "Death of the Author" in all the media I consume, whether that be books, movies, TV, video games, etc... unless there's a circumstance where I feel learning more about the author would benefit my reading of their material... hence why I care little for what the writers/devs of TFS say about the story/characters as I don't want their influence, yet I'm reading all of Tillie Walden's books in order to better understand the Clementine books for my analysis.

As a bisexual myself, it's true that I may just be projecting onto my favorite character due to my desire to see a bi4bi couple in one of my favorite video games. That's how most headcanons come to be, no? We wish to see ourselves represented in characters we love, especially when we feel mis/underrepresented in media.

I believe Louis has some queer coding going on. I don't believe it's intentional, but it doesn't need to be in order to exist. It's there, I feel it when I play the game, no one gets to tell me otherwise.

First let's tackle the idea of, "how can Louis be bi if he's never seen flirting with any guys?" ...because I have a feeling that might come from the same people who say "he's such a Straight," y'know?

We know for sure that Louis likes girls--he has a crush on Clementine no matter what, and he makes a point of saying he's never had a girlfriend before... so if he's bi, why doesn't he also point out that he's never had a boyfriend before?

Because Clementine's not a boy.

No, really, it's that simple. Clementine is his only love interest in TFS, and having him bounce around flirting with everyone wouldn't be in character for him. He's friendly, sure, but friendliness and being flirtatious aren't the same thing.

But if he's bi, why wouldn't he flirt with his best friend, Marlon, or with Aasim? Mitch? What about the great chef god Omar?

I don't know--why doesn't he flirt with Brody? Or Ruby?

Again, I must point you to my essay on Javier and how much I disapprove of this notion that all bisexual characters have to "prove" they're bi by flirting with all genders--if they aren't running around DTF with everyone, then are they really bisexual???

First of all, stop that. A lot of people, usually straight, are under the impression that bisexuality is about who and how many people you're dating/sleeping with when no, that's not it.

Second, why would he flirt with them? He's not that type of character, and none of them are his love interest. His love interest is Clementine.

In ep1, during the card game, Louis asks Clementine if she's ever had a boyfriend [he wants to gauge her interest in boys since he's a boy], and he says she can ask him if he's ever had a girlfriend before [letting her know he likes girls] and that he hasn't, by the way. Hint hint.

Louis has no reason to add that he's never had a boyfriend, either. The game's making its intent clear with this: Louis is a potential love interest for Clementine.

It does this with Violet, too. It's just different. Violet doesn't need to explicitly state that she's only into girls, the game goes to great lengths to show us this through the writing. C'mon, we all know what "Minnie and I... we were close," really means. Your spidey-senses were tingling, especially if you're queer, too.

If you go fishing with Violet and Brody, you've told the game you're more interested in Violet than Louis at this point, so you find the heart with her and Minerva's initials carved in it. That's the game making another thing clear: Violet likes girls, she's the other potential love interest for Clementine.

Y'know, in case all the "Louis or Violet" choices weren't enough of an indication.

The first card game is usually what I see pointed at when someone goes, "lmao Louis is such a Straight" for asking Clementine that, and I'm like... this? Are you sure?

Honestly, my theory is people really want Louis and Violet to fit into the straight himbo/lesbian friendship dynamic, which like... you can still do that if he's not straight. I'm just sayin'.

"But CJ, how else would we know he's not straight if he doesn't show attraction to boys?"

By looking at literally everything else about him. He doesn't need to openly flirt with other boys to be bi. Bisexuality is more than that, it's a personal queer experience. There are things in the subtext of his character, and TFS in general, that lead me to believe he is.

Heteronormative thinking could be playing a part: "cis/straight's the default until proven otherwise." Hence why some need more "proof" of him expressing interest in people who aren't female...tbh I think some people are just dumb and miss the point of headcanon in fandom culture. It's not about what's objectively true with heaps of evidence, it's about looking at canon and interpreting it through our personal lens... but whatever it's fine, ignore me, I'll just continue on then-

I believe the Ericson crew don't operate under that line of thinking.

I touched on this a little before, but TFS's narrative is steeped in queer themes; an oppressive older generation who uses force to try to shape the Ericson crew to be like them, and if they fight back, they're punished; found family and acceptance, love in a world that doesn't want you; the troubled youth of Ericson being abandoned because parents didn't want to deal with them, sending them away to be "fixed." There's no getting away from it.

I think Louis puts it best when you appeal to him in ep1: "This is how adults do things, not us."

They're a generation who only had each other, abandoned by the adults who were supposed to love them, supposed to make them better. They're a generation of genuine acceptance when it comes to each other. Clementine and AJ are able to integrate with them because they're the same way. When AJ sees the heart with Violet and Minerva's initials in it, he doesn't question how two girls could be together, he just says, "Oh. Love." and then he moves on. He grew up differently than you and I, they all did.

We also need to consider where Louis came from before Ericson.

Louis has an artistic hobby in music, something we haven't seen before in TFS as we're often too busy trying not to die to explore hobbies. The most we see of something similar is when Mariana listens to music on a cassette player.

TFS introduced characters who have interests they pursue outside of survival, and they're more artistic things. Louis plays piano and writes music. Tenn's an artist who reintroduces AJ to drawing. Aasim writes and openly journals about the days as a record. Omar takes great pride in his cooking, which is an art in of itself. Violet mentions not being into arts and crafts, but she still makes Clementine a pin when you take her route, and she wants to dance with Clementine if they're romantically involved. Minerva had a talent for music, and Sophie for art when they were there, too.

I don't think I need to tell you that many look down on the arts--I think we're well aware. We're also aware of the stereotypes of men in the arts, no? "A boy who likes art?? Son, why can't you be normal and like sports!?" That nonsense.

Louis grew up wealthy with parents who gave him everything he ever wanted, except for one thing. As he tells it, he wanted singing lessons so he could be a real musician, but his father denied him; "You get to be happy, or you get to be rich, can't be both."

Huh... can't be both, can't have both, can't like both... where have I heard that one before?

Alright, maybe interpreting the use of the word "both" here as a metaphor for bisexuality is a major stretch. I know, but listen, in my experience there's always this feeling of "pick one" when it comes to outsiders who don't understand. The fact that Louis' father tried to teach him a "dad lesson" in this specific way is... interesting, to say the least.

The implication is that Louis was a spoiled brat and his father tried to teach him that you don't always get what you want in life... but why draw the line at music, specifically? Music is something his father could've thrown money at. Louis could've had the privilege of the finest vocal coaches at such a young age. He could've become a glowing success and never ended up at Ericson.

Music isn't gendered nor is it inherently queer... but I often wonder if his father would've had the same approach if Louis came to him and said, "I want to be a professional baseball player," instead. After all, in many circles it's more sociably acceptable to have a son who plays baseball, or any sport, rather than a son who takes singing lessons, no? And the fact that his father presents it as a "choice" between the arts and conformity.... C'mon, it's representative of a "choice" people try to enforce on bisexual people: pick the "gay" option and face the consequences, or pick the "straight" option and adhere to easy heteronormativity. That's not how that works, by the way.

But I digress, it's probably not that deep, but still.

Louis' response to all of this was basically, "Fuck you, I'm gonna destroy your marriage. That'll teach YOU a lesson." Real chaotic bisexual behavior here... Okay, I joke, but he's always been one for the dramatics, I suppose.

What I'm getting at is the concept of a character, typically masculine, enjoying the arts only for their more conservative family to disapprove makes an appearance in a lot of stories containing queer themes. It's understandable to raise an eyebrow at Louis for having a backstory like that, even if it's "not the point."

Now, let's examine his relationship with Clementine.

I will die on the hill that clouis is bi4bi.

Louis is peak bi love interest energy.

When we think of a typical straight male love interest, what do we think of? Specifically in the romance genre? I don't know about you, but I read a lot of romance, and well... the leading men tend to have some things in common. Y'know, he's unbelievably handsome and broody. He's an asshole but it's kinda hot? I guess? Not really, but the leading lady's into it. He's what you'd find under the definition of "toxic masculinity" but it's fine, she's going to fix him! With her love! He's really not that bad, he's just sad about his tragic backstory! And also, he's really hot!

Every time I pick up a book and I get the sense this is where it's going, I take a moment to debate with myself whether I'm willing to power through this in hopes that the book does something actually interesting with it... it usually doesn't.

Louis doesn't exactly fit in this mold, which in my opinion, is a good thing. Instead, he's charismatic and friendly. He cares about people and isn't afraid to show it. He watches over AJ until Clementine wakes up, and gives him his food after AJ eats all of his. He's interested in music, but he's not a weak survivor. He struggles with his self-esteem and the guilt of his actions hurting those he cares about. He's hurt and traumatized over Marlon's death and it causes him to lash out, but he gives Clementine a genuine apology. He strives to be better for her, AJ, and everyone at Ericson.

He's sweet with Clementine even before they're romantically involved, and if she doesn't share his feelings, he accepts that. He doesn't feel entitled to her. He isn't the "Nice Guy" trope.

He respects her autonomy, and admires the strengths she has rather than feeling threatened by them. He doesn't get jealous or possessive. He's never physically aggressive with her, and he never makes any sexist comments about how she can't do this, or how she needs to do this, because she's female.

It's the fact that he'd like Clementine no matter what. Louis feels like someone who likes who he likes regardless of gender.

Louis is soft, something that can be construed as weak, even though that's far from the case. It's not just his personality, either; let's take a quick look at his physical appearance.

Louis has a softness to him; long hair, freckles all over his face, his lips are fuller, he's tall and thin but not exactly broad in the shoulders, especially when compared to the other men in TFS. His appearance isn't considered intimidating, and I wouldn't say that his traits lean heavy into the masculine.

We joke about him being so fashionable in the apocalypse, but his long jacket is more evocative of "fashion over function," a stereotype often thrown at feminine fashion... though I suppose you could argue that's where he keeps Chairles so it is functional.

There's the way he presents himself, and yes, even the way that he stands at points, I have no other explanation for other than, "......it's the vibe, there's bisexual energy there."

Look, I'm no body language expert, okay...

...but c'mon, what is this?

I know it's dumb, but there's something to it, that's why so many of us make the "Louis ain't straight, look at how he stands" jokes.

All of this contributes to the subtext of Louis being a bisexual character. It's not about how many genders he openly flirts with, it's about how he's written, both as a character and as the male love interest. It doesn't matter how intentional it was because it's there, I recognize it.

Again, I'll reiterate that this is how I interpret TFS, clouis, and Louis as a character. As a bisexual myself, I'm going to have bias toward this topic. At the end of the day, it's fiction and Louis is a character, y'know? Headcanon is all in good fun, and I'd like to hear y'all's thoughts on this subject.

I don't know what else I can say other than, "Dude, just look at him!"

[mangosaurus]

Hi! Love your jwcc fanarts! (Hope u don't think my question is to annoying lmao 😭❤️)

I wanna ask u what do u think about that theory abt Ben gf being a catfish? Maybe one of that people that have been hunting them idk. Some posts claim it's actually Brooklyn trying to keep herself updated about the whole situation?? TO MUCH THEORIES

Also if the gf is actually real I'm curious about your opinion. Like I saw a post saying that Ben could be Bi, Pan, etc, but really, I am bisexual myself and there is no bi subtext on that boy... and it's not like they suddenly are gonna officialize he is bi/pan, or give him this type of subtext at this point of the franchise. Is not cool when people call "bi/pan" a media trying to avoid dealing with a character queerness. It's just painful that people think this is a real way of portrait of a bi/pan experience. It's not!!

AW thank you so much! i know i haven't posted much art lately but it still makes me really happy to hear that people enjoy it. and your question isn't annoying at all, don't worry about it :) i love receiving and answering asks, it doesn't matter what they're about

the more time that passes the more plausible the catfish GF theory sounds to me. if i had to guess, ben probably met his girlfriend online, possibly through dark jurassic (which a lot of the fandom seems to be in consensus about). as for it being brooklynn ... not too sure about that one! i've mostly treated it as a crack theory up until now, if just because of how absurd it sounds on paper, but i wouldn't put it past brooklynn to pull something like that. keeping in touch with ben is probably one of her only links back to her friends, besides her contact with ronnie (who is only partially connected to darius at this point, since he quit the DPW). i'd recommend giving these two posts by kitabearuwu a read if you're interested in exploring that theory further.

now if the girlfriend is real: i obviously can't speak for you or other bi/pan/otherwise mspec people, but i've come to not care all that much, if i'm being honest. it was definitely a shock to hear, as was the intended effect, since darius, sammy, and yasmina all initially reacted with surprise. but my question is what harm does ben having a girlfriend in chaos theory pose? like, does it play into any negative stereotypes? does it communicate a dangerous message about queer people? i've seen some people argue that it perpetuates the notion that mlm relationships are "icky" and shouldn't be portrayed in media, but i have to disagree, respectfully.

i think it's also really important to remember that subtext is ... ultimately kind of subjective, and is totally independent of the creator's intentions. that's the whole point of subtext—it exists below (hence the prefix sub-) the underbelly of the text. you have to be looking for it to see it, basically. and for a long time, the fandom (or at least the queer part of the fandom) subtextually read ben as gay! a lot of that had to do with his rather intimate interactions with the other boys, juxtaposed against the way he rejected yasmina when he thought she had a crush on him ("i like you, but i don't like like you ... i'm just now starting to find myself"). but ... i don't know, if we want to start citing text, you could also argue that ben's whole thing about not putting him in a box circa jwcc s5 could be a point towards him being generally unlabeled, which leaves room for him being mspec.

if i had to make some definitive statement on the matter, i guess it'd be that this fandom gets really bogged down by the specific labels of these characters, when it's really not all that necessary. this is still a gay show made by gay people featuring unapologetically gay characters in explicitly gay relationships, of which has been some of the best gay rep i've ever seen in media. and having that kind of representation on TV matters more to me than knowing what ben specifically identifies as, even if it doesn't align with my headcanon. it doesn't have to! but i also don't know for sure if it doesn't align with my headcanon, because we haven't gotten the full story yet. ben's girlfriend is most likely gonna be of some importance, given that he mentioned her twice without going into much detail about her. that leaves a lot of room in future seasons to expand upon who she is and her role in both the greater narrative and ben's life specifically, including his identity. i just think it's best we reserve judgement at this point, basically

[fullmetal-scar-simping]

Any thoughts on them changing Scar’s face in 03? It’s so much smoother compared to Mangahood. Like do you prefer one face over the other? Thoughts on the fact that they changed Scar’s face but nobody else’s, why do you think it happened at all?

Hm. I do have thoughts on the matter, but so much of it is more about how fans perceive 03 Scar vs the mangahood Scars (because manga and Broho Scar do differ in their appearance as well, though perhaps not as immediately as 03 does) than anything to do with the contrasts in the anime vs the manga itself.

The way fans talk about 03 Scar's appearance just. Man. Bums me out. Pre-Brotherhood you had your bog standard cishet white dudes harping about Scar looking "like he should be in a boy band," and listen. If you were a teen or young adult in the oughts, you knew exactly what the subtext for the statement was: fag.

I'd have thought, all these years later, that I would be seeing better quality opinions on the dude. Unfortunately, rejoining the fandom after over a decade post-Brotherhood I seem to find similar, disparaging sentiments. Except now it's painted more as a critique of 03 being a separate beast from the manga's canon. Yet the unmistakable undercurrent of disdain towards a man being rendered more pretty, young, vulnerable, and with a somewhat greater range of emotionality remains intact, only now Western fans have the more overtly masculine, older, emotionally restrained depiction of Scar everyone prefers in Brotherhood to use as an additional way to shit on 03 Scar's looks.

People seem forever confounded by a version of Scar who isn't Peak Masc™®© and 'scary'/intimidating, so they gawk at 03's version like its a rift in reality. But when I first saw what Scar looks like in the manga a ways back (please note, I started with 03 back before 2009 and Brotherhood) I just shrugged. And finally watching Brotherhood earlier this year I was no less unbothered over the shift in Scar's appearance.

To me the change in artstyles alone across both anime and the manga makes everyone look rather different; 03 Envy and Broho Envy have completely different faces, hair density, and even demeanours but I don't see non-stop posts about them. Hell, 03 Greed vs Mangahood Greed looks VERY different to me. Mangahood looks so young and, as you put it, smooth. 03 looks older, more like he actually lives in the seedy underbelly of society. But again, no one bats an eye at this. Folks have at least noted Ed and (human body) Al's design differences, but that's accepted without much hullabaloo. 03 Lust also has (albeit more subtle) design changes over the manga, and the later Broho version looks unlike both 03 and manga Lusts. Hohenheim of Light and Von Hohenheim? Look quite different! Their face shapes aren't even identical. So no, I don't actually feel that only Scar ended up looking unlike his manga counterpart. It's a more overt change compared to most of the rest of the cast, but he's not the only one who looks younger/more beautiful. (And come on, damn near everyone has a retroactive glow-up in 03 versus Brotherhood, given the difference in styles.)

I just don't get why Scar's changes should be such a big deal.

Maybe I'm used to media that has scores of iterations of the same core characters, where even artstyles change on the regular. So 03 Scar vs manga Scar vs Broho Scar designs never registered as anything controversial. Frankly the fact of these differences are banal. Tweaks in appearance happens per iteration. Which isn't to say that there aren't choices being made by the artists. Just that it doesn't impact how I feel or engage with each version of this character.

What I find the most bizarre about this memefication of "2003 Scar is a twinky emo boy who cries and is wimpy, give us back our brick wall Big Man who has two expressions max" is that this comes from a mostly queer contingent on tunglr dot fuck. A queer, "feminist" fandom, who giggles at a character of colour the fandom mostly sees as a 'fearsome villain' having ever been rendered with such proximity to emotional complexity, to the the feminine, and deriding this character design and writing choice. It also flanderizes the version of Scar they supposedly prefer, because the mangahood Scars aren't Mega-Sized American Shooter Space Marines Who Are Gruff and Feel Nothing despite whatever weird cultural-gender hangups these same fans are (perhaps unwittingly) clinging to. The role those Scars are meant to inhabit is the racialized caricature of the dangerous Other, but even they aren't as flattened as the fanon renders them.

We can be honest though. Nobody in this fandom has a problem with other attractive characters. Only 03 Scar fuck's 'em up. And most of the people bothered by 03 Scar's appearance aren't even Scar fans to begin with. They just find it uncanny that a "terrorist villain" could ever look, well. Alluring. It crosses people's wires.

Skill issue.

As for why the 03 character designer(s) chose to change Scar's appearance from the manga, I can only speculate. It's worth noting that a cleaner, more youthful appearance does tend to carry its own signifiers in pop media. Especially for a younger audience, a more relatively youthful design can encourage seeing oneself in a character's shoes. To strip away some of the degree of separation that teen and young adult viewers may otherwise feel towards a displaced, religious, soldier-murdering character, in the hopes that they instead connect with Scar. Not as a figure meant to terrify them but rather a fleshed out character grappling with his own journey.

Maybe, more cynically, the character designers just thought a younger, more conventionally attractive Scar might better draw in viewers.

Unless anyone has some sources from the team behind the 2003 anime, we can't know the reasons with any certainty.

To answer your question: looks wise, I don't have a strong preference. Older, younger, more (relatively) bulky or more (relatively) trim (but for real tho, we know 03 Scar isn't a twig, yeah?), a prettier face or a more grizzled one, doesn't matter to me. It just adds variety to the meal, ya know? All Scars are gorgeous to me. If I could lovingly cradle all three huge men in my arms at the same time, I would.

But character wise? 03 is my fave, hands down. I prefer his staunch principles, his struggles, his characterization, his arc, his radicalism, his emotional range, just! Everything about him is pitch perfect to me. There's a reason why he's the one in my pfp, the one I drew for my blog header, hell the one I draw the most obsessively overall.

Sucks ass that sifting through ages of fan content yields so much constant trash slung at my fave amongst faves. 🥲 But my expectations for this fandom have never left rock bottom anyhow.

[ihopesocomic]

As a bi and nonbinary person i feel like lgbt media that doesn't make romance ina homophobic society or a coming out story is geniunely refreshing. Im really tired of the same old stories that are like that. So i really like i hopeso a lot better than mypride... Like

If you guys want homophobic or transphobic "realism" idk go watch mypride or whatever. Im geniunely tired of having to experience and having media reflect real world prejudice that has an effect on people.

So anyways ihopeso is really good in terms of being an lgbt friendly comic. I hope more stuff like yours comes out soon.

Also I don't know how they did it but they seriously wrote nothing and hover with the charisma of an obligatory heterosexual couple in every piece of media ever. Thats all ill say on all of that

Thank you! Just based on personal experience, enjoying a thing without it having to be bogged down by rampant bits of bigotry just makes it all the more enjoyable. Right from the start I wanted to make it absolutely clear that homophobia/transphobia/ableism/etc was just not a thing in this world. Not only do the readers not have to stress out about whether it's gonna happen, but look at that, the main couple also has a brief Romeo & Juliet moment. But it's because they have different cultures, and not because they're two girls who are romantic.

Since there's no "cishet default", there's no "corrupt religion", so why include something that only exists because one sector of humans decided to hide behind religion to justify oppression? Starts not making sense when you think about it.

Unless the point of someone's story is to deconstruct discrimination or just generally speaking about one's experiences, there's no reason to include it. Animals or fantasy or whatever. Your fantasy world has Off-brand Catholicism in it to justify discrimination against queer people? Then why are you boring, that's my question. It just especially doesn't make sense with animals. It's a good fuckin way to take any queer readers you have right out of the story. Most days I just put it down and never look at it again cuz I'm fuckin tired. It's 2023, queer tragedies are old hat, no one cares.

And if someone's one of those people who thinks it doesn't make sense to not include it, then you need to assess why you think this way because it's not normal. Or if you don't wanna do that, then yeah, go back and watch MP, cuz an off-putting amount of people bug us about why characters aren't ableist or homophobic. Y'all want homophobic lions, go watch MP. That's clearly what some of you want LOL And you're not gonna get MP 2.0 out of IHS, as much as people want it to be.

As for Nothing and Hover, there's a strange phenomenon in queer media where they have to include one or multiple bad sapphic tropes. Specifically where one is the "meek feminine one" and the other is the "boistrous masculine one". Essentially making them a poorly-written cishet couple. MP just has the extra bonus of Nothing being disabled and Hover being ableist. They complete each other/sarcasm.

And to go on a bit of a tangent, homophobia and ableism doesn't even make sense in the context of My Pride lol I know what they were trying to do, but in simplest terms, woman-haters don't worship women. And it just becomes even stupider when you remember that they're trying to explain "realism" in lion behaviors. - Cat

[liamgallaghermpreg]

this is a bit of a personal question, so i understand if you don’t want to answer! as someone who’s transmasc but fem i struggle to explain to others & rationalize myself why i feel more strongly aligned w/ fem men than fem women. it’s had me wondering whether i really am transmasc. i know that you as a transmasc are fem presenting & that you’re interested in pregnancy so i wanted to hear your take on it.

how do you differentiate between being a cis fem woman and a trans fem man? how does it “feel” different to you to be transmasc, and change how you see yourself? seeing your confidence in your photos and your comfort with your gender has been immensely helpful for me and it’d mean a lot if i could get your thoughts on this! :) pls answer if you feel comfortable

Hey anon! I’m extremely touched that me posting and stuff has helped you out🥺

I think first of all is that I try NOT to rationalize myself to people — I (we) don’t need to! One of the most important things a friend told me is “I don’t need you to get it or understand, I just need you to respect me.” This has especially been helpful with people like my parents who I genuinely think would get it more if I were a binary trans man lol. But they don’t have to get it! They just need to respectfully try to use my pronouns and say stuff like “my child” instead of “my daughter.”

Secondly, it’s important to remember that everyone’s gender journey is their own. It can be really hard to not get bogged down especially in this age of social media. Like I was posting about yesterday — it gets me down that I’m not so confident in HRT like a lot of people I know are! But also — and I know I’m immensely lucky for this — most of my friends are also trans and are very supportive of me and my identity which is very helpful. When I feel “less” trans I know that’s me projecting and not anybody making me feel that way.

Re: differentiating — I don’t see myself as a cis fem woman because I’m not! That sounds so stupidly simple but it really is. When I think of calling myself a woman I get this icky feeling all over. I don’t think this means I can’t connect to womanhood. I personally DO feel like I was a girl who later blossomed (lol) into a dude. I went through a lot of stuff as a girl that I still connect with. Doesn’t mean the trans shit wasn’t always there. Now that I know, I see a lot of egg moments in my younger self. But I still connect with my girlhood. A lot of trans people were always that gender and that’s awesome. I don’t feel that way, and that’s also okay. A great phrase I use a lot is “one person’s dysphoria is another’s euphoria.”

That all said — identifying with fem men over fem women definitely speaks to you identifying with masculinity. I think masculinity can be whatever you make it. Sometimes I feel so masc when I have a full face and super revealing dress on! I get it though, it sucks when people don’t see you how you are. And it can be a bummer to constantly correct people. It does get me down a lot. I think I take a lot of comfort in surrounding myself with people who respect me — I know this is easier said than done but I really recommend trying to get involved in your local queer community if at all possible, and if not finding people online.

Re: my presentation — I never felt like I was born in the wrong body or anything like that, I have way more social dysphoria. I don’t like that I’m seen as a woman walking down the street. I don’t like that when guys hit on me at the bar it’s 99% of the time because they think I’m just an alt girl. But I don’t want to change to fit what others perceive. I like my boobs! I like my pussy! I like my curves! And I think really trying to overcome the “this body type/presentation = woman” thing in your head is HARD but necessary. I totally get why others want top, bottom, etc. That’s their way of feeling more aligned with their gender and that’s fantastic. For me…it isn’t. Really trying to view these things as neutral is hard but necessary.

Same with pregnancy. Now I’ve wanted to be a mom since I was a little girl (see!) and now that I’m a grown man/masc/person that hasn’t changed. I really really view pregnancy as a neutral. It’s something my body can do and I want to do it. Society equates this (and wanting this — but there ARE cis men who want to be pregnant too! People of every gender!) with being a woman but working to remember and surrounding yourself with people who know it’s a neutral can be helpful. That’s another thing like…I would consider myself a mother. Some transmascs who choose to give birth may want to be called a father or another term. I view these terms as neutral in my head. Like gender identity it’s whatever feels right to YOU.

Whoever you identify with that makes YOU feel good is valid — like I know the word valid has been overused on the Internet but I really mean it. Like Joan Jett is on my gender moodboard as much as Kellan Lutz in Twilight. I really found comfort in finding my own style, which I describe as jock/goth (joth) lol and so playing around with that has been helpful. If fem men are how you feel connected to your masculinity — then hell yes! With stuff like makeup…I like makeup! That’s a value neutral! I like the artistry and playing around with it. I have to work to remember that it isn’t an inherently cisfem thing.

Unfortunately a lot of my coping is self-validation (and luckily, from my friends too) and believing that society will catch up.

I know this was SUPER rambly but my coping mechanism has been fake it till you make it from the time I was a 9 year old being bullied in 4th grade and it still is. If you act confident the confidence will come…

Idk how helpful this was but I hope it was a bit!

Btw — if you feel transmasc, then you are :) it’s as simple as that!

[savebylou]

Article below. Read it if you can.

The discourse surrounding Harry Styles is many things, but one thing it literally ALWAYS is is exhausting. Harry Styles has reached the calibre of celebrity and fandom that whatever move he makes, how he chooses to do his hair, what he chooses to wear all spark conversation and debate. It feels like for years now the odiously boring conversation on whether Harry Styles has been “queerbaiting” or not is a never ending pollution across social media and the more yawn inducing side of Reddit – but now, it’s pivoted in a new direction thanks to how Harry Styles looked when he went to watch a footie game the other day, with people saying he’s now “straight again”. O-kay.

Just a very bizarre opinion to be fronted with, in my opinion. And even more bizarre to see it’s currently sitting on 138,000 likes – which either means that many people genuinely believe such trite nonsense or they think it’s funny. It’s got to a boring area of the discourse where it doesn’t matter if Harry Styles rocks up in the pretty bog standard, neutral outfit he did or wears a feather boa as per his Love On Tour era – he’d be spoken about with the word queerbaiting not fair behind.

I think where this gets really problematic is that it’s sort of all centred on the nonsensical. If Harry Styles is bi, gay, queer – any of those things being entirely his business to keep to himself or share when he wants – then why would he suddenly not be if he wears a muted colour, goes the footie or cuts his hair shorter? I feel like the fact I’m even having to voice this makes me feel like I’ve fell down a time slip to 2010 or something. And what I find even more baffling is that the outfit in question is a shirt and sweater vest, big 70s vibes – isn’t that how Harry’s been dressing for … years? So we’re saying all this Harry Styles ‘is straight again’ because he’s cropped his hair short? Do me a favour.

Was particularly riled at this one, which suggests the reason that Harry Styles isn’t walking into a footie match with a feather boa on and some pink palazzo trousers is because Love On Tour has ended and so has the album cycle – therefore he has not interest in… Your guess is as good as mine. No interest in being gay, of which he more than likely isn’t anyway? No interest in appealing to gays? Why are we pretending that over half of every stadium on Love On Tour wasn’t filled with heterosexual women?

It’s all just very weird, to be honest with you. I am writing this as a gay man, and whether Harry Styles is presenting himself in whatever way he’s seen fit I have never once felt “queerbaited”. I have not spent the last few years of my life thinking Harry Styles was LGBTQ+ – just that he was a massive ally and someone who wasn’t afraid to be a bit flamboyant from time to time. Even if he was gay or bi or whatever it would make a grand total of zero difference to my life or to my enjoyment of his music.

If your first thought when you see a pop star with shorter hair at a footie game is “oh, Harry Styles is straight again” – you need an urgent life.

Link to article.

[cxncordia]

This new wave of Queer cinema worries me a bit.

I'm talking things like Saltburn, Fellow Passengers and All of Us Strangers.

It worries me because, while beautiful to look at, it's a beautiful package wrap around one very detrimental idea: gays are not okay.

I'm gonna spoil a bit here. Ignore the list if you haven't seen any of these movies:

Saltburn is the story of Oliver, a guy that at first glance is shown that is experiencing the worst crush of his life on Felix, a beautiful English boy that he just can't have... and thus he starts this strange journey to get him, only to reveal to us that it was never Felix whom he wanted, but the Saltburn state where most of the story happens.

Fellow Passengers shows a beautiful love story of these two men who keep on being lovers through the ages and shows the audience what it means to be gay through a moment in time very difficult, because as they deal with externalized homophobia, they deal with internalized homophobia.

All of Us Strangers, while I haven't watched it, I have read that the basic idea is that Adam (Scott) is a screenwriter who runs into Harry (Mescal) who seems to make him open up and become vulnerable. And then they seem to move back to Adam's house where his parents are still living.

Now, I don't want to extrapolate over something so silly and superficial. But it worries me that these are the new "wave" of queer cinema. Because underneath it all, the basic conflict is that being gay is somehow linked to these problems of internalized shame and regret. While not explicitly villainizing homosexuality, we don't have the counterpart on the industry. We don't have homosexuals we can look up to and when we do, they are wrapped in the police and government propaganda idyllic world that serves the powers to be. (yes, I'm talking about you, Tarlos).

And yes, that's true. We gay men go through shame and regret more punctually than straight men do: because the world was not constructed for us so we have to learn to navigate the fact that we "look" the part but we "aren't" the part. We become performatic and we fill the gap between ourselves and the very large mask we use with shame.

But straight men have something we don't: an array of power fantasies at the tip of their fingers where their sexuality is not even questioned, put into consideration or a source of shame. Some other factors may be questioned, but never their sexuality. Rebel Moon comes out in December 21st and it's a testosterone-filled action movie with male actors and male characters that have not their sexuality questioned in this imaginary universe. Aquaman 2 comes out around the same time and it also features straight masculine acting men who do not have to worry about one ounce on how gay they look.

And that's the problem.

Every gay media I watch that gets to the mainstream is "woe is me and I'm gay". Even stuff that's supposed to make you feel good (Heartstopper or Smiley) has that component of internalized shame. And I get it, many of us who have come now into economic power and who are main consumers lived a time where shame was the norm.

But it's time to stop that. And also, is time to stop telling the gays that come behind us that they have to suffer this.

It's been more than 20 years since I fist watched Queer As Folk (the British version with a twink Charlie Hunnam) and we are still dealing with the same tropes, the same stories, the same ideas.

Where are the hyper-masculine gay super heroes? Or even better yet: the fat and femme gay super heroes?

The romantic and endearing fantasy princes looking for their own prince?

The fantasy hero based on the monomyth who faces his father as a representation of the Patriarchy that has stomped on him?

Where are they?

I'm just... tired.

Tired that in 20 something years we still have the same shit and we don't seem to move beyond Queer as Folk and Brokeback Mountain type of stories. And when we do present something new they are bogged down and ignored in the corporate shitty streaming world that only cares about how much money it can pull out from our pockets. Like that supernatural show (Astrid and Lily Save the World) with two plus size lesbian main characters.

I mean, it's amazing to see Andrew Scott get it going with Paul Mescal, and to see Jonathan Bailey suck Matt Bomer's toes is a first... but I need something more. Something different. Something were the character's sexuality isn't questioned or a source of shame, but a worthy, proud, and unapologetic trait of the main character who also has fun in the movie.

I want joyful gay stories that celebrate my sexuality. I want simple gay stories. I want happy gays.

Isn't that what the term is supposed to mean in the first place?

[queer-starwars-bracket]

Queer Star Wars Characters (Round 2): General Bracket Match 19

TK-421 | Identity: mlm | Media: “OF MSE-6 And Men”

TK-421 was a stormtrooper stationed in a Maintenance Unit of the Death Star and friendly with the mouse droid MSE-6. TK-421 had an affair with Grand Moff Tarkin. He was happy to be Tarkin’s sugar baby and intentionally assumed a more naive and backwater persona, guessing that’s what Tarkin would want. He was excited to be reassigned to a cushy position on Coruscant “guarding” Tarkin’s penthouse where he could enter MSE-6 into droid races. Even before beginning his affair with Tarkin, he was concerned with his appearance and had an eye for aesthetics.

He is the stormtrooper that Luke disguises himself as in A New Hope. When he went to investigate the Millenium Falcon, our heroes killed him. In the scene where a mouse droid approaches the disguised Luke and Han and is scared away by Chewbacca, that is MSE-6 fetching TK-421 to bring him to Tarkin’s private quarters. 

Caysin Bog/Tam Polsa | Identity: mlm couple | Media: Doctor Aphra comics

Caysin Bog and Tam Polsa are two background characters on Jedha in Rogue One (the latter not even making it into the final cut, but he was also in the background of Solo), but have been given a full story through the Visual Dictionary for the movie and the Doctor Aphra comic series. Tam Polsa was a member of the Milvayne Authority who went rogue to continue to pursue Corenlius Evazan and Ponda Boba, who were kidnapping people to turn into lobotomized cyborgs called decrainiated. Caysin Bog was one such victim, although the lobotomy didn’t take as much as most decrainiated. As Polsa pursued Evazan, he met Bog and the two fell in love, further motivating the former lawman. The two became bounty hunters to fund their search. They were both very legalist as bounty hunters, refusing to kill those who were neither criminals or someone they were being paid to kill. Polsa had a strong sense of justice, albeit restrained by the legal system. Although the lengths he had to go to tracking Evazan and the jobs he had to take recruited constant moral compromise and was sending him down the ‘self destructive noir detective’ path. Polsa was extremely dramatic in his speech, while Caysin showed no outward indications of his decraination effecting him cognitively.

They were hired anonymously by 0-0-0 and placed under the command of Doctor Aphra as part of a mercenary crew to retrieve a copy of his personality matrix. Said mission involved all the twists and schemes of a typical Doctor Aphra arc. Aphra reprogramed Caysin’s cybernetics with an override, which she used to make him walk into the fire of messed up Tarkin Initiative prototypes Polsa had previously refused to kill. Consumed by rage, Polsa slaughtered the prototypes. After the mission, he figured out that Aphra was the cause of his lover’s death, and swore vengeance on her as well. 

Imprisoned in Accresker Jail with Doctor Evazan, Aphra called Polsa to break her out of jail in exchange for being able to kill Evazan. He helped save her from some fungus that thought it was a Jedi (long story), before taking a frozen Evazan- not killing Aphra but not bringing her with him anyway. When Evazan was unfrozen, he used a shapeshifting squid thing (long story) to convince Polsa he was a changeling Aphra used to trick him. He returned to Accresker Jail, where 0-0-0 killed him. However, he was intact enough for the fungi that thought it was a Jedi to revive him and create a force-sensitive organism that believed itself to be a manifestation of the Force’s desire for justice. He tracked Aphra back to his home planet, where 0-0-0 killed him for real.

[gmbeowulf]

Thank you so much for your kind words. You said it better than I did, and hell’s bells, I would love to meet your friends too! They sound amazing!

I got carried away this morning, it’s just the commenter reminded me so much of my teenage daughter. She tells me she feels a similar sense of urgency and windows closing forever. And I remember that passage from The Bell Jar (I know, big facepalm, but it ~spoke to me~ at 20) about seeing your life’s possibilities as a tree full of beautiful fruits, then watching them start to rot and fall while you’re still trying to decide the best one to pluck.

I think young women, especially, cis and trans, feel like they have an expiration date stamped on them. So I am every day trying to push back on my teen’s ideas that time is running out for her. It’s hard to try gin up hope, the way the world is right now. But I guess you have to try.

And god, I hope that poor girl on here takes your words to heart. I hope she isn’t overwhelmed by these floods of well meant advice. I hope she surprises herself and blossoms, goes from strength to strength for the next 50 years! There is so damn much screaming evil in the world trying to bring down our beautiful queer kids and young people, but maybe sometimes they will hear our voices telling them to keep holding on.

My friends are amazing and I'm lucky to know them. And yeah, it's so easy to get bogged down by all the terribleness in the world (especially when social media puts it so front and center). But I'm also a parent--my son is ten, and neurodivergent, and honestly I'm going to be shocked if he isn't bi like I am--and I have a vested interest in making sure there's still a world and that the good people haven't all lost hope by the time he gets there.

[biblicallyaccuratepigeons]

Longpost that summarizes an old rant I saved a while back.

[context: i was watching a yt video released last June about pride and the issues with it (particularly that year) and had been thinking lately about the US school system. the following is an edited version of the comment i typed out, decided not to post because it was too long, and saved on a document to collect dust]

I think, if someone gets their personal validation from a tshirt or a series of colors, there must be some issue there other than "that the person isn't the same as everyone else."

An issue that I see a lot in the queer community, at least the younger part of it in (particularly northern) America, is that they're so busy putting on a show and "living their truth" that they've forgotten what it means to have to truly suffer for that truth (i.e. the mother crying in public and online because people moved the location of what she considered was her child's gender identity, which was most likely impermanent anyway, when just decades ago, and even still today, American children were sorely beaten and/or thrown out of the house for being queer in any way; just decades ago, the word "queer" was a hateful slur, and still today, there are people who are genuinely afraid of me just for being subtly queer). I think both wings, left and right, are keeping us like babies, doing everything they can to divert our attention from real issues, and keep us from maturing enough to see how wrong they are regarding these issues--and desperate people who don't know where else to turn, or how, are eating it up like the slop it is.

My thoughts always return to the US education system, and how much the media is allowed to overcome what little we're taught in the way of critical thinking and ethics. We're stuffed into a place we don't want to be, with adults who think it's their jobs to parent us however they like, teaching us things that don’t fit into a long enough timeframe or in ways that aren't flexible enough for everyone to learn, until either our 13 years are up or we quit. We're assured that we'll make nothing of our lives if we don't finish, and then when we do we're assured the same if we don't fork over thousands of dollars for some piece of paper no one looks at anyway and 2+ years of wasted time.

In what could possibly turn out to be 21 years of our lives (if we don't fail a year or two), we learn very little about actual life skills and critical, abstract thinking--unless we're already "gifted" enough to already be thinking critically and abstractly anyways. Those of us who have already figured that out then get bogged down with work, burn out early, and hate ourselves for an undetermined amount of time while our "less intelligent" friends (whom we know to be wonderful and equal) go to college, get married, have kids, and build careers. We know we could be better; it's what we've been told all our lives. That whispering shadow follows us around, saying things like, "It should've been you," "Why aren't you like that?" and "You're such a failure."

And for the kids who don't figure it out, well fuck them I guess, it just means more sheep who will follow every sentimental word the media says. Why bother teaching people who don't care to learn, even though the reason they don't care is because the adults didn't first? Conflict is good actually, division is good actually, arguing is good actually, war is good actually. Why? Because, uh, wait, nope, we're only allowed to teach that reason to the Gifted kids. Shoulda studied harder! Have some food stamps.

I know a lot of right-wing bigots compare the lives we live with the ones presented in George Orwell's book, 1984. That's why I always encourage people to read it for themselves. These guys might be overexaggerating some things, but, like everyone involved in this whole debate about what we're going to do next, they have a point. The manner in which the government is raising our children, the way kids often hate their loving parents for no reason other than "it's what I'm supposed to be doing at this age," or "because it's cool." Our hearts being directed by outside forces towards the wrong things, like patriotism or cheap Pride merch. The many who don't know better. The few who do being too exhausted or busied to do anything real about it.

The worst part for me is knowing that no matter how much I think about it, no matter how much I talk about it, I can't put a dent in the zeitgeist. And thinking and talking is all that I, a cherished Gifted kid, ever learned how to do, so what now? All the work ethic, all the valuing of human life and rights, mean nothing if I can’t do anything.

They teach the Gifted how to think, and the "normal" people learn how to do things on their own because they have no choice. 

If only I’d been born into an abusive home, I catch myself thinking. If only I’d never known how smart I am. Then, maybe, I would be able to do something. Maybe I’d have been able to make myself move on my own, proactively instead of reactively. Maybe I’d’ve taught myself taxes, and how to stay at a sucky job. Maybe I’d’ve proactively used a knife instead of my fingernails. Maybe I’d’ve stabbed instead of slashed. Maybe I’d’ve done heroin. Maybe I’d’ve walked into traffic. Maybe I’d’ve tied myself to a bag of heavy rocks and jumped into the river, to finally feel that cool, delicious, watery peace. Maybe I’d have a knife kink instead of a rope one. Blood instead of burn. Death instead of imprisonment. Yandere instead of tsundere. Hate instead of lust.

And I would be no better off than the normal kids.

[localcouchgremlin]

I think I might delete this and I don’t know whether it’s important but Jesus Christ the gerard gender discussion is making my blood boil now,, we barely know the gang can we not celebrate their genderfuckery as it is without making excuses for invasive speculation or potentially transphobic rhetoric?? please??

A lot of what I see on one front is the fact that peoples eggs can crack upon talking with a friend or therapist or otherwise someone close/a mentor about how they’re feeling, or even seeing themselves reflected in ways never thought possible before in media, which can clear up so much for them and give trans people clarity with who they are - an absolutely beautiful thing that should not be taken for granted or pushed as ‘forcing people to become trans’ cause that latter shit’s just not true.

but that’s the key factor - community, affirming media, that is a personal awakening, and can be shared in different ways to the people you love and want to connect to. this can’t be applied the same way to a celebrity as you don’t know them personally and are not a part of their community - so trying to pin down ways they might be a certain identity is fruitless, because ‘signs’ may be common but are ultimately different for everyone queer, and just lead to frustration for many because of the lack of explicit details we aren’t owed either way.

however i also see people that have this mindset lean far too much into the denial of anything queer in gerard’s (and by extension mcr’s) art and expression, which opens its own shit can of worms. no, gerard isn’t (exclusively) a guy. he’s referred to themself as a girl, a boy and a girl at once, and finds much inspiration and identity in Joan of arc, and who are we to judge how much of that is figurative or literal? whatever the case, there is so much joy that can be taken in what we perceive as their greater freedom in expressing themself nowadays, and shouldn’t be bogged down by presuming hed be offended by some she/her-ing or trying to pin their identity down when they have indeed stated labels seem more like a tool to them than genuine indicators of identity - which is likely why they refer to themselves as they feel.

now writing this I feel funny I’ve taken this long on the subject cause at the core, Gerard’s just an individual. they aren’t god, and we’re just people out in the world and behind screens finding ways to see we’re not alone. I think being aware of our parasocialism and embracing how we percieve not just this artist, but all artists among the queer spectrums as our own art based upon theirs and their stories. there are so, so many artists and storytellers out there that have diverse identities, these experiences that we can celebrate in addition to this one - some we can directly connect to and contribute to.

I’m not sure what this turned into. at first it was frustration with this discourse and why it even exists and now ending with a bit of grounding and re-realisation of how varied and lovely the queer experience is. and a lingering feeling as to why this discourse exists. this obviously won’t stop it but I’ve been seeing so much about it recently that I think processing it proper will help me lose frustration and instead feel some joy, and if you somehow read through all of this and thought it was okay, I hope that there is more joy in your day too.

tldr: gerard discourse frustrates me so i point out that both the insistence of certain identities when the subject is unlabelled and the rejection of queer themes and experiences in their art are bad and how community / parasocialism can play a lot into this, then making an affirmation to embrace what we feel about what inspires us as our own art.

[emilylangridgegrad604i]

WHY ? P2

6. Mixed media paper - The pile of mixed media paper acts as a metaphor for how the different mediums I work with eventually all come together to contribute to a wider influence on what I like practising and exploring, my illustrations usually end up starting on a watercolour paper page, and then get transferred on to the screen, it acts as a reminder as to what my favourite kind of practise is, tangibility and the physical making of my work keeps me inspired and feeling motivated, as I can tend to get bogged down staring at my screen all day as a designer. 7 & 8. Lady Gaga posters - My lady gaga posters are one of the most special items that I own, Lady Gaga has been an inspiration and influence of mine since I was very young, she is so incredibly special to me, not only because I have a queer identity but because she always encourages me to be myself and celebrate the people around me - These two posters were given to me by my friend Pablo and not only remind me of him but also remind me of the shared love that Gaga allows her supporters to feel. 9. Chromatica Ball VIP Lanyard - A VIP Lanyard that me and my friend were given when we went to see Lady Gaga live last year, this physical element from the show reminds me of a very memorable experience and is a representation on how hard me and my friend worked to get a VIP ticket. 10. Lady Gaga Chromatica Ball ticket - Still holding on to my Chromatica Ball Ticket I hold as a reminder as to how happy and excited I felt walking in to see someone who I have looked up to for so many years of my life, it was an otherworldly experience and I came back from that trip feeling so inspired, touched and moved. 11 & 12. Pleasers and Platforms - Pleasers have been worn by drag artists for many years and act as a way to elevate a drag look or express your identity. I remember during high school, I used to wear large pleasers and platforms into school on non-uniform days, I would always get in trouble as it was deemed unsafe, but now, I get to wear them to perform and It gets celebrated - it feels very full circle and is so rewarding. 13 & 14. Incense & Candles - Incense and candles contribute to the space I express my artistic practise in as they help me stay concentrated and focus when being creative, I get to pick whatever scent I like and helps me feel at ease when im designing something, I am very picky when it comes to brands so I enjoy when the ones I have specifically chosen work well in the environment im in.