jpny01

The idea that there are 50 gender identities is a fad and will seem funny 10 years from now. There are certainly more than 2, so maybe this phase is an important corrective, but these days everyone wants to have their own special identity. At work in the USA you have to fill in your pronoun preferences in the company directory - the first time I had to do that I was really confused. And frankly, gay and straight are the most common, and for a lot of people, bi and other identies really are just a phase on the way to gay - but obviously not for all people. As a best friend, Des is in a better position than you or I to asses Mark, and although she pushed too hard, she meant well. And in any case, the whole point of that scene was to point out that her black & white thinking was wrong, so I don't understand why 90% of the comments about this completely fail to acknowledge this and act like the mere mention of a stereotype, even when it's explicitly rejected, will somehow set back the entire LGBTQ world's progress. Do you think a lot of homophobic idiots are watching this show and are going to nod knowingly?

I don't see why these shows have a responsibility to be Public Service Announcements. The existence of stereotypes is a huge aspect of coming to terms with your sexuality, and realizing they are largely false is part of the journey. When I was a teen, I was unable to conceive of myself as gay because I didn't wear drag and sachay down the street uttering arch quips. And yes, there are other gender identites, but gay and straight are the most common and it isn't Des' fault she's unaware of the spectrum. The important thing is she is well-meaning and cares for Mark and realized she was wrong and apologized. I'm kind of tired of purity tests and intolerance for people who make well-meaning mistakes. If every character starts a story as a perfect person, what's the point of the story?

Because he's sexy as f@$# and I could watch him in 100 series?

Pick-up apps usually confine conversation to asking for additional dick pics and coordinating purely transactional sex. While you can potentially get a relationship out of it, I don't see it happening before the sex part.

I get where you're coming from, and that was my initial reaction too. If you give it a shot, episode 4 is really rewarding. Some of the overused music is in the public domain and so it doesn't cost anything - that can make a huge difference to a very low-budget production. Unless you have someone on your team that can compose music, you can blow all of your budget and just a couple of tracks.

Hmm - I'm not sure I agree with you. Helping a friend come to terms with their indentity is not inherently wrong or bad. Forcing someone publicly is incontroveribly wrong, but what Des did was only misguided in intensity. I had a friend like her when I was that age and it saved me a couple of years of self-discovery.

Cute and sexy as f#$%.

100% agree. That was the hottest scene I've ever seen in a BL - to me it's proof that you can have physical love and still be PG. I hope Thailand is watching. I wish they would up the prodution values a bit, though - the artistry is good in the cinematography, but the execution is not. You either have or don't have the former, and the latter can be improved, so I'm hopeful.

I want to see him in a full-length birthday suit. Sorry, that was crass, but I'm so in love.

My first reaction was to get angry that you are calling something rape that is not rape. Rape is a serious violent crime. But then I realized that you may have misunderstood what you were watching. James fantasized about kissing Sky and unbuttoning his shirt, but he didn't do it. Then Sky grabbed him and the scene cut. Nobody raped anybody. If James had done what he fantasized about it still wouldn't be rape, but that would have been seriously morally unacceptable molestation. James at the end is clearly teasing Sky - he asked sky if anything hurt, and Sky said no. If you're a guy who's been raped, something will hurt.

At least they're not saying "No one: Literally no one".

So you're saying if someone doesn't like the high 5 they aren't allowed to watch Still 2Gether. OK, I'll do what you say and not watch it. If it gets canceled for low viewership it will be all your fault.

You clearly care, or you wouldn't have replied.

Same!

I agree, I just think as I replied elsewhere that GB suffers from being too stretched out and maybe the cliffhangers should have been more organic - in HS they are occassionally a bit cheap (although I think wee all knew the Ep 4 cliff was a dream and that Mico wouldn't take Xav's confession well), but Pearl's introduction was out of character and was an artificial sabotage. For Tina Moran in English, maybe Ms. Boo Khaki? I work in a Korean company and my title is Boo Jang, so you can imagine the direction teasing goes.

Thanks for that insight - I wasn't aware of the debate. To me the Filipino sensibility is a fresh breeze. I don't really like Gameboys (I think it suffers from having been conceived as much shorter and then was stretched out to the point of stalled character development and repetitiveness), but I do like that it's a radical departure from the BL formula. Gav is comfortable with his sexuality and his character is not a 14-year old Victorian virgin like all the Thai BL characters. In any case, I appreciate the tight narrative of Hello Stranger- everything is there for a reason, introduced themes are explored rather than abandoned, etc., and frankly, even with low budgets, the music, cinematography and editing (especially) is way superior in most cases.

Well, remember how nervous Xavier was before and during the serenade, with all his nervous laughter? And how he dressed up and straightened out his room? For him he was really going out on a limb and taking a big risk, and Mico brutally shot him down, calling his feelings a joke. If this were familiar ground for X, I would agree, he wouldn't back down. But imagine your heart falling into your stomach, and the emotional shock of the rejection - you might not be quite yourself for a critical few moments.

Xavier is a confident guy, and so was I - but not about sexuality. If you live in a non-GLBTQ-friendly culture, your ability to perceive yourself as non-heterosexual is very limited. Gay to you is cross-dressing and dancing shirtless on a parade float bedecked in rainbows, not being a stud basketball player or a trivia nerd. So you live a straight life, have a girfriend, don't really understand why guys like porn so much, and mistake your fondness for your girlfriend for romantic love rather than friendship (probably why so many women after the initial hurt end up close to their gay exes), and your romantic love for your male friends as just really close friendship. It's hard to explain how total the internal denial can be. I think that's why BLs seem so to ring hollow to so many gay men - it's just so ridiculous for straight guys (and generally about 75% of the entire male population of the school) suddenly go gay for the protagonist. Women loved Theory of Love, I thought the resolution was laugh-out-loud stupid and inauthentic. I expected the protagonist to move on and find someone else wonderful for his happy ending, not for the callous and selfish straight guy to suddently transform into a loving, sensitive gay guy.

Xavier has no way of knowing if Mico returns his feelings - he thinks maybe, hopes yes, then has his heart machine-gunned, and probably thinks he was overcome by a moment of insanity and backs off. I think after how completely gutted he was by saying goodbye to Mico, and reflecting on how equally gutted Mico appeared, and after the push by his girlfriend and the teacher, he was probably minutes away from calling Mico himself at the end of the episode. And I am 100% sure that even if Mico is hesitant and can't say what he called to say, Xavier is going to force the issue.

Nobody objected to the ridiculous scene in Gamboys where Gav is so hurt by Cairo's accusation and gives a looonggg speech about his backing off and never bothering Cairo again, and Cai just sits there silent until Gav hangs up and doesn't immediately call him back - that was so inauthentic I stopped caring. Plus what's-her-name could easily have repaired the situation by just telling Gav to call Cairo to talk because there's a misunderstanding - there's zero chance that her character would have just sat on the sidelines and watched two friends suffer needlessly. The writing to me is artificial and plot-driven, not character driven like Hello Stranger.

But Cairo and Gav are out and self-aware gay men - Mico - who remember is 17 or 18 - and Xavier are not. Instead of the endless string of random external barriers to overcome to be together, the entire story of Hello Stranger is for both of them to overcome their own internal barriers to come together.

As a gay man with a similar situation at that age, this seems so real to me that ep 6 was too painful to rewatch, and ep 7 was headed there until the saddest scene (saying goodbye), when it was clear that neither of them would be able to deny to themselves what that pain meant. Ironic, but that was the light at the end of the tunnel for me.

So consider this - while a closeted gay boy has no context in which to understand his longing for another man, wouldn't a straight woman have no context in which to perceive this relationship other than as she would a straight relationship, but with the girl replaced by a guy? Who is 100% of the time a bottom (which is way, way more prominent an issue in BL than it is in real life)? That's why I loved 2gether so much at first, because it was two men, not a man and a 14-year old girl trapped in a man's body like most BLs - until they reverted to the formula in the second half and destroyed the show for me.

BLs are almost never about gay people, they're about boys who are only gay for each other, provoking endless unintentionally homophobic rants about how love is not about gender. Love as a concept is not limited by gender, but for individual people it most certainlty is, and to say otherwise is to deny the intense and painful struggle so many LGBTQ people face not only to accept themselves, but to gain acceptance from others. I was 30 before I had overcome internalized homophobia enough to actually have relationships, even though I came out to myself (almost exactly where Mico is, first semester of college), and gradually everyone else.

So to me there's nothing inauthentic in the story - instead of having to overcome the Seme's evil manipulative girlfriend as the (horrifically misogynist) plot, our boys have to overcome their internalized shame and homophobia. It's not easy - it feels like suffocating in an airless cell pounding hard against a thick glass barrier, and on the other side is a terrifying monster that wants to get you. It's not the same as the fear of rejection by your crush. It's the fear of losing everything - including church, family, friends, even your life - by approaching your crush.

I don't understand how you can say there's no discernable relationship between them - they are very clearly in love with each other, just scared about feelings they don't understand. Did you skip over the love serenade at the end of Ep 5 and Xavier's confession? I agree it's not tasteless to mention Catholicism. It's not addressed directly, but even for atheists, Catholicism is deeply ingrained in the culture. I'm not even from the Philippines, but I grew up Catholic and I can viscerally feel the interal struggle Mico & Xavier are having because it was the same for me. Except no happy ending. :( It doesn't matter if you don't believe in the Church's teaching, it's still there. If this story were set in Copenhagen it would be completely ridiculous. But it could work in just about any Catholic culture.

I don't get how it was homophobic, but maybe I missed something you caught. Even Crystal made no qualitative distinction between Xavier's love for her or for Mico. The characters are very young, especially Mico, and having characters with internalized homophobia is not homophobic, it's realistic.

Excellent point about realism vs quality. But sometimes too much of a lack of realism is a quality issue, if the characters don't behave in ways that real people do or have inconsistent characters (like the last few episodes of 2gether when Tine suddenly starts behaving like a 19th c ingénue with consumption) - or if the fantasy elements are so horrendously tired that you roll your eyes, like the uke (there's ALWAYS seme and uke. Sigh.) tripping, the seme catching him, their faces really close together. Don't get me started on accidental kisses. If you fell down the stairs, plunged into someone and your lips mashed together, there would also be blood and teeth flying everywhere. That's a stupid fantasy element because it's ridiculous. I'll happily accept the fantasy "rules" of the BL (like the body swap in The Shipper, or one of the pair being dead like in He's Coming to Me), but often the writing is awful and inconsistent - and there needs to be some realism within the fantasy framework. Dark Blue Kiss had amazing everything when it came to the quality of the production, but the writing was lackluster at best. For me, Hello Stranger is a perfect balance.