1
3
this could have been so much more
The first half was fan service in search of a plot, just GMMTV cashing in on nostalgia and the fantasies of shippers. And then it found some, and we had a glimpse of what could have been with Tam and Phi acknowledging the pain of their break-up. Imagine if Aof at his best had directed this and the writers had put more effort in, they could have made something approaching the emotional maturity, depth and realism of Moonlight Chicken. Imagine if they had really worked with that 'worst decision of my life' aspect and grappled with the pain which came from it. This could have been brilliant, another series which matures BL into real adulthood.
Singto and Krist are skilled enough to have done their part in making this richer. They sure as hell tried to in the brief opportunities they were allowed. Aof was script advisor as well as producer, should he get credit for salvaging something or criticism here?
Instead of that depth, the plot flounders around with mediocre comedy and a half-baked GL side-plot (kudos to Jamie and Earn for trying to make something of that) with a complication which should have been binned. It dips into lazy lakorn cliches, then launches itself into an out of nowhere implausible twist which was ridiculous rather than lazy, and throws in a new twist per episode to stretch it out to the grand total of... 10. (I'm a fan of Thai genre-mixing and love a good lakorn but they got it badly wrong here.)
It's hard to do slice of life well, but imagine if they had made something special from that instead of using it as filler between the snogs. This had so much potential and they just didn't bother.
Was the annoying bullying from Tae a nod to the bullying hazing in SOTUS? Or was it just there because it was an easy and cliched plot device for the writers? They were clever in using the many flashbacks to up the ratio of fan service with a minimum of extra plot. War of Y did something similar though, so perhaps even that wasn't original. It will make money for the corporations behind it though, and that's the bottom line after all.
The end result will thrill the shippers. There's a lot of kissing and that will carry many through. But what this premise from these actors could have been, if only the creators had bothered to try.
Singto and Krist are skilled enough to have done their part in making this richer. They sure as hell tried to in the brief opportunities they were allowed. Aof was script advisor as well as producer, should he get credit for salvaging something or criticism here?
Instead of that depth, the plot flounders around with mediocre comedy and a half-baked GL side-plot (kudos to Jamie and Earn for trying to make something of that) with a complication which should have been binned. It dips into lazy lakorn cliches, then launches itself into an out of nowhere implausible twist which was ridiculous rather than lazy, and throws in a new twist per episode to stretch it out to the grand total of... 10. (I'm a fan of Thai genre-mixing and love a good lakorn but they got it badly wrong here.)
It's hard to do slice of life well, but imagine if they had made something special from that instead of using it as filler between the snogs. This had so much potential and they just didn't bother.
Was the annoying bullying from Tae a nod to the bullying hazing in SOTUS? Or was it just there because it was an easy and cliched plot device for the writers? They were clever in using the many flashbacks to up the ratio of fan service with a minimum of extra plot. War of Y did something similar though, so perhaps even that wasn't original. It will make money for the corporations behind it though, and that's the bottom line after all.
The end result will thrill the shippers. There's a lot of kissing and that will carry many through. But what this premise from these actors could have been, if only the creators had bothered to try.
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