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negrowhat · 3 months

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do you have any bl recs for a celebrityxnormal person? i've watched be mine superstar and want more of the same vibe but i cannot seem to find any, thank you!! x

Hello Anon! I absolutely have a few recs for you! I hope you don't mind venturing out of the Thai BL realm for a bit. These 3 are actually some of my faves. Top 10.

To My Star. TMS is a Korean BL. It's centered around famous actor Kang Seo Joon and local chef Han Ji Woo. Seo Joon gets caught in the middle of a scandal and has to lay low so his manager makes him move in with Ji Woo who coincidentally lives in the apartment building he owns and rents out. Seo Joon is very charismatic and outspoken and Ji Woo is very reserved and set in his ways. As they live together and work together, they get closer and closer to each other. There are 2 seasons of To My Star and s2 shows a lot more of Seo Joon's celebrity presence because he's not hiding out and waiting for the scandal to pass anymore. You can watch it on VIKI.

Utsukushii Kare aka My Beautiful Man. Utsukushii Kare is a Japanese BL. It doesn't quite start off as Celebrity x Regular Guy but it becomes that. Hira is a quiet anti-social guy who doesn't really have much interest in anything at all until he sees Kiyoi who is the most beautiful person he's ever seen in his life. Kiyoi is the school's most popular guy, people hang around him to gain something and he's fine with it because he likes the attention. Kiyoi has aspirations of being famous. He eventually becomes a model and then an actor while Hira goes to Uni. Kiyoi gets his big break as an actor and Hira is right by his side. The problem is Hira doesn't think enough of himself and Kiyoi thinks the entire world of him. There are 2 seasons and a movie for Utsukushii Kare. It's available on VIKI and Gagaoolala.

Lovely Writer. This one is a Thai BL. This series is about a up and coming, but low profile fantasy author Gene who got his start by writing a BL novel. That novel is being turned into a BL series. Enter our other main Nubsib who will be starring in the drama. They ask Gene to be on site while filming to offer character insight but he wants no parts of it and really is against his novel even being made into a series. He's not proud of his tropey and toxic novel. Anyways, Nubsib shows immediate interest in Gene who just wants to remain unseen and unheard. Nubsib wants to be everywhere Gene is. He's super taken with him and he thinks he's super cute and maybe he knows Gene better than he's letting on. They must juggle their growing feelings while also dealing with the media, Gene writing his new BL novel, and super fans who ship Nubsib with his onscreen partner Aoey.

#to my star #to my star 2 #seo joon x ji woo #utsukushii kare #utsukushii kare 2 #utsukushii kare: eternal #hira x kiyoi #lovely writer #lovely writer the series #gene x nubsib

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wanderlust-in-my-soul · 2 years

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To My Star 2: Our Unfinished Story

#to my star 2 #TMS 2 #seo joon x ji woo #finally together #finally happy #finally we all can rest in peace #and this kiss was something else #bl drama #bl series #korean bl #kdrama #myedit

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seandorothy · 2 years

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#to my star #to my star 2 #tomystaredit #asianlgbtqdramas #asiandramanet #seo joon x ji woo #kdrama #kdramaedit #kdramadaily #mine

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alwayspining · 1 year

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These kisses deserve a place here pt. 5

To My Star 2: our untold stories (2022) l ep 5 & 10 l dir. Hwang Da Seul

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respectthepetty · 2 years

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An appreciation post for the hardest working man in Seoul, Pil Hyun

Our CEO:

Never met clothing that didn't like his body (like this outfit!)

Had a small panic attack when Seo Joon kissed Ji Woo, but in the end, just worried for Seo Joon's safety

Constantly checked on Seo Joon and made sure he was okay

Said no to job opportunities for Seo Joon because he believed in allowing time for healing

Knew that caring about one's mental health was more important than making money

Was a good boyfriend to a busy and professional woman

Worked on his birthday and then had his small party ruined, but only cared about resolving Ji Woo and Seo Joon's issue

Cared enough about Ji Woo to also create opportunities for him

Helped both our guys out several times

Endlessly fought against the negative press

Was happy for his manager when he decided to become an idol instead of being bitter

Complimented Yoo Ha the first time he met her because real recognizes real

Gave money to Hyung Ki, so he could start a new life away from blackmailing Seo Joon

Had the best earmuffs ever worn

Always made time to eat with his friends

Gave hugs freely to cheer up his friends

Is the reason we even have this couple since he made Seo Joon hide out in the house he was renting to Ji Woo, he was the one to give Seo Joon's handkerchief to Ji Woo, he was the one to find Ji Woo, and he was the one to call Ji Woo prompting him to look for Seo Joon in the woods.

The list could go on, but know that if the floor is the bar for cis hetero men, Pil Hyun already surpassed heaven because he put in the work.

#to my star #to my star 2 #pil hyun #the best CEO that ever was #seo joon x ji woo

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wen-kexing-apologist · 4 months

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Hi!

For the relationship game. Seo Joon & Ji Woo. To My Star

Rose💜

Every Sad Boy needs their Golden Retriever. I just binged both seasons of To My Star and I love Seo Joon and Ji Woo together, but I definitely wish we could have seen more of the happy moments in the past because I don’t think we had enough foundation to justify the extent to which Ji Woo pushed Seo Joon away and I wish that Seo Joon had gotten to be angrier about it.

I love Seo Joon for how willing he is to be the asshole so that other people catch a break. I love Seo Joon for how open and honest he is. I love Seo Joon for the happiness he wears as armor (if you don’t know by now, happy!Sad boys are my Achilles' Heel).

I think loneliness is what makes Seo Joon and Ji Woo fit together, I think that is what calls them to each other, and the biggest reason I would love to see more of them, with Ji Woo learning how to express his feelings and being more honest is because the last thing Seo Joon ever would have wanted was to make Ji Woo feel lonely, and Ji Woo never gave him the opportunity to course correct.

I absolutely loved their kiss in To My Star 2 on the street, where Ji Woo sucks the blood off Seo Joon’s lip. I loved the way they established Ji Woo has been forever changed by Seo Joon every time he automatically reacts to prevent Seo Joon from being triggered. I think they will do well together if Ji Woo actually commits to a life of open communication. But he needed to grovel more on his way back to Seo Joon.

Send me a ship and I’ll share my thoughts about it.

#ask game #to my star #to my star 2 #seo joon x ji woo

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emotionallychargedtowel · 1 year

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the pursuer-distancer dyad & how it applies to the world of BL

Not too surprisingly, since I have a psychology PhD, I notice a lot of examples in my BL-watching of psychological concepts related to relationship dynamics and sometimes individual characteristics. I also probably like BLs because I’ve sought them out in part because they present an opportunity to do some complex thinking about relationships and how we approach them.

A quick thing to note: BL characters are, of course, not real. But their stories resonate with us because they have some kind of relationship to reality. There’s a continuum from very realistic and highly relatable, to heightened for effect (this can make it easier to see certain things clearly, so they can still teach us useful things about real life), all the way to highly unrealistic stuff where we can relate to it because unusual experiences symbolically stand in for something else (see the classic “sure, he’s a murderer, but he’s my babygirl” phenomenon).

This post is about pursuer-distancer dynamics in relationships. I’m going to explain the concept as quickly and simply as I can, then talk a little bit about BL tropes and specific examples. I hope that if I keep writing about stuff like this, this is a post I can link to for background info in the future.

Most of the stuff I’ve seen on pursuer-distancer dynamics stems from Harriet Lerner’s work. She’s a Bowenian family systems therapist with a feminist bent who has written a lot of incisive but accessible books for popular audiences. Family systems theory is a way of looking at relationships as complex systems in which our patterns of behavior are interrelated. Hopefully that last sentence will make more sense after I explain further. For now, let’s dive in.

Here’s Lerner introducing the concepts of pursuers and distancers with a bulleted list from her book The Dance of Anger, excerpted below:

PURSUERS

• react to anxiety by seeking greater togetherness in a relationship.

• place a high value on talking things out and expressing feelings, and believe others should do the same.

• feel rejected and take it personally when someone close to them wants more time and space alone or away from the relationship.

• tend to pursue harder and then coldly withdraw when an important person seeks distance.

DISTANCERS

• seek emotional distance or physical space when stress is high.

• consider themselves to be self-reliant and private persons—more “do-it-yourselfers” than help-seekers.

• have difficulty showing their needy, vulnerable, and dependent sides.

• open up most freely when they are not pushed or pursued.

Sometimes we see these roles happen in clear-cut ways similar to what Lerner describes. But they can also show up in more complex ways. Roles can vary both between and within relationships. In other words, you can be a distancer in one relationship and a pursuer in another, and you can be both a pursuer and a distancer in different areas within the same relationship.

In healthy relationships that aren’t under any particular stress, pursuing and distancing would still happen. But partners would be free to engage in either as needed in a flexible way instead of being stuck in entrenched roles.

Side note: there’s a difference between pursuing in the sense of wanting to be in a relationship with someone and pursuing a partner emotionally in an established relationship, just as there’s a difference between distancing yourself from a potential partner and distancing yourself from an established partner. I’m including a shot from Semantic Error above because it has a quality that not very many BLs have: the seme seems like he’s be a pursuer in a relationship, and the uke seems like he’d be a distancer.

So, why do we get caught in these entrenched, interrelated roles in relationships?

Lerner sees them as a sort of unspoken deal that we make with people we’re close to because deep down, we want to avoid acknowledging certain needs and the emotions that come with them. It’s a fairly universal thing that human beings both crave intimacy and fear it. But this is hard to acknowledge. It’s tempting to disavow either our need for closeness or our need for independence.

As Lerner puts it:

Emotional pursuers protect emotional distancers. By doing the work of expressing the neediness, clingingness, and wish for closeness for both partners, pursuers make it possible for distancers to avoid confronting their own dependency wishes and insecurities.

It goes both ways. Distancers can convince themselves that they don’t have a need for closeness because their pursuer is holding all of the neediness for them. Pursuers can convince themselves they don’t have any desire to avoid intimacy because their distancer will hold that for them.

Not only do we make these unspoken bargains within relationships, but our tendencies to pursue or distance inform the partners we choose in the first place. Those of us with a tendency to pursue may gravitate to partners with a tendency to distance, or vice versa.

So, what’s the alternative? Lerner writes that relationships are healthier and more honest when both partners can acknowledge both their need for intimacy and their need for independence.

Before I move on to BL-specific stuff, a couple things to note. First, the way in which pursuer and distancer roles are complementary is a pattern that comes up in a lot of other relationship roles. There are a number of ways in which we sort of delegate certain relational tasks or emotional states within a relationship and disavow those they have assigned to the other person. Second, the tendency to pursue or distance is related to other factors, such as attachment style, and I may get into some of those in other posts.

So, on to BL tropes. Let’s start by looking at maybe the most foundational BL trope, the seme/uke pairing. I honestly think I’m still working on fully grasping that concept. But of the varying definitions I’ve seen, I much prefer ones that define the seme as the person doing the pursuing and the uke as the person being pursued (rather than putting it in terms of semes as “aggressive” or making gross assumptions about topping and bottoming). It’s pretty obvious from the use of “pursue” here that the idea of a pursuer/distancer dynamic readily applies here, although it doesn’t map on perfectly.

So, what do Lerner’s ideas about pursuer/distancer dyads tell us about the ways BL dyads negotiate closeness?

It helps to explain the appeal of tsundere characters as ukes. Not as a fictional character, but their appeal to a seme. Watching a BL with a sweet seme and a grouchy uke, you might look at that seme and say, “poor thing, too bad he has to like someone who’s so grumpy” and see him as fully and sincerely seeking as much intimacy with the uke as he can get. But why did this person who’s supposedly so interested in intimacy fall for someone so prickly? Pursuers find distancers appealing because they can chase after them all they want and while, hopefully, they’ll catch up to them at times and experience some intimacy, it won’t be too easy. If it was too easy, the pursuer would 1) get more intimacy than they bargained for and 2) have to admit to themselves and their tsundere that they need distance sometimes too.

The reverse is also true. A uke can better afford to distance himself, or push a seme away, because on some level he trusts the seme to continue to pursue.

One thing I didn’t get into above but that Lerner points out: when a pursuer gets fed up with pursuing and not “catching” their partner enough, they tend to engage in what she calls “reactive distance.” This isn’t like when a pursuer calmly and authentically gets in touch with their need for independence and acts on it, making their approach to their relationship more balanced. It’s when a pursuer feels rejected and, well, pouts. I can think of a few examples of this in BLs but the first one that comes to my mind is from To My Star 2. (Spoilers ahead!) Seo Joon spends most of the season doing a serious full-court press to try to get Ji Woo back. In the face of a lot of rejection, some of it distinctly mean-spirited, he just keeps trying. And then, suddenly, he doesn’t. He takes his camper out to the woods where he has no phone reception, and when his management can’t get in contact with him, Ji Woo panics and is afraid something terrible has happened to him. But when he finds him calmly drinking a beer beside his camper, Seo Joon’s manner has changed drastically--he’s cold and dismissive. He still actually wants Ji Woo back. But he’s gotten to the point where he’s hurt enough to get into reactive distance mode. Later in the show, he does something similar. When Ji Woo finally wants to reconcile, Seo Joon is reluctant (for a little while). Chasing Ji Woo (while Ji Woo distances himself) was easier than dealing with all of the questions that come with reconciling with him, like whether he can really feel safe resuming a relationship with someone who ghosted him for a year. (I should note that there seems to be reasonable disagreement about who the seme is in this relationship, if indeed there is one in the strictest sense, but Seo Joon is definitely a pursuer in the family systems sense.)

There are other ways, besides choosing a distancer as their object of interest, in which a pursuer can build in safety mechanisms to make sure their pursuit doesn’t result in more intimacy than they can handle. I’m thinking of Utsukushii Kare here. I have a lot of thoughts here that should probably be in a separate post. I’ll just say that Hira and Kiyoi are both intensely ambivalent about intimacy and that despite Hira largely pursuing Kiyoi and Kiyoi mostly acting as the distancer, they turn those roles inside out and backwards and randomly trade positions. Honestly half my reason for writing this is so that I can pull all of these ideas into an Utsukushii Kare post later because they are a great example about how these dynamics can turn into a tangled mess.

I’ll leave it at that for the moment. As I said above, I’m planning to pull from these ideas for at least one in-depth post on Utsukushii Kare and if there’s interest and I have the time and energy I’ll try doing something similar about some other constructs that apply to BLs in a useful way.

#BL drama #psychology of BL #family systems theory #pursuer distancer dynamic #semantic error #to my star 2 #utsukushii kare #jae young x sang woo #seo joon x ji woo #hira x kiyoi

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oswlld · 2 years

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— cornelia street, t.s.

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jimmysea · 2 years

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Antoine de Saint Exupéry, The Little Prince

Soon Woo Hyung as KANG SEO JOON & Kim Kang Min as HAN JI WOO TO MY STAR 2: OUR UNTOLD STORIES (2022) dir. Hwang Da Seul

#to my star 2 #to my star #kdramaedit #seojoon x jiwoo #seo joon x ji woo #userjaehwany #todramaism #cinemu #samblr #tosnimeat #usertaeminie #marigif

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longinglook · 2 years

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TO MY STAR s2 | EPISODE 01

Come on, let's play. All right. I'll stop working.

#to my star #to my star 2 #나의 별에게 #seo joon x ji woo #son woo hyun #kim kang min #*#200

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bl-bracket · 11 months

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Round 1: Seojoon and Jiwoo Final Kiss (To My Star 2: Our Untold Stories) vs Pluem and Kevin First Kiss (Ghost Host Ghost House)

[Submitted Reasons Under Cut]

Seojoon and Jiwoo Final Kiss: "This kiss is the culmination of all they have gone through. It starts out sweet and innocent, with Seo Joon's obsession with Ji Woo's cheeks and quickly turns into more. Seo Joon has (finally) completely opened up, just as Ji Woo did earlier in the episode. Both of them are so vulnerable and in love, giving themselves to the other person entirely. Siiiiiigh. It leaves you believing that no matter what the future brings they will face it together, because they're meant to be."

Pluem and Kevin First Kiss: "Kevin seducing Pluem with his short shorts. The barely restrained want from Pluem. The lap sitting. The tender shoulder kiss. The consent. The hands under the shirt. The absolute perfect chemistry radiating off the screen. Everything about this kiss was just beautiful. I have gone back and rewatched the entirety of episode four more times than I can count."

#bl bracket #bl drama #bl shows #round 1 #seo joon x ji woo #to my star #to my star 2 #pluem x kevin #ghost host ghost house #best kiss

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negrowhat · 1 month

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15 Day BL Challenge 2K24

Howdy folks, you can find the full challenge here!

Day 6: Fave Line from Your Fave Series

Ok, well I can't just choose one because there are several lines that literally make me go insane.

"If it's too much, I'll come to you." Kang Seo Joon to Han Ji Woo in To My Star. BECAUSE SEO JOON UNDERSTOOD THAT JI WOO STRUGGLED WITH HIS FEELINGS AND EXPRESSING HIMSELF BUT HE KNEW JI WOO LOVED HIM TOO. IT'S LIKE HE COULD SEE INTO HIS HEART!

"I only have you. You're the one I've been searching for." Fighter to Tutor in Why R U the Series. Because Fighter needed Tutor to understand that he literally didn't want to be with anyone else, ever. If only Tutor could understand that Fighter had been in love with him since he met him. Ugh Why R U was a hot mess but damn FighterTutor were GEMS.

"I'm not worth what you're doing for me." "You're worth it." Zhao Yunlan to Shen Wei and then Shen Wei's response from Guardian. Chief Zhao did not understand why Shen Wei would use part of his life force to restore his sight. Why he would give up so much of himself to help Chief Zhao. Shen Wei would give up his life for Yunlan without a second thought, Yunlan will always be worth saving.

"I just want to talk to you." Chief Phupha to Tian from A Tale of 1000 Stars (ATOTS). This entire scene of Chief Phu trying to make small talk with Tian during their sleepover just proved that they were vibing since day one. He didn't want things to be tense between them since they seemed to bump heads frequently. It was such a simple and yet powerful statement. It even stunned Tian for a moment. I love, love that scene.

"I'm not going to leave you again." Phaya to Tharn in The Sign. Specifically the snuggling scene after Phaya wakes up with his memories restored. He was speaking those words as his former and current self. Lifetime's of distance that was once between them was gone.

#blchallenge2k24 #i'm late af #seo joon x ji woo #to my star #fightertutor #why r u the series #why r u #weilan #guardian #guardian cdrama #guardian 2018 #phutian #atots #a tale of thousand stars #phayatharn #the sign #the sign the series

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