jpny01

I think people are assigning more value to looks than they're admitting. Dean was classic tall, dark & handsome, and Pharm was ridiculously cute. I think it's possible that people also feel that emotionally manipulative is good (i.e. "I felt something, so the story is good"), and crying = good acting. Convincing crying can certainly can be good acting, but any actor can cry.

Also, I think people are influenced a lot by actors' engagement with the fans in social media - that's the only explanation I can come up with for all the Saint-love. When I was reading all the comments gushing over him during WhyRU, I was thinking "Are you watching the same thing I am?"

To me the family dynamic was the most compelling thing in UWMA and I quickly got bored of Pharm's 12-year old early-Victorian virgin act. Have you ever met a college-aged man (or woman for that matter) that thinks a kiss on the cheek is swoon-worthy? At that age, if names are even exchanged before sex that counts as romantic. Also, there was about 1 hour of plot and 16 hours of people wordlessly staring at each other and walking around very, very slowly.

The narrative was straight-forward, but I think it was a mistake to show the suicide in the first minutes. If the two stories were told concurrently, the death and reveal of who is who could have been the best and hardest-hitting dramatic moment of all time, and maybe I could have invested in the earlier relationship, which I didn't really care about since I knew in advance what would happen.

I liked SOTUS at the time, because it was the first BL I watched, so it was something new for me. In retrospect it's fairly average, and the sequel series was pointless and ruined my appreciation for the first series.

I couldn't get through UWMA - I don't understand why everyone loved it so much.

The age of consent in Thailand is 15, so not technically pedophilia - you should be 16 in 10th grade. I feel like we need separate words for desiring children, which is disgusting and evil, and desiring young adolescents, which is very wrong if acted upon (but in my opinion not monstrous and psychopathic like it would be with a pre-pubescent). We can understand it, but most of us can put aside those feelings or channel them into non-physical love, which Pob did here, or at least that's how I interpreted it. We're biologically programmed to feel attraction to people who've hit puberty, so our rejection of adult-minor relations is a societal construct - but a very good and necessary one.

In short, I wasn't uncomfortable at all - in this case only. If it had been people that just met it would have been creepy as f#$%..

I have to be fair, this show has some amazing shots. The ghost scene at the opening of Ep 2 part 4 is one of the most beautiful scenes I've even seen, let along in a BL. If there were more of that, and the beautifully done kissing scene, this would be an awesome show. We were always taught "show, don't tell". You can't get around that by showing people telling - there are way, way too many scenes of people sitting around talking.

EDIT: OK, so ep 3 has the most explicit sex scene I've ever seen in a BL - even more than TharnType - I'm surprised it wasn't censored. It was good, too - very natural and realistic. And yet not at all pornographic - it was definitely a love scene, and romantically shot.

What's confusing? It's a simple enemies to lovers murder mystery roommates to lovers lesbian fake boyfriend to real boyfriend ghost story.

I think I'm following it, but it is a bit of effort. Some of the characters don't act like normal people - like wouldn't meeting A GHOST kind of upend your world? That guy took it so casually. Sure, the ghost is cute, but still...

Hmm. I watched it three times, then looked on YouTube for other trailers - I didn't see any hint of gay = which trailer are you referencing and what's the time stamp? I didn't even see another man except in the photos that flashed.

What? Of course they should be expected to accept an apology! What's the purpose of apologizing if nobody is going to accept it? If there's a pattern of behavior, then maybe the apology is insincere and can be rejected, but making one poor-taste joke 3 years ago is not unforgivable by a reasonable person. Nobody said "Hitler is my personal hero" or "all gay people should be killed".

Me too, and I'm a guy!

A show about fashion design, modeling, and makeup artistry with no gay characters. Hard pass. Korea needs to get over it's homophobia.

Maybe they were daughters or girlfriends of the producers or something. At least if they were funny or advanced the plot I could have dealt - but it neither was the case.

We'll just have to wait and see. All you've discussed above I can live with and dismiss as a young person with a major crush - you can be overeager at that age. But what I can't get around is how he called someone to bribe the drama teacher, and the guy he called looked upset - there's something really non-kosher going on there. Maybe he's just a rich kid, and what he did isn't as disturbing by Philippine standards, but it looks very sinister to an American.

There is a superficial aspect to attraction - it's inevitable and hard-coded in our genes. Being attracted to superficial characteristics doesn't make someone superficial, which is a pretty judgy thing to say. It's only superficial if you care about nothing else. I don't think Marky is sexy as f#$% because of his looks, although that's part of it - objectively he's short and not classically attractive, wears braces, etc, and I might not give him a second glance purely on looks - it's also his personality and attitude.

If there is fluidity, then any label, even if there are more of them, can still make people feel apart, perhaps even more so, as before "q" covered everything not in the "main" catagories, and now you can fail to fit into 50 gender identities. There's a point where you're deliberately setting yourself apart by atomizing gender identity to this point, and in any case the very definitions depend on heteronormative social constructs to make any sense. For example, what is a demiboy? Who decides what it means to be partially a boy and/or partially masculine? The idea of masculinity is a heteronormative social contruct, so the very term demiboy seems to me to be self-defeating. Figuring out who you are doesn't depend on minute variations of gender labels, and in fact I think it can make self-discovery more confusing and self-limiting.

Likewise, finding a group based on a label is judgmental in itself, and divides and excludes rather than bringing people together. I've gotten eye-rolls from non-heterosexuals because I identify as 100% gay male, as if that means I just don't understand gender identity.

I still think it's a phase - but I didn't mean to imply it's negative or "he's in a phase where he won't eat vegetables" if that's what it sounded like - anything that tears down heterosexism is a positive. Maybe I should have said "transition" as I think all these distinctions will become pointless and unecessary in the future - I didn't mean that everything will go back to how it was. We'll probably also view meat-eating in 50 years like we view slavery now, thinking it unbelievable that we could have been so degenerate as to eat other living, feeling creatures.

Bls are predictable in general, aren't they? The only one that has surprised me, ever, is the Shipper, and I'm not even sure that was really a BL. Well, I guess YYY surprised me a few times.

Regarding Jimmy, they did have him come on too strong as a bully and now it's hard to accept him. At least he's not transphobic or homophobic. And I may be a little biased because he's played by an openly gay actor, which is needed in Asia. I don't think he's being manipulative - he didn't need to clean the room spotless and give Joey the whole closet and organize it. He realizes he was an asshole and is making amends.

I think people are passing over some very troubling behavior from Wil. Grabbing someone's hand and publicly announcing you're his bf is totally unacceptable and is sexual harassment, at least by US standards (not as bad as tearing books, which should get the death penalty, as far as I'm concerned). Also, far from being straightforward, he's inserted himself into Joey's life without being asked, and there have been a lot of suspicious coincidences about him just happening to be around at all the right times. And re-watch the scene where he orders someone, who is visibly disturbed, to bribe the drama teacher, which is in itself morally unacceptable, let alone coercing someone else to do it.

Also, a love ballad after knowing someone for a couple of days is way, way too aggressive and creepy, not to mention asking Joey to move in with him. A normal invitation would be "You can stay at my place until you sort out new housing". I think Wil is the villain of the story, and it seems clear to me, but I'm apparently the only person in the world who thinks this, so maybe I'm off.

I agree, people's appearance should be the only reason for me to watch a BL series. Also, I wasn't serious - but let's not pretend what someone looks like isn't important to how people perceive them.

But you don't know anything about him yet, and we've had clues that there are some very troubling things he's dealing with. No excuse to take it out on Joey, but there are still 28 episodes for him to redeem himself. I don't get why everyone loves Wil, who is a creepy stalker - did nobody see how upset and scared the guy he had bribe the drama teacher was? He is not a good guy.

I think I might be the only other Nuan fan. But I'm shallow and easy and he has a slammin' body. The characters are 2-D as you pointed out, but at least the Q characters aren't pathetic and used for slapstick comic relief - I can barely sit through My Day for that reason.

Well, the parts are 30 minutes each, which is fairly substantial. 90 minutes would be a bit much. I'm not loving it so far, but at least it's not homophobic, transphobic, and misogynist like most BLs. EDIT: Never mind, I was wrong. Wrote this before getting through todays ep. Yuck.

If you're going to accuse someone of being a copycat, at least check the dates. Gameboys aired 2 weeks before this did, so there's no way it was a copy, and in any case there is almost no resemblance between the two shows. The format of Gameboys and all the other BLs coming out these days is obvious, and dictated by COVID - what else are people going to do? Social media is a thing, you know - it's not like Gameboys was making some giant creative leap.