Maggi64

I just rewatched it and wondered if anyone else noticed the costume design when they were in high school. The other boys all wear beige vests, and Kioyoi is the only one with a blue vest. Hira is the only one with a long sleeve button down sweater. I liked how the costume designer found subtle ways to make sure the audience was focused on these 2 characters as distinctive. Indeed, the show has great production values such as costume, lights and settings.

I didn't mean to be political with my comment on the "left cries for censorship." It's just that I work at a university, so it's all liberals and all this stuff about trigger warnings for book. If I lived in the bible belt, I'd be complaining about conservatives, lol. At any rate, I regret the term and thus edited it.

The critic to whom you replied has inadvertently shown what's great about the show by proving how it elicits such strong feelings all around. The fact that this critic keeps commenting instead of going away reveals that the show got under her skin, which means that it succeeded, not failed.

I felt badly for Koyoma's character, but let's face it, we all love the sexy bad boys in real life too! Nice guys can be so dull.

Oh, and I want to add that it struck me as uber ironic that Americans criticized the machine gun fantasy. Um, the Japanese can truly use such imagery in fantasies because they do not have a problem with kids shooting up f*cking high schools. That is OUR problem. Yet here are Americans asking the Japanese to be careful because Americans might go shooting up high schools again. We are the only nation on earth who does that. The Japanese, conversely, have relatively little gun violence.

Agree with all of you. As I said in my post above, some of the greatest works of literature show "problematic relationships."

I loved his jealousy when it was Ep 4 cuz I thought he still needed to learn a lesson and rewatched the scene of him eyeing Koyoma a couple of times, lol. But he is so vulnerable in Ep 5 that I no longer want him feeling threatened. Although, it is good to show him that Hira has value in others' eyes.

First of all, thank you for this thread. Because I am verily obsessed with this show and was dying to find people to talk to about it. Like many of you, I had seen some comments on Youtube and Googala that were just plain silly. They seem to prefer the BL from Thailand which is just cotton candy fluff. They are deeply unoriginal and do not make you think. What's great about My Beautiful Man is that it is so thought provoking that even non BL fans would love it. But they'd have to be smart fans, because stupid people just parrot the catch-phrases like toxic, problematic, etc.

You know, I am an English Professor and I can tell you that some of the greatest pieces of literature also contain "problematic" relationships. In "Wuthering Heights" the main character Heathcliff is so obsessed with Cathy that he digs up her corpse to hug it. In "Death In Venice," the main character, a 50-60 year old man, is so obsessed with a beautiful 15 year old boy he sees in Venice, that he stays there even though he's been told there is an outbreak of cholera and to get the hell out. He ultimately chooses death just to go on looking at the boy. In "Sorrows of Young Werther" by Goethe, a man kills himself over a woman. Hell, even "Romeo and Juliette" freaking kill themselves! So what the hell are people doing criticizing this show's "toxicity"? It's as if they are saying we can no longer teach great pieces of literature. Well, frankly, that IS what they are saying because colleges now contain "trigger warnings" for such works and there are cries for censorship every day. Ugh.

But back to the story at hand. What makes it so compelling is what we witnessed this week with the switch in viewpoints. We discover that Hira had been what is called an "unreliable narrator." That is a great technique used in the Japanese film Roshoman where a rape is shown through 7-8 different men's eyes, and each one sees it differently. The point is that there is no objective truth, and only subjective interpretation. Well, with frigging Hira, we get more than merely subjective, we get somebody who is borderline Aspergers. He simply cannot see what is obvious, such as Kioyio following him to his bedroom, Kieyoi following him on his bike to get icecream, Kieyou defending him from the bullies. And Kioyoi does not call him "Stutz" like the others do either.

As for "Stutz" that translation showed up on Viki, which has the best subtitles for Asian content. Gagaloo's are not so hot. But Viki only has episode 2 up, so I had not choice but to watch on Gagaloo. But there is a big difference in translation. For instance, when they go to get ice cream on the bike, and Kioyio says, "Ordinarily this is when a person would ask why I am here" Gagaloo's subtitle has Hira respond, "You did not want to be there." In fact, Hira said, "It seemed to me that you were uncomfortable there. " And then the camera shoots to Kioyo's face as he makes an expression as if to say, "Humm, you are right. That's exactly why." Later on, in Episode 5, we discover that Kioyo truly IS uncomfortable with all the attention, because he knows it's fake.

Oh, and as for Kioyo, I feel so sorry for him in episode 5! I am with the others who suddenly saw his vulnerability. I am dying to read the novel to know more about his interior world. Really, I am that obsessed with this show. I would be embarrassed by how much I like it, so thank you for this thread where you guys seem to love it to wild extents as well!