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vinomino · 17 days

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Failed Kidnapping Attempt

A joke of a kidnapping leads a rather strange man into your life.

Featuring: Endo.Y x f!reader

Contents: NSFW MDNI, mean!endo(when is he not), slight yandere!endo, assault(?), pet names, light choking, cunnilingus, squirting, pussy slapping, creampie, enemies to ???, hate sex, not beta read

WC: 4.1k, please I bs’d this in 3 hours idek what this is either…

The metal chair creaks when you cross your legs, leaning back into the hard shell. The bob-cut man raises his eyes at the noise, slightly squinting them before returning to typing on his laptop. Besides the clacking of keys, a radio box is tuned to a random station, and the man in the device is going on and on about vitamin drinks. The sound cuts off every few minutes but then returns with a static crack. There’s an old retro TV installed in a corner and a thick layer of dust is settled on the screen, turning it gray. The digital clock on the wall reads; 1:21 AM. It’s been more than three hours since you left your workplace and more than two hours of being in this chair. The rusted stoppings under the legs scrap on the concrete floor when you nudge it backward.

“Hey, stop that.” Bob-cut shoots you a glare.

“Stop what?”

“That– Moving around. It’s annoying.”

You dramatically glance around, “And do what instead? Sit here until the sun comes up?”

Without your phone, there was nothing to do but stare at the clock while listening to advertisements. The station was the odd kind that doesn’t play any music and if you had to listen to one more spiel about juice, you were going to smash it into pieces. “Well, I’m so sorry for annoying you– I mean, I’m just as annoyed as you!” The absurdity of the situation was starting to get to you. “Would anyone be happy in my situation? Please do tell me. I would love to know– because surely I’m not the first one.” He shakes his head at your sarcastic tone, not even bothering to think of a response. The lackey was stuck doing the underdog work of babysitting.

You watch him pick up his phone and tap his fingers on the screen. “Listen, just be quiet for a few minutes.” He groans, fatigued just as much as you were.

“You said that an hour ago.”

The cool-toned lighting wasn’t doing much to stave off your tiredness, you wondered if you should try your luck, fight the man, and book it. Every single second was testing your worn-thin limits, so you stand up and walk over to bob-cut and sit down in the chair across from him. He sighs and crosses his arms with no effort to stop you. The blue cushion on the office chair was dirtied, but it provided some comfort over the metal one. Your phone sits in front of him, turned off– silenced.

“When can I go?” You ask again.

“I don’t know that.”

“Then I’m going to go now.”

“You don’t even know where you are.” He’s blunt, with no firm emotion on his face.

They didn’t blindfold you in the car, however, trying to remember an hour-long drive was impossible, but anywhere would be better than this crappy old rundown office building. You click your tongue, rubbing your neck, “Well, I’d rather be walking down the street than sit here for another hour.” You debate on the two outcomes; being killed, or getting sold off. The first made more sense because selling someone off in the 21st century had to be the dumbest idea. People in your everyday life would notice your absence, your friends would try to find you, and your family wouldn’t stop until they have found you. The GPS tag on your keys, which were currently in your bag, was another safeguard. Selling someone off without a trace could happen, but the people who were holding you right now were not anywhere near the power and wealth required to pull off such a feat. If it came down to kill or be killed, then that would just suck.

Pushing that thought to the back of your mind, you would deal with it when it happens.

“Can you play some music?”

No response.

“Hey, do you wanna see a funny dance?”

Silence.

“C’mon, at least tell me your name, because if I die I’ll be cursing you as ‘bob-cut guy’.”

A hard stare.

He runs his hands over his face, “Enough talk.”

The entrance door hits the wall, “Obiki!” A burly man steps into the room.

“Hashirao.” The bob-cut— Obiki, stands up to greet the new guy.

“This is the girl?” Hashirao juts a thick finger out at you.

“Hey~ sorry for taking so long.” A black-haired man strides in. “Got a little sidetracked.” He has tattoos covering every inch of skin you can see. “Alrighty, you guys can head out now.” The man laughs.

Obiki glances over his shoulder at you before following Hashirao out.

Now, you were alone with who you presumed to be the leader or someone with more information since those two listened to his word without any resistance. They also seemed too afraid to meet his gaze. The tatted man plops down in the chair next and swivels to face you, “You tired? It’s late.” He smiles and leans his arm on the table. “Aw, are you mad? What’s with that face, not feeling like chatting?”

Maybe sticking with Obiki wasn’t so bad.

“Can I leave now?”

His eyes widen, a coral blue, “Hmm? Who knows.” Another shit-eating grin.

“Are you going to kill me?”

“Straight to the point~ but I don’t have any plans on killing you. It’s the truth.”

So, he is the mastermind behind this.

“Then why am I here?”

He shifts and spreads his legs a bit to get comfortable, “Someone wants to see you and they’re paying a lot to make it happen.” His fingers rub together to portray cash.

“Seriously?”

“Seriously.”

You stand up and snatch your phone off where Obiki put it. “Then, I’d like to leave.” The more he spoke, the more he infuriated you. Making a ruckus at your work to lure you out, forcing you to sit past midnight in a chair because someone wants to see you? It’s insanity and you already know who wants to see you. That dude you kept refusing to give your number to, who sits outside your work in a spit-cleaned car to try and pick you up. He had to be an idiot to resort to paying someone to deliver you to him. The tattooed man grabs your wrist, “Why so sudden, pretty thing?”

You grimace, “That someone will be dumb enough to send you all the money with a little lying.”

“Seems like you know the contractor.” He chuckles, not budging. His other hand comes up to rub at the infinity symbol on his neck. “So much oomph to you, huh?” His lips creep into a lop-sided grin. Then, he starts listing off your information, your name, birthday, age, height, address, and everything someone would find in a medical file. “That’s you right?” A cocky tone.

Leaning into him to the point where you can see his pores, “You’re not very smart, huh?” You whisper back with a lace of malice, at this distance, you can see his pupils contract and the swirls of his irises. You’d like to believe that he’s taken aback, but he immediately goes back to his aloof demeanor. Unfortunately, you miss the way his cheeks faintly reddened.

“Is that supposed to scare me?” You scoff and pull away.

“What makes you think that?”

“Anyone can get that information on me.” A dull pain slowly builds at your wrist.

Lowering your arm, you also bring him down as well, his hand is still wrapped around you. “Let go.” An amused expression is all he gives you. He tilts his head to the side, his black hair bunches out on his shoulder, and he lets out a hum. “You’re not going to do anything, so just let go.” You attempt to call his bluff. His eyes darken, and immediately he shoves you backwards into the wall, grabbing your other wrist to pin both over your head. Your phone thuds on the ground, slipping out of your grasp. You let out a squeak, your arms are raised high enough that your top lifts and exposes your navel. He presses his body against yours, you feel his abs through his thin tank top. His forehead is above yours, black hair tickling your eyes, and you smell mint. “There are other outcomes than being killed.” His breath invades yours. His face goes all creepy, giving you goosebumps. Your eyes shake as you force them open– to not shut them tightly closed. The pounding of your heart fills your ears.

He releases you and takes a step back, “Alright, I’ll call this whole thing off.” Spinning around, he holds his arms apart. “I’m in a good mood.”

Rubbing at your wrist, you suppress your trembling, and start deeply inhaling to stabilize your breathing. Little black spots appear in your vision, blinking them away, you watch him grab your bag. “I’ll take you home.”

Your phone screen pops up color, it’s now half past two. The street was practically pitch dark, and you had a gripping voice in you to turn and make a run for it, to get as far away from this man as possible. In front, stood a motorcycle. Sleek, black, and definitely expensive. “I’m not getting on that.” You protest, you’d rather walk for miles than be pressed up against him again. “You got no other choice, sweet cheeks.” If you punch him hard enough in the nose, would he never smile again? The engine revs up, he situates himself on the bike, and then turns to you, gesturing with his head for you to get on. Giving in, you throw your leg over the seat, sitting a few inches away from him. “You’re gonna fall off if you sit like that.”

“Shut up and go. You should already know where I live.”

“That I do.”

To your demise, you end up with your chest all up on his back, the air whips around you as he speeds down the highway. Shutting your eyes, you squeeze your arms tightly around him to the point where his ribs poke you. “You’re squeezing me to death here.” He loudly laughs. Annoyed, you dig your nails into his stomach and claw at him. “Easy now.” His hand squeezes yours.

The two of you travel into a tunnel, fluorescent yellow stick lights make it bright enough to the point where your sight struggles to adjust. You sit back enough to move your head to see past his shoulder, the underpass seems to be endless. You’ve never ridden on a motorcycle through a tunnel before, the lights resemble an operating room. Unknowingly, your grip gets loose, and he clasps your hands tight into him, “Don’t let go.”

It must be approaching four. Tired, you rest your head on his shoulder blade, listening to the sounds of the city and rumbling engine. When you come to it, he pulls into your street, stopping at your apartment. Wordlessly, you hop off and head towards the front door.

“Hey,” he calls out to you on the motorcycle, “it’s Endo.” Endo raises his voice so you can hear, though he doesn’t know how conscious you are. “Endo Yamato! Don’t forget it!” You slowly blink at him and turn the lock. Stumbling inside, you slam the door shut behind you.

“What do you mean I’m fired? I didn’t do anything– that mess wasn’t caused by me!” The first thing in the morning you did was return your boss’s calls. The unsavory news of being fired was not how you wanted it to go. You even went willingly went Obiki and the other men so they would stop causing a scene.

“You sound alright so, yeah– you don’t need to return anything. Have a good day.”

“Wait–” The call ends.

You spent the rest of the day moping around on the couch. Squeaky clean and dressed in comfortable clothing, you run through the events that took place last night, the terrible kidnapping and Endo. You damn him to hell. You also damn that other douchebag to hell as well.

The doorbell dings and peeking out the peephole, you see Endo. What a bastard, you thought. Walking back to the couch planning to ignore him, he begins to bang on the door. “I know you’re in there, open up sweetheart!”

“How nice and cozy.” Endo swings his arm on the couch.

You give him a disgusted look. “Why are you here?”

“I missed you.” He giggles and claps his hands.

“Get out.”

“Aw, no way.”

“Leave me alone.”

“Let’s watch a movie! Oh, you were halfway through this one, let’s watch it together. Sit down–”

You snatch his collar, “I got fired because of you! Reimburse me!”

His blue eyes widen and he purses his lip. “Okay, what’s your routing number?”

“You happy now?” Endo grins, examining your face. You stare at the huge amount in your checking. Even if you worked every day for the next five years, you wouldn’t even come close to the number.

“You’re not going to report me? Sue me or throw me in jail?”

“Why would I do that?” He snickers at you flinching when he rubs the back of his finger along your cheek.

Now, you’re watching the rest of some drama movie next to your kidnapper/whatever he was. The circumstance was baffling, but Endo had the happiest expression on his face. The credits roll, you don’t even remember what the movie was about.

“What do you think about it?”

You scrutinize him under your gaze. “How many people have you kidnapped? Do you do this every girl?”

“That’s a secret.” He says with a hushed voice, blues twinkling.

Endo left and you’re laying in your bed trying to process what his intentions are. You couldn’t get a read on him at all, everything he did made no sense. Why did he even bother to get his lackeys to fetch you? Why is he even doing work if he’s well off enough? Why does he continue to bother you? Your phone dings again. He’s a weirdo. After hours of racking your brain do you fall asleep.

For the next month, he pops up out of nowhere and sticks himself to your side for hours. If you’re grocery shopping? He’ll spawn in next to you and ask if you’re getting scallions or leeks. You’re at the mall? He somehow finds you and tries to dress you up. At a bar? He’ll slide into the seat next to yours. Hiding in the library? He’ll find you. At a bus stop? He shows up on his bike. You debate sending all the money back, you haven’t touched it yet, and inform him to leave you alone. Even if you were with your friends, he’ll introduce himself and swiftly mingle in. It’s driving you mad.

“Are you stalking me?” You cross your arms.

“What’s that?” Endo plays dumb. You groan.

“Don’t you have anything better to do than annoy me?”

“Nope.” He grins while eating his popsicle.

Stopping in the doorway, “I’m going to go to sleep. Go home.”

He hums, “What if I don’t wanna?”

“Go away!” You shut the door shut in his face.

The prick crashed your date. The man you were meeting became more interested in talking to Endo about his golfing hobby than even looking at you. You got all dolled up for the occasion and now your mood is in a dump. Cursing at him, you punch your pillow. What in the world is wrong with him?

“Is this place alright?”

The random guy from the bar scratches the back of his neck. You were standing outside of a love hotel, something you thought you’d grown out of, but here you are. “Yeah, it’s fine.” Smiling, you wrap yourself around his arm. Endo needs to stay out of your business. You haven’t seen him all day. To be honest, you thought he’d appear out of thin air the moment you stepped into a bar again. When you make it into the rented room, you won’t see him for the rest of the day. With his constant presence, no man ends up taking you home and they either get weirded out by him or end more interested in him.

“I’ll pay for a room.” He goes to grab the door handle.

“Pretty girl, what’re you doing here?” A pair of arms wrap around your shoulders and your blood pressure rises.

The bar guy raises his brow, “Do– do you know him?” He points to the man behind you.

You cringe.

“Well, I don’t know you. So…you either scram, or I break your nose.” Endo speaks with intent.

He coughs at the look Endo gives him and scampers off while muttering something under his breath.

“Hey.” You shake out his hold and shove at his chest. You’re about to right-hook Endo in the jaw, but instead you give him the meanest glare you can muster. “What’s your problem? Are you seriously stalking me? Are you obsessed with me or something? Stop–”

Endo places his hand behind your head to push you into a kiss, easily sliding his tongue in since you gasped. His finger loops the belt hoop of your jeans and tugs your hips into him. To your horror, you moan and feel your knees buckle. Going celibate for over a month had worked you up enough. Stumbling back, you’re mortified, that one; you kissed Endo, and two; your panties feel damp. “What–”

“You’re quite worked up? Don’t you agree?” His eyes are creased, overjoyed that you’ve fallen into the palm of his hand.

The second you two were in that hotel room, he was all over you. Endo sucks on your bottom lip while his hand unbuttons your jeans. You tugged on his hair, pulling him in to deepen the kiss. He slides in hand into your pants, gripping at your ass before trailing his fingers right over your cunt. Endo smirks when he sees your debauched face, kiss-swollen lips, and hazy eyes.

“This wet from kissing?”

“Shut up.” You bark back, grabbing his shirt to continue making out. With enough movement from his hand, your jeans slip off your hips and pool on the floor around your ankles. He places a hand at the bottom of your ass, you get the memo and jump, wrapping your legs around his waist as he lifts you. Endo walks over to the bed and lays you down on it, mouths never breaking apart. He sprawls you over the sheets before leaning back, taking his tongue out your mouth to peel his top off. Fabric discarded somewhere on the floor, you’re finally able to see all the tattoos on his upper body. Black ink littered his skin. He bends down to kiss your stomach and pull your undies off, you bit your lip in anticipation. Your hormones override your thinking.

“Fu-Fuck–” You mewl when he slides another finger in as he sucks on your clit. If you weren’t so out of it, you’d be embarrassed by how loud the squelching was. But you couldn’t care less, not when you were receiving pleasure for the first time in months. Endo pins your hips down when you start trashing, nearing another orgasm. “Sh-fuck–I’m gonna–” Panting out.

“C’mon, gimmie another angel.”

Your legs quiver and your back arches off the bed as you gush on his face again. A high-pitched moan rips out of you as you squeeze your eyes shut. Endo beams at you, his eyes full of something you can’t describe. He lays a hand on your stomach and pushes up— pushing your top up and revealing your bra. In a swift tug, your shirt is on the floor and he clicks your bra open. He licks his lips at your bare form. A harsh pinch on your nipple has you whimpering, “Y-you asshole…” His hand comes down, a slap on your pussy makes you seize up.

“That’s not my name.”

“I don’t care–”

Another slap. Your pupils are blown wide open.

“Hmm?”

“Bastard…” You mutter under your breath.

Another slap.

“I heard that. Try again.”

Asshole. Prick. Piece of shit. You want to get up and leave.

“E-Endo…”

“That’s better, now, tell me what you want.” He rubs his hands along your folds. You’re starting to tear up.

“Just– just do it.”

“Do what?”

Frustration fields your entire body, and you bite your tongue, swallowing up your pride and ego because if you don’t get dicked down today, you’ll lose it. “Fuck me.”

“That wasn’t so hard was it, sweet cheeks?” Endo grins. “Say please.”

“Please— please. Please fuck me, Endo….” Fat droplets roll down your face.

He pulls both his pants and boxers down, you curl your toes already wanting him to be buried deep inside you. Without any notice, he flips you over, arm over your hips to have you on fours. You struggle to steady yourself, your breath getting stuck in your throat when you feel the tip of his cock sliding into your folds. Of course, he’s going to get as much satisfaction as he can. “Endo…I’m going to kill you.” You glare at him over your shoulder. He gives you an innocent look, “You remember my name? I wanna hear it.” That same shit-eating grin.

You have no dignity left after squirting on his face, “Yamato– I swear, I’m going to kill y–”

His cock slides in, stretching your walls out. Losing your balance, your face ends up on the mattress. Your jaw slacks open wide as he bullies his dick into your cunt, filling it up. Endo sighs when he bottoms out, “Damn– pussy feels s’good. You’re s’damn perfect…”

The bed muffles your voice, “Yam–shit…mnh! Fuck– slow–slow down!” The grip he has on your hips helps him pull you back into him, matching his thrusts. You bite the sheets as they soak up your drool. His balls hit your clit and all you can hear is the sound of skin on skin. You can’t even hear what you’re saying. His cock was practically smashing your cervix in, making you choke on the air. Endo wraps a hand on your throat and yanks you up till your back is against his chest. You cry out.

“Yeah? You– like that? Pretty girl can’t talk?” He mocks you.

All you can do is cry on his cock as he fucks you into oblivion. You don’t even register him flipping you onto your back until your knees are by your head and his dick is hitting new places. Yamato Yamato Yamato. You’re only allowed to think about him and the pleasure in you. This was the best you’d ever had. An unknown pressure builds up in your tummy. You need it. You need it so bad. “Your gonna cum again? Fuck– your s’sloppy baby.” His voice is making your head spin even more. “Hmm? You agree?”

It’s coming and you squeeze your eyes shut, pushing out tears. But then it abruptly ebbs away, “W-Why? Why? Please– I need it–! Please–” You see him laugh wildly, taking in the utmost delight you’re supplying him with. A feral gleam in his eyes. “Tell me who you belong me, okay? I’ll let you cum if you do.”

“You–shit…you! Yamato!” You plead, vision unfocused and saliva coating your chin.

“Pussy belongs to me, right? You’ll let me fuck it whenever I want, right?”

“Yes–yes! Ple–ease!” Agreeing to everything he says, you don’t care at this moment.

Finally, satisfied. Endo returns to his brutal pace, pounding into your gummy walls. Your eyes roll back into your head when you topple over. The orgasm rips throughout your body, crashing your nerves apart. Your nails dig deep into his shoulder as you breathlessly scream. He continues to fuck you through it, not giving you any rest. Overstimulated, you shake like a leaf, and the sheets below you feel wet. The pleasure sent you into another dimension. Endo now works towards his own peak. His brows furrow together in concentration, teeth grinding as he spills himself in you. Hot cum stuffing you full. You collect your bearings as Endo sucks on the skin of your breasts, leaving dark purple marks in his path. “Mmph…”

“What?”

“Ngh…”

Ring Ring Ring.

The phone on the wall blares through your afterglow. Endo gets up and walks to pick it up. You can faintly make out what he’s saying.

“Time……………........yeah…..can I add more time?..........thanks.”

He shortly returns to you, covering your body with his, shielding you from the cold.

“Angel, you alright?” Endo pushes your sweaty hair out of your face, a smugness emits.

Clenching your jaw, you raise your arm to card your fingers through this hair and tug as hard as you can, kissing him again. Maybe he’s actually obsessed with you. Maybe you’d end up just as obsessed as him. You want to burn him inside out, get back at him. The drenched cotton under sticks to your skin as you inhale the floral scent from the air fresher on the table. The lights are slightly dimmed and all you can hear is Endo. Even he doesn’t know what this is, an indescribable lust that wrecks his mind and a fiery passion that should’ve never happened in the first place.

#tw: kidnapping #wind breaker x reader #wind breaker smut #endo yamato #endo yamato x reader #endo smut #endo yamato smut #mino.writes #I wouldn’t post this at 7am but I fell asleep lol….

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the-conversation-pod · 1 year

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Adult Swim

We originally planned to talk about Step by Step during Work, Bitch, and Nini hadn't planned to watch La Pluie until the fall. However, because all of us refused to give up on La Pluie, Nini joined us around episode 8. Both of these shows inspired more writing than we've seen since the heyday of Bad Buddy or I Told Sunset About You. Surface-level engagement was all-but-impossible with either of these shows, and honestly wrung us out more than we were expecting.

It's time for the kids to get out of the pool for the grown folks to talk as Ben and Nini open their third eyes and discuss Step by Step and La Pluie.

Listen on Apple Podcasts!

Listen on Google Podcasts!

Timestamps

The timestamps will now correspond to chapters on Spotify for easier navigation.

0:00 - Welcome 1:15 - Intro 2:08 - Step by Step 4:40 - Step by Step: A Moment of Simping 8:40 - Step by Step: Big Themes 16:52 - Step by Step: The Romance 25:45 - Step by Step: Story Execution 50:25 - Step by Step: Where are we on Tee Bundit? 53:10 - La Pluie 57:50 - La Pluie: The Soulmate Myth 1:08:22 - La Pluie: Lomfon is Rude! 1:13:30 - La Pluie: Tai Also Deserves Some Smoke 1:18:26 - La Pluie: Tai’s Dad Read as Queer 1:20:48 - La Pluie: The Romance 1:32:06 - La Pluie: Depiction of Male Anger 1:35:50 - La Pluie: Treatment of Nara 1:40:47 - La Pluie: The Side Characters 1:44:02 - La Pluie: Sequel Potential 1:46:01 - Outro

The Conversation: Now With Transcripts!

We received an accessibility request to include transcripts for the podcast. We are working with @ginnymoonbeam on providing the transcripts and @lurkingshan as an editor and proofreader.

We will endeavor to make the transcripts available when the episodes launch, and it is our goal to make them available for past episodes. When transcripts are available, we will attach them to the episode post (like this one) and put the transcript behind a Read More cut to cut down on scrolling.

Please send our volunteers your thanks!

0:00 - Welcome

Nini

Hello, hello! Your QL fandom aunty and uncle are here with giant sunglasses, brown liquor in a flask, a folded five-dollar bill to slip into your hand when no one is looking, lukewarm takes, occasional rides on the discourse, deep dives into artistry and the industry.

Ben

Lots of simping! I’m Ben.

Nini

I’m Nini.

Ben

And this is The Conversation. About once a season, we plan to swan in and shoot the shit on faves, flops, and trends that we’ve been noticing in the BL, GL, or QL Industry. Between seasons, you can find us typing way too many words on Tumblr.

1:15 - Intro

Nini

Hey Ben, what are we talking about tonight?

Ben

Tonight it's time for Adult Swim. Kids: out of the pool! This season led to so much more writing and meta than we've seen in a really long time. There was so much to say about both of these shows that we ended up needing to move both of these shows out of separate episodes and just shove them into one.

Tonight we will be discussing Step by Step and La Pluie, and then we'll return with you all at the end with some final thoughts. Nini and I are bracing for this, because we have a lot to say to each other. [laughs]

Nini

This is gonna be round two of fight night apparently, not on everything but on some things. So you guys stay tuned and we'll see you at the end!

2:08 - Step by Step

Nini

Okay, Ben this time I got my eye black on for you. So let's talk Step by Step. Tell the people, what is Step by Step about?

Ben

Step by Step is a workplace drama that centers around a young man named Pat, who is maybe 25 — there was some confusion about that at the end?

Nini

Shade!

Ben

…who is returning to Thailand after completing some of his graduate studies, and is now working at a large corporation inside of an office tower. He is the low man on the totem pole in the sort of digital division of this corporation, and is having a very difficult time. Very early on, he has a kind of flirty interaction with the largest man who has ever existed in BL, and takes a shine to him, but is disappointed when he realizes he's his boss.

Pat eventually ends up in conflict with his new boss whose name is Jeng…slowly the two of them start to work better together. Jeng ends up putting Pat in charge of a BL advertising project in a mostly queer team, and over the course of the show there ends up becoming this huge misunderstanding between the two of them about whether or not they're on a romantic arc, as the show is also unpacking a lot of really huge themes about where queer people do or don't fit in corporate structures that are more than willing to profit off of them, as Pat and Jeng try to figure out what their relationship is supposed to be.

Nini

I think that was a very fair précis of the plot of Step by Step.

Ben

If you're listening to us and you've watched Step by Step, you may be familiar with the fact that…reactions to the last arc of this show were mixed, to put it mildly. Nini and I ended up falling on opposite sides of the fence on this one, so we have a lot to unpack.

4:40 - Step by Step: A Moment of Simping

Ben

I'm [gonna] let you have this part first: I want you to just go ahead and have your little fun before we get into the big stuff. We can begin with talking about Man Trisanu and how much you really enjoyed his performance.

Nini

His performance, yes, but before we get to his performance…I mean we say in the intro that there is lots of simping on this show, and I've been listening to our old episodes: we haven't simped nearly enough? So I'm just gonna do like a quick two minutes of absolute simping for Man Trisanu, because my god that man is large. That man is so large that for like the first three episodes, every time he came on screen, like my brain made like the boinga boinga boinga sound, like I could not actually focus [laughs] on what was happening — I had to watch episodes multiple times…

Ben

[laughs] She’s just posting awooga gifs in the chat all the time.

Nini

If I was the kind of person who would get embarrassed by this stuff I would have been embarrassed by the way I behaved. But I don't get embarrassed by this stuff, so I wasn't embarrassed by the way that I behaved looking at this man [laughs]...throughout, but especially in the first three episodes. I just kept staring at him. And then as we got like further and further into the show it was very clear that he's also a good actor, so I was invested in the character emotionally? But that also did not stop the fwarh noises in my brain. The man is large. And he's large and he's attractive. And he's large and he's attractive and he's talented. That's basically my kryptonite.

That doesn't mean that I cannot be fair about the show—there are things that I'm gonna say about the show that are not complimentary, even though in the end—I'm just like skipping to the part where I score it, I gave it a 9—there are problems with the show, do not get me wrong. But overall, I found it incredibly enjoyable. And I can't lie to you: Man Trisanu was part of why I found it enjoyable. Not just because he is large and attractive but also because he is quite a good actor. Okay, so I got my yah yahs out.

Ben

Solid 20% of the chat is just Nini going: “THAT MAN IS BIG!”

[both laugh]

Nini

He’s a biggun! [both laugh] At one point I definitely just sent a voice message that said “Timberrrrr!”

Ben

It’s like, it would be Tuesday and everybody's in the chat just, “Lorge.” [laughs]

Ben

In terms of simping, I really like Ben Bunyapol’s work in this one. Nini and I tend to fall on opposite sides of the fence when it comes to…the guys we're attracted to in these shows? Unsurprisingly, she was super into Man and all of his work; I really liked a lot of stuff Ben was doing, and I like Nini's commentary that Ben is definitely someone's problem, right now.

Nini

Oh my god, somebody is staring at the ceiling up at night, like, thinking about Ben Bunyapol because that boy is…I mean, not my style, but I can appreciate good lookin’, I can. That is somebody's problem.

Ben

I really like what he was playing with in this. I really—we'll get into this when we talk about the queer themes in this—I really like the specific type of queerness he portrayed in this. And I know that must have been really difficult to hold with everything else he was doing on the show.

Nini

I concur, he also showed some talent. There’s quite a few newbies in this cast, Ben and Man are both newbies, and you see a little bit of that, but mostly they, I think they acquitted themselves very well.

8:40 - Step by Step: Big Themes

Ben

Since we're disclosing our ratings early in this one: as you all know, Nini gives me a lot of shit on this show about how friendly I am to shows with my scoring? I gave this show a 7.5, because I think the problems in this show make it hard to recommend to people. And the more homework I feel like I have to give people, or pamphlets I have to hand out before they start watching, the harder it is for me to recommend.

However, there are a lot of things to talk about in the show I think are good. And I think because it's Tee Bundit, and we have to talk about how much the sort of…irritated version of queerness that he's carrying around in his work comes through in his stuff? Think we should start with the big themes, because that's what he clearly cared about the most. So Nini, as someone who is thrilled with this show: what are the big themes you think that Tee is going for this time?

Nini

I mean, Tee is a guy who, kind of hits on the same themes in most of his work? And the themes that he likes to hit on are around like, queerness and capitalism, or like around the monetization of queerness and sort of juxtaposing it against the way that queer people are just kind of suffocating under this fog of homophobia. So that's like one of the things that he definitely gets into in this show, like all his other shows.

Another thing that Tee is very into is playing with inside and outside, like perceptions of queer people and how queer people see themselves versus how the world sees them? I think that's a big thing. He loves a family dynamic where everybody knows but nobody says anything, that's another big theme that he's playing with in this. These are the things that show up over and over again in his work, that I tend to respond to. I find it really legible, so I quite enjoy it.

What about you? What kinds of themes did you pick up on?

Ben

The big ideas, like core statements that I can read from this is that: corporations are more than willing to profit off of queer people. They absolutely want to use our talents, our social skills, our managerial skills, and our relationships as well as our lives…to sell shit. But they don't actually want us, particularly in positions of leadership.

Another thing that comes through very clearly is that queer people cannot experience queer joy in environments that demand a very rigid form of conformity. And also, that everything that queer people want for themselves, including their joy, is not something you can have on the timeline of BL. It's going to take literally years for you to find your happiness. Which is so sad!

Nini

One of the things that I think we had discussed a little bit but didn't really delve into is that you feel a cynicism emanating off of Tee that you kind of don't like? I don't know if you wanted to get a little bit more into that, because we didn't really, like, discuss that too much.

Ben

Tee Bundit clearly—oh, there's a man I could simp for. [laughs] I think that man is very pretty, and I like how fucking angry he is all the time. [both laugh]

So, Tee is a director who has a really strong eye. Don't know that he's found an editor who works well with him yet. Or has found a really good screenwriting team to hang out with? But he has a really strong eye, and he very clearly hated being on the TharnType set. That comes through so loudly in Lovely Writer, and you can see that this has affected the way he looks at being an adult professional in so many ways.

Pat is so unhappy in this show. He's so stressed. And Jeng is also so unhappy, because he's so bottled up. It gets a little bit lost sometimes, how specifically pissed off Pat is about everything that's being thrown at him and expected of him. And you can feel that with Tee, that he has to…play to the proclivities of shipping culture, which he clearly despises.

Nini

He's made two shows about it now.

Ben

Quick aside about this, Tee leveled some I think fair criticism of BL as an industry, in that it is profiting off of the appearance of relationships of queer people, but they're all inherently fake, and they're meant to be fake. And apparently a certain set of fans did not agree or like that their ship was used as the example of this, and caused such a stink that they were forced to edit the episode and remove that commentary. And I don't know if this impacted later commentary that may have been in the show. I do not think it would have made the show more legible than it is? But Tee is just so irritated about the inescapability of heteronormativity in his professional life.

You see this for Pat, who doesn't allow himself to even perceive Jeng as someone he could be with, because of the age difference, the class difference, the work difference…and the way that they are queer is very different from each other. You see this with Chot, who seems to be an incredibly talented individual, but is not someone apparently considered for middle to upper management in any way? You've got this with Jaab where he's just like ‘yeah I'm not playing that. I got money, I'm gonna do whatever the hell I want.’

It's so frustrating, because in this show towards the end sequence where they ask Pat to come back for one more ride to try and save this stupid department. They assemble a little team together of queers or queer-friendly people and they end up using everyone's queer adjacent skills in some way shape or form to sell, like, fucking gas stations? [laughs] So they end up having Pat's formerly shitty superior write like, a BL story about looking for, like, a specific fucking juice at the fucking gas station, so that Jaab can very publicly run around on Facebook looking for Jen, the side character he's also pursuing. And then to help pimp this out, they ask Pat to call his ex, who he doesn't want to engage with on this, to help sell this shit—who was also forced to go back into the closet so that he could pretend to be gay with his BL co-star. Which is insane.

Nini

Like when you say it out loud it's like, the levels of bullshit, like Tee is very much about piling on the bullshit. And he's like doing it and pointing to the audience and saying, ‘Look at this! Ain't this some shit? This is the kind of shit that we gotta deal with on the regular!’

Ben

I'm not even done! The head of the company baited them by stripping their marketing budget because he knew his son would use his own money to save this: creating a division between the gays because of lack of loyalty and such. And so like, that comes through fairly loudly.

16:52 - Step by Step: The Romance

Ben

Part of where the struggle kicks in for me with this show is honestly with Pat and Jeng. Like, I have really strong positive feelings about Pat as a character, as an individual, and I have an incredible amount of feelings for Jeng as an individual—and I want to elaborate on those—but like Pat and Jeng as a unit, I feel, was super frustrating and really disappointing in this show, in a way that felt kind of pissy from Tee? Like I feel like…they don't feel satisfying on purpose. And that doesn't sit right with me, because of genre conventions and expectations.

I'll let you talk about Pat and Jeng, because I think you feel a lot better about them than I did.

Nini

Yeah, because I think I had different expectations. I definitely took in at the beginning, or before the beginning of the show, some of the stuff around the show where Tee was very clearly saying this isn't a romance. And as we sort of went through the show, I started to understand what he meant by saying that. I think Tee has a, like a complicated relationship with BL, that much is obvious, and I think in a way, the story that he wanted to tell here—he almost resented a little bit, having to use the romance to tell the story. And it, it shows up on a metatextual level in terms of some of the themes and some of the story points and plot points running throughout the show. He's like, can’t I just tell this story? Why do they have to, like, make out?

There is a tension there, there is a dissonance there. So it's not that I don't understand the problem that people had with it; I understand it entirely. But I was just vibin’. Because…I saw all of that as like, yeah, whatever Tee, like I see exactly what you're saying, but you also put this in here anyway, so I'm gonna enjoy the parts of this that you did put in here. That was my way of dealing with it, and that's why I really enjoyed it—because what he did put in there, for me, between Pat and Jeng? It resonated, because at first it was so much about ‘well this thing can't be and here are all the reasons that this thing can't be.’ It's clear that, like, Jeng is just falling deeper and deeper and deeper, and Pat is just like, I can't, I can't even hear that noise—to the point that he literally drowned the noise out in his own head. To the point where like Jeng actually had to tell him basically, ‘hi, I am actually hitting on you.’ And that, like, it came at the end of like a long tail because also Jeng's very aware that it's, like, an ethical minefield to be hitting on Pat because Pat works for him. So it's just like a swarm of things coming together, in a way that I personally enjoy?

And I, I’ll acknowledge that my enjoyment of this show is extremely personal to just the kind of bitch I am. I just like this kind of, like, dynamics? I like this kind of exceedingly complicated and, ‘this actually is kind of a gordian knot, but still, through that all, I feel the way I feel and you feel the way you feel, and if we could just like figure some of this other shit out—and we're gonna fuck up figuring this other shit out for a while—then it would be solid, it would be golden.’ But like I said, I can completely understand why people wouldn't rock with that. It's dissonant, it's incredibly dissonant, I’m fully aware of that. But I was vibin’. That's just how I feel about it.

Ben

My issue is that the show doesn't say that. And we have to take that as the acceptable read to move on. Like, all of the ideas about how corporate life is evil for queer people are loud themes exemplified through the characters. I was consistently frustrated with Tee in this particular outing, because important gay decisions happen off screen, and that pissed me off. So much of his idea is about how queer people don't get to make choices—and he doesn't show the queer people making the choices they can make.

Like for example, they get together and Pat and Jeng don't discuss what being at work is going to look like for them? Which was so irritating for me, because they don't really know each other? And like I'm totally fine with two bitches just being like, ‘let's just fuck about it for a little while and enjoy this ride while we go.’ But like, they don't say that! Like, we have to take that as meaning, and it irritates me, because he's not subtle about his other shit. It feels a little bit tacked on, because you're supposed to just understand this.

Like—I took that Jeng was broken. I wrote a whole fucking piece about it, about how broken Jeng was by being in the closet as he is, because he lives in a big ass closet. Like his closet was so big I didn't even realize it was a closet, I thought it was an exercise room. No, it's his fucking closet. He lives there, that's insane. But like Pat and Jeng get together, and they don't discuss what being at work is going to be like for them. We don't really see their romance function at all, and they don't give us a sense of the two of them functioning as a pair until the story is over? And that irritates me because what the fuck are they fighting for? Like Jeng is explicitly fighting for the idea of Pat, and Pat is explicitly frustrated that Jeng is trying to manipulate him into the version of Pat that Jeng would prefer him to be. And that is not really confronted in this show. I can't be happy about these two getting together because that particular tension point is just submerged. It isn't dealt with, it's just shoved out of the way. That would have been okay, ‘we're just going to bury this’ is an okay choice, but it's a choice that feels like it happened off screen.

It's frustrating because Pat's choice to break up with the MLM big tall, and his choice to break up with Put happen on screen. Pat processing his complicated post-breakup feelings with Put is executed beautifully on screen. We don't really get a functional version of Pat and Jeng on screen, and it irked me, but it low-key makes me sad, because what if Tee doesn't have enough to pull from in himself to do that properly? But he can handle, like, the painful shit and the breakup shit really well. Like that makes me sad for him…but, like, it irritates me as a viewer. If the desire to be a partner to Pat, and to change because Pat asked him to, is literally the driving force that moves Jeng through the plot—that is text—I hate that when he gets together with Pat, none of the talking about that occurs at all.

Nini

See I had a completely different reaction to that, because to me, from the time that all of that, like, wasn't happening, and then I saw the way that the plot was going, I was just like ‘oh it's a false start.’ That all makes sense to me, like the fact that Jeng spent all this time basically sweatin’ Pat, and finally, like okay, he gets somewhere, he doesn't want to confront the problems. He doesn't want to confront the problems, and Pat doesn't really want to confront the problems because Pat is just, ‘this man wants me, I want this man.’ Like, they don't talk about the issues. They get giddy on each other, they get high, nose wide open, and they don't want to confront the bad shit. So they don't talk about it. It's a false start. They don't talk about it, they don't talk about the fact that they don't really know each other, they don't talk about anything that matters…that to me tells me everything. There's a deep and intense infatuation happening there. And they're burying their heads in the sand about a lot. To me that's deliberate, and that's why it ends up falling apart. It works for me on a narrative level.

25:45 - Step by Step: Story Execution

Nini

I think part of the frustration as well—and I think here we're going to start getting into, like, some of the structural issues—because I said that I did have criticisms about this show. And one of the criticisms that I continuously had was that this show feels like it was edited by monkeys on crack cocaine. There is a lack of a certain amount of cohesiveness to the editing, that makes it hard to follow some of what's happening. Like you have to sit with it and like really train your brain and do one, two, three passes at it, to be like ‘oh yeah, that's what was happening, that's what was happening, that's what was happening.’ So I do take that criticism. I absolutely do take that criticism of the show and I agree with it. That the graph of the show, like the way that it was structured in terms of when the pivot point happens—because it happens almost towards the end—I can see where the frustration comes from, absolutely.

Ben

There's so much in this show that is interesting, but is delivered so haphazardly that you have to work for it. Like, the only useful read I got about the hets and their role in this, was to model what showing up and speaking out looks like versus what sitting on your hands and not saying something looks like. With Khanun and Beam, and their attraction to Ae—who has a baby in a hilariously inaccurate birthing scene…

Nini

[laughs] I’m sorry, you said the birthing scene and I had to crack up, like that was the most like, hand wavy like, ‘I'm a gay man, I don't know how these things work’—like ‘she had a baby, like make it like—do whatever you think having a baby looks like, it's fine, moving on’ [laughs]

Ben

She's pushing the baby! And everybody’s screaming! And POP! It's out! [laughs]

Nini

I don't know how the baby came out, because she was still wearing her pants. But eeehh, let's leave that to the side for now. [laughs]

Ben

I'm okay with that, because everything else was so silly, I get them just not wanting to ask Zorzo to take her pants off.

Nini

There's a thematic reason that Ae has her baby where she does, how she does, when she does, like there's a thematic and a narrative reason for that. But the scene itself is like one of the most cracked-out things I’ve ever seen in my life. [laughs]

Ben

That's the whole problem with the show, like there are good ideas here but like, I don't feel them. I hate that you have to think so hard to get to them. Normally I'm okay with subtext for these sort of things, but…you have to basically rebuild the moments that are occurring in the show so that you can think about stuff.

I ended up frustrated with Jeng by the end, because I feel like his arc peters out. Like there's a, a totally fine read on a lot of these things, but it is so…flat for me. It's fine for a show to make you play with the notion of disappointment? But the disappointment feels…petty, if that makes any sense? Like I don't think the disappointment is built into all the thematic structures. It's just built into the effect that the show wants to engender. It feels a little incongruous, and it's really irritating. I don't mind queer cinema making me feel negative emotions and walk out of a theater going ‘damn, bro.’ I just don't like the way this show is going for that, but also pretending that it's not, towards the end.

Nini

Okay, so here's a thing that we don't normally do, but I think would be useful for this show. So, let's fix it. Our mantra around here is generally: you meet the shows where they are. Right? But: is there a version of this show that you like, and what does that version of the show look like?

Ben

A big problem with this show is, they spend way too much time away from the Jian group office environment. The bubble of the Forge project goes on way too fucking long. The reveal in episode, like, 9? That Pat did not know Jeng was gay this whole time? Is really good, but needs to happen, at the very latest, by episode 8. Because it creates this huge compression effect on the back half of the show, that is so fucking irritating for me as a viewer. The Jeng crying and sad shit is great in episode—10, when that occurs? And like he and Pat get together in episode 11, but the gays need a solid ‘we're going to try to make this work’ episode. You have to put us in the interior of these two settling into each other. We need to understand what we have been yearning for for the whole show up to this point, so that we can understand what they're giving up when they've when they sever—it's romance, they gotta break up, you have to put the characters in a position where they have to figure out, ‘can I go back to the person I was and enjoy my life without this person in my life again?’ The answer is no, because this is fucking romance!—But we need to understand what the romance is and what they're going for.

And all of the development of Pat and Jeng as a couple, that we're supposed to be benefiting from in episode 11 when they're trying to save the stupid little BL project they're working on, feels completely unearned. Yes, I understand that the reason we're not getting payoff is because their relationship is fundamentally flawed as a false start—but it doesn't flag very effectively as one, because we aren't constantly seeing the misfires when they're trying to do stuff romantically together. We need to fully confront the fact that Jeng is brainwashed into thinking that work life integration can work for queer people. It cannot. And we don't get that. So like when they break up, the feeling is like, ‘good, because y'all needed to.’ And not in a satisfying way that another show might have done. We need to move all of the beats from the end of the show back a whole fucking episode.

Also, the decision for Pat to go off and start his own thing, take Chot and Ae, all happens off screen. This is a huge set of choices! Why is Chot running off to be with this twink? Like sure, he's playing fairy godmother in the whole show, but why does he choose to go with him? The audience is left to just figure that out. But so much of this show is about the difficult and complex choices that queer people have to make to survive in a corporate world that doesn't want us. So yes, we can infer that Chot was also frustrated with all this drama at work, and is more than willing to go work with the very talented, very successful little baby gay who showed up at his job, and go off and they gonna get this paper together. I get it. It's fine, it doesn't track as wrong for Chot to do that—but Chot's choice also matters in a show about how queer choice needs to be respected! And they don't show Chot making the choice. Like, the gay choices happening off screen are egregious to me. They need to be unpacked. If the show is about how our choices aren't respected, why aren't we showing the interior decision-making of the choices we're forced to make?

Nini

I'll definitely take your point about where the pivot point of the story happens. It's one of the critiques of this show that I completely agree with. The critical path of this show—like the throughline?—to me is so clear. What happens though, is that the critical path is sort of impacted by…like a bunch of these little side quests. Whether it is that the side quest is too present or too absent, the milestones are happening slightly off schedule. The way that it's sequenced works for me, but the way that things like lag behind or in front of each other are a little…squiffy. In terms of the way that the story is constructed, in terms of some of the things that you feel that you needed to see, or that would have made the story better to be able to see, rather than having to conjure up yourself…like, I get that, absolutely. I don't disagree with that, I think that is a valid and accurate critique of this show. I live in my head a lot [laughs] and so that didn't bother me enough to ding it, but I understand why it didn't work for you, and for a lot of other people.

I think it's just for me that…I was fine with getting pulled along by the story, because I was invested, particularly in Jeng. First they got me with Man being, you know, the size of a barn. And then I started actually paying attention, and they got me with Jeng's character. That's where the show, like, managed to string me along the entire way; I got a hook in, and I'm just like ‘okay, this is what I'm going with.’ But none of the things that you and everybody else is saying about the show are wrong. You're all correct. [laughs] You're all correct. I just…enjoyed it.

Ben

I think for me, both places where this show really broke, and where I really disconnected from this show, were in both of the kitchen scenes, which you loved. Like if we could point to two scenes where things break for me as an audience member? It's the speakeasy scene, kitchen scene—throwing food on the ground, kitchen scene—Pat reconciling with Jeng. It ends up becoming a failure point when Jeng resigns from his company—in his Canadian tuxedo —

Nini

Denim on denim y’all!

Ben

[laughs] And he says to his dad, ‘I have dreams.’ And I'm like, ‘girl, what are they? You ain't said shit for the last three goddamn episodes! What are they? Please sir, talk to the camera, I need to know.’ And like we can infer these things, we can project onto him. I can infer that the restaurant is what's important to him. I can infer that food security for the underprivileged is important to him. But for someone who's as plan-oriented as him, it feels a little weird, that this feels like a undercooked and underdeveloped idea for the character, that's just sort of simmering in the back and I'm like, ‘what, did we even put anything in the pot? Is that just water boiling?’

And so we get to these two kitchen sequences. Chot has chided Pat for not properly receiving someone's feelings, which is an idea that's been all over BL recently, that I'm totally into. Like you can reject people just fine, like you do not owe people any booty at all. But if someone tells you that you're important to them, you should at least acknowledge that they made themselves vulnerable to you, and acknowledge those feelings. Fine, good. Go buy a carrot cake and run to that man. But he goes to Jeng and tries to acknowledge his feelings and Jeng's like, ‘okay, we're together now’ and they make out, and I'm like ‘oh okay, sure, I guess? What? No!’

And this is when the not talking portion kicks in, and then Pat breaks up with Jeng, for what I believe are incredibly valid reasons of feeling like Jeng doesn't trust him or believe in him, because he makes choices for them without consulting Pat. And Pat feels like Jeng is always undercutting him, and Jaab makes a point about this in the final episode—when he doesn't talk to Jen at all? whatever—and says, ‘you kind of manipulated Pat the way Dad manipulated you.’ And I'm like, ‘that's a very, very specific idea, that makes a whole lot of sense, that we're just going to walk away from because this is the last episode—roll the fluff!’

So we get to the second kitchen scene, and I'm trying to accept the emotions of the scene? Of Pat just deciding that he's going to let go of the anger because he really likes Jeng, and he likes what the two of them had together, and he just kind of wants to let it work and figure it out together—the same way I Promised You the Moon ended. And I like that, but it doesn't land here for me? And I ended up really irritated about it. And this is where I get frustrated, like Jeng through episode…10, works for me, but the dead-eyed Jeng of episode 11 and the sad depressive Jeng of episode 12—it feels like he never comes back to life. Which may have been their point, but they went out of their way to try and make me feel like he and Pat are together and they're happy and everything's going to be okay now because they're together in the final episode. It feels unearned, and it feels like they didn't finish the goddamn mission! when it comes to Jeng.

Nini

And for me, it feels exactly the opposite, because those two kitchen scenes are very clearly paralleled, you're absolutely correct: in the first kitchen scene when they're first getting together, they don't talk about anything that's important, they just kind of roll past it. But in the second kitchen scene, they stop, they take a breath, Jeng says, ‘let's talk about this tomorrow.’ He's happy, yeah, but they make a deliberate point of not doing the same shit that they did before. They make a point of saying the things; they make a point of taking a beat; they make a point of taking their time; they make a point of actually talking to each other. And to me that's why it works. I mean it works, as well, for emotional reasons that are just pure, like, me engaging with romantic notions, reasons, and I'll fully admit to that. But to me the fact that those two scenes were so different was kind of the point? And I quite enjoyed that part.

Another problem with the show that I think makes it really not legible for people is the fact that you don't have any sense of the passage of time. Like you really have to work to figure out how much time has passed between any two events in the show.

Ben

And clearly we were on the wrong timeline from the show.

Nini

[laughs] I think they just made a mistake in the last episode. I did a lot of work on the show, but I enjoy that, so I was fine. The timeline is that the first 9 to 10 episodes happen over the course of roughly a year? And then episode 11 is very compressed. I think they do give us a chiron at one point, that you figure out it's like about three months maybe? And then the last episode, it spans years—not just including the time skip, but the actual episode itself.

Ben

It feels like somewhere between three to five years for sure.

Nini

Yeah, the last part of the episode, like maybe the last half hour, is like a series of vignettes? But it's just that the way that it's edited, it doesn't feel like a series of vignettes. It feels like scenes that are happening in sequence, which they're not.

Like I said, the editing of this show, monkeys on crack cocaine and ayahuasca, absolutely. Storyboarding, I'm not sure anybody did any?

I did a lot of work to enjoy the show. But I did enjoy it.

Ben

And I hate that. I hated the sides, like they weren't even in the final episode, they're like ‘yeah we don't care about them, get them the fuck out of here.’ No Khanun, no Jen, just get them out of here. We're gonna be here for an hour and forty two minutes, but the sides required literally zero closure to help stick the landing with the mains? Ugh, man.

Nini

They were there to reinforce thematic ideas, and they leaned way too hard into them as a narrative point when they weren't supposed to be narrative. So yes, completely agree with you, that was a mess.

It's not that I don't agree with you! We're saying that this is a fight night and I got my eye black on, but the reality is that I don't disagree with anything you're saying. It’s just that I was fine with doing that work, and you are not fine with doing that work because you think you shouldn't have to do that work, and that's…yeah, you're probably right about that.

Ben

I'm in the business of recommending things to people because I like enjoying things with people. I will not be showing this to Emily, because I have to explain too much along the way the whole fucking time. And like, I hate that! It shouldn't be this goddamn hard to enjoy the damn show.

I ended up comparing the dissonance around this show to, say, something like 2gether, which I think is remembered fondly because of pandemic stuff, and less because the show is good. Because everybody acknowledges that the show is a goddamn mess, but there's things that they take out of it, they say ‘I really like this.’ And that's how I feel about Step by Step. I loved everything that Man did in this; I think he played a 32 year old repressed gay man really well. But low key…I gotta be honest, I'm a little burned out on feeling a bunch of fucking feelings about sad rich gay boys? Like, the West is obsessed with sad rich gay boys and I am burnt the hell out on it. Like ‘oh no, he's sad, in his penthouse…’ who cares? [laughs]

Nini

I think for me as well, because I've been spending so much time with Turtles’s Asian family trauma lens, that I dug into that side of things, like a little deeply with my brain, and I was kind of enjoying kicking that around to myself as part of this.

Ben

And that’s the thing that sucks! Like Jeng, through episode 10, works so well for me. Like I absolutely loved what Man was doing with Jeng, how he was playing him, how Ben was playing Pat as kind of oblivious to it but unconsciously flirting with Jeng.

We didn't even talk about Up Poompot! Up Poompot was in this show and he whipped ass! Up was so good! Put was an incredible character. So Put is Pat's ex, who was not a great ex to him. This is very clearly a failed first romance on a lot of different levels. Put is ambitious, and he wants a lot more from his life than to just stay in the poor town the two of them grew up in, and he clearly didn't have Pat's skills to go to school…twice, study in America, and come back to Thailand as a highly trained marketing professional who can go into a corporate environment, and even with every goddamn employee in there working on his damn nerves still be the best person that they have on their team. Put doesn't have that: he's pretty and he's charming, and he's an actor. He has to go into BL, and so he can't have a boyfriend. Which is very fucked, that gay people cannot be out in BL. Insane. Put is an incredible character. He is simultaneously deeply unlikable and also incredibly sympathetic. Up is so good in this show.

And I think Ben, who has an incredibly internal character—who really could have benefited from a journal? So that we could hear his thoughts more often—also does a really good job playing someone who is barely keeping it together, and trying to restrain their quick temper. Ben does a good job as a fairly new actor dealing with some really complex internal things that have to be externalized, in a film tradition that leans towards bombastic. That's really difficult to do.

Bruce is in this! Bruce had such a rough character to portray in Lovely Writer, and it was hard to really like that character even if you felt bad for them. So glad we got a character for Bruce that we loved this time in Chot.

Zorzo is in this, she's incredible, we love her. She can do whatever she wants—she shows up on a set and we're just like, ‘hello Zorzo, what do you want to do today?’

It's just so much fun watching this cast work together. Even the new people. Saint had some difficulties with his romantic partner and I think that's because he was new and nervous about doing that right. But he was really really good with Ben: when Jaab was interacting with Pat, Saint was really good, and you can see why he was cast. His chemistry with Ben felt so natural, and didn't read as like weirdly sexual or romantic, which is very easy to fall into in BL when they put literally any boys in the same room with each other.

They did a great job letting queer friendships feel like queer friendships in this show. There's so much that's genuinely good in this show, which is why I feel like I have to give it a 7.5. Like if it had just been kind of bad and muddled? I’d have probably given it an 8 for just pure gumption. But it's frustrating, because it feels like everyone understood what the mission was and the plan fell apart with contact with the enemy immediately, and they did not regroup at all.

Nini

This is sounding like video game stuff.

Ben

I'm kind of pissed! I'm in captain mode right now. I'm assessing the film and going over everyone's screens and we're talking about who fucked up here.

50:25 - Step by Step: Where are we on Tee Bundit?

Ben

The most important thing to ask now is, where do either of us sit when it comes to Tee Bundit and Dee Hup House?

Nini

I am a Tee Bundit fan? I see some of the things that he wants to say. I think that maybe he needs some guardrails? And maybe to lighten up a little bit? Because he has good ideas, and the ideas, he makes them very legible, when he wants to.

I am curious to see how he does with some guardrails. Sometimes an artist needs a few guardrails to really focus themselves. So I am still down with Tee, and I'm interested in seeing the rest of what he's putting out this year. How about you?

Ben

I just want to grab him—like William Shatner in a classic Star Trek episode—by both of his upper arms, and say very clearly: “You got to stop being mean to the audience, bro. They're on your side.” It feels like he's beefing with us the audience, in Step by Step. Like it feels like he resents that the only way he can tell queer stories and get funded is to do queer romance, which I don't know that he's interested in—even though clearly he cares a lot about queer existence. Which is a very complicated space to sit as an artist, particularly with what the zeitgeist is feeling right now?

But I need him to not take that energy out on us as the audience, like we signed up for romance, bro! Stop making us feel bad for wanting that! It just feels like Tee is just mad, and yelling in the room, and we're like ‘I get that you're mad bro, but this is unfun for all of us: we are on your side, and you are taking this out on us.’ He's that friend, who's right…but fuck, dude!

[Nini laughs]

Ben

That's all I've got. It's a chop for me, I'm sorry. [laughs]

Nini

Nah, I mean, sometimes we disagree, my friend, that’s just the way it is. [laughs] For me it’s a 9, for Ben it’s a 7.5, so that works out to…8.25? Yeah, that sounds about right.

Ben

It’s not bad, but it’s not good.

Nini

8.25 for Step by Step, and entry into contention for the Girl You Tried award for this season.

53:10 - La Pluie

Nini

Okay, so we are talking all things La Pluie. Ben, tell us what La Pluie is about.

Ben

La Pluie is a sort of speculative fiction romance, set in a world very similar to ours, where a small subset of the population experience temporary sensory loss whenever it rains as a form of deafness. Of that incredibly small population, an even smaller portion of them, when they come of age—which is 20 in Thailand—they may begin to hear another person's voice whenever it rains. Those people are seemingly tied to each other by this rain-based connection and other people have described them as soulmates.

Our protagonist Saengtai is a 22-year-old who experiences rain deafness. He has three brothers, one older, and both of his parents are what people call soulmates. When he turned 20, his parents wanted him to know that they were getting a divorce, and this shattered Saengtai’s faith in the concept of soulmates, and he spent the next two years actively avoiding speaking to his soulmate at all. Two years later, he happens to run into him in a cafe, realizes his soulmate is hot, and then [laughs] decides to maybe give it a shot. And the show becomes this ongoing exploration of the concept of romance itself, unpacking whether or not the soulmates concept is real, portrayed by incredibly emotionally aware characters.

Our primary four characters are: Saengtai, our protagonist, who's a writer. Patts, his soulmate, who is a veterinarian, and slightly older than him, and very cool. You have Saengtai’s little brother Saengtien, who’s kind of a rascal, who does not have rain deafness but very much believes in the concept of soulmates. And then there's Lomfon, a boy who is also in school with Saengtien, who adamantly refuses to believe in soulmates, and causes his own problems along the way. There's quite a colorful cast of supporting characters, and this is probably…the most legible show that we've ever watched? From the very first scene, this show is nothing but constant payoff.

Nini

Hmm, I don't know about from the very first scene, because as you know, it took me a few episodes to kind of get there. I started and stopped, and then had to be cajoled back in [laughs] and I do not regret coming back in. The line on this for me is that I think soulmates are bullshit. I've never been a fan of this soulmate trope—in the first episode or two, I'm just kind of like, ‘I don't know that they're gonna do anything interesting with this’ and then sometime around…it was definitely around episode 4, and I know it was around episode 4 because isn't that when Tai bit that man? We're gonna talk about this, Ben.

Ben

[laughs] Tai did bite that man, in episode 3.

Nini

Tai, my precious little alley cat, that was when I decided I was in [laughs] and I was gonna keep watching. I mean he literally got drunk and bit Patts, and I was like, ‘okay this is gonna be fucking awesome.’ Who bites somebody??

Ben

Someone unhinged!

Nini

Exactly, that's the point! And you know I love unhinged, so I was in for the duration after that. That was like the end of episode 3 when he bit him? And then episode 4 it just keeps getting better.

57:50 - La Pluie: The Soulmate Myth

Ben

Let's get properly into the soulmate stuff. I stand by my comment that this show begins paying off from the very first scene. We read the blurb, we get our little intro, and he's like ‘we got soulmates in this world; I can't hear when it rains; there's a boy who talks to me when it rains,’ and we were like ‘whoa man, these two are gonna fuck real good!’ And then the show opens with divorce. And I was like, ‘never mind, I am seated!’

Right away, the show is telling you that it is going to challenge the presumptions built into its core premise. It spends the entire time interrogating its premise, with really legible characters. And I think you provided the clearest read on the sort of primary archetypes these characters fit, when you described them in the framework of faith. So, please elaborate on your analysis.

Nini

The key thing all our characters, our key characters are dealing with in the show, is whether they believe in soulmates or not? So you have Tien, who is absolutely a true believer, 100% believes in soulmates, no matter what has happened to potentially shake his faith in soulmates he totally believes in it. Then you have Tai, who I described as an apostate, because Tai used to be a true believer and then his faith was shattered, and so he's sort of gone against believing in soulmates. In terms of their love interests, you have Patts, who is sort of agnostic on the idea? ‘Eh, I don't know, maybe soulmates are real, maybe they're not, doesn't really matter to me. I don't know what to believe but I'm not going to let it affect what I'm doing, and this is the way I feel about things.’ And then you've got Lomfon, who is an atheist: not just an atheist, like a rationalist atheist. He's just like, ‘soulmates are bullshit, I don't buy this, I don't believe in anything that this is happening here.’ And then what the show does with those four viewpoints is sort of, brings them all around to a kind of agnosticism? So in the end, they kind of all get to where Patts started.

Then one of the things the show does towards the end, really at the end, is bring Patts around to being…sort of a true believer? Not necessarily in the sense of the rain deafness connection being a soulmate connection, but believing in the idea of having a soulmate. I don't think that's in any way related to the rain deafness connection at all, but more about choices and the way that he feels about Tai, and the way that Tai feels about him and the relationship that they are building. I found that really interesting, where in the end everybody kind of comes around to the agnostic viewpoint, Patts is the one who moves towards a, a believer, but not in the whole myth.

Ben

I think what works for me really in the show, when it comes to the belief in soulmates or not, is…the show understands that belief without action is meaningless. In the case of Tai and Lomfon, their choices and inaction create immense harm for the people around them that they claim to care about. In the case of Tai, he hurts Patts, for years, with his silence. Like it is totally fine for him to want to work out his comfortability with the rain-based connection privately and on his own time, but he owed it to Patts to say that. Even just, ‘I'm uncomfortable having you in my head, please don't talk to me when it rains.’ That's all he had to say. It's the silence that was really cruel for me. He's hurting Patts and punishing him, because his parents let him down. That's really shitty.

Lomfon glomps on to Tai, for whatever reason, and just determines he's supposed to be with Tai. Actively ignoring the growing relationship between him and Tien, hurting everyone along the way. Whereas Patts and Tien are both actively treating people with immense kindness and care, because of how they believe and how they move through the world. Tien cares a lot about his brother: he knows his brother was hurt by what happened to their parents, and he gives excuses for him and he tries to take care of his brother, he tries to make himself small to take care of his family and the people around them, even if he's a little bit feisty. And Patts, who maybe doesn't care about the soulmate shit at all, sees Tai once: is like, ‘whoa, I am inextricably drawn to this person,’ and pursues him very kindly. The people with the most angst about whether or not this shit is real are the ones doing the most harm to other people. It's the people who are most pissy about faith being the worst in their relationships.

Nini

Look at us here being a couple of lapsed Catholics on the podcast.

[both laugh]

Nini

There is so much that the show wants to say about that idea of faith without works being dead. So much that the show wants to say about the relationship between chance and choice. I think the show itself is agnostic on whether soulmates are real? But I think the show does also say: there is some mix of chance and choice in romance. You ran into this person in a coffee shop—that's chance. But what you do next is choice.

There're little things sprinkled throughout, like Patts and Tai finding out—once they've decided to be together—finding out that they actually had a connection from earlier on, because Patts's grandmother used to live next door to Tai. So when Tai's parents split up and he was like really sad and depressed about it, Patts saw this kid crying, and he just decided to be kind to this kid, and he helped Tai through, like, the immediate aftermath of his parents' divorce. And in return for that kindness, Tai sort of helped him through the death of his grandmother? They never saw each other's faces or anything like that, this was a happenstance. This was a chance encounter, through Patts's kindness and Tai’s kindness in return, that became a connection between them. Again, chance and choice. It was by chance that Patts saw this kid crying, but it was a choice to be kind to the kid next door.

That's threaded throughout the story in different parts, this idea that chance brings you to the table but choice determines what happens when you get there.

Ben

I feel very strongly, as a lapsed Catholic, that none of the beliefs matter if you're just trying to be right. What matters is how you treat people.

Nini

The show is more interested in the choices than the chances, but it does put the chances sort of in there. You know that the show is interested in the choices because of the way that it deals with the parents, and the parents divorce, and how the parents have made it through their divorce and continue to be people who are together in dealing with their children, who still talk to each other when it rains, who have moved out of a romantic phase and into a platonic phase in their lives. To the point where the mom can get remarried to somebody who is more suited to her, and this doesn't affect their friendship.

I really enjoyed the aspects of the show that really harped on the idea of choice, and choosing how you're going to build a relationship with somebody whether it is romantic or platonic, rather than fate putting somebody in your path and that feeling like a predetermination of who that person is going to be to you. That's why in the end, I did come around to La Pluie after not being interested at the beginning. They fucked with soulmates, and I like that.

Ben

I feel the need to rant.

Nini

The floor is yours, sir. Speak directly into the microphone.

Ben

I'm so glad that this show ended by saying that the soulmate stuff was a trap. It was really frustrating to see everybody caught up in the soulmate stuff, and the mechanic of that, as this verification tool. Maybe it's the whole lapsed Catholic thing and having a very complex relationship with faith and doubt? Because I got the whole notion that the purpose of all of this is about choice. It's about what you do with the opportunities you're given, and how you treat the people when you're there.

It was really frustrating to watch so many members of the audience just really struggle with this show, because they needed the soulmates thing to either be bullshit, or to be confirmed. I really like that the show very politely sidesteps answering that, because what matters is how people treat each other. The opening scroll of the show is a happy couple that is a guy with rain deafness hanging out with somebody who is not. Like these things were legible from the beginning for me, and it was so…tedious, week in and week out, dealing with the, like the weather report: “Are the soulmates real this week?” Stop.

Nini

Since we're ventilating the show's take on soulmates so to speak…

1:08:22 - La Pluie: Lomfon is Rude!

Ben

Yeah, let's talk about somebody who clearly got it wrong, in the show!

Nini

[laughs] Let's talk about Lomfon getting that ass beat, and why it was absolutely necessary.

Ben

We're gonna begin where we always sat: Lomfon is rude! And Patts should have punched him harder.

Nini

[laughs] I like just, I heard like a million people just turning the podcast off at this point—but it's, it's true, it's a fact.

Ben

Look, I do not care. Here's the thing: Lomfon is beefing with people for no reason, from the jump. He's beefing with Tien in the store over a goddam magazine. He's beefing with other classmates. He has no goddamn friends.

Nini

He was rude to Bow! He was rude to Tai's boss, and he likes Tai, and he still couldn't muster up like a shred of interest in anything she was doing, or even general politeness to shake her hand and say hi how you doing. Rude!

Ben

He only cares about what he's thinking about, there's no regard for other people. Like yeah, sure. He's like, 20. And like, kids gotta grow up at some point. But also, tastin’ a little bit of fist will reorient your life a little bit sometimes.

Nini

[laughs] True!

Ben

He's just so dramatic! There's this development over the course of the show, where Tai ends up with two different soulmates with connections to him. Lomfon is like, ‘I'm hearing Tai’s voice when it rains.’ Instead of, like sending, like a group text, saying, like, ‘hey, I believe something very strange may have happened to me, I think we should all meet up next Sunday at four o'clock—because I've checked the weather and we should all be together for this.’ And they could have handled this like adults and talked about stuff. No. Lomfon is rude and selfish, and so he needs to corner Tai in the rain, kiss Tai, and be like ‘whoops, my bad!’ And then when Patts rolls up on him throwing haymakers, he's like ‘whoa bro, no, he's mine!’ He's yours? Little boy. Please.

I got a lot of smoke for this motherfucker, I got some notes over here. This dude hung out with Tien at a cast party, cuddled with drunk Tien, calls his brother because Tien needs a ride home—and then while Tien is mostly unconscious, flirts with his older brother? Gross.

Nini

He's in his own zone. He's not thinking about anybody else, he's not interested in whether what he does affects anybody else and how it affects anybody else. And it takes, yes quite frankly, a jaw rockin’, for him to get his head out of his ass. Completely concur that it was needed.

Because I mean, think about this okay? Even if he actually liked Tai—which he doesn't really—does he think that this is the way to go about getting Tai? Let's ponder this for a second, just a short second, okay? It doesn't even make sense. And then, he thinks that maybe he might feel something for Tien, he doesn't know…but instead of, I don't know maybe, hm! going on a date with Tien instead of Tai—like there's so many other ways that Lomfon could have gone about what he went about. He just did it in the messiest way possible. Everybody was already telling him, ‘look I'm seeing what you're doing here and I'm gonna need you to take a step back.’

Ben

Tien picked up on it because they were on that mountain, and he saw Lomfon starting shit and looking at his brother, and he pulled that motherfucker aside, he said, ‘I am a third son, bitch, I will bury you on this mountain! Don't ever look at my brother again! Their relationship is theirs, and if you fuck with them one more time, they will not find your fucking corpse on this mountain.’

Nini

Everybody who saw it told Lomfon, ‘yo, you need to mind your own business.’ And if they didn't tell Lomfon, they told Tai—so Bow told Tai, ‘look, Lomfon’s up in your business. You need to say something and get that kid away from your business.’ Tien told him mind your own business. Patts told him mind your own business—because Patts definitely knew that Lomfon had a crush on Tai.

Ben

And Lomfon’s like, ‘well I heard Tai's voice in the rain, so now it's my business,’ and instead of talking to Tai properly, he's going to go like beef with Patts and be like I'm taller than you, so.

[both laugh] That boy got on my goddamn nerves! Like, he's an excellent character.

1:13:30 - La Pluie: Tai Also Deserves Some Smoke

Ben

Let's talk about how Tai needed that ass whooped too.

Nini

That's what I was about to say, like, we're on Lomfon and Lomfon deserved it, but Tai also deserves some smoke and I'm here to give it to him. Tai, baby boy. Patts carried you down that mountain after you ran up there in the first place offa some bullshit. He had to carry you back down that mountain, y’all come back down the mountain as boyfriends. You looked at that man in the car and told him ‘I want to stay over at your place tonight’ and that man beat land speed records to take you back to his house. You literally got the booty in every single room in that apartment.

And then you decide to go on a date-not-date with Lomfon? I feel like it was a little bit too—like he was slightly flattered?

Ben

Let me just read Tai his rights. [Nini laughs]

This man, after finally getting what he thinks he's wanted this whole time, realizes there may be a situation going on with his brother's friend. He coulda asked his brother, like at any moment: ‘yo what's up with Lomfon, like Bow is already saying dude was sniffing around, and he asked me you to do some sort of thing, and I dunno how I feel about it. What's up with you and your little friend?’ And Tien could have been like ‘oh noooo, I actually like him, why is he doing this like?’ He could have solved this any number of ways that were less dramatic than ‘let me lie to my boyfriend because I'm worried how he's gonna handle knowing that this little dude is sniffing around’—as if he didn't already know.

It is so frustrating that Patts—who is clear from the beginning that his primary concern was Saengtai’s comfort and happiness—for Saengtai to just actively ignore this man's vocalized needs. Man is telling you, he wants you to say the things. And you're like ‘well, don't my actions show it?’ No baby boy, because you're out here with some other dude in the middle of the motherfuckin’ rain, and you need to do better.

And then! That boy is at his mom's wedding. Your dad has said he is happy for her. He likes the guy that she's gonna be with, and he's happy for the life that they're gonna have. And this boy ruins their wedding, making it all about him, because he's mad that his parents’ soulmate thing didn't work out. Oh I was so mad at that boy.

He was so frustrating as a protagonist sometimes, because he just shits on all the relationships in his life. He shits on his mom. He’s low key shitting on his dad. He relies on his little brother too much without really paying attention to him in a meaningful way, and he beats up on Patts. And he does the same thing to Bow, like he works with Bow. She's clearly covering for him at work. Because he works with a bunch of other people and refuses to ever learn their names or really engage with them.

Nini

This is not to say that we do not love my little alley cat Tai, but he is a fucking alley cat. [laughs] He has the predisposition and morals of one, quite frankly. Like he's scratching and biting…in some ways he's just as rude as Lomfon. But like, you see where all this stuff comes from. And you want him to like, just for a second like, dude, retract the claws, and stop making decisions for people that are more about what you want and what you're interested in than what they want and need and have said that they want and need.

Ben

This is what I mean, like, the show being legible and saying the same thing the whole time. Like, as early as episode 2 Tai is like, ‘hey I found my soulmate,’ and Tien says quite plainly, ‘you fucked with love: unfuck it.’ And when he finally has that confrontation with his parents where they show him the complexity of human relationships, where his dad also says, ‘when you have love you need to take care of it.’

It's so funny, like, for all that Tai is obsessed with his dad, Tien is the one who picked up on his dad's, like, core skills. And Tai is so much like his mom, I'm really glad the show finally recognized that towards the end. Tai recognizes that he's doing to Patts what his mom was doing to him: not giving him any information, leaving him to suffer in silence without giving him the context that he's desperately needing. And it showed a lot of growth that he finally got his ass together, and spent the whole episode running around looking for that man, because goddamn.

1:18:26 - La Pluie: Tai’s Dad Read as Queer

Ben

I wanna get this aside in here, how Tai's dad read as queer to me the whole time, I don't know if he did to you?

Nini

He did, but I didn't know if that was the actor or the character.

Ben

I think it may have been both, and I think I like the way the show handled it. I think it was very useful for subtext to show that Tai's dad is queer? And to not confirm it at the text level. Because La Pluie is not interested in structural homophobia. But I thought it was a really interesting premise to consider what happens if a straight person and a gay person think they're soulmates. What happens if a man who knows who he is goes into a straight marriage, loves his sons, loves his wife, but they can't work, because they can't be the kind of partners they need to be to each other. Which is exactly what the show says, without saying it’s because the dad was queer.

And I think I really like the show leaving that as subtext for us to consider? Because the show does such a great job at building emotionally intelligent gay relationships otherwise.

Nini

I think there were lots of markers for it, like there were markers in the character themselves, there are markers in the relationship that the father and the mother had, the way that the mother was the breadwinner and the father was the caretaker. There are markers in the father's chosen profession, he's a chef. There is a, sort of a marker in this idea of him being—I think it was a private chef to some ambassador and spending a lot of time with this ambassador? All of these are things that I picked up on, and I don't know if they were easter eggs or if they were just throwaways, but there were lots of like tiny little markers.

Ben

And also him being the one to actually say that they should break up.

Nini

Yeah, there, there are lots of tiny little, like I said, could be read as markers, could just be coincidental, but the show is so well constructed that I am loath to leave it to the idea of coincidence.

Ben

I agree. I think it's well done.

1:20:48 - La Pluie: The Romance

Ben

Tai needed to get his shit together, because as far as I'm concerned Patts is maybe the most perfect romantic interest that BL has ever created. And that also feels really intentional for the themes that they're unpacking.

Nini

La Pluie is a romance novel. Like, if you look at the way it's structured, the way it's organized, La Pluie is a romance novel that is sort of an anti romance novel, almost? And in a romance novel, the love interest is essentially perfect. If they have a flaw, it's something that is, ‘my only flaw is that I care too much’ or some shit like that, you know, that kind of thing? [both laugh]

Patts fits into that mould in a way, but it's also subverted a little bit? So, he's handsome, he's a vet, he is kind to animals, he’s kind to people. He's very sweet, he is a hundred percent into Tai.

Ben

He drives a Porsche. He has a very nice apartment.

Nini

[laughs] He's rich. You know what I mean? All the markers of like the perfect romantic hero.

Ben

He has no family drama.

Nini

None whatsoever…he has a little tragic backstory with grandmother dying…like he’s the perfect romantic hero in a trope sense. Listen, I think sometime around the time that Tai bit that man— and yeah I'm still not over it—

Ben

He did bite that man.

Nini

I remember saying to Ben, ‘oh so like Tai’s an alley cat, but Patts is a literal angel.’ Because after he bit that man and then he threw up on him, still that man took him home, let him, like, lay in his bed. He gave him clothes, left him alone to change his own clothes, and then in the morning when he woke up hungover and couldn't remember shit, he woke up and there was a note because he had cleared out, he didn’t wanna make him feel awkward or anything like that. He cleared out, he left a note saying all the things that he did the night before, because he didn't know if he was going to remember…He was perfect about it. He was such a gentleman.

Ben

As one of the leaders of the Patts defense squad, I'm gonna have to lead a charge for my boy. Because my man is the best communicator. He clearly understands that something is wrong with his soulmate, doesn't pressure him to talk to him; just talks back to him, tries to be kind to him, tries to say nice things to him. Eventually sees a guy who he wants to pursue. He does not know that it’s Tai. But the first thing he does that night is like, ‘hey I don't know what's going on with you, but I saw the cutest boy that has ever existed, and I'm gonna pursue him, so uh, deuces!’

So they end up at this club, Tai gets low-key abandoned by his friends, so Patts takes care of him. Tai bites that man, tries to bite him again. Later that night starts fussing with Patts, accusing him of being a player, and then makes out with him! Like yes, he was drunk, but—makes out with him! Like bro! Patts starts pursuing him earnestly after that, by leaving the note. And then Tai, who does have communication skills and social skills, does the cutesy thing you would do in a movie. He's going to return the fucking clothes to Patts in a cute little bag waiting outside his job. And the two of them go out on the cutest little date, full of all sorts of great stuff.

Also, like, I haven't talked about it that much here: Title is really really good. I love the way Title and Pee both play their characters in this show. The way Title played Tai during that dinner they had? Was so good. At one point when he asks Patts, ‘do you always eat like this?’

Nini

And he points with the knife?

Ben

And he points with the knife, it is so, so perfect! And Patts is so clever. Like Tai wants to hang out and they want to go on the date and he's like, ‘let me not…bullshit about who I am.’ They ride in his Porsche to a fancy restaurant that Patts clearly frequents regularly because the staff recognizes him. He hands Tai the menu and asks Tai what he wants. Tai, who also has social skills and is like ‘I don't know about this, I don't know what the rules are here,’ decides not to make the choice on ordering something, ‘cause he's not trying to hit him up style. So he passes the choice to Patts, and then Patts makes a neutral choice by just saying ‘we'll have whatever the chef’s special is for the day.’ By making the neutral choice to just accept the chef’s special, even though Patts picked the place, he is making sure Tai understands that Patts will not be forcing him to do anything.

I just really love their date, like there's so much there; Patts is really charming, he's funny…and then moving along, the next thing Tai does, which is insane, is introduce Patts to his dad without warning. And the dad ain't shit either, picking on Patts the whole time.

Nini

[laughs] It was funny.

Ben

He hangs out with their dad, and immediately Patts’s instinct is to show the proper respect to Tai’s father. He doesn't get in the middle of their fight. He doesn't ask about it. He just sort of gives them a way to end the fight now, he politely asks about Tai and his other brothers, giving Tai a chance to talk about his family if he wants to. They go back to Tai’s place. Patts, not really thinking about it, walks in on Tai while he's changing, gets to see all the goodies. And then they have this intense moment, and they end up making out on the floor.

I want to make a special note here about La Pluie: La Pluie is one of the first BLs that I can really remember, ever, that when there is a moment of intense sexual tension, releases it. So often these shows just bait us. They titillate us, they want us to get all hot and bothered about ‘whoa, they's ‘bout to kiss’ and then they interrupt it with some nonsense. Or they just don't do anything with it and they tease us and they make bits out of it. And as much as I enjoy these shows, it was so refreshing to see a show go, ‘what if we release it? What if they actually start making out on the floor? What then?’

I get frustrated a lot of times in BL about how they make these boys dickless. And there's this really lovely thing in La Pluie that Patts’s concern was Tai's pleasure. But they stop, because Tai isn't ready. And though Patts was a bit caught up in the moment, he catches himself. And they back off, and they have a conversation about what else is going on. Patts learns a little bit more about Tai—low key they played with some of the yaoi framing in that moment, because as big as Pee is, he crouches himself down and makes himself lower than Tai, and is kind of looking at, up at him in cute ways—because you'd expect Patts to be maybe the seme in this sort of framing—and they do that early on by putting Patts on the left with the date shit when Tai goes to see him, but Patts is queering that narrative by intentionally moving himself to the right when he's trying to get closer to Tai.

When they're on their Chiang Mai trip, one of the most insane things this show does that I will never get over, is…they’re sharing the bed, both of them are awake. They know what's going to happen, we know what's going to happen, but everyone knows Tai is not exactly ready, because we haven't climbed that mountain yet. We haven't dealt with the core angst. We're both two men who are very attracted to each other, and we know we're attracted to each other—so they start to get hot and bothered, but Tai has them stop again, and Patts, our strongest soldier, pulls himself back again. But Tai, listening to his good sis Bow, is like ‘I can't keep leaving this man hanging, I can't keep starting these things and then not finishing it.’ He offers to blow Patts and it was very explicit that that's what happened. We know!

It's so impressive to me that this show presented Tai giving Patts head as a way for him to maintain control over a sexual encounter. The whole notion about giving pleasure as a form of control is something we have not really seen explored in BL this way. I really liked that this show focused on the different ways that two men are going to become more physically and sexually comfortable with each other over time. And even after everything, after Tai has cast him aside, he still chooses to go back to Tai and try and reconcile with him, because he did lose his temper. And that was a scary moment. And I think I like that Patts losing his temper was made as jarring and scary as possible in the show, because I feel like really perfect characters need to have this intense rage about them. Because I have never met a chill pacifist in my life. The choice to be kind is so hard in a world full of cruelty, and I like that underneath the surface of Patts is a temper that he has to manage and maintain. I love my man.

Nini

I can't remember who it is, somebody put this on Tumblr: that Patts is kind but he's not always nice, and Tai is nice but that he's not always kind.

Ben

Exactly.

Nini

Tai seems like, you know, gentle and soft. But when it comes down to it, Tai is the one in the narrative who's actually kind of cruel? It's very interesting to put that on a romantic protagonist. How it ends up getting read is incredibly interesting, because that person is the romantic protagonist, it ends up getting…cast aside, and here I go back into Calvinism and the green flag label [laughs] that I thought I had ventilated with Bed Friend.

Ben

[laughs] As soon as you said that my third eye opened, and I was like—

Nini

Here I go again!

Ben

Where—where's my bat?

[both laugh]

Nini

I didn't get this out of my system the first time, somehow. But yeah, the way that that's received in a protagonist, the fact that the protagonist is kind of a little bit of a bitch boy, quite frankly [laughs], gets glossed over, and then the person who made a mistake has it sort of loom large.

1:32:06 - La Pluie: Depiction of Male Anger

Ben

I got a little bit mad about that with the fandom too like, we got all this bending over backwards week in and week out for Lomfon's rude ass and Tai’s rude ass. Patts loses his temper once, punches a boy, punches a wall, and we're like ‘oh! he's dangerous!’ And I'm like, ‘I hate this!’

And there's a lot more I want to unpack here in the future — this does not feel like the right time to do it, but we really need to talk about that at some point, as a community that engages with romance? Because we have a really fucked-up relationship with violence. Like, Patts, not leaving a mark on Lomfon was seen as egregious. Punching a door in frustration was seen as egregious. But like, Bad Buddy opens up with Pran shit-kicking Pat to the fucking ground, as these boys beat the shit out of each other!

Nini

I think like, it's a lot of things. It's a question of who gets to be angry, and how anger is portrayed, and men's anger, and the way that women—because of the way that we have to be socialized to protect ourselves, the way that we view men's anger that is sort of slightly different from how men will view men's anger? And how being familiar with certain kinds of angry expressions from men is, like, one of the reasons that women shrink from that kind of stuff. And there's so many women in BL fandom.

Like I understood where that was coming from, but at the same time, the show is so legible. It's very legible that this is Patts…reaching the end of his rope, and it's very clear in the show that Patts would never actually hurt anybody. [laughs] He doesn't even really hurt Lomfon. Lomfon is fine! He gets his ass kicked a little bit, but he's fine!

Ben

As our great friend wen-kexing-apologist pointed out, this show has a makeup budget. My boy Tai got his shit fucked up on that mountain, and the makeup crew made sure he looked messed up even in that wet filming situation. They could have afforded to make that boy's mouth bruised the way it should have been for talking the way he was, and my man doesn't. And that's the thing that gets me. Like, everybody else is allowed to be an asshole, but Patts, who I believe deserves to be righteously angry about this shit going down at this point in their relationship—and it's like ‘aw, geez, I don't know about that brah.’

We see, through Patts’s relationship with Nara, that he would never actually hurt Tai. And that's why the intensity of his frustration I think should have been the focus, not the expression of it. I really resented the way it felt like everyone suddenly wanted to regulate Patts’s frustration. I hate the whole notion that he is only allowed to be upset in an attractive, gentle way. Because he's been gentle the whole goddamn time, and everyone has been so rude and disrespectful of him.

Nini

Like, there is room to talk about the expression of Patts’ frustration, but you can't have that room if you're using it in a reductive manner to just completely kick him out the window as a character. I don't buy that, I don't subscribe to it.

1:35:50 - La Pluie: Treatment of Nara

Ben

With Nara, we saw that Patts is capable of dealing with difficult romantic situations. Because Nara is treated so sympathetically about everything that went down with her and Patts. How she feels frustrated about Patts’s soulmate connection with Tai, long before they start talking, I think is valid. Because she felt frustrated. She felt frustrated that anytime it rains, Patts gets moody, and it feels like somebody else is in the middle of their relationship. And you got the sense from them accidentally making out in the rain one time, where Patts immediately cut it off and apologized, that he didn't want to put Tai through that, even before he knew who Tai was. I got that Nara felt frustrated that her intimacy was scheduled around the goddamn rain. She felt an innate jealousy in her own relationship that she knew she was struggling with and couldn't exactly cope with. It wasn't fair to either of them. Patts is like, ‘look if I can get rid of this I would, because I do care about you.’

Nara takes some time. She gets to reflect, she decides to grow. She knows that it's hard out here in these goddamn streets, and Patts is a keeper, and she tries to do the big romantic gesture. And that's why Tai liked her! Because that boy loves big romantic gestures! And Patts lets her down, he apologizes, he's like ‘I'm sorry I may have led you on, I want things to be okay between us. Because what happened between us was real, it mattered to me, and I still care about you even if I can't give you my heart like that anymore.’ Yeah, “we should stay friends” is kind of a cliche, but it feels earned here.

And I also like that Nara got to be disappointed and heartbroken and upset about it too. I liked that people cared about how she felt. They wanted to reintegrate her into the group. The other vets liked Nara, even if she wasn't going to be Patts’ girlfriend anymore. But they understand that in the breakup, they're Patts’s friends. And you know those people respect relationship dynamics, because they didn't just look to Patts to see if Nara was okay to be around, they look to Saengtai, to see how the new person was going to feel about that—particularly because he just ran up a fucking mountain because of her—and he says it's okay, and they were so eager to reintegrate her into the group.

And then she and Dream get to get rolling. And they let us have them at the end! She was like, ‘look, we only got five minutes left in this show, if you going to get this shit you better come correct and you better come now.’ And I loved that! Because the girlies deserved it.

Nini

She said, ‘I'm grown, give it your best shot.’

Ben

I saw some frustrations with the ending, and how a lot of the episode was Tai running around by himself, and meeting some random characters at the end, and…us not spending a lot of time with Patts, like Patts not really talking at the end? But it works for me. Tai had to deal with the silence, for the first time—that he inflicts silence on so many people, and now he's the one who has to sit in the shit that he made.

And I liked him meeting a couple that had challenges to deal with in their relationship, and being told once again, ‘you just got to do the work bro, you gotta talk to each other, you gotta listen to what your partner is saying to you.’ And I like that the final scene with Tai and Patts is Tai not hesitating.

Man! This show was so rewarding to watch because it wasn't trying to trick us.

Nini

The show was wearing its bona fides on the tin. It was very clear where it wanted to go, what it wanted to do. It wasn't playing with us. It wasn't trying to gotcha with us. It was just laying out its central idea, and continually reinforcing it throughout the story and the narrative for the entire way through.

Does that make it, like, unpredictable and exciting? No. But it made it really enjoyable to watch: to watch something lay the path, and then walk the path, was more fun than it, I expected it to be, I have to say.

1:40:47 - La Pluie: The Side Characters

Nini

And, when we're talking about laying the path and walkin’ the path—man, let's just get to it, let's talk about Tien and Lomfon.

Here are the polar opposites, okay, because in Tai and Patts, like you have an agnostic and an apostate, like they're not as far apart as somebody like Tien and Lomfon, who are a true believer and a total atheist. How do they get to the middle? All the shit that happens in the middle, especially, [laughs] how do they get through that and find their way through each other? Basically, Lomfon has to grovel, and I enjoy a good grovel, so I had a great time.

Ben

Here's the thing. My boy Tien deserves so much more than he got. My man initiated a gay pinky touch, and then Lomfon, was like, ‘hm! I don't know what's going on, but I know that I have these special signs from the universe about this stupid key chain, that I need to go kiss this boy's brother, not the one reaching out with the gay pinky touch while taking care of me while I'm sick, twice!’ I'm gonna stay mad at this man. [both laugh]

This man ruined a gay pinky touch. Tien is so patient with both of them. Like Patts is beating up Lomfon, Tai is screaming at the universe, clearly suddenly they can all hear in the rain, Tien doesn't know what's going on—but he cuts through the bullshit right away with Lomfon, it's like, ‘I liked you! Why are you being like this?’ Even when Tai didn't realize what was going on, Tien holds back his own disappointment that his brother maybe didn't necessarily see him the right way, and still says, ‘thank you for always being on my left.’

Ahh! I love that boy so much! He's so good, he deserves so much more. He was dressing like an early 2000s lesbian the whole time, serving nothing but constant looks. He was so fun to watch, especially when he was being kind of sassy with everyone.

Nini

I like Tien as a character, I like his wardrobe…don't even get me started. That outfit he wore to the wedding? Unreal. I loved it so much.

Ben

I loved it. It's so good. Oh my god.

Nini

Un. Real.

Ben

That whole family looked good, like holy shit! [laughs]

Nini

We didn't even talk about Saengnuea! And oh god, we're never going to get forgiven by one of the clowns if we never even bring up Saengnuea.

Ben

He was so awkward and goofy! I, I liked that boy too. I loved Bow, I loved the vets—what's so great about the side characters with La Pluie, is they do their role just enough to help us understand the world in which these characters exist. Like Tai is surrounded by people trying to just pour love all over that boy, and he will just not let them. Patts is surrounded by a community that loves him, that wants the best for him, that wants to make sure that he gets what he deserves too. Oh my god, just—what an excellent show.

1:44:02 - La Pluie: Sequel Potential

Nini

The thing that I think that we want to end up on is, I said before that La Pluie is basically a filmed romance novel. If you are aware of how, like, these romance novels get set up—a lot of the time, it will be multiple stories set in the same universe, where each of the characters basically gets to fall in love. We know at least that the La Pluie people seem to want to get into all of the Saeng brothers and their various romances. I don't know if they will get to, but what do you think about the obvious setup for the Saengtien sequel at the end of the show, and this idea of going into, like, a Bridgerton-esque series of romances using all of the same characters?

How do you feel about that?

Ben

Honestly…I’m a little bit nervous because I just worry that the audience won't respond to it really well. I feel like a significant portion of the audience just actively did not get La Pluie. They were really caught up in the soulmate stuff. And I just feel like a lot of the audience maybe didn't…gel with all the themes?

Nini

So as usual, Ben is the one thinking about everybody else while I very selfishly think about myself. [both laugh] And I'm just like, ‘give it to me.’ I'm ready, I'm here for it. I trust these writers, I trust this director, I think that if they get a chance to delve into this universe in more detail and focusing on different characters, I think that they can nail it? I'm ready to see what happens if they get a chance to do it.

I don't care about whether people are going to get it correctly or not, I don't. I kind of care, but at the same time I don't care. So that being said: Ben, is this a ten or a chop?

Ben

La Pluie is probably in my top five BLs of all time, and it's probably in my top ten shows of all time right now. It's a 10. It's a 10. [laughs] It’s a 10!

Nini

All right? So for Ben it’s a 10, for me it’s definitely a 10, that leaves us with La Pluie as a 10 show!

1:46:01 - Outro

Ben

And we're back.

Nini

Okay Ben, so…lotta ink spilled over these two shows. I don't think I've seen so much meta being written, probably since the Bad Buddy era. We've got a strange combo here: a show that was incredibly legible, and then a show that made you work a little bit harder, and in both instances it feels like people didn't get it? [laughs]

I don't know, what are your thoughts? What do you feel about this?

Ben

One of the big stories of this year is BL maturing as a genre and beginning to genre blend. Like in a lot of ways, La Pluie wants to straddle the line between BL and classic romance, and I think it does a pretty admirable job at it. Whereas Step by Step feels like the BL elements that it's trying to manage are holding it back from what it really wants to be. That feels like the sort of thing that inevitably happens with this type of outgrowth.

La Pluie doesn't really want to say things sort of directly or inherently about queerness, it wants to talk about romance itself. And romance as a genre. Whereas Step by Step really wants to talk about queer stuff in a real world, and that's a whole lot messier to deal with. They both did some things really really well, and the audience connected to that. And what fascinated me so much about it was that the audience felt compelled to talk to each other about it. I felt like that happened maybe more organically on its own with Step by Step? Some of us kind of forced the issue on La Pluie. I know that I was part of it, like very, very directly, and it's been fun seeing people respond to that, by just us saying very earnestly: please tell us what you're thinking. And engaging with what people are writing.

I think it's good for us and the genre to take it more seriously? It has been really fascinating for me seeing people engaging the way they are, but I legitimately feel a bit fatigued by it. And like, the last time I felt fatigue in BL, truly, was at the beginning. I know a lot of you don't watch as much content as I do, like you couldn't possibly do it, it's not healthy for you. I don't know how starved some of you have been for content that you can genuinely connect to, that can help you feel a little bit less lonely about yourself. And like I’d never gotten tired of queer cinema—I’d gotten hurt by it, but I'd never gotten, like, genuinely tired of just being in it that long.

And I feel a little tired from all of the intense writing that La Pluie and Step by Step kind of demanded of us. It's a really fascinating time for me as a fan, to feel like the shows are demanding more of us as viewers, as we watch them, than to just be pleased by them or intrigued by them so that we'll engage and buy merch and stuff. It was really fascinating having two shows this season that really feel like they wanted us to think about things along with them.

Nini

I know that you and I have talked about that feeling of fatigue, like for me, this is the most anything I've watched in years. The level of exhaustion that I felt, and then to have these two shows sort of spring up at the end of the season, and demand—you’re correct—demand my attention…not just in terms of the shows themselves, but then in the reaction to the shows. It's sort of left me a little hollowed out, almost, a little wrung out? I don't know yet if in a good way or a bad way. It's yet to be seen.

I remember saying to you at one point, I was like, I need something mindless to just sit and watch for the next couple of weeks, at least. Or, like, maybe longer, I just need something that I don't need to think about. And that's not a place that I'm accustomed to being in media? Because I am normally the let's get deep into it, let's get into the guts, put your arm in and come back with a beating heart kind of girl when it comes to the stories. And right now I'm just like, eh, I want something shallow and surface that I don't have to think too much about, please, just for a little while. And then I can re-engage my brain later. It's a very strange place for me to be in, I don't think it's a place that I've ever been in? But yeah these these two shows, they took it out of me, I gotta say.

And that's how we end the season ladies and theydies! We are a little wrung out, and we'll probably talk about that a little bit more in the Lagniappe. But yeah! We tired, y'all. [laughs]

Ben

It’s gonna be fascinating, like, getting to listen back over this, because we talked really in the season about how slow it was for me to get into the spring season, coming off of the the winter hangover from Moonlight Chicken, Utsukushii Kare, My School President and The Warp Effect. And it's weird now at the end of the spring season, where…I don't necessarily feel like a tired hangover from it? It's a hard feeling to describe because the winter shows were really good, really hit something in me…

Nini

The winter shows were emotionally intense. There was like a heavy emotional hangover coming off of the winter. I don't feel that emotional hangover now, but I feel mentally drained.

Ben

Yeah, it's a far more cerebral feeling, and like the thing for me is, I grow stronger on that feeling. [both laugh] It's gonna be, it’s gonna be hard for me if these new shows don't keep up! ‘Cause, it's what I want! I do not want to yuck anyone's yums, like, there is absolutely a place for fluff in this genre. I will never, ever vote against the silly and fun shows. I just also really love meaty shows that make me think really hard while I'm watching them. And I love when that feels intentional—like we do a lot of hard thinking on our own about these shows, but damn is it satisfying when it feels like the show itself is in that conversation with us. And I really hope that this isn't the last time we have an Adult Swim episode because we got a bunch of really thinky shows to think about.

Like, I was very harsh to Step by Step when we talked about that show, but I don't want Tee to stop thinking as hard as he does. I want him to stay in the guts of trying to unpack where queer people fit in modern Thai cinema. That's a really important thing to figure out, and queer people should be part of that conversation. And like even if I didn't think this was the best execution of his ideas, I don't want that conversation to get missed because his show didn't land consistently for everyone.

Nini

I'm tired y'all. I'm so tired.

Ben

[laughs] I’m so energized. Keep it coming.

Nini

My brain hurts! And this is the shit that I normally love, but my brain, it hurts, and my brain, she needs a break! And so, a break she shall have. [laughs]

We'll be back at you next time with the Lagniappe, but that's it for us now! We are just going to wrap it up on Adult Swim.

Our first Adult Swim episode: may there be others. We out! Say bye to the people, Ben.

Ben

Peace.

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