#that there are still people out there who appreciate what nanon went through in this episode

[waitmyturtles]

Turtles Catches Up with Old GMMTV: SOTUS Edition

[What’s going on here? After joining Tumblr and discovering Thai BLs through KinnPorsche in 2022, I began watching GMMTV’s new offerings -- and realized that I had a lot of history to catch up on, to appreciate the more recent works that I was delving into. From tropes to BL frameworks, what we’re watching now hails from somewhere, and I’m learning about Thai BL's history through what I’m calling the Old GMMTV Challenge (OGMMTVC). Starting with recommendations from @absolutebl on their post regarding how GMMTV is correcting for its mistakes with its shows today, I’ve made an expansive list to get me through a condensed history of essential/classic/significant Thai BLs produced by GMMTV and many other BL studios. My watchlist, pasted below, lists what I’ve watched and what’s upcoming, along with the reviews I’ve written so far. First official Old GMMTV Challenge review up: SOTUS.]

[NOTE, March 23, 2024: I want to note, from the future!, that my thoughts on Krist Perawat, his acting, and his career trajectory regarding his personal controversies, have changed quite a bit since the publication of this 2023 post. There is excellent commentary out there about the detrimental impact of fandom behavior on Krist and his reputation over the years that I’ve been influenced by, and his comeback to BL in Be My Favorite was a risk that I supported. I have a lot of nostalgia for SOTUS and SOTUS S now, and their impact on the Thai BL genre since their airings.]

I spent a lot of the weekend wrapping my head around the MANY thoughts I have about SOTUS -- but first, I want to say that the FEEDBACK I received on questions that I posted throughout my watch of the show really heartened me. THANK YOU, THANK YOU (!!!) to EVERYONE who made helpful comments on my posts (here, here, here, here, especially here, and here). All of you helping to set me up for how I understand the historical timeline of the development of BLs in Thailand was absolutely necessary for the lenses in which I ultimately watched the show.

And I think there’s a number of perspectives I ended up adopting over the course of my watch. It might help me to write this piece if I list out those lenses now:

- Lens #1: WHY, OH MY GOD, WHY WAS KRIST CAST IN THIS ROLE - Lens #2: People had to have enjoyed this in 2016 because there was nothing else like it available at the time, despite Krust - Lens #3: Maybe the first two points are related - Lens #4: Singto is reaching remarkable-level here - Lens #5: Maybe all of these points will help me understand why many fans still think of this show fondly, despite the subsequent Krust/KrustSingto drama and possibly questionable points made on sexuality and sexual preferences.

More than anything else, I think it helped me to watch this show while recognizing that I’m an #old. Being early middle-aged (early, I tell ya) helps me, literally everyday, to remember that history guides me to understand the world in which I view it now. So to watch a show from 2016, which is long-ago or not-that-long-ago, depending on your frame of reference, means that I was watching history. And history is.... a reflection of that one, singular moment in time, with the context of past events, people, and places influencing that moment in time. 

I went out of order on the Old GMMTV Challenge because I was too eagerly curious about Singto to watch Love Sick first, and wait on SOTUS (as I’m planning to reward myself after this journey with a big old watch party of He’s Coming to Me, running back to my snuggly Ohm/Nanon rabbithole). 

But as well, speaking of Bad Buddy: I also felt like I really wanted to get SOTUS under my belt after a number of separate and FABULOUS conversations about how Bad Buddy had purposefully relied on a BL framework (citing @miscellar), and how Aof and his team, plus Nanon and Ohm themselves, had set out essentially to create a critical meta-BL, complete with embedded reflection on BL tropes -- exactly the sorts of tropes that were borne out of SOTUS. (Here and here are two links to said fabulous conversations.)

I probably think about Bad Buddy at least once a day by way of how deeply layered it was a drama, so: to SOTUS I needed to go, to understand the tropes framework that @miscellar and others opined on, and for me to undergo a learning experience about how exactly today’s BLs are influenced by the ones that started the genre in Thailand. 

Considering the lenses I listed above, I’ll say this: at the age I was at in 2016, and knowing that, as an Asian, I’ve always had a craving for shows by Asians, set in Asia, within Asian family and social systems, about issues of acceptance and equity felt by Asians: I predict that, save for Krust’s performance, I would have been CRAZY for SOTUS as a new kind of show that I wanted and needed to watch.

During my excellent conversations with the Tumblr family, I came to understand that SOTUS was Thailand’s first true BL. It centered on a same-sex attraction-to-relationship, established various levels of perspectives and commentaries on power dynamics, and set up a number of important tropes -- pink milk, university settings, engineering-as-gay, the gay-for-you motif, side couples and best friends, etc. -- that we then saw and see repeated in subsequent BLs.

Where I was at in 2016 -- I would have eaten it almost all of it up.

Now? Now, I get to see all the problematic factors about it, through the lens of history.

So I want to be fair about the commentary this show receives NOW, because one thing I heard repeated in the feedback I received over the past couple weeks, in part, was about nostalgia. Reflecting particularly on Singto’s performance as Kongpob -- I mean, with a slightly more sophisticated, mature, well-rounded, better-written script, his performance would have been totally groundbreaking.

But I THINK, both from a 2016-lens and from a now-lens, that the script was terribly choppy. I don’t think the script did justice for the risks this show was otherwise willing to take. And I think, again, that’s because SOTUS is a product of its time, where there were no precedents for how to otherwise tell Kong’s story -- and that SOTUS was breaking the ground that the current crop of GMMTV’s screenwriters and directors are now tending. In essence: GMMTV was experimenting with HOW to tell the CENTERED story of a same-sex relationship, and we saw that unfold in SOTUS’s real time. 

Besides the choppy script, this show ultimately did not achieve creative groundbreaking status, for me, because of Krist. Not to be hyperbolic, but he’s one of the worst actors I’ve seen in an Asian drama, and I’ve watched some bad KBS daytime shit. If someone tells me that Krust has been great in certain cishet shows, that’s fine, but I’m not running to them (and now I’m SO disappointed about The Jungle, which I was otherwise looking forward to this year). And this feeling is not at all inclusive of his actual problematic homophobic behavior. He was just terrible in SOTUS. 

We know and have seen tsundere leads. We all love our biases who have played tsundere leads. The problem with Krust is that he had zero reactivity and chemistry to an excellent Singto, regardless of the script, regardless of his acting methodology, if he had any to begin with. 

So I have to think: did GMMTV cast him because, maybe, he was having trouble getting other projects that would have required, say, acting? And GMMTV was like, well, this guy’s under contract, let’s throw him a bone with this experimental show we’re doing, and see how it goes?

I am tending to think that that’s possibly what happened. And maybe, even, GMMTV could not have predicted how FANTASTIC Singto would be -- and, therefore, how wide the divide would have been between their performances. And, how much GMMTV was risking by putting this mismatched pair together for what ultimately was groundbreaking material.

GMMTV couldn’t have predicted the future, right? Hollywood tries with its predictive models, but this was new ground for this company.

Where the choppy script and Krust’s terrible acting really fails the show is, as I mentioned earlier, the issue that I bring up about power dynamics. Krust as Arthit was going to do something in this show that was rare at that moment: Arthit was going to move from a socially majority position to a minority position by falling in love with Kongpob.

That’s a big deal. That happens in two of my most dearest BLs, Old Fashion Cupcake and Cherry Magic, and many others, of course. The Asian collectivist perspective plays huge parts in both shows, unconsciously, that lead to the uke leads considering taking up with their semes. And it happens to Arthit, too. In the Asian collectivist perspective -- you, as a uke, respond empathically, and maybe even try to meet your seme where your seme is at. 

I think the only times that I saw Krust at least trying to show up in this show was by way of this power dynamic move, to attempt to respond to Kong/Singto emotionally. There was a little eye contact. There was a little instinctual responsiveness. But otherwise, there was really a lot of dead air and dead space, leveraged by an only-okay soundtrack that left Krust and Singto struggling to act in essential silence, with Krust barely scraping by on attempting to communicate his struggle in his developing attraction to Kong. 

I’m just wondering to myself: how much do I blame the actual show itself -- like the script, the director, the writers, etc. -- about how it ended up this way? I think I ultimately have a sympathetic heart about it, again, because of the history, and my betting (based on everything that everyone here on Tumblr has taught me about) that again, this was a kind of experiment for GMMTV, without the company knowing how HUGE KrustSingto would become. 

Other points about the show that I want to quickly capture before I wrap up on Kong/Singto:

- The hazing, while concerning, didn’t make me swerve, as it was clear from the start that it was sanctioned by their school. I want to say that this kind of hazing is important to many Asian school social systems, but I know things have changed a ton since I was a kid. As with almost all social and family systems, the hazing, I think, offered another commentary on power dynamics that I think was reflected throughout the show. I thought the hazing was actually an interesting mirror to what Kong and Arthit were struggling with individually, between themselves.

- I LOVED THE SIDE CHARACTERS. M, Wad, Prae, May. They were fun, well-written, and WELL-ACTED.

I want to wrap this up with a reflection on Singto/Kong and his acting vis à vis the script. 

Going back to the 2016 moment-in-time frame: I know I would have gone crazy for him seven years ago. Forget about it. Mans totally rose to the occasion of what this show was doing. I think the script ultimately failed to truly capture what he was willing to throw. (And that leads me to not being surprised that he was then subsequently paired with various leads in future shows, probably to try to capture a magic that he clearly demonstrated in SOTUS.)

In particular: I did NOT think the script did Kong justice by keeping the revelation about his budding attraction to Arthit until episode 11 (I *think* it was episode 11, but I could be wrong, and I’m not going back to fact-check, ha). I want to think that that’s one of the (many) kinds of mistakes that GMMTV is correcting for now. The comments about wives, the insistent “you like me”s -- they were non-contextual for much of the show, ESPECIALLY BECAUSE Krust could not catch a damn ball. That’s what ultimately broke me about this show. And I think that demonstrated a lack of fluency about how GMMTV could write scripts on same-sex attraction. 

As well, as I wrote in this post -- the post-Arthit-coming-out discussion between Kong and M threw me. M asks Kong -- “do you like men?”

And Kong had SUCH a specific answer. To me, as I wrote previously: his answer was, I definitely don’t like men. I’m definitely not gay. I just like Arthit.

My guess is, for Thailand’s first full-fledged BL in 2016 -- this dialogue HAD to be written this way. To enter into the kind of territory we see NOW, as we saw in Moonlight Chicken -- where we see one man’s (Jim’s) struggle with IDENTIFYING himself as gay, AND presenting another man AS HIS boyfriend -- we had to START somewhere. That somewhere was SOTUS, in almost total opposite territory, where the concept of the admission-of-gay could not be contemplated.

@bengiyo’s comments in the last post I linked above, in particular, collide in part with @absolutebl‘s analysis on the Asian collectivist vision. However, I can’t help but compare this issue, again, to what we recently saw in Moonlight Chicken...where conversations about Jim, about Li Ming, and with Wen, a fully out and identified queer man, all touched upon individual identity.

That’s where we are -- that’s where we CAN be -- now, in 2023, and in the near future. SOTUS was important for me to watch to understand how we ended up here, now, for what was okay and was not okay, in 2016. 

It’s okay, now, to appreciate collectivism WHILE ALSO identifying oneself as queer/gay. At least, it’s okay in fantasy BL-land. (Again, I’d peep @bengiyo’s comments about how that may not be reflective of what domestic Thai queer audiences may be feeling about these shows.) 

I have a lot more understanding to undertake regarding how Asian queer audiences see this. But at least from the perspective of this first-generation Asian American -- to see the progression of history as the doors slowly open, from dramas to Asian (and other) audiences regarding how one can identify oneself, safely and happily -- that’s a big deal, and I see how SOTUS was a harbinger of things to come. 

Singto was simply up to the task to break ground in this show, and it’s such a shame that he was let down, in my opinion, by his co-star. The subsequent history of that pairing breaks my heart, because I think it taints a lot of what SOTUS ended up bringing to the table. I’m glad we have Aof and Bad Buddy, now, to serve in part as a reflection for what SOTUS did, and how BLs and BL tropes could age, be manipulated, and be IMPROVED and developed upon, over the course of time. But the actual history of KrustSingto messes me up a lot in regards to how I might feel nostalgic, myself, for SOTUS, as I learn more about classic BLs.

It’s a confusing mindspace to be in, to move backwards in time to understand how things have developed -- but I gain such a bigger appreciation for the shows I’ve fallen in love with now, over these recent months, for where they came from.

[I want to give HUGE thanks to @absolutebl, @bengiyo, @nieves-de-sugui, @respectthepetty, @miscellar (especially for all the BBS context), @lurkingshan, @wen-kexing-apologist, @shortpplfedup, @clairificusrex, @dribs-and-drabbles, and everyone else who made comments in my SOTUS watch posts. All of you are my historians. More than the fun of writing these reviews is interacting and conversing with the Tumblr fam.]

(Love Sick is on deck. If anyone is following this journey, I’ll be fast-forwarding through the second season, ha -- I can’t commit to 36 lakorn-length episodes. I also have a HUGE and lengthy wedding trip coming up in a couple weeks. So the conclusion of this project will be delayed, but definitely know that I’ll be posting thoughts here and there as I plod through.)