dgbanc

It’s a petition for permanent residence in the US that took years to be processed. They’ve been approved for Green Card including Otep. His parents are already there and they’re waiting for Otep to join them in the US. That was a flashback. Tau broke up with him so Otep would join them in the US per her Tita’s request (Otep’s mom). Otep is just visiting his friends in the present time.

Parents controlling their children isn’t far from reality unfortunately. It’s all under the guise of “Family Values” so no one really tries to argue about how bad it is. Anyone opposing to the idea of leaving their parents after high school or college and start their own lives independent of their parents are sometimes viewed as selfish and are shamed mostly by older relatives for not “helping” their parents especially during family gatherings (which is fairly frequent)

They are guilted to stay with their parents as long as possible. As a result, there are far fewer young adults independent from their parents compared elsewhere in the world. Unfortunately some parents still view their children as investments. It’s not uncommon to find a household where the breadwinner is a young adult instead of their parents.

On the bright side, in the case of PH BLs, both the parents don’t want their children to stay for monetary reasons, but I think more for emotional support, it’s still bad, but not as bad as it could’ve been. The mom in In Between was just a little worse because since she can’t control Otep, she used his son’s friend to get what she wants.

Otep's mom brought the "petition" status to Tau, so that means she doesn't want Otep to pop in and out of US for his dad, but more about him moving to US for extended period of time or maybe permanently. US Citizenship Petitions really take a long time to get approved so it is a long term plan for the entire family. Sometimes even around 10-15 years from the moment you start the process until you get approved for a Green Card. After getting a Green Card, you'd need 5 years of continued residence in the US to become a citizen. Tau's reasoning for the break up was: it'll be easier for Otep to move with his parents if he is no longer tethered back to him in the Philippines. This was Tau's final selfless act. Now that he knows what it was like after losing him, he wants to be selfish for once and have Otep for himself.

A post credit scene?
Marvel's Gameboys

I think they'll post the pilot on YT but I doubt they'll post all episodes on YT. iWant creates series to gain paid subscribers and offering it free on YT would counter the purpose of being an "iWant Original" unless Dreamscape steps in. I don't think international viewers would pay $13/month to watch one tv series when there are tons of BLs free on YT. I'm not even subscribed to TFC myself. They're not HBO to charge me that much for a subscription lol.

I think any given conversation about 20% to 30% would be loan/foreign words (spanish/english/chinese etc origin) and the other half or more will be native languages (tagalog, bisaya, and other local languages). I think in the future this will continue to be the standard. No foreign language will take over local languages simply because language in the Philippines evolves day by day. Some niche slang seep into everyday tongue if it survives long enough. For example, some filipino gay lingo used exclusively by gay people around 2000s is now widely spread, used, and accepted as everyday word regardless if they are gay or not. Anyone trying to learn Filipino language need to be on constant alert on these new words because what is in the textbook is already outdated a few years after it's printed.

Example of evolving language: people are now simply saying "Sana all" which means "I wish this (thing that one received, certain event that happened, someone getting lucky, someone being happy, or anything good) happen to or experienced by everyone". This evolved from a full sentence into two words that doesn't make sense without understanding where it came from. If someone who is trying to learn Taglish. it would be confusing because these two words translates to "I wish all". It would be worse if someone saw "sana ol" "sana oil" or "china oil". It means the same thing as above and both acceptable way of saying it. Both are a result of creativity (or out of boredom) finding words close in pronunciation to "sana" and "all". Taglish is basically used for convenience. As long as two people find a way to say things with the least amount of effort by eliminating words and/or syllables without sacrificing the meaning, it will stick to everyday conversation and will gain widespread use.

To your question if everyone is bilingual, yes. Everyone is at least bilingual as soon as they enter the school system. If someone is born outside of the National Capital Region or where Tagalog is the primary local language, they'd be trilingual or more. There are a lot of local languages in the Philippines that aren't a dialect of Tagalog.

English fluency depends on the person, of course, but everyone will at least understand anyone speaking English. Which is why people (especially younger audiences) complains when local TV network buys the rights to a TV show and insist on dubbing the show in Tagalog, delaying its release, when they can just put english subs on top of it. Movies aren't even dubbed or subbed in tagalog unless it's not in English - then it's subbed in English.

No one really uses pure Tagalog, pure Bisaya, or pure English in every day conversation unless they're in a formal setting. It's always a mix between languages. It's just easier to convey what you wanna say using multiple languages because you can bend the rules of either languages and still be understood by other Filipino speakers. The composition is local language (depends where people are born) + Filipino and English. But nationwide, Taglish is the base spoken language because Filipino (which is Tagalog based language mixed with Spanish/English/Chinese loan words) and English are the two official languages of the Philippines and both taught in school side-by-side.

I think Crystal will back off the relationship first before Xavier does.

When she was teasing Xavier about who'd he go back to between her or Mico and then laughed, saying she was just playing, her last frames was her thinking that between her and Mico, Xavier will choose Mico. I think she already knows that Xavier is happier with Mico.

heh heheh hehehehehehhe

I knew they were gonna swing hard this ep because of last episode, but at the beginning where we were given flashback of Xavier and Mico celebrating Xavier's birthday when he felt the loneliest before it all went crashing down was just rude lol

On the bright side, we're back at the beginning. We got 2 eps left. That leaves the second half of ep7 for Xavier to realize Mico was feeling what he felt for him, too and that "you're joking, right?" this ep was not a legit response to his confession. Ep8 will be the make up and start of their non-professional relationship

Seph and Kookai's ship is finally sailing! The chemistry between them is undeniable. They are so cute!

Ep 3 still has quite a bit of filler, but definitely improving. We finally got a significant flashback of "In Between" and it's great! Hopefully moving forward we see more plot than fillers

Is it Wednesday yet? I'm ready to get heartbroken. Ep 5 was titled Hello Sadness and there's barely any sadness in that episode. Ep 6 might hit us with that heavy stuff

Wtf this looks even better than local tv networks quality wise. Was this shot before the pandemic began? This looks full production compared to Hello Stranger, In Between, and Gameboys both being limited productions because of community quarantines. My Day did not come to play. Inject this directly to my veins lol

August seem to be Philippine BL month. These four will be releasing new episodes in succession until Gameboys and Hello Stranger concludes while In Between and My Day continue to provide our weekly fix

There is too much filler in this series. The intro/production company logos/credits/reviews and previews are too much. There is also way too much dead air and there are some filler in the main story too. I think if you remove all those it would cut the entire episode in half to like 10 minutes. Putting what happened before also doesn't make sense because of the pacing of the story. Barely anything happened in the last episode because of the filler problem, so it's not hard to forget the past episode. They don't need to cut the episode into two parts. It only highlights the filler problem. It's acceptable for Thai BLs to do this because they're at least 40-44 minutes per episode, so most of the filler are clustered at the beginning and at the end of the episode.

I just realized I used filler 5 times on my post and now it's 6 lol

Okay I have been mulling this over the last few hours and I can say this as Filipino myself, I think one of the biggest flaws in our culture is parents having tight grip over their children's lives under the guise of "Family Values". This was highlighted in this episode when Cairo wanted to try live independently after Mommy Leila said she wanted to move to Bukidnon (for context, they currently live in Quezon City which is part of the National Capital Region, or Metro Manila, to Bukidnon, a provincial area in the southernmost cluster of islands in the Philippines). Leila said she was happy that Cai wanted to be independent, buuuuut she ultimately used the dead dad card in order to hold Cai back from leaving the nest "because she needs him more than ever". As we all know his brother is still living with them as well. We can put him at least 21-22 years old possibly having a full-time job at this point. Cai is 20 years old and is 1 year away from graduating. At which point are these young adults able to be young adults?

I think Filipino parents need to be more supportive of children wanting to live independently than guilting their children to continue living with them throughout adulthood. When I was 19, after getting a full-time job myself, I wanted to move out of my parents and my Mom and Dad were both against it. I was able to reason my way out of it - telling them I know they want to support me as long as they can, but I wanted to know how well I can do on my own - especially knowing I still have them as a fallback. They reluctantly agreed to it. It's been years since, and I am still holding up on my own and now building retirement portfolio for my future. They are very vocal how proud they are of what I am able to do on my own. I'm the youngest of my siblings, but I am the only person who is not receiving any financial support from them. They were worried I would struggle on my own and told me they were strong enough to keep supporting me. I never doubted that they can support me. It was more of me wanting to know if I can successfully live independently. I've proven to them and myself that I can be on my own. The unexpected result of being able to prove myself that I didn't need anyone to support me was that it boosted my then, non-existent self esteem. It was the product of knowing that I have full control of my life.

I think culturally speaking, family plays a huge part in our lives, and that's great. But the family bond and dependency to family is waaaaaay too strong that it's hindering personal growth of young adults in the family. I think collectively, we need to loosen up a bit and let our children face the world on their own to see how high they can fly. If they fall, be there for support so they can try again. I think it's unhealthy for parents to rob children of their own lives . When those children goes into being parents themselves, they will probably continue the cycle of parents being dependent to their children because they weren't able to build enough for retirement themselves.

On the bright side, the producer when asked if there is any further extension for Gameboys for an even 16 episodes, he said not likely, because they have a movie to do as well as Pearl's GL series Pearl Next Door. He noted that ep 10 will still have finale vibe, but they found a way to add 3 additional episodes that are even better. Allegedly. lol

I think Black Sheep is their "indie" vibe arm. I've only seen Dreamscape and Star Creatives which only produces soap operas for their main channel. Black Sheep will probably continue to produce for Youtube or probably iWant, BL or not

i think neither IdeaFirst nor Black Sheep (production company behind Hello Stranger) foresaw the success of both BLs considering there wasn't really a huge Philippine BL series before them. I wouldn't be surprised if Hello Stranger is also extended up to 10 episodes.

IdeaFirst in particular had a meteoric rise as soon as Gameboys was released with no marketing efforts whatsoever. They are an independent production company that doesn't have huge backing like Black Sheep does. They just dropped episode 1 without any teasers or trailer. According to Social Blade they had 3 or 4k subscribers in April 2020 to now having 165k subs with each new episodes getting 500k+ views in 1 week which is impressive considering both leads of Gameboys are more like indie actors than mainstream. Hello Stranger gained traction fast since both leads were already mainstream talents from Black Sheep's parent company before this BL.

2gether the series was a huge hit in the Philippines and opened the doors for PH companies to start producing BLs for web release. Coupled with the sudden closure of the biggest broadcast network in the Philippines, ABS-CBN (Black Sheep and iWant's parent company which is producing Oh, Mando!), it was kinda the perfect storm for the rise in streaming online since there are less content to watch in traditional TV

a "movie" sequel was in the works and and the series is being extended for 3 more episodes for a total of 13 episodes then movie. I assume the "movie" will also be streamed on YT like an hour/hour and a half special. The writer just tweeted implying he's in the middle of writing the movie special when he started writing episodes 11-13 extension.