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Flower shops usually get orders to be filled and delivered (hence Kavin giving Uncle Ga a new car for deliveries) rather than relying on walk-in customers. We see them in their quieter moments, but the majority of a job like that is actually arranging the flowers. You get glimpses of this mostly with Kaning and at the funeral.

I agree with Mone about going over to Twitter. And I agree with you about how disappointing the comment section has become. It was so fun for so long!

I jumped ship when the discussions over here became mostly people writing bad fanfic ideas, or just literal descriptions of scenes, and confusing it for analysis. You'll be able to find many of the same people by their same profile names over on Twitter too.

Try searching #F4Thailand

I like your post ^^

To go further with your point about Mona and Kavin being trapped in the past...

My takeaway was that the show beautifully blurred the line between romance and friendship. He is so preoccupied by memories of Mona, haunted by them even, because it was such a precious friendship (not because of his romantic feelings for her)

Watching the episode, I didn't feel at all like Kavin had lesser feelings for Kaning than for Mona. We saw his sincerity with Kaning in all the little moments throughout the show (and also so nicely shown to us in flashbacks from his POV) so we know his feelings for her are deeper than even he realizes until his epiphany.

His feelings for the loss of Mona's friendship didn't cheapen his feelings for Kaning (it wasn't like he was "settling for her" etc). But, in the same way, his feeling for Kaning and Kaning's feelings for him didn't cheapen his past friendship with Mona either.

Hahaha. I was thiiiiiis close to adding Something in the Rain & One Spring Night with the tag (Jung Hae In <3 <3 <3)

I already added Secret to my list from our previous discussion (and I'm just waiting for the right mood for angsty revenge) but otherwise, we have a lot of overlap lol, though I haven't seen Lost so it's also going on my list!

Hope you enjoy 2521!

Haha. Well right now I would ABSOLUTELY recommend Business Proposal and Twenty Five Twenty One (both on Netflix). They're currently airing, so it's helping me stretch out my week between F4 episodes lol.

Business Proposal is having just as much fun playing with tropes as F4T and I am absolutely in love with every scene between the FL and her BFF.

Twenty Five Twenty One is cute, funny, and heartwarming as hell. It's set in the 90s for a fun nostalgia feel too. I have already teared up multiple times watching it (in a very good way).

Since you asked (and who doesn't like to recommend!) here are some of my favs in a variety of genres (all Korean or Chinese since they've been my drama bread and butter till now):

(youth) A Love So Beautiful -china; Weightlifting Fairy
(family) Go Ahead; Stars Falling from the Sky
(reconnecting couple) 18 Again; Go Back Couple; Cunning Single Lady
(melo) Just Between Lovers
(makjang) Shining Inheritance
(wuxia) Goodbye My Princess; The Untamed
(xianxia) Love and Redemption
(bromance) Goblin
(sismance) Hi Bye, Mama!
(historical) The Story of Ming Lan; The Sword and The Brocade
(metaphorical) The School Nurse Files
(absolute crack up) Vincenzo
(pure romance) You Are My Glory

Btw, send me your recommendations too. I'm super curious about your favorites.

I watch so many shows that are just meh and then every time I find a new amazing show that really just *affects* me, I get this weird feeling in my stomach that's like "but what if I never find another show that makes me feel this way again???" And then when it's done, I end up going through so many more meh shows before I land on another amazing show again and then I have the same feeling lol. It's a weird cycle, but it gives me life.

Omg. So, I just watched a YouTube video compilation of the Ji Yung/Ga Eul scenes for episodes 1-10 and Ji Yung is pretty much just negging Ga Eul the entire time.

I took notes lol:

-He scoffs when she asks him to take a photo of her while she's sight-seeing.
-He scoffs again when he comes across her taking selfies on the beach and says condescendingly, "you're trying hard".
-He pretends like he's trying to be helpful as he suggests how to dress sexy since he thinks she's trying to seduce Jun Pyo
-Gets into the paddle boat (chases her into the boat) and says he'll help paddle while also saying, "though your legs do seem strong enough"
-When talking about Ga-Eul going on a date he says, "that's quite a feat for her"
-When he talks about girls not looking good when they cry (far from the intimate set-up between trusting friends like between Kavin/Kaning), it happens when he sees her crying on the side of the road, walks up to her, and without any lead up just tells her that girls don't look good when they cry.
-Makes her feel terrible on valentines day when she brings him chocolate to thank him for pretending to be her boyfriend, "leave it there with the others (points to big pile of presents)" and then chases after her to say "this is why I dislike innocents like you...acting is just acting, if you take it seriously then we have a problem".

Textbook negging.

Moreover,

-He helps her onto a horse when she doesn't ask him to, and previous interactions indicate she wouldn't have consented to the touching
-Thinks, "Girls like Jandi have a thing for bad boys"
-Follows her onto a paddle boat (which she runs to in an attempt to get away from him) in order to get information out of her about Jandi
-One of the only decent interactions between them was when he brought her out to cheer her up and makes her literally watch him play the saxophone lolololol (nightmare date irl)

Whoo boy. And Ga-eul's character seems to sum up mostly as "not like other girls" because she acts rude to the playboy instead of swooning over him (well, at least until he wears her down through all the negging sheeeeeesh it really is that bad).

Woah, I feel the opposite lol.

At Mira's party, I remember giving a slow clap when the writers added Kaning to the party just so they could have a meet-cute for her and Kavin. I LOVED that they got to meet on their own terms before Kavin went to Kaning with a scheme in mind. It was a beautiful set up (for Kaning's smack down "trust your friend") and also a way to build up their relationship from a more solid foundation than usual.

Also, every time the writers put them together, I was impressed at how well they focused on THEM.

One of my favorite instances of this was when Gorya and Kaning go to the hostess club and they meet Kavin there... It's pretty much all Kaning and Kavin talking together and Gorya is kind of sidelined in the scene. It helped emphasize really early on that Kaning and Kavin existed as characters outside the main narrative.

There have been other instances of this, by the way, that was just a particularly applaud-worthy one imo.

Haha!

Episode 11 convinced me that it's a deliberate character choice. When the guards are trying to get her to shush and Thyme keeps having to shush her (and she was really only talking at her normal level lololol) it made me decide they have her do that on purpose.

It could be related to her shouting off the rooftop? As in, whenever she's venting emotions, she can't help but shout?

"As a person who wields and understands power, he's affirming that Gorya and Kaning are powerful too." <-- yes! Love this.

I endorse your whole comment, but wanted to highlight that quote in particular because it moved me.

What is your understanding of character depth, btw? It seems like we might be working with different definitions. Backstory adds to depth, for sure, but so does a character's worldview as well as wants/thoughts, and changing behavior over time.

If Kavin is seeing and interacting with the world as the son of a government employee (with all the caution and eye for political maneuvering) that's also depth.

If we watch Kavin's interactions with Kaning subtly deepen over time... going from using her (to stop Gorya) to helping her (for Gorya), to always wanting to be around her and acting without thinking to position himself near or in front of her (like when Gorya wants to hit her with the pillow), that is also depth.

He is not a static character. We don't yet know his full back story, but we see how much he has also grown and changed because of the influence of the people around him.

Kavin’s playboy persona is maintained in his interactions with Kaning, which are flirty to the max. That said, he isn’t a 1-dimensional character who can only be defined by his traits like “playboy”.

I feel like we’ll be getting a more fleshed out backstory re: love, but it will only help re-contextualize his behavior till this point, it will not change things from “not deep” to “now deep”.

Regarding BOF, thanks for going a little deeper. I (along with the whole world lol) love Kim Bum and I thought he was the best BOF F4 (but still not enough to keep watching tbh).

There's no offense taken lol, though it would help if you could go into more depth with your analysis of Kavin vs So Yi Jung? Tbh, I never finished BOF and any memory I have of the side couple is basically just of their faces and not of their characters or the storyline, so I'm interested in anyone's in depth take.

As for Kavin:

His character has a lot of depth (it just hasn't had anything to do with a past love/broken heart yet).

His background is still just as pretentious as it ever was, only this time, instead of his family revolving around tea, his father is clearly a high-powered government official. Kavin's lines usually revolve around giving advice, or seeing the big picture in a way that the other members of F4 don't seem to see it (as should be expected of a government official's heir). Think about the advice he gives Kaning and Gorya during the funeral, for instance. It's about helping them understand their role within the big-picture of "the game of how the country is run".

He is also always attuned to the public eye, like when and MJ made GoryaThyme go to to cafeteria lounge after Thyme declared Gorya was his girlfriend in one of the early episodes, or when he and MJ were getting students to stop filming Thyme as he was beating the student in ep. 7.

And, because his character is always so reserved and so aware, it makes the moments when he can't help but want to stay with Kaning very heart-fluttering to me, especially because these moments have become more and more obvious as the show has worn on.

He's always juuuuust about to leave, then stops to eat yogurt with Kaning, or offer her a ride, or stick his head out the car window to say one last thing before she steps inside. And it's lovely, because you can tell he just likes being around her so much that he can't help himself.

I especially like how his nickname for her has gone from condescending (at Mira's party) to simply adorable. It's felt like a very genuine progression to me and I've loved the slow burn of it all (but I'm also super excited for their resolution - whatever it may be!)

Not alone! I absolutely feel like their slow burn is eating me up inside in the best way.

The intention was to provide a relevant piece of information to follow up my initial comment and your response, which you or others can choose to read or not read, as you see fit.

I wasn't really arguing with you btw. I was just pointing out that while people will have SUBJECTIVE preferences, OBJECTIVELY F4 Thailand is "the best" by almost every metric that can be objectively measured (like the ones I listed, also add production value)

"It will depend on what you're looking for" is purely subjective.

To describe the difference using your shoe analogy:

I "subjectively" prefer sneakers, but a pair of cheap, knockoff sneakers will be "objectively" worse quality than a pair of sneakers made with better materials and processes, though I might still "subjectively" find the cheap sneakers more comfortable.

Someone could "subjectively" prefer BOF but that version is "objectively" worse quality than F4T by measurable metrics.

Tbh, if you watch or read things shallowly, you probably are less likely to be influenced by it (so maybe you're totally right about how less "sensitive" you think you are to the influence of fiction!).

I'm reminded of this study, which "showed that fiction influences empathy of the reader, but only under the condition of low or high emotional transportation into the story." (where "Transportation is defined as ‘a convergent process, where all mental systems and capacities become focused on events occurring in the narrative’")

(https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0055341)

Regarding the hacking: I hadn't thought of this till it was pointed out to me but they've shown us how OP F4 is and it's actually pretty necessary to set up Talay as at least somewhat on their level. We watched the videos deleted with Phupha in episode 1, so we need some kind of reason to believe Talay actually wields this power over Thyme (for it to have more meaning when Talay chooses to not complete his revenge- otherwise it would be too pandering imo)

Fiction is hugely influential and affects people on a very deep level, so making statements saying something "is fiction" as if that means it's not important or it's not necessary to feel strong emotions for, is bad discourse imo.

I'm not trying to attack btw, I just want to address this impulse explicitly, since i think it's something that I needed to unlearn as well.

Hahaha I think you hit the nail on the head there with the "no matter how obvious you make it" comment.

I think it wasn't Phupha talking to Thyme because Talay is more like a mirror held up to Thyme. And so when they have discussions, it's like they're talking to themselves.

Consider, Phupha's aftermath was worsened because he was face-down in the water when they found him.... clasping his Talay talisman. He was also hurt during the time before Talay was sent to join him at the school. Talay likely holds guilt for not being there to protect his righteous idiot as much as he hold hatred for F4.

I'm curious how you feel about Gorya's family being split apart due to the machinations of Thyme's mother and whether you see that and Gorya's victimization through the red card game as separate concepts?

I find your criticism interesting and would like to know more tbh