jarabaa

A very handsome man with a lovely presence on screen that's both graceful and ... sensual. He stands and moves like a dancer, and knows how to look at someone (= the camera) in a way that'll make you swoon. Lucky Toon (Vich).

A very handsome man with a lovely presence on screen that's both graceful and ... sensual. He stands and moves like a dancer, and knows how to look at someone (= the camera) in a way that'll make you swoon. Lucky Toon (Vich).

Thanks for this very detailed account. It certainly helps! But ... I am sad that I need all this help. I have watched three episodes so far, and of course I love the series - the characters, the scenes, the writing, the settings, the "period piece" authenticity, the acting (obviously) and the beautiful actors themselves, etc. It's most impressive. Beautiful and evocative. And there are things in it that are close to things in my own life. This makes it all the more painful, elegiac, touching. I can easily imagine that you cried when writing up your notes.

But. I feel it should be more than something which is painful, elegiac and touching. . Or something other than that. The layers of flashbacks on top of each other mean that I desperately need a Benedict Tan on MDL to analyse and summarise everything for me. Which means in a way that YOU are the storyteller, the analyst, and the summariser - and you are an excellent storyteller, analyst and summariser!

But aren't you also making up for faults in the series itself? That's what makes me sad. It saddens me that such a beautiful series adds up to such a welter of flashbacks that I lose my way and sometimes lose attention and need to be guided so expertly by another viewer. Still, maybe I am complaining too early about the pace, the nature of the storytelling, maybe all this exploration of different epochs in the past will ... "add up to something", namely a real story + cast of characters that I can grow fond of and admire and become attached to. Does that make sense? I do not just want to encounter beautiful, evocative reminders of my own past - intense, romantic vignettes of young love ... or maybe I would prefer to have all the beauty and intensity, the sweet impressionistic evocation of past love, in one single film - rather than organised in a series of 8 episodes. Or maybe what I am missing is a connection to Phob and Nut today - one version of their past would be OK, but a sequence of more than one past epoch in the lives of these characters without any tangible immediacy to round off their accounts leaves me ... uneasy and bewildered. And I don't think that the aim of writers, actors and production team was to make me feel uneasy and bewildered!

There are many outstanding parts - but the whole .... well, what did it add up to? What was the story that was told? When did it begin, when was the middle, when was the end? If I am not mistaken, it was ALL supposed to be rather long ago. And there are two levels of distant past - one is around 18 years ago, the other around 14 years ago. Correct? I'm still not clear about it all. Were there flashbacks IN flashbacks? Or different orders or registers of flashbacks?

Sometimes - often - what I watched was brilliant, first-class, beautiful, evocative. Camera shots, colours, cutting, angles, props, writing, acting, dialogue. Etc etc. Perfect. I was taken back to my own adolescence - very intensely. It brought me to tears, many times. I was very regularly very impressed. There were even moments when it was so painful to watch because of all of the beauty and perfection and intensity that I had to pause my watching and do something else.

But. As others have commented, good grief, such a welter of flashbacks in and upon other flashacks - it was too much. It lost the necessary sequential narrative for me. Now maybe that sort of traditional "storyline" doesn't have to be the only game in town. Maybe BL is ready for other things. We had the craziness of YYY, for instance. We had the alternating past and present storylines of Until We Meet Again. We had the detective mystery thriller/who-done-it of Manner of Death. We've had a few ghost stories. But what was this? And most importantly, WHY all in the past? Why did the whole past nature of all the events on view become the main feature of the whole thing? It could have been .... OK, "Proustian" - but whose memories were we exploring - were they real memories - why was this or that being remembered? Those dimensions were missing, so it wasn't a deep exploration of memory either. It was just a complex lasagna of flashbacks, all delicious and rich, but not in this case adding up to one truly pleasing feast.

Definitely those toys can help. A good practical suggestion. Plus absolutely telling the partner. If he knows what he's doing he can do more than help...

Skip skip skip - that was the series. I don't have to watch everything. But loved your comment. I gather there was yet another "romantic ghost story". No thanks... Love the MoD profile pic. Those two give us the best m/m love scenes.

I look at it another way. I agree with your concerns about sexual violence and coercion. That's simple enough. And I am so out of touch and clueless that although I know what Google is, I don't know what SJW means. But my issue is ... "these shows need to show".

How far do we go in prescribing "what shows show"? Drama is drama. It has always been characterised by "licence" - it's a product of the imagination. Shakespeare, Dickens and other great male authors of the classics, plus innumerable female novelists and poets of the more recent modern era - Patricia Highsmith, Hilary Mantel, Joyce Carol Oates, Sylvia Plath - depict all kinds of violence and cruelty in their works. I don't think we can demand that they really shouldn't have shown the things they showed.

It could be that nowadays, with all sorts of fictional stories to be followed in so many different media (even comics and computer games, unknown when I was young), we really do need to make a concerted effort to take a step back and recognise fiction for what it is. Generally it's pretty clear it's fiction - not some sort of fly-on-the-wall documentary. Take Lhong. Obviously, in real life, people in Thailand WOULD call the police if someone like Lhong did the outrageous things he did. I honestly don't believe that in the fictional world of TharnType we "need" to be "shown" the machinery of justice at work. In the case of mysterious curly-haired guy, well, we haven't yet seen all that the writers want to "show" us - there's plenty of punishment which could yet lie ahead. There's no sign above his head saying "This character will lead a happy, comfortable life to a great age" ... who knows what will become of him? However, there are certainly some instances of crazy unrealistic bad writing in BL series which ends up seeming to "show" us outrageously guilty criminals getting away with it (e.g. in "He's Coming to Me" - however, that was obviously a wildly unreal fantasy story from beginning to end). Finally, I find that I myself definitely require regular check-ins with everyday reality - I am regularly quite shocked to note the ease with which my own interior imaginative world gets fully in synch with some totally fictional milieu that I've only just got acquainted with.

That's very interesting. Thanks for addressing that issue and clarifying that point - and amending your profile. And so I can see your question was definitely very serious. And the answer is: look around - there is a lot of material by gay men on the web, on YouTube, in many different sources, addressing all aspects of this question - including the plain old physical mechanics (= the pain you refer to). In all the erotica and porn which has anything to say about learning to bottom, it's characterised as something that's painful at the beginning but which most bottom men learn to enjoy - and enjoy is an understatement. But it most certainly requires a lot of preparation on all sorts of levels. Plus ... practice. Plus ... the right top. Many men find the pain unacceptable and come to the conclusion that bottoming is impossible. Some find that they simply cannot do it. But I'm telling you ... give it time. Which means practice, the right man (or men), preparation and readiness, etc. Read and follow the extensive advice offered by other gay men.

The BL series can be a bit misleading if you are a real-life gay man. Their origins lie belong to the world of fantasy, and especially the all pervasive influence of Japanese culture, i.e. the "yaoi" phenomenon and the idea of the "seme" and "uke" roles. Seme and uke describe a kind of dynamic which in my view is very real in male/male relationships of all kinds - and can be very rewarding and beautiful. But straight people invariably translate it directly into terms of top and bottom in anal intercourse.

However, life absolutely is not that simple. There are men who are seme - powerful, maybe slightly cool or proud, competitive, a whole list of things which are considered to be conventionally "masculine qualities" - and yet in bed they prefer to be bottom. And by the way, these are not really male qualities - I know masses of women who abound in seme traits! Meanwhile, there are exemplars of the uke persona who are total tops. Of course there are many men in who are "versatile", enjoying both sexual positions, or who switch sides (more than once, generally), and lots of guys who simply aren't into anal sex and choose not to experience it all. It's always important to keep all those men in view - the versatile practitioners, the role-switchers and the non-participants - because they add up to a lot of guys, meaning that these binary oppositions (seme/uke and top/bottom) represent only a certain section, maybe a minority, of the whole big world of men who love men. So take your time, don't panic, don't rush things, and try to be philosophical.

Picture doesn't do him justice. Wonderful as Leon, seemingly his first role. Every scene a revelation. So good at subtle emotions and responses - struggling to say something to Pobhan, interacting in a convincingly affectionate way with the cat (!), looking non-plussed or concerned - or in love ... His beautiful face is full of emotional intelligence, making flat, dull lines meaningful and moving.

I'm thinking more and more that Smart Paungmanee - as far as I can tell, a complete newcomer to this Thai screen drama world - is a wonderful actor. One to watch. He is so good at doing rather subtle emotions and responses in Leon. Waiting around, struggling to say something to Pobhan, interacting in a convincingly warm and interested way with the cat, looking non-plussed or concerned - or in love ... He's beautiful, yes, but his beautiful face is full of "emotional intelligence". He can make some routine, dull lines full of shy tenderness or tongue-tied concern: which is more beautiful than his lovely face (or the equally lovely ways he moves his body ... ) A star is born!

Reading your post here, I assumed you were a gay man. The series and storylines you refer to are of course all about love between men, after all. It's a question that is very much on the minds of gay men in many different cultures - for many different and important reasons. But your profile says you're female. Not what I expected... [And I'm not qualified to reply.]

Absolutely. TharnType2 was ... almost inevitably a disappointment. There was an attempt to show the challenges faced by a long-established m/m couple and though the issues were real things faced by real men in real relationships, it all came across as lurid and disjointed and melodramatic. Which was especially true of the way in which Leo and Fiat were introduced there!

I agree, 100%. I'm hooked on m/m romance, it's my thing, but I genuinely like - and take an interest in - all the couples and individual characters. in this series. Plus it's fun to see how people interact with Ou Wen & Mark and their relationship.

Yes, I certainly noticed it - immediately. No idea what it was doing there. In fact, the melody itself is a piece of music composed by Haydn - long before it became Germany's national anthem. But anyhow, I still don't know what it was doing there!

Yes, it really is the Greatest Question of All Time. And the thing is, in this series he's surrounded by FOUR other totally stunning actors ... yet his beauty remains mesmerising throughout.

OK, I am going to agree with you. 100%. I am sorry too that so many viewers are angry, bitter, disappointed, fed up, and so on. And to a ... substantial degree I understand why they are angry, bitter etc. But that's all I'm going to say! It's really too dangerous commenting on others' negative assessments of this series.

But I'm like you - I'm enjoying it a lot. In fact, I love it. I love the three gorgeous men in this tantalising triangle. I love the references to Saint-Exupéry's truly immortal book. Especially the Fox and the Rose and their significance. I love the second couple. I love the acting. I love the songs. I love the weirdly empty coffee shop. I love the equally weird but fascinating emphasis on semi-precious metals, gemstones etc. I would love to see them together. But I also love the tale of what you call pining, jealousy, misunderstandings etc. I love it all .

You are SO right. He's a brilliantly conceived and written character played by a brilliant young actor. He radiates a smiling charm which is utterly exceptional. His lines are almost all dry observations or clever games, jokes, tricks. Although his sense of humour seems to be based on very acute understanding of the people around him, and is often sarcastic, it's never bitter, never cutting. In terms of dramatic quality, he really is a most remarkable creation. Just thinking of Nam Goong (Namgung), a purely fictitious character, somehow brightens my day. I yearn to see him in every scene and hear his every witticism.

The most handsome teacher in Korea!

I'm only at ep 7 as yet, and I'm still loving this, but I am a bit concerned that at some point our vessel changed course and set sail for the land of Heterosexualia, capital Straightville. And that seems to be where we've dropped anchor. OK, I'm entertained by Carmen + Ping, and the evolution of KK's + Francesca's marriage is compelling, and we're all fascinated (maybe not in an entirely benevolent, I-wish-them-all-the-best kind of way) by what's going on between Tin and Fong Tze Chin, a charming girl, and the story of Darren & his son & ex-wife is sort of touching, but WOW, I'm getting a bit tired of walking round and round Straightville's world-famous and much-visited Boy+Girl Gardens. So sad, meanwhile, thinking of Lonely Homosexuals KK and Siu Muk drinking away their sorrows back on the ship. Frankly, I'd love to re-board, say goodbye to Heterosexualia - a country I know terribly, terribly well already - and see if we can yet discover that mysterious, far-away Land Where Boys Love Boys. Does anyone think we'll ever get there?

Ditto. I HAVE watched it over and over. So much to enjoy.