#ITSAY

[kit-teung]

something something wanting someone to like you back so bad that you try to force yourself into the shape of a person your crush has a crush on

[noaso-art]

teh & oh-aew from i told sunset about you 🌺

insta

[qland]

I'm finally watching I Promised You the Moon after so many years of avoiding it like the plague, and y'all... it's literally not that bad. IDK what everyone was on when the series dropped in 2021. Everyone was acting like it was going to like ruin your life or that it made ITSAY unwatchable. It's really good!! Why did people lie to me?!?

Like okay yes, Teh makes AWFUL decisions and I cannot justify any of it. He's awful to Oh'Aew. However, this is totally consistent with his characterization in ITSAY. Teh is deeply immature and insecure--that's his character! His actions are irreprehensible but they're so him. I don't understand why people said this series ruined his character. He's always been like this.

And this season also does wonders for Oh'Aew's character. Both seasons are undoubtably the Teh show (he's the main character no doubt) but I genuinely believe that IPYTM does an even better job of characterizing Oh'Aew outside of his relationship with Teh. We finally get to know who he is as a person. And he's deeply flawed too!! He's also immature and insecure but the difference with Oh'Aew is that he's trying to grow up and learn to be a better person.

I've only just finished episode 4 so my opinions could change over the next hour of television I guess, but as of now, I don't understand why everyone hated this series when it dropped.

[maybe-boys-do-love]

I will never be over the kind of queer representation we get in BL, especially Thai BL, because not only do you get, even in a single show, a vast spectrum of mlm characters from bi-awakening jocks and stoners to soft boys and nerds to full-on femme-boys and kathoey folx...

YOU ALSO GET to see how each single character is allowed to act in a broad range of queer performance styles instead of being relegated to stock character traits like a camping queen or the sad repressed cowboy. So you have Tinn in My School President acting serious when he's doing his presidential duties but assertively flirtatious when he's trying to win over Gun and then being hilariously giddy or pouty when he's on the phone in his bedroom. Or you have Pat in Bad Buddy bro-ing out, acting cutesy with his partner, or in deep introspection on the verge of tears. And those are just two especially outstanding examples in a genre full of so many others!

All this means you also get a broader range of actor types that includes actors who present much more clearly as gay (whether they identify openly as such or it's just how they happen to appear), which is such an amazing thing to see for my little gay theater-kid heart. Like Oe-aew in I Promise You the Moon, I was told and repeated the fact to myself that there was very little space in the performance industry for actors whose queerness was too obvious, and that space was made only for the most flamboyant among us (and even then it was only the rare instance that they were more than a comedic side character). But seeing an actor like Gun--who, without naming his sexuality, visually presents like a femme twink and is clearly comfortable with exploring feminine and queer expression in his personal life--have a field where he gets to play such a vast range of rolls and not have it questioned is remarkable. And there are actors who have more subtle tells to a sensitive eye that then now have a place at the table where there used to be no chair at all. And creating an environment for those actors who present as queer means that those traits and gestures can be invested into the characters' queerness in a way that has previously been specifically avoided in a well-meant but homophobic attempt to disrupt gay stereotypes. (And I'd even reach to say it gives straight actors better opportunities to develop gay qualities in their characters.)

I'm so grateful to see a world where the variety of queerness for men can exist because it seemed so impossible not that long ago. I can recognize failures and flaws in this industry but there is no media to my knowledge that comes anywhere close to the kind of gay representation happening in the Asian BL world (especially if you include the reality shows in there!). And while that world is technically a fantasy world, it's built in a real professional industry by real people including a lot of queer-folks, and those fantasies they're crafting within that business are propositions for audiences to bring to fruition in their daily lives.

[paulinamakes]

crying in the club (brother's vegetable cart)

[itsayteh]

loser bisexual characters directed by boss kuno you’re so dear to me

[certainpancake]

BOSSKUNO IS COMING BACK TO MEEEEEEEE WITH THE JEFF SATUR

[firelise]

Wandee Goodday, ep 4 I Told Sunset About You, ep 3 ↳ platonic back scratches

[wanderlust-in-my-soul]

The Kiss Of Life

KinnPorsche

Dark Blue Kiss

The Eclipse

Cupid's Last Wish

Why R U

Niyamruk So Much In Love

I Told Sunset About You

We Best Love: No. 1 For You

The underwater kiss (Part 1/?) as part of my favorite bl-tropes collection, as always in no particular order.

[waitmyturtles]

Gelboys, Episode 4: What’s Old Is New Again Is Kicking My Ass In Such Good Ways

[Another appropriate title to this post could be: Sad Boys (Bois?) Are Eternal, which, oh yes, they are.]

(h/t @my-rose-tinted-glasses)

I was half-liveblogging to @lurkingshan while I was watching this episode late yesterday, asking and begging Shan, WE ALL COLLECTIVELY GET WHAT’S HAPPENING HERE, RIGHT?!?!5555583737474 🤣🤣😭😭😭😭

The eternal trap of embarrassing yourself for a love that’s almost impossible to call your own, is what I was first reeling about.

The fact that Baabin voluntarily left the concert of his dreams to chase after his one-sided love of Fou4mod is what got me this week in my nostalgic feels. When I was a young lass — how many hang-outs and adventures did I miss with my friends because I was chasing after a dillweed. So many.

Do I regret missing those moments with my homies? Some, yes. Not all of them, though.

I don’t regret having the experiences I had in my teens and twenties — because, stereotypically, they made me who I am today. Chasing after assholes taught me that chasing after assholes was an activity that didn’t pay off, emotionally and even financially (ha, yes, seriously — Baabin spent dough on those tickets).

What we’re seeing in this show is the process of Fou4mod and Baabin laying down the bricks of their life experiences, creating moments in their lives that their future selves will learn from by way of how they want to experience happiness AFTER the tumult that we’re watching them go through now. We, as the audience, are observers to the youth that we know these young guys will grow out of before they know what hit them.

Besides all of what Baabin went through in this episode — ESPECIALLY during that INCREDIBLE confessional crescendo and decrescendo — I am also just SO obsessed with the story of Fou4mod and Chian crossing a significant line of youthful experience in the photo booth.

In a case of the director himself getting real macro and meta, look at Boss Naruebet Kuno showing us what’s old is new again, again.

(what’s up my girl @shortpplfedup) (h/t to the legendary @liyazaki!)

All of these scenes, from 2021’s I Told Sunset About You, to today’s Gelboys (actually set in 2022, tee-hee), sit in the space of young high schoolers contemplating the whens and the hows of how they will cross lines with the people they are attracted to at these moments.

This goes for Baabin, too. He ultimately can’t decide to cross the line of confessing to Fou4mod, leaving him alone, staring and tearing up at a picture of the goddess Lisa, in multiple stages of regret.

From Teh and Oh-aew to Fou4mod and Chian — these young men are negotiating their lines of intimacy and engagement, for what might be the first time in their lives. I absolutely love that this is a theme that Boss has returned to in his work. Instead of giving us a fantasy high school romance, Boss gives us ITSAY and Gelboys, two shows that sit in a more raw and real place of teenagers being messy because….they don’t know anything else but the messiness they’re in now. It takes a whole lot of life experience to have love and sex with someone that can be on the calmer and more copacetic side.

I am just kicking up my heels with this experience of watching teenagers grow up in intimacy through Boss’s work. He’s not shying away from depicting the very real pain and confusion of these experiences. I channeled Baabin fully from my past experiences during this episode. No matter the technology and distractions these young people have in Gelboys, the confusion, the pain, and the hyperbolic joy of unrequited love or first sex remains constant, consistent, and eternal for every generation of humanity — and I love that Gelboys is using a very loud drill, louder over the sound of Spotify playlists and Siam Square concerts, to make that point.

[rythyme]

you know what? fuck you. *untells the sunset about you*

[epikhightechnology]

I just got home after a long hard day and found mail in my mailbox and I'm so happy 🥹🥹🥹 3 beautiful postcards from @zimmbzon through @mailed-it 💛💛 Look how beautiful, everybody!

Dr. Kan my belovedst 😭😭😭😭💛💛💛💛💛💛💛

Khun Yai truly "drunk on love's celestial bliss" look at him lost in the sauce

Imma tell sunset abt this postcard right now gosh so beautiful 😭😭😭💛 thank you so so much @zimmbzon i will cherish them 🙏🙏 my birthday is later this week and this feels like an early present i'm so happy

Thank you @mailed-it & everyone who organised this project, yall are the best

[suburbanforestwitch]

If you're looking for a BL where the level of angst is

“I have no idea what these feelings are but I want to crawl inside your ribcage and ignite a small apocalypse in your honor”

then I Told Sunset About You might just be exactly your brand of emotional damage.

[jackandjoker]

i told sunset about you part 1/?

credits:

pictures from pinterest

@ashtrayangell on tumblr / ally condie / the picture of dorian gray, oscar wilde / @maykitz on tumblr

[maybe-boys-do-love]

Boss Kuno is really out here giving us heavily bipolar-coded characters in a sympathetic but honest light, and we respect him for that.