TianQi

As a Chinese person, I'm interested in where you've gotten the idea that non-East Asians, westerners in particular don't call out fetishization? Yes, fetishization of East Asia and East Asian people certainly exists in western media, but you'd have to be hiding under a rock to not be able to see all this stuff routinely criticized in western social media outlets like Twitter, YouTube etc. often times by people who aren't even of Asian descent.

Also, in China, for the 2018 New Year's Gala, there was a Chinese lady with painted black skin and a monkey in a basket on her back representing African people. Sparked outrage worldwide. Then, in 2021 after a year of bad press from COVID, what did we get? We got dancers with brown body suits dressed in "African" clothing twirling around on stage. Again, international feedback, nothing said domestically.

However, in 2019 and 2021, you see Chinese netizens consistently angry at western fashion brands for hiring "ugly" models. Ugly here meaning: single-lidded.

Around the world, there is hate on the Asian community. There is hate on the African community too. Don't be mad when somebody calls hate out just because you just happened to be an extended part of the community doing the hate. Why? Because hate isn't unique to one group. All are guilty. Calling out the hate is part of accountability.

You, alone, are putting a more overwhelming amount of effort under comment after comment trying to make excuses for criticism of a show I assume you had no hand in making.
If you don’t like what people say and would rather they speak less, common sense says don’t respond to them. Don’t you know that responding will only illicit another response??

While the rate of poverty in Africa is highest, “the whole continent is people being poor” is just lazily inaccurate.

To the first question: a lot of gay people get married in a ceremonial sense if they can't in a legal sense, so that could be why they said that. In Cutie Pie it's a little bit different because it's being portrayed as a legally-binding arranged marriage, but yeah...

To the third question: I think she had already accepted/given up on Taesong changing after he told her point blank that he loved Haebom. During the talk with Haebom, she had the memory of telling him herself to do exactly what makes him happy first and before, in earlier episodes, we see her kinda feeling bad and almost guilty for how self-less Haebom had always been. And as a proud, headstrong woman herself, I think she was able to quickly see through her own hypocrisy in wanting them to break up. She realized that she had already braved society as a single mom with Taesong AND Haebom in toe, but now she's trying to tell them that they're not able to brave that same society. At least that's how I saw it.

To questions two and four, I have no answer. LOL And that last part about not telling the audience about why Taesong said he didn't want Haebom as a brother is sloppy, I agree.

Let me gush first. This is probably one of my favorite Korean BLs so far. For as textbook kdrama/bl fluff as it was, so many parts of it still seemed true-to-life to me. Haebom is the littlest, cutest, cheek-pinchiest, lip-poutiest of all the babies, but, barring being the victim of bullying, he actually does have a backbone...especially when standing up for himself at the end. The actor playing him physically fit this role so well too. My squealing "Aww!' at all of his facial expressions while watching annoyed my friends who were around me while watching it. LOL Aside from his divine looks, Taesong wasn't a cold and aloof "cool kid", but actually just madly in love with his life partner and obsessed with doing what he could to take care of him and I just can't get over how good that makes me feel inside. I think it goes without saying that I think their chemistry was great. Their peck kisses, cuddles, smiles and everything else was just emoted so well.

This is a very easy watch and there isn't anything groundbreaking about it aside from just how insanely cute it is, but it's worth the time. I think they made it seem like there was more to be explored with the mom and her background, but they never did and I'm not really so upset about that since this wasn't really about her.

Sorry, what I watched was the 'teaser', not the trailer, but I watched it here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=244WCZxSn24&list=PLN2ucE8fs5B5YjPvk7xKTizmDn49mQbpM

Definitely gonna check it out

Yeah, I mean the storylines too. I didn't find them to be of a terribly higher quality than a lot of what we get now. That's why I think it kinda sucks. At this point, even though we get around 15 BLs a year, it's still only two or three of them that we end the year having really enjoyed.

I agree, but I'd say that the quality back in the day wasn't great either, at least for most of the Thai BLs. Except back then (roughly 2015-2018), we'd only get like two or three per year.

Seems like the webtoon version of this is better than the live action, so I'll probably read it since, as of episode 2, I'm actually enjoying this. It's as fluffy as that cream bun at the end of episode 2. Hae Bom is so smol.

Just a few tidbits about Chinese. In Chinese, we don't really ever refer to ourselves in the third person when talking to people and when we do, it's when we're talking to children ex. "Mama can't get you candy today. Sorry baby" or something like that.
Otherwise, it occurs exclusively in historical dramas.
And the phrase is "eating* vinegar", Vinegar is seen as a seasoning/sauce, not a beverage, so we use the word "eat" rather than "drink". We also "drink" soup instead of "eat" soup in Chinese LOL but that's a topic for another day.

I'd say the first half is more dedicated to the mystery part of it with just a few romantic things here and there, but the second half definitely dives into the romance and without spoiling the end, I'll just say that I personally found the ending to be great.

Very good points and I share all of them except the DomeVee story resolution. I think their story was supposed to be resolved the way it was to really drive home that "Right person, wrong time" theme and to show the audience that not all romances are destined to work, at least not immediately. I like how they did that personally.

This wasn't bad, but I do feel like it just got a little boring around ep. 10 and thereafter. If the show were mainly focused on DomeVee or SaenAii as the MC and FahThorn as one of the side couples, I think I could have enjoyed it even more.
I really liked how everything was filmed. Lighting, camera angles, etc. It really excelled at that and the story wasn't terrible even if the writing wasn't all that strong, but all the basketball stuff took up a bit too much time that could have been spent on the relationships.

Lmao carrying the show??? Please. 🤣

I couldn’t even tell Bas was mixed with European. Learned something new today.

Rewatched the trailer and...meh...I wish they'd have found someone else besides Yoon. He has his appeal, but it's not sex appeal.

Agreed. Every time he speaks English, I'm reminded of how not good at acting he is, in general. Not in this, My Engineer, Y-Destiny, or KinnPorsche (he's especially bad in KinnPorsche imo).

No, yeah, he was definitely 17 up til recently.

Thais, like some other Asian cultures hold that, at birth, you're already 1 year old. So, by October 2020, his Thai age was 17. Of course this means that as of October 2020 and presumably time of filming, his *actual* age was 16. You can see his IG post celebrating his (actual) 18th birthday this year: https://www.instagram.com/p/CaaOMz7P42U/

But you're also right that World Y Entertainment posted in October 2020 using his Thai age, but they didn't do that for Porsche (who was the only other actor whose age they mentioned in that series of posts). There could have been a few reasons why they did this: two different people making the posts, Kris' age listed somewhere at the time as 17, the person who made the post asking Kris himself and Kris responding with this Thai age etc., but I don't think it wasn't done by mistake and as we can see, MDL didn't a mistake either.