Clean and Jerk (2019)

This is a solid, friendly Thai PBS youth lakorn, earnest in that Thai PBS way and progressive in themes and content. On a surface level, it's remarkable only for the literal strength of its centring of women characters.

There isn't much need to talk about that in a review - it's all right there. University friendships and rivalries. The community a sport fosters. Young people who get it right sometimes but also get it wrong and learn from their mistakes, with an on-going theme that we can't change what's been done, only acknowledge responsibility and carry on. Supportive adults and those who make their own mistakes too. A range of difficult situations which help them understand each other.

Two BNK 48 idols and a trainee in lead roles but also a team with four young women who clearly lift weights. It may just have been good casting, or writing to fit them, but all of the young women suited the personalities of their characters. I love that we had women on the screen who were there specifically for their physical (and mental) strength. I'll go back to the credits so I can add their names here, or recognise them in a Comment.

Most of the men are supportive (or illustratively not for those three catcalling nobs). They have their own stories but were never allowed to overshadow the women. That was good writing. (Small extra - P'Pond's half smile which let them include a barely spoken story of a supportive phi perhaps, or probably, becoming increasingly smitten instead.)

But it's not just surface. It also does that brilliant Thai thing of embedding a trauma narrative in the plot while still keeping it light. (The BL stans who are primarily here because of one actor have likely seen that before even if they don't realise it.) And they hid a second one in

(continued in a comment even though no one reads them because it came in the last episode so it requires a spoiler).

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