I watched first 10 episodes on Youtube and found it very unsatisfying, not because of the credits and end titles every two minutes but because no scene or song ever lasts longer than two minutes (actually, somewhat less). That's a huge limitation for a work lasting 80 minutes, and for me a fatal one. I also don't really want to watch a 80-minute drama with only two characters, however cute one of them may be.
If you search MDL for "Happy Ending" you'll find six dramas with that title. So clearly most people don't think of the slang meaning. When someone mentions "Gone with the Wind" do you immediately think of flatulence? The subtitles should not just have been better timed. They should have been better written. The translator wrecks tender and serious moments by throwing in vulgar slang. Has no idea about English speech registers. This drama deserved better.
Thanks for the historical background – that was really very helpful to me. Your notes on "phô" also provide really useful historical and cultural background: now I understand Yai's attraction to Jom much better. What you wrote on the cinematography also helped me understand what I had been experiencing without realising it.
In the English subtitles on Gaga it was obvious that reflection and shadow are the same word in Thai, and the hapless translator (unbelievably) picked the wrong English synonym every time. But Gaga's translations are always bad and can be depended on to mangle the finer points of any screenplay. I thought it was brave of the production team to have English dialogue – just a pity that it always sounded to cringy. Could they really not have found a coach for the actor playing Robert – or do you think he was meant to sound like a Frenchman struggling with English? Whatever the intent, it was a small disaster.
I agree with everything you say about the ending. But time travel stories are always wildly illogical, and bound to frustrate anyone with functioning brain. I hope they won't attempt a second season, because it would really have nowhere to go.
The following is a list of Taiwanese BLs that I've liked and/or that have had good reviews. You'll have to sift…
If you're asking about The On1y One, I can only say it's extremely well acted, cleverly written, and directed by a genius. It tells its story in a very subtle manner, by which I mean you need to pay close attention to nuances of the main characters' words and behaviour to work out what's going on with them. In fact, I would say you need to watch it twice to fully understand every detail. But it's well worth it. Because the script has a lot of depth it's important to watch a version with good subtitles (if you don't understand Mandarin, that is). Viki's subtitles are much better than GagaOoolala's, as always – but even then, the Viki translators are out of their depth in quite a few places. You don't need to worry about "nc" scenes and other ideological sins because it's the story of two boys in their late teens slowly waking up to new and confusing feelings. The first series ends when they haven't got very far, though there are a couple of really tender moments. Everyone is on the edge of their seat waiting for S2.
It seemed to me that the kiss at the end happened after Tokl had graduated (he had some kind of scroll-thing in his hand to symbolise this). The point being that they waited until he wasn't in high school any more.
I completely agree with you about the cliché of a character being about to say something but interrupted by a mobile phone. I curse the invention of the mobile phone. There's scarcely a BL to be found that doesn't use it half a dozen times as a cheap way of creating plot tension. It seems never to occur to anyone in a BL that answering a phone is optional. Actually, worse than the cliché interruption is just how rude young BL characters are when their phone rings. They'll interrupt anyone at any time to answer the stupid thing. [End of rant.] I agree with all your other points too. Especially regarding the wonderful Haruna, and cute little Ryota doing just a bit too much silent wide-eyed gaping.
Good review, short but apposite. You write that "the Japanese have done it again ... except for the weird title". I'd replace "except for" with "right down to". JBL is continually producing clunky English titles devised by people who clearly know no English at all. "Old-fashion cupcake". "Restart after come back home". Usually, the worse the title, the better the drama. These two examples, along with Perfect Propose, are all wonderful. Someone else here suggested they probably meant "Perfect Proposal". Perhaps – that makes grammatical sense, though not much of any other kind.
The only thing I disagreed with was your take on the handjob. I'm not in sync with woke ideology where sexual etiquette is concerned, and I thought it smart of Kai to find the only way Hiro was going to relax and get to sleep. In other words, the end justified the means. And also, I find it a bit far fetched to be calling Kai aggressive: the whole point of his character is his utter passiveness.
Great review, thanks. You've expertly summarised everything that passed through my mind when I was watching. Bravo for pointing out that too much kissing is boring, and that more than we got here would have been unnecessary and just an unwelcome interruption to the dialogue. I've never understood people who prefer voyeurism to getting on with the story.
I do feel that in your final summing-up you might be taking the drama's title too literally in asking which of the guys deserves all the blame, while ignoring an elephant in the room. As you point out, Tae Ha has made the common mistake of getting engaged under social pressure, in the hope of curing himself of his attraction to men. It's to his credit that he realises his mistake and breaks the engagement off rather than continuing with an expensive wedding and a disastrous marriage. I'm not inclined to blame him for seeing Ji Woon while engaged: he had to sort out his doubts somehow, and if he hadn't the result would have been worse than it was, i.e. two unhappy people trapped in an unworkable marriage.
Can Ji Woon be blamed for seeing Tae Ha despite his engagement? As I recall, he put up a decent show of reluctance but in the end his feelings for Tae Ha were too strong to resist (which after all is what we demand in a good BL). Was he morally obliged to refuse to sleep with Tae Ha while he was still engaged? You might say that's what a true friend would have done, but then again such a "morally right" action would have had the worse outcome, i.e. the disastrous marriage.
The actions of the fiancée, on the other hand, are clearly despicable. If she has doubts about Tae Ha's true feelings for her, the right course of action is to tell Tae Ha so and have it out with him. Instead she snoops through his contacts and phones Ji Woon, a perfect stranger, from whom she hopes to ferret out information that Tae Ha has seen fit not to give her. With this one action she has breached the trust on which her engagement is based and made the failure of the engagement not just inevitable but deserved. The wonder to me is that Ji Woon agrees to meet her. What he should have done was to emphatically refuse, saying that if she wanted to meet him then her proper course of action was to ask Tae Ha to arrange it, and that the idea of a secret meeting seemed to him uncomfortably underhand. That he doesn't react in this quite normal and obvious way is actually the greatest weakness of the plot, it seems to me.
As if this was not enough, after the break-up the fiancée does some more snooping and comes to stalk Ji Woon in his apartment building, simply in order to abuse and threaten him, and accuse him of being responsible for the broken engagement. This accusation is laughable. It is her own sneaky actions, lack of trust in Tae Ha, and inability to work things out with him that have led to the break up. She has absolutely no business being here, harrassing Ji Woon and blaming him for her own mistakes, bad luck, or failure to win Tae Ha over, whichever it might be. Again, the wonder to me is that Ji Woon caves in and apologises to her as abjectly as he does. It is decent and polite for him to express some kind of regret, but she is being far too unpleasant (and morally compromised) to deserve more. Ji Woon is, unfortunately, and despite his beautiful nose, too nice and too weak for his own good. He's not the bad guy in this story but he is the weakest, and like you I wonder what this augurs for the future of his relationship with Tae Ha.
At the end of ep 10 it does seem a bit unfinished. I think the produces realised that and that's why they added the 11th episode, the so-called spin-off. I think the spin-off makes for a satisfying ending – did you see it?
It seems that people who said that this is more like a bromance hadn't seen many japanese dramas because even…
Some JBLs are bit steamier: have you seen My Personal Weatherman? Not that I personally find "intimacy" in dramas particularly interesting. Mostly it just seems to be an unwelcome interruption to the story when nothing happens.
I agree with you about the difference between Viki's and Gaga's subs. For this show I relied basically on Viki, but often found the significant conversations to be fairly cryptic and needed to hear Gaga's translation as well. The two are frequently wildly different – hard to believe they're translations of the same thing. Some differences are obviously mistakes in one or the other – hard to tell which. There are at least two places where Gaga just has no subs at all for 10 or 15 lines of dialogue: ep.4 13:25 – 13:50 (trivial chatter before class) and ep.7 between 22:09 and 23:05 (conversation between Amagi and Takara overheard by Tanaka through open window). In both cases the dialogue in question is hard to hear. Possibly Viki can translate it only because they have a copy of the screenplay which Gaga doesn't have. But the second gap, being a conversation between the main couple, is a serious omission.
The subtitles should not just have been better timed. They should have been better written. The translator wrecks tender and serious moments by throwing in vulgar slang. Has no idea about English speech registers. This drama deserved better.
In the English subtitles on Gaga it was obvious that reflection and shadow are the same word in Thai, and the hapless translator (unbelievably) picked the wrong English synonym every time. But Gaga's translations are always bad and can be depended on to mangle the finer points of any screenplay. I thought it was brave of the production team to have English dialogue – just a pity that it always sounded to cringy. Could they really not have found a coach for the actor playing Robert – or do you think he was meant to sound like a Frenchman struggling with English? Whatever the intent, it was a small disaster.
I agree with everything you say about the ending. But time travel stories are always wildly illogical, and bound to frustrate anyone with functioning brain. I hope they won't attempt a second season, because it would really have nowhere to go.
You don't need to worry about "nc" scenes and other ideological sins because it's the story of two boys in their late teens slowly waking up to new and confusing feelings. The first series ends when they haven't got very far, though there are a couple of really tender moments. Everyone is on the edge of their seat waiting for S2.
I agree with all your other points too. Especially regarding the wonderful Haruna, and cute little Ryota doing just a bit too much silent wide-eyed gaping.
The only thing I disagreed with was your take on the handjob. I'm not in sync with woke ideology where sexual etiquette is concerned, and I thought it smart of Kai to find the only way Hiro was going to relax and get to sleep. In other words, the end justified the means. And also, I find it a bit far fetched to be calling Kai aggressive: the whole point of his character is his utter passiveness.
I do feel that in your final summing-up you might be taking the drama's title too literally in asking which of the guys deserves all the blame, while ignoring an elephant in the room. As you point out, Tae Ha has made the common mistake of getting engaged under social pressure, in the hope of curing himself of his attraction to men. It's to his credit that he realises his mistake and breaks the engagement off rather than continuing with an expensive wedding and a disastrous marriage. I'm not inclined to blame him for seeing Ji Woon while engaged: he had to sort out his doubts somehow, and if he hadn't the result would have been worse than it was, i.e. two unhappy people trapped in an unworkable marriage.
Can Ji Woon be blamed for seeing Tae Ha despite his engagement? As I recall, he put up a decent show of reluctance but in the end his feelings for Tae Ha were too strong to resist (which after all is what we demand in a good BL). Was he morally obliged to refuse to sleep with Tae Ha while he was still engaged? You might say that's what a true friend would have done, but then again such a "morally right" action would have had the worse outcome, i.e. the disastrous marriage.
The actions of the fiancée, on the other hand, are clearly despicable. If she has doubts about Tae Ha's true feelings for her, the right course of action is to tell Tae Ha so and have it out with him. Instead she snoops through his contacts and phones Ji Woon, a perfect stranger, from whom she hopes to ferret out information that Tae Ha has seen fit not to give her. With this one action she has breached the trust on which her engagement is based and made the failure of the engagement not just inevitable but deserved. The wonder to me is that Ji Woon agrees to meet her. What he should have done was to emphatically refuse, saying that if she wanted to meet him then her proper course of action was to ask Tae Ha to arrange it, and that the idea of a secret meeting seemed to him uncomfortably underhand. That he doesn't react in this quite normal and obvious way is actually the greatest weakness of the plot, it seems to me.
As if this was not enough, after the break-up the fiancée does some more snooping and comes to stalk Ji Woon in his apartment building, simply in order to abuse and threaten him, and accuse him of being responsible for the broken engagement. This accusation is laughable. It is her own sneaky actions, lack of trust in Tae Ha, and inability to work things out with him that have led to the break up. She has absolutely no business being here, harrassing Ji Woon and blaming him for her own mistakes, bad luck, or failure to win Tae Ha over, whichever it might be. Again, the wonder to me is that Ji Woon caves in and apologises to her as abjectly as he does. It is decent and polite for him to express some kind of regret, but she is being far too unpleasant (and morally compromised) to deserve more. Ji Woon is, unfortunately, and despite his beautiful nose, too nice and too weak for his own good. He's not the bad guy in this story but he is the weakest, and like you I wonder what this augurs for the future of his relationship with Tae Ha.
Not that I personally find "intimacy" in dramas particularly interesting. Mostly it just seems to be an unwelcome interruption to the story when nothing happens.
There are at least two places where Gaga just has no subs at all for 10 or 15 lines of dialogue: ep.4 13:25 – 13:50 (trivial chatter before class) and ep.7 between 22:09 and 23:05 (conversation between Amagi and Takara overheard by Tanaka through open window). In both cases the dialogue in question is hard to hear. Possibly Viki can translate it only because they have a copy of the screenplay which Gaga doesn't have. But the second gap, being a conversation between the main couple, is a serious omission.