Eternal Love of Drama

These are angry and depressed people that why they’ve come here to be violent. Just ignore as much as you can. No happy, well adjusted person behaves this way.

When you watch a great BL you enjoy you and the other fans are still joyfully enjoying it years later and spreading the love. It’s only been a couple of months and already these fans of that series are depressed and are everywhere rampaging in their sadness and spreading their toxic misery on every platform

I just saw that Yoon is among the most popular BL actors in Thailand and he beat their fave of course, hence the overwhelming pain and despair you’re seeing. UN already passed 100 Million views even though it didn’t have massive advertising and marketing and has many other accolades.

The fans it’s made for love it. It doesn’t matter what envious, biter people think. They need pity and I hope they can find happiness soon. https://twitter.com/Rankingstartwi1/status/1565520352020930561

Wow! The amount of toxic masculinity on display over this BL series by fans of a wanna-be BL that didn’t even have a plot.

The envy is palpable but I love how hard they have to work to find fault with a series that is actually BL and vastly superior to their faves ha ha .

They will soon lose weight trying to piggy back on this series because no one pays any attention to them anymore and it’s not even been 6 months and that forgettable monstrosity has already been FORGOTTEN

I think you’ve hit the nail on the head. It’s That fandom that is following this very good series, down voting it and trashing it everywhere. I don’t do reviews but I’m going to have to write one for this series. It’s the best mafia BL I’ve seen since Trapped from Taiwan and Killer and Healer from China.

It’s like a social contagion the way people from That fandom work so hard to stop people from watching and enjoying this series, swarming and dog piling even their own fans who have any criticism of their own wanna-be BL series that had a lot of shortcoming in the most important ways - like no plot and a lead actor who cannot act.

I saw someone in a BL community on Twitter criticising a shirt that Kim wore. That’s how desperate they are to pick at literal threads to find a criticism they can get other BL fans to laugh at and drop the series. I’m not surprised to see the rating for UN at this level too. It’s all orchestrated.

Ha! I retweeted that Nas tweet too. Are you on Twitter? I’m using the same handle https://twitter.com/BLLoversLink/status/1534102930613325824?s=20&t=OBb1y8By2ah1czocqLXTFw

That’s exactly how I felt about SCOY when I wa the hate; we’ve all been Toh at one point or other, in one way or another if we’ve ever loved someone. But it’s only when we can see Toh’s humanity in the ways he’s different from us that we can give ourselves permission to human in all its wonderful ways.

My background is in gender policy mostly in the development/economics realm but one must have a multidisciplinary and intersectional lens to make social policy that will actually affect people positively and affect those furthest from power disproportionately so.

If you’re on Twitter please join us sometime with other SA activists, survivors and of course enthusiastic BL enjoyers 🌸

Yes, I’m really glad for the care and thoughtfulness they put into this series that helped many queer men, young and old, to see themselves in these lovely characters and to leave them with a sense of optimism and hopefulness about their own potential as non gender conforming men deserving of love and being treated as an equal by the men they love.

The majority of the fan feedback has been quite dispiriting but I realise we have to start by being more understanding of how hard it is for most people to fight our cultural indoctrination into patterns in which we tend to assign negative interpretations to actions undertaken by less powerful or stigmatised people in society, while projecting legitimacy to the exact same and often worse actions undertaken by the powerful. The more gender conforming the man the more people fall prey to these white-washing prejudices and it is highly irresponsible that the most highly capitalised BLs are the ones playing right into the pre-existing dysfunctions when they should be challenging them, as is the entire point of BL! I guess capitalism ruins everything?

Last week some of us on Twitter held a spaces on Consent in BL and the way we project our femmephobia onto femme characters like Kim/Porchay (Kinn Porsche) and now we see we need to continue this discussion next Sunday and now dissect consent itself, especially coerced consent a concept many find challenging to condemn but only when a highly gender conforming male is the one doing the coercing. Like some old fashioned consciousness raising.

I’m not often on MDL but I had to reach out and thank you for your lovely review which I’m sure validates and made a lot of Tohs in fandom feel very seen 😊

Just saw this now on Twitter and had to come here to say thank you for your brilliant and empathetic review of this gorgeous BL series. In an era of expensive, glossy but mediocre and regressive series SCOY takes us back to the glory days of BL. Those were days when femmes are the star of the show, their perspectives are centred instead of invalidated or labelled unrealistic, and femmes and other AMABs who’re least gender conforming are positioned as valid and among the most desirable as romantic partners.

@Sko_kia

True. Bai Qin is the woman of his head - like it makes sense he should identify with her as they had the same background, but Cui Xi is the woman of his heart - the one he has no business loving but what his whole spirit longs for. Reminds me of Bob Marley and that mixed-race Jamaican beauty Queen 😀

Did you see Killer and Healer, Brock? Mao ZiJun is the lead role and he’s in love to the end of the drama. Magnificent!

Also check out The Rebel Princess for military action, court intrigues and passionate romance.

And if you’re up for a truly unforgettable, thrilling dystopian KDrama watch The Devil Judge, similar action/crime drama to Killer and Healer, best KDrama I’ve seen in some years - since Empress Ki

Yes I know. I was joking because of so many parallels between the two. But Killer and Healer is King 👑

Thanks @Manisha! It seems to have disappeared somehow though; I can’t see it here just a big B 😃

@Li Man Man has written an absolutely gorgeous AU which you simply must read totally absorbing and mind-altering in the best way: https://archiveofourown.org/works/32220883. Give it a try 💕

How funny yet sad that we don’t even need words to understand what this fan is feeling 💕

Omg yes! I wrote a thread on this very thing. At first I wondered if The Devil Judge was inspired by Killer and Healer as there are so many parallels 😂. But in the end K&H still surpasses TDJ https://twitter.com/BLLoversLink/status/1429454343187705867?s=20

PS: This doesn’t mean UWMA or BM do not have flaws but that those blemishes are so inconsequential that they do not warrant the level of passionate criticism, and hardly bear mentioning because they’re not destructive to any good values we should care deeply about.

Ah yes, I understand. UWMA gets criticism and hostility even now. Just do some Twitter searches for example. A couple of weeks ago something blew up about speculation the Dean/Pharm actors were going to be in a new BL together and many people groaned - why them? Same people have been clamouring for a new BL starring Lhong. Two weeks before that Pharm’s masculinity was being questioned with people pointing to compromises they think he made to argue Pharm has no agency, is the inferior in the relationship and he doesn’t make choices but rather is controlled by Dean, etc.

Meanwhile, while people really stretch the meaning of “taste”, some objectively terrible BLs dont received] that level of critique, including when some “seme” characters who’re abusive to the “uke” character or they both abuse each other, with zero redemption arc end up getting the guy he abused- like bad people deserve good things? I’m not going to name names because someone will come here telling why they love those characters thereby proving my point.

That kind of character trajectory actually gets more hype, enthusiasm, normalisation and unquestioning support, and consequently less critique than many healthy characters and the series they’re in - people suddenly become writing and film specialists dissecting each line of dialogue, it’s pacing and every camera angle.

There were a couple of BLs from Taiwan recently, hella bad in many respects but had a lot of gratuitous skinship, sexual assault and ill stereotypes of gay people but those BLs still had people asking for a continuation so that the obviously glaring flaws and egregious content of the series can be better handled in a season 2! Zero concerns about camera lighting or screenplay of course. That kind of thing.

I’m not saying that people can’t watch and find those BLs meaningful to themselves; I’m saying people forgive a lot when the toxic themes they perhaps experience in their own lives are portrayed in a series in ways that resonate with them, while even if a series might be excellent representation and executed artistically and politically well, people will nitpick the most obscure flaws or invent nonexistent ones to reject media which isn’t validating their existing view of the world. So it’s interesting to not just acknowledge what feedback there is on a particular BL, but to understand the why, the what is it exactly that people are instinctively responding to. From that I think you start seeing the broader patterns.

@Love Drama Ok, but I didn’t say it comes near the impact of UWMA. I said it’s getting the same kind of criticism UWMA and GameBoys got because in these outstanding BLs neither the plot nor the tension is driven by toxic masculinity between the leads so people claimed these series were boring. Also because they didn’t prioritise skinship critics also claimed “its just Bromance”.

BL fans have become so accustomed to these two elements being the basis getting viewers attention they don’t know how to feel when they don’t see these elements prioritised in a BL, where complex storytelling, character depth and plot is uppermost. I hope that explains the connection I’m making

Thanks for your feedback on my comment.

Oh my! You haven’t seen UWMA? Until We Meet Again is one of the top BLs in all of Asia. Experienced, award-winning actors and director who was in BL all the way back to LoveSick days. It’s a soulmates romance surrounded by a mystery/thriller. Great rewatch and reactor value and also good gripping stuff to introduce someone to BL with because of its own unique, layered storyline. It had a lot of criticism at first also but it’s been years and there are still not even a handful of Thai BLs at that League.

Totally agree, as per my post below..

I was actually hoping to find time to screen shot these very lines for a new Twitter thread after re-watching Ep6.

“To quote Aue talking to Aek about art at the opening of the gallery in ep 5: “To each his own. People appreciate things differently. It’s like in cooking. We cannot please everyone. No matter how hard we try to create.”

I love it. We’re in a bloody pandemic and I can take all the emotionally intelligent, lovely, non-toxic men falling slowly in love my eyes can see right now. I’m so glad they’ve put the lyrics to the songs on screen so I can even sing along each time.

No art is perfect but whatever flaws there are in Bite Me do not bear mentioning, certain,y not compared to the creative ground breaking work the Director is trying to do - and it’s working!

People are being so loud about ultimately insignificant things they don’t like you’d think they’re being paid. There’s a deluge of BLs out there, literally hundreds now, so why are they so mad this one isn’t up their streets. It’s just insane!

Western English speakers are a terrible and entitled bunch. Who spends so much time watching and discussing a drama they don't like? What kind of madness induces this? They’re actually turning out to be one of the additional entertaining offshoots of this drama.

The insistence that this Thai BL drama should centre them and their perspectives is just laughable. If you hate it this much and are so let down must you rant about it and fight people who like it on the internet? What’s stopping them from watching GoT or Twilight or Bridgerton? Ha ha I think we know why.

When the drama, conflict and tension in a BL doesn’t come from toxic masculinity and gratuitous skinship people just don’t know what to make of their feelings. They would happily sit through hours and seasons of that crap and never nitpick the glaring narrative flaws, poor lgbt representation and backwards politics, in fact they will make up outlandish theories to justify these dramas, like TTTS, Tonhon Chonlathee, Lovely Writer, IPYTM and now Don't Say No.

Both the lead characters in Bite Me are emotionally intelligent men, their conflict doesn’t arise from an abusive seme, internalised homophobia or repeated forced intimacy which amounts to romanticised sexual assault. All these things have become so normalised in BL that without them people feel something integral is missing from the mlm relationship. I can assure you if the “exended staring” scenes critics are so tortured about were replaced by random groping and gratuitous sex scenes none of them would be counting the minutes. It is the fact that the emotional connection between Aue and Aek is being placed front and centre that gives people so much frustration.

It is some consolation that the same criticisms were made of UWMA and GameBoys of the Philippines yet which BL has won more critical mainstream tv awards, many of them international, as well as lgbt image awards than these two, and which other BLs have been nominated for an Emmy or are on Netflix globally?

Another part of the explanation lies in what the lead characters in Bite Me share with UWMA and GameBoys is clear when we understand the hype for KinnPorsche which is based on seeing visual displays of wall-to-wall hyper masculinity but you will need a microscope to find out the story from these glitzy trailers not to talk of finding the romance, as this thread tries to say: https://twitter.com/BLLoversLink/status/1444713800805007366?s=20

Anyway, let them talk; more views for Bite Me and more side-bar entertainment for those of us who adore this lovely BL series