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waitmyturtles · 10 months

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Turtles Catches Up With Old GMMTV: YYY, and When BL Talks About BL Edition

[What’s going on here? After joining Tumblr and discovering Thai BLs through KinnPorsche in 2022, I began watching GMMTV’s new offerings -- and realized that I had a lot of history to catch up on, to appreciate the more recent works that I was delving into. From tropes to BL frameworks, what we’re watching now hails from somewhere, and I’m learning about Thai BL's history through what I’m calling the Old GMMTV Challenge (OGMMTVC). Starting with recommendations from @absolutebl on their post regarding how GMMTV is correcting for its mistakes with its shows today, I’ve made an expansive list to get me through a condensed history of essential/classic/significant Thai BLs produced by GMMTV and many other BL studios. My watchlist, pasted below, lists what I’ve watched and what’s upcoming, along with the reviews I’ve written so far. Today, I examine the success -- or not? -- of Cheewin Thanamin’s YYY and what the show does by way of macro-level commentary on the BL genre.]

Alright, so YYY! It would be VERY EASY to write this show off. Maybe the old Turtles of the early OGMMTVC would have done just that (exhibit A: SOTUS, which I’m thinking about revisiting in a wrap-up piece after the OGMMTVC is done, thanks to Krist and his fantastic acting in Be My Favorite).

But I’ve learned my lesson. There’s a LOT going on with YYY that makes it absolutely worthy of inclusion on the OGMMTVC list. It was @absolutebl Sensei themself that made the case for YYY, especially in ABL Sensei noting my interest in Cheewin’s emotional filmmaking trajectory from Make It Right/MIR2, to Secret Crush On You, to Bed Friend. I thank you, ABL Sensei, for pointing me in this direction to see this *other* side of Cheewin!

So why do I think YYY is important on the OGMMTVC list? It’s a short, VERY CHAOTIC, VERY UNEXPECTED six-episode series that focuses on two roommates, Not (Yoon Phusanu) and Pun (Lay Talay), who fall for each other in short order in the midst of a wild and inexplicable living environment. They’re supported by their fellow apartment-mates, Ohm (Pee Peerawich, most recently of La Pluie) and Arm (Scott Satapong), and most importantly, are living under the VERY watchful eye of their probably-transgender building manager, Porpla, played by THE MOST UNBELIEVABLE actor in Poppy Ratchapong. OMFG. More on Poppy in a bit. (OMFG, Poppy. I’m in LUV.)

I’ll break down the importance of YYY in the following order:

1a) Who exactly is the writing team of Fluke Teerapat and Tanachot Prapasri, and why are they important (I’m actually going to try to figure this out along with the rest of y’all, and hopefully if folks have more info, they can chime in!), 1b) What did director Cheewin Thanamin bring by way of past vision to YYY to explain the show’s composition, 2) Why the show’s subject matter actually serves as critical commentary to what was happening with the BL genre vis à vis the association of BL and romance, 3) A quick deep-dive on the EXCELLENT acting we saw in YYY, and why that’s also important to the show as a whole,

and, as always, possibly more. Let’s do this.

So, Fluke Teerapat and Tanachot Prapasri. I’ve tried to find more information on these two dudes to some avail, but my quick analysis of their work really stems from MDL, Fluke’s past acting career, and analytical conjecture about why they wrote YYY and what they wrote after YYY.

As we know, the guys of these broad circles -- New Siwaj and his Studio Wabi Sabi, Cheewin and his Copy A Bangkok studio, Fluke and Tanachot as writers, and many, many others -- are, generally speaking, of a community of BL creators that are outside the usual GMMTV circles. (I’ve written about this before -- while my project is called the Old GMMTV Challenge, with the goal of digging into how we’ve ended up with GMMTV’s current standard of BLs, the list features quite a few non-GMMTV BLs, as I believe art is always speaking to art, no matter where it’s published.) (And, I am sure most of you are familiar with this, but if not, there are master lists of the history of Thai BL studios out there.)

I note the non-GMMTV affiliation of these guys, because -- some of these guys, like New and Tee Bundit, actually contract with GMMTV for specific shows, like A Boss and a Babe and Hidden Agenda, respectively. Fluke Teerapat himself was a pre-BL actor in the 2014 movie My Bromance with Fluke Natouch (so many cute Flukes, amirite), and also acted in GMMTV’s FIRST BL in SOTUS -- Fluke Teerapat played Wad, who was maybe? hopefully? kinda? indicated to be shipped with the older Prem (Gunsmile Chanagun).

I’ll add two more points to consider here as I continue to sit with the influence that Fluke, Tanachot, and Cheewin brought to YYY: Firstly, GMMTV BLs, up to YYY’s moment in 2020 generally asked for romance in their shows. Again, that’s a generalization. (I don’t think Theory of Love fits in this category.) But considering what had come out on GMMTV CLOSELY PREVIOUSLY to YYY’s airing -- 2gether and Still 2gether -- GMMTV was riding a romance high, and counting their massive BrightWin dollars.

Secondly, YYY is the first piece on the OGMMTVC list that features Cheewin Thanamin as a solo director. Going backwards, as we know, Cheewin’s previous work on BLs including co-writing, co-directing, and acting in Make It Right and Make It Right 2, and he was a writer on Love Sick, season 2, and was a guest actor on Love Sick, season 1.

Putting this all together: at least Fluke and Cheewin have utterly tremendous histories with the literal birth of the BL genre, Cheewin outside of the GMMTV circles with Love Sick and Make It Right/MIR2, and Fluke beginning his career as an actor in GMMTV’s first BL, AND first HUGE BL.

Cheewin and Fluke have had front-row seats to the development of the BL genre, seeing and understanding what fans, studios, producers, and major networks in GMMTV, Channel 9, Channel 3, and others, demand and expect out of the genre and the dramas by way of fan service, shipper culture, romantic storylines, tropes -- all of it. Cheewin and Fluke have been around for a MINUTE. They clearly HAVE critical viewpoints about BL, and are not afraid to scrutinize the genre in their works, which is what happened in YYY.

I’m going to get confusing for a second to jump to the closer present for my next analytical point: what else have Fluke Teerapat and Tanachot Prapasri written?

They’ve written My Ride (2022) and La Pluie (2023). I haven’t watched either of them yet, but I am damn glad that I’ll be watching them after the OGMMTVC is done, in their chronological order, and I already can’t wait to write about them. Because what I bet is that I’ll see what intelligence and scrutiny Fluke and Tanachot had leveraged in YYY, the cutting criticisms about BL they lined YYY with, and then took the sharpness of their writing and the critical viewpoints they have ABOUT the BL genre to My Ride and La Pluie, two beloved BLs that are lauded for their directness in structure and storytelling.

In Cheewin, Fluke, and Tanachot, we have a team of creators that’s not afraid to be critical about the genre in which they’re operating. Now -- this take, this perspective, can sometimes work well (I’m eagerly awaiting Tee Bundit’s Lovely Writer on the OGMMTVC list, as I understand he takes this macro approach in LW), and in other times, it does not work well at all (exhibit B: Tee Bundit’s Step By Step, rant linked).

YYY took a lot of risks. It was a weird show. It didn’t... quite make sense. But it was clearly designed to criticize what we, as fans, usually expect out of BLs, including clean and romantic storylines and happy endings.

Episodes 5 and 6 of YYY fully explained to me the show’s purpose. First off: BLs are jobs for the actors. The ships are not real. And YYY states as much. Pun is considering quitting his job as a shipped half of a boy-couple, and his acting partner isn’t having it.

In episode 6 -- before Not and Pun go to space? -- we get two screen quotes of the life of YYY itself.

The world that Porpla operated in the apartment building where Not, Pun, and their neighbors lived was chaotic precisely BECAUSE of Porpla, and what Porpla demanded out of the human behavior around them. Porpla could only be appeased, as an obsessed yaoi fan (LOL), with the confirmation that Not and Pun were together and dating. If that’s not a metaphor for fan and network demands out of BLs and ships, then I don’t know what is. AND: those demands CERTAINLY create chaos, especially for the individual creators and performers associated with BLs. (I didn’t take screenshots of Porpla’s INSANE outfits, but really, the chaos of YYY stemmed and centered around Porpla -- and Poppy Ratchapong’s ABSOLUTELY INCREDIBLE performance of Porpla).

While watching YYY -- Porpla, the Chinese brothers, the coffee and janitor couple, all the flashbacks, Not’s hilarious and nonsensical sign-offs (omg, I was gagging with laughter) -- I was reminded of Lukmo and Yok in Make It Right, especially in Make It Right 2. New and Cheewin did some crazy shit with Mo and Yok, especially their confusingly edited and strangely metaphorical sex scenes. Mo and Yok were chaotic right up until their open and tender moments about their emotionality to each other.

At the time of my watching Make It Right 2, I noted that it seemed to me like Mo and Yok suffered from editing fumbles, which I think is still accurate. But now that I’ve watched YYY, I also might want to theorize (I wonder what you think of this, @lurkingshan), that Mo and Yok might have been specifically written BY CHEEWIN himself, AND that the chaos and strangeness of their metaphorical intimacy (like, sexual food metaphors using mortars and pestles, it still scars me, ha) may have been specifically designed to serve as a mirror against the more straightfoward (but still chaotic) romantic ships in TeeFuse and FrameBook. I’m not ENTIRELY sure. But I think I can feel confident in theorizing that what New and Cheewin were doing in MIR was to add a gentle question about whether EVERY ship working in a BL is worth it. (I think New touches on this in Love By Chance vis à vis TinCan.) And I think Cheewin furthers that question in YYY vis à vis Not and Pun -- who, spoiler alert, do not end up together at the end of YYY. They end up in space. Yeah, totally.

(I just want to note here that a major reason why Cheewin in particular is such an important person to focus on for the OGMMTVC is that chaos is not his ONLY bag. As I noted in my MIR2 review and earlier above, Cheewin has a SEPARATE perspective that he’s explored in multiple shows — the journey of queer joy. We have seen marriage proposals from FrameBook in MIR2 and KingUea in Bed Friend. While chaos is…chaotic, I love that Cheewin has MULTIPLE THEMES that he explores in his works, and he’s not necessarily *beholden* to them in any one of his shows. Unlike Tee Bundit, Cheewin may not be held back by funding issues, and *can* dabble in non-romance structures. But from what I’ve seen of his art by way of romance — he does those structures beautifully as well, ending at least MIR2 and Bed Friend in glorious happiness. Again, I really appreciate @absolutebl Sensei recognizing these two different tracks in recommending YYY to me.)

Anyway, listen. YYY is home to micro- on macro-commentary about the BL genre and BL’s resulting questions and chaos, using chaos itself as a storytelling tool. Porpla is THE entity, the über-fan, the symbol of CULTURAL PRESSURE for BLs to WORK and PLAY in happy endings, when happy endings might not exactly be what filmmakers like Cheewin really want to achieve all the time (see above). I appreciated that time was actually taken to explain to Porpla that Not and Pun were not going to be together. I gotta say that I commend Cheewin, Fluke, and Tanachot for playing hardily in this sandbox, clearly having fun doing it, in such wild fashion.

AND: I MUST give Yoon, Lay, Pee, and especially Poppy their flowers. They acted the hell out of this show. Yoon had me DYING with laughter at his nonsense monologues at the end. Pee is clearly one well-rounded actor, handling comedy crazy well, and I can’t WAITTTTTTT to see him in La Pluie (cc @wen-kexing-apologist).

But this post and the performance of this show ultimately belongs to Poppy Ratchapong. When I first late-night liveblogged about YYY and I was like, POPPPPYYY, the HOMESLICE @dribs-and-drabbles came THRU with a post celebrating Poppy that had me SILENTLY DYING on a work Zoom call with them abs, DAMN! LOL. FAMILY: I MEAN, if you’re gonna watch YYY, you’re gonna watch it for Poppy as Porpla. His Porpla was SO wild, SO chaotic, SO emotionally (UN)balanced, SO insane, SO crisp, SO controlled in their manipulation, I mean. Porpla will definitely be in my top 10 list of favorite OGMMTV characters. Poppy did Porpla’s wild identity utterly solid.

(YET ANOTHER REASON to criticize Step By Step: an underutilized Poppy! I can’t wait to see Poppy in Lovely Writer, and I have GOT to watch Cutie Pie after this project is done.)

YYY was an experiment in macro-level commentary on BL. It was definitely fun, confounding, confusing AF, but I had a lot of fun with it. I’ve proven that I don’t have to like the shows for them to belong to the OGMMTVC syllabus, but I didn’t NOT like YYY. I enjoyed it a lot, and for the sake of seeing this wild side of Cheewin in definitive form -- and to also see the roots of Fluke and Tanachot’s writing before My Ride and La Pluie -- it is absolutely worthy of belonging on the OGMMTVC list.

[Okay! I’m ahead on my watchlist below, as I’ve already watched Manner of Death -- that review is dropping next week. And I am ALL kinds of nostalgic and warmly weepy for A Tale of Thousand Stars -- I am soooo glad I am spoiling myself for some awesome rewatches during this project.

Quick note: in my review of 2gether and Still 2gether, I noted that I wanted to pen another pain-related Big Meta on pain, trust, and separation in BLs. I was going to originally write it on Still 2gether, Bad Buddy, and Until We Meet Again, but of course -- ATOTS also has a classic example of separation. So I’m going to hold off on writing this at least until I’m done with ATOTS, and/or when my life calms down a bit in the fall.

Speaking of life calming down, my August is going to be IN.SANE., so I will do my best to keep up on the watching and the writing. Pour one out for me, y’all!

Status of the watchlist below. I made an addition, btw! I added Be My Favorite, which a lot of us are currently watching. GMMTV going so far as to make a show in part as über-commentary on half of its first HUGE BL ship in Krist? That is MAD worthy of inclusion. And, it’s a great fucking show. Any feedback on this, let a gal know!

1) Love Sick and Love Sick 2 (2014 and 2015) (review here) 2) Make It Right (2016) (review here) 3) SOTUS (2016-2017) (review here) 4) Make It Right 2 (2017) (review here) 5) Together With Me (2017) (review here) 6) SOTUS S/Our Skyy x SOTUS (2017-2018) (review here) 7) Love By Chance (2018) (review here) 8) Kiss Me Again: PeteKao cuts (2018) (no review) 9) He’s Coming To Me (2019) (review here) 10) Dark Blue Kiss (2019) and Our Skyy x Kiss Me Again (2018) (review here) 11) TharnType (2019-2020) (review here) 12) Senior Secret Love: Puppy Honey (OffGun BL cuts) (2016 and 2017) (no review) 13) Theory of Love (2019) (review here) 14) 3 Will Be Free (2019) (not a BL or an official part of the OGMMTVC watchlist, but an important harbinger of things to come in 2019 and beyond re: Jojo Tichakorn pushing queer content in non-BLs) (review here) 15) Dew the Movie (2019) (review here) 16) Until We Meet Again (2019-2020) (review here) 17) 2gether (2020) and Still 2gether (2020) (review here) 18) I Told Sunset About You (2020) (review here) 19) YYY (2020, out of chronological order) 20) Manner of Death (2020-2021) (not a true BL, but a MaxTul queer/gay romance set within a genre-based show that likely influenced Not Me and KinnPorsche) (review coming) 21) A Tale of Thousand Stars (2021) (review here) 22) A Tale of Thousand Stars (2021) OGMMTVC Fastest Rewatch Known To Humankind For The Sake Of Rewatching Our Skyy 2 x BBS x ATOTS (watching) 23) Lovely Writer (2021) 24) Last Twilight in Phuket (2021) (the mini-special before IPYTM) 25) I Promised You the Moon (2021) 26) Not Me (2021-2022) 27) Bad Buddy (2021-2022) (thesis here) 28) 55:15 Never Too Late (2021-2022) (not a BL, but a GMMTV drama that features a macro BL storyline about shipper culture and the BL industry) 29) Bad Buddy (2021-2022) and Our Skyy 2 x BBS x ATOTS (2023) OGMMTVC Rewatch 30) Secret Crush On You (2022) [watching for Cheewin’s trajectory of studying queer joy from Make It Right (high school), to SCOY (college), to Bed Friend (working adults)] 31) KinnPorsche (2022) (tag here) 32) KinnPorsche (2022) OGMMTVC Fastest Rewatch Known To Humankind For The Sake of Re-Analyzing the KP Cultural Zeitgeist 33) The Eclipse (2022) (tag here) 34) GAP (2022-2023) (Thailand’s first GL) 35) My School President (2022-2023) and Our Skyy 2 x My School President (2023) 36) Moonlight Chicken (2023) (tag here) 37) Bed Friend (2023) (Cheewin’s latest show, depicting a queer joy journey among working adults) (tag here) 38) Be My Favorite (2023) (tag here) (I’m including this for BMF’s sophisticated commentary on Krist’s career past as a BL icon) (watching)]

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waitmyturtles · 10 months

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Turtles Catches Up With Old GMMTV: My Bromance and Yaoi Influences Edition

[What’s going on here? After joining Tumblr and discovering Thai BLs through KinnPorsche in 2022, I began watching GMMTV’s new offerings -- and realized that I had a lot of history to catch up on, to appreciate the more recent works that I was delving into. From tropes to BL frameworks, what we’re watching now hails from somewhere, and I’m learning about Thai BL's history through what I’m calling the Old GMMTV Challenge (OGMMTVC). Starting with recommendations from @absolutebl on their post regarding how GMMTV is correcting for its mistakes with its shows today, I’ve made an expansive list to get me through a condensed history of essential/classic/significant Thai BLs produced by GMMTV and many other BL studios. My watchlist, pasted below, lists what I’ve watched and what’s upcoming, along with the reviews I’ve written so far. Today, I cover My Bromance, a 2014 stepbrothers movie rooted in yaoi tropes and structures.]

Okie-dokie, my yaoi smokies! Earlier this week, I reviewed likely the most seminal film to have influenced the Thai television BL genre, 2007's Love of Siam. I took on one more pre-BL movie to round out the early Old GMMTV Challenge list in My Bromance (2014), and I did so for a few reasons.

First, a little time period context: before the launch of proto-Thai television BL in Love Sick (2014) -- an ensemble drama that did not center, but rather included, a queer romance in Phun x Noh -- Thai cinema was where queer relationships were mostly explored. In discussion with @bengiyo, Thai, pan-Asian, and international queer cinema was also where the majority of stereotypes about the presumed endings of queer relationships were mostly held, as I discussed at length in my Love of Siam review.

My Bromance aired in February 2014, and Love Sick aired in July 2014. I don't *think* the two properties spoke to each other by way of art or influence -- in part, simply because My Bromance is rooted in some STRONG Thai yaoi tropes that almost pre-determined the ending of the film (spoiler alert, I'll get into this later). (And I want to note and appreciate the differences in the term "yaoi" as interpreted in Japan vs. Thailand.) Love Sick, while utterly and fabulously chaotic, ended in happiness, with Phun and Noh confirming their relationship.

The second reason why I added My Bromance to this list is because history tells us that Thailand's past and present fascination with Japanese yaoi manga and anime, in part, primed wider Thai audiences for television dramas featuring queer love and relationships. As we know now, Thai filmmakers have made Thai television BL a genre of its own, complete with tropes and built-in assumptions about how the dramas are structured and how the stories are told. The most overt Thai yaoi-influenced drama on the OGMMTVC list is TharnType, and I wanted to add at least one pre-BL yaoi piece to get a sense for how yaoi would then play out on television (and I know there are PLENTY more very early television BLs that were touched by yaoi, but TharnType is the most influential one on the future of the BL genre).

The third reason for this addition is that the two leads of My Bromance -- Fluke Teerapat and Fluke Natouch -- both have long and notable careers in Thai television BL, with Fluke Natouch also having starred in a number of other pre-BL queer Thai films. Fluke Natouch, for me, reached legend-ish status by just existing in Until We Meet Again, which became a fast favorite of mine when I watched it for the OGMMTVC. But separately, I was particularly curious about seeing Fluke Teerapat in a pre-television Thai BL piece. As many of us know, likely his most famous role is that of Wad in SOTUS, GMMTV's first BL from 2016, in which Wad may or may not have been presumed to be paired with the older character, Prem. More importantly, since then, Fluke Teerapat has had a long career in Thai BL screenwriting, penning (with his partner, Tanachot Prapasri) two of the most notable non-GMMTV BLs of the past few years, My Ride and La Pluie. Both of these shows have reached a touch of cult status, and if they were both penned by a guy who's been around the BL way for a second, then -- I wondered if Fluke Teerapat's early acting career could give me insight in any lessons he learned about, maybe, what NOT to do in Thai BLs today.

Welp, I think My Bromance helps with those lessons, lol. @lurkingshan hipped me to the central trope that structures My Bromance -- the yaoi stepbrother trope in which, yes, oh yes, stepbrothers, ya know.

Maybe the first and most overall general assessment I can give of My Bromance is that it could perhaps get a little insane in its storyline by way of how it needed to be centralized around the taboo yaoi stepbrother trope in the first place. I've talked with @so-much-yet-to-learn and @absolutebl in the past about how in some shows rooted in yaoi, or at least a taboo trope or two -- how oftentimes, that show may include two or three or more taboo influences, since the show already decided to go to a different place than a socially acceptable moral or ethical center-norm.

I think I was watching that in My Bromance. Besides the stepbrothers realizing that they were attracted to each other, probably the most remarkable infrastructural inclusion of this movie was the utter cluelessness by Golf, the stepbrother played by Fluke Teerapat, that trying to continue a relationship in the face of everything against them might have been an effort not worth pursuing. That love of this sort might lead to more pain than pleasure.

Golf was a character set up as essentially abandoned by his father and stepmother for the sake of work, as both parents left Golf alone to travel for work constantly -- which left Golf alone in a house with Bank (Fluke Natouch) for lengthy periods of time that allowed them to find out their love for each other. Now, if you and your lover are alone for an inordinate amount of time, then yes -- you are going to think that in that environment, in that particular moment, your love can flourish. But when reality hit, and Golf and Bank were found out, and attempts were made to split them up, man, did Golf ever put the pressure on Bank to just... suck it up.

It was a tough framework to watch. Golf, through Fluke Teerapat's acting, was the living version of denial personified. He would NOT accept, immaturely, that Bank and himself could NOT be together. EVEN WHILE Golf and Bank were ultimately separated, physically and emotionally, Golf expected Bank's love to remain true. (I mean, imagine, this Bank is played by an 18-year-old Fluke Natouch. Bank was taking hit after hit!) And this is even after Golf returns from a years-long overseas stint.... with a girlfriend. Golf still scolds Bank for giving up on their love...

...to the point that they get into a physical altercation with deeply impactful results involving a car accident, surgeries, organ transplants, everything. Apologies for spoiling the ending, but it was so wild for me that I just need to process it for a second and consider its impact on television BLs.

I mentioned before that Bank was taking hit after hit. Before the car accident, his own mother seemed to begin to accept his sexual orientation (!!!) -- even trying to set Bank up with a new boyfriend. Thundering right back to another yaoi framework, Bank replies that while he might be gay, he doesn't need to love another man (what was this movie DOING to poor Bank?!). Then, later on, Bank even reluctantly agrees to try seeing a new guy himself at school. Bank himself wasn't necessarily an innocent blushing maiden -- at one point, he called Golf a coward for not being 100% committed to their love, which I think was an accurate call-out for what Golf was expecting Bank to accept by way of Golf's outward performance as a straight man. The poor kid was just trying to figure himself the hell out in the face of confusion and repeated abandonment.

Then the car accident happens, and Bank is gravely injured, to which Golf responds with a kidney (at least Golf showed up in one way!). And Golf disappears after that.

We learn, after Bank leaves the hospital, that Golf has died. (Here's where we get into the we've-come-to-expect-horrible-endings-for-queer-characters paradigm that I discussed in my Love of Siam review.) Man, Bank was taking a lot. He was under the impression at one point that Golf was going to get engaged. And then he learns that Golf, instead, was gone!

It was a lot -- a lot for a movie that clearly was not going to treat its queer characters well, inconsistently at best, and a lot for a movie that kept piling on the yaoi-ness of the genre it was playing in. These guys stood no chance of happiness, especially with Golf insisting that Bank still love him, despite everything Golf himself was doing in trying to live a straight life with a girlfriend/fiancée before he departs the film.

Now, with the benefit of watching this 2014 film with 2023 hindsight, I knew that Golf would "come back" in a My Bromance television series from 2020. But in 2014, at the end of the first movie -- I am sure audiences were just like, what.... was all that for. Bank had been through the ringer, for a relationship that was going to be difficult to maintain anyway, in a society that isn't easy on gay men in the first place in mid-2010s Thailand. (And the WONDERFUL @twig-tea filled me in on the context of the long wait to get to 2020's My Bromance sequel in the first place -- only for fans to be disappointed again in the quality of that series.)

When I think about this film in the context of 2019's TharnType, and even to a smaller extent, 2018's Love By Chance (both MAME pieces that feature yaoi overtones), it just seems that a common framework of early Thai yaoi BLs was that many of the dudes just didn't deserve empathy in their creation and longevity. That being queer AUTOMATICALLY meant that one was subject to pain. It's interesting for me to ponder this as this expectation was flirted with on television screens, as opposed to the movies. Again, while I discussed this previously in the context of how cinematically-driven queer and/or BL art plays out -- in regards to art that's structured specifically around yaoi frameworks, it seems like a rule that the dudes are supposed to take hit after hit, without the responsibility of the content checking in on the characters and offering them alternate trajectories of emotional discovery.

We didn't see that in TharnType -- TharnType featured a deeply complicated resolution that involved the intentional hurting of feelings over lengthy periods of time, and a redemption for an INCREDIBLY problematic character in Lhong. And TharnType was made not that long ago -- just four years ago from now.

I talked at length in my Love of Siam review about how brilliantly today's BL filmmakers have taken other expectations of Asian media, such as the concept of open-ended endings, to fascinating and artistically challenging results (to me, resulting in beautiful pieces). But when a piece is structured around yaoi rules and tropes, then it seems like many characters don't stand a chance at happiness. I know that's not a hard and fast rule, but it does create an expectation that something might happen.

I haven't seen My Ride and La Pluie yet, but at least with my dear drama clown friends, I followed the La Pluie journey through meta, and it looks about as opposite from My Bromance as anything -- a tight story about an emotional journey that featured a little magical realism and a lot of emotional development. I want to think that Fluke Teerapat saw the early work that he himself was getting involved in, and said to himself -- man, I know how I can make this MUCH, MUCH better, especially to represent queer happiness and queer love. I think he was beginning to address these conflicts in 2020's YYY, which features a wildly fabulous character in Porpla DEMANDING that the men of their life perform exactly to their yaoi standards. By the time Fluke Teerapat gets to My Ride and La Pluie -- it makes me think he had learned ENOUGH about what could go bad to make excellent standalone art.

Because of my respective fascination and appreciation for both Flukes, I'm glad I watched My Bromance, and separately, it does very much deserve a spot on the OGMMTVC syllabus to just show us what was out there on the eve of Love Sick's premiere. We hear so often that yaoi was an important influence to early Thai canon novel BLs and the television genre, so this sets up folks nicely to understand why shows later on like TharnType existed and were so popular. The expectation had been born and bred, and with TharnType's heat included, it drove the masses crazy. For my totally personal tastes, My Bromance wasn't my speed. But I do think and hope that it set up the two EXCELLENT Flukes for developing their standards around good, even GREAT, BLs in their writing and acting futures.

[Allllllllllright! My previously unscheduled detour into early Thai queer cinema is done for the moment, and I am back to the chronology of a few weeks ago, when I left off with Manner of Death watched and unreviewed. That review will drop early next week. My LOVING homage to my first P'Aof Noppharnach BL in my rewatch review of A Tale of Thousand Stars will drop after that. And then, my surprised take on Lovely Writer -- surprised because I did not expect, at all, to fall so much in love with it!

I'm getting through Nadao Bangkok's Last Twilight in Phuket and I Promised You The Moon at the moment, and soon on the horizon, I've got Not Me and 55:15 Never Too Late on deck -- 55:15 on the list because of its integrated BL storyline and commentary. And then a moment that *I* know I've been waiting for -- my long-awaited Bad Buddy and Our Skyy 2 rewatch. Oh, my heart. Can't wait.

The latest list is below -- I welcome your thoughts! (Tumblr's new web editor is jacking with this list below and not letting me strikethrough those shows that I've watched. For the most updated list, check this link right here.)

1) The Love of Siam (2007) (movie) (review here) 2) My Bromance (2014) (movie) 3) Love Sick and Love Sick 2 (2014 and 2015) (review here) 4) Gay OK Bangkok Season 1 (2016) (a non-BL queer series directed by Jojo Tichakorn and written by Aof Noppharnach) (review here) 5) Make It Right (2016) (review here) 6) SOTUS (2016-2017) (review here) 7) Gay OK Bangkok Season 2 (2017) (a non-BL queer series directed by Jojo Tichakorn and written by Aof Noppharnach) (review here) 8) Make It Right 2 (2017) (review here) 9) Together With Me (2017) (review here) 10) SOTUS S/Our Skyy x SOTUS (2017-2018) (review here) 11) Love By Chance (2018) (review here) 12) Kiss Me Again: PeteKao cuts (2018) (no review) 13) He’s Coming To Me (2019) (review here) 14) Dark Blue Kiss (2019) and Our Skyy x Kiss Me Again (2018) (review here) 15) TharnType (2019-2020) (review here) 16) Senior Secret Love: Puppy Honey (OffGun BL cuts) (2016 and 2017) (no review) 17) Theory of Love (2019) (review here) 18) 3 Will Be Free (2019) (a non-BL and an important harbinger of things to come in 2019 and beyond re: Jojo Tichakorn pushing queer content in non-BLs) (review here) 19) Dew the Movie (2019) (review here) 20) Until We Meet Again (2019-2020) (review here) 21) 2gether (2020) and Still 2gether (2020) (review here) 22) I Told Sunset About You (2020) (review here) 23) YYY (2020, out of chronological order) (review here) 24) Manner of Death (2020-2021) (not a true BL, but a MaxTul queer/gay romance set within a genre-based show that likely influenced Not Me and KinnPorsche) (review coming) 25) A Tale of Thousand Stars (2021) (review here) 26) A Tale of Thousand Stars (2021) OGMMTVC Fastest Rewatch Known To Humankind For The Sake Of Rewatching Our Skyy 2 x BBS x ATOTS (review coming) 27) Lovely Writer (2021) (review coming) 28) Last Twilight in Phuket (2021) (the mini-special before IPYTM) 29) I Promised You the Moon (2021) 30) Not Me (2021-2022) 31) Bad Buddy (2021-2022) (thesis here) 32) 55:15 Never Too Late (2021-2022) (not a BL, but a GMMTV drama that features a macro BL storyline about shipper culture and the BL industry) 33) Bad Buddy (2021-2022) and Our Skyy 2 x BBS x ATOTS (2023) OGMMTVC Rewatch 34) Secret Crush On You (2022) [watching for Cheewin’s trajectory of studying queer joy from Make It Right (high school), to SCOY (college), to Bed Friend (working adults)] 35) KinnPorsche (2022) (tag here) 36) KinnPorsche (2022) OGMMTVC Fastest Rewatch Known To Humankind For The Sake of Re-Analyzing the KP Cultural Zeitgeist 37) The Eclipse (2022) (tag here) 38) GAP (2022-2023) (Thailand’s first GL) 39) My School President (2022-2023) and Our Skyy 2 x My School President (2023) 40) Moonlight Chicken (2023) (tag here) 41) Bed Friend (2023) (tag here) (Cheewin’s latest show, depicting a queer joy journey among working adults) 42) Be My Favorite (2023) (tag here) (I’m including this for BMF’s sophisticated commentary on Krist’s career past as a BL icon) 43) Only Friends (2023)]

#my bromance #my bromance meta #fluke teerapat #tanachot prapasri #fluke natouch #my ride #la pluie #turtles catches up with the essential bls #turtles catches up with thai bls #turtles catches up with old gmmtv #the old gmmtv challenge #ogmmtvc #yaoi bl #yaoi tropes #yaoi influences on thai bl

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