Suliabryon

Hi! I remember you from that thread as well! Thank you so much for commenting. It DOES feel like forever, doesn't it?? Crazy how many dramas we can watch in just a few months. 😂

I'm going to check these out. horror is a weird one for me. I can do things like zombies, but not like...genuine horror if that makes sense. But it sounds like this more like a supernatural mystery?

I've watched it! It was crazy good. I can't even believe it was the first drama for them both? Their chemistry was INSANE.

I've watched a bunch of c-BLs and some k-BLs and now a few t-BLs, let's see, I'm sure I'm going to forget some:

Deep In
Double Helix
A Winter Sun Wakes the Wind
Revenged Love
The Prosecutor's Proposal
Summertime
Am watching Ash, The Last Oath, this one, and You Maniac
Payback
ThamePo

But really at the moment I'm looking for recs that fit the same feel as this and ThamePo, I guess?

Okay. I started this on kind of an "I'm bored" lark. Like...I JUST got into BLs earlier this year after a series of unlikely events led me to check out the first episode of Deep In and suddenly I was mainlining it. I'd tried a few Thai BLs before (a friend tried for a year or so to get me into them, but they just didn't grab me) and c-dramas definitely dominate my mainstream drama watching, so I thought "huh, maybe it's c-bl's for me". So that's what I've been watching.

And then somehow I stumbled on ThamePo and ended up mainlining it and found the entire thing SO wholesome and adorable and I loved it SO MUCH. But I thought maybe it was just that one drama and the chemistry of those actors.

Like, full disclosure, this is not my usual kind of watch. I'm pretty eclectic in my viewing habits, like I'll do traumatic enemies to lovers, wholesome family dramas, overcoming tragedy or trauma, revenge, etc. But I don't usually do...IDK, cute? Even though I loved how adorable ThamePo was.

I'm just saying, it's not USUALLY my thing.

But now I am finding myself REALLY enjoying this drama, too. Like, it's very simple, but it's sort of a....a feel good watch, right? Like even though Wan is way too cutesy for the usual type of character I invest in, I find it doesn't matter. I like the chemistry he and Third have. I am still really enjoying watching him and Third fall for each other while hoping Nine gets what he deserves at some point, and wondering what Renji's deal is (he better not hurt Wan, but so far he just seems to want Wan's rose colored fan glasses to be broken).

IDK. This might be like a whole new genre for me? Help me out with some recs, maybe? Because waiting each week for this and You Maniac to drop ONE EPISODE EACH is sort of killing me.

I agree! I was shocked that after all of the interruptions last week and build up we got...essentially a light, cut away kissing scene not even close to as intense as all the REST of their kissing scenes as the actual "NC" scene. Me: ....like I don't care that it was all PG, but it should at least measure up to the yearning and intensity in the rest of the series so far???

Yeah, the blind dating went on a little too long, HOWEVER it definitely had some important "moving forward" for all of the characters...except Moth who really served as the catalyst for growth for everyone else in this sequence.

I actually feel really bad for Dean. He strikes me as a guy who actually has a very low self image but hides it with all of his "everyone wants me, and they like me so much I even stay friends with all of my flings after". We don't know what happened in his past yet to get him here, but his "allergic to anything serious" attitude makes me wonder who hurt him, whether that's family or past romance.

Glad to see Ten and Pun finally making some kind of headway despite Ten's self-sabotaging, lol.

Right? They are so adorable!

This drama is obviously not your cup of tea, and that's fine. Not everyone is going to like every drama.

But I'm really struggling to understand why someone who clearly hated the entire premise of this show bothered to comment on it at all.

Stalkers exist for celebrities all over the world. For Thai artists as well. And in fact, I find your statements especially ironic on a BL drama when BL artists - many of whom also have idol backgrounds, as there is significant overlap in the industry - have had to deal with stalker, sasaeng behavior from "fans", with artists issuing statements about personal safety, asking for boundaries to be respected, and companies INCLUDING GMMTV the makers of this very drama, taking legal actions to protect their artists.

Your final statement seems to want to change the entire story to suit you by making Po "a real sasaeng". Um....that's literally nothing to do with the theme of this drama, would change the entire tone story completely.

I wouldn't have commented at all, but I wanted to give an opposing POV to others coming to this see this classic first collaboration between the leads after finding them in You Maniac.

This show is a delightful, fun, cute romance against a backdrop of characters dealing with the high cost of fame and the pressures companies put on idol artists, with MCs who need to learn to recognize what truly matters to them, and what in life is most worth fighting for.

I posted an explanation of the ending up under Discussions that is apparently what the original author has explained on his Twitter/X, stating that the LAST sequence is the dream, the REST of the show is the reality, and the last sequence is meant to show Eunho's internal growth and emotional breakthrough as he embraces his love for Dohyeon and in his dream, gets to confess to him much sooner because of it.

No, I totally got it! They made it a little confusing with his saying "it was a dream" and ending in the dream sequence instead of having him "wake up" to reality next to Dohyeon, but I still understood that what we saw was a now more confident Eunho going back in his dreams to be more true to his feelings with Dohyeon from the beginning, and promising him to always be together. ❤️

I've only finished ep 9 so far but my heart just BROKE for them! 💔😭 Eunho feeling so lost and jealous and insecure, and Dohyeun (who I think might be a little on the spectrum) just loves him SO MUCH his heart can't contain it, so he inadvertantly makes everything worse just because he misses Eunho ALL OF THE TIME and just wants to be with him, no matter what. And he knows enough to know that he messed up, but not really HOW, but he knows this time somehow it's BAD so he is desperate to make Eunho forgive him and just apologizes "for everything".

Dohyeun is DEVASTATED. 😭😭😭 And Eunho is hurting just as much, he just can't stand feeling inferior and like he's holding Domin back anymore, when that isn't what's happening at all. 😭😭😭

Also, WTH with the low ratings?!?!? I haven't watched the last ep yet or read comments to avoid spoilers but so far this my favorite K-BL I've watched and it's been great.

ETA: Started ep 10 and the way Eunho's parents set him up!!! 😅

I hope we get a BTS of it, but we'll see! Yeah, I'm loving their livestreams, too. :)

I found it!! And they did handle it well, ha ha. There was obviously some embarrassment, but I really got the feeling they were actually quite proud of how it turned out and happy it was such a good scene. Minghao gesturing for the staff to calm down was hilarious, and Liang half crawling into his lap was awwww....they really held on to each other to make it through the shy part of their reacting, lol.

As someone raised around another projectile weapon who has taken courses with trained professionals...I was literally yelling at my TV "Do NOT sh00t that arrow while he is standing down range!!!" And also fully expected him to get hit because he WAS standing down range AND not very far from the target. Was no one on set familiar with this rule? LOL.

Let me tell you, I started this show because "zombie apocalypse" is kind of up my alley, and apparently this year so are C-BLs, so why not? And the actors are both good looking (especially Minghao, but both of them, really). I'm a veteran of too many seasons of The Walking Dead as well as games like The Last of Us (we won't talk about game 2, no thank you) so I come equipped with a love of the tropes and they've done a decent job of hitting them here with the whole "humans are more dangerous than the zombies" and "this immune person might be the key to humanity's survival" and "love is still the shining hope in darkness". I'm here for all of that.

But it happens to be a BL so I also knew we would probably eventually get some intimacy.

And, other c-BL's have really been upping the s3xy ante this year, but somehow I was STILL entirely unprepared for that NC scene in ep 12. The emotion? A-Leh crying when he kissed him? The desperation from them both that felt very "this could be our last night on earth"?

The, um, detail?

I also really love that even as aggressive as he was in the moment, A-Leh stopped the moment Lin Zai expressed any kind of hesitation, and then also checked in with him later when clearly they were both all in "Is this okay?" Very 🫠🔥.

The actors did an amazing job of selling not just the intimacy but the emotions underpinning it, which is what honestly makes any NC scene either great or meh. This one was great.

I've been watching the actors react to the episodes on YT as they've aired, and they are both literally so adorable. Minghao is the complete OPPOSITE of his character, such a soft pookie, and they have such a great rapport, but they are both so SHY about even small things that I can't wait to see them react to THIS. 😂

Okay, so I think I may have seen something different from the trailer. What I saw was a VERY short maybe teaser? Anyway now I'm going to go search! and also look for the other title you mentioned.

Yes, adaptation is always hard! And it is VERY difficult to turn off my editor brain and just enjoy a story and notice every single plot hole or hand wave or character inconsistency...sometimes I can, and sometimes I just can't and have to give up on both books and shows. OTOH, it's also a very valuable skill when I read my favorite authors specifically to figure out how they're doing something really well. I learned how to do exposition better by studying Ilona Andrews, for example. They are really, really good at inserting exposition in a way that is natural and not just a boring info dump to the reader.

I've learned to view a show or movie based on a book as a completely different version of the story. Like seeing Pride & Prejudice adapted, each version is unique from one another, and unique from the book.

I think that is a real possibility! He seems to get uncomfortable anytime someone asks "and what about after?" Because "after" has always meant moving on from that person and just making them a "friend", but clearly the idea of that is uncomfortable to Dean in Moth's case.

I'm an author and editor, and while I haven't written Omegaverse yet, I know authors that do, I've read it, etc., and man....Knot was a TOUGH WATCH. To be frank, so was ABO Desire. To me, Omegaverse basically took the most popular tropes from shifter/vampire/werewolf PNR and dialed it to 11 to give "fated mates" "mating bonds" heat" etc. etc. center stage in every book (and obviously in M/M it was world building for one partner to get pregnant). Anyway...I know to people unfamiliar with the genre it must seem odd and confusing, but to me it's not much more complicated than any other PNR with those tropes. I just feel like they need writers who know how to handle it. Or, in ABO Desire's case, maybe the writers should have gotten help from someone with experience in script writing and directing, because I think their inexperience really hampered things. (I think I read that the whole thing was done by the novel's authors as their first screen project?)

Books and shows are NOT the same, and what works well on the page does not always translate well to screen. It takes real skill to know what needs to be changed and how to change it.

In Knot's case, though, it felt very much like just bad writing. Which is too bad because there were so many MOMENTS that had such potential, and the leads have good chemistry, but then those moments would fizzle into poor writing again.

Anyway, obviously I could write a whole essay about what went wrong with the Omegaverse shows, but yes, I've seen the trailer for Love Scandal and WOW. But I will also say, I've heard often trailers can be entirely misleading, so here's hoping that insane chemistry and dynamic between the leads shows up in the actual show, and that the script is better than Knot's. ❤️

Oof, this comment section is rough, and that's saying something on MDL. I just want to talk about the drama. I'm pretty new to BL, got into the genre this year with some of the C-BLs out and then recently stumbled on ThamePo and went in not expecting much, and then found it to be the most adorable show. Seriously, I loved everything about it. From Thame trying to figure out if he liked Po and then getting jealous and replacing all of his ex's stuff in the apartment (SO adorable, come on) to Po trying to navigate dating someone famous while dealing with the insecurities his ex left him with, it was just grounded enough in RL relationship issues and had something really charming about it.

I find a little of that same mix here, but done in a different way, obviously. But so far the conflict for the relationship is essentially the same in that it's about these two people dealing with their own insecurities and flaws as they slowly figure out they actually have real feelings for each other. I know right now 4 episodes in, they're still acting like it's all about the physical attraction, but let's be real - if it was just physical, both of them could easily have moved on to someone else, and neither of them is willing to do that, but also can't quite seem to figure out why. 🤣 They're in denial that any real feelings are involved, but they SHOW it every time one of them feels bad about hurting the other's feelings, or when one of them gets worried about the other. They are already emotionally involved and just haven't admitted it yet.

They've done this with both characters now, where both Moth and Dean are struggling to focus on anything else, but they're so puzzled WHY and then some other character has to point out they're spending all of their time thinking about each other. 😂 Both of these boys are so broken when it comes to relationships, it's going to be a steep learning curve, ha ha. And s3x isn't going to magically make it better or make those feelings go away, it's just going to complicate it more.

Interesting, btw, that Moth literally seems to panic a b it each time they ALMOST get into it. I think some part of him knows that taking that step with Dean will be an emotional point of no return and is scared of it.

RIGHT?? Exactly! This would be a case of opposites attract, and I love it. I want all of FL's friends to find happiness and I LOVE when shows let background characters pair up. I don't need much just little hints at their story as the larger tapestry unfolds. Like what we're seeing with Yuchen and Jiu Gao.

I'm been an author and editor for over twenty years, so it's not often that I don't see something coming in a story, but boy did this show "get me" with the whole "disease is a not a disease" thing! They laid the groundwork and I SHOULD have seen it, but I didn't! Bravo, show.

Man, Lady Du is despicable. There's trying hard to rise above your circumstances, and then there is just being a complete sociopath and not caring at all who you hurt or destroy to rise up.

ETA: OMFG Nanke showing up like a ghost and scaring the life out of them! 😂 He's so serious! I love it.

"Can she be trusted?" 😂 Sir, do you think XLX would just casually reveal things to her friend if she couldn't be???

Also, why do I now lowkey ship him with Xiaolian based on one sentence?? 🤣 If I was writing this I would have her have to deliver messages or things to him and her being utterly terrified of this stoic ninja, while he slowly softens to her and finds her adorable.