#just a quick gifset but i rec everyone watches this entire episode it was so CUTE

[taeminie]

Brightwin on GoyNattyDream

[three--rings]

Okay fine, guess I’m gonna talk about Kinnporsche now.

This isn’t a review or a rec post so much as, My Thoughts on KinnPorsche, let me show you them.  (Anyone?  Appropriate extremely dated reference is appropriate.)

So despite my love of many danmei and danmei-sourced media, I don’t do a lot of BL series.  I dipped my toe in the yaoi and BL manga pool a while (like a decade?) ago and just never got grabbed by it. 

And BL series have several points that generally count against them for me: one is the amount of them that feature very young characters/actors and focus on school stories.  Look, I’m in my 40s.  That starts to feel creepy real quick, as well as just being boring to me.  I don’t like a lot of modern drama PERIOD because it bores me, I much prefer historical/fantasy/etc.

Secondly, the style of humor that tends to be used in BL involves a lot of second hand embarrassment and that shit is LETHAL to me.  Like I physically cannot watch it.  So while I’ve been curious about various BL series, especially Taiwanese and Thai series, I’ve rarely actually decided to watch them.  (Really the exception was Cherry Magic, which was fine but didn’t do a huge amount for me because it was so sickly sweet and also so embarrassing.)

Okay, but Kinnporsche had a huge amount of hype around it and I was like, what’s up with this and how is it different?  And first of all, the fact the two mains are Entire Adults was a big draw.  (The actors are 27 and 30, thank god for adults.)  So I watched ep 1 (motivated mostly by a gifset of the fight scene cause yes, I’m that messy thank you).  And I liked it a lot.  Like, it felt a little like a guilty pleasure, a fantasy mafia fanfic world where all the men are allergic to shirt buttons but very compelling in its way.

I guess, if you don’t know, I’ll briefly talk about the plot.  Kinn is the heir to a mafia family and his life is saved by Porsche, a bartender, who is recruited to be his new bodyguard thanks to him paying off a large family debt.  Porsche is an entire disaster of a person, addicted to getting drunk and screwing women in alleys and fucking things up a lot, but has a heart of gold.  Kinn is extremely gay and really pissed about how attracted he is to this dumbass. 

So anyway, then the second episode dropped and I HATED EVERY SECOND OF IT and nearly quit the show entirely and also nearly posted a long rant about it.  The second episode is pretty much entirely Porsche being embarrassed and embarrassing as he’s introduced to the EXTREMELY unrealistic world of Being a Bodyguard for Kinn’s Family.  (I would just like to say that if I were going to adapt this story, I’d set it in a near-future sci-fi world because that would explain the amount that it resembles anything the least bit believable or realistic.) 

But so I spent like a week wondering why everyone seemed to love this show so much and didn’t seem to have the same problems with it I did.  Like, for real, I was in the tags like...Explain To Me, and I guess that’s why I watched ep 3.  And..it wasn’t as bad.  Part of what I didn’t like in ep 2 was the character of Kinn’s older brother Tankhun and getting into that would be a long conversation, but he’s...an extremely quirky, very effeminate apparently queer person who is “crazy” and....yeah.  But he improved once I saw he wasn’t just a joke or meant to be an antagonist.  (Cause he felt kinda like the “evil Wrong Kind of gay” to contrast with Kinn’s “right” kind of gay, but that’s not where it went really, so okay, fine.)

And to be clear, the show continued to have Moments.  Like the chemistry of the leads is Insane and the nature of the relationship is totally My Kind of Thing. 

Then episode four...well upped the stakes.  By getting quite a bit more problematic, but also...in a way that...had my attention.  (More on this a little later, I’m avoiding spoilers now.)

And episode five showed more skill in the way the story was told and ALSO telegraphed their intention to handle the problematic elements seriously, which made me tentatively back on the show’s side.  (Okay, I was really enjoying it by this point, ngl.)

And then they dropped episode six on us.  Episode six.  In which, our two heroes are handcuffed together and lost in the jungle For Plot Reasons and have to Work Together to Survive and also Work Our Their Shit.  And omg omg omg.  It was literally the best thing. Like, tropey, sure, the whole show is, but omg it was done so well and so skillfully and beautifully acted.  The whole episode is just...adorable and touching and moving and you get to watch these two really fall in love For Real and also I fell in love with them at the same time. 

And episode seven continued to give me confidence in this show’s ability to both surprise and handle complicated material a mature and thoughtful way.  There are so many episodes left, and wtf is this show going to do to us? 

I will say this show is very much not for everyone.  It’s pretty violent and not really ashamed of its violence.  It’s a mafia story and gets fairly dark in that regard, not always condemning the violence either.  It’s not gory or like Gross about it.  But still.  Must enjoy morally grey characters.  (Probably ESPECIALLY since the main series villain is also one of the secondary romantic couple?  Which I’m personally not looking forward to because I’d like him to burn in a fire, but we’ll see.)

It’s NOT a show for anyone who, say, finds the work of MXTX too morally impure.  Like, do we have some consent issues?  Yup, we sure do.  But big trigger warning for sexual assault and impaired consent and the aftermath of those things.  Which I think is actually handled pretty damn well ultimately, but YMMV so be warned. 

Discussion of sexual assault below the cut, also spoilers.

So to get at my feelings about ep 4, etc.  In ep 4, for anyone who hasn’t seen the show, Porsche is drugged by the villain character who attempts to rape him.  Kinn finds him in time and insists on being alone with him, and no one else taking care of him.  Porsche throws up on both of them, which leads to them getting mostly undressed, and is very intoxicated by the drug and comes onto Kinn STRONG.  Kinn tries to resist but eventually gives in and they have sex.  The morning after, he is pretty closed off about the whole thing.  Porsche reacts like...someone who has been sexually assaulted, mostly.  They don’t directly address it with each other until ep 6, when they explicitly do and it’s really well done, IMO.

This pairing is obviously messy and what happens in ep 4 was clearly crossing a line, but the narrative TREATS it as such.  Porsche struggles with the aftermath, both being seemingly rejected by Kinn but also pretty clearly in the smoking the bathroom scene, with the fact of having been assaulted by Kinn.  But so does Kinn, who very obviously KNOWS he did wrong and fucked up and is having a hard time dealing with it and honestly this all felt real to me.  A lot of it is in the performances which, these two DON’T stop impressing me.

Ep 7 has a little bit of the same messiness.  I don’t think Porsche is actually (that) drunk at the end, I think he was faking it.  But there’s a little bit of toxicity in the beginning of the scene with him and Kinn, from both sides.  (Understandably from Porsche’s part.)  And working it out through sex isn’t top of the Relationship Therapy Guidebook.

But also, it feels Real to me.  Like, real relationships, especially sexually intense ones, can be very messy at the beginning in just this way.  And I’m honestly happy to see this kind of messiness portrayed because there’s so much out there that is sanitized into perfection, in which fictional characters aren’t allowed to do anything imperfect at all. 

On the other hand I’m way less enthused about the prospect of Vegas getting a redemption/romance arc.  And not very happy with the other romance with Chay and Kim, though I don’t know if that’s going to be a thing or what, but...err, it makes me squirm both for embarrassment reasons and for Kim being ethically dubious AF.

Like I’m enjoying Kinn and Porsche so much because they can take each other’s shit, yanno?  Porsche, for all his sad puppy eyes, and Kinn for all his fragility, they can both take and dish it.  I feel like they are on the same level in a great way.  The other pairs?  Not convinced, gulp.