Maggi64

Finally, a BL with a female character we can all like. I'm only on Ep 2, but so far I find Mi Ae to be a straight up cool chic. I freaking loved how she responded to that sexist, judgmental Gynecologist and how he shouted, "Hey bring back my uterus! She stole my uterus!" lol

Can you give me a link to Taekondo? I never heard of it until your comment here, and I cannot find it listed in MDL anywhere.

I had no idea that the sound was out of sync because I do not speak Japanese. Are you Japanese? Do you speak it?

I'm a typical American who only speaks English, lol

I know, a bad copy can ruin the experience. So scroll down and use Geegee16's link because it's a clean copy (it's under a spoiler tag). You'll also be able to follow the movie better if you read the review that's posted in the review section.

I had gotten the link from a comment by Geegee16 further below in this thread. I know you said you finally found it on Google, but just in case, here's the link I got from Geegee16:

https://ok.ru/video/1718505769673

It's on OK.ru

Let me know what you think after you finish. Everyone else I've recommended it to loves it. If you are a BL fan then you definitely love it!

Great list: the slipping towel, the towel bath, an accidental fall or catch, sleeping-beauty false-kiss, somnolent confession, gentle lock-of-hair restoration, alcoholic amnesia, and rain-born fever. But you forgot about the wiping food from the other guy's mouth. Why the hell do women directing these things think that is so sexy? Also, don't they watch other BL's and thus would know how cliched this is?

I also loathe the "I'm not really gay, just gay for you." It suggests there is something wrong with being gay in general. Besides, at least one of the two must be gay, otherwise who does the pursuing? It's not easy to have sex with the same gender if you are simply not attracted to that type of body. I was pursued by a gay women in college and we kissed, but I simply could not get anywhere near her genitals. It kind of grossed me out, even though I've got the same equipment myself.

BTW, I just rewatched Gonin after a couple of years. Just so freaking good! Hard to believe that movie is 30 years old. I loved the critic who called it "a gay Reservoir Dogs." But sooo much better than Reservoir Dogs.

As I'd just said to br85 above, you must also bear in mind that he grew up as a gay teen in India, where it was still permissible to openly and loudly shit on gay classmates. Likewise, there are rural enclaves in Japan (such as the town portrayed in this show), where it's still acceptable to shit on gay people.

My take on this was that homophobic bullying was so acceptable in this rural Japanese town that it even became performative. I saw the bullying as a gross kind of over-the-top performance art that the boys were enjoying, almost the way actors enjoy putting on a show.

I think that you responded differently to the bullies because you grew up in India where it was still ok to bully gay kids like that. Etoks and I grew up in America where homophobic bullying was punished at schools as early as the mid-80's. We certainly never see teens behave like the bullies in this show in the 2020's.

I was in high school in the mid 80's and a jock once made an effeminate kid (whom we all assumed to be secretly gay), get on his knees and eat a handful of dirt. Nobody applauded that sadistic jock; in fact, even his fellow jocks dumped him from their clique after that stunt. All the regular kids gossiped about how sick and horrid he was. And then, a week later, he was expelled from the school. This was 1984 in NJ, when gay activists were just getting more vocal. I doubt it was the same for you in India.

Perfectly put; it's cotton candy that's void of nutrition (ie, substance), and will rot your teeth (ie, your brain), but you watch anyway. Actually, I would not be watching if that little blonde boy were not in it. It's all about him.

I just love his round, cherubic face, and pouty lips. Also, how he's somehow both surly and sweetly shy at once. I find myself wanting to cuddle him, and that's 100% the appeal of this show for me.

Question:

To whom was it more frustrating when Haruto pulled away from Shiba and said, "Just kidding"? To Shiba? Or to us, the viewers? Because I soooo wanted to see that kiss!

Youtube plus rampant product placement!

Isn't, "Never give up, never surrender" from Galaxy Quest? That is so funny! lol

Excellent point. Because when I researched this I'd read that GMMTV makes its big money exporting the BL's to certain foreign countries, especially in the West. But their BL's are not available unilaterally across the globe.

I will check out "4 Minutes" because I like that actor Bible. He's wicked smart, studied the notoriously difficult discipline of Mechanical Engineering, and speaks English fluently (I'm American and can tell you that he speaks English as well as any American). He's also an intellectual who discusses English literature intelligently. So, yea, if he's in "4 Minutes" I'll try it. But I cannot stand all the product placement!

I also liked "Moonlight Chicken" -- especially the romance with the deaf teen. I thought "I Told Sunset About You" and "Manner of Death" were a higher quality than most Thai BL's. And they did not have product placements! lol. There might be other Thai BL's I enjoyed, but that's all I can think of right now.

MDL alone lists 70 new Thai BL's from 2023. Check the list from an MDL member named Bella_bae.

Then google the highly reputable source "ResearchGate" and you'll see that there's been a steady, rocket-fast rise in Thai BL's from 2013 to 2023. In one mere decade it's risen from 10 to 80+ BL's a year. For 2024, it's projected to exceeded a 100.


ResearchGate
https://www.researchgate.net › figure › Number-of-Tha...
Number of Thai BL television series released per year

I discovered the BL genre 3 years ago and, at first, watched all of them. Within 1 year I utterly gave up on Thai BL's. I will sometimes drop a Japanese, Korean, or Taiwanese BL, but at least I'll give them a shot by trying the 1st ep. With Thai BL's I do not even bother starting one. I already KNOW it will be bad.

I did some research and discovered that Thailand makes over 100 BL's a year. That's 2 new BL's a week. A week! They manufacture so many shows off their BL Factory Assembly Line that of course they suck. Yet the production companies have figured out that Quantity is more profitable than Quality. In fact, BL's are so profitable in Thailand that they are among the country's Gross National Products and make tons of cash in foreign export money.

Lastly, do not trust the ratings on Thai BLs. Because I suspect multi-billion dollar production companies like GMMTV use bots to boost ratings on review sites. It costs them relatively nothing to have computer bots tap numbers to boost ratings on all their shows. That, my friends, is why even the crappiest Thai BL will have a higher rating than even the best J-BL.

I surprised myself by liking this so much, since I usually regard shows called "fluffy" to be vapid, cliched, and forgettable. And let's face it, this plot truly is pretty thin. Moreover, the production is so poor that they didn't bother to edit out the black screen that appears between scenes. But something about our pouty lipped, round faced, cherubic, blonde Baby Boy with a grumpy demeanor and gravelly voice just gets me! I want to swaddle him in a thick blanket and hug him so badly that I am rooting for Mr. Cop to do it so I can satisfy my yearning by proxy.

I don't know if it's an Asian thing or the fact that the Asians simply put out more BL's and it is BL's where the step brother fetish appears. BL's, specifically, rely on step brothers as a premise cuz BL's are quickly written by amateur writers and, hence, the writers go to easy, lazy ways of getting the characters to meet -- with step brothers being one of the easiest ways to get them together.

Also, I agree with you that it's about the ages of the step brothers when they meet. In History5 and Unknown, the younger brothers were about 10-12 when they met the older brother. That seems to be the cutoff age. Which make sense, since studies show that the potential for sibling bonding weakens after the age of 10. In other words, you are only going to feel like real siblings if you grew up together from infancy or toddler years. The older you are when adopted, the less likely you and the family will bond with each other.

Exactly. In fact, the Masterpiece Theatre and BBC adaptations of Austen's novels follow the novels to a Tee, which means the leads never kiss at all. They simply end with a wedding scene. The 2005 Hollywood version was a feature film and added the kiss. My point was that if directors add a kiss to even Austen, it's because they know audiences expect to see a kiss in a romance. So why not expect it in a gay romance too? It's just standard stuff for romances, but many here imply that people wanting to see a kiss are somehow sleazy or oversexed.