PPBongi

Undoubtedly, this is one of the best BLs to come out of Thailand in a long, long time. Assuredly, it will be like nothing you have ever seen before. It is realistic, fresh, and reflective of today’s fast paced adolescent living. Antithetical to when I was their age? I hate to tell you this, but little has changed! It is exactly what it was like when I was their age. While the forms of communication, clothing styles and slang, and certainly the awesome freedom to express oneself are all vastly dissimilar, what the internal feelings and emotions are and how those are established and exhibited are exactly the same way that we expressed them some 60 years ago and I suspect goes back much further. It is comforting to know that egocentrically and emotionally little has changed. If this is representative of today’s generation, then the reality is we have always been generational gelboys. Where I wanted to see this unique series succeed was to tell a more truthful story. I wish they had used actual teens for the roles so as to have captured the genuine immaturity of the substantive times; not the reflections of the past memories of the current performers. I am not a proponent of using older performers for roles that are clearly contemporary and in the here and now. There is no reason to do so. That IS what the story is about. We want to see, sense, feel, and genuinely grasp what they are experiencing in real time. Not a reflection of what was but a reality of what is. If they had used contemporary performers this would have been a dynamic masterpiece and set the standards for others to follow. It would have lent a greater level of sincerity to the production and the story, and we would have grasped the deeper meaning of the emotions because they would not have lived them yet. We would have watched them project their raw emotions, and for me that would have given it a greater sense of uncertainty. After all, they are teenagers, and they have their whole lives ahead of them. Let us see how each of them would have portrayed their own ‘tabula rasa’.