oddsare

Not you making me emotional about this all over again 😭

That point about Thee adjusting his behavior while still being himself? I didn’t even consciously notice that but you’re SO right. No wonder that confession worked - we’ve been watching him earn it the whole time.

adds this show to my “rewatch when I need to feel things” list

“Low rating out of spite” is absolutely valid criticism and I respect the pettiness. Sometimes the most honest review is just “they deserved better than each other” 😂

Thank you! The MDL comment sections basically wrote themselves into SATC characters - I just connected the dots 😄

Right?? Bad Guy My Boss set the bar for beautiful chaos and this one is delivering! 🍿
I feel you on the Jimmy thing. He’s giving “villain origin story but make it a romance” energy right now. Very one-note crappy, as you said. 😅 But if they can pull off a Sorn-level redemption? That would be chef’s kiss. My Stubborn really showed us how a good redemption arc can turn things around.

I’m cautiously optimistic they’ll give us enough depth to understand (not excuse, but understand) why he’s Like That™. Because right now he’s just… a lot.

But hey, the messier the starting point, the more satisfying the groveling arc will be! 😂 I’m ready to see what they’ve got planned to make us go from “this man is THE WORST” to “okay fine, I forgive you.”

Let the redemption journey begin! 🙏✨

OMG YES! Jimmy being worse than “bad boy my boss” is EXACTLY the energy we need. Like sir, the bar was already on the floor and you brought a shovel. 💀

Run showing up to stir the pot? PLEASE. I need that man to walk in with zero context and maximum chaos. Just pure mess-making energy. And Fah being the sugar-free diva? Icon behavior. We love a queen who keeps it real.

The fact that the plot moves at asteroid speed means we’re getting maximum emotional damage per episode. No filler, just chaos. We’re about to be FED. 🍿💕

I’m so ready for this beautiful disaster to ruin my emotional stability every week. Let the mess BEGIN! 🚂💥

Thank you so much - that means a lot. You’re right that this show really does leave a mark. There’s something about the way it refuses easy answers that keeps pulling you back to think about it. I’m glad the post resonated with you!

Thank you! I’ve been thinking about it nonstop, so it felt good to finally write it all down. ❤️

Oh god, the fact that Toh heard the warnings and said “noted, will proceed to ignore completely” is SO on brand. And drunk-in-an-alley Jimmy sounds like exactly the beautiful disaster energy I signed up for. Can’t wait to watch this trainwreck unfold! 🚂💥​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

I’m really glad it added something to your reading of the show! Thank you for reading!​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Thank you so much - that means a lot! There’s something about shows like this that demand you sit with them and think through what they’re actually doing. Happy new year to you too!​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Before ringing in the new year I have some time to write about To My Shore, and I’ve been thinking about this show nonstop, so here we go.

You Shulang refused to be Fan Xiao’s Bodhisattva.
More than once.

That’s the hinge of To My Shore’s Buddhist logic. He refuses the role of savior even when the story keeps handing him the script.

Okay so the Buddhist teaching in To My Shore isn’t sitting in quotations from sutras or in lectures about compassion. It’s embedded in the way the story REFUSES to let love override karma, consequence, and the limits of human beings.

There’s even a specific Chinese verb that haunts this story whether or not the characters say it out loud: du (渡). To ferry someone across. To take them from one shore to another. In Buddhist Chinese the shore, an (岸), is where all that samsaric turbulence finally calms down. One bank is delusion and craving and karmic entanglement. The other bank is lucid acceptance where you’re not being dragged around by obsession anymore. To du someone is to row alongside them through that current. You’re not becoming their owner. You’re their temporary ferryman.

And that’s exactly what To My Shore keeps denying its characters the right to do wrong.

No one gets to outsource their karma. Fan Xiao is the kind of person who in a more conventional melodrama would be redeemed by love: rich, traumatized, violent, convinced that if he clings hard enough to one person all his brokenness will be justified. And he wraps this in Buddhist language. He calls You Shulang his Bodhisattva, talks as if this man is his calamity, his trial, his destined deliverance.

That’s a very perverse use of karma. In classical Buddhist terms karma is not something you hand to someone else to process for you. No relationship, no matter how intense, cancels the need to face your own actions.

The story insists on this. Fan Xiao doesn’t get to say I was in pain, I loved you, therefore the harm I did is part of my path. Shulang doesn’t get to say I suffered, therefore I’m spiritually superior and obligated to stay. Both of them are pulled back again and again to the same core teaching. You cannot use another person to escape yourself. You cannot du someone by making them your emotional washing machine.

The Bodhisattva ideal in Mahayana Buddhism is luminous: someone who already could cross into liberation but chooses to remain in the world to help others cross. That’s the language Fan Xiao reaches for. He wants Shulang to be the one who never leaves, who keeps descending into his personal hell to haul him out.

And the story shows the danger of that ideal when you drag it into an unequal relationship. If Shulang accepts the role of Bodhisattva he legitimizes being hurt, surveilled, weaponized because he’s saving someone. If Fan Xiao insists on seeing him that way he turns his victim into a prop for his own enlightenment.

Buddhist teaching on attachment does not support this. What To My Shore dramatizes is that clinging to your savior is just another form of grasping. Calling it spiritual doesn’t make it less grasping.

So the crucial Buddhist move in the story is Shulang’s refusal. I’m not your Bodhisattva. I can’t even save myself. That’s not a denial of compassion. It’s a refusal to let compassion become a license for abuse. It’s the insight that the Bodhisattva ideal misapplied becomes an excuse to keep people in samsara instead of helping anyone out of it.

This is where du comes back in. To du is to ferry someone across. From delusion to clarity. From grasping to release. But the story quietly corrects a common fantasy. You do not conquer the river by loving hard enough. You cross it by letting go.

That’s why du wan (渡完), “the crossing is finished,” isn’t I saved you and now you belong to me. It looks more like this. Shulang sends the evidence. Fan Xiao goes to prison. The river of consequence doesn’t dry up because someone cried hard enough. They both step into it. Shulang declines revenge but also declines reconciliation on demand. Not killing you is already my greatest mercy is a Buddhist boundary. I will not add new harm but I will not erase the karmic imprint of what you did. Time passes. Lives diverge. When they meet again the power dynamic has dissolved. The old roles have been burnt away.

In Buddhist terms the crossing is finished when the roles drop. When there is no longer savior and sinner. Only two people who have each taken responsibility for their own side of the river. That’s du wan. That’s the ferry ride ending.

From a Christian‑inflected perspective you look for a moment of forgiveness. The scene where the victim says I forgive you and that forgiveness is the seal on a happy ending. To My Shore uses a different logic. What matters isn’t whether Shulang can pronounce absolution. It’s whether both men can stop using the relationship as a way to avoid seeing themselves. The Buddhist question is less have you forgiven and more are you still clinging. Are you still making this person carry your karma.

So when they finally stand on roughly equal ground the Buddhist insight isn’t love defeated sin. It’s Fan Xiao no longer demands to be saved. Shulang no longer defines himself as the one who must save or punish. Neither of them is chanting Bodhisattva over the wreckage to make it meaningful.

If they walk forward together after that it’s not because one has washed the other clean. It’s because both have accepted that love is something that happens AFTER you stop trying to turn another human being into your raft. The shore in the title, the my shore of To My Shore, only actually exists at that point. When both of them step off the boat whether onto the same bank or different ones.

Underneath the car crashes, the sex, the revenge, To My Shore is quietly orthodox in a very Buddhist way. Actions have consequences. Compassion without wisdom becomes a trap. You cannot awaken on someone else’s spine.

Its most Buddhist teaching is simple and hard. Stop insisting that the person you hurt must also be the one who saves you. Stop insisting that staying in hell together is proof of love.

When both of you can finally step off that raft whether onto the same shore or onto different ones that’s when the crossing is really done.

Over Christmas I ended up in the unlikeliest double feature: Sex and the City reruns with my family and Reloved being dissected to death on my timeline. Somewhere between Carrie and Big’s mess, I realized Reloved is basically what happens when you take 90s NYC commitment issues and add paternity fraud, ghosting, and two adorable kids.

For the uninitiated: Sex and the City was the late-90s show that asked “can women have it all?” which really meant martinis, designer shoes, and emotionally unavailable men who communicate exclusively through mixed signals. Carrie Bradshaw was the narrator, a columnist who turned her disastrous love life into weekly think pieces. Her friends, pragmatic lawyer Miranda, sex-positive PR exec Samantha, and romantic optimist Charlotte, served as her relationship advisory board, Greek chorus, and intervention squad rolled into one.

Now imagine that friend group watching a Thai BL drama where two exes reconnect as surprise co-parents.

Chaos, basically.

The premise? Two exes, Than and Akin, reconnect as surprise co-parents and must confront their messy breakup, lingering feelings, and whether love deserves a second shot.

Sounds romantic, right?

Wrong. The internet is DIVIDED.

What the Viewers Are Saying And Why They’re Exhausted

Let me break down the court of public opinion, which has basically turned into a Reddit tribunal:

THE CASE AGAINST AKIN. He ghosted Than for YEARS without explanation, believed his messy friends and one phone call over his actual boyfriend, never pursued a DNA test even after knowing the mom and helping take care of the child, and is now treating Than like a criminal while refusing to explain why. He has been declared a walking red-flag factory: jealous, possessive, and operating on the emotional maturity of a teenager who just discovered subtweets.

THE CASE FOR THAN, AKA EVERYONE’S GREEN FLAG KING. Than is loyal, emotionally transparent, great with kids, and has the patience of a saint dating a stone wall. Viewers are BEGGING him to develop some self-respect, set a boundary, maybe consider literally anyone else. There’s a business partner named Nat who’s looking pretty good right now.

THE MISCOMMUNICATION INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX. Every episode is the same: Than asks “why did you leave me?” and Akin glares and walks away. Repeat for 48 minutes. The show promised a complex, devastating reason for the breakup. What we got? Gossip, insecurity, and one unverified phone call. It’s like if The Notebook was just Ryan Gosling asking “what do you want?” for two hours while Rachel McAdams stares silently into the middle distance.

THE PATERNITY PLOT HOLE. Viewers are baffled that no one, not Akin, not the mother, not a single responsible adult, thought to confirm who fathered this child. If the kid turns out to be Than’s, Akin robbed him of fatherhood. If he’s NOT Than’s, Akin wasted years punishing an innocent man. Either way, we’re in “ma’am this is a Wendy’s” territory of bad decision-making.

Enter the Ladies Who Lunch

So naturally, I started wondering: what would Carrie and the girls think?

CARRIE’S TAKE. Carrie would be FASCINATED by the melodrama. She’d write a column titled “The Ghosting Paradox: When Silence Speaks Volumes But Says Nothing At All” and spend three episodes analyzing whether Akin’s behavior is self-protection or self-sabotage. She’d relate it to that time Big disappeared to Paris. Or was it Napa? Or his ex-wife’s book party? Either way, she’d eventually admit that Big at least CALLED.

Her conclusion? “Maybe the real second chance is the one we give ourselves: to walk away from someone who won’t let us in.” Then she’d buy expensive shoes about it.

SAMANTHA’S TAKE. Samantha would watch exactly one episode, pause mid-argument scene, and announce: “He ghosted you for YEARS? Honey, the only thing you should be chasing is an orgasm and a restraining order.”

She’d also point out that Akin raising his ex’s alleged child is “emotionally masochistic performance art,” and wonder aloud why everyone’s so hung up on paternity tests when there are perfectly good co-parenting apps that don’t require unresolved trauma. Her advice to Than? “Dump him, find someone who uses their words, and for God’s sake, stop making loyalty your ENTIRE personality.”

MIRANDA’S TAKE. Miranda would start out sympathetic. She understands complicated exes and co-parenting chaos. But halfway through episode three, she’d lose patience. “So he CHOSE to believe rumors over having an actual conversation? That’s not romantic, that’s a lawsuit waiting to happen.”

She’d draft a very practical email on Than’s behalf: “Dear Akin, either explain yourself in the next 48 hours or I’m blocking your number and moving on with my life. Regards, Someone With Self-Respect.” She’d also absolutely demand a DNA test and possibly recommend mediation.

CHARLOTTE’S TAKE. Charlotte would be CONFLICTED. On one hand, she’s a romantic who believes in second chances and the redemptive power of love. See: her entire relationship with Harry. On the other hand, she has STANDARDS.

She’d say something like, “I believe people can change, but only if they actually TRY. Where’s the grand gesture? Where’s the accountability? Where’s the proof he won’t just ghost again when things get hard?” She’d also be deeply concerned about what this relationship is teaching the children, and would probably suggest family therapy. Possibly couples therapy. Definitely individual therapy. Therapy for EVERYONE.

The Verdict

As I sat there, surrounded by empty wine glasses and my mother’s commentary (“Why doesn’t he just TALK to him?”), I realized something: maybe we’re all just tired of watching people choose silence when words would fix everything.

Reloved wants to be a sweeping second-chance romance. Instead, it’s become a masterclass in what happens when two people love each other but refuse to actually communicate. It’s like if You’ve Got Mail ended with Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks just staring at each other in Riverside Park, never speaking, for ninety minutes.

So here’s my Carrie Bradshaw moment: is a relationship really worth fighting for if one person won’t even tell you what the fight was about?

As for me? I’m Team Than Finding Literally Anyone Else. Preferably someone who’s heard of therapy.

Or at least someone who texts back.

P.S. If you need me, I’ll be rewatching the episode where Samantha tells a man exactly where he can shove his emotional unavailability. It’s called self-care.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Lin you posted this KNOWING it sounded like a Shakespearean love confession and then hit us with ‘btw they’re brothers’ 💀 you’re a menace to society🤪

I’m SOBBING into my store-bought orange juice that NO ONE made for me because I have zero people in my life who would manually juice fruit they KNOW I hate???

Bold of you to assume the wit and sardonic playfulness ever left, BradBluddy16. I’m just letting Van’s emotional devastation do the heavy lifting this time.

Episode 10 is the moment Van finally runs out of places to hide.

For so long he’s survived on performance. The charming fuckboy. The unbothered friend. The guy who doesn’t do feelings but somehow always has someone in his bed. Underneath that though is a boy who went home one day and never really had a home again. Two dead parents. No extended family stepping in. No soft place to land. He doesn’t process that. He just builds a personality on top of the crater and keeps moving.

Farm quietly slips into that crater and fills it. He becomes the person Van calls without thinking. The one who shows up, drives him, feeds him, absorbs the chaos without demanding anything back. Van comes to rely on that presence the way other people rely on family but he never lets himself name it as love because love is what dies or leaves or gets taken. So he slaps the label “like family” on Farm and treats that as a loophole. If they’re not really lovers then he can’t really lose him. If he doesn’t say I love you then no one can come and rip that love away.

That’s why the relationship with Farm starts as a grab for security, not a confession. He doesn’t ask himself do I love him. He thinks I can’t lose him. The difference is HUGE. It’s how he ends up inviting Farm to be his boyfriend while still acting like the guy who flirts at bars, like nothing about him has to change. In his head Farm is the constant who will always be there even if Van is careless. It’s a deeply selfish logic but it’s also heartbreakingly human. If you’ve learned that everything can vanish overnight of course you cling tighter and pretend you’re not clinging.

Mai’s confrontation in Episode 10 is the first time someone kicks the ladder out from under that logic. Mai doesn’t indulge him. Doesn’t let him hide behind I’m lonely or I just wanted warmth. He calls it what it is: using someone’s love as a buffer against your own emptiness. And the most telling thing is how SMALL Van becomes in that scene. The witty comebacks are gone. He looks genuinely stunned that his best friend is angry on Farm’s behalf, not his. For a guy who’s used to being forgiven and teased and lightly scolded, real moral outrage is new. And it hurts.

Then the old phone blows everything up. Farm reading those messages is basically watching Van think out loud: I knew he loved me, I wanted to keep him, so I used dating as a way to trap him here. It’s brutal because it confirms Farm’s worst fear that his love is a tool, not something cherished. When Farm walks away it’s not a cute lovers’ spat. It’s the first time Van’s he’ll always be there fantasy fails.

And Van’s body immediately tells the truth his mouth refuses to say. He can’t sleep. Can’t eat. Wanders through his day like someone grieving a death. Mai jokingly calling it broken heart syndrome lands half as a meme and half as a diagnosis. This is what actual heartbreak looks like and Van has it. For a man who’s always insisted his breakups didn’t touch him this is the first time we see him shattered.

What makes it feel so painfully human is that he doesn’t suddenly become noble or eloquent. He doesn’t deliver a perfect apology speech on the spot. Instead he flails. He lurks outside Farm’s spaces. He tries to reach out and keeps getting shut down. He looks physically ill from the effort of not collapsing into tears in public. It’s messy, undignified, and exactly how someone behaves when they are realizing far too late that the person they treated as replaceable is in fact irreplaceable.

Underneath the anger and the bad choices Van is a terrified person who never learned how to love without bracing for impact. Losing Farm, really losing him not just threatening to, finally strips away the performance. Episode 10 doesn’t fix him but it makes him honest. For the first time he has to look at himself and admit: I loved him. I used him. And now I’m hurting because of the very thing I was so afraid of, being left behind.

It’s ugly growth but it’s growth. And there’s something very human about the fact that it takes a complete emotional breakdown for him to start becoming the kind of person Farm actually deserved from the beginning.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

OKAY SO logically if they’re running a café on the first floor, CCTV makes total business sense, right? RIGHT?? 📹☕
But my brain IMMEDIATELY went to “WAIT IS THIS A VOYEUR KINK SITUATION??” 💀😭 I can’t be the only one whose mind went THERE first! The way BLs have conditioned us to expect the MOST, I swear! 🤣🫠

Jimmy woke up and chose EFFICIENCY! 🏃‍♂️💨 Two desserts, two stops, maximum romantic impact — this man’s operating like he’s got a delivery route! Peak time management!
But FAH??? Man received that dessert and said “this is someone else’s problem now” 😂💀 INSTANT re-gift! Zero hesitation! That’s cold-blooded! I can’t breathe I’m laughing so hard! 🎁➡️👋

FAH HAS MAJOR BADDIE ENERGY AND I’M HERE FOR IT! 😈 That man is 100% gonna chase after Teh and make it EVERYONE’S problem! Forget slow burn — Fah’s about to turn this into a full-speed pursuit and I’m READY for the chaos! 🔥💅

NOT TOH IMMEDIATELY STARING AT JIMMY’S CHEST 😭😂 The man saw pecs and his brain just SHORT-CIRCUITED! Zero chill, zero subtlety, just pure thirst on main! I was SCREAMING! That’s not even slow burn, that’s instant combustion! 🔥👀