SaruwatariMayu

Tysm for the added details !! This incident had mostly no coverage in my country and I wasn't aware of it.

I heavily disagree that this show "started well" in the non-camp sense of the term. It's either dogshit as an average show or genius as a camp show, with absolutely no in between for me. But to each their own my friend !

No, because that's a whole other sentence lmao
Now assuming you're actually asking and not trying to pick a fight over something I haven't said, "something deeper" doesn't necessarily only mean a deeper connection, but something below surface, something unsaid. There are a lot of things in the visual language of this show (and the body language of the actors) that say things they wouldn't be able to speak outright, and considering this is a show that is decently filmed and edited, I don't think it's a coincidence. That stands on its own, and when you add the meta narrative around it (the released original script, comments and interviews of the artists themselves) it's just very evident that the relationship between Gaon and Yohan is meant to be at the very, very least queer-coded.

Also, please spoiler your answer. I know spoilers are rampaging on this hell site but let's at least /try/ to be respectful of people who haven't seen the show yet. I didn't mention names in my first comment for a reason.

This kind of conceptual, horror-adjacent piece of art with much to say about the world we live in is my favorite. It breaks your heart in all the right ways. The deep-seated pain we carry with us, the ugly parts we try to hide from others, and this very, very human need to be loved and appreciated and cared for.

What if I had been raised in a loving family ? What if I had been born in another body, with another face ? What if someone had reached out when I was drowning ? Would we still have walked the same path ?

There's a french saying that goes - "With ifs, one could put Paris in a bottle."
I feel like this show is a beautiful answer to that. Our lives are the way they are. We can only walk our path, and hope to find something worth fighting for.

Not a drama, and I'm not sure if I'm quite catching the things that you enjoyed watching this, but I felt this was quite similar in vibe and uncommon storytelling to the french show Les papillons noirs. Fair warning though, it is even more disturbing than this one.

No, all the full body nudity scenes are filmed from behind, so you at most see some butts.

I have many thoughts about the morality, ethics, philosophy and (lack of) worldbuilding for this show and maybe I'll share them one day but first and foremost : too many watchers are forgetting bi people exist in this world. Trying to undermine the deep on-screen love between two characters or blatantly ignoring the very obvious hints of something deeper between two others just because they're both men is not it. Especially more so since we know how conservative Korea is. Just because we've been getting more internationally available korean queer content as of late does not magically mean homophobic sentiment and censorship isn't strong. Likewise, it does not necessarily mean that the on-screen romance was obviously a fake to distract from the gay undertones. Both can exist at once. Food for thought !

No no yall don't understand. The art of making something so utterly bad without it lacking entertainment value - that's the scenarist's superpower. Everything is timed so supremely well to make you cry-laugh that I refuse to believe they're anything but a genius. If it was just bad it'd be one thing, but just look at this comment section. A truly unentertaining show most people would just stop watching, yet yall see how many people come back here to meme and shitpost ? To the point where those are almost equal if not more prominent than people complaining ? A regular bad show doesn't have anything near that effect. It's a dumpster fire we're all way too invested in watching burn, precisely because it is still entertaining. That's camp. That's as peak a camp show we're getting BL drama wise and it is absolute. Immaculate. Comedy.

To anyone reading this : please do yourselves a favor and don't expect a serious, dramatic show. This is the campiest drama I've seen in a GOOD while. The whole show doesn't take itself seriously, and it knows perfectly what it's selling : a good fit of drunken laughter featuring some side of tantalizing eye candy. That's it. That's the show. Be it the unidimensional characters, the improbable situations, the old-fashioned banter between ~love rivals~, the impromptu sexy scenes with comedic timing so good it'll make you roll on the floor, it's got it all. All of it.

Highly suggest you watch this alongside friends and make a drinking game out of it. Can only hope the scenarist doesn't drop the ball and try to fake out a serious ending, because if it keeps going straight to the camp goal, this is probably the best comedy BL we're getting this year.

Are you perhaps familiar with the japanese way of tatemae / honne (建前 / 本音) and "reading the air" (空気を読む) ? If not, I highly recommend you read up on those concepts, because they are absolutely key to understanding the vibe, especially more so since Yoh is such an unreliable narrator. Miscommunication as a trope isn't specific to Japan, but the way it is played out in this drama is very Japanese in and of itself, and without understanding a little about the way their society and interpersonal relationships function, it's a bit harder to understand their relationship. That of course doesn't mean you'll like it afterwards, but there is a lot of subtext being lost since this is a series that doesn't hold your hand too much in understanding the characters and their actions. (Case in point with the teru teru bozu scene, which I am sure many people who aren't familiar with this particular japanese tradition will absolutely not understand fully !)

I don't think there are any NC scenes in this. It's a very obvious case of Yoh putting up a front because he doesn't want to admit that he actually loves Segasaki, and again, honne / tatemae is helpful in understanding that trope. Segasaki makes a point of picking up on every little thing Yoh says or non-verbally express, like the drying sheets thing, or Yoh being disappointed he won't eat dinner with him. Does he realize how much of an idiot Yoh is ? Probably not, and that is the point of this show - to make them understand each other's way of thinking and acting better, because they are diametrically opposed in those.

Just food for thought since you seem from your other comments to want a different pov on this show. Obviously every piece of media isn't for everyone, and that's ok ! Life would be very sad if we all enjoyed the same things in art.

I was getting ready to comment saying it had been a while since I watched something that made me laugh so hard, then THAT scene hit me like a truck. How can a single movie excel at so many things at once ? It's a comedy, an action movie, one about activism and doing good for the world and the little and big ways we love each other. I loved it so, so much.

The Dohwa Juri Fye Jiwoo team deserved the win. The main vocal duo is impressive yes but they didn't make me feel much, whereas that team actually gave me so many chills. Their voices were so good. I'm gonna be replaying that for days...

Washed away by mud, town disappearing in flash, "a decade later" - is it just me or are they strongly hinting that Kuzumi was one of the victim of the 2011 tsunami ? I really love that last line of his - "I won't become one of your stories", because it allows the audience to build up his motivations and character for themselves, but I think this theory is the one that jumps out the most to me.

I'm not disagreeing with you necessarily, but one thing to keep in mind is that those are the number of arrestations. There are many, many factors to take into account when looking at those, not least of which is the war on drugs' legacy of over-criminalizing minor offenses, while other countries mostly turn a blind eye to them. Put at scale, I don't think any given European country, for example, consumes much less drugs than the USA do. It's just much less criminalized.

Unfortunately South Korea tends to prioritize criminalization over mental health care in drug abuses cases. Throwing an addict in prison is easier for society than actually dealing with the root cause, so I'm not feeling too optimistic about his future right now.

He sounds to me like someone who has been scarred by life enough that he just cannot consider that anyone could live in the same conditions as him (namely, poor and gay) and be happy, because that man is seriously depressed. He's very emotional when it comes to Li Ming because he cares a lot about him. He's so hyperfocused on sparing him a life of pain and harsh realities that he doesn't even realize just how much his own worldviews and emotions are affecting his nephew in the present. I don't think that's necessarily being bigoted. But he does need a serious waking call, or he'll lose his only family for good.

It's because he knows how hard it is to live like him that he doesn't want it for his nephew. Jim has serious communication issues, and quite frankly has no idea how to be an emotional caretaker for a kid at all. He's 100% focused on keeping Li Ming safe while completely disregarding Li Ming's happiness, because his own life has brought him next to none, and so he cannot bring himself to consider that Li Ming could live a happy, fulfilled life if he were to live it in the same conditions as himself : poor, and gay. That's why he's always pushing him to further his education, and that's probably why he doesn't accept him loving another man as quickly as he should.

There's definitely space for queer stories without display of physical affection, and I'm of the mind that there should be more queer platonic stories period. But again, demanding that queer media shy completely away from such an innocuous thing as a chaste kiss ? Then comparing it to having sex scenes ? I'm sorry but that's not a leftist take at all. This is pure conservative bs - the sameself ideology that posits we're all degenerate sexual freaks unable to feel "real love". It concerns me greatly to see so many people hail the complete desexualition of queer people as righteous, when we know it's fully in concordance with the people who want to see us all dead, or at the very least back into the closet where they can calmly forget we exist lmao

Respectfully, the people who say BL is fetishization know nothing about its history. The author who pioneered the genre, Moto Hagio, originally wrote her most famous work as a lesbian story but changed the setting to a boy's school because in the context of japanese society of the 20th century, men had so much more agency and freedom to feel and experience things. It has been speculated time & again that she was not straight at all. The tropes that originated from her work (including the whole "straight men falling for each other" you've cited below) cannot be studied without the understanding of the society they were created in, especially the concept of honne and tatemae.

Multiple studies have shown that women enjoying and creating BL in Japan are more open to queer identities, support queer political rights, and, *shockingly*, are often queer themselves. Not even mentioning the number of gay men who thrive in the genre regardless of medium, because BL as a whole is a subgenre of queer media, and it is no surprise that a subset of the queer community would love it.

So yeah, I don't think you could argue BL is fetishization. Are there people consuming it who have no boundaries and do not care about real life queer people ? Yes, just like there are white people consuming black political and civil right media who go on and continue to be racist. That doesn't make the genre in itself problematic.

Again, look around and see how many straight romance series do not have a single kiss. Almost none, that's how many. It's nowhere near fetishization to ask queer romance series to be afforded the same treatment, and I keep to my idea that treating queer display of affections as inherently sexual in nature is homophobic as hell.

I haven't watched this yet, came to look at the comments to see the general reception to it before starting, so I don't have an opinion on the necessity of any kiss scenes or lack thereof.

I would however kindly ask people who complain about others complaining about the kiss-teasing if they would have the same reaction if this was a straight series. I don't want to assume anyone's intention, but some of yall be sounding lowkey homophobic. People who love each other kiss, it's a very normal and not necessarily sexual thing to do. It's a proof of affection. Why are we comparing queer people kissing to sexual scenes or "soft porn" ? Sounds very much like the classic conservative puritan bullshit that people who consider our whole existence as nothing more than a kink would say and I'm not here for it, especially not from people who are consuming media about queer love :)