BLLoversLink

Inspirational, well rendered stories to lift the spirit

This is a simply beautiful and moving series of stories all eloquently told.

Of struggle, humility, love, sacrifice and of course JOY!

I teared up many times and would recommend to others for instant reconnection to what it means to be human, across all our differences and the various ways we come to be instilled with national pride and hope for humanity

Stories we hardly get to see in the west and all from the point of view of the little woman, man and child of China. Long live 🤛

It’s subbed and on YT https://youtu.be/h5B9smsliBw?si=VL36nsoHe1WwzqbB

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Musings on Ep6 of GelBoys - the Thai BL reset

The feminist ethic of care, the sine qua non of BL that separates it from mainstream gay media, is conspicuous in Gel Boys by how the creators address its absence. It is absent in some (three) of the relationships, but it is very present in (two) others. Before a couple can become good lovers, this production suggests, they must first become good friends.

Women can relate to this current in the narrative well because they suffer this in their relationships with men all the time; men who they’re genuinely interested as people refuse to maintain close relationships of emotional intimacy with women if they won’t get the sexual payoff they prioritise more. In that sense this seam in the narrative is not about being gay rather but *Masculinity* not allowing men to be fully human by having their emotional repertoire restricted to a narrow range of potentials. This is harmful to men as well as women because, if we are to thrive in the emotional sphere, transactional relationships cannot be a human norm.

The provocative means by which GelBoys raises male sexual ethics, in all its simplicity and occasionally its complexity, is what makes each episode gripping. I’ve watched some adult BL reactors writhe in discomfort not just because we’ve all had these experiences as teenagers but because for many men this is still the painful and unfulfilling reality they live. GelBoys strikes us all in a visceral way.

The red/flag green flag discourse these provocations elicited among viewers may have been more useful if they weren’t misinterpreted by an excess of postmodernesque “every transgression is valid”. The subtle distinction being missed by many is not simplistically that we shouldn’t write-off young people as red flags while they’re still developing their characters, as too many mistakenly assert, but that its in the interest of young people that behaviours which are objectively red flags should not be minimised or go unchallenged regardless of age. The urgency of this second more correct reading is obvious in the crisis of loneliness, alienation and emotional disconnection we can see adult males complaining of today. Bad habits formed in childhood and not broken early are extremely difficult to jettison in adulthood.

Good Relationships are Ends in Themselves:
In Ep6 we’re not only fully aware of Bua’s manipulating patterns but why. He wants and needs to be the centre of someone’s life and he is willing to use sex to do it. Again the narrative is pointing to how men use sex not just to get the relational intimacy they really crave but also to how sex is used as a substitute when they can’t get it.

We do not know definitively what Bua’s sexual orientation is but we do know he has a hole inside him that social media cannot compensate for, ie the basis of all love - care. As such Bua’s relationships with Chian, Moo and Baabin are means to an end, not ends in themselves. Bua’s relations with other boys so far cannot be considered to be motivated by care and therefore not love; they are not even reciprocal, just extractive. This inevitably frustrates and hurts everyone involved.

Similarly Fou4Mod didn’t need to introduce a sexual aspect to his relationship with Faifa. They already had a solid relationship, however Fou4Mod needs the peer validation he thinks only a sexual relationship can provide so he *uses* Faifa for that. Through this exploitative miscalculation he loses one of his most dependable and non-tractional relationships.

GelBoys Critique of Masculinity Norms:
GelBoys’ conveying of Baabin’s character returns the Uke to his rightful place as star of the BL Show, something that has been missing in dozens of recent productions. Baa is the least conforming to the masculinity norm of not investing relationships with care. Baa is also straightforward with his opinions; speaks the truth sometimes gently, sometimes harshly; is faithful to his own feelings, and is empathetic to the emotional needs of others.

Hence, Baabin in their kissing scene, is characteristically honest to Bua saying the kiss is just a curiosity for him, not a declaration of romantic intent. Which is fine as the odd one-off because he’s a teenager and this is experimentation done with full disclosure, which Bua accepted without so much as a wrinkle.

The next morning Baabin makes the effort to hide his gel manicured toes so they won’t raise a problem when he’s alone with Fou4Mod because he’s ready to mend their estrangement and he’s conscious of F4M’s fragile emotional state. Baabin repeats his identical position in the 4-way zoom meeting – he’s not romantically interested in Bua.

How anyone could have seen the lead up to that kiss scene, listened to their dialogue afterwards which is congruent to both characters in the scene, and conclude that this was going to be a love match, I do not know. Perhaps this says how much our generation has become inured to sexual relations without any emotional element of care as an acceptable norm for men.

What’s up with Chian’s sudden 180 degree:
Similarly, Chian, a person who has had no romantic interest in F4M for 5 episodes but was happy to fool round with in case it is instrumental to spur Bua to get jealous and somehow return his affection, is in real time, suddenly ready to commit to F4M? Didn’t we just watch him despairing that his post isn’t even being viewed by his close “friends”?

Isn’t Chian also having a crisis of loneliness, defined by lack of social media attention - not lack of F4M, when he is motivated to act out of character by the realisation that F4M might be at a loose end? Should we not take Chian’s historical context as relevant to his real desires? Even Fou4Mod is shocked at this abrupt about turn.

No Love is Presented as a Transaction:
So far it’s been a game of schemes and transactions for Chian and Bua in the way they have dealt with each other as well as with Fou4Mod and then Baabin. Only the romantic affection of Fou4Mod for Chian, and that of Baabin for Fou4Mod seem to me to be sincere and demonstrate authentic care – Fou4Mod and Baabin pursue these relationships as ends in themselves. These motivations and actions are more likely to result in a love relationship - once they’re directed at the right target.

Now having said that, I don’t know where the writer will take things from here in the episode seven finale. Still I sincerely do not want to see a time-skip cop-out like IPYTM instead of a conflict resolution arc and a rebuilding of earned trust in the relationship first as friends, then as boyfriends.

Onto Ep 7…

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“Dark Romance” whose highs make for a riveting watch

I finished this intriguing “dark romance” drama in days and highly recommend a watch! My review is on the highs and lows of the storytelling techniques, especially on what the Director, Pan Yan Qian is trying to do in a feminist vein, but I’ll just start by saying while I spotted the flaw in several Directorial and narrative choices, I was never bored, considered dropping, or would fail to recommend it as a compelling watch.

Looking at the Director’s other work (My Name Is Zhao Wu Di 2024) female empowerment seems to be her bag, but her liberal political lens is obviously only going to take her part of the way with what she wants to achieve via the main characters’ trajectories. In this drama she gets the importance of redistribution of resources to provide the woman with the power she needs to have leverage in a relationship with a very powerful man who abuses his power, but what she gets wrong is that she assumes sexual equality is when women get to be as terrible as men with power and are able to cruelly force certain outcomes; whereas the real feminist victory would to work to change the nature of the game altogether. Because she doesn’t really have a grasp of this after the extended scenes of emotional torture which have been justly complained about and I totally get it having now watched, the female lead (FL), Zhao Xing Rou re-subordinates herself by returning to gender roles which are necessarily hierarchical - of supporting the male lead (ML) Yi Qiu Ting at home in the family and in the community, while he goes out into the world and changes it - which is literally inequality. She gave up the more equal identity position she had vis a vis her husband to return to the same iniquitous power relations that infantilised, reduced and disempowered her years ago!

Now I feel that I have to point out for people who might not have a full grasp of Chinese political/military history this man is a Warlord, don’t be distracted by the uniform, in what basically was a Fascist period in China before the Communist Revolution that removed the fascists, both the local KMT nationalists to which he originally belonged, and those belonging to the occupying army of Imperial Japan. We open the drama with this woman in a relationship with a fascist, (the non-state, private equivalent would be a Mafia) so already we should be informed what kind of violent world and unethical inter-personal milieu Zhao Xing Rou has entered into by her own consent. This is where their journey starts before Yi Qiu Ting joins the Chinese resistance forces at the very end. As head of the Hao family warlord clan this is moral morass Zhao Xing Rou also willingly if briefly occupies in a leading role. This is the context which underpins their entire journey and on which all character growth and development hinges on.

Now on the multiple rape scenarios:
I get why there was the dubious consent scene at the outset but I think the overkill of the ML’s sexual assault on the FL at her apartment was flagrantly unnecessary as was the FL’s attempt (it was not completed) to facilitate a sexual assault on the ML in the final third of the drama. In the first instance she consents to the sex but not the fertility drugs administered by stealth. The ML’s attempts to protect the FL by ensuring she has a basis (pregnancy with the Yi heir) to be accepted by his powerful family given her poor background, is wrong but the narrative lets us understand why he willfully decides to do that wrong thing and hide the reasoning from her. This makes sense for the narrative in that it substantiates the intimate villainy of the ML that must subsequently be tackled in the narrative - he’s now a villain in his public as well as his private life.

Every other subsequent assault was just gratuitous nonsense, which was supposed to be sexually titillating I imagine, but totally failed to do that and rather just mystified and repulsed the audience on that score. Those scenes did not make sense for either of the characters’ motivations or for their characterisations - two traumatised people who love each other and make terrible choices ostensibly to protect each other and or preserve the relationship for themselves; Major fail.

The BL CP:
The MM CP meanwhile also started with a pronounced power imbalance on many scales (authority, age, masculine presentation, dominant/subordinated, military/intellectual), accentuated by identity mystery and mistrust about the past. However, unlike the main leads the secondary leads in the next most compelling relationship, Peng Wu and Wu Chong Mo, have a journey that recalibrates their power dynamic, in which they rely on and support each other and earn the explicit endorsement for their atypical relationship of the ML in doing so. On this aspect the Director did well (now you see why women invented BL because it’s so hard visioning equal relationships between men and women - who are not social equals, on a permanent basis that’s not frustratingly contingent or illusory.

The BL element is really popular and as a result the Director has promised a special episode featuring that relationship; also one, but sadly not both, of this pair - Zhan Xuan will star in a new BL, “Revenged Love” https://youtu.be/4qmLHpHAyOA?si=8zREY20QxBfoFPuN , coming out on GagaOOLala this week!

Further Recommendation on this theme:
If you’re interested in exploring these themes and want to see a complete feminist subversion of “dark romance” tropes watch Killer and Healer which is a masterclass on the entirely important visioning Director Pan Yan Qian tries to do here but which Sam Ho, who incidentally is the Director of the much anticipated Danmei adaptation Immortality, does much better.

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Beautiful story with a beautiful message

I want to start by sharing part of a review a friend created on letterbox which is beautiful (just like the movie imo) and demonstrates how today we are forced-fed conservative and reactionary ideas masquerading as progressive ones under a fig leaf of liberal identity politics.

She writes: “male sex work is portrayed as being done for survival but it is made very clear that all of these men are pushed into this line of work where their bodies are commodified and their personhood is alienated because of financial need and capitalist incentive. the negative impact their sexual exploitation has on their psyche is communicated very well.” I think many supposed BL Directors who think it’s edgy to portray male prostitution as a cool, positive choice men make, could learn from this queer Director how not to flippantly portray people like Jet at the corrosive, dead end of the labour food chain under capitalism as enjoying their own exploitation! BL is political and as such cannot treat prostitution as an apolitical process, or the product of individual choice among the most oppressed segments of the labouring class.

I think Yon Fan, the Director who was also the Writer, did a very good job and I am now keen to look at the rest of his filmography since most of them seem to be queer stories including lesbian stories.

Some points of departure I want to raise given the discourse I’ve seen from viewers.

- It’s Not the Father; It’s the Son -
I don’t think that the father necessarily rejects Sam. That man loves his son. And as a parent, a loving - nay a doting parent, the first thing you worry for is how is your child, this sensitive, socially aware and upstanding young man going to be treated by the world and how will that affect the man that he knows his son to be. No matter what the dad’s level of shock or even disappointment, no matter how big or small his worry or his son’s future after he is gone, I feel he would have surmounted it; but Sam was so wound up in his own guilt, much of which is deserving guilt for unethical actions that violated the trust of a primary person in his life, which turns out to be all for nothing (spoilery) and that understandable guilt he carried also would not let him go back and make good on the irreversible harm he had caused.

This is the core of the story; how living a life on the margins doesn’t necessarily allow one to have superior insights into the human condition or the good life but can enmesh good people into a series of bad choices that limit not only their own future but those of several people around them for whom they actually have love towards and receive love from. If not for the cataclysmic events, which Sam’s accumulated actions precipitated, he would’ve been able to assure both his parents as a filial and responsible son. This is the true tragedy of the closet. Not primarily who gets to have sex with whom.

I love the way Bishonen utilises the devastatingly beautiful lady Kana, the Fujoshi in the mix, to remind us that to love is one thing but to be loved and to know that you are loved is *everything*. To ignore this aspect is to evacuate the meaning of the story from the point of view of the protagonists which is the story being conveyed.

- First & Second Cinema is Part of Today’s Filmaking Rot -
This brings me a discussion a few of us have been having in our Killer and Healer Discord about first, second and third cinema because people keep mentioning the degree to which Bishonen is good “for a low-budget film”. No it was good for a film - period.

Director Yon Fan does everything himself, he even picked up Sam for the cast as his lead actor quite randomly on the street; he didn’t even have a stable of experienced actors and as I’m always saying when the Director knows what they’re doing and has a story to tell that’s important to him, even a basic actor can portray that story because the most important, the bulk of the meaningfulness of the work comes from the Director’s creative vision and skill. Every scene, every bit of narrative said and unsaid, every frame that gets into the final cut, reflects the Director’s choices and intent. Director Yon Fan owns this story; hence it cannot be replicated or mass produced, which is the essence of revolutionary filmmaking and allows Bishonen to be evaluated from within a Third Cinema political space, just like all good BL.

If we compare Bishonen to what is coming out of the most highly funded, Thai corporate machine in terms of what passes for BL these days for example, it is clear that the more money that is put into BL productions, the more reactionary, the more fake, the more exploitative, and the more boring and insincere is the result.

Money is not only undermining the enjoyability, even the very watchability of the BL in countries where it has become industrialised, but it is also seriously destroying and separating the resulting productions from the radical queer potential of that genre.

Industrial, mass-produced culture is an oxymoron. Bishonen is one of a kind precisely because it is art, created not for profit (it made $18k when it was released) while the big studio movie Bros with a price tag of $22M flopped critical as well as financially and is no longer talked about, but Bishonen’s legacy will still be moving audiences who stumble across it to tears, to smiles and to complete empathetic recognition for at least another 30 years.

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A light but totally enjoyable watch!

View only if you like double agent underground resistance drama with fight choreographies that look like a ballet, extended deep gazes accompanied by meaningful soft smiles, declarations of forever fidelity, revolutionary women being revolutionary, and a good laugh every few minutes.

If you liked this and want more you’ll love Killer and Healer for it’s superior CDrama treatment of similar themes in a bromance of the same era and Til Death Do Us Part a Chinese male-male Republican romance under Japanese occupation.

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Can’t believe I’m now writing a review of my favourite Chinese drama of all time

Killer and Healer is an excellent, complex story about revolutionary queers in time of great social, military and political upheaval. It is made in the same highly exalted creative and literary tradition as Nirvana in Fire (2015), and the more recent War of Faith of (2024) of which there are all too few in this category of dramatic artistry.

Chief Jiang YueLou and Dr. Chen Yuzhi are two good men who have a highly developed interest in the well-being of their fellow citizens, but they have diametrically opposed philosophies on how to go about it, and diametrically opposed personal characters which stem from their radically different personal histories, which is the basis of their ideological clash.

Zhan Jun Bai and Boss Yu, share a passion for Chinese opera over which they bond and become instantly attracted to each other, but they are opposed in every other way. I won’t say more for fear of giving away an important part of the plot, but their agonised relationship makes total sense, and even with whats not made explicit, we understood their constant references back to contesting their relationship in the context of Emperor Ai, the originator of the “Cut Sleeve” legend and his tragic love affair with Dong Xian. By the end, and especially the ending, it is made clear how they could not live together, but also particularly in the case of Zhan JunBai, they COULD NOT LIVE WITHOUT THE OTHER. I think that’s a pretty powerful love story arc and something you see only rarely in heterosexual love stories, and never ever see in more explicit BL such as from Thailand or South Korea.

In case some are not familiar with the history, the time period is a very tumultuous time of internecine wars and conflict as the new Socialist Republic wrestled with the remnants of the corrupt, capitalist Kuomintang, and building a country in which the masses of the people could survive and thrive after colonisation, which the Chinese called 100 years of Humiliation . It opens with some time spent in Hong Kong which was still under the most ruthless imperial domination, which made life hell for the people of that Chinese region, who only got their liberation from the British when the 99 year lease, one of a number of exploitative land-theft imperialist arrangements secured Unprovoked at gunpoint, expired as recent as 1997. So yes, lots of Chinese people lost their lives during these extended periods of violent colonial occupation and the destructive overhang of the Opium Wars meant to destroy the Chinese people, a phenomenon sadly outside of historical record prioritised in western dominated media.

In the late 1940s following the wars of liberation, China had to face the worst drug addiction problem in the world with 1 in 5 people of its population addicted to opiates. The Opium Trade had been forced on China, against the laws of China because Britain and its western capitalist allies thought this reflected free trade, modernity and liberal values (sound familiar?). Trade in opium was highly destructive to Chinese society and the damage went far beyond the millions killed and enslaved during these western wars of economic and cultural imposition. Cleaning up the criminal vestiges of this western onslaught is the job that Jang YueLou confronts in Killer and Healer. Within three years the Communist Party of China was able to overcome that problem with the help of dedicated men like Chief Jiang YueLou and Dr Chen YuZhi.

All the actors, even seemingly minor ones are perfectly cast and excelled in their roles. Mao ZiJun and Yi BoChen not only mastered their characters emotions but seem to have been born for these roles, making their characterisations and even their sizzling relationship dynamic between them from the first encounter, simply impossible to replicate.

Killer and Healer is a magnificent, meaningful drama that gets better on every rewatch and I look forward to the next BL from this Director, Sam Ho, which is a little Danmei adaptation called Immortality.

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An Ambitious Series Off To A Slow Start

This is an ambitious GMM series.

I’m all in for it to be successful, as anything to do with politics and military history is my bag, but I’m stumped they gave this significant project to someone with so few accolades as a Director in general and specifically to a production team with no BL success record whatsoever. Let’s see what they can pull off.

Will this be another GMM BL where the actors are expected to compensate for an otherwise weak creative effort and then take the blame when they inevitable fail to do the impossible? I hope not. This strategy is what GMM has largely been trading on for the last two or three years with very little success - yet they persist.

I don’t think we can discount that they’re trying to make another hit as big as To Sir With Love but I think they’re going need much more than aesthetics and expensive color techniques. TSWL has an accomplished Director and a technically strong, culturally confident, very senior writing team that really immersed themselves in every second of the translation of this story to our screens as their critical and commercial success attests. However, not even that entire creative team along with the two superstar actors who helmed the TSWL production have been able to replicate that level of success in a BL with a greatly reduced-in-quality script. This matters.

The Episode
Thailand has a very interesting and complicated history with the Imperial nations and though it was not directly colonised by Europeans it still had a tense relationship with them for hundreds of years. Thailand also had relations of domination with some of its neighbours and had its own imperial ambitions in the region so I’m keen to see how this plays out in the story. This should provide much of the foundational dramatic tension for the story, but somehow so far, it has not put in an appearance.

It’s good that they try to depict some of the cultural norms and past-times from that period which is pretty cool even if they’re mostly limited to extensive scenes of fighting arts. I hope they will expand on this area in due course besides the few seconds of a music theatre show.

It was very nice to see some familiar props, sceneries and even sets from TSWL and I think that’s a useful welcoming nod to a community that already has positive associations with these symbols.

When Rati describes himself as a Frenchman and Thee describes a few of Rati’s actions and instincts as Thai, I’m not sure where the politics of the narrative will take this but it suggests a core struggle for Rati’s character will be his own political consciousness as an indigenous person and this development is surely going to make huge impact on the choices he will undoubtedly have to make. Looking forward to this if so.

I’m hoping that they don’t do the usual rushed relationship that has become a hallmark of GMM TV flops because in the very first section of the first episode they seem to already be into each other which is not a promising start given a context that precludes it, but perhaps they have too few episodes to accommodate the depth and breadth of the original story? Let’s find out.

A few things that gave me pause:

Someone who looks like a stranger to the locals and is even associated with a European embassy at a time when France has violently colonised pretty much all of the immediate surrounding countries, is going to be beset by spies monitoring his every move and you can triple that during wartime. So Rati’s immediate bonding with a Thai stranger without a sense of his own security is very odd but again, maybe they have to rush it because they haven’t got enough episodes; I don’t quite understand, and the flashbacks don’t make this more compelling. A French-speaking operative would be regarded as a hostile, not a friendly, force in occupied Indochina and certainly with good reason during WW1.

These contextual oversights might help explain the forced intimacy which logically seems much too much too soon in the way it is introduced before the end of the 1/4 parts. This is usually the sign of a writing team that is not confident in its ability to maintain dramatic tension so they substitute for it with sexual tension instead - once more not great. The dramatic tension heightens all the other sources of tension, even some of the jokes might’ve landed if a modicum of dramatic tension could’ve been generated. Urgent sounding music scores do not make up for this lack.

As a brand new member of a diplomatic corps in a new assignment he/sh would be drilled to be on maximum guard. Even if attracted to someone sexually you have to regard them as almost an enemy, and losing a necklace doesn’t constitute such an extenuating circumstance that would make one abandon precautions that could literally save one’s life. If Thee’s trying to seduce Rati sexually, we haven’t been given even subtext that he is aware of Rati’s sexuality as a factor that could help him and not endanger him and his mission, so I feel Thee needed to have put in a bit more work in order to persuade Rati to let down his guard so prematurely, but maybe there’s more that we don’t know yet.

Let’s see what unfolds with episode 2.

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Episode 1 Review Kudos

The premise is an old one but a great one in terms of romance tropes (is this story adapted from a novel?). Everything looks beautiful - aesthetics are this studios’ strong point, but although I would’ve loved to see a stronger script it was only obvious in very few scenes; the scenes that were the most important were very well executed by the whole team.

Where the protagonist discovers his real roots and that the man who raised him is not indeed not his father, were done really well and I cried every time including the parts that made me smile. They did a very good job stimulating our emotions without reducing them via the usually base, hackneyed methods. This is ideal for any BL opening episode to successfully convince the audience to want to know more about the characters’ stories and not simply to support their faves appearing on-screen.

I also like that we have a confident and competent Uke, I celebrate the absence of an abusive-for-no-reason Seme and that the old dynamic between this CP has been turned around. Incidentally this is the reason people are bored with most CPs in Thai BL: because stale Directors are not giving popular actors good scripts, not because they’re tired of seeing the actors together.

I love that the “father” is acting in the character role traditionally given to a mother figure, and that his fathering is characterised primarily by the most important component of love, which is Care. The father does not impose traditional ideas about gender roles or masculinity on the son, which is the only way you can truly love and raise a child with a healthy, non-distorted, self conception - of any sex or sexuality.

For episode 1 I say Bravo to the entire team!

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