Eternal Love of Drama

Some friends have put subtitles on the beautiful Boy Sompob OST for Unforgotten Night. It’s even more special now with the translations added and brings back such lovely memories. Enjoy! https://youtu.be/D4Qj0aqiGt0

@Kikuitadaki So true. I actually started reading the book to find out if there any veracity to these miscasting claims. They literally only removed his moustache in the series and people are having a meltdown! It’s like they will not be satisfied unless they bring the exact non existing man out of the book somehow 🤣.

Honestly I’ve been tracking this and any time a BL series doesn’t have two masc4 masc men together - the very ultimate in heteronormativity, we get endless complaints from western fantis because they want representation to reflect what they have at home - reflect entirely made up things that are culturally relevant only to themselves. This is the opposite off what anyone should expect in Asia BL. But it’s as if they won’t rest until every BL looks like a live action Tom of Finland comic 🤣🤣🤣

@Greenbean Khap khun ka for contributing to the discussion.

It’s called an adaptation which means that the director has a particular vision for how he would like to turn the backbone of the story into a television series. Each David Copperfield book has multiple TV adaptations spanning nearly a century and there are still debates about what kind of men, ethnicities, skin colouring etc were appropriate to star in those roles created by Dickens and a lot of it stems from patriarchal and racist ideas about men and masculinity.

This idea of what is masculine is a topic deeply embedded in homophobia, even straight men are assaulted by these terminologies which are informed by misogyny, that is why the two can never be unrelated. Homonormativity is also an issue in how even queer men influenced by it make their own evaluations of what is the right look for men in certain roles.

The fact that we are talking about Asian men is also important to the racial context of the feedback; the only people saying this are native English speakers and people exposed to the dominance of US and anglophone media. Thai people and BL fans are not the ones are making these backwards contentions and it is significant and relevant to point that out. Someone who is researching gay media in Asia has written an entire book in English - Regimes of Desire, about those perspectives on who looks right for what role, and who is manly, desirable, etc and how this longing for more hegemonically masculine aesthetics is ultimately a discussion about desiring whiteness.

Because you might not be aware that that is what is informing those predjudices does not make it not a phenomenon operating under these critiques and I’m bringing that to attention so people can be more aware of those silent ideologies.

I try to use words as accurate as possible to describe what I’m talking about and certainly didn’t mean to trigger anyone. Luckily reading words used correctly is not as harmful as directing heir meaning to the people we unthinkingly subject to that treatment

PS: I hate to say look it up but if you’ve been reading this thread at least, you will see that many criticisms of Yoon’s unsuitability for the role centered on him having “a baby face” (and I think we can agree that baby face isn’t a descriptor used to positively evaluate men’s masculinity, right??)

Yeah, that’s the part that will stay for me for a long time too. Hope you enjoy the rest of the journey 💕

Yes indeed. We’re all hoping for the same thing.

What I liked about the Unforgotten Night is that it was showing that even though Kamol is a tough guy involved in very deadly and criminal business when it comes to the person that he loves he’s very soft, he’s vulnerable with him, doesn’t rely on hierarchies and dominance in their romantic relationship and treats Kim like an equal.

That is: the world may be on fire but we don’t need to have a perfect world before we can be good partners to the people we love and who love us.

I think that more than anything else that is what BL is trying to model and to demonstrate aspirationally and that’s what I think UN did an excellent job at, never mind other more superficial things. It delivered the most important things

Well many millions more do not agree and the data is there to prove it.

Yes it’s called unforgotten night not repeat the same thing every night. People in love have complete rich lives where they enjoy friends, family, work, food and even pets.

I also remember the night I met my lover and every day we add new memories to the basic things that brought us together. What’s patronising about acknowledging how relationships actually work?

Ok sorry for the writing part. I’m responding to a few things and isn’t want to leave anything out and forget.

Yoon was a good actor before this and absolutely killed it in this his first role. If you recall from his other work Yoo changed his voice, the way he walked, his body language, how he held himself -completely unlike Earth for example who simply plays himself in every single BL as emotionally constipated man number one. If you think about how powerful men behave they speak slowly, they react slowly especially to provocation, they’re cautious, they don’t get hysterical as we just saw in that series where is someone who is supposed to be a mafia don is scrabbling around on the ground with a university student who wants to hire like that would never happen. He’s always very calculating and projects Power ever frivolousness.

Everything in the portrayal is like real life - it comes down to how cerebral he is and how much he can out-strategise his enemies rather than his facial looks. I think he did all those things brilliantly.

Then I think you need to watch a few more BLs including perhaps some from Japan and you will see how unforgotten Night is really signalling a return to Classic BL production and performance.

There has been a lot of new creators flooding the industry with bogus not quite BL or BL-adjacent productions that got a lot of attention sometimes from people who were new to the genre and not watching it for decades like some of us and they think that those standards of Mediocrity is what the bl should look and feel like.

BL has been setting its own agenda, it has its own politics which are progressive and way beyond what is available in western queer media, it avoids not just heteronormativity but also homonormativity which is all the rage in the west and so when people don’t see it sometimes they miss it and start crying about why it isn’t there, it doesn’t just attack heteronormativity but also hierarchies within gay politics. For eg you
would certainly not see such a backward conclusion as the man who came into the relationship as the more powerful mafia boss ending up
with the exact same power differential at the end of the story vis-a-vis
his partner who has to give up his education and independent source of income as a white, 1950s American housewife might do.

So our view can be warped by the things that get a lot of promotion,
a lot of marketing hype and a massive loudmouth fandom but it doesn’t
mean that they are BL or that objectively they can be counted as within
the state of the art

@Chelsea Black The BDSM is what brought them together, but as you would know if you’ve ever been in a relationship, 1) your sexual kink is not the thing that you’re indulging in every single night or is it 2) the essential element - even of your sex life, that will keep you together.

This is a romance series and it makes sense that as the series went on it was more about the growing love and emotional connection between them. Just because somebody met in a nightclub or a coffee shop doesn’t mean they’re going to do that every day for all the time that they spend together because that was the thing that originally brought them together

I did not think that you intended to be homophobic but I think the statement is the same thing a homophobic person would say so it has the same effect even though the intention was not there. As you say we are all learning and those are seemingly small things which are actually very significant in how we think about and pigeonhole men and I don’t even want to dwell on the racial aspect because we do that to Asian men A Lot.

It means that when an Asian man looks more like what a US or European cultural/media idea of whata mafia man should look like ie more white, then people exposed to that Western media will rush to say that particular Asian man suited a mafia role better. Saying that typically Asian males are not masculine enough is something that has been done to Asian men by colonisers for 100s of years and something we need to really stop doing.

I didn’t watch this drama for Yoon but decided to give episode one a try. I have seen Yoon in other series that we are not as well written in which he did an okay job and I forgot about it. But in this production where they have a proper script, a proper plot, proper character depictions and excellent world building
(we actually know what Yoon’s criminal enterprises are, what industries he would not get involved with, who are his business and commercial enemies and why they want to kill him in general, and what is the biggest deal that he’s currently working on that is putting everyone’s life in danger in particular, and we actually see this man working from morning till night - the other non-BL about mafia that people like to compare it UN to, none of those things occurred)
so you understood their motivations and back stories without belabouring it with lazy exposition dumps in the last episode as other wannabe BL have done.

For example even bad buddy had a lot of plot, continuity and pacing issues and never lived up to audience expectations (go and look at the numbers - 8+M for 1/4 of Ep 1 But subsequent segments fell off by at least half and continue to stay there even the episode five 4/4 with The famous kissing scene that made many people come back and give it another chance, never reached the episode one 1/4 level. Yet no one criticises Bad Buddy To the extent they are criticising Unforgotten Night for things that they’re far better at than bad buddy.

Meanwhile unforgotten night rakes in more than 1 million viewers every night when it was airing for every segment and has not fallen off. It is on track to at least be as comparable as bad buddy on performance even though I did not have two massive leading men, the most well-known director in Thailand BL, the biggest production studio with the biggest budget, or enormous social media and advertising clout. I haven’t even added GagaOOLala views.

UN also achieved all this with a concerted hate campaign against it for the entire time it was running and even now it has ended people are still spending energy to criticise a series that if you look under any of the YouTube videos has a 99.9% approval rate. At this rate they will soon criticise it for not been Oscar nominated

I saw fans are talking about it but nothing official yet. We live in hope 💕

Its often a conscious effort by the creators to make one of the secondary relationships vague, especially if there is is a continuation of the original source material, so that they might make that secondary couple more prominent in any continuation of the stories in that universe.

But also lots of people have crushes on older men and it’s just tingly and nice to know the feeling is reciprocated, but bc of his job and maturity the older person has far more reservations and can’t just act on his feelings like the younger person obviously wants, and nothing physical happens in ghe end. That’s fine too and very realistic.

I usually never support second seasons but for this one I think the creators really did their homework and they’ve created a classic BL but I would at least be happy for a Special Episode which I hope they make 2 hrs long ha ha

@BL MaMa 50 It doesn’t make sense to me either why they are comparing an ordinary Lakorn series to this BL. I think Unforgotten Night can only be compared to trap the Taiwanese BL Trapped.

Unforgotten Night has experience BL, it actually has a plot; you understand the motivations of the protagonists as well as the antagonist and why they want to kill Kamol; you know what their business; is you know what crimes they do and don’t do for money; you know the major deal that is causing the current conflict; you actually see Kamol working every day, every night except when they went on that holiday.

Some fans of some other series that had a lot of advertising drew in a lot of people and even its own fans were so disappointed they started fighting among each other and simply have not stopped, are so sad bitter and disappointed they just go around trying to prevent other people who like BL from enjoying the series and its extremely crazy and pathetic.

We should feel sorry for them because if they had had a good show from the beginning they would still be busy talking about it because it just finished a few weeks ago. Look how people are still talking about The Untamed happily with other fans and that ended years ago. That’s what
happens when you create a good BL.

It is not the fault of Unforgotten Night that their series didn’t get over 1 million views every night while it was airing and the only series that got that much traction and it wasn’t even consistent was Bad Buddy a year ago. UN passed 100 MILLION views when it still had two episodes to go and that’s only on the small studio’s own channels not even counting
GagaOOLala and other platforms.

All these haters needed to do was get their faves to write a better story with a plot and with acting and they would be so busy enjoying it for the next 5 years they wouldn’t find time to harass other fans to feel the joy they’re not getting from their fave

I agree. I also would never understand why instead of going and hyping the series that you love you come where other people are enjoying something and tell them that they shouldn’t and how much you hate it.

Only a demented person could do such a thing. I hope they’re at least being well paid for embarrassing themselves in public like this

In the series Baiboon is in university and he and Khom are 3 years apart

First of all it is more than a little homophobic to say that a mafia man or any man must have a certain face to take on a male role. Kamol is perfectly masculine, he looks powerful in his role, he behaves like an actual powerful man in whatever business - mafia otherwise would behave.

Some of you may find it helpful to know your own history and also queer history and look up what actual mafia we are like and also their sexuality; you will learn a lot.

In the United States for example one of the most famous and deadly mafia kingpins in history is literally called Baby Face Nelson and he goes down in the annals of criminal gangsters whereas other more straight-passing men have been less impactful mafias and long since forgotten much like the series you’re desperately trying to link with this one every day.

For what it’s worth I not sure it’s relevant to compare UN to ordinary lakorns/series that are not even BL.

It’s embarrassing to hear both ignorant and homophobic takes coming from people reviewing a BL of all things

I just advise people to stop when you see them looking at each other and smiling gently in the street after all the fuss has died down in Ep 37 and they have accomplish the goal.

100 million views on the studio channels alone up to Ep 11. Not sure how many on GagaOOLala and other places. This is why the haters can’t get any sleep 🤣

Envious incels from that toxic fandom have come together to suppress the rating. This is how they use their loneliness time

You’re right it should be no less than 8.5. I loved it and everyone I know that watched did too

I don’t think there’s an air date yet. I think Unforgotten Night is a very different series from Checkout. UN for one thing, is a BL, a romance series and it has an actual plot and a great script that touched people’s heart.

CO I don’t think qualifies under any BL metric because it’s challenging nothing, deconstructing nothing, just soft porn with lipgloss but just wants the BL fandom engagement because it’s the fastest route to money in media right now.

Yes Japanese BL industry came first but when Thailand decided to initiate the live-action series space they used the Korean K-pop model as the business model and that’s where the fan service comes in. So when you look at the history of Thai BL FS service you see that it doesn’t originate in Japan or even China, both of which are also countries influenced by super successful K-pop and the marketing of K-pop idols.

Thailand has become so popular with its BL business model things have come full circle in that they’ve even influenced the Korean K-pop idol industry which is now following Thailand by putting their idols into the live action BL series like Semantic Error for instance, to boost their Kpop careers. The big Chinese FS moment for this started with the Untamed Actors,

I’m not sure about the K-pop music idols but certainly in the BL industry in Thailand those young actors do not make their money from the series; the real money is in the fan service part of the industry that’s where they do the promotions, sponsorships, live events and fan meets and all of those centre around the fan service. It’s not like in Hollywood where actors can get multi million dollar cheques for acting; in Thailand, China until very the last couple of years though less so than Thailand, and increasingly in Japan since covid, the money in liveaction BL comes from the acting-adjacent work -ie the FanService

Yes the video is lengthy but it goes quickly, I just listen while I’m working out or doing something else like a podcast rather than sit all the time and watch it?

Yes I’m also a nerd about Asian BL, fandom and different fandom cultures 😁