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Ivan's starlit confession

(because i'm insane and can't process my pain)

When you took center stage and filled my lungs with your being, I asked myself for the last time:

Will it be worth it? To exchange my voice for a kiss; my soul for your gaze; my life for your life—will it be worth it?

When you began to sing, the questions were spiralling out of me:

You have never spared me a meaningful glance, nor do I have a place in your heart; why am I going through such lengths for you? I have tormented and teased you, yet why do I crave you like a swirling tornado? I have stayed by your side all this time, why are you still chasing her shadow? (when I have always been your willing satellite.)

When you sang the chorus, I wondered:

How would you feel? If I were to really leave your side, if I were to stop orbiting around you—how would you feel? Will you find it unfair? Will it hurt you as much as I hoped it would? Will it destroy you? (Will you grieve?)

When I began singing, I knew what your answers would be.

And I'm more relieved than anything.

When I reached the chorus, I sang a silent prayer:

That even if my body that is but a mortal flesh ceases to dust, may my voice seep into the stars, my soul to scatter into the halo of the distant moon, my life to be the fire in your pulse,

For I am giving to you the devotion of a man who has never had faith.

(And if you ever look up into the black sky, may you be reminded that I am yours, and yours alone.)

I turned away from my place, as I came to you. My feet had never been so lighter.

Because I only knew one truth—

And so I kissed you (look at me)

And held you (please, look at me)

And kissed you once more (you're beautiful)

when Cupid fired his bullets—

...

...

(You are worth it, Till. Infinitely so.)

..

My hands drew away from the warmth that is you, and as my breath grew fainter, as my bones grew weaker, I etched you in my eternity,

Because there is only one absolute truth—

My God. My Universe.

I yearn for you.

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bella was lucky she didn’t have a cell phone of any kind because you know ya boi edward would be blowing up that phone 24-7 going “saw a snail today…. effervescent” or some shit equivalent

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He said you know nothing. He wants to live his life like everyone else, not cooped up in here like this.He’s been deaf for 3 years now. You’ve never tried to learn sign language. He said that you are ashamed of him being deaf.

Gemini Norawit as HEART & Fourth Nattawat as LI MING MOONLIGHT CHICKEN THE SERIES (2023) Aof Noppharnach Chaiwimol

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I know some people were slightly annoyed with the way Heart's (and Li Ming's) sign language wasn't subtitled but I'm pretty sure that was the point? Why should Heart communicate with people who haven't learnt to communicate with him?

He lives in a world where people (including his own family) expect him to make accommodations for them when it comes to communication but who don't return the favour. The audience is part of that world too.

Edit because I had more thoughts:

Something I want to add:

While I understand that it probably felt odd to a international, non-Thai speaking audience to suddenly have to subtitles cut off when Heart started signing, the effect would have been exactly the same for the Thai speaking audience who, up until that point, would have understood everything perfectly without subtitles. We're supposed to find the sudden lack of understanding jarring, we're supposed to physically feel the communication barrier and the frustrations that it brings (frustrations that Heart has deal with all the time).

While there are definitely arguments to made about whether "othering" Heart this way was the best way to highlight the difficulties he faces in a hearing-biased world, personally I found it incredibly effective. It made me realise that even if the show was in my mother tongue, I still wouldn't have been able to understand Heart because of my own lack of knowledge and it made me start to question whether I'm okay with that being the case.

There is also one instance where signing is subtitled and it's at the very end where Wen signs to Heart:

And why is that? Because finally, finally, after years of people not making an effort to communicate with him on his own terms, the people in Heart's world are trying, finally they are reaching out to him. Moonlight Chicken's ending is a happy one, with all the loose ends tied up and dreams on the route to coming true, and in that happy ending, finally, everyone can understand one another.

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“You…have never…celebrated…” Ah! You’ve never celebrated the new year with anyone before? With me now.

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i just saw someone's comment on youtube saying "in the first life, heart couldnt hear liming's voice so in their second life, tinn fell for gun as soon as he heard gun's singing" and yeah bye

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Moonlight Chicken is For the Queers

Ok I started my rewatch of episode 8 and figured out what I want to talk about for this series' finale: intentions and resolutions. This post will be about intention, and how I truly feel that Moonlight Chicken is a gift for queer people. Why? Well, there are many reasons, but for the purposes of this post, I will simply present the following title card.

Moonlight Chicken, Chapter 8: The Self-made House and Home

(if you are expecting this post to be anything other than a jumbled mess of my personal experiences with no clear through-lines or relevant transitions between sentences, thoughts, etc. then turn back now)

Whatever we want to say boy loves started as, fetish or otherwise, queer people are still able to see themselves or get comfort and representation. But coming from watching literally 25 boy loves in the last four months, this show feels different from most (not all) of them, to me, because of how strongly this show centers around built community, rather than romance, as it's central theme.

And yeah while any standard friend group in BL could be considered community in the abstract, the idea that they are a community is never quite presented. It's Team taking food from Pharm and all three of the gang teasing each other, it's Kuea and Diao spending most of their time talking about their relationships, it's Porsche forgetting Pete exists because he's so caught up in Kinn. More often than not we are building towards and hoping for declarations of love between two characters. And do not get me wrong, that is all well and good, and always what I'm rooting for in those shows. And we get something akin to that in Moonlight Chicken too, which is when you finally have Li Ming and Jim calling Heart and Wen (respectively) their boyfriends.

But the "I love you" we get in Moonlight Chicken? That isn't between the couples, it's between Li Ming and Jim.

Because the thing that makes Moonlight Chicken different from other BLs is the emphasis it puts on queer elders raising queer youth. It's about queer youth learning from queer elders and queer elders learning from queer youth. It's about how home and birth families don't always fit quite right, and how you build families and homes despite. And it's applicable to many people, children in abusive homes, disabled people, etc. too. Which is why P'Aof adds strained parental relationships and deafness in to this piece. But because this is fundamentally a BL show, I'm viewing this more through a queer lens.

So naturally, this also means I am informing my analysis of this show through my feelings as the only (known/out/visible) queer person on either side of my family. When I was little, a decade or more before I realized I was queer, I asked my mother one night if I was adopted. I'm not, and I know that, but why did I ask? Because I never really felt like I fit. Not the way I was supposed to fit, not the way family was supposed to fit together. My house never felt like a home.

And it's why I love this exchange between Wen and Jim at the end of episode 2

"I want home," "Don't you already have one?" "I don't." "A person like me doesn't fit to be anyone's home,"

And technically we know this isn't true. Wen does have a home, he has a condo, he has a place to sleep. But emotionally is where the problem lies. Wen is living with his ex, the apartment is cold, he has work colleagues and a friend that he and his ex both know and that's it. And as he tells Jim in episode 7, all his friends are straight. And then he meets Jim, and there is a spark, and maybe it's possible for home to grow there.

Literally, physically, I have a home. I have a family. But the more I embrace my queerness, the more I understand and am comfortable with myself, the more isolating and cold that house and family feel. I'm such a different person now than I was, and there are homophobes and transphobes on both sides of my family, and that makes it hard for me to feel like I am loved. Even when logically I know I am. But it's hard, when your mother says she accepts you and has yet to use my pronouns properly despite me being out to her for over a year and having three separate conversations about it. When your uncle spends twenty minutes or more complaining about trans people, when your cousins don't think trans people should exist. That's my family...technically. That's my home...technically. But it hasn't felt like that in years. So I understand what Wen means here, Wen's definition of home is not a place it is a feeling.

And Jim? We know Jim is already everyone's home. He is home for Li Ming, he is the closest thing to a parent that Leng has in his life, he makes sure the community not only has food, but has as much as food as they could possibly eat. He is first and foremost a community caretaker. But he is so wrapped up in his grief about Beam, his self-hatred, his stubbornness, his exhaustion that he is not able to believe that about himself. Home is a place and not a feeling for Jim, because he can't allow it to be.

The key to Wen and Jim's relationship is finding and building that home.

Home, Family, Community. These are incredibly important themes to Moonlight Chicken and those themes are incredibly important aspects of being queer.

I don't know how Thailand is re: homophobia and transphobia, if kids risk the same chance of getting kicked out of their homes for being queer, etc. But that is a very real possibility for many queer people in the States. But I'm thinking of homelessness in queer youth, how 28% of queer youth have reported experiencing homelessness in their lives. I'm thinking of ballroom and ball culture and how participants in the Ballroom scene were parts of Houses with mothers and fathers at the head of them who acted as mentors to their queer children. When I think about queerness and what it means, I think about ballroom. I think about connection, I think about community.

But that community is often forged from necessity borne out of isolation. What do I mean by isolation? I mean the isolation that Li Ming feels in school, around his school friends. I mean the faces Li Ming makes when his friends are talking about girls:

I mean the physical barriers the show places between Li Ming and his school friends.

It is the isolation that comes with queerness, with poverty, with everything about Li Ming. Beyond the fact Wen is a little younger than Jim and thus better able to understand and see Li Ming's desires to be seen as an adult. I think it is this state of listlessness in Li Ming is also something Wen recognizes. I think at this point Li Ming is so desperate to get away, to go to America, to be listened to and respected by Jim.

Jim who is too caught up in constant stress to see the home he has built for himself, Li Ming who is too caught up in wanting to be understood to appreciate that he has a home to run from. Wen who is working as a go between for Li Ming and Jim because he wants them to be his home. Heart who has been trapped at home and found his freedom because Li Ming understands the frustration of misunderstanding, and the importance of community.

I'm thinking about how so much of the final episodes are dedicated to showing community, showing family, showing the audience that home lies in the collective.

We see it in how many people rush to help Mrs. Hong:

We see it in the people who help you carry your grief:

We see it in how deeply and broadly the pain is felt when community pillars are lost:

We see it in the end of and era:

We see it in the olive branches:

And in new beginnings:

Very few people in these shots are connected through blood, but they are a family. And when I look at these shots the only thing I can think about is how I felt the night I threw a party for all my trans friends. All I can think about when I see these shots of everyone sitting and eating together is how many times I would look over to my friends and see them beaming. How many times someone came up to me to excitedly say this is the first time they felt like they could fully be themselves. How everyone kept asking to do an event like this again. How everyone kept asking to be added to a group chat at the end of the night so they could keep in contact.

And I remember how it felt for me to realize that I had built a community for myself in a place that I have really been struggling to feel was home. Because I had spent so much time in school and work, barley able to scrape together enough money to cover expenses, exhausted and stressed and unable to see what I had sitting right in front of me.

And I think about other queer people I have met, who light up when they see someone else who is gay, who talk about how lonely they feel because they only have one other queer friend. How immediately the need to invite them out, to introduce them to people, to make sure they have community strikes.

I think about how I worked at a summer camp out of state, and got to try out my pronouns, and figure out who I was, and then a few months later, I had to return home. Where I wasn't out yet, where I was going to get misgendered, and how quickly I came out to all of my close friends about my gender identity to try to mitigate how much my mental health tanked when I had to be someone my parents thought I still was. How at the same camp, the queer kids flocked to all the queer staff, how desperate they were to bond. How much lighter they got to be when they were away from their parents and allowed to be themselves around people who also understood not only them as people with the identities they held, but also their struggles existing in a household that didn't see who they were.

I think about how, in the States at least, "are you family?" is/was used as code for "are you gay?"

It's why it is so important to me that Moonlight Chicken ends with the line: "I just built a home. I don't want to move anywhere."

Because Wen has finally built his home. Because he has found his family, his queer community, his home. And yeah, we get the romance, yeah we get Li Ming and Heart holding hands, and Jim and Wen making out, but the emphasis of the final episode is moving forward, being brave, allowing yourself to love, and allowing yourself to stop, look around, and realize that you've made a home for yourself that is built of the people you love who love you in return.

Community building is a huge part of life for literally everyone, but it vital to the survival of marginalized communities. And when I think about my own relationship to queerness, one of the most sacred and important aspects of being queer is building the family you need.

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can you believe li ming:

learned how to sign to communicate with a cute guy who also happens to be deaf

fell in love with said cute guy

helped cute guy get a better relationship with his parents

started dating cute guy

is going to america to live his dream and is taking cute guy with him

accomplished all that in 6-7 months

!!!!!!!!!!

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I haven’t felt this way in a long time. What way? Like a normal person. To me, you are normal.

MOONLIGHT CHICKEN (2023) dir. Backaof Noppharnach

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“To me, you're normal.”

MOONLIGHT CHICKEN (2023) episode 05.

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Here's a parallel I hate

What Heart signs in the background of the church.

What heart signs to the sign language instructor at the church:

gif from @ablazenqueen

In order the signs are DEAF. THREE. YEARS. NOW. FIRST. MEET. DEAF. SAME."

Thank you to @deafcruz for pointing out the sign: SAME

So for a rough English translation: "I've been deaf for three years and now is the first I'm meeting others who are deaf"

What Heart signs to his mother in their fight: DEAF. YEARS. THREE.

gif from @maxescheibechlinichacheli

followed by "You never learned sign language. You are ashamed of me being Deaf,"

And like...yeah...we knew this already, but I can't believe that I didn't pay attention to what Heart was saying at the church until literally last night because he mentions how long he's been deaf and how long he's been deprived of community so casually in that scene. Probably cause he's just excited to meet other Deaf people. But that simple statement looms overhead, getting ready to be used again when Heart finally speaks his mind to his mother. When Heart finally shows her how isolated she has made him because her feelings have been more important than his life.

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Your voice is very nice. I want to hear it more often.

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You can speak? Hey! You can speak? Can you speak again? I want to hear.I want to hear your voice.

Gemini Norawit as HEART & Fourth Nattawat as LI MING MOONLIGHT CHICKEN THE SERIES (2023) Aof Noppharnach Chaiwimol

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GEMINI NORAWIT as HEART and FOURTH NATTAWAT as LI MING in MOONLIGHT CHICKEN (2023) for @loversmore

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oh, when we're alone / it's like we're home

heartliming x home by reese lansangan for @feralmuskyscentedhoepran