#oh my assistant

[heretherebedork]

Bisexual realization S-tier!

@absolutebl followed by him instantly dreaming of his brand new crush rejecting him for being bi. I feel like this is the most accurate depiction.

[forkaround]

someone asked me recently "what is the appeal of BL?" what do you think?

@heretherebedork @respectthepetty @yeetlegay @shortpplfedup @lutawolf @luckydragon10 @apomiles @moerusai @pharawee @poetry-protest-pornography @disaster-j @laughsalot3412 @queersouthasian @everyforkedroad @iffervescent @dancinbutterfly @godotismissingx @highpriestessofjogan @jupiterjames @colourme-feral (I don't know most of you but I've been following your blogs and I'd like to know what you think)

[asiandramas-takeover]

As I rewatched the ending of Unintentional Love Story, it hit me real hard that I was part of history. I’ve been part of the growth of KBL’s. From “bromances”, to unhappy endings, to full fledge korean queer shows & my god did the realization feel amazing. I’m so happy for this representation & I can’t wait to see more.

I’m tagging 30 KBL’s because Tumblr doesn’t let me do more & the fact that there are more I can tag makes me emotional.

Ps. If you have yet to see “Long Time No See” I highly recommend it. It’s the first korean bl & it was released in 2017.

[queersouthasian]

What do you mean making a show your whole personality isn't a normal thing to do?

[gillianthecat]

Office Romance QL

Of the shows listed in my post on Workplaces in QL shows, these are the dozen I would consider to be "office romance," in that the romance centers around or starts because of the office setting. (Again, there are many shows I haven't seen yet, so this isn't a complete list.)

Marketing/Advertising Office

🇹🇭 GAP

🇹🇭 Step By Step

🇰🇷 The New Employee

🇰🇷 Roommates of Poongduck 304

Graphic Design Office

🇹🇭 Bed Friend (or is it marketing?)

🇹🇭 Middleman's Love

🇯🇵 Senpai, This Can't Be Love!

Game Design Office

🇹🇭 A Boss and a Babe

🇰🇷 Our Dating Sim

Other/Business Empire/Generic Office setting (or I never figured out what they did)

🇯🇵 Old Fashion Cupcake (i never figured it out)

🇯🇵 Cherry Magic (stationary company, iirc)

Journalism

🇯🇵 Candy Color Paradox

Publishing Industry/Writers Manga Artists/Illustrators

🇰🇷 Oh! My Assistant (an office of two, but I think it still applies)

(even though The Novelist/The Pornographer (🇯🇵) is theoretically the same set-up, I don't feel like it fits the category)

update 1/4/24

Real Estate Company

🇯🇵 Ossan's Love

[absolutebl]

10 BLs from 2022 that I’m Most Likely to Rewatch

(and some I already have) 

Old Fashion Cupcake

Minato's Laundromat 

Takara & Amagi

First Love Again 

Cherry Magic the movie (I think I missed stuff) 

Oh! Boarding House 

About Youth 

DNA Says Love You

Cherry Blossoms After Winter 

Semantic Error (movie, again) 

2022 & earlier BLs I’ll be rewatching for nefarious purposes 

Roommates of Poongduck 304 

Happy Ending Romance 

Love Class 

Oh My Assistant

To My Star 2: Our Untold Stories 

Oh My Sunshine Night (to put together a RainPayu cut)

KinnPorsche (to put together a VegasPete cut)

My Esports Genius Brother

Restart After Come Back Home 

TharnType 

Nobleman Ryu's Wedding (if I can find the darn thing) 

Love Sick 2 (if the new hardsubs get completed)

[foralleternityidiot]

I LOVE instantly loving a new series. It’s the closest thing to love at first sight I will ever experience.

[respectthepetty]

A gay red, a straight blue, and a bi purple walk into a bar...

[maxescheibechlinichacheli]

Seon Ho's reasoning was like that Road to El Dorado gif:

He likes both, both are good and in conclusion, he's bi and in love with Mu Yeong:

[heretherebedork]

You know what? I love it here. I love that this episode started with a talk about not caring if men are gay and turns into a BDSM lesson in a coffee shop that looks straight and then ends in a gay bar with a straight man kissing a gay man while a bi man stares and now everyone who's actually interested in each other thinks the other person is taken and not interested.

[forkaround]

Making a compilation of all the times Marriage Legalization has been talked about in BL. I have Big Dragon, Cutie Pie, LITA, Vice Versa, Love Mechanics (they get engaged at the end), Does ChadokDika count? Tell me if I’m missing any.

[jadestone5233]

Watching Happy Ending Romance, with all its seriousness and deep thoughts and speculating, then watching Oh! My Assistant right after is quite frankly hilarious. Because they’re very much TWO different genre types…but also Oh!My assistant is surprising me? Like that bar is definitely a gay bar…and labels are being used which isn’t always brought up in KBL. Either way happy with what Korea is offering at the end of the year

[that-bl-bitch]

I was not expecting Oh My Assistant to be sooo funny, it was over the top and dramatic similar to how Japanese BLs usually are, not exactly of course but similar and I really liked it. It gave me teeny tiny tiny Sensei this can’t be love and kabekoji vibes, tiny, it also reminds be something else that can’t quite place and honestly it was really refreshing feeling watching it, for me anyways. It felt nice to laugh out loud to KBL, and cute too

[gillianthecat]

re: The Novelist

c.c. @petrichoraline @sadday4sure @thewayofsubtext @waitmyturtles

I liked it. I liked it quite a lot. I'm still processing (/starting Mood Indigo), so I'm not sure if I have much I can articulate about it yet.

All I knew about it going in was the basic premise (pornography writer and his assistant) and that it was from the other side of Japan's BL traditions, meaning that it was "dark," contained dubcon, and was high heat. So I wasn't sure if it even was a romance or would have any sort of happy ending and thus I kept my heart to myself for the first few episodes, not trusting the show with it. I watched with a more analytical mindset at the beginning, which morphed into a love for the characters as they showed their own hearts.

Perhaps if I'd gone in unaware I would have found it dark and disturbing, but as it was a found it more aching and melancholy than anything else. The dubcon was no worse than other shows I've seen, and fit the story and the themes better than many (I won't get into those comparisons here). There was angst and loneliness and lashing out, but the power never felt overly weighted toward Kijima's side, despite Kuzami's youth and relative innocence, and the tangle of debts and their work relationship.

The actors were all excellent. I was relieved to see that my newfound love Izuka Kenta (who I'd seen for all of 5 minutes of screen time in Candy Color Parodox) is in fact very good actor, and brought nuance and strength and complex desires to the part of Kuzami.

I can't help but comparing shows to other shows these days, so here is what I was thinking while watching this one. The Novelist came out favorably, if it was a comparison of quality.

There is of course the use of dubcon, for which my only other real reference point are Thai BL, and that analysis is a multi-tentacled beast that is would get me off track for the rest of this post, so I won't start on it. I will say that one thing I noticed was that the pornographic fantasies were generally (all?) dubcon ones, and that both affected my interpretation of the characters' feelings about the real dubcon scene (because they both were into dubcon in fantasy), and habituated me to seeing dubcon in the show by the time the fifth episode came around. The other thing I guess I will say is that it feels different to me, easier to tolerate and move past, to see one character violate another out of sadness and fear and the desire to push someone away and hold them close at the same time. In real life absolutely no, the reason for ignoring consent matters not, but seeing it in a story I can work with that.

And then there are the pornographic fantasies, which were used so interestingly here. They were our (and seemingly Kuzami's) introduction to desire and sex. They usually featured other actors portraying the porn characters, which at first bothered me - I wanted more time with Kijima and Kuzami as they wrote together - but then came to make sense, for reasons I can't articulate now. The show's seduction of us followed Kijima's only half intentional seduction of Kuzami. It lured us in with his voice dryly describing lurid sex acts, sounding humorous at first, but soon grew more genuinely erotic as the music and the cinematography and Kijima's voice changed. And there was something about the way the porn fantasies provided both distance from the characters and simultaneously made them seem even more vulnerable, their minds laid even more bare than their bodies, that created this uncomfortable, seductive eroticism of the show. Kijima was arousing Kuzami while still pretending Kuzami's arousal was meaningless to him.

Which was part of why I didn't know what to expect from the show at first. Was this going to be an overcast and complicated story of self-discovery, about how Kuzami was changed by one summer with this seductive twisted older man? It wasn't until Kido showed up and Kijima fell slightly to pieces, that I understood that it would be both their stories, and that I could hope for romance rather than just sexual awaking, even though I wasn't yet sure of a happy ending.

The fantasies too changed over the course of the series, going from the ones about men and women that Kijima wrote, to Kuzami's fantasies of the two of them, and then disappeared altogether, as they stopped wanting a fantasy and started their convoluted paths to wanting and seeing each other's real selves, not the fantasy version.

(The comparison about fantasies in my mind, which I probably only thought of due to a coincidence of timing, was to the innocent romantic fantasies of My School President. Which despite the very different content, share a similar role of showing the character's desires to the audience, and of pointing to the contrast between unrealistic fantasy and the reality of loving and being loved by another actual human being with their own subjectivity in the world.) (This honest dive into arousal while creating erotic art in collaboration with someone desired was what I was vaguely hoping for, though did not expect, from Oh! My Assistant. So I was glad to have it done so well here.)

Closely connected to the fantasies was how much the show was about writing. Both literally, a good portion of screen time was spent watching Kuzami writing Kanji and listening to to Kijima recite the words of the novel, and in that Kijima's story was about his journey as a writer. I felt the pain of his not being able to write, I felt the isolation of "writer" being his only identity, his only sense of self. This was what I wanted from Happy Ending Romance, which frustratingly did not feel like it was really about writers. This very much did. I could dig deeper into why it felt that way, but this post is already much longer than I meant for it to be.

The focus of the story was so tightly held on Kuzami and Kijima in their time together that fevered summer. We learned very little about them beyond their moments together. And I think that works. It builds the heightened intensity of their connection with each other, like they're living in a world apart from the rest. Kijima seems to have been living in this isolation for most of his life, while Kuzami apparently has friends and classes and a life outside this bubble, but it is Kijima whose backstory we end up learning more about. In a less nuanced show Kuzami would be almost a blank slate, ready to be molded* by Kijima's desires, but Izuka Kenta and the subtleties of the script imbue him with a quiet strength. At the beginning he doesn't yet know what he wants, but when he figures it out he has a solidity of purpose that won't let him be pushed around.

*yes it's a mixed metaphor but I didn't like any of the matching sets I could think of

And he sees Kijima, because he so desperately want to. Once he figures out that it's Kijima he wants, he works so hard to get under his mask and see him. Despite Kijima doing his damnedest not to be seen. Takezai Terunosuke is excellent in the role, playing both the Mona Lisa mask and the broken man beneath, and showing the cracks to get there. When he broke down in tears, back to Kuzami... I cried. This show, which I thought was going to be about how Kuzami was changed by their time together, ended up being about how Kijima was changed by him.

I feel like I'm talking circles around the center of them, but there is so much that could be said, so many ways to examine their relationship.

Oh! and the cinematography/editing/sound/etc! So good. I kept thinking about everyone's brilliant responses to my questions on this post, and really noticed the use of wide long shots and letting the actors come in and out of frame. It served the story well.

This was my first "dark" JBL, and I want to watch more now, to better put this show in context.

Fuck, y'all. This was supposed to be a single paragraph simply stating that I liked the show. And maybe naming a few topics I found interesting. Instead it swelled into this, and still feels very incomplete. But I will leave the rest for another day. Especially as I expect I will have an even more thoughts on the characters after watching the rest of the series.

[alcairsei]

like the way seonho goes from "do i like men??" to "do i like muyeong?" to "how do i seduce muyeong?" in the span of like five minutes

[allthefujoshiunite]

Hello... can I ask a link to your review on anime, "Buddy Daddies"? Sorry I can not find them, or are you writing them in your twitter? I just finished the anime, and now I can say it's one of my top favorite anime ever....! Can I ask for your BL recs that have the same vibe as Kazuki/Rei, please?

Also from Sk8 between Reki/Langa and Joe/Cherry and Adam/ Tadashi, who are your favorite ship? And why? Whichever your answer is, can I also ask BL recs that have the same vibe as them?

Sorry if I ask too much, please feel free if you want to answer them or not....Thanks for sharing your recs and reviews, you are my best guide on BL manga/manhwa...... I knew you first time from your A to Z BL challenge and then I found your blog. I hope you know that founding your blog and tumblr means so much to me.... Please just answer (if you want) any time you want whenever you're free....🙏

Hi again! I answer these asks whenever I have time & energy, so no need to apologize. ^^ Time to recommend some BLs and answer your questions!

As to why you couldn't find Buddy Daddies (BD from now on) review on my blog; because I haven't reviewed it. Neither on my blog nor my Twitter. When I was about to finish the seasonal first impressions (I had two reviews left, BD and High Card), the major earthquake happened and I took a break. After that, the political climate and the economy have been so bad that I didn't have the energy to spare for my blog. I still write reviews (mostly of books, on my Instagram, but in Turkish) and occasionally talk about stuff on Twitter but that's it. One other minor reason that made me feel reluctant to write on BD was because my thoughts on the series is quite negative. I didn't finish it, and not sure if I ever will. But I did like Kazuki and Rei together, the mighty "sunshine x emo" trope, and happy to hear that you've found something you felt so passionate about!

I'll recommend 3 titles that have a similar pairing. I'll also add my reviews from my blog, you can head there to find additional information such as the publication status, where to read, screenshots etc.

It's Just a Dream... Right? by White Eared: If you like supernatural elements, are okay with reading ongoing, mature content, then I highly recommend this one. I've reviewed it before, you can check it out here.

The Neighbor I Desire by Makoto: If you like the "I just can't leave you alone, I have to take care of you!" trope and when characters share a table, eating together, this might be up your alley. Another title I've reviewed for my Friday BL corner.

Oh! My Assistant by MILA & AngryMonster: You said you've found me through my A to Z Challenge so you've probably have seen this but in case you haven't. Another puppy seme with an uke that's not exactly an emo, but fails to convey his emotions. Here's my review, but Tapas has removed this one from their library and now it's on Lezhin. You can find it here (All Ages) and here (Mature).

As for Sk8. It was a fun show to watch but I wasn't deep in their fandom. I can understand the appeal behind Adam/Tadashi and found Joe to be really cute ~ Joe/Cherry have that enemies to lovers vibe that starts off as something strictly physical. Hence, I can recommend Glasses Cloth & Playlist. I know the name is weird but it's short & completed, and I highly recommend it. You can find out more about it here in my review.

That's all I have for you! Hopefully you'll find something that suits your taste and my recommendations were at elast close to the vibe you're looking for. Enjoy, and let me know what you think of them if you ever get to read one!