lietk12

> life and memory
Oooh, those themes, along with "time", are probably my three favorite themes in art! I've been procrastinating on watching Eien no Kinou because of how intense I heard the heartbreak was, but maybe there'll be a chance when I can watch that as a substitute for Ko Young's wasabi-eating challenge in an attempt to let the sadness pour out

It looks like the final three texts Yeong received from Nam-gyu are:
1. A quote from George Eliot (I think this was received and translated in episode 1)
2. "If obsession isn't love, then I've never been in love yet" (received and translated early in episode 2)
3. An announcement that Nam-gyu died around 13:00 on December 16, 2016; and the location of the funeral home.

Since there's a scene in the middle of ep. 2 (after Nam-gyu picks up Yeong) where Nam-gyu is speeding enough that Nam-gyu pointed it out, and then is driving in such a distracted way that Yeong tells him to keep his eyes on the road, I think it's left open-ended whether Kim died by speeding into a crash due to 1) general distracted driving, or 2) distracted driving because of being distracted by thoughts about Yeong, or 3) intentional reckless driving due to suicidality. But regardless, Yeong probably blames himself - near the middle of ep. 1, Yeong had called Nam-gyu a very conservative driver (and not as a compliment) in response to Nam-gyu driving at the legal maximum speed limit because driving "any faster would [have been] dangerous". This suggests that between ep. 1 and ep. 2 Nam-gyu had become less concerned about driving safety after meeting Yeong, for one reason or another.

Ooh, thanks for the recommendation - I've been saving City of Sadness for a special day with a block of several hours to feel some Emotions, but I had forgotten to add Flowers of Shanghai to my queue!

I think I had watched The Assassin just after rewatching Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon - so my expectations were totally uncalibrated. But even then, The Assassin was still amazing! Definitely a film I want to rewatch so I can appreciate it more.

Yeong goes on the dating/hookup app and sees a profile with the same name "Q" as the name Gyu-ho had previously used on that app (which we could see on the night he stormed out of the apartment before returning). The dating profile lists its favorite artist as "Kylie Wilde" (which was a bit of knowledge shared between Yeong and Gyu-ho), and Yeong knows that Gyu-ho is supposed to return to Korea soon. Yeong matches with the profile in hopes that it belongs to Gyu-ho.

Yeong meets "Q" (actually a Japanese businessman named Takahashi Ikuo who introduces himself as "William Habibi"). Presumably, they hook up, and they continue hooking up in the subsequent days/weeks. Before one of these subsequent hookups (at the same hotel as before), "Habibi" invites Yeong to accompany him on a trip to Thailand.

Yeong arrives in Bangkok, and checks in alone at the same hotel where he had previously gone on vacation with Gyu-ho (because that's the hotel "Habibi" had booked). We see a flashback of his joyful memory of arriving and settling in together with Gyu-ho at the hotel on that previous trip. Back in the present, Yeong is alone in the hotel room because "Habibi" is busy with business. He soaks in loneliness as he wanders through the city, revisiting a mall he had previously visited with Gyu-ho - and remembering more of the joys of that previous trip, starting with being in that same mall, through another flashback. Back in the present day, Yeong and "Habibi" get drinks and wait for fireworks. We get another flashback memory of the rain scene from ep. 6, but this time shown from a different, less idealized/glossy perspective. In all of these flashback memories so far, we see Yeong and Gyu-ho experience disappointment at various mismatches between idealized expectations of how things would go versus the reality of how things actually go. But this last flashback ends with an appreciation of experiencing life even with those mismatches, by experiencing life together with a lover. Notably, one of Gyu-ho's lines here while lying down on the road is "I open my eyes and see the sky".

Now the story shifts to the narration and perspective of "Habibi", probably on the taxi ride back from drinks. He talks in retrospect about how sometime in the past he had temporarily lost his vision for some unknown reason, so he had been stuck in a hotel room for two weeks of his travel. His last/only memory before his vision loss was of lying down and seeing the ceiling of his hotel room (maybe the opposite of Gyu-ho lying down and seeing the sky). Now that he's regained his vision, he keeps lying down and looking at hotel ceilings in his travels. We see him doing this in the hotel now that he and Yeong have returned from drinks, and then he walks to the shower and collapses there in despair. Yeong finds "Habibi" repeatedly whispering a phrase to himself which Yeong had previously translated for him (on the day they had first met) as "you're fucking evil". Yeong picks up "Habibi"'s phone and sees a wallpaper with "Habibi" and "Habibi"'s wife and daughter, and a bunch of disappointed messages in Japanese (presumably from "Habibi"'s wife) - in chronological order, transcribed by Google Translate:
- [20:56] これ以上生きる意味がわからない。 (Google translates this as "I don't know what the point of living is anymore.")
- [21:07] あなたの娘が可哀想だと思わないの? (Google translates this as "Don't you feel sorry for your daughter?")
- [21:41] 家族みんなあなたのこと待ってるよ。最後になるかも知らないからなってきてほしい (Google translates this as "All of my family is waiting for you. I hope it will be the last time". Maybe the second sentence is cut off in the middle.)
- [22:13] 私はもう死んだも同然だわ。(Google translates this as "I'm as good as dead.")
- [22:15] 12 missed calls
It sounds like maybe these messages are about "Habibi"'s absence from some family event because he is in Thailand with Yeong. Maybe "Habibi" had lost his vision during the Thailand trip and missed the family event as a result? In the novel (which has some plot differences from the drama for this story arc), actually there was a family member who had cancer so she wanted him to return. Either way, "Habibi" seems to feel ashamed about living a double life. We flash back to another memory of Yeong and Gyu-ho's time in Thailand, again with similar themes as the previous flashbacks, and again in stark contrast to the kind of loneliness/sadness/etc. which Yeong and Habibi have both been feeling separately-while-together in Thailand.

Back in a present-day morning in Bangkok (probably the day after the fireworks), Yeong wakes up next to the bed where "Habibi" is sleeping, writes a farewell letter to "Habibi" (in which he expresses his hope for Habibi to find self-acceptance), and leaves because he wants to live wholly as himself and with authentic love (i.e. "sharing ourselves exactly as we are", which probably looks quite different from what Yeong and "Habibi" were doing with each other).

According to Wikipedia, in the original novel the main character (the narrator) isn't named (but I'm reading the novel now and I see he does get addressed as Young at one point); his friend/apartment-mate is named Jae-hui. The original novelist wrote the screenplay for the drama series, and it seems like he made an intentional creative choice to rename Jae-hui's character to Mi-ae in this adaptation, and to rename the title of part 1 of the novel the same way for the first two episodes of the drama. There's an interview ( http://dazedkorea.com/fashion/article/2818/detail.do ) where the director of the drama's first two episodes, corresponding to the novel's first part, says something like: "‘Mi-ae’, the only one of the four parts to have a changed title, also draws attention for its change in narrative. [...] It was said that they wanted to give Go Young a narrative similar to Jae-hee’s vivid growth process in the original work." (this is Google Translated from the original Korean).

I believe the movie focuses mainly on part 1 of the novel - if so, then the first two episodes of the drama might be reasonably seen as an "alternate universe" version of the movie's plot, focusing much more on Go Young as the main protagonist. Apparently the actors portrayed their characters differently between the film and the drama (according to https://english.khan.co.kr/khan_art_view.html?artid=202410221751287&code=710100 ) - so maybe having different names might help viewers to keep the characters separate between the two adaptations.

omg this makes me so excited to read the novel, thanks for sharing these thoughts about what the drama adaptation changed!

On his passport his legal name is listed as "Takahashi Ikuo". I think he introduces himself as "William Habibi" to his hookups because he's closeted/DL, maybe he wants to keep this part of his life separate from the other part of his life involving his wife and daughter because he feels some shame about living this double life. Or maybe he wants to keep some emotional distance from his hookups by using a pseudonym.

According to https://yalereview.org/article/sang-young-park-queer-fiction , in the original novel the character gave his HIV the nickname of "Kylie Minogue", after the gay icon. I'm guessing they changed the name in the television series to a non-real person, for legal reasons.

In the credits for the episode there's an insert song listed as "Erotic Joke" by 수란: 작사 수란 홍지영 수비 / 작곡 수란 방달 . I'm guessing that this is an original song made for the drama because it doesn't seem to exist on the internet, and because the song title seems to be a reference to one of the dialogue lines about Yeong being Gyu-ho's most erotic joke.

haha you can blame me for marking them as related! to explain myself, here are the narrative resonances I had felt between this series and that film (copied from what I wrote in https://kisskh.at/758821-love-in-the-big-city/recs):

> If you take Love in the Big City's episode-6 relationship arc; combine it with episode 8's nostalgic, melancholic, and temporally disjointed remembrance of times past (and idealized expectations pulled back down to reality) on vacation in a foreign land; intensify the moody sense of loneliness and dislocation; make the humor a bit more subtle; keep the attention to grittier dimensions of gay life, the more explicit elements of gay sex, and the questionable maturity of the very flawed (i.e. human) protagonist; and you film the story in an art-house style; then you might get something like Happy Together.

for a more personal perspective (the reader-response lens for declaring relatedness): the first time I watched this film I was in my late twenties in the middle of a long-distance relationship, and I really couldn't connect with it. then I rewatched it after the end of that relationship, and with a fresher experience of feeling lost in life, and it spoke to me on a much deeper level. now it's one of my favorite lgbtq-themed films, and my favorite new-wave film. similarly, I think I wouldn't have connected with Love in the Big City as much as I do now if I hadn't experienced the beginning and end of that relationship.

oh, and there's also a striking visual connection between these two shots:
Love in the Big City: https://kisskh.at/photos/DkZnB5_3
Happy Together: https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:1100/format:webp/1*rwbOSBr0-3nA1YAmCzoj-w.png

"Kylie" (Kylie Minogue in the original novel, Kylie Wilde in the drama adaptation) is Yeong's nickname for his HIV status. He explains this nickname towards the end of ep. 5.

it's just the usual incessant media-consumption Discourse™ trapped in a rat's-nest of various gratuitously-entangled artificial binaries about genre labels ("BL" vs. "gay/queer media"), the validity of viewership preferences ("fantasy"/"fluff"/"immature"/"garbage" vs. "realism"/"stressful"/"doomer"/"boring"), affective expectations ("happy ending" vs. "tragic ending"), artistic quality & personal taste ("soulless"/"impactless"/"inferior"/"simple"/"shallow" vs. "original"/"groundbreaking"/"superior"/"complex"/"deep"), production industries (thai vs. non-thai, korean vs. non-korean, etc.), and viewership identity (straight women vs. gay men, the two genders of the Most Productive Location of online LGBT-themed squabbling). some of these binaries are relatively harmless on their own (e.g. with some people commenting that they usually watch BLs and feel that this drama is very different from what they normally expect of BLs; or that their personal tastes lean towards fluff or towards realism; or that this drama is special in some way), but the people who bring Discourse™ into the conversation tend to also be smuggling in conceptual baggage (e.g. from previous discussions in other comments sections) which ties those more-benign binaries to other more Discourse-prone binaries, and the result is beef with the metastatic cancer of Discourse™.

then, because the combatants are In the Mood for Anti-love (but not in the fun Tony-Leung-and-Maggie-Cheung-gaze-longingly-at-each-other-while-Wong-Kar-Wai-dithers-away-the-production-budget kind of way) and because paranoid reading is one of the pillars of modern social media's structure of feeling, opinion differences on these binaries get unreasonably extrapolated by some readers (and also perhaps by a few more inflammatory commenters here to sling poop) into obviously-wrong personal attacks on what kinds of audiences are valuable/Good (misogyny vs. heterosexism, philistine vs. snob) and what kinds of art should be valued or even what kinds of art should be allowed to exist (because our unsilicited opinions definitely matter to the corporations/people who have enough money/industrial-power to fund the production of mass media, and because this Discourse™'s rhetoric of art/entertainment production as a zero-sum game is definitely a complete description of reality, and because it is definitely impossible to hold onto the hope for more funding to produce more+better art simultaneously in all of the genres in question).

and of course, because we're on MDL, this form of collectively-self-perpetuated saṃsāra is practiced in the style of daily drive-by shootings where none of the new commenters have learned anything from what was said the day before, because otherwise why would they/we feel the craving to illuminate/inflict their/our Very Original Opinions upon everyone else (most of whom did nothing so karmically evil as to deserve such abuse). as a bonus: because of the narrative content of this series in particular, the Discourse™ here is also seasoned with occasional stray bullets about sexual behavior (including promiscuity as well as the sexual ethics of HIV status disclosure/non-disclosure in the era of U=U and TasP), the relevance of protagonist (dis)likeability, and how gay people are/aren't supposed to behave. enjoy the local flavor! I recommend pairing it with stinky tofu.

as is usual for Discourse In Online Comments Sections™, no commenter ever seems to change any other commenter's conflicting opinions or reach a better understanding of anyone else's different positions. rather, I suspect that they/we are actually mostly talking past each other at some imagined peanut gallery and at some imagined debating partner who is more convenient (and less nuanced) to argue against than the other actual participants in the Discourse™. people who post more conciliatory stances (perhaps in an attempt to harmonize the combatants Once And For All) don't seem to make much of a lasting impact on the Sisyphean project of redirecting this river of sewage, so maybe it's their/our own damn fault for engaging at all and extending the slow painful undeath of useless discussion across the MCU (kisskh Cinematic Universe). meanwhile sane readers (thus, not me) are probably just silently scrolling past and doing better things with their finite time on this planet.

on the bright side, at least all this chattering is very useful for escapism from other more existentially-satisfying pleasures (and/or from the anxiety-inducing Horrors of our time), for giving ourselves an excuse to feel superior over random strangers on the internet, and for generating hot air to keep our rooms warm! isn't the internet wonderful?

yeah haha, it was probably more of an emotion process than a logical thought process - I could imagine someone reacting in those ways out of a feeling of shame (at being exposed vs. at being denied) and anger (at having a decision made for him without his input, in the context of homophobia, vs. at again having a decision made for him without his input, again in the context of homophobia). perhaps part of the process of developing wisdom as we go through life is learning to bring our emotions and thoughts together into more balance so we respond to situations in ways that are more aligned with our values - or at least that's what I heard in a therapy session a few years ago. when I was in my early twenties, I also did things which don't look logically consistent in hindsight! (no comment on how that's going now that I'm in my early thirties)

Thanks for the clarification that you do treat real people differently from this character! My previous message was not intended as advice about anything, but rather just as a hope that you do indeed already make that distinction. I had been unsure because your language reminded me of my own negative self-talk in the past in that self-talk's harshness, content, and black-and-white quality, as well as some (perhaps unfair) criticisms I heard from my father in the past - it sounds like my own personal baggage led me to read your tone of humor in a different way than what you had meant.

From your response, I realized that I had misunderstood what you were saying about the trope of the writer writing about their own life experiences. I think I understand more clearly now what you originally meant.

I totally agree with you about the style of the last two episodes! I really loved their use of longer takes, handheld camerawork, scene compositions, and their overall vibes.

regarding Habibi: he's a closeted/DL Japanese businessman with a wife and a daughter at home. He lost his vision for some unexplained reason (the hospital couldn't figure out) and as a result got stuck in Thailand for two weeks, I guess until his vision recovered. When Yeong picks up Habibi's phone in the shower (where Habibi is sitting in a despairing mood, repeatedly whispering to himself the phrase "규탄 해라" which Yeong had previously translated to him in ep. 7 as "you're fucking evil"), there are a bunch of disappointed messages in Japanese (presumably from the wife) - in chronological order, transcribed by Google Translate:
- [20:56] これ以上生きる意味がわからない。 (Google translates this as "I don't know what the point of living is anymore.")
- [21:07] あなたの娘が可哀想だと思わないの? (Google translates this as "Don't you feel sorry for your daughter?")
- [21:41] 家族みんなあなたのこと待ってるよ。最後になるかも知らないからなってきてほしい (Google translates this as "All of my family is waiting for you. I hope it will be the last time". Maybe the second sentence is cut off in the middle.)
- [22:13] 私はもう死んだも同然だわ。(Google translates this as "I'm as good as dead.")
- [22:15] 12 missed calls
It sounds like maybe these messages are about Habibi's absence from some family event which he missed because he had to stay in Thailand for longer than expected due to his vision loss? And Habibi is experiencing a lot of self-loathing.

regarding the news about the phytoncide mattress: I'm guessing Yeong's dad ran the company which made or sold the mattresses (since the news broadcast says the company was run by a "Mr. Go", and since Yeong's dad gave Yeong one of the carcinogenic mattresses) and will be in a lot of debt for lawsuit settlements regarding the carcinogens in the mattresses.

for the sake of the people around you, I hope you are practicing more compassion towards them than what you've expressed here towards the ML and the screenwriter. I mean this very sincerely. 🙏

We have a responsibility to be nuanced, precise, and careful in making any claims about HIV transmission and treatment efficacy, including treatment failure. The research work I do is not related to HIV/AIDS or public health, though I do have some basic background knowledge in how this kind of clinical knowledge is produced because of my past involvement (as a PhD student) in research related to other infectious diseases - so I did an informal, non-comprehensive review of the literature related to HIV "virologic failure" (the phenomenon of viral loads going back above a threshold despite adherence to the treatment plan - e.g. because of viral mutations - which might require adjustments in the treatment plan in order to bring viral load back down) and "viral rebound" (the more general phenomenon of viral loads going back above a threshold during treatment, whether because of virologic failure, loss of full adherence to treatment plans, or other reasons) in the era of U=U. Here's my tentative assessment:

1. The scientific consensus from clinical research studies is that there is no evidence of HIV transmission occurring through sexual activity between adult couples when the HIV-positive partner maintains a viral load less than 200 copies/mL [1]; this is the WHO's threshold for the term "undetectable". This is also the generally-accepted threshold for use as protection against sexual transmission of HIV [1, 2]. Also, there is no clear evidence for transmission when the HIV-positive partner maintains a viral load less than 1000 copies/mL [1]; this is the WHO's threshold for the term "virally suppressed". Together, these findings are the science behind the U=U message. Since we're talking about HIV transmission risk, I will follow the WHO [1] in using the 1000 copies/mL threshold for my discussion below of "virologic failure", even though the 200 copies/mL threshold is the preferred threshold in higher-income countries such as the US.
2. The available evidence shows that a viral load between 200 copies/mL and 1000 copies/mL is associated with increased risk of virologic failure (i.e. viral load increasing above 1000 copies/mL), at least among people taking older treatment drugs [1]. The relative risk of virologic failure within the 200-1000 copies/mL range is unknown for people taking dolutegravir (which has become the WHO's preferred treatment drug since 2018) due to lack of evidence about such relative risk [1], which is because...
3. virologic failure with dolutegravir-based therapy is rare [1, 3]. This means that it does still occur (even if rarely).
4. There is plenty of reasonable evidence that an individual's risk of virologic failure decreases the longer they maintain continuous suppression with adherence to the treatment plan [4, 5, 6].
5. I've only found a few studies related to rates of viral rebound in the era of U=U, and I didn't see such studies specifically about virologic failure. The studies I found about viral rebound all made measurements against the 200 copies/mL threshold, rather than the 1000 copies/mL threshold. [6] found a low rate of viral loads rising above the 200 copies/mL threshold over the three years of the study. [7] found a similarly low rate of viral rebound. It also found that the majority of study participants who experienced viral rebound had viral loads which rose above 1500 copies/mL, indicating increased risk of transmission. Note that most participants were on older treatment drugs (and some participants were on more complex treatment regimens which are more difficult to adhere to), and very few were on dolutegravir. [8] found a high rate of viral loads rising above the 200 copies/mL threshold for people in the one-to-four year period after maintaining undetectable viral load for at least six months. But the data used for that study was collected in the time before the U=U campaign (and the patients must've been on older treatment drugs), which I imagine could have significantly affected treatment adherence and thus is a big caveat on the study's relevance to this discussion. Overall, these studies conclude that at least some populations may need more support for treatment adherence and more frequent viral load monitoring.

From this review of the literature, I got the impression that 1) clinical practices, scientific knowledge, and public-health practices are still evolving, in a way that calls for some scientific/clinical claims in previous comments here to be qualified with more caveats; and 2) the main clinical concern among researchers for the issue of viral rebound is the challenge of maintaining consistent adherence to viral load monitoring and treatment plans. As for topics like treatment adherence, HIV-status disclosure to sexual partners, and HIV-prevention practices - which are complex issues fundamentally about human decision-making, emotions, and behaviors - I think we have to practice compassion for the people involved, and we have to acknowledge why they behave differently from how we think they should behave (whether that's about public health goals or personal ethics in sexual relationships). Otherwise, (as Honglou Meng points out) we miss the broader social factors underlying those behaviors. We have to acknowledge & address those factors in order to help people practice health behaviors such as beneficial disclosure, prevention practices, regular testing, etc. [9] discusses the personal, interpersonal, and societal contexts in which decisions are made about status disclosure, while [10] and [11] talk about the relevant social & legal issues in detail specifically for status disclosure in Singaporean and South Korean society, respectively. Given the knowledge that exists about how those societal issues impose barriers to adoption of various practices for public health, I think it would be irresponsible to not acknowledge those factors when criticizing the health-related behaviors & choices of the individual people facing those barriers. It would also be wise to pay attention to the reasons why some people (perhaps including one or more of the other commenters here) don't feel confident in the U=U messaging (e.g. as discussed in [12] and [13]), so that we can communicate more effectively about U=U and about HIV as a manageable chronic health condition.

Sources:
[1] World Health Organization. The role of HIV viral suppression in improving individual health and reducing transmission. 2023. https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/9789240055179 . This is a policy brief summarizing the scientific consensus on HIV viral suppression and virologic failure based on systematic reviews of scientific literature.
[2] Weld E. Limits of Detection and Limits of Infection: Quantitative HIV Measurement in the Era of U = U. J Appl Lab Med. 2021 Jan 12;6(1):324–326. https://doi.org10.1093/jalm/jfaa176 . This is a clinical discussion article rather than a review article; however, I am only using this source as a supplement to the systematic reviews summarized by [1].
[3] Pena MJ, et al. Virological Failure in HIV to Triple Therapy With Dolutegravir-Based Firstline Treatment: Rare but Possible. Open Forum Inf Dis. 2019 Jan 1;6(1). https://doi.org/10.1093/ofid/ofy332 . This is a clinical case report which also refers to the existing literature on virologic failure for dolutegravir-containing triple therapy regimens.
[4] United States Centers for Disease Control. Evidence of HIV Treatment and Viral Suppression in Preventing the Sexual Transmission of HIV. 2022 Jun 2. https://www.cdc.gov/hiv/risk/art/evidence-of-hiv-treatment.html . This is a CDC fact sheet summarizing evidence on HIV viral suppression. It does not cite existing research regarding durability of viral suppression, so I cite [5] and [6] to supplement it.
[5] Dharan NJ, Cooper DA. Long-term durability of HIV viral load suppression. Lancet HIV. 2017 July;4(7):E279-E280. https://doi.org/10.1016/S2352-3018(17)30063-2 . This is a discussion article commenting on a primary clinical research study, which also cites previous studies reporting evidence for correlation between suppression duration and durability of suppression.
[6] Min S, et al. Evaluating HIV Viral Rebound Among Persons on Suppressive Antiretroviral Treatment in the Era of “Undetectable Equals Untransmittable (U = U)”. Open Forum Inf Dis. 2020 Dec;7(12). https://doi.org/10.1093/ofid/ofaa529 . This is a work of primary clinical research. It also cites previous studies reporting evidence for correlation between suppression duration and durability of suppression.
[7] Liu T, et al. Risk of HIV Viral Rebound in the Era of Universal Treatment in a Multicenter Sample of Persons With HIV in Primary Care. Open Forum Inf Dis. 2023 June 6;10(6). https://doi.org/10.1093/ofid/ofad257 . This is a work of primary clinical research.
[8] Gunn JKL, et al. Understanding the Risk of Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) Virologic Failure in the Era of Undetectable Equals Untransmittable. AIDS Behav. 2021 Jan 13;25(7):2259–2265. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10461-020-03154-z . This is a work of primary clinical research.
[9] Canadian HIV/AIDS Legal Network. HIV disclosure to sexual partners: An overview. https://www.hivlegalnetwork.ca/site/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/Legal-Network-HIV-disclosure-to-sex-partners.pdf . This is a (non-peer-reviewed) chapter from a resource kit for service providers.
[10] Jain R, Wong CS, Tan RKJ. Fear really comes from the unknowns: exploring the impact of HIV stigma and discrimination on quality of life for people living with HIV in Singapore through the minority stress model. Sexual Health. 2024 Sep 9;21. https://doi.org/10.1071/SH23204 . This is a work of primary qualitative research.
[11] Choi JP, Seo BK. HIV-Related Stigma Reduction in the Era of Undetectable Equals Untransmittable: The South Korean Perspective. Inf Chemotherapy. 2021 Dec 21;53(4):661–675. https://doi.org/10.3947/ic.2021.0127 . This is a narrative review and discussion article.
[12] Grace D, et al. Challenges to communicating the Undetectable equals Untransmittable (U=U) HIV prevention message: Healthcare provider perspectives. PLoS ONE. 2022 Jul 21;17(7):e0271607. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0271607 . This is a work of primary qualitative research.
[13] Ngure K, et al. “I just believe there is a risk” understanding of undetectable equals untransmissible (U = U) among health providers and HIV‐negative partners in serodiscordant relationships in Kenya. J Int AIDS Soc. 2020 Mar 6;23(3). https://doi.org/10.1002/jia2.25466 . This is a work of primary qualitative research.

I think it was a (joke?)/provocation referencing the fact that "Habibi" is a Japanese citizen (which Yeong knew after opening "Habibi"'s passport in his wallet and seeing Habibi's legal name and nationality)...very bold behavior, I could never

Please mark your comment as a spoiler!

Please mark your comment as a spoiler!

darn, I had only just stumbled upon your very entertaining reviews of other BLs! I was looking forward to more criticism bangers (as I hear the kids say)

but yeah cutting down drastically on BL consumption (or maybe making a strategic retreat to art-leaning films) is definitely the sanity-preserving move given how oversaturated the market is now 🥲