Completed in 2025

This feels like a television version of what those AI chat bots read like to me. I only barely had an idea of what was going on,  but I also couldn't stop watching even after finishing what I set out to for a watch challenge. I think if I were watching a version without the music edited out (and also like...the sound of anything? this can't be normal so I'm guessing this is a side effect of where I watched it) I would be completely swept up in this even with the really bad translations. The parts that I do understand (reincarnated sister bickering, the leads being in a "just for business until oops not really" marriage) are enjoyable. There is still like the whole rest of it (any relationship or most conversations the leads have with another person) that is completely incomprehensible though.

Another one where I think I read the manga and liked it more in that medium than I do here. I didn't mind the private investigator guy (if anything I mostly felt bad that he liked such a terrible guy), but there was not that much to be interested in for the main character. At one point he was described as a rat who follows the Pied Piper and like...yes, that is what's wrong with him and why I don't really like watching a movie about him.

I finished this only because it's a (the?) classic "what if one of them was a robot" and there's not too many other things I can watch for Hayami Mokomichi. He was fine (great even, I never have problems with the robot in one of these), but hard to appreciate when he was constantly opposite people who got on my nerves. The few exceptions were any of the extremely thirsty older women (me too, honestly) and Namakiri, who was definitely in a way more interesting and funny show than the one centered around the FL. This FL was extremely annoying, even with the knowledge that she couldn't really help it on account of originally being a high schooler (ugh) in a manga from 2006. The business guy? Guy that needed a comb very badly? No idea why all the reviews for this show call attention to him especially. When I realized this was going to be one of the sad robot stories where the robot dies because it loves too much, I thought 'well I do hate those, but usually these work very hard to make you feel okay with who the lead ends up with'. I kept waiting but this never happened. I disliked this guy on sight and it never got better from there. It's possible all the parts that would have made me like him were in the scenes I skipped starting about halfway through, but I really doubt it.

Anyway I'm glad there's no special out there so that I'd have to watch more of this!

I think the only thing that kept me from dropping this is residual goodwill from the actors' other projects. I liked the setup, but a lot after that was 'these are a bunch of kids in college' detours which were so boring that they could only be experienced at 3x speed. Since I was not that interested in these things, I did spend most of this time wondering if these two really suit each other and my thoughts are...ehhh.....sort of but also not really but also yes for like, a minute at the very end? The last few episodes were all mostly about things related to the main plot (leads having a connection besides just meeting incidentally, solving the main mystery, a coming out story that I did actually really like) and were better for it.

I think I would have liked this more if this was really about the Mantis and not her crybaby son, who spent most of the drama being the focus, and also an idiot. It's possibly just the kind of mood that I'm in lately but I think the Mantis was justified and they should have let her go free with blanket permission to do whatever she wanted. Anyway, Go Hyun Jung was really good, feels like it's been awhile since I've seen Lee El but I liked her here, and I really liked the side character guy (vice president to my president of the Mantis fan club) who, of course, died due to the main character being an idiot.

If this was just a rating for the last five or so episodes, this would be maybe a 6.5. The low rating is for the first eight or so episodes, where way too much time was spent on the older sister, a pretty boring internship at a fashion magazine, and her cartoonishly evil boyfriend. The only bright spot of that plot was  occasionally seeing Gun, who similarly kept me from fast forwarding during 2gether whenever he was around. Once more things were happening in the Sandee and Thada-focused plot, the show kept going at an enjoyable pace. I can see why this ended and people actually wanted more of it at that point. I also appreciate how even though I was definitely too late to be surprised by the Pete/Kao reveal, this show still was able to surprise me with a different reveal.

Anyway, Kiss Me Again, let's go (if I get around to it this year)! Also hope they fired whoever edited this series before Kiss Me Again was made!

Most of watching this felt like watching Supernatural but if you started it in season 7, and also the parts before the opening credits where they establish what the thing of the week plot is going to be about? That's like half an hour for some reason, and only sometimes the main characters will show up but in a "cleaning up the bodies" way rather than a "prevent anything from happening" way, at least until the show switches gears for the "what was going on all along" plot.  As for that bigger plot...honestly I'm not even sure I really get what happened. I think the story is not that difficult, but the delivery method (poorly told in bits and pieces, sometimes sidelined for random stuff that nobody could possibly care about) was so bad that I gave up before the payoff. I did like the first couple of episodes, but it just started to unravel into 'oh I recognize them...no idea what they're doing though' and by episode 5 I was fast forwarding through most things, though I did slow back down for the last three. The brief things that I didn't fast forward through (power struggle within the cult between uh...piano girl and...Evil Tay's granddaughter(?); sad Junior/Mark time/dimension travel-ish story; sad memory loss side character; Gun reminding me that I would probably have a better time just rewatching Not Me; a couple moments between Tor/Gun that weren't buried under bad storytelling) did keep me from dropping but like... I don't know. I can see the vision, and I get why people probably have this top of mind for 'shows that deserved better/more' but like, I also get why this got an open ending and not even a hint of a follow up.

For the second part, they took out all of the parts that were fun and just replaced them with like...assault. I guess that element was present in the first half too but it was not the focus, whereas here I feel like that was the only thing that was happening, and sometimes they would break to mention past lives again. I still liked the leads but I feel like they were barely together in this half. Oh well. I'll probably give vertical dramas another try someday if I can figure out how best to watch them, but until then I have those 10 minute episode Chinese mini dramas.

This was, for very brief moments, cute, but I was mostly just annoyed while watching this. This is another type of show that it feels mean to be mad at it for not being good (it is extremely rough knowing that we're in the early BL era for South Korea and that I can't just skip ahead to a future where these are like consistently good and watchable), but for a pretty basic story (or well...I guess two basic stories? Why was one half of this about money borrowing problems, these shows are not long enough for multiple plots/too many characters) it was told in such a boring, strange way. The only reasons I didn't drop this is that it's really short and it always feels a bit silly to drop a show this short, and the actor playing Sangha is really cute, in a "I want to put him in my pocket"-type way.

This mostly made me think about how I should just rewatch Pee Mak for this year's Scarython. It was kind of boring, minus a few scares and funny bits. Weird seeing the gay detective sister from Kiss Me Again/Belle from the worst Senior Secret Love series and fun seeing Daou in not a TikTok for once, I do really need to watch Century of Love.

Whoever decided to style the three main guys extremely similarly for the start, like down to them all pretty much having the same hair color, should be beaten with hammers. That made the first half so difficult to watch,  not helped by this whole thing feeling like scenes were missing. This was edited by someone who has never heard of transitions and who has a sink or swim approach for letting the audience figure out how much time has passed. Being annoyed at this for not being very good feels kind of mean because like...it's a Chinese BL from 2016, it can't really help it, but this somehow manages to be both boring and rushed. There's no time to feel anything about the leads, and I'm not even interested in finding out what happens in the second part.

Second verse, same as the first except this was completely charmless. I didn't buy a bit of the relationship between the leads. This movie was so long but the set up for these two felt totally rushed. They met up a couple of times as kids, she left, and that was supposed to mean something to me as a viewer when she came back, but it definitely didn't.  I also didn't really care about the hunting/healing the monster plot so I did a lot of fast forwarding through this. I thought the main point of making ML able to heal people was that he could  heal her?  We tried all these medicines but this guy/love was the real cure? But no, we just did the first movie all over again, or well, ML definitely died, anyway.

I wanted to like this so much but I think you can't do "nothing happens but for laughs" in Japanese GL considering nothing happens in these already. I liked the lesbian bar regulars and the office gang, but didn't care for the leads.

This isn't the worst live action that I've ever seen but it's maybe one of the more disappointing ones. I love both the anime and the manga, and honestly most live actions turn out kind of silly so I thought this would be something okay if not great. But this was just kind of slow and boring. I like the cultural festival plot normally (or well, uh, the normal cultural festival plot, and not this weird mashup of the cultural festival plot and kind of four other events plus some new stuff for the movie)  but I wish that hadn't been where the movie spent most of its time. None of the characters really seemed that connected to each other which to me is just as important as all of the jokes. Speaking of the characters, most of the performances also fell pretty flat. Saiki was probably the least terrible (this feels like such a whiny fan nitpick but why was Saiki talking out loud so much?), and the rest were middling to terrible, with each actor/actress picking one note and sticking to it. The only positives I can think of are that most of the characters looked like the characters, and the background characters and Saiki's opening monologue mostly felt like the source material.

I think a lot of my problems with this could be summed up by just saying that I hate 456. I thought his plan was stupid, and if anybody got those people killed, it was him for having the idea in the first place. Dae Ho was 100% right; even if he hadn’t gotten too scared to bring the ammo back, that was only ever going to end the one way. I also didn’t appreciate his pick and choose approach to morality. It’s okay to hunt down and kill the guy you blame for your stupid plan not working, but when you see a guy pushing people to their deaths in front of you there’s simply nothing you can do, at least not until after several people have needlessly died due to your inaction. We can’t possibly let any of the guys who want to kill a baby turn on each other so that we can safely leave with the baby! The right thing to do is start a big fight so that even more people die, obviously.

Rapid fire other things that I hated: so many scenes of the VIPs; crypto scam boyfriend (I knew it! He sucked last season too!) and Jun Ho continuing to earn that self-demotion to traffic cop by not doing anything of use all season except calling the coast guard. All the deaths were also pretty nothing-y to me, except for when I swore for a full minute after crypto scam boyfriend killed Park Sung Hoon’s character because it meant being stuck in the game even longer.

Things I liked: The guard/sad dad subplot, nice to see someone actually achieve a goal this season; Wi Ha Joon and Kang Ha Neul, still hot (and no I don’t care that Dae Ho pretended to be a Marine, literally there’s people who are dying); Thanos, my terrible beloved; Nam Gyu’s Thanos impressions; “boat captain guy and evil Gong Yoo fishing together" picture; and Se Mi and Sae Byeok for a little bit while their respective guys who let them get killed were going crazy. OH, ALSO Woo Seok didn’t die! And maybe he should be a detective? He’s like the only guy who managed to detect something in the whole show.

Oh wow, vampires are not back! This takes place in a world entirely populated by people whose brains are turned off. So many times I would think a character knew something extremely obvious only for it to be a big reveal for them, or watch one of them take something totally insane at face value. I remember being excited based on the teaser. I've seen the leads before in Not Me and uh...the other one was good-looking in an episode of Off Gun Fun Night, and like...they do look great together! I would love seeing them in something better than this. I just couldn't get past how much I hated the characters Mark and Tong. In addition to being dumb like everyone else in the show (tied for dumbest, common sense always escaped these two), they were just so boring. I liked when they were just being a fun/happy/cute couple but as they became Mark and Tong Facing Whatever Dumb Problem They Have, that's when the fast forwarding started. A couple episodes in, I started to dread moments where side characters would go away and I was stuck with just the leads. It was especially rough towards the end, when we're down a Neo and left with Mond playing the only guy with a personality (even if he does undergo a personality switch about three fourths of the way through, would give anything to know more about this guy who was a comic book villain-level weirdo completely against his own interests for most of the show only to just go 'actually...nvm’ and be normal for the end). The world building was also garbage. At the end of this I understand less than I ever did about how vampire powers work: how can a vampire tell the future but get tricked multiple times, or why a healing vampire can't heal someone, or why you'd want to kill the golden blood people instead of locking them away to drink from, or why no vampire who was trying to actually protect a golden blood person wouldn't just turn them into a vampire to render the whole thing moot and...just...god. Just the absolute worst.