Maggi64

Wait, what perms? The potter has slightly wavy hair, but that's it. Also, I've always wondered, do some Asians have naturally wavy hair or is it always a perm when we see waves?

We've got JWY spying on the potter and searching for clues at his house. We've even got an executive telling JWY, "Get close to the potter. Get inside his heart and mind to find out what he's thinking." Such rhetoric makes one think we're dealing with a great con-artist scheme with millions at stake. Nope. We're actually dealing with some dude's boss wanting a couple of clay pots.

Bingo. They have zero sexual or romantic chemistry. The side couple generated more in the mere 5 min we've seen them interact. There is not nearly enough of them.

Ki-tae never said he was doing them anonymously. I'm sure he signed his name. That's how he got offers from the other guy who interviewed him as well. If one wants to advance their career, they'd have to use their own name, right?

I haven't seen white stage makeup this thick since "Ocean Likes Me." These are beautiful men, so why so go so heavy with the makeup? And why use a camera filter to make their complexions look even more alien?

No worries. And listen, I am so dumb that I thought Park and Lee were their first names because the Koreans list those names first when writing them. The Japanese also confuse me by putting the surnames first.

When did we see him going on a blind date with a girl??? I assumed he'd dated a boy in college. He said he knew he had a crush on Lee Wan ever since Lee Wan vanished, so he'd have been in the mental realm of wanting a man. Accordingly, he'd have dated a man in college, right? I mean, if the pronoun is either/or, I'd go with it being masculine. Except you said he's shown dating a girl. I need to find that scene. Where is it?

Yes. In fact, the webtoons were the entire basis for his recommending Lee Wan to the company. He showed them Lee Wan's work. Then Lee Wan discovered that Ki Tae had recommended him for the job in Ep 2.

Wait, these are all different initials.
P.S.H.
P.J.C.
L.S.G.
L.J.H.
Why did you say they are the same?

The show got even better in eps 5 and 6 so, naturally, the MDL rating got lower. Ugh.

THE GOOD KIND OF FLUFFY!

Bad fluff is when it feels airy and empty, like cotton candy. It's overly sweet, cheap sugar that's spun into a large puff, but with no substance to give it weight. Good fluff, however, has a sense of weighted warmth, charm and heart in there. Our Dating Sim? Oh yea, this show is good fluff all the way!

Oooh, that tension between Ho Tae and cafe guy sounds hot. I like a homophobe who's actually repressing hidden homosexual desire. We saw that in a character in the Chinese BL "Uncontrolled Love" from 2016 (ie before the ban). Have you ever seen it? When homophobes get over their repression, they fall hard!

You wrote: "strange that the beginning of episode 5 didn't start at where the story was at the end of episode 4"

I did whole post about this. I said we didn't know how it ended on the soccer field because it cut to the office in Ep 5. So I said, "Let's pay a game and guess what happened on that soccer field that we did not see." People had some really funny replies.

I also tried to read the novel of Uncontrolled Love and stopped. I preferred imagining the characters the way they were in the movie and felt that if I kept reading, I'd have the book's awful versions of those characters in my head. For instance, the orphaned pal KeLuo is a sweetheart in the movie, but a gross rapist in the book. Xie Yan is also more abusive in the book.

The director did a stellar job with this and maintained a quick, crackling pace; created a consistently fun vibe; and pulled charismatic performances from his leads. Which is why it's so odd that the director is not listed anywhere. Does anyone know who directed this?

I can't read Korean, so can you tell me what that twitter post says? Does it say something about its ratings?

You nailed the ultimate irony -- which is that the actual authors of BL's would have no idea what the hell these academics are talking about. The women who write BL's simply want to communicate love stories that replace the "Knight in Shining Armor" with a seme and the "Damsel in Distress" with an uke.

That's especially the case with the BL "Uncontrolled Love" which this professor writes about later in this article. He spun elaborate webs to create a thesis about a film that what was essentially a simple fairy tale wherein a Rich Aggressive Knight (seme) seeks to own and protect his Sweet, Orphaned Damsel in Distress (uke). Lemme tell you, if you've seen "Uncontrolled Love" then you know what I mean about the uke being a Damsel in Distress. The dude gets beaten up and smacked around by half the characters in the movie.

At any rate, this paper is actually one of the more grounded ones because it correlates BL's with economics, and that's a concrete entity. You should see the papers that are entirely theoretical, such as correlating BL's with women seeking safe spaces. I often read these papers and think, damn, these people are clearly not even fans of the BL genre. Because they don't get it, and they sure as hell are not having any fun watching it.

Thank you for replying, and thanks for reading the thread! It's been lots of fun.

Towards a Queer Affective Economy of Boys' Love in Contemporary Chinese Media

Alvin K. Wong
Boys Love
Publication Name: Continuum

This article expands the existing research on the boys’ love (BL) cultural phenomenon by analysing two popular BL films, A Round Trip to Love and Uncontrolled Love, and one TV series, Addicted, all streamed online in 2016. Previous research has explored the various aspects of BL such as cultural globalization from below, the online publishing industry and censorship, and the theme of incest and queer sexuality. This article turns a greater attention to the dialectical relationship between affect, queer desire and neoliberalism by unpacking further the affective work that BL performs in contemporary China. BL is both structurally constrained by the economic infrastructure of heteronormative kinship norms in neoliberal China and residual forms of socialism, as well as offering alternative modality of affective tendency that exceeds these structural impediments. Conceptually, this research explicates three forms of affective work in BL in contemporary China, namely affective imprisonment, queer affective reparation and affective overcoming, in order to illuminate the relationship between affect, queer desire and neoliberalism in contemporary China.

This article proposes to theorize BL as a form of affective economy that emerges from neoliberalism and economic restructuring taking place in postsocialist China. These structural and economic shifts had taken place as early as 1978 when Deng Xiaoping experimented with neoliberalism and privatization through initiatives such as Township and Village Enterprises (TVEs) and ideological liberalization after the end of the Cultural Revolution (Harvey 2005). Marketization and neoliberal globalization were in full swing when Deng embarked on the famous 1992 Southern Tour to the special economic zones (SEZs). Neoliberalism in China thus combines an array of individual and social mechanisms involving privatization, self-enterprising individualism, foreign direct investments, rapid urbanization, unequal rural-to-urban migrations, and a strict household registration system (hukou) under a planned economy. All these factors result in a most capitalist form of postsocialist modernity that some have called ‘socialism from afar’ (Zhang and Ong 2008).

At the same time, BL cinema and media as cultural formations are not simply overdetermined by these larger structural processes; in fact, they offer critiques and alternative imaginary to envision other forms of queer sociality. This queer visuality can potentially overcome (or at least acknowledge) the social violence brought about by globalization, neoliberalism and new forms of social inequality in contemporary China. While existing scholarship on queer Chinese studies has often deployed a framework of queer Marxism that exposes the unequal access to cosmopolitanism and cultural citizenship for queer subjects such as the money boys sex workers(MB in NGO lingo) and elite gay middleclass men (Rofel 2007, 2010; Liu 2015), my research here further expands this line of inquiry by exploring a greater range of gay male subjects beyond the predictable money boys-urban gay men dichotomy.

Grad students are writing dissertations on BL's for PhD's in both Gender Studies and Queer Studies. The topic is included in both fields. I have to laugh when I read some of these papers because they are packed with pretentious, overly erudite rhetoric designed to take a perfectly simple concept and intentionally render it complex. I just got a 50 page paper in my email today, and while I am not going to read all of it, I'll copy paste the 1st page from it so you can see how crazy this stuff is (see below)