#Tien Bromance Extra: My Small Family

[twig-tea]

A question for you because you seem like one of those people who has watched everything: how did you get started watching bl, and what are your ultimate favorite shows?

Double-barrelled! I'm honoured.

How did I get into BL?

The short answer is that ~2016 the YouTube algorithm served me up Lovesick and I immediately went EXCUSE ME WHAT IS THIS and looked up everything else available and watched literally everything I could get my hands on (which at the time was easy because there was only a handful compared to today, but it still felt like a wealth of content to enjoy).

The longer answer is that I used to be really involved in GL (I was the secretary at the first Yuricon in North America in 2002 or 2003) and then BL manga fandom (was in a scanlation group for awhile) through ~2006? so its extra hilarious that this wasn't my route in; I apparently took a break right before they started making live action versions in Japan. But when I got into Thai BL it was fun rediscovering these tropes in a new medium and through the lens of a new-to-me culture, noticing how they differed and how the genre had matured (and how it hadn't), and on catching up on the stuff out of Japan, seeing some of the manga I read over a decade ago come to life! So I mention this history because it's definitely a part of why I stayed (and probably why the algorithm found me relatively quickly).

I only started tracking things in a spreadsheet in 2020 (and it's not nearly as comprehensive or useful as @absolutebl 's), but I did try to backfill the highlights of what I've seen and I have over 550 rows on there, fwiw. I'm a completionist so I do try to watch everything, though that's getting more and more impossible these days.

Ultimate Favourite Shows

This question is so hard. I know you didn't even give me a limit but you have to understand @lurkingshan, I can't choose favourites, I have a draft top ten list that has been blank for 3 years because I can't commit. Okok. I'm just going to list shows as they come to me (not in any particular order):

Thailand: Until We Meet Again, He's Coming to Me, Diary of Tootsies, WhyRU, Ingredients, Not Me, Secret Crush on You, I Told Sunset About You & I Promised You the Moon, Triage, You're My Sky, Make it Right, La Pluie, My Ride, Bad Buddy, My School President, Laws of Attraction, Moonlight Chicken, Dear Dr I'm Coming for Soul, To Sir With Love/Khun Chai, The Eclipse, Midnight Museum, Lovely Writer... Grey Rainbow [ducks, hides, runs away]

Japan: Doushitemo Furetakunai (no touching at all), Kinou Nani Tabeta (What did you eat yesterday?), Our Dining Table, Takara-Kun and Amagi-Kun, Old Fashioned Cupcake, 7 Days (mon-thurs & fri-sun), His (miniseries & movie), I Want to See Only You, Kieta Hatsukoi/My love mix-up, the Cherry Magic Movie, Life~Senjou no bokura/Love on the Line, 180 Degrees Longitude Passes Through Us, Given (anime is my fave version), Tokyo in April Is..., Cornered Mouse Dreams of Cheese, Utsukushii Kare/My beautiful man

Korea: Our Dating Sim, Semantic Error, The Lover [BL side], Color Rush, Blueming, Cherry Blossoms After Winter, Love Class 2, Made on the Rooftop, Discipline Z, Light on Me, To My Star (yes both seasons), Strongberry (faves are Long Time No See, Confidential Coffee Break, and A First Love Story), Sing My Crush, Just Friends?

Vietnam: Goodbye Mother, Hey! First Love, Nation's Brother, You Are Ma Boy, Follow My Sunshine, FOOLs, Tien Bromance: My Small Family, Love Bill

Philippines: Gameboys, Gaya sa Pelikula, Boys Lockdown, Cheat [warning: horror], Your Home, Better Days

Taiwan: Be Loved in House, My DNA Says Love You, We Best Love (1 & 2), HIStory (Crossing the Line is my fave, and second fave is...Make Our Days Count [ducks, hides, burrows into ground]).

Other: Summerdaze (short from Singapore), Stay Still (Hong Kong), HeHe and He (Hong Kong, final season in progress but s1&2 are so funny) and the bromances/difficult to categorize: Scumbag System, Word of Honor, The Untamed, Guardian, Coffee Prince, Bromance (Taiwanese), Great Men Academy, Mr Queen, Sleuth of Ming Dynasty, SCI Mystery

*deep breath* ok I'm stopping lol narrowing it down any less than this gives me pain so I won't try. Also I'm sure I forgot something obvious (and Tumblr was eating drafts of this at various points). All I can say about this list is it's under 100 and that's the best I could do.

Thanks for the ask, and to anyone who made it this far thanks for reading!

[squeakygeeky]

Vietnamese BL Industry

This is my attempt to make a little bit of sense of the production side of Vietnamese BL. As a tiny bit of background, BL is very popular in Vietnam, especially Thai BL, but it’s hard to get the budget to produce it. At the same time, it attracts international attention, which isn’t common for Vietnamese media. A lot of actors have actually appeared in multiple BLs but Thai-style imaginary couple co-branding doesn’t seem to be much of a thing. Maybe a little playing with that in promo for a specific series, but that’s it. MDL doesn’t include Vietnamese shows so that made this...fun.

@absolutebl​ and @heretherebedork​ already have guides to VBL here and here that describe some of the series mentioned, so check out their blogs, and also feel free to ask my for anything from recommendations to speculation.

A note on names: Vietnamese names go family name - middle name - given name, but a lot of time western name order is used in credits. But also family names aren’t used that much and sometimes are left out even of credits. What is used varies from show to show. So I’m about to be wildly inconsistent and just use whatever I happened to see in whatever credits I was looking at when I made notes, and I was too lazy to include diacritical markers, which often get left out in the credits anyway.

Ho Si Hau/O2 Production

Ho Si Hau has been making BL since at least 2017. In around 2020 he discovered actor Ba Vinh and proceeded to cast him in pretty much everything he’s made since and shows no signs of stopping. O2 is his own production company, but he also directed You Are Ma Boy for D GROUP Media. He has a few actors he works with repeatedly (and I think is their agent). It’s been a rough road (including him being repeatedly accused of fraud and oversharing a bit in his emails) but he’s managed to harness the power of international crowdfunding. He is absolutely a BL director and just desperately wants to continue making more and more BL. I can’t remember him ever including trans or lesbian characters. His works are generally pretty domestic, although he does have one high school series and one in the planning stages. He seems to be trying to explore some interesting themes, like including a temporarily disabled character in Want to See You, touching on the lack of gay marriage with Mr. Cinderella, and some stuff regarding filial piety and child abuse in Nation’s Brother, but a lot of this has been getting lost in execution. Loves a faen fatal way, way, way too much. Based both on behind the scene footage he does seem to workshop his actors for intimacy and the results speak for themselves. 

Want to See You Mr. Cinderella You Are Ma Boy The Most Peaceful Place is Your Place Nation's Brother The Ring Goes Missing Ngày Em Đến Active Boys

Oril Nguyen

Oril Nguyen works mostly with MCV, which produces a lot of things other than BL, but also directed Tien Bromance Extra: My Small Family (we’ll be getting to Tien Bromance in a second). He’s been directing BL since at least 2017. He’s somehow even more domestic than Ho Si Hau and has directed two series where the leads have an adopted child, My Monster in Law 2 and Tien Bromance Extra: My Small Family. My Monster in Law is also notable for including a couple that got legally married in New York prior to the events of the series. He includes trans side characters but no lesbians come to mind. His works are generally light and funny, although I’d say there’s a bit more to Follow My Sunshine and The Promise. Very good at directing intimacy and must also workshop his actors.

The Promise Beef, Cupcakes and Him Hey Rival, I Love You! My Monster in Law Hey! First Love Tien Bromance Extra: My Small Family Follow My Sunshine

Nguyen Huu Tien 

He’s not BL director, but he did direct queer movie Bridge of Destiny, which he did not appear in. He has his own production company, Duoc Si Tien. Yes, this is the Tien Bromance guy. He’s one of the leads in Tien Bromance and Sea Him. I think he at least partially self-funded those. He really loves film and playing with genre and also seems to like attention and appears on reality shows, so I feel like that explains a lot. Expect anything from him to be absolutely wild. Just bonkers. Appears to have a horror movie called Hanh Phuc Mau coming out soon. He’s acted twice in series with Huu Tai, but that’s less co-branding and more that he really likes to work with Huu Tai, who he also cast in Bridge of Destiny.

Thu Ha/Team RL 

Director of the excellent Stupid Boys, Stupid Love and then the connected You Are My Sunshine and You Are My Stupid Boy. Stupid Boys, Stupid Love included a GL couple with a butch character. The first of those seemed to have the highest production value and was the best one. The Star Always Follow You is coming out soon from Team RL, presumably with the same director and definitely using familiar actors, including the BL couple from SBSL/YAMSB being paired again. The two most recent series suffered from low production quality. Low heat, but good chemistry and the low heat works for the cute high school settings.

Huy Hung/CifTV  

CifTV’s production is fairly low budget and they do a lot of chat based shows instead of live action. Their live action series are also low budget and range from ok to truly terrible. Huy Hung directed My Little Sister, an actual GL, for them and was previously an editor for CifTV’s Neighbor Guy, Roommate, and My Brother. My Little Sister is high school and stepsister’s trope but not as bad as I was expecting based on those two facts and my other experiences with CifTV. Huy Hung also directed the unfinished GL School’s Out Let’s Date Now for TBR, but is most notable for directing My Lascivious Boss for Pap, which had a relatively decent budget and script and which I really like. Great range of gender and sexuality representation overall. Not good at directing intimacy, expect dead fish kisses, if any. Works with Nam Mario from MLB a lot.

Danny/AB Studio 

Danny writes and directs, wrote Fools, didn’t direct it. Directed Stage of Love, Vietnam’s only uni BL (unless I got my vocab wrong and it was set in high school). AB released one episode of The Letters, but nothing else BL since then and were last co-producing a het highschool series. Would love to see them back on the BL side.

609 tv

I don’t really know what to put here. They don’t produce BL technically? They mostly make commercials and movies that basically function as public service announcements about stuff like HIV and PrEP (I assume this gets them funding), aimed at a gay male audience. One of these, Hy, was screened at the US Consulate. Si was depressing, don’t watch it. Threesome Game was fun. Handsome Doctor, a medical cross-dressing comedy promoting feminism and mental health treatment, featured a bunch of familiar BLish tropes for some reason despite not being a romance and having a straight (but gnc) female lead, and made no sense whatsoever as a thing that existed, but I adored it and wish had gotten past two episodes. 

Holy Thang/YoungLife TiVi

Used to work with 609, has his own production company now. Directed Football Guys, A Love Song for My Beloved, and Memory. I’ve only seen A Love Song for My Beloved and it was bad. The only VBL director I am actively avoiding.

[save-the-data]

TIEN BROMANCE EXTRA: MY SMALL FAMILY | s02e01

Full Episode List

What am I to you? My life partner, always. 

They are back! Tien and Tai have the most natural chemistry of any co-stars. These two now have starred as lovers in three different shows in the Tien-Tai universe, and it just shows how comfortable they are together each and every time. Also I love them as characters. 

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TIEN BROMACE: MY SMALL FAMILY | s02e08 

Full Episode List

Love this family unit. All three of them survived trauma to be together, deserving of love since they were denied that growing up with Tien losing his parents, Tai having to hide his sexuality and Do unfortunately seeing his dad murdered.  But that in turn taught them that life was precious and to not waste a moment, just grasp happiness and love whomever you want. 

Furthermore, Do is such a sweet child and the way Daddy Tai is so proud of his son is adorable to watch. 

This season has been an improvement on last, however each episode has a throw back to a previous episode and explored by expanding on either a character trait like Tai ‘wickedness’ or a situation, for instance the homophobic teacher in today’s episode. 

[squeakygeeky]

Okay, so imagine you have two characters you ship so you decide you want to write a bunch of angsty darkfic to torture them. It happens. But you like exploring different genres, so you start with horror and each fic puts the characters into a different horror/thriller/suspense subgenre, but you have a running storyline throughout. Your tags get used in a meme because they’re like, ‘vengeful ghost, axe murder, torture with snakes, gangsters, amnesia, bowl cut (threatened), mutual pining, adoption, happy ending.’ You’re having a great time, but then one day you suddenly look up from your keyboard and exclaim, “My god! What have I done?” 

Then as an apology to your own characters you write a bunch of absolute fluff where they get to just enjoy being two gay dads to their adopted son. You draw in some new readers and they’re confused when one of the dads comes home with a stab wound and the other dad just sews it up like this is normal. The old fans are like, oh yeah he’s a mob boss, don’t worry about it. The tags on this fic include, ‘parenting, drag, light stabbing, homophobic teacher, kidnapping, family dinner, bodyswap.’ 

Then imagine this, but as an actual Vietnamese webseries. This has been my 100% complete and accurate review of Tien Bromance and Tien Bromance Extra: My Small Family.

[squeakygeeky]

Husband/wife language in Vietnamese BL

Chào các bạn! Today I’ll be looking at times in BL when a character in a gay relationship is referred to as the wife. To be honest, I thought this one would crop up more given that it gets used by IRL same sex couples in Vietnam (but don’t ask me how commonly nowadays, this is what I need someone else to chime in on) and that it gets used in Thai BL (and Vietnamese BL copies Thai BL, sometimes literally). Also, the one source in English I found on Vietnamese-language LGBT+ literature does talk about its use in some stories with gay couples, but that’s barely relevant. BL is BL. And in BL it only shows up in My Monster-in-Law as far as I can tell. 

chồng = husband

vợ = wife

In that show, Cường is the husband and Jackie is the wife. They use these words constantly with each other and everyone else around them uses that too, and it’s never questioned in any way whatsoever. This is despite the fact that Jackie is supposed to be Vietnamese-American (but it’s not like the show tries to use that seriously for characterization, it mostly comes up in him mispronouncing words like actually using ‘weasel’ instead of ‘husband’). They are a legally married couple which is very unusual for BL, but this is a super dumb sitcom. Basically the whole premise is that Cường came home with a male wife (linguistically totally possible) with no warning and Jackie gets treated by the mom the way a daughter-in-law would, leading to various shenanigans. 

There is a really interesting contrast with Tien Bromance EXTRA: My Small Family, which also has a long term couple raising an adopted child. It also even shares Oril Nguyen as a director. But in this one I only caught the word ‘chồng‘ and that’s only used once from Tài to Tiến. Tiến does get the more masculine pronoun ‘anh,’ but even though ‘em’ is used for Tài, and he does all the cooking, there’s no use of ‘vợ.’ Later when they come out about their relationship to Tiến’s aunt, Tiến says Tài is his ‘bạn đời,’ which is life partner and gender neutral. 

As a side note since both series have kids, the daughter in MMiL calls her dads ‘Jackdy’ (instead of Daddy Jackie) and ‘ba Cường’ and the son in TBE:MSF uses ‘ba Tiến’ and ‘ba Tài.’ ‘Ba’ of course is dad, so even if there’s linguistically a wife, there’s no mom. Except that one time in TBE:MSF when this happened: 

That’s Tiến in the dress, not Tài, mildy traumatizing their poor child, who earlier was sad about not having a mom. 

The only other time I caught husband/wife language was not in an actual BL but in a reaction video where the actors from My Lascivious Boss were joking around about who was the husband and who was the wife in relation to some characters, so that’s why I know it does get used in a casual joking way as well, just not so far in an actual BL.

Do I think the lack of ‘vợ’ in TBE:MSF is deliberate? Yes. Am I sure what it means? No. I just felt like this was something worth pointing out to you all, and I guess if you want further speculation send me an ask. Do I think we’ll see a man getting called ‘vợ’ in a future BL? My guess is no, given that it’s only shown up in one series, which started in 2017, which in BL years is a forever ago, and given that it’s a post Bad Buddy world. But who knows? VBL is still chaos. 

Anway, ‘chồng’ and ‘vợ’ function as pronouns, I hope you’re not surprised at this point. 

Note: I don’t recommend My Monster in Law. I do somewhat recommend Tien Bromance EXTRA but you really need to have the full Tien Bromance experience, and that is not for the faint of heart.