Maggi64

Yes, Taishi's poor, but there's also the fact that he just plain has a voracious appetite, which Kohei finds adorable. We know he finds it adorable because he breaks into an enormous smile whenever Taishi expresses excitement while eating. Sometimes he even laughs. Frankly, so doI.

ANOTHER GOOD REASON FOR THAT KISS

Many are citing the fact that the manga illustrated the kiss the same way, and the Japanese are fanatically faithful to source material. But there's a 2nd reason for that kiss to have made sense, and here it is: Taishi was not ready for a deep kiss yet.

He would not have responded with a deep, tongue kiss in real life either. He'd be too shocked and simply freeze. Wouldn't you if you were in his place and utterly surprised? I am sure we'll see a proper kiss later in the show when Taishi is ready for it.

I had him confused with Lee Sun Kyun. Now that was a travesty because his drug tests came back negative, yet they cops and media continued to harass him anyway.

That's a good idea. I'm shutting down for the night, but I would absolutely join a discussion about Korean Celebrity Suicides tomorrow and any other day.

I watch tons of Asian cinema, not just BL's, so I often have questions about Asian culture. I love most things about East Asia (which is why I watch their movies so much), but there are also aspects of the culture that I find baffling.

Or sometimes I'll see something in a movie that makes me simply curious. For example, I noticed a character say the American phrase "sexual harassment" in a Japanese movie recently (he said it in English), and wondered if the concept of sexual harassment in the workplace is now standard in Japan. Anyway, those are the kinds of questions I'd like to ask in general.


BTW, are you from a Western country? I am sensing that you are.

That's a good point. I wish MDL had a page where people could have general discussions like this that were not about a specific show. You know, like Facebook posts. Because I often have questions/comments about Asian cinema in general, but don't know where to voice them because it's not appropriate to post them on a page for a particular show.

Hummm...... I'm going to shoot an email to the MDL staff and recommend they create an Open Page for general discussions.

Yes, but she's not the one who accused you of stanning a drug addict. That was somebody else. I'm guessing that other person is from an Asian country while Kittyen is from the West. At any rate, Kittyen's comment shares the same ideas that western countries do about celebrities, which is cool.

I'm shocked she meant Yoo Ah In when all he did was smoke a little pot.

Given the standard of perfection that Korea expects, I don't get why anyone would even want to be a celebrity in that country. I'm not being sarcastic either, I truly do not see any upside to being famous in Korea. I think YAI should learn English and come to Hollywood. After all, 2 Asian movies have won the Best Picture Oscar recently. I don't mean "Best Foreign Language Movie" either, but best picture overall. One was "Parasite" and the other was "Everything Everywhere All at Once." Asian celebs are getting bigger and bigger in America, so if they want to smoke a lousy joint or two they should come here.

You are spot-on correct when you said the Korean fandom gives its celebs "no rights to live and/or act like a normal person in society." They seem to want their celebrities to behave like priests or nuns who never drink or have normal sex. In fact, CNN did a story about all the celebrity suicides this year and they discussed how Korean Management Companies make their idols sign contracts that actually prohibit dating.

That's just baffling to Americans. I mean, it's normal and healthy to date. So why the hell would the Korean fandom hate when their favorite idols date somebody? In America it's the precise opposite, especially when a celeb dates another celeb. In those cases, the media actually uses a celeb's dating status as a way of promoting them because the public loves reading about celebrities getting together (eg, Victoria and David Beckam, Annette Benning and Warren Beatty, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, Beyonce and Jay-Z, and, well, so many more that I cannot even list them all.

May I ask what country you are from? Because no American would demonize Yoo Ah In for drugs. Western countries are all about supporting people who do drugs with 12 step programs. In fact, Americans are shocked at how the Koreans demand absolute perfection from their celebs, and how the Korean fans persecute celebs who make the slightest mistake until that celeb commits suicide.

I don't want to repeat what we've all written already, but if you read the most recent comments above you'll see how Korea has so many celebrity suicides that people in the West now call the Korean fandom, "The Celebrity Suicide Machine." Or you can just google and see how American news sources such as CNN, Variety Magazine and People Magazine, etc, have all covered the story.

I agree that the show is wonderful. But what do you mean by "1 litre of tears is an exception"?

I was cool with the back of the head quick kiss because they were standing in a public staircase at school where anyone could come upon them at any second. The Japanese are not relaxed about public displays of affection in general, so they certainly wouldn't be relaxed about gay p.d.a. I am assuming the show will include more passionate displays of affection later in the show in some scene when the boys are in private.

Moreover, I hear that the manga portrayed it as a back of the head kiss as well. And man-oh-man, the Japanese are tenacious about being faithful to mangas! I was shocked at how they had Nozue and Togawa stop short of a full kiss in "Old Fashioned Cupcake" simply because the manga illustration showed a teensy, tiny smidgeon of empty space between their lips. I actually thought that it was a bit fanatical to be that faithful to an illustration. But, hey, that's just how the Japanese seem to be when it comes to staying true to mangas.

What "drug addicted" celeb was she talking about anyway? You did not mention any celeb by name here, so I assume she was referring to a celeb you had defended on another page.

She must be somebody who has no clue how big a problem celeb-suicide is in Korea. But it's so big that if you google you'll find a number of American Magazines have covered the topic. The topic is a big deal here because we simply have nothing comparable in the West. Of course not, because the public here does not freak out on discovering that celebs are, umm, human beings who have sex outside of marriage or maybe smoke a little pot. But the Koreans want their celebs to be as pure as religious icons.

And if the celeb falls from grace, yikes, the Korean masses will persecute them until they kill themselves. Once the celeb is dead, there won't even be any discussion of how the culture is to blame for it. They just move on to the next celeb to idolize then demonize. Now, I don't speak Korean so I can't access Korean media first hand, but I trust the English language journalists who've written about how part of the problem is that the Korean media pretends their Celebrity-Suicide-Machine does not exist.

If a Western actor the caliber of Lee Sun Kyun had killed himself it would be EVERYWHERE in the media. We'd have been exploring the problem on every talk show, newspaper, and magazine for the rest of the year. Alas, the Korean Celeb-Suicide Machine simply declares, "Next."

Thank you! The funny this is that I have not even seen ep 4 yet, but based on these comments I now want to see it. I had issues with the character Taeshin in eps 1, 2 and 3 because I thought the author was portraying him as aspergers (e.g., only an aspies person would never have heard of homosexuality until college), yet at the the same time the author portrayed him as having friends and craving a relationship with Takara, which an aspies person would not want.

So I thought the conception of this character was too confused for me to really get into him. I think the author of "My Beautiful Man" did a much better job creating a character who was clueless, but not so ignorant of social habits as to be aspies. For instance, Hira recognized the social echelons at school and how Kiyoi was at the top, while aspergers people don't recognize social echelons. He was just weird, which is what Kiyoi always called him, lol.

Yo, guys, there's no reason for anyone to be taking etoks21's comments about the show so personally. His initial comment made fun of the SHOW and not any of the individuals here. Then somebody went after him personally, and thereon the convo descended into personal insults on both sides. It didn't have to be this way. I mean, the original comment was intended to by sarcastic and funny. So laugh if you find it funny (as I did), or move on if you did not. I, for one, cracked up at the comment, "I'm seeing Taishin as a mildly attractive, young lesbian."

He said that vis-a-vis Taeshin's supposedly not knowing he was attracted to Takara because people know if they are gay or not by time they get to college. Hell, I am a female and knew I had crushes on boys as early as the 1st grade. We may keep it secret, but we know what gender we like very early on. In fact, the gay English novelist E.M. Forster's novel "Maurice" is about a gay man who is forced into secrecy due to England's anti-gay laws in the Edwardian era. Since nobody ever talked about what they called back then "the unspeakable habit of the Greeks" he did not understand himself to be "gay" per se. But the character did know that he was unduly attracted to his gardener when he was 12. And he knew he had sexual dreams featuring males -- and only males -- since adolescence. The point is that we know if we are gay or straight early on. So I must agree with Etoks about the silliness of this BL conceit that guys in their 20's still don't know what they're feeling. They know.

You make a really interesting point about how the flaws of characters in movies from each Asian country teaches us about those countries' cultures. Hence, we need to see these flawed characters. I actually watch little from China because you can tell that the govt is controlling and censoring their movies. My favorite Asian films are, hands, down, Japanese. The Japanese have a way of presenting flawed characters that are compelling, complex and fascinating.

Flawed characters are the best, because they bring the conflict and drama. Incidentally, I'm an English Professor and I often assign the novel, "Wuthering Heights" by Emily Bronte. It features an incredibly flawed character -- Heathcliff.

In the old days, students understood why this is a classic and why Heathcliff is romantic, even though he's also an abusive psycho. For example, he is so obsessed with his beloved, Catherine, that after she dies he digs up her corpse to hug it. It gets harder and harder to teach this novel every year because students complain about the character's violence and want to talk about the patriarchy. The fact is, it was written by a woman in the 1800's when almost NO women wrote novels. So we should support it. But the thinking of contemporary students is so rigid and "trigger warnings" are part of it. Some of my colleagues put trigger warnings on their syllabus. But I refuse to pander by doing so as it demeans great art.

Bingo, I thought of "My Beautiful Man" as well. I was also amused that the show was a massive hit in Asia whereas Western viewers were all pious and accusing Hira of "stalking" and "sexual harassment." They were also calling it a "toxic" relationship wherein Kiyoi was abusive.

Essentially, Western viewers criticized both characters using trendy terms like stalking, toxic, sexual harassment (it's rated only 7.8 on MDL). Meanwhile, Asian viewers interpreted these characters as distinctive, unique and fascinating. If authors were to create characters according to the rules of Social Justice Warriors then all we'd get are generic, bland, boring characters.

Stalking is, by definition an "unwanted" and/or "threatening" pursuit of someone. While the term is traced back to 16th Century England, it was more commonly used to mean hunting animals (eg, a hunter stalked its prey). It was not used to indicate human prey until the late 1980's. This was when a fan obsessively pursued, then killed celebrity Rebecca Schaeffer, and tabloids began to use the term "stalking" to describe the case.

Usage of the term "stalking" snowballed over the years as it became common lexicon which applied to even non-famous people, and eventually became a legal charge. The first anti-stalking law was 1990 in California, USA. By now it's a law in all 50 states, and a number of other countries. Different countries have different requirements for something to constitute stalking, but one requirement they all share is that the object of attention must feel threatened and/or fearful.

Nowadays, however, the term is overused and people say "stalking" when it's really just romantic pursuit. For instance, people are saying that the character in this show, Taeshin, is stalking Takara even though Takara clearly does not feel threatened or fearful and, to the contrary, welcomes the attention. Accordingly, if someone reported Taeshin to the police for "stalking" a judge would throw the case out of court on insufficient grounds.

Sure, transferring to another school because your beloved goes there is weird. It's also peculiar that Taeshin did not know gays existed until he got to college. I haven't read the manga, but the actor playing this role speaks in an unusually low, slow monotone. All added up, it is more apt to call this kid weird than a stalker. Many people also misapplied the term "stalker" to Hira in "My Beautiful Man," when it was more apt to call him just plain weird. As anyone who saw MBM knows, Kioyi liked Hira's attention, which meant no, not stalking. He even liked that Hira was weird. Indeed, the last line of that show was Kiyoi smiling brightly as he says, "Why did I fall in love with such a weirdo?"

I hope we get something similar in "Takara no Vidro," because I love oddballs with unique character traits. So many BL's feature bland, generic characters that I honest to god hope Taishen becomes even weirder in upcoming episodes.

The difference between someone stalking you, or romantically pursuing you, is whether or not you welcome their attention. Takara not only welcomes Taishin's attention, but welcomes it more and more as time goes by. It was the precise opposite with Taishin and the Uncle. Taishin started off welcoming the Uncle's friendliness, but then began to show discomfort more and more as time went by.

It made total sense for Taishin to call Takara instead of the police because he already regarded Takara as his protector. Remember, the 1st time they met Taishin was crying and Takara comforted him, which made him feel emotionally secure. If you're a shy, tiny, sheltered kid who's in love with a tall, strong, protective guy, then of course you'll call that strong guy for protection from something that's scary, but not so drastically dangerous as to warrant police.

I did the same thing when I was in college and this drug dealer would always hit on me at a bar I liked. Sometimes he'd even follow me when I walked back to campus. It made me uncomfortable, but wasn't legal grounds to call the police. Well, I also happened to be madly in love with a guy I'll call Jay. One night, the dealer was yelling at me for rejecting him and I thought, "I've got to call Jay to get over here and tell the dealer to get lost." It felt terrific to have the guy I was in love with protecting me! And yes, Jay became my boyfriend soon after this.

Gotta say, if Taishin wants Takara as a boyfriend, he knew exactly what he was doing! lol

Where do you live? Because I am in New Jersey USA and don't have it yet.