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iamthinkingaboutvariousthings · 3 months

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The Dark Side of BL

@weekendatennuis asked:

Your BL curriculum breakdown today was *chef’s kiss* and the 10 cutest BLs was delightful but sometimes this little sunshine likes a little more heat and dark!

Have you done a breakdown of the darker ones?

Ooo, thank you and this is interesting. Because I recently got Gaga, I’ve been working my way through their back catalogue which includes some of the most dark BLs ever made (Japanese, of course).

How dark do you want it? Do you want a list of dark BLs that I still think are good and watchable? Or just a list of some of the darkest BLs ever?

Here’s:

Top 10 BLs without an HEA still worth watching & 3 that will wreck you

But these aren’t necessarily dark. However, those 10 are about what I would go with as my favorites. Since I don’t wallow much. I respect the need to wallow, though. So I guess I have to remove my taste and really play.

I am not going to include betrayal shows (like My Bromance, In Between Seasons, Grey Rainbow, History3: Make Our Days Count where the “twist” is one of the characters dyeing unexpectedly) or the Doomed Gays of Chinese History (e.g. The Male Queen).

Also, some of the following might not really qualify as BLs anymore. I did not include microfilms. If I remember where I saw it I included the source.

The 10 Darkest BLs I’ve Ever Seen

TRIGGER WARNING ON EVERYTHING!!! A lot of them are also VERY high heat. These are in order, starting with darkest/worst.

1. The Shortest Distance series (Japan 2019-2020 GaGa) [1. The Shortest Distance is Round (Noir) AKA Saitankyori wa Mawari Kudokute; 2. The Shortest Distance is Round 2: Rain and Soda AKA Saitankyori wa Mawari Kudokute: Ame to Soda Mizu; 3. The Shortest Distance 3: Fallen Flowers AKA Saitankyori Wa Mawari Kudokute: Rakka Ryūsui] - OKAY SO this is the darkest BL I’ve ever seen, it’s so dark it pushes into absurdist. It gets to a point where you’re like: so he cuts off his own junk for love? Of course he does. What else would he do? It’s teacher/student, false accusation, hustler, explicit sex with multiple men, and includes abuse, rape, violence, and mutilation, possibly a few others as well. But seriously, by the final installment I was all *yawn* TRY to shock me, boys.

2. Dangerous Drugs of Sex AKA Sei no Gekiyaku (Japan 2020 GaGa) - erm, right, so this is a suicidal man kidnapped right before he jumps and then kept and sexually tortured (high kink) by a doctor for… reasons. Explicit. Ends “happy” by some people’s standards. VegasPete the first installment.

3. Double Mints (Japan 2017 GaGa) - codependency, murder gay, bullying, humiliation and torture kink, self mutilation, Yakuza violence, rape, attempted suicide. Ya know, whatever.

4. Forbidden Love (Japan 2008 GaGa) - whipping boy trope, servant who grew up in the sinister mafia-esk family. Spoiled, rich, loose-cannon seme madly in love with the older, somber, moral-compass uke. Homophobic family, cheating, murder gay, incest, & necrophilia! Oh goodie.

5. Boys Love the series (Japan 2006 YouTube) - murder gay, mild necrophilia, cheating, abuse, rape, and ends with suicide for love.

6. Boys Love the movie AKA Boys Love 2 Schoolboy Crush (Japan 2007 YouTube) - teacher/student, obsession, desperation, abuse, mutilation.

7. Light (Taiwan 2021 GaGa) - ironically named movie about a street hustler (incest, rape, abuse survivor all depicted on screen) who falls in (and in love with) an undercover cop.

8. A Round Trip to Love (2016 China YouTube) - 2 parts, obsession goes rotten in China’s favorite way: kidnapping, rape, and uke sacrifices himself into death for the sake of his abuser. Because how else could it possibly go?

9. The Effect (Thailand 2019 YouTube) - classic uni-set Thai BL, seme falls madly in love with beautiful uke but it goes the way such kinds of obsession actually would in real life - into stalking, rape, abuse, accusations, and suicide.

10. Red Wine on a Dark Night (Thailand 2015 DramaCool) - I think this might be meant to be a slasher flick but it comes of more as basically “baby is a murder gay” weeeeeee.

Moody Arthouse Smackdoodle

Some that are more moody and angsty and cerebral dealing with depression and the like with an edge of honest queerness.

Your Name Engraved Herein (Taiwan 2020 Netflix) - this movie is fantastic but it is also seriously depressing, it’s a self acceptance journey, but if you wanna wallow in high quality acting and serious gay drama, this’ll do it.

Goodbye Mother AKA Thua Me Con D (Vietnam 2019 Netflix) - like YNEH this is a great movie but it deals openly with homophobia, bashing, family trauma and social acceptance.

For Love, We Can (Hong Kong 2014) - an indie movie about parental homophobia, light/dark pairing, and (of course) HIV.

The Cornered Mouse Dreams of Cheese AKA Kyuso wa Chizu no Yume wo Miru (Japan 2020) - obsession, cheating, breakup, reunion, then break up again, explicit.

Pornographer movie series - AKA The Novelist, Mood Indigo, Pornographer Playback (Japan 2018-2020) emotional manipulation, cheating, obsession, seduction, May/December (age gap AKA younger/older), kink, touch of necrophilia, explicit.

Method (Korea 2017) - May/December, actor idol pairing, that should have been everything I wanted in life but it’s more about the actor cheating on his wife and their weird “artsy” relationship and frankly, I hated this. And I don’t say that lightly.

Itsuka no Kimi e (Japan 2007 YouTube) - okay this is basically about a college student who saves this boy from drowning and then gets embroiled in his, and his identical twin’s messed up lives. It goes very weird.

His the series AKA I Didn’t Think I Would Fall In Love (Japan 2019) - boy goes to visit his absent father ends up kinda homeless on the beach gets adopted by local family falls in love with the boy working and living with them. Lots of long drawn out glances.

Innocent (Taiwan 2021 GaGa) - mental health, childhood trauma, actually kinda sweet.

Okay But Make it Really BL-ish

These are all more BL with a strong representative sampling of darker themes and problematic yaoi tropes. So if you are enjoying Utsukushii Kare then these are worth investigating. In thematic order.

Does the Flower Bloom? (Japan 2018 YouTube) - bridging the gap to the arthouse style this is a May/December romance about an artist student and the house he inherits from his recently dead parents and all the people around him who are obsessed with him, including an older man.

Takumi-Kun (Japan 2007-2011 YouTube) - series features all the problematic tropes and watches almost exactly like yaoi reads, the leads do have good chemistry, though. Includes incest, abuse, dub-con, and obsession.

Addicted Heroin (China 2016 Viki) - unfinished due to censorship but still very good, well acted and shot, high school set, rich kid falls madly for the genius poor kid in his class, starts an aggressive pursuit, includes kidnapping for love, obsession, stepbrother trope, plus some cheating. I love this one.

Capture Lover (China 2020 Viki) - the ending is a touch confusing but basically this is the rich kid seme with nothing better to do, put to work in an office, falls hard for the strict boss, moves himself in and aggressively seduces him. Like a grown up Addicted. (Features Han Jing Chen, China’s Singto.)

River Knows Fish Heart (China 2018 GaGa) - this BL managed to sneak by the censors probably because it’s not very well acted and low budget. It’s also in Addicted territory, only this time with the jock who falls madly for the nerd and then just moves into his house to takes over his life. The tsundere uke is VERY tsundere and the seme is hella pushy so it goes right into dubcon territory but also it’s very teen angst about it.

Irresistible Love: Secrets of the Valet 1 & 2 (China 2016 YouTube) - 2 parts, I not-so-secretly love this BL. Kidnapping, whipping boy, obsession, mutilation, very hard fought happy ending (in one version). Absolutely classic Chinese BL pre-censorship.

Legend of Long Yang AKA Rebirth (China 2017 GaGa) - whipping boy trope… literally, servant character takes the strap for the prince, who then makes him his bodyguard and lover when he becomes king. Low budget historical, comes off as kind of cosplay wuxia version of Irresistible Love, but we get (in the credits) an actual kiss, and they both live. So yay for small mercies.

HIStory Obsessed (Taiwan 2017 Viki) - the softest version of the world’s most problematic yaoi tropes, while still managing to be those tropes.

HIStory 4: Close to You (Taiwan 2021 Viki) the side dish plot is basically a pastiche of problematic BL tropes inherited from the above. Great chemistry, high heat, stepbrothers, dubcon, obsession, stalker etc…

You might also try some of the ones I really loved but are only borderline BL (no cheese, no cringe, no smarm)

Not Me (Thailand)

Manner of Death (Thailand)

3 Will be Free (Thailand)

Triage (Thailand)

Love Mechanics (Thailand)

I Told Sunset About You (Thailand)

Old Fashion Cupcake (Japan)

Life: Love On The Line director’s cut (Japan)

What Did You Eat Yesterday? (Japan)

Restart After Come Back Home (Japan)

Blueming (Korea)

Long Time No See (Korea)

To My Star (Korea)

Ocean Likes Me (Korea)

DNA Says Love You (Taiwan)

(source)

#bl rec lists #absolute bl rec lists #japanese bl rec lists #korean bl rec lists #chinese bl rec lists #taiwanese bl rec lists #dark bl #depressing bl #high heat bl #vietnamese bl rec lists #thai bl rec lists

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iamthinkingaboutvariousthings · 3 months

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A Very Informal BL Tumblr Census

As all the BL 2023 Wrapped posts were going around in December and January, I was surprised to see how many people said this was their first year in the BL Tumblr sphere or that they stopped lurking for the first time in 2023. To investigate this phenomenon (and my general impression that BL engagement went up during the COVID-19 lockdowns), I created a series of polls in early January to see what I could discover:

When did you start watching Asian BLs? (the first one, focused on post-2017) and When did you start watching Asian BLs? (the follow up, focused on pre-2017)

When did you join BL Tumblr? (i.e., when did you start reblogging/liking/viewing BL content on Tumblr)

When did you stop lurking on BL Tumblr? (i.e., when did you start making your own original posts and/or interacting with other BL Tumblr blogs)

Which show did you start writing meta for? (for those of us who write meta)

A big thank you to everyone who voted!

When did you start watching Asian BLs?

My first poll on this topic was made with the express interest of spotting a pattern in recent BL watchers - anecdotally it felt like a lot of people had just started to join and post on BL Tumblr in 2023 and I wanted to see if that coincided with or followed an uptick in BL watchers (i.e., did people start watching BLs and joining BL Tumblr around the same time, or had people been watching BLs for a while before joining BL Tumblr). Furthermore, I felt like I had heard a lot about a pandemic surge in BL watchers (and BL content), so I wanted to focus specifically on the 2020 to now (2024) period.

Over the time period of 2018-2024, the largest number of new BL watchers came in 2020 with 20.0% (and 12.9% of those respondents started watching in the first half of 2020).

For those curious, the breakdown for new viewers in 2020-2024 in six month intervals is as follows:

The majority of respondents on the first poll said they started watching Asian BLs before 2017, so I made another poll (though I was once again limited by the number of options you can have in one poll) exploring 2007-2017 year by year, and then "2006 and before" as the final poll option.

Note: there were 869 respondents to the first poll, and 73 to the second poll.

Interesting to see the big spike of new BL watchers in 2016 and 2017.

Note: I didn't really have a hard and fast definition of "Asian BL" in mind when I made this poll, though I was thinking more of live-action content vs animated series as that is what I see more often in my corner of Tumblr. It was interesting to see people's responses in the tags of what they considered Asian BL to be (including or excluding Chinese censored shows like The Untamed, including or excluding animes like Yuri on Ice, etc.), but I know the lack of clarity on what exactly *is* a BL for the purposes of this poll made it harder to answer and also introduced a bigger margin of error (someone excluding animated series might have said they started watching BL at a later date than someone including animated series, for example). This polls were always intended for my own curiosity though, so you'll have to excuse the lack of academic rigour.

When did you join BL Tumblr?

In short: the largest number of respondents joined BL Tumblr in 2023 (25.3% of respondents), followed by 2022 (19.2%). Additionally, a significant number of respondents joined in or before 2017 (17.9%) - once again, I was limited by the number of poll options and by my initial focus on recent Tumblr history, and I didn't make a follow up poll for this one.

The number of people joining BL Tumblr year by year has grown fairly steadily since 2018 (roughly 6.6% per year), except for a small drop in 2021. The biggest jump was between 2021 and 2022 (went up 7.8%).

We also saw 0.6% of respondents say they joined in 2024, which is exciting (welcome!).

The "started to watch Asian BL" numbers for 2023 were pretty low compared to other years, unlike the "joined BL Tumblr" numbers for 2023, so seems that there were a significant number of people who had been watching Asian BL for any number of years before joining BL Tumblr. The spike in new watchers in 2020 and in 2022, as well as a decrease in new watchers in 2021, do coincide with increases and decreases in people joining BL Tumblr for the first time though, which is interesting.

Note: I tried my best to make a distinction between "joined BL Tumblr" and "stopped lurking on BL Tumblr," but I know the very concept of a start date for "joining" BL Tumblr is quite nebulous. For example, I myself had seen and sought out Asian BL content on Tumblr before I made a side blog, so when did I really "join"? Furthermore, there might have been people who joined BL Tumblr and subsequently left before this poll came around (not to mention the lack of reach of the poll to begin with - there's many people currently on BL Tumblr who's vote I didn't catch).

When did you stop lurking on BL Tumblr?

In short: 2023 had the highest number of respondents who said they stopped lurking on BL Tumblr (27.5%), followed by 2022 (20.0%). This is a significant increase over all the other time spans investigated (2017 and before, 2018-2019, 2020, and 2021), which boasted an average of 5% of respondents. Once again, this poll was limited by the number of poll options and by my initial focus on recent Tumblr history, and I didn't make a follow up poll covering the time span of 2016 and before in more detail.

The number of people making their own posts and interacting with other users in this corner of Tumblr has also increased over the period of 2019 to 2023. There was steady growth over the period of 2019-2021, before we saw a big jump occurring (like in the previous category) from 2021 to 2022 (went up 13.5%). The jump from 2022 to 2023 was less than the one from 2021 to 2022 but still much larger than those previous years.

There were also 1.4% of respondents who said they stopped lurking in 2024, and 31.5% of respondents who said they were still lurking (hi!).

Interesting to note this in light of other data - while 2023 didn't necessarily have as many people joining BL Tumblr for the first time, it did have a lot of existing BL Tumblr folks coming out of the woodwork to make their own posts for the first time. Furthermore, the poll results for 2021 saw a small dip in people watching BL for the first time and in people joining BL Tumblr for the first time, but more or less continued the existing trajectory for "people who stopped lurking on BL Tumblr".

What show did you start writing meta for?

For this poll, I picked some shows I had heard people say was their first foray into meta, as well as other shows that seemed to have a lot of meta about them.

No one on the initial poll said Our Skyy 2 was their first foray into meta, and some of the other shows people mentioned in the tags were Word of Honour, I Promised You the Moon, Manner of Death, and Chains of Heart. Also, shout out to those who answered "I don't remember".

Now of course the release date of these shows does not necessarily correspond with the time period these metas were written in - Bad Buddy, for example, continues to have new meta written about it all the time even though it aired 2021-2022. However, it is interesting to note the strong showing of shows that aired in 2023 on this list. Part of this was my own selection of choices, obviously, but still, 23.4% of respondents said their first meta was written for a show that aired entirely within 2023 (this doesn't include MSP).

I did a follow-up poll to investigate my hypothesis: When did you write your first BL meta?. There were fewer respondents for this one (53 vs 137 for the poll for "which show"), but it still paints an interesting picture: a whopping 45.2% of respondents said they wrote their first BL meta in 2023. (also 3.8% said they wrote their first meta in 2024!)

As you can see, the graph for "When did you write your first BL meta" follows a similar trajectory to the graphs for "When did you join BL Tumblr" and "When did you stop lurking on BL Tumblr".

Alright, that's it from me! Thanks again for voting on all my polls. Obviously this represents but a small and limited fraction of BL Tumblr experiences, but I hope you found it interesting regardless.

#this is so interesting thank you!#2024 bl tumblr census #bl fandom #tag wrangling needed

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iamthinkingaboutvariousthings · 3 months

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A boy can dream, can't he?

#tech tips

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iamthinkingaboutvariousthings · 3 months

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Is Playboyy really that messy?

If you look at the quick succession of scenes, some barely reaching the 2 minutes mark, the changes in mood and style - here a romantic kiss, there a dramatic reveal with the occasional social criticism thrown into the mix - the answer would probably be: Yes, it's very messy. The characters and the plot lines are plenty. You've got tons of imagery from other media as well - ep11 was especially rich in movie references. It's all over the place and it's a lot!

But I wonder, what if the series works similar to a pointillism painting?

It's one brightly colored dot right to the next, but the image itself will only be revealed when you take a few steps back. Only then can you see the figures and the landscapes immerging from the chaos.

If you ask me, Playboyy is like a collage of queer life. It takes the pop culture, the Greek statues, the (sometimes failed) romance, the sex and kink, the drama, the music, the clothes, the activism, the conflicts with older generations, the experimental styles, the references... The series takes all these things and sticks them together to create something new: They put Michelangelo's David next to a pair of rainbow angel wings, next to an article about murdered prostitutes, next to the cut out of an underwear fashion model, next to a cheesy quote from Notting Hill.

So Playboyy can't be only a series that discusses sex or offers criticism towards problems in our modern societies. You've got those things in there, mind you: Look at the upper right corner of the artwork and you'll find discussions about kink and consent or look down and you'll have your critique towards a government that can't even acknowledge prostitution is real. But as a whole, Playboyy is a collection of different experiences, things that happend and things that are only imagination.

The series itself tells us repeatedly that it's neither a thriller nor an action movie or an 80's romcom. Playboyy can't be just one thing, one genre, because it encompasses everything (everything that is queer that is).

It is up to us viewers what we want to take from this piece of art. You can watch it as a silly and entertaining flick (equivalent to: Yay~ Lots of bright colors and glitter :D) or go for the cinematography and the references (how did they even build this thing? o.O) or discuss political issues (let me read that news article again...), talk about sex and kink (is that a naked guy with a dog mask over there? omg!) and so on and so forth. I think in the end Playboyy the Series is meant to be a vehicle for us, to get the discussions going and to show us the many different facets of queer life in Thailand.

#playboyy #playboyy the series

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iamthinkingaboutvariousthings · 3 months

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Recent WLW/GL Series Guide

Going to start a compendium for all things wlw but until then, so everyone is in the loop, will recommend some recently completed and currently airing shows I think people should check out:

Keep reading

#wlw media #gl series #wlw series #gl dramas #gl rec list #korean gl #thai gl #japanese gl #rec lists

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iamthinkingaboutvariousthings · 3 months

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I was talking with @lurkingshan in the comments about the latest episode of Playboyy and though I would just make a post.

This seems obvious to say but I will still say it. These are my personal views on the show.

I wrote on my monthly breakdown that the thing about this show that was preventing me about engaging with it was the acting. Because when it's not that good I keep getting pulled out of it and I can't connect with it emotionally and so I stop caring about the characters and caring about the characters is my ultimate reason to watch anything at all.

But other than that, and this last episode is a great example of this, is the fact that the way it's cut just doesn't leave room for me to focus on any one thing. The way we go from a very dramatic scene, to a love fest, to the investigation of a dead friend, to a well shot sexual encounter, back to the investigation, back to the love, etc etc just doesn't allow any of it to resonate enough for me to give a damn about any one thing.

Just this episode, in order, we get:

-Someone being shot -Aob being beaten -"Father" red envelope moment -leaked tape followed by "now panic and freak out" -photo shoot moment because of reasons -resume panic and freak out -journalist exposing pedophilia and grooming -crying kisses -hair washing moment -3 romantic comedy references in less than 2 minutes -the best undercover agents -whatever that First and Soong moment was -cue dramatic reveal : "Jason is the owner of playboyy!!!" -Cute boyfriends moment where they feed each other and share their favourite things -revisiting old memories and having sex in locker room -Now Fight! -Sad side character moment The End

Which of these should I care about? Because it keeps jumping from one emotional beat to a completely different one I can't really connect with any of them. And I want to. Because I really think this show is showing interesting things in the middle of all this. Important things are being talked about here and I want to care about all of it.

But ultimately the show is not letting me.

#playboyy #cheewin thanamin #myrosetintedglasses meta

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iamthinkingaboutvariousthings · 3 months

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Kink in Playboyy: A Less than Fond Farewell

Alright besties, I have not been talking much about Playboyy because I honestly have not had all that much to say. But after Episode 10 and what I heard about Episode 11, I am here to say I am officially DNFing Playboyy.

And like, maybe I would have let this go without a word, but I think after Episode 10, there really needs to be a conversation around some concerning patterns I am noticing about the portrayals of sex in this show.

Because this show really hates kink y’all. Like really hates it. It absolutely needs to be said, in my eyes, that every single person who has engaged in kink in Playboyy has been abused by it. And I think it is very telling that the only screen shots and gifsets related to sex that I see are of the more wholesome moments, rather than the kink, the aftermath of the kink, and most if not all of the moments of physical and sexual assault are nowhere to be found in the tags.

Porsche uses dom/sub or master/slave dynamics to abuse Jump, Jump reverses that dynamic to abuse Porsche as a way to get revenge against how Porsche treated him. And he only does that once he figured out that Porsche is engaging in kink (being a sugar baby) outside of his time with Jump and is essentially perpetuating the cycle of violence from his own abuse in his sugar baby relationship.

Captain engages in voyuerism through the making and selling of sex tapes, and he records those without the knowledge of the sexual partner which is technically uh….sexual assault because Captain’s sexual partners did not have a full understanding of what they were consenting to when they agreed to have sex.

First and Soong… I mean, do I really need to spend any time listing the ways that both of these characters were abused through kink? First is literally physically assaulting sex workers by exploiting his wealth to get them to agree to sexual acts they are clearly not comfortable with because they are being offered amounts of money they cannot turn down. And on the flipside, First is physically assaulted by Aob in retaliation for First’s treatment of the sex workers at Playboyy. That doesn’t even get in to the extortion of Soong through First’s dad, or First being subjected to that terrible therapist of his.

Nant started having sex, became a sex worker, engaged in kink, faked his fucking death, and then ended up dead from a drug overdose. Nont has an entire crisis about enjoying sadistic sex and has been running around pulling guns on people, threatening to burn them with fire and wax, and assaulting Prom thinking that he was the murderer because he had a trunk full of fucking leather.

And Zouey is off in the corner just chilling with his boyfriend, having his first penetrative, likely relatively vanilla sex off-screen. And sure, if you want to argue the popcorn bag was kink, we can argue that, but fundamentally that played far more for laughs, and so that they could do a fucking penis cam then they have treated a single moment of BDSM in the show.

This show undervalues sex work in my opinion, does it show sex work to be exploitative? Yes. But it also has it’s sex workers physically assaulting people, stealing, being murder suspects, with little to no actual conversation around poor treatment of sex workers and negative experiences for workers and clients alike. And with little to no conversation around how engaging with sex workers can actually help people explore their sexuality, figure out what they are comfortable with, and doesn’t always have to be exploitative.

I don’t know, I just look at the way that kink is engaged with in this show, and how all roads around kink in Playboyy really seem to lead to narrative punishment. And then I think about Cheewin’s other sex heavy show, Bed Friend, where the kinkiest sex they’ve had is also what brings them closer together. Like, King and Uea bring pet play in to the bedroom, and then the very next scene King is on the verge of asking Uea to be his boyfriend, and you can tell that if he had asked Uea was prepared to say yes.

Anyway, I am really disappointed in the fact that this show marketed itself off of the heavy inclusion of sex, because I have found the sex scenes to mostly be boring, abusive, or flat out assault; the nuance required of discussing the pros and cons of sex work to be missing; and the inclusion of kink to be almost entirely result in non-consensual physical and emotional punishment. The plot is far too broad, the show is way too long, the cast is way too large, and the nuance that I think is required to have the conversations I think Playboyy thinks it is having around sex and sex work is just…missing entirely.

Shout out to Cheewin and co’s camera work though cause the lighting and cinematography has truly been gorgeous.

#playboyy the series #cheewin thanamin #den panuwat #i think i'm gonna start collecting playboyy meta b/c Cheewin fascinates me #in his ambitiousness and in his triumphs and failures #wenkexingapologist meta #sex in bl #kink in bl #sexuality in bl #sex scenes in bl

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iamthinkingaboutvariousthings · 3 months

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Tutorial: How to Embed Gifs (and get the one you actually want from the set)

There have probably been posts about this before, but since reposting is still a (deeply unfortunate) thing, I figured I'd give this a shot in case it's not a well known trick.

The tumblr Gif tool will allow you to embed gifs directly into your post without saving and re-uploading (reposting) someone else's work.

When you're building your post, just use the yellow GIF icon in the post builder:

You can search here by tag or keyword. If you happen to know one of the tags used on the original post you're looking for, that can narrow things down:

To narrow down to a SPECIFIC post, you can also paste the URL into the search field. This will pull up the very first gif in that set:

If you select that gif, it will pop into your post with a credit and link back to the OP (specifically back to the OPs post with that gif in it):

This is a properly attributed gif embed. The credit on the bottom right points back to the original post:*

Often, the first gif is not actually the one you want to embed, but there is a way to swap the image out for the one you want without losing the source attribution.

*It's helpful to put some reference text near your initial embed so you're able to swap the right image out later on. For this post, I'm going to use that short block right above the embedded gif as a reference.

In another tab/window, go to the OPs post and find the actual gif you want to embed from their set. Right click the image and Copy Image Address:

Once you have the URL copied, go back to your post and scroll to the gear icon at the top:

Open that menu and in the dropdown, where it says Text Editor, swap Rich Text to HTML:

Your post will turn into a bunch of code once you do this. Don't worry, we will change it back.

For this post, I put reference text above that first embedded gif so I could easily find the URLs I need once it becomes HTML. This is super helpful if you're embedding more than one gif. The reference text is highlighted below. This indicated the block that my currently embedded gif lives in:

In order to swap the first gif out for one that's later in the set, you just need to replace the SRC gifv and SRCSET gifv URLs with the image address you copied:

Once you've pasted the image address into these spots, you can go back to the gear icon and switch the Text Editor back to Rich Text:

Your post should return to it's previous, glorious state, but instead of the first gif embedded, you should now see the one you actually want from the set. The credit and source attribution back to the OPs post should remain intact on the bottom right:

This might seem super complicated at first, but it's pretty straightforward once you've tried it, and also a lot less frustrating for gif makers to see this than seeing our stuff just get reposted.

Anyway... If you found the gifs outside of tumblr or you didn't make them yourself, don't save and re-upload (aka. repost) them to tumblr, 'cause someone probably stole them from here to begin with and that's not cool. Search the tags and find the ones you want. Reblog from gif makers. If you want to embed a single gif from a set, try to do it this way, or minimally, credit the person you took it from.

#tech tips

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iamthinkingaboutvariousthings · 3 months

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Anyone: *is watching Leverage for the first time*

Me: have you heard about watch order? Do you know the watch order? Hey. Hey. Are you aware that season one is out of order and requires a specific watching order. Hey. Hey. Hey. Have I told you about watch order yet?

#leverage #watching order #how to watch

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iamthinkingaboutvariousthings · 3 months

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Lately I’ve been feeling like Thai bl is truly all over the place with so many shows airing at once and some of the best ones flying under the radar while discourse is focused on a couple of the big messy ones. I think you’re the only person I know who is actually watching ALL of them and has been here for the whole evolution of the genre, so I’m curious what stands out to you about this current moment. Do the shows feel different to you? Is the way fandom is interacting with them changing? And what are your current favs?

I ended up writing a thesis, sorry friend lol To be fair to me there are 3 questions in there, all of them meaty! I've done my best to give a sense of where I'm at with Thai BL and how it feels like it's changed over time.

Caveating all of this: I am just one fan who I'm sure has had specific experiences that will colour my opinion, also a lot of this is just vibes so I'm open to being told I've forgotten something major or misremembered what it was like! If you are reading this and your opinion or experience is different please share, with stuff like this I'm always interested in hearing about differing opinions because the fandom experience will depend at least partly on where you hang out. For years, my main fandom space for BL was the YouTube comments section (RIP me).

Overall feel

Honestly, things overall don't feel all that different to me in Thai BL in particular, even though I'm about to talk about a lot of changes and ways it actuallyd does feel very different below lol And after reflecting about it, I think it's because these things still feel very much in flux, in a way that they've felt in flux this entire time. Producers are still figuring out the best funding and distribution models and merch models to make money; creators are still calibrating how queer these shows can be and still be popular; actors are still figuring out how to do BGP (business gay performances) without having fans interfere in their private lives off the clock. Writers are still trying to figure out how to write 12-episode arcs that don't drag in the middle or fumble the ending (which is also not new). The tension between established ships, fan expectations, and genre requirements has honestly been there almost the whole time, though the reverberations of missteps is louder now because of the larger fanbase that is (comparatively) more plugged in to live viewing. The core question in BL has always been 'how do we make this marketable', and that unsurprisingly hasn't changed, though the answer to that question has over time, if that makes sense?

Shows

Do the shows feel different? As a whole, I'd say yes. The biggest differences are of course total quantity and overall quality, but the actual distribution of % of shows that have high(er) production values (i.e. quality) feels close to the same--it was close to 50/50 in the late 2010s and now is maybe more like 40/60 with a higher percentage coming from more smaller production companies. But the numbers we're talking about are something like 15 shows in e.g. 2018 and something more like 50 shows in 2023 (being vague because there are shows that people could argue over whether they should count). The quality overall has increased, even the pulps look better, sound better, and tend to feel a little bit more put together than the pulps of even 2020 (please note that these are all relative qualifiers, most of these shows are still not objectively good). 2020 in particular was a watershed moment for high production value BLs; we get colorists and special effects artists, and sometimes decent sound production now!

There has also been an improvement in terms of what is depicted and how certain subject matter is treated very generally, though I think that's still in flux. Things like evil ex girlfriends are less common than they were and the women in BL are more likely (in general, still not always) to be treated as realized characters. We've gotten more and better femme representation in ensemble shows, and the "gay for you" trope is much less common. Consent is now considered sexy and is much more common than it was; non-consent as "sexy" has eroded and is much less common. Things that used to happen in almost every BL now happen in a much lower percentage. I also feel a little bit less worried about some of the actors on pulp sets because there is more general scrutiny about things like minor actors, intimacy coordination, BGP (business gay performance) expectations, and sexual exploitation. Overall, show recommendations these days come with fewer caveats.

The assumption that if you worked with someone on a BL once you would stay with them as an established pairing was surprisingly early in BL; I don't know if it's just because there were a few shows that had side pairings then get main shows, so the actors did work together on a few shows in a row, which made them feel established, or whether it's because the BGP started early to build hype both before and after shows aired, or whether audiences just made homophobic assumptions about how if two actors had chemistry they had to be gay for each other, and otherwise nobody would want to "play gay" more than once, or would want to have to kiss too many other men....in any case, there were huge scandals and blow-ups around this in BL on even the earliest shows, and some early shows were snubbed because of the pairing alone. Similarly, it was established very early in BL (i.e. 2016-17) that an unhappy ending for a pair would result in your show being panned; cheating was also a guaranteed flop in BL circles (though some ensemble shows that had gay relationships in them such as Friend Zone did fine with cheating plots and unhappy endings). Overall it feels like some things were only depicted in early Thai BL and creators have avoided them since due to the audience reception at the time. I will say, generally, that there have now been enough examples of people in a "branded pair" moving on to a new pair or multiple shows, that it feels less like a death knell to a BL career if one of the actors says they no longer wanted to make BLs, or if they switched companies.

I pay a lot of attention to queerness in BL, and that has changed a little bit too, though not in the way I expected. I had been expecting a more clear and steady trajectory in BL, but we've instead had real swings, and I've realized there will just always be shows that feel more or less actually gay or queer than others, and that's ok. Early Thai shows really spoiled us for good queer content, GayOK Bangkok and Diary of Tootsies are still shows by which i measure what we get now, and both of those are from 2016. I would say that more "mainstream" BL (i.e. by one of the major production companies) hit what turned out to be queer saturation around 2020 and that's where I was most surprised not see a more clear trajectory; rather than things getting more queer from there, I'd say a greater percentage of shows overall feel more queer, but we haven't (and I now suspect won't) reach the queerness we had in Thai tv in 2016. That being said, my secret running list of things I want to see in BL gets shorter every year as entries get crossed off, so I would say the range of queer experience is slowly getting captured as more content continues to be made by a wider range of production houses (PrEP being mentioned in a mainstream show is my white whale).

I know some people assume that shows are higher heat now overall, but I don't think that's true. I do think Thai television producers and directors have overalll gotten better at capturing sensuality, and acting workshops have improved chemistry-building overall too. But from what I can tell the ratio of high head and low heat content is still pretty similar to what it's always been, maybe slightly higher (e.g. at a quick glance I'd guesstimate 30% of shows had a sex scene in 2018 vs 40% in 2023).

Fandom

The main differences in fandom from the really early days and now are the ways we, as international fans, are able to engage with each other, with thai audiences at the same time, and with content creators, and the entitlement that comes with that. In the 2010s we were almost always watching after Thai airing, with either fansubs or, later, official subs, trailing online releases by days or weeks, which themselves may have trailed the Thailand airing date by days or weeks or sometimes even months. That became less true around 2019ish, and especially in 2020 when I think Thai producers were desperate to reach audiences during the start of the pandemic (and when audiences were desperate for something to distract us from what was happening in real life).

As a fan in the mid-late 2010s, watching something was either unofficial via a fansubber, or you were wading through hundreds of Thai comments to find anyone else writing about the shows in English. Now, it's actually rare we don't have immediate international distribution, though it may be paid. If the subs are not up at the same time as the official upload, even on free sites, fans get furious. It's a bit surreal to see people complain about waiting a few hours for subtitles, especially on YouTube, when we sometimes waited months for a series to finish being subbed (not to say people didn't complain back then too, because they sure did! But there were fewer international fans overall, and it wasn't an expectation that there would be subs, so fewer people complained when it happened). This meant that a lot of people only watched shows when they were complete, and people were not watching with any kind of synchronicity.

With international fans moving into simultaneous watching with Thai audiences, we suddenly had the chance to talk about shows as they were airing and affect the conversations about them and even, sometimes, the decisions. Folks seem to have differing opinions about what makes a BL, and what makes a BL good, and they are vocal about when a show doesn't meet their standard. This has always been true, but the strong opinions have more of an effect on the discourse when they're expressed in real-time to the show being aired. Also, when we have literally 3x the number of Thai shows being aired (nevermind other countries which have also increased), it seems so much more egregious to me to complain if a single show doesn't meet your particular taste. Just go watch something else! That was less possible in 2016, but now nobody has any excuse lol Please note here that I'm not saying shows should not be criticized. But when you have one loud faction saying shows should have nothing but innocent kisses if any skinship at all and showing more is distasteful and possibly homophobic, and another faction saying a show should be panned if they don't have at least one sex scene and if there is no good kiss it's homophobic, I don't know where that leaves content creators but I see the tension and how it sometimes results in my least favourite tropes like "blushing maiden" even after a couple has canonically had sex. These factions have always existed in BL fandom, this is not new, they just both seem particularly silly now with so much content to choose from.

The shows that get attention and the shows that get snubbed feel the same too, in all honesty. You can ask yourself the following questions:

Is the show a little slower paced?

Are the story beats less melodramatic?

Do its characters feel more human?

Do they feel more queer?

Is it a comedy?

Is there any risk of an unhappy ending?

Do people not think one of the lead actors is hot?

Do people ship one of the lead actors with someone who isn't his costar?

Do people have to do anything other than go to YouTube to watch it?

If the answer is yes to any of those questions, and especially to the last one, fewer people will be watching, even if the show is good. That's always been true. [Shows I'm thinking about when I say that: Make it Right, He's Coming to Me, My Ride, You're My Sky, Oxygen (though the sides in this one are also at fault), YYY, Something in my Room, Ghost Host Ghost House, Dear Doctor I'm Coming for Soul, Cooking Crush.] All this is to say, there have always been shows that have been ignored, though I agree with you OP that with more shows airing, more are being ignored at any given time.

The other thing is that when a show is good, it doesn't necessarily invite discourse. The messes are often what encourage people to dig in, fill in gaps, linger in the adrenaline. The part that does feel different is also related to the increase in genre BLs; genre stuff in general tends to get more attention in fandom spaces, and the way people are functioning as fans feels different in that they're bringing the way they interact with genre content to BL as BL has started having larger and better funded genre content. I'm thinking about those early genre BLs like He She It, My Dream, Love Poison, Golden Blood, So Much In Love, Why R U....we started getting genre shows in BL in I think 2017 and basically had 1-2 a year until 2020ish and then it increased from there; and the ones that had funding and decent distribution got engagement until they started going off the rails, and then they had even more engagement and then fell off. I don't think it's a coincidence that the shows last year that got people to write meta were La Pluie, Be My Favorite, and I Feel You Linger in the Air. When a show is building a world, there's more to say and interrogate about it, and when a genre show fails, it can fail more spectacularly than a regular romance story. The most popular BL shows used to all be straight-up BL bubble romances, but I think genre shows really started to take over a greater percentage of the popular spots in 2022 and 2023. Again, the main difference here is that there used to be 1-2 stand-out shows per year, and now there are closer to 6+ per year, and as we got more stand-out shows the variety of what type of show stood out as popular has expanded. I do think the overall percentage of shows that are more standard romance plots has reduced, partly because Thai production companies are running out of popular y-novels to adapt. So I'm anticipating we'll continue to get more genre content going forward, and maybe a higher percentage of original works too.

Shows I'm Enjoying Right Now

Right now, the Thai shows airing that I'm watching are:

Cooking Crush

Dead Friend Forever

Cherry Magic Thailand

City of Stars

The Sign

Playboyy

PitBabe

7 Days before Valentine

For Him

Of those, I'd currently most recommend Cooking Crush as a generic BL recommendation. Dead Friend Forever is very good, but is not a romance and is difficult for some to watch (there are a lot of dark themes in addition to the gore and scary bits).

Cooking Crush is doing so many things I love. I've written about the way it's set up its major conflict to be amongst the friend group here, and way the show is depicting communication between the two main characters and how they improve their communication with one another as they get closer here. Two of my biggest BL pet peeves are a conflict for the sake of a dramatic penultimate episode that ignores or retcons a character's growth or the building of trust that a couple has already gone through in the series, so the fact that this show is working so hard to establish strong communication between its leads and then setting up the significant drama to actually about friendship rather than romance is something I cannot overstate my excitement about. To tie this back into what I wrote above, this reminds me of Diary of Tootsies and I mean that in the best possible way.

Dead Friend Foreever is, like I mentioned above, not a romance; it's a slasher horror melodrama with a very well established mystery, an ensemble cast of mostly hateable characters (which I admit isn't usually my thing, but since they're likely all going to die as a result of the genre they're in I'm finding that more tolerable than usual, and there is at least one character I like). DFF did a great job of structuring the story for the ultimate payoff of information reveals. There are a lot of shows that have been messing with non-linear storytelling recently, Cooking Crush being one of the ones that actually does this poorly in my opinion, but Dead Friend Forever effectively uses non-linear storytelling so that we find out important pieces of information about particular characters at a time when that information will have the most emotional impact on what is happening in the "present" of the storyline. Every time there is a reveal, it informs what we've already seen, recontextualizes it, and means we understand some of the character motivations and actions differently from when we saw them the first time. I mentioned above that there are dark themes in this show; one of the things that I really like about this show is that the impact of class is not glossed over, and that the consequences of these events feel very real for the characters; people do terrible things in this show, but these actions are not treated lightly by the show itself.

You'd think these two shows would have nothing in common, but there are things that they share that put them both in my top category. Generally, in both of these shows, the character arcs are clear and logical; when a character does something, even if I don't like the action itself, I can understand exactly why they that and can see how it matches where they are in their arc at the time. The shows show change in characters as a result of what they experience, and the relationships in this show really matter. When characters start acting in ways that feel out of character or against their own arc because they have to in order to drive the plot forward, I struggle to remain invested; that's not happening with either of these shows. Both of these shows also treat serious topics with seriousness, and consequences for actions are real and felt by the characters in the show (and if someone gets away with something, the show is clear that this is not just). Nothing has happened that hasn't been signalled or implied earlier. Both shows also have clear class consciousness and represent the disparity caused by classism in a critical/harsh light.

Whew! I think I got to everything you asked. Thanks again for the extremely interesting question!

#thai bl #bl history #thai bl industry #twig-tea meta

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iamthinkingaboutvariousthings · 3 months

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So, Microsoft is terrible. Yes yes, the oldest claim in the world.

But specifically... I just hate how Windows 10 tries to conflate and confuse web searches with things on one's own computer. The start menu should never do anything related to web-searching, especially if it purports to try to give examples of things that are on my hard drive!

This will make old, computer-illiterate people more malware-vulnerable. You have to maintain a strong distinction between "things that are on this computer (and maybe even included in Windows)" (safe, one hopes, or you already got pwned by it, probably), and "things on the web" (scary, dangerous, not to be trusted at all).

Eroding that barrier in the UI is awful. It just FEELS like a violation every time I start typing into the start bar, and it tries to show me ANYTHING web-related. My computer is NOT just an internet-portal! It has tons of stuff on it, and when I'm interacting with the OS, I ONLY want to see things that are already on here!

If I wanted to see something online, I would go to my browser! All the online stuff should be segregated into the browser!

Specific programs can access the internet; that's fine. But my OS's functions and interface should JUST be about the things that are already on my computer.

#EVIL EVIL EVIL #but the workarounds in reblogs look worth checking out to see if they're still good three years later #tech resources #microsoft

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iamthinkingaboutvariousthings · 4 months

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Hello Siiri! First off: I just yelled in delight that you're offering subs on Ossan's Love Returns -- thank you! I have not watched the previous series or OL movie, but I come to you after learning that EarthMix will cameo in this week's episode. I'm watching older Thai BLs to learn more about that nation's genre of BL, and I'm learning about the Thai genre's Japanese BL roots -- which makes the cameo extra sweet for me in my history project. In any case, I am wondering if you could offer a kind of overview of the importance of the Ossan's Love franchise in Japan. My very favorite BL of all time is Kinou Nani Tabeta? -- and I've been so thrilled over the years to get TWO seasons, a movie, and the New Year's special. Ossan's Love has even more content. Would you say it's a bigger BL than KNT? Is the audience for OL growing actively in Japan? I'd love to learn more about the context of its importance in the Japanese media landscape. I feel like I generally have a grip on these things in part due to the fame of the various actors that end up in BLs (like in Cherry Magic), but Ossan's Love has been around for so long, that I'm not sure how to quite contextualize its popularity against other JBLs. Thank you for considering my question!

Hello!

I don't want to make any claims on who's more popular without gathering actual data, but I can talk about the general context of the show.

OL actually precedes Nanitabe's live action, so they weren't in competition during their original airing. OL differs from most other bl live action outputs by being an original script. It's not based on a manga unlike pretty much all other Japanese bls out there, and as such, it pretty much single-handedly brought gay relationships to the mainstream when they had so far been mostly confined to the bookshop bl section: if you wanted to read a bl, you'd go to the bl section, but otherwise you wouldn't be exposed to it.

The first season of OL aired in 2018. There are all kinds of live action bls airing these days, at least one per season, but it wasn't like that back in 2018. Live action bl until recently was either typical age-gap uke/seme anime (Gravitation, Sekai ichi hatsukoi, Junjou romantica) or made-for-dvd movies with mostly unknown actors. My first bl movie was Ai no kotodama. I don't know who those actors were or where they are now. By comparison, the cast of OL is full of popular mainstream actors. Pretty sure at least one person fainted when Tanaka Kei was on the cover of An an's love & sex (was it me, you'll never know!).

Even now, at lot of the bl you'll find on Gaga or Viki actual airs in a specific bl slot or on a paid subscription service. You had to buy each episode of Old fashion cupcake on Rakuten to watch - meaning you need to already know what you're looking for. Nanitabe and Cherry Magic both aired in TV Tokyo's Friday midnight slot , but TV Tokyo is a local network. I had to watch both online because we don't get TV Tokyo in the prefectures. What we do get though is TV Asahi, the network producing OL. It's one of the major national networks and the second most viewed channel after Nippon TV (it's also the channel buying GMMTV shows for Japanese distribution).

What made OL such a phenomenon was the internet and social media. It was the most tweeted show in 2018 and Japanese people tweet a lot. It received the Popular Word of the Year Award. You read it right, Ossan's Love was the Popular Word of the Year 2018 with #MeToo and e-sports (for comparison: in 2022 one of the words was state funeral because of Abe's assassination, and one of last year's winners was boiling of the planet).

As for how OL Returns is doing - it's super successful! Last Friday even omutsu paatonaa/diaper partner was trending on the internet. Last time there was an update about viewership, the first two episodes had been viewed 4.5 million times. The Japanese fandom is super active, and people of all ages are watching. They're doing quite a bit of promo, too. Tanaka Kei & Hayashi Kento were on Geinoujin kakuzuke check, a popular new year's quiz show.

I know OL doesn't get a lot of love in western bl fandom. On one hand, I'm like huh okay fair enough. But on the other, much bigger, you could even say enormous, hand, I'm like you don't have all the facts! You don't even speak Japanese! Take a seat! But if you wanna trash the airline remake (was it really necessary???), I'll bring the snacks.

#ossan's love #japanese bl #ossan's love returns #isaksbestpillow meta

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