Ryn

I'm confused. Are people not understanding that Mingmuang is being a sneaky wingman, and not at all making fun of Punn? He's lying to Punn for sure, but he's doing it in order to push Punn and Achi towards each other without either of them noticing that's what he's doing. He can see that Punn would be too shy to approach Achi without help.

Ah, it's about domestic equality, not financial. Yes, that makes more sense. I think they've got a point there. The amount of 'cooking for your lover' that is involved in BL is getting kind of ridiculous, and it does come from both partners usually. That domestic relationship of equality is clearly romanticized.


I have of course heard of The Handmaiden but I've been a little scared to watch it. I wouldn't necessarily call it a GL (because there is a certain expectation of lightness/rom-com-ness/guaranteed happy ending within GL/BL), but I also wouldn't call it queer cinema (because it wasn't directed by a lesbian, or with lesbian viewers in mind).

I've been scared to watch it because reviews say it gets very dark, and watching queer people go through very dark things is emotionally hard for me, because when I was younger and looked for queer media, it would often end in the main character dying a horrible death either by suicide or violence from community or family.

When that's the only ending you see for people who are like you, it has an impact on the types of futures you can imagine for yourself and whether you think the world has a place for you at all. That's why I gravitate towards the much fluffier BL/GL or things like She-ra or The Owl House. If I watch queer media, I always first check whether it has a happy ending. It's fine if things get difficult for the main character, up to a certain point, as long as everything is okay at the end.

This preference for positive media is a trend among queer people. To illustrate, there's this independent webseries on YouTube called 'Hetero' and its tagline to draw queer audiences in is 'everyone is gay and nobody dies'. The makers feel the need to clarify that nobody dies beforehand, so that audiences feel safe getting emotionally invested in the characters.

We're kinda done watching queer people get sexually abused, violated, murdered, shunned to the point of suicide. I'm done with 'misery porn', = media designed to get straight people to sympathize with those poor queers whose lives are so full of misery, the term doesn't actually refer to porn.

Media about queer people that wins prizes often falls into this category. It's why we call it Oscar-bait. This type of media is made by straight people, with a straight audience in mind, which obviously appeals more to the straight majority than media made with a queer audience in mind, so it's more popular because of demographic numbers. E.g. the Danish Girl, Brokeback Mountain. They're not necessarily hits among queer people at all. They're often heavily critiqued by queer people.

Another reason I'm hesitant to watch this is that it apparently contains nudity, which I generally avoid.

The YouTuber VerilyBitchie made a video called 'The Lesbian Gaze' which I think you would enjoy a lot. It includes analysis on the male gaze present in The Handmaiden and other media focused on lesbians.



I'd like to add to your list of reasons for why women enjoy media in which two men fall in love. I don't disagree with any of your reasons of course. (Different reasons apply to different people. Not all women enjoy m/m media for the same reasons.)

You've probably heard of AO3 (archives of our own). It's the most popular fanfic website. The overwhelming majority of content on there is m/m. Most of the authors and audience are women. Women enjoying gay media isn't only a thing in Asia.

But the interesting thing is that you can apparently do polls on AO3, and those polls show that the majority of authors and readers of m/m media are NOT straight women, only 30% of them are. They're mostly bisexual and asexual, and there is even a significant percentage of them who are lesbians and trans people of all varieties. I got these statistics from Sarah Z's video 'Gay Fanfiction' which explores the question of why fanfiction is so dominated by m/m ships and why it's mostly written and read by women.

A lot of these queer people say that they read/write m/m media partially because it helps them explore their own struggles with self acceptance and coming out. They relate to the characters' experiences, but it's still more emotionally distant than if it was about someone who shared their actual identity, so consuming this media is less heavy of an emotional burden.

For asexual women, a lot of them say that they read/write m/m media because it helps them enjoy sexuality from a distance, without having to identify with either of the main leads too much, because having to imagine oneself in a sexual situation would be personally uncomfortable or unbearable. Autochorissexuality/aegosexuality is a thing, and I'd say it heavily correlates with enjoying BL for women or GL for men.

Maybe emotional distance from sexual situations also helps women who've been through sexual abuse? Seems logical to me.

I have a bunch of ace, bi and nonbinary friends, some of whom are very into m/m fanfic, and they have their own musings on why this is.

One friend said that the most well-developed characters in media she consumes are almost always male (because of society's sexism female characters are underdeveloped blabla). Exploring the relationship between two male characters who are canonically just friends is therefore more interesting than including a female character who just wasn't written to be as interesting.

One friend said she enjoys that in m/m fiction she can explore what (the threat of) violence means within a romantic relationship. If a gay guy has a crush on a friend who is maybe straight maybe not, then because of society's homophobia, the relationship may turn violent when the straight friend finds out about this crush. And maybe the 'straight' friend isn't straight at all, but is in heavy denial about his orientation and is using violence as a way to prove his masculinity and supposed heterosexuality. These themes are interesting to her. In BL, especially enemies to lovers series, main leads punching each other is a thing that sometimes happens, and it would not happen if either of them were female. The potential for violence increases angst potentials.

And one acquaintance, who I think was hetero ace, said that for her it was simply about double hot guy = double hot. She also said that she just doesn't like women, and she did come off pretty unabashedly misogynistic. She enjoyed the pornographic side of BL, and not the fluffy side. None of my friends in that conversation shared her reasons for enjoying BL, so y'know, that's how some people work, but def not the majority.

And I've already mentioned the 'it's emotionally distant, therefore sexual violence happening to the main character feels more fictional' reason. I think that is the reason that 'Killing Stalking' was so popular among straight women. James Somerton made a great video about why women enjoy media in which abuse gets romanticized, especially m/m media, but also media like 50 Shades of grey.

I mean, Addicted Heroin, TharnType and KinnPorsche were massively popular, so I don't think we can deny that the romanticization of abuse is a thing within BL. I once tried to go read some Chinese BL on a fanfic-esque website to see if I could use it to improve my Mandarin, but the most popular tags were 'abuse' and 'slight abuse', so I was out of there real fast. It is undeniably a popular thing among a subset of BL fans.

James Somerton's video is called 'Killing Stalking and the Romancing of Abuse. I think you'd enjoy his video called 'Shipping, the Good, the Bad and the Thirsty too.

Rowan Ellis made a video essay called 'The Rise (and Rise) of the Omegaverse', discussing how and why queer people engage in 'the omegaverse'. 'The omegaverse' is a mostly western genre of m/m stories (that I'm not personally familiar with), in which there are essentially a second set of genders. There's male/female and on top of that every character has a second gender of alpha/beta/omega. As I understand it, these are kind of like top/verse/bottom, but also kind of different.

Essentially queer people use this fictional set of genders to explore gender equality and inequality, how it interacts with romantic relationships, gender expression, oppression, how it can be hidden, how the rules can be broken, etc.

Rowan Ellis surveyed a LOT of queer people who enjoy m/m omegaverse stories on what they enjoy about it, so I think this video would be right up your alley. She really offers new insights, as she always does.

Ellis herself is an ace lesbian, so not someone you'd think would enjoy m/m media, but yeah no she absolutely does. I mean, among all of my queer friends of various genders and orientations, everyone loved Heartstopper, which was written by an aroace woman and is mostly about a fluffy relationship between two teenage boys. So I don't think we can say that the majority of people who enjoy BL are straight women. Maybe in Asia more of the female audience is still closeted, but I just don't think they're all actually straight. Some of them will be, but the majority? I don't know.

A giant part of the reason why Heartstopper was so popular is 'queer optimism'= queer people want to see media in which we get to be happy. Queer optimism was/is a new and very popular trend among queer audiences, and BL slots right into it. (The wave of anti-LGBT hate and legislation in the past year has pretty much stopped this brand new trend in its tracks, because it feels like this is a time to fight for our goddamn lives, not to go 'everything is going to be sunshine and rainbows for us yay.')


As a nonbinary person, a part of the reason I gravitate towards BL is that the romantic relationship doesn't include people with body parts that I don't want to be reminded of, and nobody in the relationship gets treated like a girl, either in a sexist way or in a regular 'you just are a girl' way. It helps me avoid gender dysphoria.

I cringe a bit too hard at heterosexual relationships in media. A part of that is due to me being reminded of how men have treated me in the past and how that makes me want to crawl out of my skin. Another part of that is due to me not wanting to be reminded of female-ness in general, like, I don't want to have to look at a character and think 'ugh, is that what I look like to other people? Barf.'

That second reason is still a thing that happens when I watch lesbian media, but the first one not as much (because of the same domestic equality thing you mentioned), which is why GL is still easier for me to watch than anything straight. GL also sometimes includes butch lesbians who could be nonbinary if you squint, which I obviously enjoy. I hope once I finally get access to medical transition the second reason will go away too, and I'll be able to enjoy lesbian media without having to endure dysphoria.

So yeah there are not only 'pull' factors towards BL, but also 'push' factors away from straight media.

I think by now you'll understand why a movie that includes naked women and is mostly about the sexist ways in which women get viewed and treated by men is not something I want to subject myself to. I'm sure it's brilliant, insightful and important, but I don't think it's for me.

I guess I'm looking for two types of media.

The first is fluffy media that implicitly tells its audience that queer life can have a happy ending, that we're allowed to exist in this world and be okay, that life doesn't have to suck for us. Asian BL and GL perfectly fit this desire. I know that this fluffy media is often not deeper than your average hallmark christmas movie, but I'm okay with that. I really wish there was fluffy nonsense about like 6 attractive trans people of various genders falling in love with each other in the same style that BL guys do. I guess I just want to feel okay about myself, like there's a place where I belong and can be okay. I'm trying to negate internalized queerphobia.

The second type of media I'm looking for is media made by queer people that is about fighting systemic injustice, about nonconformity, changing social rules, found family, self-discovery, diversity and acceptance. Media like The Owl House, She-Ra, Our Flag Means Death, Luca, The Eclipse etc. I really want to watch Nimona and Strange World but haven't been able to stream them illegally yet.


Uh yeah so loads of extra reasons there, and obviously not a lot of them apply to straight women, but I thought I'd elucidate some reasons for the (probably) 70% of BL enjoyers who aren't straight women :)

Why do they call their fans 'mommy'?

Actually, after thinking, it's odd that queer studies papers say the thing about how the partners in BL are social equals because they're both male. I think I disagree with that.

Relationships in BL tend to be very unequal in terms of social status. One of the partners is often a billionaire, a mafia boss, the coolest kid in class etc, while the other is the exact opposite, economically struggling, just an office worker, the most socially awkward kid in class etc. That polar difference appears to be part of the appeal.

And that goes for all romance stories for all of history. Look at fairy tales, it's almost always a struggling girl meeting prince charming. The reader identifies with the average shmuck protagonist, and fantasizes about being chosen by the coolest partner ever.

There are exceptions, e.g. Bad Buddy.

The only area where BL partners are consistently equal is that they're both male, and therefore don't have to contend with some aspects of misogyny.

But maybe the relative lack of misogyny is also what those studies meant by 'social equals', idk.

I majored in Chinastudies. I wanted to take a minor in 'gender & sexuality', but ultimately decided not to because I thought I needed to be practical. So I did marketing. Terrible decision. Marketing is a load of bollocks.

I'm just personally queer af and a nerd, so I love most things that analyze queer media and queer life.

Oddly, majoring in Chinastudies is what introduced me to the concept of BL, because a teacher showed us a part of Addicted/Heroin in class to show what was popular in China at that moment, and I was intrigued. Sadly it's a really rapey show.

I haven't watched any of the shows or movies you mentioned. Thanks for the recommendations :)

Step by Step felt very queer to me. I didn't check if it was directed and written by queer people, but it almost has to be. Both leads explicitly identify as gay, and it has my favorite character in any BL ever, Chot, who is an extremely feminine gay support character, who still gets treated as an actual character rather than just comedic relief. Given how guys like him usually get treated by the genre of BL, he's nothing short of revolutionary. We even see him code-switching to appear more masc before he feels safe to be himself! The standard BL protagonist bottom is allowed to be somewhat feminine, but not too feminine. No feminine mannerisms/hand-gesturing/voice inflection allowed.

Another one that felt very queer was 'The Eclipse'. The way it uses an allegory of a school to critique society's conformism is just *chef's kiss*. The way it deals with internalized homophobia and finding community is beautiful.

Neither of these seem to have been popular among BL's core audience of straight women, which is sad, but both are absolutely brilliant in my eyes.

I'd really like if more BL allowed there to not be an obvious 'top' or 'bottom', if they were both masculine or both feminine, or if the manly man was the bottom and the feminine guy the top. I'd like the relationship dynamics to be less of an imitation of traditional heterosexual relationship dynamics. I'd like more diversity. But again, not sure that would work with straight women.

Also we desperately need more lesbians, more trans people, aces, intersex people etc. Like for real the disparity between the amount of BL produced and the amount of GL produced is just unfair. And the rest of the letters might as well not even exist. I need more GL and more positive trans rep in my life.

I did not say that being in a safe environment means that people can't tell you when you fuck up. I said Mela said he should talk things out in a calmer way. Personally I think he projected a bit and should have put a little bit more effort into actually listening, but yes it was a good thing that he spoke up.

I also didn't say you said you were looking for amped up cattiness. I said that's what reality tv shows usually are. I said that the behavior I saw in the Sparks camp show matched my experience with camps and queer friend groups, so it was quite real to me.

I don't like it when people put words in my mouth. Don't do that.

I appreciated reading this conversation because queer studies is my jam, but I am confused about one thing; why isn't anyone considering bisexuality? Some guys are mostly into women and then later in life realize that they can also fall for some men in rare cases. It happens. I know some of them.

As for why I think the 'only gay for you' trope exists (just my theory), I think women who write these things identify with the 'bottom' and lust over the (always described as extremely conventionally/normatively attractive, rich, handsome, romantically successful) 'top'. The bottom is a stand-in for the author and intended reader/viewer. The top is straight because the author is into straight guys and because being gay would (in the eyes of society) tarnish his reputation as 'the perfect guy that all the ladies fawn over'.

There tends to be a whole bunch of misogyny in BL, especially older BL, and ESPECIALLY towards evil ex-girlfriends, aka competition for the protagonist. I think the 'only gay for you' trope is connected to the 'not like other girls' thing, the 'pick me' thing. (y'know Taylor Swift style 'she wears short skirts I wear t-shirts)

In BL, relationships with women (competitors, I'm not counting mothers or sisters here) are almost always portrayed as unserious, interchangeable, easily discarded, not true love, annoying, full of petty lies and vanity.

But a relationship with the male protagonist, who is not like all the catty petty other girls, is instead portrayed as fated, eternal, special, important, end-game.

He can be traditionally feminine; soft, naive, insecure, passive, small, helpless, clueless etc, without having to be a girl and therefore without having to deal with some aspects of misogyny.

The appeal of the story is that the extremely popular male love interest chooses to be with the protagonist rather than any of his other options. The fact that the protagonist had all those other options makes being picked more meaningful. But since all readers have to be able to identify with the protagonist, the protagonist has to be pretty generic, so how does he stand out from all the other girls? By not being a girl.

So I think it's due to internalized misogyny on the authors' part (and I'm not dissing them, misogyny gets ingrained in all of us, and it's hard to disentangle and get it all back out again). It's a way for them to fantasize about being feminine and being loved by a very masculine man, while to some degree being able to avoid contending with the misogyny still present in their own heads and the misogyny that very masculine men often (not always) express towards women, which they've more than likely experienced in their own dating lives.

There is something they enjoy in the relationship dynamic characterized by benevolent domination, weak/strong, fem/masc etc. But they don't enjoy the devaluation of women that often comes with it. They still want to be valued, special, not seen as interchangeable with a million other women etc.

You know how lesbian relationships are often seen as 'not serious/not real relationships, just gals being pals', lesbian sex seen as 'not really sex', and lesbian kissing seen as something women just do for fun to turn their boyfriends on etc, while gay relationships (m/m) are seen as so serious that if a guy has one gay kiss, he is tarnished for life and must actually have been secretly gay all along?

Relationships with women are given less value/importance by society than relationships with men. Polyamorous relationships sometimes (toxically) have a 'one penis policy', aka, a guy tells his poly girlfriend that she's allowed to sleep with and date as many women as she wants, but not with any guys. This is because he views relationships with women as unserious, and relationships with men as a serious threat to his own relationship with her. If the guy is bi, he himself is also only allowed to pursue other women, not men.

Making your protagonist a guy is a way of making a relationship with him more valuable/special/important/serious in the eyes of society. It makes it more permanent, less easily discarded. It avoids the devaluing of your female protagonist character and her relationships.

If the love interest was not straight, and he had an ex-boyfriend, that ex-boyfriend would be as serious of an option as the protagonist, which would be a problem. Shippers may root for the ex boyfriend instead. The protagonist may not have anything that makes him stand out from the crowd of other suitors anymore.

Essentially, BL has a 'one penis policy' for the same reason that the real life 'one penis policy' exists in some poly relationships. The devaluation of relationships with women.


As an extra bonus, the fact that the character that the author/reader identifies with is a guy lends them some emotional distance from him, so writing rapey things happening to him doesn't feel as personally emotionally threatening, and can instead feel fictional, not real, and therefore exciting. It would feel too close to home if the protagonist were female.


Personally I'm excited that BL is slowly moving away from these tropes, and towards being written more by queer people instead of only straight women. I'm not a fan of these tropes.

But you know what, if this is some people's way of exploring their own sexuality in a way that feels safe from misogyny, who am I to take that away from them? Clearly women need and deserve a safe space where they get to be in control of the narrative and they get to be inherently valued.

(I haven't watched shigatsu no tokyo wa, critique is directed at BL in general.)

I mean, when Stanley did start to get heated about Justin, Mela made it clear that this was supposed to be a safe space, and they should talk things out in a calmer way.

To me it seems like the producers were trying to create something akin to a safe group of friends where sharing trauma doesn't feel scary because you know that people aren't in the business of attacking or judging each other over that kind of stuff. That's the kind of friend group I'm used to personally, so it doesn't seem out of the ordinary for me.

And I mean as someone who's been to camps, you do tend to feel like you really get to know people on a deep/familiar level in just a few days because you spend the entire day and night together. That's been my experience anyways.

This feels much more real to me than the amped up cattiness, screaming matches and drama you'd usually get on reality tv show. People caring about each other's feelings and not wanting to be dicks seems normal to me.

I'm just guessing that's why they do it. I don't actually know why they do it.

But yeah it's Chinese actors re-doing their own lines in a studio. The words are the same. The timing is just slightly off.

The Thai adaptation will be called 'heroin'
https://kisskh.at/752357-heroin

Most Chinese dramas appear to be dubbed. You can hear it because there's no ambient sound or echo, other than manually added in sound effects, which to me sound unconvincing, canned.

But yes the mouth movements don't match. I speak Mandarin. I don't think you need to speak Mandarin to notice that though.

I think they do this to save on costs. It's pretty hard to get audio right. You need to attach tiny microphones to each individual actor (typically underneath shirt) otherwise their lines won't stand out from the background noise enough. Or have one of those people dangling a microphone above the actors, just outside of the camera shot. I imagine just having actors record audio separately in a studio is easier/cheaper.

Probably bromance not romance, but not 100% sure. Yes they're stepsiblings, but they only just met. Parents just remarried.

The original work this was based on was romance between stepsiblings, and the relationship dynamic was ridiculously abusive (separately from the stepsibling issue, just y'know, casual kidnapping and consent problems). So far no idea if this will be equally as abusive.

Personally I'm watching this because I really want to know how they're going to un-gay the gay webseries that was literally the reason for China's ban on gay webseries.

1, Pat reacting that aggressively was way over the line and I'd break up with him too, but
2, yeah 'If you can't understand my silence, you won't understand my words' is a dumb sentence. Don't ever expect people to read your mind.
They both need a looong break from each other and think about the mistakes they both made.
3, Lomfon could hear Pat too, so I guess they're three-way soulmates. Polyamory would be cool representation, but these three would never get along with each other so no.
4, A series straight up BREAKING a soul-mate connection is original and I like it. It's good that they're forced to actually communicate about their actual feelings instead of relying on 'well it's meant to be anyways'.

Oh really? That is funny. I know essentially nothing about the irl couple side of things so that is actually surprising to me, that there's apparently so much of it out there from China. I guess it makes sense as a way to compensate for the lack of fictional gay stories.

Well yeah... did you not expect this? How else would you explain the complete BL blackout in China after 2016? BL is extremely popular in China, and there's 1.4 billion people there so if there wasn't a ban as harsh as this, it would be a main production site. Do you think it's a coincidence that 'The Untamed' was the number one drama of 2019 in China? It's *just* straight enough to pass the censors, but the novel it was based on certainly isn't.

To illustrate, I majored in Chinastudies, and my teachers would show 'here's what's popular in China right now' during class breaktime. Both Addicted and The Untamed featured. That's how popular it is.

The Chinese government doesn't tend to intervene in culture unless something goes viral. The fact that it intervened at Addicted and BL tells you that it was extremely popular.


To get past China's auto-censors authors can just write risky words in pinyin instead of in Chinese characters. They're not stopping. But there's always a risk your work will get deleted with no warning if it gets popular enough.

Just because it's banned doesn't mean the government actually manages to fully enforce the ban. Porn in general is banned, you really think Chinese people aren't finding ways to access it anyways? Nah fam.

When I lived in China, everyone knew where to find the local prostitution hot spot. Sure, prostitution was banned. That just meant it was risky.

Web series like this are not allowed to be made. I don't think this series aired in China. I don't think people in China can even access it at all without a VPN.

Addicted/Heroin was a webseries, never adapted for tv, and it was the reason China banned queer content online. It was extremely popular and the government didn't like that. Before Addicted/Heroin, gay content was already banned from tv, but the ban didn't extend to the internet yet. So this new law was exclusively made to target online content.

Addicted/Heroin was removed from the Chinese internet entirely. Because it was released episode by episode, this meant the last episodes were never allowed to be released, even though they'd already been produced. I think these episodes did eventually get released on YouTube, which people in China can't access without a VPN.

The law banned all 低俗 (vulgar) online content, and put queerness into that category along with drug use, violence and pornography. It mentioned the Chinese word for fujoshi (腐女, literal translation= rotten/corrupted girl) by name. The government didn't want their young women to be corrupted by gay content online. It was considered harmful to society.

Even writing gay fanfiction isn't allowed in China. Of course they still do it, and just use euphemisms, but yeah no the ban goes pretty far and is specifically targeting BL (耽美).

China even attempted to ban Chinese LGBT+ people from posting about their own queerness on Weibo (China's main social media website) and straight up instantly deleted a whole bunch of people's contents and accounts (e.g. 'here's a picture of me and my boyfriend'), but there was so much protest that weibo said it would no longer automatically delete content solely on the basis that it was gay, but would still remove gay content that it considers too vulgar, draws too much attention, and might influence young people into thinking that being gay is trendy and cool.

Interestingly the ban doesn't explicitly say anything about lesbians. It's all about gay men and fujoshis. The government considers young women's interest in BL to be more harmful for society than the existence of queer people. You can be gay (as long as you play along with respectability politics) but you can't be a fujoshi.

A LOT of things in this episode this not make logistical sense but oh well.

I still really hope Bow and Kung become a thing. They're both equally ridiculous and dramatic. Perfect match.

And I like the added complexity of Lomfon getting soulmate hearing loss too. I hope they'll deconstruct the whole soulmate thing somehow, like, people can be compatible with multiple others, it happens. There doesn't need to be only one true love. Soulmates can be temporary and still have been an important and necessary part of your life. But maybe I'm expecting too much complexity and it'll just get explained away as a technicality.

After seeing a couple named 'Burger' and 'King' in some other gay Thai drama, we now have 'Tako' and 'Bell', people. Honestly, I'm enjoying this sense of humor.

I haven't watched this series yet, but asexuality is basically not being sexually attracted to anyone. It's a (lack of) sexual orientation.

Like, a gay man is attracted to men, a straight man to women, a bisexual man to both men and women (and maybe nonbinary people), and an asexual man is sexually attracted to nobody at all.

Edit: I've now started watching the drama and I guess this is also relevant.

There's also 'aromantic'. Aromantic people do not experience romantic attraction to other people. They generally don't want to date anyone.

A person can be aromantic and asexual;
or they can be asexual but homoromantic or heteroromantic etc;
or they can be aromantic but homosexual or heterosexual etc.

The asexual character in this series is homoromantic. He is gay and asexual. This means he is romantically attracted to men (dates men), and is not sexually attracted to anyone (does not want to have sex with anyone).

Some asexual people still choose to have sex, for various reasons, but I don't know whether that will be relevant to this drama.

I don't think I'm going to give this a shot, but damn naming a couple 'burger' and 'king' is hilarious