#not to say that fetishization of queer people in bl isn't still a problem - but that is not the case for only friends

[gaykey]

love how much only friends is pissing of these like? bl/queer media purists.

saying it's fetishization when literally every aspect of the show is created by queer people, for queer people (queer people of colour might i add) - which is no where near as common as it should be in the industry.

and when it is, it's touted as too sexual?

still so much media showing non cis-het relationships is only acceptable when it's completely de-sexualised or het-washed.

very telling.

[forcebookish]

if arkarm were really both supposed to be gay for you then why was arm made admin of a Hot Boy facebook page in the first place? shouldn't he just be gay from the start? sus writing choice tbh

[wen-kexing-apologist]

Moonlight Chicken is For the Queers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We see it in the end of and era:

We see it in the olive branches:

And in new beginnings:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[heretherebedork]

What can u say about the issue that BL doesn't really represent the LGBTQ community but rather it fetishize them and not highlight the ongoing struggles of the community? I mean, the OG audience of BL is the straight women, not the Queer community they said.

Also about the lack of representation of the community within the industry and stereotypes the fem gays and masculine women as 'sideliners'. According to them, what BL is showing is literally impossible and majority (not generalizing) of gay men are rather feminine, hence lacking the true representation of them and also stereotyping them. I've read that they also stopped watching BL because it's unrealistic, stereotyping and "pokes fun at the struggles of the community; romanticizing and fetishizing them"

Apologies for long question but i feel you'd be great at answering this. :))) Just wanna hear thoughts from others.

Especially now that "War of Y"?? Don't know if that's the title of that new series, doesn't really address the dark side or problems within BL industry

Alright, that's a heavy question to start the day with but I get it.

So, it's true. The main audience, original audience, for BL is not the queer community and it doesn't show the struggles and it's definitely a version of idealized and goddamnit that's why I like it.

@absolutebl wrote a gorgeous answer about this and why BL isn't the same as queer media and it was much, much better than anything i'm going to say here but I'm gonna do my best to talk about this from my personal perspective.

I also think a lot of the criticism is something that is changing in the industry as well. We're seeing more and more queer people in the production of these shows and in the actors. They're not perfect, they're never going to be perfect but they're getting better and they're improving and there's a huge difference between countries and between different companies and just... this is a big industry and where one company might be awful another might be coming out and improving at the same time.

But part of it is that BL is not aimed at specifically at the queer community and it's not about the struggles of the queer community. It's first and foremost about romance and the story of two boys/men in love and often in a fairly idealized world in terms of acceptance and that's why I like it.

As a queer person... I don't enjoy watching shows about the struggles about queer people in the real world because I just... don't want to watch that, honestly. That's not my taste. I like idealized worlds, I like happy endings, I like characters whose struggle of being gay is more about 'but that guy is an asshole!' than 'but society is going to reject me for who i love and I will lose my family and everyone I love if I come out'.

BL is a growing and changing industry and there is plenty to criticize, nothing is perfect, nothing can be perfect, and yes, it's still aimed at women and yes there are definitely harmful stereotypes that are present, especially in BL before 2021 (and, yes, still present). But the industry is starting to push back on those. Look at SCOY. Look at a lot of the newer GMMTV and compare them to what they used to be.

I can't say they're typically poking fun at the issues but they do sweep them under the rug because that's just not what the shows are about and, again, I like that about the shows. I'm not here for realistic depictions of queer pain, I am here to celebrate the idea of love and ideal love and the romance of two men just being in love in a place where the worst judgement they get is 'but he's a weirdo!' or 'but you could do better!' and where their fathers can be taught not to be homophobic by telling his surrogates exist and where parents are supportive and where there is joy in queer love and that joy doesn't come from overcoming overwhelming odds but because there are no overwhelming odds, that queer love is just love and that they love each other and just...

Look, War of Y just started and it's definitely touching on a lot of the darker elements already. I mean, the first episode included an actor obviously uncomfortable with close fan attention and then getting creeped on by a businessman and trying to rip his own skin off in the bathroom because he can't stand that his body is literally a commodity for the people around him while also falling in love with someone who's using that for the sake of business. You wanna talk about BL that's more likely to address these things? Welcome to War of Y.

Also, yes, BL continues to have a huge problem with their representation and villainization of women and, frankly, feminine gay men if they're too feminine (y'all remember Green? oof) but the world is growing and the industry is changing and we're right there on the front lines.

BL will never be what everyone wants. And that's okay. Not everyone has to like it and criticism is good for industries and good to think about (oh hey, certain parts of this fandom!) and that's fine.

Critically thinking about what you watch is good and understanding why you like what you like is also good and knowing that it's imperfect is important.

BL is not perfect. BL is not everything for everyone. But I love BL for exactly what it is. Imperfect. Growing. Changing. Loving. Romantic. Iffy. Trope-filled.