jpny01

Maybe he had a stroke or something.

It's more total nonsense. There's a difference between "joking around with" and "bullying". Boys joke around with each other. If they feel comfortable enough to include a gay guy, that's a good thing. If they feel they need to walk on eggshells around him, that's a bad thing.

My best friend has an extremely conservative family - after college I spent a year teaching English in Poland - the first thing his dad asked me when I got back was "did you get any Polish sausage?" That was funny, not bullying.

Anyway, I generally like this series - it needs the energy turned up a couple of notches - not the worst problem a BL has ever had.

I don't know why I said bottle. That's very strange. A reverse Freudian slip?

Aww, thanks.

That's true in real life, but not BL. They boy in question has usually lived a happy and totally straight life, then suddenly his sexuality does a 180 because he catches someone who trips. That's my problem with it - it's simply not true to life at all. And it's usually explicit - "I'm not gay. I only like__________", i.e. he's straight, but somehow Boy X has caused his feelings to transcend gender so that he could be in love with another guy. I know a lot of people find that somehow romantic, but I find it stupid and insulting to people who have had to struggle with their sexuality and sociatal acceptance thereof.

I was just watching Given, and it's funny that everyone is mindlessly imitating Yaoi from 30-40 years ago and actual Japanese BL is decades ahead - Given is so fresh and creative. Like you said the Philippines started out so innovative and exciting, and now they're bargain-basement Thai. I still think Stuck On You is not bad, but it could have been better if they'd trusted what they were doing and not fallen back on tired cliches.

But we had no idea about all that in the first couple of eps - it just seemed like he didn't like Tae for the bottle incident and his general weirdness. But we still wanted them together - isn't that "trope conditioning"?

I didn't make the connection with the OST - he is very good.

I was just teasing. It almost never ends up happily in real life - that's one of the reasons we like BL and why unhappy endings make people want to burn things down.

1. Acting. 2. Writing.

This feels like it was written as a screenplay - too many BLs are adapted from meandering novels that end up just being frustratingly drawn out as a visual series. That's why ITSAY and IPYTM worked so well too - written for the visual medium. BL can get formulaic, and even if we like the chemistry between the actors, there's a part of you that knows you've seen this 1,000 times already and it's a little like if you take a document and copy it, then copy the copy, copy the copy of the copy, etc. It just gets faded.

This series isn't particularly original, but it avoids a lot of the cliches, and the relationship between them develops naturally instead of because Best tripped, War caught him, and they stared at each other uncomfortably long until War turned gay, like is usually the case.

Best seems to have won War's heart through music - doesn't it mean more when it's for a substantial reason like that rather than a shallow cliche?

So then did the girl end up with the notebook and think Dew had written the song about her, then realized at the performance that Best wrote it forabout Dew, and that Dew was digging it? I don't know how else to take the last scene with her sitting in the bleachers and conspicuously plopping down her attaché case.

But it seemed like Dew had read it from the note he left.

Anyway, I liked this. I sill thing War is too... mature, I guess, but he's such a great actor I can overlook it. They had the trope where any uke that ventures anywhere near a basketball court will get beaned every single time, but it was woven into the plot and made a "thing", rather than a throwaway "check the box" trope. And Dew intercepting it was a nice variation on a theme.

They put way too much makeup on the guys in some scenes - it was marring War's beauty so it was hard not to notice. I loved his giant collection of skincare products. I guess he's out to his mom - but if he isn't, she knows. BTW, there were some scenes where his calves looked like they'd been mauled by a pack of irate weasels. I hope he didn't get an infection.

Yin has improved a lot as an actor.

You taped a photo of a guy you had a crush on to a page in your notebook you'd written a love song on, then crashed into him and left the notebook which he read and realized he felt the same way about you?

In the opening, I was amazed at how seamlessly the product placement was with the plot - I barely noticed it. That was sarcasm. I get that they need sponsors, but come on. Although X naked and wet helps soften the blow.

To me, it feels like there's one good BL, the one with Than and Din, with two really awful ones stapled to it. The one with X makes no sense, and the one with the teacher and the other guy is so badly acted that I suspect they were given the script seconds before filming started and so they just decided to stare at each other unenthusiastically for a really fairly astonishing length of time.

But Than & Din do have screen presence, I mean come on, have you SEEN Din? And there's a bit of chemistry there, too. I'm not sure I can make myself watch the 2/3 bad parts, but if the stories barely intersect, maybe I can watch the good 1/3 and not miss anything.

I love how expert grandma is at manupulating hot boys to do everything for he while she sits around living a life of leisure.

Do you mean Mean's joke? I apologize, I'm not sure what you're referring to. But if it was Mean, I also read into his comments that he was taking a poke at the way fans of ships mercilessly assault actors who "betray" their ship. How many people refused to watch He's Coming to Me, even though Singto had a way better partner that he has a lot more chemistry with? Doesn't matter, because he was cheating on Krist.

He said he won't appear in any BL outside his ship - so he didn't really say he's totally leaving BL forever. Although he effectively is because who would chance another love story with TinCan after the last disaster? And he's appearing in this, which is a BL...

I will also admit that was a funny scene, and it prevented it from being literally exactly the same scene we get every morning after. The paper thing was witty and I really wish we'd get more of that in BL.

The affable earnestness doesn't come from the copy couple, and certainly not Both & New Year - it's because the main trio are so f#$%ing cute I can't stand it. So why couldn't they have made it just about them, and not thrown in a billion other characters that have nothing to do with anything else? It's like they ripped a chapter each out of a high school and a college BL and stapled them to the script of this one. Why? Because if there are no blue shorts or engineers, it's not a BL, so let's put them both in just to be safe.

The dad thing was so badly written it surprised even me. There needed to be just one short scene to lay the foundation for that, like Mom lecturing Dad and telling him not to be like their parents.

That's why I liked Brothers so much - the plot was a meandering mess, but people always acted like, well, people.

But I'm with you - I do like this. I'm obsessed with Aof, and I really like Simai and Eak too. Even Lukmo when he's not scowling and sulking, which is beyond old at this point.

If a significant other tried to stick his fingers in my face in a restaurant I'd slap his hand away - nobody does that. That's why sometimes it's hard to gauge things in BL - people don't act like actual people, so it's hard to connect to what they're feeling or intending. Since everyone that's ever eaten anything on a BL has gotten a chunk of food stuck on their lip and someone has invariably wiped it away, it's so normalized that it has no significance anymore.

That's more or less why I get irritated by tropes. They're lazy writing and directing, as if the production doen't trust their actors to portray things like being attracted to someone without having to catch them when they trip.

So maybe Daon likes Tae, or maybe he's just really nice to him as a red herring. We won't know until they use their words because important things like that aren't portrayed by acting, they're portrayed through tropes and sound effects, or that stupid triple-take shot to let us know something important is happening, as if we couldn't figure that out ourselves when there's a first kiss.

Ask yourself WHY you're rooting for Shin Woo - were you in the first couple of episodes when he was a total asshole? A lot of people were - because we're programmed by the formula to root for the two people we know are going to get together from the first 30 seconds of the series by the tropes. Like accidentally shoving a bottle up someone's ass, as if that were actually possible. How do you trip and land so that you're shoving a bottle up someone's ass? Humans put out their hands to break their fall, not thrust them upward.

In 1,000 Stars was there one single trope that told you Chief was in love with Tian? No. It was done through acting and the interaction between the characters - and it was very subtle - but we knew it. We didn't need Tian to shove a bottle up his ass.

Yes, but in BL you never see anything but the palacial rich-people areas. Nobody takes trains, nobody lives in a middle-class place, etc. I get that's part of the BL "thing", but it's nice to see characters that are normal every once in a while instead of so rich that they have a bodyguard raised from early childhood to protect you and supply you with his blood, or when people can't figure our whose father sent an army of henchment to beat someone.

Right - I thought it was refreshing that these are normal people that don't drive luxury cars everywhere or buy last-minute plane tickets to resorts. BLs are often so sanitized that it barely seems like they're in Thailand.

I might agree about Boat & Gun vs Pond & Phuwin, but it's early yet. I thought Pond & Phuwin had good chemistry early on and it got stale later. We'll see with these two. I'm not sure I'll ever get tied of Boat's soulful eyes, and I'm very sure I'll never get tired of... never mind, you know me already.

I'm mystified that people thing his behavior is hurtful, but maybe it's a generational thing. To me, you tell someone if you're interested in they say yes or no. I guess things are differerent now.