jpny01

All of that plus he looks really good with his shirt off. I liked in the episode where he leaned in, read Pob's body language, and immediately aborted and apologized. I'm pretty sure Mame has an assistant somewhere who snuck that in. Mame would have had Leon rape him.

Leo was willing to abduct and torture FIAT, let alone a lowlife like King. I don't think Mame knows anything about basic fiction writing, let alone how to portray relationships.

Got it - I agree with that. I thought you meant aggressiveness like Leon shows. He's aggressive but respectful. Which is hot.

Why couldn't Leo just tell Fiat what's going on and then deal with it? What kind of an idiot is that easy to manipulate? And how did Fiat not notice that he only had a bottle of water and yet it made him comatose and forget the whole night? And that conversation the next day - what? It made no sense!

Drama is fine, but it has to make sense!

There's a slapdash quality to this. Ja and First both have beautiful bodies and should look perfect in formalwear, but they coudn't even be bothered to properly tailor their suits. Leo looked like a little boy playing dress-up with his father's clothes. Fiat's was a little better, but go take a look at Y Destiny - THAT was how you wear clothes.

What's wrong with aggressiveness?

But everything else, agreed It's not just the story elements but the incompetent way they're written. They depend so much on people 1) behaving out of character 2) completely implausibl failures of communication and 3) complete idiocy from smart people.

When in all of human history has there ever been an exchange like:

"You need to be on your guard."

"OK, will do. I have no follow-up questions."

Again, great camera work. That shower scene was beautifully executed. But so much so that it was all that was needed to show how Jill felt - it didn't require the entire episode like that. Also, if the song is longer than the episode, you can cut a verse out so that the audience isn't staring at a black screen after only getting a few minutes of just one mood.

Unfortunately, in many cases the slapstick is trans- & femphobic, which is really revolting in a genre that should be friendly. It seems to be slowly improving, so maybe there's hope.

Everything about Ben seemed artificial & shallow to me - I couldn't get into the story. Also, he could have had Ron Angeles AND Royce Cabrera but rejected them both. Who would actually do that?

I like to think it's because they're listening to me. (Don't worry, I'm not that deluded.)

I'm afraid to try it - but it looked delicious. And extremely unhealthy, but there's always a correlation there.

Or in this case, instead of filling the space with lots of words, it does it with staring and taking a fifteen-minute break between each spoken phrase.

We might note the end result of the romance in GSP, yet it was still compelling. I didn't even really love 1000 Stars, but the boys were committed and played people in love with each other, and it showed, even though Earth was playing a very stoic character. Here, Zung can't help but be smoldering with those huge dark eyes, and he'd probably have chemistry with a soggy cardboard box, but if you told me this was a bromance, I'd 100% believe it. In fact this would be a better story if it were a bromance and focused on the mentor-protege chef relationship instead of spending so much time on staring at each other.

It feels to me sometimes like some viewers want to fetishize boys liking boys while stripping them of their sexuality. Boys (and girls!) have sexual attractions, and that's a big part of what romance is for most people. Whether or not they're acted upon is irrelevant to how successful a story is - it's the longing and anticipation that holds our interest, not the sex itself. Although I wouldn't say no to seeing Aue in a love scene. :)

What Araron Newman said. Sorry, I shouldn't have used abbreviations. GSP is "Gaya Sa Pelikula, which is IMO one of the two top BLs of all time and the best Filipino BL by a wide margin, athough I'm sure there are Gameboys fans that would disagree.

I Told Sunset About You is only 5 eps, but is just sublime in its storytelling, cinematography, and acting. It's a coming of age story, but the characters are unique and different - for example, one of them is really weird, but in a charming way. I think it would probably win a vote for Best BL.

Top Secret was actually awful. If they'd just focused on the main four guys it would have been a cute show, but it's like they realized they had no high school kids or engineers in the story so they stapled them on for no apparent reason.

I much prefer a glacial plot where nothing happens to a bag of tropes - I don't think there have been any in Bite Me. Nobody's even tripped and been caught yet! How can anyone be in love if they don't trip and fall into someone's arms?

I like all that too - I'm only disappointed because it has 100 times more potential than the average BL and I was so excited at first. You'll get no argument from me about Don't Say No and Lovely Writer (to be fair, Top Secret got totally derailed by COVID). At least this has characters and situations that make sense! And the acting is much better and the production is top-rate. There are still 5 eps for this to get somewhere.

I found with today's episode that I still have "BL character with knife" PTSD - I cringe whenever anyone is chopping anything. I'm always expecting that someone will have to get out the gross brown q-tip.

I didn't get past ep 4 of TT2 - but I'm tempted to watch it now.

I don't think Mark is a bad actor - I just think he's miscast. I don't think he's a great actor, but he's competent enough for a BL.

The cinematographer is very talented - the director/screenwriter I'm not sure about. We'll see. The acting overall is quite good.

Your point 5 I can't agree with. The plot development is no slower than some BLs, but not most BLs. Sure, it's better paced than Make It Right 2 or Love Sick 2 (or almost anything 2), but we're on ep 7 and nothing has really happened. I loved the first episode, liked the second, and now it's sort of a habit I hold onto in the hope it will get moving with the comptetition.

I think it was a mistake to market it as a BL - it really isn't. I'm not sure what it is, really. Maybe that's the problem - I'm not sure anyone thought this through. This ep we finally heard it explicitily stated that Aue like Aek, but why? We have no insight into that. How does Aek make him feel? Does he like Aek for who he is, or does he like the idea of Aek? The only details we get are the lyrics of that sappy ballad they play over and over. This ep, we got the same fakeout we've had several times now - "Everything's great with you forever by my side. Um, As an employee." Sigh.

Slow pacing is fine - but not if it's moving in a circle. The only thing in this episode that I didn't feel deja vu over was the new hot evil chef and the desert that camera-boy was photographing. But even Hot Evil Chef is symptomatic of a problem. Instead of developing the relationship with the other evil chef, we've introduced an entirely new one out of the blue, so now we've hit reset again. And I'm sure the bag of evil chefs hasn't been exhausted yet.

I was sure this would be in my top three BLs after the first ep - as it is, I forgot it was even on today - I was checking WorldofBL for something else and this was at the top of the feed. I think I said before that this is is all style over substance, and I haven't seen anything to change my opinion. The style is beautiful, but that's not enough to keep this high on my list.

One thing I'll say for this: it isn't full of flashbacks to scenes we've already seen a dozen times, like a certain other slow-burn BL. Like a lot of people have said, the problem isn't the slow burn - it's the total lack of anything happening, except to minor background characters, all of which had way more story movement this ep than Aek and Aue have had for the entire series so far.

I like the food porn, I like setting the scene, showing us where Aek is from and what has made him who he is. That's all great. But this is Ep 7. I don't like all the unnatural dialog unnatrually delivered. I guess I should be grateful that I got to write the opera I've been meaning to get to in the pauses between every phrase everyone speaks.

At this point I'm here to look at pretty things - like that desert at 30:14, Aue in general, and now the new hot evil chef character. The casting director of this series is the best casting director.

But this is giving a lot of people an opportunity to feel smug and superior if they like it, so it's pproviding some service, I guess. Solipsism5 is the only person who's managed a defense of this without being a condescending jerk.

I was thinking that too. The new villain is really hot though. Whoever the casting director is for this show should get an award of some kind.

I disagree. ITSAY and GSP are the way to do slow burn romances. I love slow-burn romances. This is a no-burn romance. Think about it - if I asked you to describe the plot of ITSAY, it would take you several paragraphs. What is it for this show? Nothing has happened. Was the plot advanced at all this ep? Your post is incredibly condescending. People who find this non-moving don't want "steamy sex scenes" - that's making a lot of smug assumptions.