etoks21

omg. f**k you. "harder to find true love in LBQTA community." First of all, it's LGBTQ, second of all you're a bigot and a mouth-breather.

Hong never knew the queen when they weren't f**king. He's bi. Banging her woke up his straight side. He'd been with the king for many years and loved him deeply. Did you see the love and passion with which he made love to the king, or did your bigot-glasses keep you from noticing that. Did you notice he laid on the king's shoulder and cried when he was first being asked to bang the queen?

You see what you want to see here, and nothing else. Hong said those hurtful things to the king about not ever having loved him, etc. because of all the king had done to him and the queen by that point, including cutting his nuts off. Then he turned as he died to gaze upon the man he had always loved.

One kid a few years older than another kid can't "groom" them. Quit throwing around terms you don't understand.

You may think I think the way I do because I'm gay; I don't care. But I know you think the way you do, not because you're straight, but because you're an ignorant bigot.

You're exactly right. The chief was on his way to getting her out of his system when she came sniffing around him again in the library and threw herself at him, pathetically so.

Thanks for the treatise on oxytocin. However, you make the opposite of the point you think you're making. The king and chief had a relationship of many years and truly loved each other. Did you not see the passion and lust/love in the chief's eyes when he was making love to the king. That kind of intensity in sex, after many years of being together, is a pretty good sign of long-lasting love.

Oxytocin is what the queen/chief were all about. The queen was a virgin, the chief, who I surmise to be bisexual, had never been with a woman, so yeah, brain chemicals were firing off in all directions but it wasn't "romance," it was lust, as the king said. Lust is OFTEN mistaken for love, which is why so many bad marriages are made when people get hitched too quickly, thinking they're in love.

Bingo. Hong loved the King, and had since childhood. I think he is bisexual and banging the queen woke up his "frozen" side, but those two hardly interacted outside of bed. They weren't in "love," in any real sense. It was all lust and the excitement of the new.

When he and the king were having sex...you call the lust on Hong's face and the passion in his eyes "loyalty and gratitude?" lol I call it love and lust. The king is only a few years older than Hong. He wasn't "groomed." You're applying recent, modern figures of speech to an ancient story when such concepts didn't exist.

They were infatuated, not in love. They had almost zero interactions outside of bed;; they didn't even know each other. It was all about new sensations, lust, and confusion. Had the king never put Hong in that position, he never would have thought twice about the queen.

It's ridiculous to refer to the king as Hong's "friend." Did you see the passion in his eyes and on his face when they made love early in the film? That's not the look of a "friend."

Hong Lim lied at the end to hurt the king the way he knew would be the worst. It was apparent a number of times early on that he loved him.

I reacted intensely the first time I saw it. Sobbed like a child. Tonight was my fourth watch. With every go-round I pick up new layers, subtleties and nuance I didn't catch before. It's just a matter of time before I watch it again. That's how good a film it is. But yeah, I was wrecked the first time, for sure.

Consider you're missing out on a lot you might not have registered in your only watch of the film.

Because the king/chief relationship was the central focus of the film, from the very beginning. It's not even close. King/Chief had been together for many years, whereas the queen was a late-comer to the show, so to speak.

In my view, queen/chief was about new physical sensations, natural lust, and sexual deprivation to that point, not actual love. They didn't even know each other out of bed, so how could they be "in love?" In lust, as the king suggested, yes. I see the chief as bisexual, but in love with the king. Then what the king forces him to do awakens his bisexual side, and he develops a crush, like you have in high school on the first girl or boy you have sex with.

The chief denied loving the king at the end purely to inflict pain, which it did, immensely so. But he turned over as he lay dying on the floor so that he could gaze upon the king until his last breath.

That's my take on it.

Thanks for letting us know you find seven short paragraphs an impossible challenge to digest. That's a good indicator of your intellectual capacity.

I don't buy that people need to live the rest of their lives after a "trauma" tip-toeing around everything they expose themselves to through media, trembling with anxiety, afraid they may encounter something that reminds them of what happened to them. That's living one's life as a crippled victim, and it's a choice, not a necessity.

This is what mental health treatment is for. The idea being to learn to live with what happened to you so that it doesn't ruin the rest of your life. My dad fought in WW2, was shot down and spent 18 months in a Nazi POW camp. He spent the rest of his life seeking out movies about WW2 and soaking them in. His favorite sit com was "Hogan's Heroes," which featured a group of American POWs in a, you guessed it, Nazi concentration camp.

My dad lived the rest of his life just fine without your precious trigger warnings to shield him from reality. And if he had had mental problems related to his WW2 experience, it was up to him to seek treatment so he could live life in the real world.

Trigger warnings are silly, and at the very least, should be put behind a "trigger warnings" button so the rest of us don't have our watch ruined by what often amounts to a list of plot spoilers. That trigger warning button would be a nice trigger warning for the sane among us to avoid your list of trigger warnings.

"...it was such a better more fun openminded place before twitter and facebook pulled every idiot on the web."

Well, not EVERY idiot. You're here, after all.

If you think my reply to you qualifies as "a pile of garbage on fire," you are WAY too hyper-sensitive to be anywhere near a computer attached to the Internet.

People's alleged "triggers" are THEIR responsibility, not anyone else's. It is not the rest of society's job to tip-toe around their inability to cope with reality. If someone really is that sensitive, they shouldn't be watching, listening to, or reading any form of storytelling. Even many children's stories contain violence of some sort.

Also, I'm going to challenge your assumption that feeling "sick" at the sight of some fake blood in a drama is necessarily a bad thing. Just last night I watched the excellent 2009 Chinese film "City of Life and Death," which deals with the horrific war crimes of all kinds perpetrated upon the people of Nanking, China by the Japanese army in 1937. I spent 2/3 of the film watching through my fingers, my stomach in knots, tears occasionally coursing down my cheeks. What happened in Nanking is unspeakable, and the film's portrayal of it made me feel "sick."

To which I add..so what? Feelings are what dramas and comedies and everything in-between are made to produce in the people who watch them. If I had gotten to the point where I felt SO sick I didn't want to keep watching, then, guess what? I could have TURNED IT OFF and stopped watching. This is not rocket science.

I chose to keep watching because, like many other viewers, the negative emotional and physical responses I was having in response to the content of the film was more than worth the expanded awareness of what those Chinese people went through. Watching the film is also a form of bearing witness to atrocities committed against others, so that I will carry those feelings forward and do or say what little I can to ensure it never happens again.

This idea that anyone has the right to an expectation of never having an unpleasant feeling while encountering art is new in the last 20 years and as stupid, and even dangerous, as it is infantilizing. Dangerous because it threatens the free expression of ideas, thoughts, feelings, and everything else we are equipped to experience.

These lists of "trigger warnings," which are really just spoilers disguised as care-taking for emotionally unstable people, should at the least be behind a button you have to click on to see "tags." Instead, these lists are inflicted upon all of us at the bottom of most synopses, where they are not always easy to avoid.

How about a "trigger warning" for those of us upset by trigger warnings, eh? When do I get one of those?

Very sexy.

I feel you, but Hsiao Hung is too damn talented and charming for this not to be at least worth a watch. I gave it an 8/10 because of him.

Very nice. A new BL sub-genre is born: SEXY FLUFF.

Enjoyed seeing Shun Yu's assertive side emerge after he understood their relationship and that he was not just a toy for the General Manager. In fact, an entirely unseen, robust, fun-loving, and damn-near butch element of his personality burst thru in the finale and it was a delight to behold. His confrontation with Mama President was golden.

Speaking of which...I felt sorry for the actress playing mama. They costumed her in such a ridiculous, but amusing and inappropriate-for-business outfit that I had to laugh. Sequined, sparkling micro-miniskirt and sweater to show off her huge, top-heavy boobs and her little bird legs. lol

Lots of filler and manufactured, idiotic miscommunication in eps 4-9, but the charisma and acting of the two leads, their obvious chemistry, and especially the radiant presence and comic/dramatic timing of the uber-charming Hsiao Hung, pulled this thing up from the 4/10 I probably would have given it with lesser leads, to a solid 8/10.

Hsiao Hung is going to be a big star.

One fake stabbing that's not shown up close, followed by fake blood flowing in one scene out of a three-hour show is not "gore," it's a staged, acted-out stunt that's over in 30 seconds.

Close-ups of extremely realistic, long-form torture, beheadings, axe murders, actual, live animal slaughter, and genital mutilation might qualify as "gore," but those aren't present here.

You made a show of your sensitivities with your OP. I responded. That's what happens in comment sections.

As for your plea for an "injury" tag...good god, would a toe-stubbing qualify? Why is anyone owed a content warning about an "injury?" There are injuries in cartoon comedies.

They were doing all sorts of war crime, atrocities, murders, torture, rape, you name it, as under orders to do, which excuses none of it. However, you do not triumph over your adversaries by behaving in the same animalistic ways they did.

The war was over. Treaties were signed. The POWs were supposed to have been returned to Japan, and they weren't. So yes, they were "unfairly detained.

Vengeance only creates more vengeance in return. The cycle had to be broken, which is exactly what the U.S. did in the way it dealt with its post-war occupation of Japan. America remade Japan from a feudalist, Samurai-code, macho, life-is-cheap, society into a peaceful ally and trading partner by treating its people and enlisted personnel with restraint and empathy. With, of course, the exception of quite a few barbaric higher-ups who gave the orders, who were executed. I don't agree with that; they should have been jailed for life, but that's how it went down.

After what Japan did to the rest of Asia, and given how many American deaths it was responsible for, on top of the Pearl Harbor attack, would it have been wise to seek revenge and torture everyone to death? No. No, it would not.

OK. I respect your apology to Maggi. I'll stop haranguing you. You're right, it's good to change and it's great you're willing. Have a great night or day, depending on where you are. :)

By the way, I'm a long-time MDL friend of Maggi's, so that's why I came down on you so hard. oops.

Wow, this gets better and better...

lol, then why are you here adding more comments, if you've "moved on?" Furthermore, why don't you remove your mind-bogglingly stupid, immature posts?

omg...you aren't just stupid, you are an imbecile. I hope you have someone providing live-in care so you don't forget to wipe your ass.

Keep going! This is fun!