Nolan Peale

I wish it was bolder in expressing what it was trying to say. But it is too, well, bound to the idea that we need to look away when things get uncomfortable. I wish one of the characters would just break out and say "I'm not o.k. and I'm on the verge of losing it" because that's been the story that's been unfolding. I think there was a good idea somewhere in here about a group of friends who had been rejected by their families or couldn't cope with family life sticking together and falling in love that got lost somewhere. That would have been interesting and I think that was the theme from the beginning. We have all these children who are never with their parents. They are being passed around. They wander about hospitals. They get dumped off to whomever is willing to watch them. And when they grow up, they aren't o.k.

I like how this series really turn the optimistic story about growing up on its head. The progressive optimistic story about parents is that they sacrifice for their children, who then move up in the world and move away to Bangkok to make it big, leaving the old neighborhood behind. But here, its the opposite. All the parents seem to be leaving the neighborhood and their kids are stuck there. Heck, the one kid who has managed to make her way out of there had to come back this episode. The golden boy attempts suicide. The kid who was abandoned by his mom is so anxious that people have only helped him because he's cute that he can't deal with an erection and start having sex because if he becomes and adult, he's afraid no one will take care of him. The epitome of success - the one who worked his way through medical school as basically a single foster father - can't figure out if he's in love or just really guilty about something. Like those are two things that are difficult to tell apart.

These are not happy people, but there was so much potential to make them interesting. Give them a struggle to overcome. A problem to work out. Force them to make a decision. But instead we've meandered around so much that we're in episode 9 and finally getting backstory. But whenever that gets too uncomfortable, we are taken out of it.

I'll be curious to see how this ends. My guess is that nothing will happen and somehow they'll tack on a wedding and call it a day.

Like "Do you need some help with that?" or "I can help cure that" are cliché porn responses to that, but come on...they are perfectly fine cliché's to spice this drama up.

Not really. There's characters from about 3 or 4 different novels in this series and they all appear with their boyfriends from those novels and tell their stories.

All Thai wigs are bad. All of them. Seriously, if anyone here is at all skilled in wig-making, move to Thailand and you'll have the entire entertainment industry knocking at your door in a week.

His sister. It's probably hard enough to tell his mom "No", but sometimes she's asking him for tuition for his sister. Plus if the father sexually assaulted him, he's probably doing it to the sister as well. That kind of abuse doesn't always stop with a specific gender.

This series is giving me I Am Your King 2 vibes, where I’m worried that Mr. Innocent but not so Innocent Ji Hyun would have been better off with anyone else besides the older man he fell for.

Sometimes, a satisfying emotional ending for a series involves a kiss after which two characters hold hands while walking off into happily ever after land. In others, an emotionally satisfying ending involves a bunch of characters laying dead on the ground while characters are handcuffed together marching off to prison. This is starting to feel like the latter type of series.

I think that’s Jae wan’s mom.

Yep. Thank you for pointing out that both boys are not "broken" or mentally ill. Tae Hyun is. Da Yoel isn't. He's just found himself doing something that doesn't give him a whole lot of pleasure that he started doing because it made his father happy. The closest he comes to being "mentally ill" is that he's tied his hippieness that he isn't experience into a keyring of flares that becomes something of a fetish object for him. He just has an epiphany that he's not enjoying archery and willingly gives that object up to boot. He's a sullen, unhappy and lonely teenager, who doesn't know what he wants, but...well, that's not illness.

What he could use, though, is probably a kiss on the lips from the person he's attracted to every now and again. Preferably at a climatic moment that would give us viewers an emotional payoff for sitting through 3.5 hours watching him be surly and making us worry that he was so drunk and passed out for so long that he probably should go to a hospital. Hey, right then, when he came out of his soju coma and they were overlooking the city while the sun was rising, having revealed their feelings. That would have been a great spot for a kiss. Especially since Tae Hun spent all that effort dragging him to that spot because he knew it was an important location for Da Yoel. Apparently, though, kissing at sunrise from scenic locations is what happens in porn and I'm watching the wrong porn.

Ace = Asexual which is the "A" in LGBTQIA+. This series makes sense if we used the labels the kids use these days with their 60 different flags. Da Yoel is makes sense as a character if you read him as demisexual and Tae Hyun makes sense if you read him as asexual. Not that I'm fond of using labels that the characters themselves aren't using for themselves. Heaven forbid! I'd never do that! Why would anyone ever be so bold! But basically on the LGBTQIA+ system, this is an A+ romance.

If you read it like that, though, the whole "I'm giving you a hickey" sequence makes a bit more sense because his friend is starting to recognize that Tae's lack of sexual interest in anything isn't normal.

Yep. The source material doesn't have anything to be censored out, so if this wasn't labeled a "BL", or have and LGBTQIA+ tag on it, it would just be a drama about a boy who finds himself attracted to another boy, but whose sexuality is undefined, and his traumatized, asexual companion. Their sexualities are "not normal" and that's as far as it gets. In a Chinese censored BL they at least somewhat nod to the fact that if the censors weren't there, they would be jumping into bed with each other. In this one, the source text doesn't really allow for that reading and even in their most supposedly intimate moment, where they go off alone for their "Lovers Leap" the plan all along was to cook a meal and dress in matching PJs. Its not even the standard "uke is a bit of a prude" and "seme is always horny" behind closed doors. It's the Ace fantasy rendezvous.

Even potential erotic conflicts with the side characters are non-extant. Actually, So Yeong is the only other character who has any attraction to the main couple. Rolling around together on the infirmary bed is nothing but teenage male horseplay. And all those long stares from Min Jung are mysteriously long stares that don't mean anything. He just shows up to the final round of the tournament to find out the results to stare at Da Yeol one last time. If you want to read that as "he's in love with Da Yeol and a potential rival in a love triangle" you'll have to write your own slash fan fic because it was all in your head. He's stares to misdirect and that's about it. He probably just stares like that because he's an archer and staring at things like that is what they do. He looks the same way at cans of soup in the grocery store when he's shopping.

I wonder if the plan is for Jeong Ho Gyun to make a career of being a pretty face supporting actor with nothing to do with any plot. Hopefully he'll get a promotion to third-wheel or owner of the coffee shop where the leads hang out in his next role.

Yeah. In a rare nod to realism, they decided that boys would have different haircuts after going to university. But it threw me off because Tae Hyun had straight hair and Da Yoel's hair was wavier. Like they had swapped hair.

I liked it and all, but it does give me pause about all the excitement fans of Kpop were feeling because "idols were going to do BL!". There's definitely going to be a tradeoff and its probably going to be that every Ace romance manhwa is going to be fast-tracked into production. And that's what this really is. I don't think this is a BL. Its devoid of any of the homoerotic tension, which I think is necessary for it to be BL. It certainly isn't an LGBTQ series since there aren't any LGBTQ characters. But it is an LGBTQIA+ series with an emphasis on the A. 2 years into their relationship and they are, what, jumping into a hot tub completely clothed? The problem with Ace romances when they involve 2 men is that they look a lot like bromances, censored Chinese BL, or soft Catholic morality dramas about how its o.k. to be "gay", just no sodomy, please. At least it isn't the old morality drama where one of them dies. At least they don't end up with sudden insta-girlfriends so they are clearly a monogamous couple in the end and so its not a bromance. They don't "straighten the characters out" and neither ever claims to be straight. But that's really about it.

So, overall, well done for a series about finding your true passion and starting to overcome childhood trauma and the complexities of same sex male emotional connections. But as a BL, it fizzles.

One of those things that might end up playing better in Thai fans than me, but I'm finding the band-o-friends really annoying. Like no wonder Fuse hasn't found anyone. His friends talk shit about him whenever he brings someone around. LOL. I hate that I have to call out the one named woman in the cast, but Paula is very annoying and is no replacement for Yiwah. "You abandoned me!!!!!" "You stole my man!!!!" "Tell me whether or not you had sex last night." Bleh. Why Fuse wanted Ana to kiss him while she was on the phone is beyond me. I would just ignore her calls.

Well, the other bit of info we were supposed to take away from it was that Ana, despite his reputation, wants to have a relationship. I mean they also had a long scene at the end of last episode where some rando came up to them and called him a slutty slut slut to his face. So they needed to undo that information. That said, I agree with Ms. Odessa that it was an odd placement for a flashback.

I think it was to set up the reaction Ana had to Fuse playing video games during breakfast.

I'm kind of hoping the next KBL will have 2 equally fearless and chatty men meeting and bantering their way into love without social reserve getting in the way. These pairings of Mr. Formal with Mr. Sprightly are all starting to run together. If this weren't labeled a "BL" and we didn't find out that TJ had an ex, I'd get no sense that this wasn't a bromance since there's really no erotic tension between them. It could easily just be a story of a gay man mis-interpreting friendliness as flirting.

Oh, great. So when I go to Korea and need to exchange currency, I'll be guided to a bunch of screaming fans and not a booth with someone with a stack of won waiting for my dollars.

He doesn't actually seem to have that many friends. We don't see him talking with other people. That said, we have no idea who ran against him for class president. It might be that no one else wanted it so it was his by default, the alternative was more unpopular, or it just automatically goes to the number 1 student. He apparently has the best grades in the class.