twig-tea

[twig-tea]

This was such a fun conversation to be a part of! Like Ben said, sometimes it's just so nice to talk about shows we liked. Thanks again to @bengiyo and @shortpplfedup for having me on the show to chat about these two great television watching experiences.

I have been super absent here but I'm still watching (the spreadsheet is actually well in the 800s now) and I do plan on giving an update eventually. A bunch of new GLs have started since we recorded this episode, and I'm hoping a couple of them will turn out good enough for me to come back and yell about. Fingers crossed!

Scent of a Woman: Fragrance You Inherit and Fragrance of the First Flower

AND WE'RE BACK

NiNi and Ben finally got back into the booth with @twig-tea to discuss two of our favorite GL or lesbian projects in the past year. Join us as we unpack the difficulties of coming out later in life. Stick around for Twig gushing about beautiful women.

Timestamps

The timestamps will now correspond with chapters on Spotify for easier navigation.

00:00 - Welcome 00:55 - Introduction 03:16 - Fragrance You Inherit 08:34 - Fragrance You Inherit: All About the Relationships 17:46 - Fragrance You Inherit: Sakura's Coming Out 21:50 - Fragrance You Inherit: On-chan 24:21 - Fragrance You Inherit: Final Thoughts and Ratings 29:08 - Fragrance of the First Flower 37:14 - Fragrance of the First Flower: A Friend and a Foe 45:22 - Fragrance of the First Flower: Life Life-ing Is Good Drama! 52:49 - Fragrance of the First Flower: Final Thoughts and Ratings 57:04 - Outro: Lesbians!

The Conversation Transcripts!

Thanks to the continued efforts of @lurkingshan as an editor and proofreader, we are able to bring you transcripts of the episodes.

Please send our volunteers your thanks!

00:00:00 - Welcome

NiNi

Welcome to The Conversation, the Queer Media And Brown Liquor Podcast.

Ben

I'm Ben, the media critic.

NiNi

I’m NiNi, the VIIBs queen.

Ben

And we are your drunk Caribbean uncle and auntie who are sitting on the porch in the rocking chairs.

NiNi

We’re here to talk queer film and dramas, with a special focus on Asian QL.

Ben

So if you like to dive deep into queer stories…

NiNi

If you like cracked out takes on art and commerce in queer media…

Ben

If you just enjoy simping for attractive people…

NiNi

We believe in simping!

Ben

Tune in!

00:55 Introduction

Ben 

And we're back. Tonight, we're talking about lesbians. It's time. It's gone too long. And thankfully, Japan and Taiwan offered us up something worth discussing. Tonight, we're talking about Fragrance You Inherit, and we're also talking about Fragrance of the First Flower.

Because we're gonna be discussing lesbians at length, we've brought our most powerful lesbian with us. Twig, say hello.

NiNi 

It's really truly accurate. [laughs]

Ben 

Everyone I know thinks I'm insane for having watched 300 BLs. Twig has watched over 600. She is the most powerful lesbian we know.

Twig 

I think we're at over 700 now.

Ben 

700 QLs from @twig-tea. Yeah, okay.

NiNi

She is our oracle.

Ben 

Before we start talking about the shows directly, Twig, since you have your spreadsheet in front of you, what's the ratio at this point of GL to BL?

NiNi 

How do you know she has her spreadsheet open in front of her?

Ben

She definitely has it in front of her, don't worry.

Twig 

I always have it open in front of me. [laughs]. I think about a hundred of the entries are GL now, so we're up to like a seventh, which is actually pretty impressive.

Ben 

One-to-six is the ratio. Oh my God.

Twig 

Listen, that is significant improvement over just a year ago.

Ben

I know, I was gonna say, like a year ago, I think it was one to 11. [laughs]

Twig 

[laughs] Yeah.

NiNi 

Hot damn! So yeah, we have finally started getting more GL. And we have been disappointed recently, but not by these two.

Twig 

Yeah, I think one of the things about GL fans is we were all hoping that we would skip the stage where a lot of crap was put out. [laughs]

Ben 

Instead we're speedrunning it.

NiNi 

[sings] That's just the way it is. 

[speaking] Oh my god. Not me singing. It's been a minute, folks, and we are on the edge of Pride Month, so I am deep in my feels. I've finally graduated, I'm free, and I'm having a mental breakdown. But it's all good in the hood. Don't mind me.

Ben 

She says as she's stumbling back into the booth, “Please record today!” [laughs] Okay.

NiNi

Like, I just need to get my head back on straight and talking to my friends is the best way to get my head back on straight.

03:16 -  Fragrance You Inherit

Ben 

Well on that note, let's head into Fragrance You Inherit.

NiNi 

This won one of our Standout Queer Narratives of the Year in the VIIB Awards for 2024. And we did say that we were gonna talk about it in more detail. So let's get into it. 

Ben, what is Fragrance You Inherit about?

Ben 

About how the child of your biggest love showing up at your house does not have to be the end of your entire world. In Fragrance You Inherit, our lead Sakura attends the wedding of her closest girl friend in college and is distraught that the woman she loves is marrying some guy.

NiNi 

Literally some dude as far as she's concerned.

Ben 

In her despair, she has an anonymous hookup with a man at a bar. This hookup leads to the birth of her son, Toki. She goes on to become a fairly excellent single mother. She and her son have a very communicative, supportive relationship, but she's never told him this important thing about herself.

One day he tells her while they're hanging out in the evening that he got a girlfriend and he wants her to meet her. So he brings over his girlfriend, Kanae, and Kanae is the spitting image of Mone, Sakura's friend. She learns that Kanae is indeed Mone's child and… kinda has a bit of a freak out over it internally. The kids want their moms to get along. And so she meets her friend for the first time in almost 15 years and is gonna spend the show working through her complex lingering feelings for Mone that she never got over while trying to deal with her son's growing uncertainty about things his mom isn't telling him. Other complications ensue.

NiNi 

Where do we even start with this magnificent piece of magnificence?

Ben 

Twig, you and I watched the show and were basically like sunbathing in it after each episode. Why don't you tell the people how it felt to watch this show?

Twig 

I keep using the word kind for this show and it's really the one that fits the best. It's gentle with its characters and it's gentle with the audience. It doesn't traumatize the audience when it could have. [laughs] Any of the drama that happens is relatively quickly handled and not overwrought. And that makes it sound boring but it's not boring at all, it's just really lovely. It's like taking a warm bath, you just get to hang out with these people who are just trying their best and not always perfect but really gentle and honest and interested in each other's well-being. And you get to see them grow together and you see their relationships build and it was just such a lovely show.

NiNi 

Lovely is a great way to describe it. I felt like you said, Twig, like they're all invested. Everybody had gone on to build a really happy life, and when Mone and Sakura re-entered each other's lives, they wanted those happy lives to continue, not just for themselves, but for each other as well. And so they navigate the fact that they had these incredibly strong feelings for each other and, in Sakura's case and maybe in Mone's case as well, still do. It could have gotten ugly, and it wasn't about any of that. It was this really gentle, really, like you said, kind way of dealing with these lingering feelings.

Twig 

Yeah, the choices that everyone makes in the show aren't necessarily perfect choices, but they're choices that they all own for being the choices that were right for them and that they're content with where they ended up because of it, which is such a rare thing to depict in shows. So many times the conflict of the show was about how the choices that people made were the wrong ones and they have to realize that. Whereas in this show, it's more about just having closure.

Ben 

The shows that I find that I enjoy the most are ones where the characters have a very strong internal motivation. What works so well about Fragrance You Inherit is every single character at every moment is trying to do the most decent thing they can with all the things they're trying to juggle. You might've expected this to be about Sakura and Mone throwing away their family lives and other relationships to pursue this long lost lesbian love between them that they never consummated properly. And it's not, it's about both of them recognizing that there was a thing there between them that they maybe could have done something with. They're, like Twig said, content with where they are in their lives now. And they're able to move past that. 

Jumping ahead, I really like that we end on Sakura properly completing her confession to Mone at their kids' wedding to each other. Like now that we've completed this very important familial ceremony, I will put this to bed finally.

08:34 - Fragrance You Inherit: All About the Relationships

Ben

Takeda Kouhei is in this show!

NiNi 

Yes, Takeda Kouhei is in the show playing Ryosuke, who is Sakura's best friend and listen, truly one of the great performances. I love Ryosuke so much and what he is for both Sakura and for Toki. 

Ben

On-chan!

NiNi

On-chan. He's a safe place for Toki when Toki is struggling. And he does it in a way that's not cloying. Like when Toki shows up at his house, he's like, “What are you doing here?” [laughs] But he's also incredibly kind to him, and sort of helps him navigate without spilling something that Sakura wants to tell Toki herself.

Twig 

One of the things that I really loved about this show was that, like Ben said, the characters were really driving the story. The web of interrelationships between all of the characters was important and the show treated them as important. The core of the narrative is about the lost or never quite got off the ground relationship between Sakura and Mone. That's what connects everybody together. The relationship between Sakura and Toki, that mother-son relationship is also a really huge part of the story. Toki and Kanae, Toki's relationship with Kanae as a first love, we get some of that. We get Toki wrestling with what his relationship with Sakura and what his history means for their relationship. And also what Sakura and Mone's relationship means for his relationship with Kanae. We get Kanae and Mone, the mother-daughter relationship, and Hirohiko, the father, we get his relationship with Kanae as well. Then On-chan, the friendship relationship with him and Sakura and the sort of mentorship relationship between him and Toki. Like literally everybody is interconnected. There's story with all of them.

Ben 

We get the initial setup of Sakura and her son seem to get along really well. Clearly she gay, but she ain't told him. All right, she probably gonna need to tell him at some point. Toki brings Kanae over and Sakura was running around the house trying to get ready because she wants to put on a good impression for her son's first big girlfriend that he wants to bring home. Incredibly endearing. Sakura has to sort of emotionally muscle through meeting the daughter of her first love who's also wearing the damn perfume that she gave her 15 years ago—this show came to torment lesbians in particular. [Twig laughs] And then the kids are like, well, we want our moms to meet. So she ends up hanging out with Mone and she's trying to do the right thing. Like, she's clearly nervous about meeting her again, but resolves after seeing her that she is ready to be a mom friend to her.

In any other show, we might've expected the husband to be secretly shitty. But like when we finally meet Hoshii Hirohiko, he's just a dork dad who loves his wife and his daughter. And they clearly love and respect him too. She tells him she's got a boyfriend and then she goes to sit on the couch and he's sitting behind the couch peeking over it like it's a fence or something like, “Wait, who is this boy? Tell me about him.”

NiNi 

It was very sweet.

Ben 

It's just so endearing.

Twig (11:51)

I mean, he gets a moment with Toki, too. 

Ben 

Where he's like, “Yeah, of course this boy is actually good. Goddamn it, I raised my daughter well.”

Twig 

Yeah. And then of course we get the incredibly important moment where Sakura realizes that she and Toki have the same taste in women. Very critical for a lesbian mom.

NiNi 

That was very cute, like she said the thing and I was like, does Toki already know? And then as the show goes on you realize no, he doesn't know but if she makes comments like this all the time that's why maybe he feels like there's things that he's not being told.

Ben 

The runner that's holding all of the major plot developments together is Toki wants to understand his mom. He recognizes fairly early that something about Kanae triggered something in his mom. He ends up investigating through, like, old yearbooks and old photos to realize that Sakura and Mone were friends 15 years ago. He's always been bothered that his mom doesn't have any friends other than On-chan.

And it's interesting watching Toki grapple with the loneliness that he's worried about for his mom. The fact that his mom doesn't really know who his dad is and has never lied to him about that plays into some of this and his own struggles with wanting to understand his mom. It was interesting with On-chan's role across the whole show because he was accidentally a problem for them. Fifteen years ago. 

Like, Mone liked that she was Sakura's, basically, only friend, met On-chan, totally misunderstood, and thought that Sakura and On-chan were dating—On-chan is asexual and aromantic—completely misunderstands this and ends up committing harder to Hoshii as a result. This continues to plague me. I feel so much about the fact that Mone was maybe interested in Sakura, but the way she commits to Hirohiko at the first sign of any sort of uncertainty tells us that it's probably for the best that they didn't go forth with this. ‘Cause there's a part of me that doesn't believe that Mone was gonna be able to handle being in a full-time relationship with a woman.

Twig 

Yeah, totally agree with that. I think that that's one of the really interesting things we see her grapple with in the present. She feels guilty about the way her friendship with Sakura ended. Sakura and Mone both sort of have in their head that they were the ones responsible for the ending of their friendship. They both have to come to terms with the part that they're responsible for separately and then together agree to both forgive each other where they're really forgiving themselves because neither of them were actually mad at the other one. 

NiNi 

I think there's, what it felt like to me was that Mone was maybe thinking that she had feelings for Sakura but then thinking that Sakura was with On-chan. In a way buried it on purpose like, “oh I shouldn't have these feelings.” And Sakura was kind of feeling the same way because it was this weird feedback loop. It was just like, “Oh, I shouldn't like this girl.” And Mone just double committed, as Ben said, to Hoshii in a way that felt very like, okay, I'm going to bury this piece of me because it seems to have messed up my friendship with Sakura.

And Sakura kind of went similarly about it, except that maybe Sakura had more of a sense of who she was. Part of the story in the present is Mone figuring out this thing about herself, that she thought that to feel the way that she did wasn't correct for her. And then realizing that no, actually, there is this part of her that did love Sakura and does love women. And she maybe doesn't need to explore this part of her life because she's happy. But now that she knows this thing about herself, she feels more at ease, it almost feels like.

Twig 

Yeah, she definitely wasn't ready as a teenager to grapple with any of that. She seemed relieved to bury it, whereas Sakura seemed to be more burdened by burying it.

NiNi 

I guess that's the difference between knowing and not knowing because I feel like Sakura knew whereas Mone maybe didn't really know.

Ben

I think one of the useful things to talk about there is less about the knowing and more about the role that confessing plays in people's lives. One of the most important things for your experience as a teenager is romantic rejection. And this is probably the thing that emotionally stunts queer people the most, because the tension and danger around confessing makes queer people sort of reject themselves preemptively. So they're never forced to deal with the other person saying no to you and then having to sort your relationship out after that. That's what makes me so sad about this particular story. Sakura doesn't really get over Mone for like 20 years. At that point, is she ready to face the lesbian dating pool in the Japanese equivalent of Tinder? Oh my God.

NiNi 

This is the question that I have based on the ending because when I watched it I sort of got the feeling not that they were saying no but that they were saying maybe sometime in the future. I wasn't exactly sure at the end of it what the story was trying to say precisely.

Twig 

I think It was definitely more about Sakura moving on than Sakura and Mone having a second chance. The way that we ended with the not yet, I did struggle with it a little bit. I think it's okay that it's not pat, that she wasn't quite ready, but I wanted to be able to see her fully move on and we didn't get to fully see that. But I felt it was still a satisfying ending for me.

NiNi 

Oh yeah, it was a satisfying ending. I was just a little unsure about where the ending wanted me to land, but that didn't make it any less satisfying to me.

17:46 - Fragrance You Inherit: Sakura's Coming Out

While Sakura's moving on was part of the ending, the other part of the ending was the release of this tension between Sakura and Toki. There's been this tension as Toki tries to figure out who his mom is, and that sort of affected his relationship with Kanae as well. There's this great scene that he has with Kanae where he kind of is trying to tell her without telling her because he realizes that it's not his thing to tell, but also he wants her to know that it's not that he's keeping a secret from her necessarily. He wants her to be part of his life. He wants to share these things with her, and making that clear to her while still maintaining his mother's ability to keep it a secret if she wants to. It was a very interesting tightrope that they walked there. 

I liked how seriously they took the relationship between Toki and Kanae, because they were taking it seriously and I think that young love is important and whether it goes on or it ends, how it happens is important. It was nice to see it also being taken very seriously by the narrative.

Twig 

Totally agree. I really appreciated the scenes where they had conversations about the relationship that showed that they were really putting work into it, that it was an effort on both of their parts that they wanted to make it work to show the sincerity and the seriousness of what they were embarking on together. And what you said about the way that Toki navigated the difficulty of having the knowledge about his mother and wanting to respect her right to share or not share that secret was so good. I thought one of my favorite things about the show is the way that it handles coming out as a concept. I thought it did a really good job of framing coming out as not something you owe anybody, but when you give that knowledge of yourself as a gift to the people who have earned it or who you love, it benefits your relationship as a whole and the world expands and is improved by it. 

I thought, like, that was just really beautifully said by the show and the multiple coming out scenes we got in it. It's very easy to make a show where there's pressure in the narrative to come out and where not coming out is treated as some sort of wrongdoing, and I thought that the show did a really good job of making it clear that Sakura was never a bad person or wrong for not having told that secret yet and at the same time showing how it expanded her relationship with her son and her mother when she did come out.

NiNi 

My gosh, the scene with her mother. 

Ben 

The way that they handled her finally saying to her mom what her mom clearly already knew was very well done.

NiNi

I wept. It was beautiful, honestly. The show is just unfailingly kind and gentle. Like, there so many points at which the show could have turned in a different direction and gotten more contentious. But instead, at every turn, it just chose to make everybody be trying to do the best that they absolutely could do in the moment that they were in, and showing that the people that they were in the moment with understood that they were doing the best that they could do as well. Everybody's coming at each other in every moment with grace, with an allowance for who they're dealing with and the love that they feel for that person.

It's not that people didn't necessarily get angry, because I think Toki got angry maybe once or twice, but it's just that that anger is not really directed at his mother. It's more directed at the situation and why they're all in the situation that they're in. And so when he has to have that conversation, yeah, he needs some time and space away from his mom to figure out what it is he wants to say, which is why he goes to On-chan. But when his mom does find him and they have that talk, he is not angry with her in the least. It's just really this beautiful thing that I really, really enjoyed watching. It felt very soothing to watch this show.

21:50 - Fragrance You Inherit: On-chan

NiNi

So who's everybody's favourite character and why is it On-chan?

Twig 

He really was the best.

Ben

We haven't had a gay uncle in this genre in so fucking long. And it was played by Takeda Kouhei, who everybody knows from Old Fashion Cupcake.

NiNi 

Love that man. He's so good.

Twig 

Just that close, long-standing friendship between a gay man and a lesbian woman. It’s something that made the show feel more relatably queer than a lot of QL does to me. People ask me, and I know they ask you Ben too, all the time, what makes something feel queer? Is it just that it's sad? Like sometimes, no, it's that we've got besties. 

A lot of the times in BL, the queer besties are just other people who also are going through that realization at the same time and it's nice On-chan knew he was gay before he and Sakura started talking and it was that mutual realization of “we're family” that made them be friends in the first place and part of why they kept each other company through all these years. That kind of knowing moment is the kind of thing that we don't often get in QL.

Ben 

What I think works so well for me about their friendship is that he's always holding her to account. Like, he'll be as nice about it as he can, but he will not let her just spout bullshit around him. He's always telling her the uncomfortable things she needs to hear. And it's the same with Toki when he shows up. It's like, “You just scared the shit out of your mom, kid. Let's resolve that first.”

NiNi 

I just love that when Toki shows up at his house the first thing he says to him is, “How do you know where I live?”

Ben 

[laughs] Like, he could've been entertaining. You're not supposed to show up unannounced, kid.

NiNi 

It was delightful because he's clearly a big part of Toki and Sakura's lives. Like, he's always in their space with them. But he was still shocked when Toki showed up at his house like, “Oh you're not supposed to be here.” [laughs] It was so realistic and delightful as somebody older whose friends have kids who are sort of in that space now, in that elder teenage space. Sometimes they'll come to me and I'll be like, “What are you doing here? Why am I the person that you're choosing to talk to about this? Shouldn't you go talk to somebody else?” And then you realize, oh no, I'm the auntie figure now. So I'm the person that they're gonna come to when they don't wanna talk to their mom. Just was just very recognizable and relatable.

24:21 - Fragrance You Inherit: Final Thoughts and Ratings

Ben 

So let's talk about the fact that this is not a queer romance and how people struggled with that as a concept, as usual. I bitch about this at least once a season. [Twig laughs] The importance of queer art that doesn't necessarily end in queer boinking.

Twig 

I have been feeling so many feelings this season in particular about how our stories are apparently only worth paying attention to if they're titillating to a straight audience, and fuck that. That's how I feel about that. Our stories are interesting and worth telling even if it's not actually about us fucking as the core. That doesn't make it any less queer. We have full lives that are about more than just having sex. Some of us don't even have sex at all. That doesn't make us any less queer. While it's sort of defined by who we want to fuck or fall in love with or spend time with, there are ripple effects in a lot of other aspects of our life. 

Those parts of our lives are also interesting and worth telling. We are full human beings. I guess sometimes it feels like you all forget that. [laughs] So, when people want to throw out a story because it's not about falling in love or having sex, I feel like I need to remind people that we're human beings who do more than that and that the other things we do are also important.

Ben 

We still need queer media about people in their 30s and older sorting their feelings out about shit that happened to them in their teens. That is important and significant.

NiNi 

My uncle has always said to me that queerness isn't just romance, it's not just sex, it's societal. And one of the things that I enjoy about both of the shows that we're talking about tonight is how societal it felt, like the romances or the feelings or the whatever are in there, but it's not necessarily about that. It's about everything around it. It's about every way it impacts people's lives. I truly appreciated that about these two shows. When I used to write more, I used to always say, "Are you here for a ship or a story?” And these two shows are definitely a story. It's about this entire little society of people, this little microcosm, this family that is just figuring out some things that go along with queerness.

Alright, so…

Ben 

RATINGS!

[Twig laughs]

Ben 

NiNi?

NiNi 

I gave it a 10 and an award.

Ben

Twig-tea?

Twig 

I feel like I gave it a 9.5.

NiNi 

Where did the .5 come off of?

Ben

The ambiguous ending.

Twig 

Yeah, yeah, even though it was satisfying if you have to ask, like, what exactly was that? This is just a smidge off, but honestly it was such a wonderful watch experience like, the watch experience itself was a 10.

NiNi 

Ben, how about you?

Ben 

I also gave it a 9.5 because I was a little bit miffed by the ambiguous ending. I didn't mind Mone and Sakura needing more time to sort that out. I didn't mind them wanting their kids to complete their arc before they decided to tackle theirs. But I found myself a little frustrated at the end that Sakura still feels like her lesbian existence is defined by her feelings. So that's the reason I gave it a 9.5. I think it's a little incomplete for me.

NiNi 

So I think we can give it a 9.5 from The Conversation. I mean, we gave it an award, people, you know we like it.

Ben 

We really want you all to watch it. We say this all the time. if you only watch BL, it rots your fucking brain and you just really cannot watch the genre properly because you're not always engaging with stories and themes that are being told. You’ve got to diversify your motherfucking bonds. Like, ou gotta watch other shit!

If you're a queer person who only wants to watch queer media, fine, I respect that. I'm all about it. I'm one of them people, too. You should watch something like this that's not just about whether or not queer people are gonna boink each other. This is a compelling narrative about a collection of queer people and how their own queer histories complicate and influence the lives of their children. This is an excellent show and a fairly short watch at that too. It's only six 20-minute episodes. You owe it to yourself to watch this.

29:08 - Fragrance of the First Flower

NiNi 

Okay, so now we are going to talk about Fragrance of the First Flower. I recently watched this, finally caught up and watched both seasons. But I think Ben and Twig, you guys watched the first season back when it aired originally and caught up with the second season this year, so maybe we can talk a little bit about the differing experiences we had, you guys with watching it in two tranches and me with watching it as a binge.

Ben

I have a weak memory of the first season, I'm realizing at this point. I remember the basics. So we've got two ladies. We got Yi Ming and Zhong Ting Ting. And Zhong Ting Ting and Yi Ming were volleyball players together in high school. The gayest thing they could possibly be. 

NiNi 

I saw the volleyball and I was like, this is why we're watching this. [laughs]

Ben 

I'm always watching volleyball at some point somewhere. Actually, right now I'm watching tennis.

NiNi 

I mean, it's just volleyball with racquets.

Ben 

Look, I'm all about sports with nets, so. They were very close in high school. There was clearly a lot of gay things going on there. Zhong Ting Ting was way more into it than Yi Ming was. And then Yi Ming is like, “Nah, I'm outta here.” And then she goes on to get heterosexually married to a guy. They have a child together who does have special needs.

She runs into Ting Ting again, according to the blurb, at a wedding. I do not remember this. And they rekindle some of their relationship in the first season. But once again, Yi Ming is not ready for this and calls things off with Ting Ting.

So that happens in 2021. And Twig and I are scratching our heads watching this like, well, that was mostly pretty solid, but kind of abrupt and weirdly unsatisfying. And so we just put it on the shelf for about four years. And then they're like, we're coming back. And we were like, “Oh sure, I guess.” 

When the show comes back, Yi Ming did divorce her husband, who is now realizing that being a sort of absent partner is not conducive to a sustainable long-term marriage in the modern era, and is trying now to work through things. He kind of thinks his ex-wife is going through a phase, but he grows. Yi Ming eventually tries to rekindle her relationship with Ting Ting. And we watch these two try and sort out what being a couple in their now 30s is supposed to look like. And it's kind of a mess and it's not a smooth ride for any of them. 

Do you have any caveats, Twig and NiNi?

Twig 

One of the things that made the first season a bit of a struggle, especially at the end, was the revelation that Ting Ting was also was in a relationship with a man at the time that she was pursuing Yi Ming, even knowing that Yi Ming was married with a child.

Ben 

Wait, she was? Holy shit!

Twig 

And that's the thing that makes Yi Ming go, know what? I can't handle this shit. I don't believe that you are ready to be with me as I blow my life apart because you're dating someone else. And Ting Ting's like, well you told me to. And she's like, yeah, but still.

The ending was just so unsatisfying and left us in such a frustrating place with the characters. You've set up that these characters have failed each other massively in this moment and then just left us. So I was so happy we got the second season and for me it actually did manage to bring it all back in and successfully and satisfactorily conclude. 

I am curious to hear your thoughts, NiNi, because I'm wondering how much the multiple years of sitting with what happened in season one helped me reconcile and be prepared for forgiving the characters through season two.

NiNi 

For me, because I watched it all as a whole, I didn't experience that feeling of dissatisfaction or unsatisfaction that you guys did. I just went straight into season two. So I didn't have to sit with that unfinished feeling.

I was just able to go through the entire story and it lines up pretty well. Yi Ming and Ting Ting, they run into each other at this wedding and then we get the first season more or less a series of flashbacks to their high school days when they were clearly into each other and sort of developing this relationship and then they get caught basically being affectionate in the street outside of school. They've built up this thing where after volleyball practice Ting Ting rides Yi Ming home on her bike, and they got really a little bit saucy for being outdoors, and they were seen and it became a whole thing and Yi Ming freaked out and sort of separated herself from Ting Ting and Yi Ming was older anyway so she left. 

She graduated, she moved on to college, she met this guy, she ended up marrying this guy and Ting Ting just kind of ended up floating a little bit. She didn't quite get herself together. Yi Ming has a job, she has a family, she has all this stuff and Ting Ting is in her 30s now in the second season trying to make a career out of music. She's in this band, this band is not doing great, she works part-time at a cafe, she doesn't really have a life path in the way that Yi Ming had. 

Yi Ming has now left her husband and she's like, okay, I'm ready to be with you, but is she? And the whole second season is really dealing with that idea of Yi Ming thinking that she's ready to be with Ting Ting, but not actually being ready to be with Ting Ting. And Ting Ting struggling with that because in her head, she's been there all along and she doesn't understand why Yi Ming is struggling with this so much. And it's not just the part where they are two women together, it's also just struggling with who Ting Ting is. The scene that I can't forget is when Ting Ting moves in with Yi Ming and starts unpacking her stuff. As Ting Ting unpacked something, Yi Ming packs it back away because Ting Ting has all this boho, like really colourful, kind of cluttery stuff and Yi Ming's space is very neutral and regimented and it almost feels like she can't make room for Ting Ting in her space at all, even as much as she wants her there. It was a really interesting scene that stuck with me all this time.

Twig 

Yeah, I love that scene too. One of the things that I really loved about this series, both seasons, is how both of these characters feel fully developed. We know who both of them are, even as they're figuring themselves out. Both of them have very clear and satisfying arcs. And it's not just about them coming to terms with being in a sapphic relationship. They also have to navigate their personalities and the situation, like what Ting Ting's role is in Yi Ming's child's life, for example. It wasn't done when they both were ready to be queer together. One of them is a very, like, uptight person and the other person is very laid back and, how do we make that work? They're in different points in their careers and how do we make that work? And we have different life goals and how do we make that work? A lot of things that they were struggling with were varied and all felt like parts of the larger whole of these characters.

NiNi 

I always love when characters in a relationship or getting into a relationship have sex and then it doesn't fix anything. Even as they're physically connected, Yi Ming is clearly struggling both with the being openly queer aspect of things and just being with Ting Ting, who is so different from her.

37:14 - Fragrance of the First Flower: A Friend and a Foe

NiNi

You see her navigating the struggles through the character of her boss and her boss's wife. Watching their relationship and trying to figure out how to be in a relationship with a woman from watching her boss’s wife. 

Ben 

I did not like that boss.

NiNi

[laughs] Why didn't you like the boss?

Twig

Because she was an astrology bitch?

Ben

Yeah, she was so serious about it. [NiNi laughs] Every time she showed up, I remember messaging Twig, like, “Oh lord, here she come again. Can she have one conversation she don't bring it up? Oh, we made it out of this conversation. Nope, there it is.” Every motherfucking time. Goddamn.

NiNi 

[laughs] This is why I always keep my own personal astrology bitch-ness away from Ben. [laughs]

I liked the boss. I liked that the boss was a wife girl, and open about it, and at first it shocked Yi Ming, but she was also really curious about it.

Ben 

Signaling to Yi Ming that she's also a lesbian by constantly talking about astrology  and the baby she's trying to get pregnant with. [NiNi laughs]

NiNi 

I just loved that whole storyline. Just watching Yi Ming look at the boss and the wife as a way to navigate things with Ting Ting and then realizing, okay, yes, they are also gay, but their relationship is not our relationship. That was incredibly satisfying to me.

Ben 

Yi Ming was not ready at the end of season one. And so she's broken up with her husband. She's gotten her own place. She's returned to the workforce. And now she feels like she can maybe try to do things with Ting Ting. There's a lot of gays like that. Shiro is one of those gays who had to get his whole life in order before he could possibly start doing things with other people. He needed the sense of security about his ability to take care of his own life. And I really liked the drama with Ting Ting working service jobs because in her heart she really wants to be a successful musician. I liked that that was something that she was struggling with trying to hold on to at one point she takes a reliable job. And this ends up being a huge tension point relationship with her band.

Twig

I really love Yi Ming working on those parts of herself before she's ready to have a relationship with Ting Ting, and then she looks up Ting Ting on social media and she basically creates a moment for them to start again. She sort of manufactures a moment then she chickens out a little bit. One of Yi Ming's main arcs that she needed to work on was that relationships are two people and she can't control it all herself. And so I loved that that didn't work, that Yi Ming working on getting herself to an established place was not good enough to make the relationship work. And Ting Ting trying to change herself into who she thought Yi Ming wanted her to be so that they could work also didn't work.

Both of them were sort of doing their own thing in their own corners to make this relationship work and it wasn't working and they were both so frustrated and got really angry with each other about how neither of them seemed to be recognizing the effort they were both putting into this relationship because neither of them were talking about it or realizing that the effort they were putting in was not actually the effort either of them wanted from each other. It was really well done.

NiNi 

One of the other little signals that I really enjoyed was the whole runner about the bar stools. Yi Ming told Ting Ting back in high school she wanted to be the kind of woman who had bar stools in her house. And Ting Ting held on to that for all those years and made sure they had the bar stools. And then Yi Ming kept them covered in plastic. It was such an interesting little runner watching them sort of fight-not fight about that. The fact that Yi Ming had the same problems with Ting Ting that she had with her ex-husband really sort of drove home the point that it wasn't just about finally coming out and being open and being herself. It was also about learning to be a person in a relationship with somebody else and let go of some things and learn to compromise on things and learn to recognize when somebody else needs space inside the relationship.

Ben

I'm still laughing at the whole, “Well we agreed that we wouldn't do things we don't like anymore. So I'm not gonna wash the dishes.” [everyone laughs]

NiNi 

I was a big fan of that moment.

Ben 

I can still hear her screaming Zhong Ting Ting after her.

I want, Twig, for you to talk a little bit about our romantic rival. WThis is honestly the part of the show that I really wanted to get a queer woman's commentary on because this feels like the kind of moment that does not work as well in male-male romance.

Twig 

First of all, Jia Xin was so hot. [Ben and Twig laugh] She came in swaggering with her guitar and her beautiful voice and her appreciation for Ting Ting's music and she's so hot. Sorry, words. Sorry I can't be rational about this, she was incredibly hot. 

NiNi 

Speak your truth, Twig, speak your truth.

Twig 

And I think it was important for the narrative that we be shown that Ting Ting had viable other choices because at that point in the story it really kind of felt like Ting Ting was clinging to a version of Yi Ming that she had in her head from when they were in high school, even though they'd already come together and come apart once before in their 20s, and Ting Ting was wrestling with that question, too. Like, do I still actually want to be with this person? And so Jia Xin coming in and representing who Ting Ting on paper might think she wanted was critical for Ting Ting realizing that no, I don't want the extremely hot lesbian who will go on the road with me and make music with me and have jam sessions and make eyes across the guitars. She plays me the song that she wrote about me, my god. [NiNi and Twig laugh]

NiNi 

Focus Twig, focus.

Twig

What was I saying? I mean like honestly shunning I'll get on your motorcycle and you can sing to me whenever you want.

But Ting Ting needed to have that experience to realize that what she had with Yi Ming was actually worth fighting for. I thought it was really effective use of a rival.

NiNi 

I'm really now questioning why Ting Ting went back to Yi Ming, but also you make some valid points.

Twig 

A lot of people had bad thoughts. But yeah, and I thought that was one of the things.

Ben 

The answer is always in the food. 

Twig 

Mmm, yes, that's right. That is correct.

Ben

When Ting Ting was going through a difficult place and they needed to bring food for support, Yi Ming was able to make food. Jia Xin was only able to buy it. That's it.

NiNi 

And this, ladies and gentlemen, is why he is the expert.

Ben 

But it's great. Jia Xin has like a stern confrontation with both of them because she's mad. She's trying to smash and both of these lesbians are getting on her fucking nerves.

Twig 

[laughs] I'm always compelled by the stories where people who are filling each other's weak spots and make each other better people find a way to get over the things that make it hard for them to be together and build something real, as opposed to the people who are very similar coming together. So for me, I didn't have the problem that I know some people in the audience might have had where Jia Xin seemed like the better choice, because Ting Ting wasn't driven in the same way by that relationship that she was with Yi Ming. It was a way to stagnate.

Ben 

And also two artists getting together, that's not good. It's not gonna work.

Twig 

My god, there's no way that would end well. The sex would be great and then everything would fall apart!

Ben 

I agree with that part. While she and Yi Ming were not together, and especially when they were fighting, they definitely should have fucked. At least twice.

Twig 

Yes.

NiNi 

I wasn't entirely certain that they didn't.

Ben 

They didn't. Ting Ting is way too loyal to the version of herself she's trying to be for Yi Ming. There's a kid she's trying to be dedicated to. She ain't fucking other women right now.

NiNi 

Sigh.

Twig 

That's okay, that's what AO3 is for.

45:22 - Fragrance of the First Flower: Life Life-ing Is Good Drama!

Ben 

Let's talk about the ex-husband. They did a lot of work in the last episode to show that this guy had done some growing on his own and I actually really respected the way they wrote his coming around to the situation, where it wasn't perfect but it was believable in a way that you could relax about.

Twig 

Yeah. The way that it all comes together was really satisfying for me because the work that Yi Ming does on her relationship with Ting Ting is what makes her able to have a better relationship with Ren Xiu. I thought that the show did a really good job of making that all work together, that Yi Ming realizing the way she needs to approach relationships was what allowed her and her ex-husband Ren Xiu to come to a place where you could imagine them having an amicable co-parenting future together in a way that didn't seem possible a few episodes into the second season. 

Obviously Ren Xiu also had to meet her halfway on that, and the show did a good job of making it believable that he was able to get to that place, too. And they were able to start to build something with Ren Xiu and Ting Ting. They were bonding a little over putting up a tent together and it was really sweet actually. They're never gonna be besties, but they were able to share a beer and that felt right.

NiNi 

I also thought it was funny that Ren Xiu tells Ting Ting he's also a guitarist. So I'm like, oh, Yi Ming has a type. It was fun and interesting. I liked the fact that Yi Ming had to get rid of all these compartments that she'd put up in her life, because her life is so compartmentalized. She's so busy trying to keep all the different parts of her life separate. And it's only breaking down those compartments and opening up her life to the people in it, like all the parts of her life, the people in her life that allows her to unclench basically and start to pull her life together into some kind of harmony.

Ben 

That's the part about this series that I liked the most. This is a show about two mediocre people trying to make a relationship work between them. Both of them are dissatisfied with the state of their lives. Ting Ting wants to be more of a more successful musician than she is. Yi Ming wants to be more than the housewife she's settled for being. And it's interesting watching these two's lives evolve over the pursuit of the things that are important to them and each other.

Yi Ming takes a job, gets clocked by her boss who decides that this little budding lesbian needs a friend. I'm gonna force her to be my friend through the power of astrology. I really liked the building complexity of creating a friend relationship with her boss, having to let Ren Xiu know that she was actually serious about Ting Ting, this is going to be a thing, not sacrificing her role as a parent, but also making it clear that she is not the sole parent for their son anymore. 

That's what I want out of my dramas! I want the drama to come from the people and the pursuit of the things that are important to them and be able to understand why these things are important to them.

Twig

Like, Ting Ting being a musician is not just set dressing, it's a part of who she is, part of her struggle, and the realities of being a struggling musician inform and affect her relationship. 

Ben 

Exactly.

NiNi 

And also affect her proposal. I just love that this show also features a double proposal–

Twig 

Double proposal is my favorite thing.

Ben 

Oh my god. We won, gays.

NiNi

–because that is the gayest thing. 

Twig 

I love a double proposal. The gayest of tropes, my favorite thing.

NiNi 

Man, and the fact that like Ting Ting let the band talk her into doing this big grand gesture version of it and she's halfway through it and she's like fuck no, not this. 

Twig 

[laughs] Abort! Abort!

NiNi

She literally in the middle of singing, mid-line she's like no. It was delightful.

I loved it so much. But I liked that the way that it ended the double proposal back at their old high school just the two of them felt like them. Like she let go of the idea of what it should be, which was one of the things that she was struggling with the entire time in the relationship and just allowed it to be what it was.

Ben 

Twig and I legit, we walked into this show, back to back trying to cover each other over this one. We were not sure going into this one and it was surprising how consistent the second season felt. They took 12 25-minute episodes and it didn't feel like they were spinning in circles or wasting our time. Like I really felt like there were good ideas that the show really wanted to explore. Even down to Yi Ming failing to take Ting Ting on a date she wanted to go on, ruining it with the awkward energy around it.

Twig 

And they got to play volleyball again!

Ben

We did get to see them play volleyball together again.

NiNi 

I would just like to point out that the only reason Ting Ting started playing volleyball is that she saw Yi Ming playing and she literally had a complete lesbian breakdown and was absolutely like, I need to be where she is at all times!

Twig 

Most realistic reason why anyone plays sports.

Ben

As she should. Exactly.

NiNi 

I know we talked about this as well when we talked about The Eighth Sense, how that little country twink was like, I'm gonna go join the surfing club. Can I swim? No.

Ben 

I'm gonna drown for some dick. I understand you, country twink. Man, I love that country twink. I haven't thought about him all week.

NiNi 

Like the beginning of all this is literally her staring open-mouthed as Yi Ming played volleyball. [laughs] Love it.

Twig 

Whomst among us has not? The thing that I loved about ending the show on the proposal was that it was such a great bookend for the start of the show. The wedding that Yi Ming and Ting Ting meet again at is next to a lesbian wedding. It was a good moment for Yi Ming to see two women getting married is just a thing that's happening. It sort of set her up to have her first reawakening in this third chance romance. 

Ben 

I like that before we got to those proposals, we had them taking a walk in the park, having a frank conversation about what marriage means to both of them. 

Twig 

Yes.

Ben

Yi Ming does not have a high estimation of marriage after her whole experience with Ren Xiu. So I really like that we didn't go into a double proposal without them voicing their doubts about it and also why it's important.

NiNi 

Yi Ming seeing this lesbian wedding right next to the wedding she's at and it being normalized is part of what allows her to let herself get into something with Ting Ting. It's sort of the catalyst for her reconnecting with Ting Ting and finally deciding to leave her husband and all of that. I think that if it hadn't been for this wedding and the fact that these two women were marrying each other to be seen as quote unquote normal, I don't know that Yi Ming would have gotten there otherwise.

Twig 

Agreed. And that's why I love that the series ends with them getting married and presumably being that for some other closeted lesbian. We can keep the cycle going.

NiNi

Love it!

52:49 - Fragrance of the First Flower: Final Thoughts and Ratings

NiNi

All right, so anything else that we want to mention about this before we get into the ratings?

Ben 

We did mention the band, right? And how incredible the Ting Ting friendship with them is.

NiNi 

It's delightful. They're fantastic. They know her. They know her type. They know her business. Their entire relationship is utterly delightful.

Twig 

We didn't talk about it much, but they're fantastic. I don’t know if we want to talk at all about the depiction of autism in the son.

NiNi 

I feel like what the show was trying to do there was make it explicable why Yi Ming was wound so tight about the son, why she was so protective of him into the point of maybe keeping him away from Ting Ting to an extent, because she doesn't know how Ting Ting is going to respond to her son, how her son is going to respond to Ting Ting. She's worried about how that's going to go. She doesn't see Ting Ting doing the work in the background. Ting Ting wants to figure this out together and she's sort of holding it so closely to herself because of this additional consideration that she asked of me because of her son being on the spectrum. To me, that's what the show sort of used it for more than having the ASD discussion.

Twig

It was the awareness of his need for schedule and predictable patterns. That was a realistic need that if she didn't meet, there would be consequences for him and in his behavior, so both he would be uncomfortable and he would make the rest of them uncomfortable by reacting. It did have practical implications that she had to seriously consider. 

My friend has a son who is autistic and nonverbal and I've seen her go through this exact consideration of where am I allowed to be selfish and where is it just unfair of me to put myself first when that puts my child either at risk or or makes things difficult for him? It's a struggle that all parents have, but when your kid is neurodivergent, it adds a layer of where the responsibility lies that they have to struggle with. I appreciated that that was a very real thing for her to grapple with, it wasn't just set dressing, it was used intentionally in the story to add to what she had to wrestle with in terms of the decision she was making about her life.

NiNi 

Okay, so ratings. Let's start with you, Ben. How did you rate this one?

Ben 

9, it's a solid show.

It's a solid 9 for me. I think it's for most people. I don't think it's for everyone.

NiNi 

Twig?

Twig 

Yeah, I gave it an 8.5 for very similar reasons. It's not a perfect show, but it does so many things really well. There is definitely some hangover of years of being like, have a season one. It was so close to being so great and then frustrating and so I'm still not over that frustration.

There are moments where the show could be a little tighter, could be a little less cheesy. It's mostly really great. It's not perfect, but it's so charming that in my heart, it's higher.

NiNi 

I give it a 9. I think it is a solid show, especially when it's viewed all together without the split in the middle. I agree that there were a couple of little hanging chads, so to speak. But overall, it's a solid show. It's well done. It's well thought through. It's very intentional, so 8.5, 9 that means it's gonna be a 9 from The Conversation. Great little show. 

Ben 

It's on GagaOOLala. Go support Gaga and watch their goddamn shows.

NiNi

As usual, we have not been paid by Gaga. I mean, if you guys want to. But we're always going to plug it. It's a great platform.

Twig

Can I say one last thing about the show? I just feel like we didn't say it. The show is really pretty.

Ben 

It really is. I think we really undersold that component. It's genuinely a very relaxing, very attractive show to watch.

Twig 

Yeah, I always feel like I need to call it out. I appreciate it. Production value is huzzah!

57:04 - Outro: Lesbians!

Ben 

So let's talk final commentary on lesbian life drama in the era of GL schlock we're getting right now. [NiNi and Ben laugh] GL is kind of going through the doldrums. For you, who's a long time queer cinephile who's been on the front end of the genre since the nineties, where are you sitting with GL and lesbian life dramas right now on our way out of this episode?

Twig 

I'm never gonna say that I'm unhappy that we have more content. My hope is that the fact that we're getting GL from more and larger production companies will make people realize that it exists. A lot of what's being made right now is falling into the same pattern of a few tried and tested authors getting adapted over and over. 

NiNi 

*COUGH* CHAO PLANOY.

Twig 

If you're not a fan of those tropes, then you're kind of shit out of luck.

I think the genre is still trying to figure out how GL is going to make money because the fervor for the ships has a different flavor to it than the BL ships. 

The other thing is honestly it feels like people are still not really convinced that it's popular even though every time one comes out, even if it's mediocre, it gets a million views. How big does the show need to get to prove that there's an audience there? The lesbian enjoyers are still out here trying to shout whenever something comes because they're so afraid it's gonna stop coming. 

So in that sense it's kind of nice to have enough being produced that it feels like we can be a little choosy as opposed to just have be happy that we're getting anything at all. But it really does feel like most of what's being made is like, make it fast, make it cheap, hit the tropes that people seem to think is necessary for GL, but like really isn't and I wish they'd stop. We don't need a big lie. We don't need amnesia in every show. We really don't.

NiNi 

She went there! So I guess the long and short of it is more of this.

Ben 

We deserve better. We deserve way better.

Twig 

Yeah. And so, when there are good shows, I feel really strongly about everyone going to watch them, please, because we need to drown out the other stuff. We need to show people that narrative and strong characterization and character-driven stories are also popular, because I want more of them.

NiNi 

More lesbian life drama, less Chaser Game W. Yes, I went there.

Ben 

Oh man, that's getting a second season!

Twig

We’re getting a season 2!

NiNi 

Chaser Game W already had a season 2.

Ben 

Wait, did that already happen?

NiNi 

Yes it did. 

Twig 

My god, it did.

NiNi

And it was terrible, I heard. Because I did not watch it.

Twig

Yeah, no, it was bad. I can't believe I said that and I've seen the season.

NiNi 

That tells you everything that you need to know.

Twig 

It really does.

Ben 

All we do is lose sometimes, I tell you! [Everyone laughs]

Twig 

We're also getting BL Main season 2, so know.

NiNi 

I mean, sometimes we win, sometimes we lose. Any final words, Ben?

Ben 

I am glad that despite how dry QL feels right now, we were able to have a lovely discussion about two projects with one of our friends that focused on stories about women. Because as Twig pointed out, despite how many women are enjoying the genre, not a lot of stories about them are being made.

NiNi 

That is going to wrap us up on, I'm calling it Scent of A Woman. Ben has told me that we are not calling it that. 

Ben 

We sure aren't.

NiNi

We will see who wins. [laughs] 

We out. Say bye to the people, Twig.

Twig 

Bye!

NiNi 

Say bye to the people, Ben.

Ben

Peace!

[twig-tea]

all i can say is... i wish only to give the biggest hugs to the author and webtoon writing team of the most beautiful khun of siam 🥲😥😭

disclaimer: translations may contain minor inaccuracies, i'm open to all edit comments and suggestions

The following is translation of the tweets from Khun Benz - the webtoon author/creator

"The issue with THACCA is that if there weren't this funding, the final work might have been even worse. The government has already given the most support, the question is whether the people (re: Change 2561) can produce it to be worthy of the capital that was given."

"We have been frustrated about the series for a whole year. We were mocked by fans of that production company periodically. When the series aired, it was like letting out a ghost so that the audience could see. (translator's note: "letting a ghost out for people to see" means to expose or reveal something hidden, often unpleasant or a bad situation, the english equivalent might be "letting the skeletons out of the closet"?)"

"In truth, the (webtoon) writing team had already commented on the parts that were problematic and raised issues, and even criticized the script that destroyed the image of the LGBTQ+ community, made the actors look bad and completely destroyed the core of the original [story]. But [we] received a reply back that [us], the writing team does not understand the fun of a genre like a series, and they still insist on doing it their way."

Khun Benz also review EP 1 here as objectively as possible from the standpoint of a script writer and not author of the webtoon

The following is translation of the tweets from Khun Ice - webtoon assistant to the author.

"I saw the series and no one dares to review it because they'll get attacked. My face is thick enough to represent both sides to talk and exchange views freely. You can curse. Go ahead and curse me, but after cursing, try to figure out if the root cause comes from the producers looking down on the audience, shall we?"

"We have never attacked the actors or the production team. The only thing we have questioned from the beginning is the producers. Even when we offered to help, they didn't listen. We offered to give feedback on the original script, but they weren't interested. We helped send data and were willing to adjust some parts of the script to still be able to film while keeping the fun, but not to the point of looking down on the audience."

"The only thing the producers said was to give the actors a chance. Which, of course, we can definitely give. There are many techniques to make an actor become a character. But if the problem lies with the core of the story or the script, the one thing we asked for was not to look down on your consumers. But what they asked back was, 'if anything happens, let's take responsibility together'."

"We were willing to be silent for the producers for a very long time, even about your way of thinking, until you came back and subtly criticized/mocked/snidely remarked (แซะ) us in an interview before the series premiere (translator's note: most likely referring to the itmbc documentary). The purpose of our suggestions and advice was so that the final outcome would turn out well, and both sides could support each other. The viewers would get a fun series to watch. The producers are adults in name only. You hold a grudge just because what we said wasn't to your liking."

[twig-tea]

I'M THE MOST BEAUTIFUL COUNT PILOT + CASTING BACKLASH - AS EXPLAINED BY A THAI WEBTOON NOVEL FAN

Disclaimer: Translations may contain minor inaccuracies, I'm always open to suggestions and corrections. These clips and comments are from April 2024, after the ITMBC pilot was released. I'm just translating these to give international fans more context into the disappointment and heavy backlash webtoon novel fans has against this specific production. After this backlash, Change2561 issued that it will take into consideration the feedbacks given by fans and the end-result is what we are seeing on-air. The extent of constructive criticism Change2561 has accepted and improved upon since the pilot is debatable but this post does NOT wish to elaborate on that matter.

This post is only to give context on how generally disappointed/most Thai webtoon fans initially feel about the casting of Kosol and Chaichet, the comedy direction that Change2561 decided for this adaptation -> a huge reason why Change2561's adaptation of ITMBC is a work currently not being well-received by local BL audience as well as the webtoon assistant writer showing their disappointment in a scathing live reaction thread review of the first episode (allegedly, the author/writing team did get a chance to feedback on the problematic parts of the script but their feedbacks were dismissed by Change2561 - not translating this because this one is a whole other discussion but you can take a look for yourself how bad the situation is between the creator vs change2561).

Transcript of what OP says

Came back there from the clip reacting to the casting of 'I'm The Most Beautiful Khun Of Siam" series. Y'all gotta agree with me the casting of Kosol isn't alright at all. I've already tried to stay quiet on this matter as much as possible because what if in the future they sponsor me to promote this series. But for now, my mouth is really itching to talk about this so please allow me to take off my "influencer" brand for a minute here. There is a very interesting comment that said "Some comments here are so heavy/insulting Give them a chance first." And I'm the person who has read all the comments in that clip. There were just about 300 comments and I read them all. And I feel like no one in there has actually insultingly criticised the actor who played Kosol. To be honest, most of them don't even mention the name of this actor. As for me, I don't find these comments insulting/heavy at all. They're just saying that the features of the character do not match [with the actor], not even saying that he has bad acting or anything like that. What I'm about to say is the actual heavy critcism. Okay, let's start.

So actually, Thai BL novel fans or Thai sao y, that you people so often claim to be brainless, have been hurt so many times before when the adaptations don't match with the source material. This story isn't the first one, because before that there was already Khem Jira Tong Rot (translator note: OP is referring to Spirit Reborn which was a scrapped pilot of Khem Jira handled by another production company, which got so much backlash that they scrapped the entire thing before the rights to KhemJira ended up in DMD with KengNamping) that was already not okay at all. And even before that there was 2Moons and older than that we have Love Sick. Sometimes, in the cast of the BL series there will be issues of not fitting with the look of the characters, or stiff acting, or bad acting... But even then, this group of BL novel fans have given many chances to many actors in many different series, many times already. To the point where the producers [of these BL series] often feel like... "This group of fans is so easy to be satisfied, they just want to see two guys kissing each other." "So we can just put whoever we want to act in these roles." "We can do the selll the koojin (branded pairing) however we want." "We can do whatever we want, because the novel is popular anyways. Either ways fans of the novels will have to watch it anyways." "They are so generous, they will give the actors a chance." So with this series, please allow me to be a little evil. So producers might realise that they can't keep doing this to BL novels anymore. Actually, for the actor playing the role of Kosol, there might be a lot of scripts adapted from BL novels that will suit your character, but it's just not this one.

Why don't we look at it from another angle, that perhaps this actor could have taken the opportunity of another actor who's more suitable for this role. Why don't the producers (translator's note: OP uses the term "camp" which means the production house/company or in this case is Change2561 but for the rest of this translation, I'm just gonna use "the producers" for ease of understanding) give the opportunity to actors who are more fitted for this role, let them play in this role. Or find another story that more suited for this actor instead so that the actor can have an even more breakout performance with that role.

To be honest, the producers are pretty cruel to him. When trying to shove him into a role that when you look at him, you know he's not right for it. This isn't just a [paperback] novel. It is a webtoon novel where you could see the images. You could see the personality, the costumes, the hairstyling and everything. And yet, they still chose someone who's not suitable.

In the past, there are already many cases you can see where if you adapt a novel and you choose actors that don't fit the characters, you're definitely gonna get cursed at. But does the producers know that? They DO but they don't care. They decide to make their own actors take the criticisms from fans of the source material instead. After that, the producers will play victim like "Oh, just open your heart and give these actors a chance."

Here they go again with that "give our actors a chance". Personally for me, if you love your actors, you shouldn't be saying this. Because that [reasoning] line indirectly harms your own actors. It sounds like you're begging for pity, for mercy... like "Yes. We know our children isn't suitable with this character and their acting capability is still limited, cannot get the audience into the story that much. But please give them a chance." "Give them a chance to make money from the BL audience please."

If you wanted to sell this koojin or if you wanted to make a series for this koojin, you could just write a new original script for them, frankly speaking. That would have been much better for him, instead of making him the target of criticism like this. Even when nobody is criticising him, they're all criticising the producers.

Before that, there were already cases of when actors' look may not match with characters but the end result is still good, why? Because they act well. Even if it's not like groundbreaking acting but immersive enough for the audience to feel that hmm if this is someone who plays Kosol, it might be alright because in any case there are still traces of Kosol here and there. But we already have fitting images, a [pilot] teaser that is 6:42 minutes, yet here I still can't feel that this guy is Kosol, to put it basically.

It's exactly the opposite of the guy that plays Woradej. From just 10 seconds of him on that palanquin and I can already tell that bitch (affectionate) is exactly Woradej. From the way that his legs are crossed, the way he waves at his fans, the way he smiles... etc That is exactly Woradej.

And in my previous clip, there's another interesting comment saying that "If we change actors now, it's probably not possible anymore because the two lead actors are already a koojin with each other. It's weird to change them now." My dear, what planet are you from? Changing actors in the midst of production is such a common occurence in lakorn/television/film industry. Good actors are always ready to step away from their comfort zones so that they can show case their acting capabilities. And of course, a good producer is one that should listen to the feedbacks of the majority of fans. You shouldn't do what isn't good and what you could fix, you should fix quickly. Actually the art direction is fine, but the characterisations are really not okay. You didn't even put the double tiger tattoo in there (translator note: Kosol has tiger tattoos on his back which weren't seen in the pilot, I believe he has them in the series now but I haven't seen them clearly).

On more thing is the character of Chaichet. Chaichet is a kid. In the webtoon, he's still a child. But in the pilot, he looks so grown already. The fact that Chaichet is a kid is very essential to the story. Because this kid serves as a puppet ruler, like Thaksin of the Thai people. Whatever is not good, whatever goes wrong they can blame the [puppet] king. Because our king is too young, our young king isn't capable of ruling. It has to be a role like that. But if it's the actor we saw in the pilot, he's way too grown and in that era if you're that grown, people already consider you to be an adult.

And if the production only do well in terms of setting this that but doesn't do well in terms of the characters, I'm also secretly afraid whether Mumu (Kosol's tiger) will end up as just an orange cat. Because no matter how much I love cats, but if you turn a tiger into a cat, I will still curse you out. Mumu is probably even harder to pull off than Kosol because of how to make him as closest to the source material as possible. They could just cut him off completely, or if they do bring in a real tiger that might also be dangerous for the actors. And if they use CGI, then it has to be super smooth and not the kind that's so obviously fake.

Just responding in advance to the people who are gonna comment things like: "If you don't like, then don't watch. Turn it off." Oh, you don't need to challenge us. If there's a black ocean, if the viewer turnout is low, while the novel is so popular, the producers are not gonna blame themselves, they are gonna blame the actors for not having good enough acting, not attracting audience. Next year, if your children don't have a series, then don't blame us.

Hi everyone, this is my third clip on this matter already. When is this gonna end? I keep wondering why Woradej is the only character with a suitable actor. It turns out that the producers didn't have the intention of adapting this webtoon novel. But they want to push this one actor of theirs so they had a team meeting to decide on which hot and popular novel can be used to support this one actor. And someone suggested this popular webtoon that's much discussed by everyone, which might fit with the character of this one actor. That only is enough to explain for me why Woradej is the only character that ended up with the most suitable actor in the role, because they produced this series for Woradej only, for the person who plays Woradej.

Actually, the producers might not even know this webtoon novel that well, it's just that they're given a suggestion of a novel that matches completely with the actor that they would like to push. Let me debate that for a bit, because in a clip that was released, that producer said the role of Woradej is created especially for this actor. I have to admit that this actor can play this role very well. But it cannot just be one actor that plays his role well. The webtoon has its own value, it has its own fanbase. It wasn't created to support another person. It has its own self-values. In a latest update, the webtoon artist has also retweeted a tweet saying that "once an author has sold their own right, then they have no more say [in the adaptation]" because it's like they've already sold their work away. So the only thing a writer can do is write as best as they can and for the rest, you can only pray. If the artist is retweeting things like this, y'all know that the artist themselves is probably not alright with it.

Here are translations for a Thai constructive criticism comment with 2.4K likes under the ITMBC pilot.

1. Have [the producers] thoroughly researched the story's content before thinking about adapting it? The main focus of the story later on is the king, societal satire, and the power struggle for the throne. The scope of the story is huge, possibly on par with or even larger than Buppae Sanniwas (Love Destiny). If you only read the first few chapters, you might think it's a comedy, but if you read and analyze it more deeply, you'll know that it's a serious and satirical story.

2. All the characters influence the story. It’s not like you can pick just any actor or pairing to play in this. Why does Kosol have to be tall, tanned, not conforming to beauty standards, and have a fierce, cruel, villain-like face? Because the character needs to prove himself (translator's note: that you shouldn't judge a person by their appearance). Then there's the theme of same-sex love being scorned, imprisoned, sent to penal servitude, and being hated by society. That's why he has to use fear, absolute power, and a fierce face that makes everyone who looks at him bow their heads in terror.

Prince Chaichet (Kosol's younger brother) is also a very important character. For example, whenever the two brothers argue, Woradej has to step in to mediate between them. Moreover, Chaichet should definitely be younger than [in the pilot] because he has to be a puppet ruler for others and act like an innocent, naive, child king who doesn't know anything. The power struggle in the story is incredibly fierce.

3. From the pilot, it's clear that the producers didn't care about the content or have a thorough analysis of the characters. Every character's action has a reason and its own psychological obstacles, but in here you've changed it as if you didn't put your heart into the project at all.

For those who say, "It's just a pilot, why be so serious?" Don't you think that when you don't put your heart and soul into a work and don't pour your all into a project, it's like you're looking down on the audience, the readers, and disrespecting the artist (author)? Do you know how much the artist invested in this work? Yet you're taking their amazing work and ruining it. As someone who has followed the artist for many years, my heart truly aches for them. I've witnessed their hard work and seen them overcome countless obstacles to get to the day their work shines. But in the end, you came along and ruined their masterpiece.

4. This story has helped international readers appreciate Thai culture and become interested in Thai comics. If you do it well, if you can turn it into a big project, it could be a true soft power project. Therefore, you need to cast capable actors, and the storyline, script, and costumes all require dedication and meticulousness.

5. This story doesn't focus on the male characters' love to that extent. It's actually a political story where the protagonist is gay and wants to be accepted by others. It's not suitable to become a business investment to sell a koojin. It demands quality. But judging from the pilot, it's as if a little person is trying to do a gigantic, overwhelming task.

In short, if you can't do it, if you can't achieve the things mentioned above, then I advise you not to continue, because it will hurt both the readers and the artist (author). But if you can make adjustments and pay more attention to the script, analyzing the characters more thoroughly than this, there's still a chance. (However, if you want to focus on the koojin and promote your actors, I'd recommend you find another script. It's not that the actors are bad—they're very good—but they just aren't suitable for this content.)

This is my opinion, as a fan of this novel webtoon and as a fan of the artist.

MORE CRITICISMS UNDER CUT WITH HUGE !!!!!! SPOILERS !!!!!!!! OF THE STORY. PROCEED WITH CAUTION!

Some other constructive criticism points made by Thai fans also under the comments

1. Banjong only sees Woradej as a friend, and is even the person who will eventually kill Woradej.

2. Woradej's servant has no romantic feelings for his master, but why are the producers are trying to force this relationship.

3. The scene with Chaichet made me so furious. Chaichet would never push Woradej into a situation to die like that. Why did you create this scene? Besides, he's just a child of about 10 years old, so why are you making it seem like he's part of Woradej's harem? Is this why you chose an older actor for this role? To sell the story of a protagonist male lead with his harem?

4. (Still on the point of the characterisation of Kosol)

The most infuriating thing here is [the producers] trying to turn all four of these people into Woradej's harem, when three out of four are not gay and have no romantic relationship with Woradej at all. I want the producers to know that it's not just Thai readers complaining and criticizing, but fans of the webtoon in China and Indonesia are also complaining a lot. I'll give credit to the producers for casting the main character Woradej very well, but even so, one person can't carry the whole series.

source: 1, 2, both clips are compiled and vietsub by LBXRCST, critiqueing comments under the ITMBC Pilot also compiled by LBXRCST

final personal note: i'm also currently watching the series and i'm enjoying it for what it is but i also think it's equally important for international fans to understand why many thai webtoon novel fans wouldn't (not to generalise because thai fans are not a monolith and surely there are thai viewers who are currently enjoying this series) watch this series and clear up some kind of rumors going around that people are boycotting this series because it has a femme mc?

[twig-tea]

Re: i'm the most beautiful count boycott.

Yo long time no see bitches (i just started college again for the second time) Ya'll on here and some internerds all over the internet start to get on my nerves again. the amzing @arminthada already compiled a lot of Thai fan's response and the writing team behind the webcomic feeling on the matter. and i want to say they was so sweet and thoughtful in their engagement with ya'll, BUT SADLY this month had been a lot for Thai people (we almost/still maybe has a war and there were a mass shoting) and i'm at my limit to be nice to you non Thai Jabronies who speaks with so much confidant on Thai topics that ya'll has no idea what ya'll talking about.

NO! THAI PEOPLE AREN'T BOYCOTTING THIS SHOW BECAUSE THE MAIN LEAD IS FEMME.

We are boycotting this first because of the colorism. And unlike you fuckers I'm as a Thai Chinese person with paler skin tone than the average Thais not gonna speak much on this because i haven't faced any of the issues that people with darker skin in Thailand been facing. but here the thing it not just the skin tone of the actor but also east asian beauty standards that people are complaining about the casting choice of Ping. and here, here the motherfucking thing people seems to be missing the point. The biggest reason why people are boycotting this show is because they fucks with the Story that has so much potential to do good within Thai society, the story of the webcomic is extreamly political. it satire the history that had been used and continued to be uses to justified so many shitty things in Thai society.

So me a Thai person who can't speak on certain topics without fear of being throw in jail can be upset and annoyed by how this story in the right hand could had been but ended up with a watered down harem BL romance stupid nonsense with awful production, awful casting and awful dialogue. And i can be more upset for the author and writing team with how much dumb ass fans of and change2561 itself treated them. this company has no respect for Thai arts, no respect for queer thai people and abosolutely has no respect for Thai audiences. SHIT IS STILL BAD HERE and to see an importent art being butcher in the name of BL capitalism is fucking hurt.

And look like i have to say this every year but

YOU DON'T LIVE HERE, YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT THAI PEOPLE HAS BEEN LIVING UNDER AND JUST CUZ YOU WATCH SOME THAI BLS DON'T GIVE YOU THE RIGHT TO OPEN YOUR MOUTHS ON WHY OR WHY NOT THAI PEOPLE ARE DOING OR FEELING.

SHUT THE FUCK UP AND ENJOY YOUR STUPID SHOW IN YOUR FUCKING CORNER. THERE NO NEED TO COME BOTHER US!

[twig-tea]

Oppan special episode trailer

That Oppan returns with a special episode! Makoto: My guardian deity... The storyteller is none other than the beloved family dog, Carlos! Carlos: Hello, I'm the master of this house. Makoto: I'll catch the culprit that broke the tanuki. Please believe in Carlos's nose and my legs. Carlos by his side, Makoto hunts for the culprit that broke the guardian deity of the Okita family. In the midst of all that, he encounters a rigid, narrow-minded father just like his former self. New guy: There's no way a working family man can handle taking care of a pet. Makoto's best friend Daichi also encounters new problems!? Madoka: The aquarium back home is short-staffed. Daichi: So you're going to Kyuushuu...? Can a Shouwa-era old man, now updated with Reiwa-era values, really solve everyone's problems? Carlos: A walk. A walk. A walk.

The special is scheduled to air on June 28. Subs will be made available on my blog.

[twig-tea]

"The ocean is for contemplating things bigger than we are, and helping us to feel humble. And the beach is a place for raw honesty." - @twig-tea

For @twig-tea 💙

[twig-tea]

THE J-BL DROUGHT IS OVER!

The kings are back june 13th with SIX episodes!

They might be in a lovey-dovey state, but in the sequel, there is a “thorny and painful road” that seems set to test their love…

The first season is available on gaga and I cannot recommend it enough!

[twig-tea]

Ben’s Big BL Blurb 7: BL Is Over Its Piners

It’s been quite a while since I wrote one of these. I’ve been watching a lot less, but I wanted to jump back in and meditate on the state of pining in BL, and also comment on how things haven’t felt this sparse in BL since maybe 2019 for me. 

I’ve noticed in some of the shows I’ll discuss below that piners are no longer universally lauded for the purity or sanctity of their one-sided crushes or obsessions, and instead have been confronted or challenged by the narrative. This is a fascinating (and honestly necessarily) evolution for the genre. Let’s get into it, in no particular order…starting with the worst.

Something’s Not Right is Appropriately Named

Adapted from the same source material as Blueming (2022), this show follows stressed piner Do Ba Woo and his crush on his childhood friend Ji Hoon. Ba Woo is at his wit’s end with the vivacious Ji Hoon and wants to end their friendship. Ji Hoon, responding as any man would to their best friend suddenly wanting to sever ties, ignores this and wonders what might be wrong. 

Meanwhile, interloper Jung Ha Min discovers Ba Woo’s diary and misunderstands it as a novel. He pesters Ba Woo into finishing the novel so he can use it for a webtoon, and encourages Ba Woo to ask Ji Hoon out for a week. When Ji Hoon surprisingly agrees, Ba Woo goes on to torment this confused man for a week with hot and cold behavior, rejecting Ji Hoon’s own confessions, and facing no realization about his own role in his misery before the story retcons the drama by saying Ji Hoon was withholding his own feelings the whole time.

Final Verdict: 4, Not Recommended. Friends, this show is a mess that also apparently erased its original supporting cast (@lurkingshan and @ahxiang). It fails to understand that Ba Woo is the problem here in that he’s constantly confusing Ji Hoon and treating him cruelly. It fails as a romance for me because I didn’t even want the guys to be friends by the end, and spent most of the show baffled by the apparent determination to make Ba Woo vibe with Ha Min. I also deeply-resent the show retconning Ji Hoon in the final episode by having him have also been nursing an older crush. At no point does Ba Woo grow from any of the events he’s encountered to reckon with the fact that he’s the one causing all of their problems. This was an unusually frustrating viewing experience that I do not recommend. 

While I do think this show wanted to tackle the intensity of unrequited feelings, I don’t think it did right by Ji Hoon at all. This show completely misses the mark on saying or doing anything interesting with one-sided pining and its impacts on both and related parties. Ba Woo was a rude, misanthropic friend, and this show was more concerned with Jung Ha Min developing his own unrequited crush than the believability of the romantic connection between its leads. ONE CHOP.

Business as Usual Should Have Remembered that Our Dating Sim Exists

I’ve been thinking about how elegantly Our Dating Sim incorporated the game development work into the second chance romance after finishing Business as Usual. Business worsens the conflict by having the guys be actively dating and FUCKING as our mad piner, Kim Min Joon, severs ties with Jin Hwan over a misunderstanding. Min Joon essentially stagnates for  eight years before Jin Hwan joins the same company. Jin Hwan is clearly still interested in Min Joon, and we eventually learn that Min Joon badly misunderstood a call he overheard and ghosted his boyfriend for no valid reason. 

My primary difficulty with this show is that it doesn’t want to spend time on the work Min Joon needs to do to earn its wedding epilogue. We recently finished the Theory of Love Romcom Rewatch, and this is something I’ve been thinking about a lot in the wake of dealing with Third again (probably helped by the uncanny resemblance between Chae Jong Hyeok and Gun Atthaphan). Compare this to Our Dating Sim, in which Lee Wan came face-to-face with the separation anxiety Shin Ki Tae developed after being ghosted, Min Joon mostly faces one tough conversation with a mutual friend that inspires Min Joon to do a dramatic run to the airport to say that, despite their differences, he wants to commit. I didn’t buy it.

Final Verdict: 5, Rewatch Our Dating Sim instead. I will grant this show that it did seem to understand that Min Joon was the major problem here, but it doesn’t know what he needs to do to make things right between them. I also want to give this show credit for letting the men have sex even though they hadn’t solved all of the problems between them. However, they failed to use their dating advice book conceit to help with the arc of the relationship at all, nor did they address the way Min Joon’s avoidant behavior led to him also being a bad supervisor. I generally struggle with second chance romances like this where the wrong party doesn’t go on a growth arc and face the reality that they hurt the person they loved. TWO CHOPS.

Gelboys Finally Gave Me Another Thai BL Built Around Internal Drama

I’ve been sitting on what I want to say about Gelboys for quite a while now due to my frustrations with the fast happy ending for both couples. While I don’t think that was wholly earned, I do want to praise this show for making the boys’ affection/obsession with each other the primary source of drama and driver of the narrative. Too often, I find that Thai BL relies on external sources of tension or romantic obstacles rather than face the fundamental personality issues that make the relationship difficult or impossible. 

In Gelboys, we have a quartet of boys who like someone in the group in a way that the other can’t or refuses to reciprocate. Fou4Mod wants someone (notably Chian) to choose him fully. Chian wants to be with Bua, and wants to use Fou4Mod to make Bua jealous. Baabin wants to be with Fou4Mod, but won’t confess. Bua eventually wants to be with Baabin, but Baabin won’t let go of his crush on Fou4Mod. They all end up making each other miserable. 

Friends, the misery of this show was delectable in a way that felt fresh after this creative team’s last major BL outing of I Told Sunset About You. It was interesting to see them completely avoid the conversation around sexuality in this show in favor of a focus on trains and youth freedom to play at malls to focus on how young people use internet tools to torment themselves and each other. I remember vividly the social moors of the MySpace top 8 friends feature, and I was obsessed with the way the kids used the Close Friends feature of Instagram to carefully show off information to their crushes. I was also deeply mortified by Chian asking ChatGPT for relationship advice, and Fou4Mod using a generative AI to make a fake makeout video. The digital landscape is dark!

On the pining front, each of these boys is such an asshole about the boy they’re pining over. Chian wants Bua, and is cruel to Fou4Mod for it. Baabin essentially ends his own friendship with Fou4Mod rather than confess properly. Bua finally pursued Baabin properly, and is the only one to properly apologize for the pain he inflicted on another over the course of this. This show was plain about how withholding feelings and using people’s feelings against them led to such cruel outcomes. Unfortunately, it rushed a happy ending that soured my taste at the end. 

Final Verdict: 9, Highly Recommended. This show is for those people who want to see what youth urban romance feels like in the modern era. There are so many ideas about how consumption plays into dating and flirting, particularly around the way the boys chose to have their nails painted (or not painted). It was really something special to have a show where what the characters wanted was the source of all of their issues, rather than an interloper inflicting contrived drama on the pair. In a year where I can’t seem to finish a Thai BL, this is a bright spot. 

Heesu in Class 2 Understood Unrequited Love

Heesu in Class 2 explores the impacts of two queer boys having unrequited crushes, and why these boys have avoided confessing. Of all the shows about boys I watched in recent months, this one felt the most queer to me. This was such a visceral experience for many readers who were able to appreciate the role of Heesu’s sisters (@soypim), the way admissions like Heesu’s will forever change your dynamic (@nabi-unveiled), the ways this show grappled with one-sided love (@wanderlust-in-my-soul), and how shows like this remind us why we seek out queer media (@watchingblsnowandforever).

While we had disagreement about whether this show’s divergence from the source material was worthy, I still think we got a great drama out of this AND I think viewers who want to see Heesu and Seungwon’s dating era should read the webtoon; I don’t think it’s a one or the other situation here. The webtoon is well-intentioned, and I think it’s a worthwhile read for people curious about how a simple narrative can be expanded into a full drama.

Final Verdict: 10, Don’t Miss This One. More than anything, I want to praise everyone involved with making this show. I loved the way they navigated turning this webtoon into a gay kdrama, and I hope the delays in releasing this don’t spell an end for this type of approach from Korea. I especially want to praise Ahn Ji Ho for his stellar performance as Hee Su. I loved this show immensely, and it’s currently my favorite of the year. This show is going to feel different from what romance viewers of BL content are used to, but it’s a really special show that tells you what it’s about and then delivers on it.

Fragrance of the First Flower Season 2

I am so glad we were able to return to these two after so many years. I’ve been struggling with the global state of GL, and this is the only bright spot I had this year. I loved seeing these two try again after their breakup. Yi Ming was able to divorce her husband, but she’s still working through so much to figure out if she can have a proper relationship with Ting Ting. I also loved the way this show used its second lead as a way to further Ting Ting’s steadfast devotion to her relationship while still respecting the feelings of a friend. Some of the boys above could have used that lesson. 

Final Verdict: 9, Highly Recommended. Seriously, just go watch it. We don’t get enough good lesbian shows, and this one cares a lot about lesbian realities while still managing to be kind to the characters and the viewers. 

Fellow Travelers Has Me Back in America (6/8)

I wasn’t kidding after Heesu when I said it might be time for me to stop identifying so much with BL and return to my roots. This show follows the lives of four queer characters and their families starting in the McCarthy era of government employment into the AIDS crisis of the 1980s. It explores the validity of queer love and the difficult realities about pursuing them across more than 30 years. Anchored by absolutely stellar performances from the entire cast, it is my biggest queer obsession right now. 

I originally avoided Fellow Travelers because it was a Showtime exclusive and, while I love Matt Bomer and Jonathan Bailey, I wasn’t in the mood for white gays surviving the McCarthy era. Unfortunately for this show, the fans making fan content about this show failed to highlight that there’s an interesting Black couple in this show that are also exploring issues around race and gender in queer relationships. I also didn’t know that the series takes place in the 1980s as well.

What I have found so compelling about this show is how much information we have about where everyone is. We know who is alive in the AIDS crisis of the 80s. We know who chooses to marry into heteronormativity and who doesn’t. We learn who knows about who. This makes our time in the past far more compelling because now you’re paying attention to how people end up where they are not if they’ll even survive. I just finished an episode involving the son of a gay man and I am compelled to continue.

2 Husbands 1 Wife is Actually a Poly Show (5/10)

Featuring Asaka Kodai of Cherry Magic’s Tsuge, this show explores an attempt at a three-person marriage involving Yanaguchi Mia, Satomura Shinpei, and Mitsuda Takuzo. Mia, an office worker, wants to marry Shinpei, a dancer. However, Shinpei doesn’t think the two of them are big enough adults to make a marriage work, and so he proposes adding a third person to help them. After attending the funeral for Takuzo’s (and at one time Mia’s) rabbit, Shinpei proposes they approach Takuzo (who is Mia’s ex) to be part of their trio. Initially hesitant, the three are going closer during their trial period. 

What’s so compelling for me about this one is how seriously the show is taking the potential around sex, public appearances, affection and jealousy within the trio, and family management. As of episode 5 and the preview for 6, we’re even exploring Mia having to reckon with the fact that the two husbands will inevitably have a relationship with each other as well, following the fact that Shinpei was clear to Takuzo that they will be husbands as far as he’s concerned. This show has managed to accomplish so much in its 20-minute episodes, and I find myself eager to watch it on Thursday evenings on my nicest TV.

Top Form is as Sappy as Its Source Material (8/11)

I haven’t written about this one, mostly because I remember watching Dakaiichi years ago. While I have my own qualms about the changes the Thai show has made, especially when it comes to the timeline, I honestly think I’m just not enjoying the sappiness of the project this time around. That is not the fault of this show, which is actually accurately capturing how sappy Dakaiichi was. I was also turned off by their decision to basically adapt the assault storyline exactly as the original. Mostly, I’ve struggled with the sex for love politics of the Thai version in a way that I think has weakened the original Japanese narrative. It’s a personal issue I’m having, and I think if you’re curious about the show, you should check it out.

Dropped Shows

Look, I just can’t do it anymore. If the show doesn’t hit, I’m letting it go. GMMTV is the biggest loser here. Since the last blurb I’ve dropped:

My Golden Blood (1/12) - It’s not sexy enough, and the chemistry is deeply lacking.

Ossan’s Love Thailand (8/12) - It started to offend me, so I dropped it.

Break Up Service (3/12) - Off is good. The show is not.

Sweet Tooth, Good Dentist (1/12) - How could they do this to Mark Pakin?

The Bangkok Boy (1/12) - I want an action BL. This isn’t hitting.

The Boy Next World (9/10) - Things went stupid, so it got dropped.

Boys In Love (1/12) - This kind of saccharine isn’t hitting for me right now.

The Age of Pining is Over. Now is the Time For Earnestness

The biggest thing I’m thinking about right now is how many shows engaged with the negative side of unrequited pining this year. As a Known Piner, I am all for this. All piners must understand that they must face the mortifying ordeal of being known if they want to experience the benefits of being loved. It’s also important that we grapple with how withholding our feelings from the people we love leads to confusion, resentment, and possessiveness. I’m thankful that in Heesu in Class 2 we got to see all the contexts of why queer people would withhold those feelings and how it hurts everyone, and I’m glad Gelboys was willing to be so visceral about the ways young people love and hurt each other in the digital age. I’m curious what comes out of the other side of this if we start to see something more earnest. Perhaps we’ll get something as heartfelt and beautiful as When Life Gives You Tangerines.

But also...seriously...where is Japan? It hasn't felt this dire in almost 6 years.

[twig-tea]

The many faces of one-sidedness

I love Heesu in Class 2. But before I delight you with my own opinion on the series, let me tell you that I haven't read the manhwa and am only referring to the series here and perhaps a little discourse on expectations and the shift in the viewership of bl series will follow. I just know I can't write meta without digress.

During the broadcast of the series, I noticed how divided opinions were. While some were crying after the original source and didn't even want to give the series a chance, on the other hand there was a debate about whether it was a good bl series or not and what it should be. I don't understand why adaptations can't be seen as a medium in their own right. While the manhwa forms the basic framework on which the story is built, the adaptation is perfectly allowed to go its own way and use its own motifs, build its own storylines that fit better with a filmed story. An adaptation is still its own story with its own story being told, because a one-to-one transfer will mostly never work. @bengiyo wrote a fantastic meta about it! And if you want to read why Heesu in Class 2 is a lovely queer kdrama, go and check out @lurkingshan and her breakdown of the whole story. But well, I already digress.

Heesu in Class 2 was such a good story about the different ways and difficulties to have a one-sided crush. Take Heesin, for example. Heesin feels like she falls in love with men every other day and always confesses it immediately. According to her logic, you can only get over a crush if you confess. This makes her life both very simple and very complicated. She contributes to the daily, loving chaos in the Lee family. She suffers and loves with all her heart. And it seems like it's no big deal to confess that you like your crush. She seems like the opposite of Heesu, whose queerness doesn't allow him to love and suffer so carefree. He suffers quietly without confiding in anyone, while Heesin can celebrate her heartbreak without expecting anything but pity.

Heejeong is the responsible one. The one who gives up her dreams and her love because of fear. Sometimes loving means daring. You jump into something uncertain and make yourself vulnerable in front of another person. Heejeong wanted to study overseas with her boyfriend, but she got cold feet and lost out on an uncertain future. Instead, she lives her 9-5 everyday life with her siblings, in which nothing really exciting happens. And it doesn't have to be to lead a fulfilling life. But she is not happy. She is still hanging on to her dream and she should be able to at least try to live it or live the life she has dreamed of.

Fear can be a major obstacle. Heesu gives her the advice to do what she wants to do. As the most responsible character in the household, portrayed as the most grown-up, she has so far taken on the role of the parents and moved further and further away from her dream self. She has kept a part of her personality, of her self and her past a secret from her siblings. In the end, she realised that this is her life, which she can only shape on her own. She is the architect of her own happiness. Her unrequited love is not even so much for her ex-partner, who she still sees and who is still a big part of her life, but rather with her missed self that she has always dreamed of having. She has spoken out and faced her fear. She wants to be happy for her own sake and to do this she has to overcome her fear and find herself.

Heejae. For me, Heejae epitomises what it's like when the boundaries between romantic love and friendship become blurred and you're caught in a world in between. Being in love with your best friend is one thing. But being in a relationship with someone you love as a best friend is something else. Just as friendship can turn into love, love can turn into friendship and the process of realising this is often difficult and lengthy. You have got used to each other. You feel comfortable. You think you have everything. But her partner has noticed how things have shifted, that something is missing at the end. So he breaks up with her. He no longer wants to deal with this unrequited love. That's not enough for him. He wants to be loved. Loving as a friend is a wonderful thing, but for most people it is no substitute for romantic love. And sometimes it's not easy to realise that your feelings have changed, especially when you've been carrying and cherishing them for so long.

If you want to read more about these siblings you can read An Ode to HeeSu's Sisters by the lovely @soypim.

The sisters are representations of parts of Heesu. Heesin is the antithesis of Heesu. As a heterosexual woman, she can make confessions of love without receiving direct backlash. At best, she is remembered fondly and makes the person feel good even if the feelings are not reciprocated. She stands in the same spot as Chanyeong and Jiyu. It's so easy for heterosexuals to show their vulnerability. Heesu can't do that. In a homophobic society, it's not easy to tell someone you like them. It might not be remembered as a nice memory, it might be seen as an attack, an event that has negative connotations. It's so much harder for Heesu to be so open in his world. And the series manages to realise this so incredibly well.

Heejeong on the other hand stands for the missed moments, for the what-ifs, for the fact that sometimes you have to dare to take the next step if you don't want to stay trapped in the black hole of yourself forever. It's interesting that Heesu is the one to give her the advice to decide for herself, for what makes her happy, and that she shows him again that this is possible by taking a step into her own, hopefully happy future. You can decide for yourself and that's good. Heesu can also decide for himself and decide not to step into the black hole, but to pull himself out of the swamp and follow his dream. Everyone has their own black holes. Everyone deals with them differently. But trying to be happy should be possible for everyone. And even if you decide to stay in your 9-5 or, well, in your closet, that is totally fine, too. No one should stop you from doing what you want, but it is always good when there are people who support you and cherish the person you are.

Heejae. Heejae is just one step ahead of Heesu. She had her best friend as a partner and didn't realise that love had changed. She wouldn't and couldn't let go and had to wait for her partner to break up with her to realise what was going on. Heesu is caught in a similar dilemma, in love with his best friend and at some point, no longer able to distinguish between romantic and platonic love because it has always been like that. Sometimes you get lost in your feelings. Sometimes you don't realise the shift. Sometimes you need an outsider or the other person to realise this.

One thing I didn't understand is the resentment Chanyeong got. Yes, he had a lot of screentime. But that was perfectly ok. He was not only part of the side-couple, but also one of the most important people in Heesu's life. His best friend and secret crush for years. And the perfect parallel between his own heterosexual world and the queer reality in which Heesu moves. While Chanyeong had this secret crush on Summer without realising it was Jiyu, he breaks dozens of girls' hearts when they realise that he doesn't reciprocate their feelings. For Chanyeong, it's so natural for someone to confess their feelings to him and always have, and his approach to his relationship with Jiyu is also simple. Boy likes girl. Girl likes boy. End of story. And while the two move fearlessly together in their world and bring out the best in each other, Heesu stands alone. He has found a relatively safe anchor with Seungwon and is pretty sure that he would accept him, considering the fact that he has two mothers, but he still has to go through everything alone. He doesn't have the freedom that Chanyeong has.

And while some people have certainly been waiting for Heesu to finally confess his feelings to Seungwon, or vice versa, he first must make peace with Chanyeong. Because this friendship is threatening to drift apart. The friendship is one-sided. And they both realise that. To save them, Heesu has to be honest. And Chanyeong is allowed to react the way he did. He is allowed to be overwhelmed. He is allowed to not know how to deal with the fact that his best friend was in love with him for a long time. It's okay to be human. The important thing is that he talks to Heesu in the end and gives them a chance to readjust their status as best friends. Because Heesu is Chanyeong's best friend, and he wants to be that for Heesu too. It hurts when you feel like you're not the safe haven you always thought you were. It is allowed to have feelings. It is allowed to express them and it was bitterly necessary to do so. And it was just as necessary for Heesu to tell him the truth, because only then did the two of them have the chance to redefine their friendship. It was only through this openness that the one-sided friendship could become an equal friendship again.

Heesu. He says himself that Chanyeong and his unrequited love were his black hole. He had to face it in order to free himself from it, to free himself from the attraction of this well known crush. Because only after he's done that can he be free for the new feelings for Seungwon. I thought it was so great to see how these different infatuations manifested themselves in Heesu. With Chanyeong it was so well-rehearsed, so normal, that in the end he couldn't even know what it was like to just be Chanyeong's friend. The feelings blended together and became a daily mask for Heesu, which he knew exactly how to wear. For Seungwon, on the other hand, these feelings are new. He is helplessly at the mercy of his insecurities, the butterflies and all these new feelings.

I enjoyed seeing him like that so much. And I was happy that he was allowed to be angry with Seungwon. I could understand how he felt so well. ‘Was it fun?’ Oh, I felt that! ‘Do you know how much I struggled by myself?’ Heesu thought he had found a safe place with Seungwon where he could be who he is. And then, in the end, he finds himself alone. Heesu is hurt and finally lets it out. The boy who wanted to please everyone and had advice for everyone, who everyone confided in, but who is alone with his problems has had enough. And it bursts out of him. Fortunately, Seungwon finally manages to open his mouth, apologise and clear up the misunderstanding. And in the end, although not everyone is perfectly happy, they are on the way to a happier future. And every single character was important not only to write a good story, but also to portray the characters genuinely and realistically.

I love my bl bubble and I wouldn't want to miss it. I enjoy watching two boys fall in love and kiss in a world of candy floss and rose-coloured glasses. But I don't forget my roots either. And apart from the whole bl bubble, I think it's great to watch a series from time to time in which queer people are embedded in everyday life and you realise how different experiences in everyday life can be. How difficult it is to move as a queer person in a heteronormative world and how difficult it can be to do the seemingly simplest things for others. Heesu in Class 2 is not a bromance, but a realistic portrayal of queer youth in a society where they can be lucky that people think they are only very bromance-coded when they go to school arm in arm. In other societies, even this gesture would be unthinkable. And as beautifully simple as the bl bubble usually is, I think it's good that such soft tones also exist, which can bring life and the beauty of love in all its tones closer to a larger audience and allow a society to grow up that is more value-free, unprejudiced and open. And an adaptation of a well-known and loved story is the perfect try to give this topic a bigger audience.

I've noticed over the last few months that the bl bubble is more interested in explicit scenes than well-told stories. Why bother with a story in which the protagonists don't even kiss? Why settle for such a bromance when you can just watch two good looking guys make out, fuck the plot. And I'm not saying anything against an interlude of honey on the carpet, it has its appeal, but that doesn't mean I deny a show and its character its queerness just because there's no kissing. Sometimes the quiet sounds are the ones that need to be heard. Sometimes it's the quiet tones that have the most impact. Sometimes it's the quiet sounds that make you understand what it's like outside your own bubble and what difficulties there actually are.

If I only consume media on one side of the spectrum, then I only have a limited field of vision of everything around me. And I understand that not every type of story is to everyone's taste, and that's a good thing. Otherwise it would be pretty boring. But every now and then you should take your head out of your bubble and look around the world.  And just because something is not to your liking doesn’t mean it is bad or not well written or not worth to be told.

If you need some inspiration for some queerness in kdramas, @lurkingshan and @twig-tea gave us all a very detailed History of Queer Representation in Modern Kdrama. Thank you for that!

[twig-tea]

I've struggled with what to write about Heesu in Class 2.

Opinions have been polarized, and I know that whatever I write isn't going to resonate with at least half of the people that I follow and respect. It helped that I wasn't going into this blind. I knew it wasn't a typical BL. I had read a LOT of commentary in the past couple of weeks.

Many people who wanted the source material didn't get what they wanted/needed. I can understand that. While I typically like it when adaptations twist and build on source material, I have had the experience where I was incredibly disappointed in an adaptation. I Hear the Sunspot -> I'm talking to you. When you hold something near and dear to your heart, it hurts when you don't recognize it anymore. Especially if the adaptation removed the things that you valued and loved.

But I hadn't read the source material on this one so that wasn't a factor for me. I do plan to read it now that I've watched the show. I will probably keep the two as completely different entities in my brain. Based on people's reactions, that feels like the best move forward.

Many people who DIDN'T read the source material also didn't get what they wanted/needed. They might view it as homophobic or disrespectful of serious issues. Or it may never have connected with them emotionally. But my world is VERY homophobic so this felt very real to me. It connected emotionally and it hit HARD...at least in certain scenes.

My feelings are too raw to really discuss the show analytically. I'll talk pacing, visuals, astronomy metaphors and all that once I finish up my astronomy project for work. I'll try to approach it objectively when I write up the analysis of individual episodes. There is a lot to dive into on that score - some positive, some negative, some neutral.

However, right now, in this moment? I can't even think about how I would "rate" this show. I'm too busy having big feels after the finale. Because while it may not have been a "BL" by many people's standards, it was definitely queer. And that counts for something. I'm no high schooler - I turn forty in a little over a week - but it scraped my open wounds and made them bleed. Honestly, episode 11 of Your Sky did that to me too. I just kept my posts private on that one, because this feels like serving myself up for judgment. I might regret this post.

I tried during my two hour walk last night to figure out what I could say. Every take I tried got personal fast. I can't separate it. And in the end, I've decided to not even try.

So is this post meta analysis? No.

Is this post a critique or analytical evaluation of the show? No.

Is this an endorsement of the show? No.

Heck. Half of this post probably isn't about the show at all.

It feels weird to say since many people around me call me a robot or unfeeling, but this post is pure emotion for me. It's probably oversharing. Just like whether a show is popular or not, I don't have a gauge for that. I'm the person that will spend two weeks talking to almost no one outside of my children/husband, but then spend three hours discussing all things garlic with some random person I never met previously. That's Let Free the Curse of Taekwondo's fault. I don't really have an in between mode. I'm silent, or I don't shut up.

Warning: This got long. No surprise there. Also, in case it is a trigger for you, religion and sexuality are intertwined throughout this post and it touches on themes of coming out.

Anonymous Inbox Warning: If you read this post and come into my inbox to worry about my "mental health" or "recommend therapy" or anything similar, I'm just going to delete it. Therapy is great. I'm aware. I highly recommend and advocate for it. That is not the point here.

But after watching Heesu, here are the things stuck in my brain.

I envied Heesu and Seungwon.

Was it hard for them? Yes. Were they struggling due to things that are unfair and that I wish weren't true of society? Yes. Will they continue to struggle? Unfortunately, yes. But they're figuring themselves out and are coming to terms with their identity in high school. There's something to be said for that.

Thanks to neurodivergence and my conservative, religious upbringing, I didn't figure myself out until I was already married and had my first child. Both in terms of sexuality and my personal religious beliefs, I was in my mid to late 20s before I figured things out.

Because for many, many years I just thought I was evil and morally bankrupt. After all, I really enjoyed Cruel Intentions and I really really thought it would be a whole lot of fun to make out with Watts in the garage (Some Kind of Wonderful). @dribs-and-drabbles I loved that they were one of your ships. But I could never ship it. Keith didn't deserve her. She was mine.

But this was a problem, because I was taught that sex was the root of all evil. Even heterosexual sex. And to have such perverse desires meant something was morally and drastically wrong with you. Stupid purity culture swamp.

I decided that if I tried hard enough and studied enough, that I'd figure out how to fix my broken brain. After all, there were ways to overcome my broken hearing. There were ways to overcome my broken empathy meter. There were ways to overcome my attention issues and the chaos of my brain. Surely, there was a fix for that part of me that really liked thinking about the Olsen twins and Taylor Hanson too.

I'm fine with being called "stubborn", "argumentative", "weird", "scary" and the dozens of other not quite positive adjectives I hear about myself. I mean this with full sincerity -> it doesn't bother me. I get called plenty of positive things too. And one man's "stubborn", is another person's "independent". But I didn't want to be evil. So I tried. I really did.

It took me a long time to accept that I wasn't actually broken or morally bankrupt. It took me a long time to figure out the problem was as @babyangelsky put it that desire was considered a swamp to begin with. I'm still hoping my person accepts that one day too.

So yes, I'm incredibly happy for Heesu and Seungwon that they figured all of that out in high school. I hope this show, BLs in general and changes in society as a whole help teenagers get there much faster than me. I'm sure a smartphone or internet resources like we have today would've helped.

I felt relieved when Heesu figured out that there was someone in his world who wouldn't judge him.

Even as I deconstructed religiously and embraced my sexuality, I never worried about my (younger) brother's reaction. I always knew he'd be in my corner. He was a musical theater major. He's kissed men as part of his shows (our family doesn't know that), and he had already deconstructed (they also don't know that). He figured things out much faster than me. He listens to me talk about BLs and all of my fun dilemmas with them. We have never directly talked about my (or his) sexuality though. Sex is not something easily discussed in our family. Plus, we're still siblings. I really don't want to think of him in that way.

But I know he has my back. And that has meant everything over the years.

However, my brother lives 5 hours away. I get to talk to him only a couple of times a month (if that). He's not the people that surround me on the daily. And the people that surround me? They WILL judge. Strike that. They DO judge - everyone and everything. Openly and loudly. I live in a very close knit, very conservative, very religious family and community. It wasn't my intention to stay, but words left unsaid mean I married someone who talks a lot about traveling and seeing the world but never intended to see it.

And nine days out of ten, that's okay. I love our home that he built with his own hands, our hikes through the woods, our gaming sessions, and our "fun" times too 😉. But that tenth day when I take a break from work, stop doing the laundry or packing the kids' lunchboxes and really think about everything? It's rough.

For a very long time, I kept all of my thoughts on religion and sexuality completely secret while being swallowed alive by my black hole. I tried to convince myself that it didn't matter. But when I found that one person in my daily circle who I realized would accept me? It was a miracle. It changed everything. I eventually found a few. I'm forever grateful for those former coworkers.

It's insane how much lighter it feels when you remove the load by "just one person", and how much strength you gain when you realize that you are not really alone in your thinking. In funny things (to me), they weren't surprised. "I thought that was a given. It's pretty obvious."

Over the years, the Tumblr community has been another light for me. Even when I was lurking. Just knowing that there were people out there who'd have no problem with my kinky thoughts went a very long way. So that scene for Heesu, when he realized Seungwon wouldn't judge him - I felt it in my bones.

The tennis court scene in the finale with Chan Young/Heesu pains me...for both of them.

And I'm still standing on it.

I can't judge this scene objectively within the narrative. It got too personal so most of what I say about this scene will have very little to do with Heesu/Chan Young's actual relationship. Again, this isn't meta. This is emotion.

I had a strong negative reaction to Chan Young in episode 1. This was followed by a humorous bit of time with @lurkingshan when my brother pointed out that he was a lot like my husband all the way down to him being a competitive tennis player in high school. I didn't expect just HOW far that analogy might go though.

Because just like Heesu, I started by coming clean with my Chan Young. Difference being that my Chan Young is my friend, lover, and other half.

So this line...

I've heard it. I took YEARS to come completely clean precisely because I knew it was going to hurt him so very deeply. I tried to soften the blow. I tried to lead up to it in small steps. But it didn't help.

Side note: @my-rose-tinted-glasses By our standards for Min Jun from Business as Usual, this might make me the bad guy. It's probably why I am trying so hard to forgive him. I haven't got there with him yet. Ghosting feels different to me. Min Jun essentially left the court.

This line...

I've heard it too. It was wrapped in language about moral corruption and rebelling against religious rules just because I disagreed with them. But the gist was the same. Choosing myself is being selfish. I've just decided I'm okay with that. That I'm worth being selfish about. If I have to be my own biggest fan, so be it.

But this one...

It's the reason that I can't analyze this scene objectively (yet). Because it's true. I destroyed my husband's whole world and vision of our life together by my confession. In gaming terms, it was a headshot. In the show, Chan Young now has to reframe everything that he thought was a part of their relationship and decide where to go from here. It's not an easy task.

When I liveblogged Let Free the Curse, I said I wasn't going to touch Juyeong's cross necklace and how he removed it to be with Dohoe. That I couldn't deal with it. This is why. As @respectthepetty pointed out in their Let Free the Curse commentary, that cross is heavy for my Juyeong and it's not a fun place for me. I've put the person I love in a place where they have to choose every single day whether to put on that necklace that they VALUE and BELIEVE in or choose to embrace me, the person they love, who is also the sinner on the road to hell. It's tearing them apart and robbing them of their joy. And while I'm no longer being sucked into my personal black hole, I now get a courtside seat to all of their pain. I created a rift in their universe.

So while many people are understandably upset that Heesu is apologizing in this scene.

I didn't see it as apologizing for being queer.

I saw it as apologizing for hurting the person they love and care about. For being a source of pain. And yes, there IS a difference.

Because yes, I struggled with my identity for years. But I'm not sorry that I now understand myself, and I'm not going to trap myself in a glass room. I will not apologize for being myself. However, on that 10th day, when everything gets a bit too real for us both, I get to hear the tears at night from my person. And I am really sorry that I'm the cause of them. I really wish I wasn't.

So I'll forgive him if he hits a tennis ball at me from time to time. I'll dodge most of them. The ones that connect WILL hurt. But he's hurting too, and it's going to take time for him to put that racquet down.

We've been on this court for a very long time as he decides what to do about that cross necklace. But it took me a long time to put us on the court in the first place.

I'm really hoping we get here one day.

For both of our sakes. I really hope we do. But we may not.

For now, I'm just glad that we're both refusing to leave the court on that tenth day. Because the other nine days are still a blast.

I'll try to watch the scene with the actual narrative in mind next time.

It broke my heart when Seungwon's mom asked him what she should do.

It WRECKED me like no other scene if I'm being honest. Even worse than the tennis court scene.

Why? Because I don't want to hurt my kids. I don't want to end up on my bad mothers list. I'm trying to figure it all out, but it's tricky. I had a similar conversation to this one with my two older children just a few weeks ago. Unlike the tennis court, this is relatively new territory for me. They're just now getting old enough to understand. For context, I'm not really "out" by most people's standards within the larger community. I'd like my Chan Young to stop hitting balls at me before I move forward in that regard. I'd really like to have him by my side if I take on our community and the rest of our families. So for now I wait as he ponders what he's supposed to do.

But I haven't kept my thoughts on things or my reality from my kids in the meantime. They know my beliefs and where I stand. They are even aware that I blog and watch BL. They laughed at me quite a bit during the emoji tag game as I tried to figure out the coffin in @dramalove247 's set. They thought it meant vampire by the way.

Six days out of seven, it doesn't really impact them much at all. But on that seventh day, they're getting very mixed messages from the adults in their life. The one that says all the things we grew up with. And the one (me) that constantly says choose kindness, choose people, choose yourself, screw purity, screw normal, screw the rules.

The mixed messages will impact them. It does confuse them. And as much as I'd like to, I can't shelter them from that without lying about who I am and what I believe. But I also can't protect them from all of the ugliness in the world.

So when my braveheart that always speaks his mind asked a few weeks ago if I ever thought about just telling everyone. I responded very similarly to Seungwon's mom here. "I can do that. Do you really want me to? Just think about what would happen." It took him all of about 15 seconds. "It would be bad. Real bad. Yeah, don't do that."

So I'll stay silent and evade...for now. I'll stop when their answer changes or if, like Seungwon, they or another kid in the community needs me to flip the table for them so they can proudly embrace their own identity. Their needs are my priority when it comes to the larger community.

In the meantime, I'm going to do everything in my power to make sure they feel loved and supported for who they are. We watched Star Trek during our family movie night the other month, and when we got to this scene...

my oldest laughed. "Mom. That sounds like something you would say."

That feels like a win in my book.

And if Heesu in Class 2 makes even one queer kid have hope that they'll be accepted or gives them the courage to step into the light in a world that's not a BL bubble, then that's a win in my book too.

No matter where I end up rating it once I can approach it more objectively.

[twig-tea]

A Brief History of Queer Representation in Modern Kdrama

Earlier this week, totally unrelated to Heesu in Class 2, @twig-tea and I were making a list of kdramas with proper queer representation, because Twig loves to track queer things and I love to make highly specific lists. In light of all the discussion around Heesu and its appeal to a mainstream kdrama audience, we thought it would be helpful to share as context for what Heesu’s creators set out to do, how it compares to Love in the Big City and its goals, and why both shows are so significant for those who are not as familiar with this media landscape. We wrote the below together (strap in, folks, it's a long one).

As always, let us be clear what we are talking about with this list. We’re only looking at modern mainstream kdrama, so this list is not inclusive of Korean queer cinema or QL dramas, both of which have a rich history of their own. And when we say queer representation, we mean canonically queer characters that are acknowledged as such in the text of the show, if not by saying the words, at least by openly acknowledging same sex attraction. If there’s anything we know about queer people on the internet, it’s that our community can read gay subtext into anything, but that’s not what we’re doing here. For this list we are only interested in depictions of LGBTQ+ people that are clear and spelled out for anyone watching a show.  In addition, for the purposes of this list we are talking about intentional inclusion of queer characters with a proper role in the story, not nominal nods to queer people existing (like every Hong Seok Cheon cameo in a drama), comedic gender bending without real reckoning with sexuality (ala The King’s Affection), use of queer people as the butt of a joke (glaring at you Vincenzo), queerness in psychosexual dreams to titillate and generate buzz (hiiiii Friendly Rivalry), or subtextual gay tension between two same sex actors who happen to have chemistry (waves hello to The Devil Judge). The point of this exercise is to chart the evolution of significant queer representation in kdrama—both good and bad—not to document every gay character that ever appeared for two seconds on screen. That said, while Shan has watched several hundred kdramas and Twig has tried to watch everything gay on the planet, it’s possible we missed something that should be here, so let us know if you think we did (though please do mind the criteria and don’t send us an impassioned essay about why Beyond Evil should count). 

With that, let’s begin our walk through of the last two decades of queer characters in kdrama. 

Coffee Prince (2007) 

Among the most famous dramas on this list, Coffee Prince kicked off queer rep in modern kdrama with a classic gender bender in which Go Eun Chan, a girl, pretends to be a boy for Reasons. But what made it stand out is that her love interest falls for her while he still thinks she’s a man and has a whole sexual identity crisis and bisexual coming out process. Choi Han Gyul (and Gong Yoo), you will always be famous! This show was sincerely groundbreaking, not only for depicting a male romance lead struggling with his sexuality, but also including lots of gender fuckery for the female lead. It’s still one of the most significant queer kdramas ever made.

Life is Beautiful (2010) 

This show is notable for how high it set the bar and how nothing has reached it since. Yang Tae Sub is our central character in this 63-hour ensemble family drama, and his arcs struggling with the closet, falling in love, coming out, commitment, and marriage (yes: marriage! In 2010!), are surprisingly realistic and touching without being too cliche. Kyung Soo and Tae Sub start as a casual hookup, and they have to recalibrate as their feelings change (and yes, they kiss on screen and the show is clear that they have sex throughout the series). They fight, they make up, and as their relationship deepens they have other problems in their lives they support one another through—their gayness is not the only or even the most interesting thing about them. It’s also notable that both of these actors (Song Chang Eui and Lee Sang Woo) were established kdrama stars before taking these roles. 

Secret Garden (2010)

This het romance features a side character (played by our beloved Lee Jong Suk) who is a young musical prodigy pursued for his talents by the second lead, a senior musician. Over the course of the story we learn that he’s gay and harboring feelings for his would-be mentor. His plot is minor, but he ends the story happy and successful in his career, if not in a relationship. It’s small scale representation in the grand scheme of things, but one of only a handful of decent depictions of a gay person in kdrama at that point.

Reply 1997 (2012) 

This wildly popular drama (at the time, it was one of the highest rated cable dramas in history) that spawned two follow-up iterations features a gay character, Joon Hee, who is in love with his long time best friend, Yoon Jae, and confides his feelings to their other best friend, Shi Won. Of course, this show is ultimately Yoon Jae and Shi Won’s love story, so Joon Hee does not get his happy romance ending, but his friends and the show treat him with kindness and compassion, and his character was well received by audiences. 

Reply 1994 (2013)

Similar to its predecessor, this drama featured a side character with a gay subplot, but this time it was more about questioning his identity. Bingguere is a character whose arc is all about his confusion and indecision, and that extended to his sexuality when he struggled to understand his attraction to the male lead. Ultimately, he moves past those feelings and we learn his partner in the future is a woman, and the drama doesn’t really clarify where his sexuality landed. It’s kind of weak in terms of explicit queer rep, but showing a man grappling with his sexuality in a very popular family drama still feels significant.

Seonam Girls High School Investigations (2014) 

While most of their content is limited to two episodes of this 14-episode high school drama, Eun Bin and Soo Yeon have, to our knowledge, the first lesbian kiss on Korean television, which earns them a place on this list. They are an established couple struggling with how their relationship is a risk for them (because it can be and is used against them). Their relationship doesn’t survive to the end of the series, but they are treated with compassion and their humanity is underscored by the narrative. They also spark an important conversation among the main characters about whether they should be helped because they’re gay, which was a little better intentioned than it was executed, but the show had the spirit. 

Perseverance Goo Hae Ra (2015)

In a show about aspiring musicians forming a group to take a second shot at stardom, Jang Goon (portrayed by solo idol Park Kwang Seon) is one of the core group members with a heartwarming arc about acceptance. His story is about his father coming to terms with him being an idol and being gay. He has a one-sided confession scene that is decently done, and the scene where his father accepts him knowing the truth (after having been outed against his will) is genuinely moving. It was also touching to see the girl who originally crushed on him support him once she found out about his sexuality. 

Hogu’s Love (2015) 

This drama was considered progressive for its time, as its core plot is about Hogu, a man who decides to support his first love when he finds out she is pregnant with someone else’s child. In addition to that, side character Kang Chul has an arc where he experiences attraction to Hogu and tries to sort out his feelings, considering whether he identifies as gay before ultimately deciding he does not. It’s not the best rep we’ve ever seen, but it was part of an interesting attempt by a drama to explore complicated social and identity issues.

The Lover (2015)

Lee Jun Jae and Takuya (played by Lee Jae Joon who was also in the gay film Night Flight (2014) and Takuya of jpop group CROSS GENE) are roommates in this series about four couples in an apartment building. Their story starts as a comedy, in which Jun Jae and Takuya end up in ship moments that are played off by the narrative as jokes and misunderstandings, but then they catch feelings for real. We see one of the characters struggle with his queer awakening and there is a happy ending. Using the actors’ real names was a choice, and led to some seriously disruptive RPF shipping; but it was refreshing to have an active idol not only play gay but in a romance with a happy ending. 

Prison Playbook (2017)

Another ensemble show with a queer side character; Loony, one of the main character Je Hyuk’s cell mates, is notable for his queerness not being used as a joke and not being the core of the character’s arc. Instead, this character struggles with addiction and how that affects his relationship, which is only incidentally gay. His story is moving and well developed, especially considering the size of this cast, but it doesn’t get a ton of screen time.

Romance is a Bonus Book (2019)

The queer rep in this drama is minor but overall positive, as we learn that the male lead Eun Ho’s ex-girlfriend, who he is still friendly with, ended their relationship because she fell in love with a woman. The show presents her as a lovely person who helps the female lead several times and is happy in her lesbian relationship, and we even get to see her with her partner briefly. A small win for sapphic representation in a very popular Netflix drama.

Moment at Eighteen (2019)

Jung Oh Je (RIP Moonbin) is a side character friend of the main lead. His sexuality becomes part of the plot when he is confessed to by a friend of the female lead, and he admits that he has a crush on the second male lead (Ma Hwi Young). While the characters in the show are mixed in their response, it’s clear the story is on the side of treating Oh Je with compassion. 

Be Melodramatic (2019) 

This is an ensemble show centered on a group of friends who move in together to support a grieving young woman, Lee Eun Jung, and one of the housemates is her younger brother Lee Hyo Bong, a gay musician with a long-term partner. He is a side character and his most significant plot is about supporting his sister, with his sexuality and relationship part of his characterization rather than an active story thread. It’s a positive depiction and the way his sexuality is presented as just part of who he is felt significant at the time. 

Love with Flaws (2019) 

Joo Won Suk (RIP Cha in Ha) is one of the FL’s older brothers, and while not the focus of the drama he gets his own fully developed arc, including the mentorship of queer side character Choi Ho Dol. The queer rep in this show covers suicidality, the loneliness of the closet, bullying, solidarity, and fear of parental shame. That makes it sound depressing, but it’s a hopeful story about the character moving out of depression and into self-acceptance, has one of the best scenes depicting gay acceptance from a father in any show, and both Won Suk and Ho Dol have a happy ending (including for their romance). 

Itaewon Class (2020)

The first drama on this list to feature a transgender character, Itaewon Class is about a group of social misfits trying to launch a restaurant on a trendy street in Itaewon. Ma Hyun Yi, a transgender woman saving money for her gender affirming surgery, is among the gang. Her story is not a big focus for the drama, but she gets a nice arc about coming into herself and gaining recognition for her talents as a chef, and the other characters always respect her identity. It’s pretty solid representation for a side character.

Sweet Munchies (2020)

This drama tries to tackle the problems of homophobia and appropriating queerness but misses the mark on both. The queer character in this show, Kang Tae Wan, is here to function as a driving force and conscience for the main male lead and female lead; he’s essentially the second lead but never had a chance (though he didn’t know it, since the main lead is pretending to be gay for clout). Tae Wan is a good character, but the narrative doesn’t care much about him or about queer people in general, it’s focused on how heterosexuals experience queerness. Not exactly amazing queer representation, whatever its intentions.

Run On (2020) 

This drama features both a gay character and an asexual character, both of whom are written respectfully and get proper coming out scenes. There is also some messiness around one of the main characters appropriating queer identity as a way to avoid the pressures of her patriarchy, and the drama knows she’s wrong for that. This was one of the first instances of a kdrama acknowledging queer people as a regular part of the world around us and not singular oddities, and it was nice to see multiple facets of queer representation in one show.

Mr. Queen (2020)

This gender bender retains its place on the list because the main character (a man who awakens in the body of a Queen during the Joseon dynasty) openly struggles with his gender dysphoria as well as what it means that he’s attracted to a man, and these struggles are present for the bulk of the show. The character also has sex with both men and women while in that body. It’s one of the better representations of gender swap and feels queer, even when the relationship on screen has the guise of heterosexuality. 

Mine (2021)

In this drama about ambitious women married to powerful men who struggle to break free from their constraints, one of the main characters reunites with her first love—another woman. The drama follows Jung Seo Hyun as she struggles to acquire the power she needs to live as she wants, and she ultimately achieves her goal, reuniting with her lover at the story’s end. It’s the first kdrama with a lesbian character in a major role who gets her happy romance ending. 

Move to Heaven (2021)

Despite only being featured in episode 5, this was a good story that garnered a lot of attention in a popular Netflix drama, so for cultural impact reasons alone it belongs on this list. We start the episode with Jung Soo Hyun’s death, but this is a show about finding closure after death, so for once this death doesn’t feel like bury your gays. This is a compassionate tragedy in which we see how fear held Soo Hyun back from his relationship with Ian Park while he was alive, but his belongings at death indicate he was getting ready to face his fear and move to the US to marry Ian after all. Through the main characters of the show, Ian gets the closure of knowing Soo Hyun loved him. 

Nevertheless (2021) 

Yoon Sol and Seo Ji Wan have a typical plot for side characters (they’re in the female lead’s friend group) with a friends-to-lovers arc that depicts the fear and frustration when both friends are closeted and uncertain about risking the friendship but reach the point where they can’t pretend anymore. Since they’re both women, this felt pretty radical. They got a good romantic arc and a happy ending, if not a lot of screen time.

Under the Queen’s Umbrella (2022)

In this sageuk, the fourth prince is living a double life, hiding away makeup and women’s clothing that they wear in secret. The character is depicted as trans, but given the setting, explicit language and modern terminology (including altered pronouns) are not used in this side plot. When the prince’s mother finds out, she supports her child to have an artist paint a portrait of their true self, and ultimately, the prince leaves the royal family to go live a more authentic life in isolation in a bittersweet resolution. 

A Time Called You (2023)

The queer rep in this drama comes in the form of a brief backstory montage for two gay characters, one of whom (Yeon Jun) is in a coma. We learn that he ended up in this state after getting into a car accident while in the process of confessing to the guy he mutually liked (Tae Ha), who was killed in the accident. From there, Yeon Jun’s body is taken over by a heterosexual character (it’s a whole time loop thing). This entry is mostly notable for featuring a high profile cameo from Rowoon playing Tae Ha, and unfortunately, for being a fairly textbook example of the bury your gays trope. In 2023!

Wedding Impossible (2024) 

This disaster of a drama purported to finally feature a gay character in a prominent role that drove the narrative—in a story about Do Han pretending to marry his longtime friend to avoid being forced to marry another woman—but Do Han ended up a minor side character in his own story when the show chose to focus nearly all its attention on his brother’s het romance. Worse, the other characters treated him terribly and the story blamed every problem on his sexuality. This show was straight up homophobic and it was a significant regression for queer depictions in mainstream Korean media. 

Bitter Sweet Hell (2024)

image credit @respectthepetty

Choi Doi Hyun (played by Park Jae Chan of Semantic Error) is the closeted son of the main character, struggling with how hiding his secret affects his school life and his relationship with his family. His story ends happily with Jun Ho in the US, which felt like a win after the above history with kdrama, but because his secret being his queerness is hidden for most of the story, we don’t get to see it inform the narrative much except in retrospect. 

Squid Game 2 (2024)

The most recent entry on our list features Park Sung Hoon as Hyeon Ju, a transgender woman who enters the life or death game at the center of this drama to earn money to move to Thailand and get gender affirming surgery. While her inclusion wasn't entirely groundbreaking, Hyeon Ju was a well-developed character with a sympathetic backstory who quickly became a fan favorite, notable given Squid Game's popularity and broad international audience. 

Bringing Better Queer Stories to Mainstream Drama Audiences

With all that context established, we have been contemplating how queer creators in Korea can reach a wider audience with their stories and ensure queer representation in kdrama is both more common and more authentic. We look to Love in the Big City and Heesu in Class 2 as a start, as we would argue that both shows exist in the gray space between mainstream kdrama and kbl. They both leverage kdrama style and structure to tell queer stories that include, but are not limited to, gay romances. They both had unusual distribution and battled to even get released and in front of an audience, with LITBC rushing its episodes out amidst public protests and Heesu sitting on the shelf for two years before being quietly released on a streaming platform. And they both had goals to reach an audience beyond the usual BL viewers, albeit with wildly different tones and themes in their stories. The BL audience is too niche to effect the social change that queer creators are seeking, and the limited runtime, genre tropes, and laser-focus on romance means it is harder to make wider social and cultural points in a BL story (it doesn’t hit the same when gay characters are treated as human in a story that takes place in the no homophobia BL bubble). And as we’ve seen from this walk through the past, there are real limits to queer representation that is not created by queer people or informed by their lived experiences.

As you can see from reviewing this list, these two shows were the first kdramas in well over a decade (after the only other example, Life Is Beautiful) to center on a gay main character whose journey drove the story, and they were doing this in the context of a media landscape that rarely elevates queer people beyond minor side plots, still regularly fumbles on respectful representation, and in which representation seems to be getting worse. Love in the Big City set out to show a young queer man’s life in all its glorious messiness. Go Young was not an easy character, and the show did not hold back on his flaws or shy away from either the joy or the struggle he found in his sexuality. Heesu is about a younger character and so his struggles are centered around coming of age and first love, but it similarly depicts a beautifully flawed young gay man coming to terms with himself and asks the audience to empathize with and care about him as his loved ones in the story do. Where LITBC uses a unique storytelling structure to draw in the viewer and highlight what makes Young’s life feel different, Heesu roots itself in familiar drama beats and queer-coded side plots in the hopes that the audience will see and be comforted by the familiar in Heesu’s world. 

Both of these stories, in their own way, speak to a mainstream audience and ask for queer existence and queer humanity to be acknowledged. And this does not make them problematic as queer works, because they accomplish their goals of speaking to a wider audience while still being true to queer experiences. Given how scant decent queer representation has been in kdramas over the last twenty years (consider the size of the list above against the fact that there are well over 1500 modern kdramas, and so few of the above listed characters are mains or even significant sides in these dramas), more shows like LITBC and Heesu are needed to bridge this gap. We sincerely hope they find the support they need to get made.

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Heesu in Class 2 - OST

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Heesu In Class 2 gives these queer moms hope

❤️🧡💛💚💙💜

Heesu In Class 2 isn't targeting the BL audience, it's queer representation in a Kdrama and that makes us excited. This difference means that the struggles of being a queer youth were expertly contrasted against those living a het normative life, wrapped it all up inside a cute kdrama, and delivered it to a much wider audience. An audience that may not have seen this perspective before. And the messages Heesu In Class 2 delivers to this audience are both powerful and important.

Love is Love. Mutual love is a precious gift and should be celebrated in all forms.

There were so many great messages during this series, but that felt like the final thought of Heesu's story. One that Heesu made when he said:

"Such insignificant tiny beings like us manage to find each other amidst countless specks of dust. How great of a miracle is that?"

The struggles of Heesu's sisters gives us all the evidence we need to see how precious it is to find someone that returns our feelings.

There were lots of other incredible messages/moments throughout the series that we were obsessed with. We already talked ourselves out of rewatching the series just to collect more evidence for this post, so we will try to be satisfied with only listing the ones we remember off the top of our heads.

A quick list of epic moments Heesu In Class 2 delivered to a wider audience:

"Maybe everyone can see what I am trying so hard to hide." Starting off the series by showing Heesu's fear of someone discovering his crush.

Constant contrast between queer vs het experience/acceptance. TWICE calling out the difference in difficulty and risk for a queer person to confess a crush. "I'm pretending not to know."

"Before my secret swallows me up. Before I fall into this dark hole forever." Heesu talking about the danger of secrets in episode 9.

Seung Won talking to Heesu about his mom being with a woman after ending her unhappy marriage to his father, "They live together 'cause the like each other. It's much better than living with someone you don't like."

Heesu finding comfort when he learns that Seung Won sees nothing wrong with being queer:

"At least Seung Won wouldn't hate me just for being myself, or get mad because I'm different. The moment I thought that... the weight on my mind was lightened by the weight of just one person."

Seung Won's mom's willingness to lie to spare him from the judgement of others. Seung Won choosing the truth over the constant work it would take to live in a lie.

Heesu's fear of being outed when he receives that threat. The disgustingness and cruelty of someone being willing to out him for revenge.

We HATE Heesu and Seung Won trying to play off their relationship as a "bromance" in public. But we also LOVE it because once again it is in direct contrast/comparison to the het couple and including this bitter pill is both realistic for their story and shows the audience the inequality, fear and pain in not being accepted by society. So we hate that this poisoned our happy ending, but we hope it gives the larger audience something to think about.

Series like these plant the seeds that change hearts. ❤️🧡💛💚💙💜

We sincerely hope this series reaches as many people as possible with it's important messaging. We have even decided to make a MyDramaList account just so we can support this series. Our hope is that this story moves some people. Causes them to stop and think. Gives them a new perspective. And hopefully finds it's way to some lonely Heesus out there and gives them hope.

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An Ode to HeeSu's Sisters

I adored HeeSu in Class 2 and was so excited every time we got to see more about the side character’s lives and relationships. It serves as a great example of how supporting characters can meaningfully reinforce the themes of a story. I loved all the characters, but, as someone who grew up with siblings, I have a soft spot for HeeSu’s sisters. So, I wanted to take a second to talk about each one for bit.

please be advised that the following will contain spoilers for the series.

The main roles that all of HeeSu’s sisters play in the narrative are as mentors to him. Their advice to him directly influences the actions he takes in his own life, and as an audience we’re able to see how their subplots allow him to learn from his sister’s experiences and apply those lessons to his own situation. The show also does a beautiful job of showing how the sisters influence each other and not just HeeSu.

Ok, let’s start where the series starts. With our youngest sister, HeeSin

HeeSin: The Pain...And Dare I Say Hope?...From Rejection

HeeSin has one of my favorite introductions to a character ever. Her first couple of scenes told us everything we needed to know:

1. She’s told a guy she likes him as soon as she could

2. She was rejected

3. She’s heartbroken

4. She loves a good, dramatic wallow in the pits despair

5. This happens A Lot

In episode 1 when HeeSu tells his sisters about the lesbian confession, Heesin’s reaction to the girl’s crush already having a girlfriend was fascinating.

“There’s still a chance then! You see? If you never confess then you’ll never know!” It really reveals a lot about her mindset that this was her first thought.

She also pointed out that sometimes it could be nice just to know that someone likes you. For a person who has clearly confessed to people and gotten rejected many times, this initially struck me as an absolutely unexpected take. However, it does makes sense though that this character would need to find a bright side to these frankly painful experiences. Getting rejected can be incredibly painful. When I took my first social psychology class I learned that rejection can manifest as actual physical pain in humans. Thus it’s only logical that HeeSin would have developed a positive mindset towards these rejections she’s frequently faced as a way to soothe the pain.

“They’ll always know me as someone who liked them, which could makes me a special person to them.” This hopeful notion is what leads HeeSu to attempt to confess his feelings to ChanYoung at the park, and while he’s running over there his monologue exposes something pretty important. HeeSu not only feels that his crush on ChanYoung his hopeless, but also that there is no hope in this universe that someone he likes could like him back.

But what HeeSin’s arc shows us is that there actually IS hope!! She doesn’t just bag a regular dude, but she bags a guy who was already in a relationship. That’s one of the more unlikely scenarios, and yet this is the one that actually ends up working out for her. It hearkens back to HeeSu’s monologue about how impossible it felt to him to ever have someone he likes also like him back, along with HeeSin’s assertion at the kitchen table that you really will never know what could happen unless you express your feelings. Could you get rejected? Oh, absolutely. Could it actually work out? Well, there’s always a chance!

Now, at this point you may be looking at me funny like, “yeah ok, Pim, but HeeSin is a woman confessing to guys. Typically the worst-case scenario for a straight person confessing to their crush is they get rejected. They don’t need to worry about homophobia, being hate-crimed, being kicked out of their home, or being disowned all because of their sexual orientation.” And to that I say, you’re right. Confessing for queer people comes with an extra layer of complexity, which is where our next sister comes in.

HeeJeong: Living Authentically Is Fucking Hard (But You Should Do It If You Can)

Something @bengiyo brought up in this post is that many of the subplots in this series are queer-coded and HeeJeong’s is no exception. Basically, HeeJeong and her boyfriend wanted to go to New York to study abroad together, but last minute she decides not to go with him and presumably they end their relationship but are still close. She spends time with him when he comes into town, and seems to have accepted the uncertainty of whether or not he’ll even come back home after his studies.

What is notable about all of this is that her siblings have clearly been unaware of the full background story. It seems that she never told them to the full sequence of events leading to their breakup. She even lies to them at first about why she was coming home late. It isn’t until HeeSu tells her that she should do whatever she wants and that he’ll have her back no matter what, that HeeJeong starts to tell her siblings what’s going on. She doesn’t reveal everything, but she at least owns her decisions and tells them that they don’t need to worry.

HeeJeong’s arc felt like a coming out metaphor to me. Not only is what Heesu says to her an ideal response to coming out to someone you’re close to, but her fear of judgment from her family really resonated with me as someone who has come out to family in the past.

What makes her arc feel even more like a coming out story is that it isn’t over once she tells her family about it. She actually is left with a decision to make: does she want to keep living as she has been or does she want to take a big leap in order to live the life she wants.

And the life she wants to live isn’t easy to achieve either. She needs to quit her job, leave her family, move to a different country, and at the end of the day she isn’t even sure if she and her boyfriend will end up getting back together. But like she said, she truly wanted to study more and she decided she was finally ready to follow that desire.

I think HeeJeong is meant to represent what could happen when we decide not to live authentically to what we want. Which, in most cases, what actually happens is whole lot of nothing. This of course applies to queer folk like HeeSu who could be obliged to just never confess his current feelings for SeungWon or his past feelings for ChanYoung. But it also applies to everyone. You want to become a nurse, but you never apply to nursing school for fear of rejection? Ok, then you’ll just never be a nurse. You want to go study abroad, but you get scared and decide not to go? Ok, then you’ll just stay at home with your siblings and keep working at the same job. But! You’ll always be thinking “what if?” What if I just applied? What if I just asked him out? What if I just moved to that new city?

As HeeJeong said herself, it can be really scary to take a big leap to do what you want. There are indeed risks and stakes involved, but because her ex is also her best friend she feels more comfortable knowing she wont be alone. She doesn’t say it out loud, but it’s clear that HeeSu’s support also helped her be more comfortable in going after what she wants.

After HeeJeong first tells the siblings that Yes She Still Hangs Out With Her Ex and That’s What She Wants To Do and That’s Her Business Thank You So Much, the next step the story takes is to examine what happens when you keep living a life that is unsustainable.

HeeJae: Complacency Is Comfy But Precarious

I pondered HeeJae’s role in this story for a long time. She’s the only sister whose significant other we actually meet, and from the beginning she is the most nonchalant about her relationship. Her attitude towards her relationship is so indifferent and detached, especially considering they keep breaking up and getting back together again.

I’ve never been in an on-and-off type of relationship, so her unwavering confidence that her boyfriend would come beg her to take him back was nothing short of astounding to me. People really live like that? Insane. But that’s kind of the point of her entire arc.

The actual definition of complacency is ‘A feeling of contentment or self-satisfaction, especially when coupled with an unawareness of danger, trouble, or controversy.’ This very much describes HeeJae’s approach to her relationship. She doesn’t question what she wants from her relationship until something happens that she doesn’t expect: Her boyfriend breaks up with her this time. What she tells him during their break-up in the park is that she likes that they’re like family, he’s her best friend, and that she likes that she’s comfortable with him.

The problem here is that relationships, actual functional relationships, are not one-sided. She clearly never took the time to ask herself, and especially not her boyfriend, whether he’s actually happy in the type of relationship they have. He tells her though, “I still want to be loved.”

Rather than making a statement about queerness, I feel like HeeJae’s arc is about relationships in general. It’s certainly in conversation with HeeSu and ChanYoug’s story line about the dangers of one-sided relationships. That arc deserves its own posts, but what I will say is that it felt right to have HeeJae and JeongGu’s confrontation in the park in the same episode as HeeSu and ChanYoung’s confrontation on the tennis court. Both of those relationships needed to be reevaluated, and the conclusion of both of those conversations was the same: things need to change but it’s all gonna be ok.

In Conclusion

These were just my personal takeaways from the sisters and how they added so much depth to this story. There's definitely more that could be said about them and I'm sure there are different takes, but since I hadn't seen anyone else really talk about them I wanted to at least start the conversation and show the some love. 💖

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i actually cried twice watching the heesu in class 2 finale.... the show handled closet anxiety and the fears of queer youth so kindly and deftly I'm gonna miss it immensely

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If it's something you're interested in talking about, I'd be interested to hear your thoughts about the ways Heesu succeeded in expanding a BL to a more mainstream category vs. some of the shows like Spare Me Your Mercy and I Hear the Sunspot etc. that I know you felt missed the mark

Hey anon, thanks for the ask. This is a good question, because there is important nuance in discussions of how to expand the reach of queer art (and as I have written about before, confusing commercial success with artistic merit). I think for me this idea of what is a successful version of taking queer stories more mainstream is about two primary things: 1) does the story stay authentic to queer truth even as it speaks to a broader audience and 2) does the story stay honest to the genre it's working in and give the queer characters the same full spectrum of humanity that it would hets in the same story. Note that all of these shows have source material that differs from the screen adaptation, so I am only talking about the shows here.

For me, SMYM missed the mark on this by setting its story in a genre that would normally have a more mature and sexually explicit depiction of an adult couple and intentionally removing much of that material for a queer pairing to cater to het sensibilities, along with generally de-emphasizing the romantic development to the point where the main pair's relationship trajectory was confusing to follow. I Hear the Sunspot missed the mark by artificially interrupting and regressing the main relationship to put off letting them get together and switch focus to a side character. Neither of these shows felt like they were depicting an honest relationship progression, and the creators spoke openly about making those choices to disrupt the queer narrative intentionally in seeking broader appeal. Essentially, these shows betrayed their own genre conventions and de-emphasized aspects of the characters' queer experiences to try to appeal to a broader (and homophobic) audience.

In seeking to speak to a more mainstream audience, Heesu took a different approach. It set its story within the high school romance kdrama framework, and it followed the conventions of that genre to a tee (including all the romances, het or queer, staying chaste). And despite not seeing sexual content for the characters, the entire narrative was about Heesu's experiences as a queer person, his journey to coming out to his loved ones, and his pursuit of a queer romantic relationship that made him feel fulfilled and content. It called to mind Japanese queer programming that is specifically created to depict "alternative lifestyles" to a mainstream audience to promote tolerance and understanding (think Koisenu Futari or Oppan). The intent behind this show was to help a broader audience understand and empathize with the reality of life as a queer teenager in Korea, not to obfuscate it. It sought to make the audience care about queer people by showing us who they are instead of hiding who they are. That, for me, is the crucial difference.

[twig-tea]

Quick thoughts on Lahn Mah (or How to Make Millions Before Grandma Dies):

(I've waited for Lahn Mah for quite some time, or basically ever since @clairedaring brought it to my attention. Thank you Claire for being the greatest GDH film studio hype person on this site ❤️)

It's such a simple story. We have our boy M. deciding to care for his terminally ill grandmother as he counts on some perks in her testament. There's really nothing super exciting about it. You can envision how the plot will go before you even start the movie.

It's a simple story but told very thoughtfully. There's a surprising level of depth to the characters that prevents the whole thing from being drowned in sentimentality. The movie does not shy away from the mundane, often bitter side of internal family affairs. Every character does questionable things, some relationships are hanging by a thread but it's not odd. or created to make more artificial drama. It's painfully realistic.

It was very relatable to me. Halfway through the movie, I wasn't just simply watching it. I was at the same time analyzing relationships within my very own family, comparing some scenes with my own experiences because I have seen these dialogues play out in real life. I may come from a completely different culture but let me tell you, we could switch a goddess with a cross or a saint and we could have the same narrative unfold somewhere in central Europe. Also, the scene where they were playing cards? My late granddad taught me how to play (and cheat). So yeah, there are plenty of opportunities to have a good cry not even because of the movie but because of the memories.

The huge strength of the movie is the way that it was filmed. We are immersed in the world in which our characters are living (which is an interesting world of the Thai Chinese family, slowly losing the connection with their roots). The space is telling the story which is as important as all the dialogues. Some of the most emotional moments are connected with the way the space changes. Or when characters change but the space does not.

Our two main actors are a blast. The movie relies on their performance and the push and pull of their characters. It's a fantastic dynamic that I imagine might have been quite hard to perfect but they did it!

The plot might be simple, and it might not be subtle but it can be a healing experience for some. I loved the parallels that I could catch that tied everything together and I appreciated that it is not some artsy deconstruction of a family's condition in the modern world. Sometimes all you need is a heartwarming piece of cinema made for a broad audience that's very easy to connect to.

tldr; Pat Boonnitipat made me cry again with his heartfelt depiction of a youngster taking care of an elder in the family. Contains a solid cast, a story of personal growth that we've all seen before and just enough amount of humour to nicely wrap it up. If you have a good relationship with your family it's a great opportunity for a bonding experience.

[The movie is available on Netflix for now only for these countries but has many more subtitles available besides English. It's also in selected US theatres since the 13th of September]