etoks21

Episodes don't have to be censored by the government. Show-makers/director/writer/producers self-censor, chopping it into a wink-wink-bromance when they write the screenplay because they know if they don't do it, the government will.

So yes, one way or another, the episodes released were censored.

Please quote me where I blamed "...every single Chinese person for the actions of their government." What the hell are you talking about?

Also, please quote me where I said anyone, anywhere should "stop existing." What the hell are you talking about? Is it your opinion that censored bromances, which are an insult to every gay audience member and which mock the intelligence of every straight audience member, are essential to allowing Gay Chinese People to continue "existing?" Again, what the hell are you talking about?

Why don't Chinese gay people just keep watching BLs from other countries via VPN and pirate sites? Why watch this silliness?

Are you with this production's marketing team?

That's the wrong link. I'm looking for the petition to PREVENT a second season from being made.

How about you stop telling me what to think and say in my comments?

I don't take my thinking orders from the LGBTQ+ "community" speech police, of which you seem to think you are a paid officer.

Here's you: "You can hate his work all you want,.."
Here's me: "You should def see YNEH. I hate the last 20 minutes, but what goes before that is one of the best gay feature films ever."

What part of "...but what goes before that is one of the best gay feature films ever." do you not understand? You need to brush up on your Gay Community Speech Police How-to-Read-Before-Responding manual.

You are pushing an agenda and it can summarized as "STFU unless you say something I approve of." I don't care what you approve of. This is the second show I've seen directed by him with an "all gays must be miserable" ending and I'll say what I wish about it.

His work speaks much louder than all the interviews, podcasts, IG pages, etc. you may hunt down in your attempts to prove the opposite of what's obvious. And wtf? with a dude who hasn't even come out to his family directing a hugely important film like Your Name Engraved Herein?

Don't answer. I'm done with you.

Bravo.
There is no way in hell the psycho-homophobic, authoritarian dictatorship of China will ever lift the gay ban. They already know there is a HUGE market in China for BL because millions of their people watch foreign BLs via VPN and other illegal tricks all the time. Their bigotry outweighs their desire for $$$ in this one area only.

I found "Stay With Me," which was the last censored bromance out of China I watched, even more painful because in so many ways it was beautifully made and yet we were STILL expected to read between the lines and fantasize scenes we were never going to be allowed to see on screen.

They can kiss my ass AND suck your dick. :)

Why does anyone watch even one minute of these censored bromances? We all know how it's going to go...
I'm of the opinion NOTHING out of China should be viewed by international fans until its government lifts its horrendously homophobic gay ban. What are you people thinking by even showing an interest in this crap?

There's a bizarre tendency among MDL BL fans to imagine what they WANT to see on the screen is actually there, and then rate accordingly. 8.2/10? Are you kidding me? For a censored bromance masquerading as a BL? No.

This tendency to gobble up the tiny crumbs of gay-hate that fall off the Chinese table is disturbing. No thanks.

The director did not write the story and it is not based on any part of his life. The events in Taiwan surrounding the love story reflect 1987's tumultuous political/societal upheaval, but the love story is fictional.

From IMDB (This is in reference to the horrible ending I wrote about above):
" Well-known Taiwanese film critic Teng Yong Ping suggests "the "heartfelt romantic storyline" is confused when "the last act of the film inexplicably fast-forwards the timeline by 30 years and transports the characters, now adult and played by Leon Dai and Jason Wang, to a current-day setting in Quebec City on the pretext of them attending the funeral of their former teacher, Father Oliver. This odd screenplay choice could be due to the film being partly funded by the Canadian government."

I doubt it. He seems to like tearing his gay couples apart. I'll look into it though.

You should def see YNEH. I hate the last 20 minutes, but what goes before that is one of the best gay feature films ever.

I just put up a post on FB today questioning why in god's own name anyone of good conscience remains a Catholic. New, horrendous cases of sexual abuse have been making waves across Eastern Europe for some time, and a couple of the countries' leaders confronted the Poop, I mean the Pope, about it when he came flouncing thru town:

https://www.facebook.com/tim.otte.9/

:) Good

I didn't realize it until I was halfway through TOO. Someone mentioned it in comments. Seriously, what's the guy's problem?

Correction, he did not write YNEH, he only directed it.

Someone mentioned a couple of weeks ago here that the thumbnail photo next to the title above presents Wang and Tian as demure Catholic choir boys. I saw what they meant and laughed.

However, upon reflection, it seems to me these boys aren't demure at all, but like Catholic choir boys the world over, are looking downward with reverence and awe at each other's pulsating love units.

Who sees what I see?

I don't want another season to be made. It only encourages the mindset that made this bloated production nothing more than a slightly-gayer Chinese censored bromance.

Director Liu Kuang Hui, who wrote and directed Your Name Engraved Herein, which ALSO ends with a deliberately baffling separation and messy, equally baffling last-second reunion, seems to have some internalized homophobia he should work through with a therapist.

YNEH was way worse than TOO though, because LKH wrote a gorgeous resolution scene that placed the lovers together at long last, then lowered the axe with an absurd disappearance of one half of the MC. No logic to it at all.

EXACTLY. I don't even trust the director to have actually written this supposed script for a second season. I want to see a copy of it. Writing such a thing takes hundreds of hours. Who would spend their valuable time that way with no guarantee it would ever see the light of day, especially a well-known writer/director with other matters already on his plate.

I did not know for most of the time I was watching TOO that this was the director of Your Name Engraved Herein, one of my favorite gay-themed movies. However, it comes as no surprise because the ending of that film was just as fucked up and "all gays must suffer in the end" in spirit as is the ending of TOO. After a monumental crisis is overcome and the lovers spend a cathartic and beautiful afternoon together naked on the beach, the audience is led to believe all is well.

But not so fast! Birdy disappears from the scene out of nowhere and for no apparent reason devastates his beloved Jia Han (for the second time!) and they don't meet again until accidentally running into each other like 25 years later. It's insane. NOW, knowing the dude who directed TOO also directed YNEH, it all makes sense.

Director Liu Kuang Hu seems to have some serious internalized homophobia issues.

I never heard of or saw this petition against MDL's front page ban on gay content. If I had I would have signed it in a heartbeat. Do you have a link to it?

That ban is the most shameful aspect of MDL. This site is full of gay content, but gay content is deemed too shameful to put on the front page. What year is this?

I wrote about this to admins three times last year. As is always the case here, they simply ignored my messages and I never received an acknowledgement they had received them, let alone responded. Seriously, f**k them.

Is there somewhere I can go to sign a petition to PREVENT a second season? If you know of a link, please let me know. :)

Nice insight. I will let that enrich my experience of the rest of the series.

I love your story from high school. omg, that poor kid. So happy the jerk was expelled. I have to admit, I never once saw bullying anywhere near that horrific, even in four years of public high school.

For one thing, I grew up in a town of 12,000 in southern Kansas. I'm guessing even our mean kids weren't nearly as mean as you New Jersey street toughs. :) The bullying I saw was much more discrete, less physical than what you describe, which in some cases can actually be worse, perhaps because it's all psychological and under the radar.

The worst cases I can recall consisted of persistent gossip, an occasional insult, and of course, shunning. As a closeted gay kid, I somehow managed to fly above the radar and actually existed in the "popular" cliques, though it's that sort of thing where classmates who heard through the grapevine that I had come out 22 years later, likely weren't all that surprised, if you get my drift. :D

And out of pure animal, survival instinct I kept my distance from kids my age who were vaguely, generally thought to be gay.

lol

You kill me. Over the last five years, ie. during the time since I discovered Asian cinema and BL, I've come to a much greater recognition of my yearning for the most angsty, painful, dramatic, excruciating, even horrifying developments in the fiction I partake of, from novels to plays to movies; no matter the medium. The more suffering I experience as an audience member, the happier I am. Which of course, reveals me to be a masochist. I'm OK with that. :)

But I'm also OK with happy endings. It's simply that those happy endings are all the more intensely joyous and bright because the story took me to the darkest of places first.

Asian cinema has made me MUCH more comfortable with tragic and open endings, as long as they are coherent and well-presented. There are at least two well-known BLs I downgraded from what might have been a 10/10 to a 1/10 because of the most sadistically homophobic, bait-and-switch endings I have ever seen in any medium I can recall. I later learned this was a "thing" among Asian BL writers; they were OK with telling gay stories as long as any happiness the boys experienced was crushed by sorrow in the end.

Regarding another BL I left on the list despite its horrific and absurd ending, I allowed it to make the cut because there is a perfect spot near the end where the story SHOULD have wrapped things up. The last two times I watched it, I stop it right there and refuse to acknowledge the messy last 20 minutes exist. :D

This is likewise true of many older gay Asian films, well hell, American gay films too: Gay happiness could be presented as long as it was obliterated by the movie's conclusion. There is one such film I have kept on my 30 Best Gay Films list despite its soul-murdering ending, because the rest of the film was just so fucking good. The conclusion comes out of nowhere, relates to nothing that went before, was foreshadowed in no way whatsoever, and is slammed down on the audience out of spite, I guess. If you ever meander over to my custom lists and are bored, see if you can pick the one I'm talking about. In this case I do watch the devastating ending because it is so well-acted and of course, feeds my need for agonizing emotional pain. :P

Another reason I left it there was because it's 23 years old, and just the fact that a film with an explicit, non-coded gay love story at its center out of 2001 Asia exists is quite a marvelous thing.

The On1y One has no excuse however; it was made in 2023.

Apparently, I heard the word "moving" and made the leap to assuming this was in reference to moving out of the dorm. It's just a hiccup of my life experience I suppose: To me "moving" denotes moving from one's current living situation to another. I missed Tian' second question "when are you moving to class B?"

Anyway, I posted an unqualified mea culpa to my misunderstanding of that scene somewhere in this thread, addressed to the commenter who called me on it.

I was fascinated by Tian insisting on not only helping Wang move to the new classroom, but taking the lead on it; being in charge. I loved the way he kept his eyes on Wang's the entire time, with that observant poker face of his, as if daring him to admit what he was really up to; that he had failed the test on purpose to cowardly distance himself from Tian. And also making it plain that he KNEW what Wang had done.

I'm not challenging this tic of Tian's personality or character, but his near-immediate "I will wait for you..." regarding Wang after the move was made, because who of us is not weak in some way? However, it came awfully quickly after the heart-rending stairway scene where Tian was alone and dealing with the reality of what Wang had just done. I had felt that in that scene he was accepting what had happened as the new reality, but I thought he'd come to the conclusion this was a bridge too far, that Wang had put up a wall and that was it.

But all of a sudden Tian was proclaiming his willingness to "wait." To wait for something that had not been promised, nor showed any sign of becoming a reality, feels like an exceedingly codependent thing to do, and I perceived Tian as stronger than that. To me, he's a person who would think "I have done all I could and I have been rejected emphatically. This is over. I will degrade myself no further. I will close this chapter of my life and move on." Instead, he proclaims his fealty to permanent victimhood.

Thoughts?

Such a botched ending.

On edit: Benjamin's acting in the lunch scene where he asked Wang when he was moving and got express confirmation there would be no last-minute reprieve, that Wang would no longer be always in front of him in class, and worse, that Wang was set on playing out this ridiculous pretense to its heartbreaking conclusion; was masterful and excruciating. To see the tears in his eyes as he fought to control himself was soul-rending. I had tears running down my cheeks and snot running down my upper lip.

That sort of acting is very difficult and rare: To be able to convey so great a level of torment using only one's eyes, perhaps a slight change in the set of the lips, and angle of the head, is remarkable. Lesser actors, which means MOST actors, would resort to facial contortions and quivering lips to do what Benjamin did almost motionlessly. I can't overstate the respect I have for his talent and hard work as an actor.

I think its budget was insufficient to portray what they intended at a professional level of excellence. I dropped out somewhere in the third episode, so maybe it became fantastic after that.