blbeloved - Tumblr blog

blbeloved · 18 days

Text

Turtles Finds a Coping Mechanism: The Until We Meet Again Rewatches

I've been so committed to crushing through the Old GMMTV Challenge that I kind of didn't allow myself to think that life's blips and bloops would shake me from my pace.

Well, real life has SLAYED ME as of late, SLAYED ME, and as @lurkingshan has noted to me -- yes, there's a CERTAIN amount of dissonance for my watching UNTIL WE MEET AGAIN, OF ALL SHOWS, as a coping mechanism, but here we are. I wanted to copy @bengiyo and rewatch UWMA anyway as a means of preparing for New Siwaj's Absolute Zero, which will be premiering at the end of September -- a time when my life will be calm-ish (???) again -- so I decided to take the plunge to see if UWMA would be a salve to my frayed nerves. It is, it totally is.

So here's some stream of consciousness notes, quite unlike my usual comparative/analytical style, just to honor what a ridiculously fabulous show UWMA is. (In my OGMMTVC analyses, I don't always get to gush over the cute stuff anyway because my posts get so long, so I'm doing a little of that here, too, ha.)

I knew that as soon as I watched it the first time for the OGMMTVC that I desperately wanted to rewatch it, so I just gave myself the go-ahead to eat the leum kleun candy. I've already completed one rewatch and am well into a second rewatch -- this show is so damn good, and now that I know the beats much better, I'm just having a lot of fun seeing in-depth the little nuances I missed the first time.

1) On my first watch, I did not appreciate how clearly Pharm was into Dean from the very start. The way Pharm flips through the photos of Dean that Team sends him from the first beach trip; the photo of Dean eating Del's breakfast; the way Pharm looks at the Facebook photo of Dean holding up the leum kleun. And how Pharm reacts when he saves Dean's phone number in his phone -- that ENORMOUS grin. I knew a lot going in the first time about Pharm's blushing maiden approach and how he was gunshy with intimacy for so much of the show. But I forgot in those early episodes -- homeboy was really into his crush! Taking that secret photo in the library, etc. He acknowledged it pretty immediately -- especially in that whispered conversation Pharm has with Team and Manaow in their English class. I had also forgotten that the show began with Pharm possibly questioning his sexuality, but being solidly knowledgable that it was Dean that was causing him to catch feelings.

2) Speaking of that fleeting moment in the library: after having watched the entire series the first time around, and remembering that Dean had saved that very first Post-It that Pharm had used to write a quick note on the papers that Pharm gave back to Dean in the library in... episode 2? Pharm had originally erased his name on that Post-It. It didn't click with me until this rewatch that Dean was able to make out Pharm's erased name from that Post-It -- which caused Dean to save the note, and use it as reference in the very last scene of the series. So cute.

3) I finally took the time to read about Phra Aphai Mani, the prince of the legend that Dean and Pharm talk about in the aquarium. Remember how Pharm says to Dean that Pharm doesn't like players?

DUDES. HAVE YOU READ ABOUT PHRA APHAI MANI? I guess, like, yes, if you're gonna have a super-long epic poem, a lot of shit needs to happen, but Aphai just kept marrying WIFE AFTER WIFE! FOUR WIVES TOTAL! One ogress, one mermaid, and two maybe humans? A half-ogress son here, a half-mer/son THERE, prince of THIS, king of THAT. Homeboy's life was COMPLICATED! I'm all EXTREMELY SYMPATHETIC to chaos, but this takes the damn cake. (And maybe gives me a touch more context into what's happening with that second marriage in I Feel You Linger In the Air, without the actual monsters/mermaids.) (Oh man -- imagine the Only Friends version of Phra Aphai Mani.) (NO.)

4) The first time around, I kind of though that the bits about Alex hitting on Pharm were a little extraneous and maybe a touch unnecessary, à la New Siwaj's style. But after my first rewatch, I stopped thinking so, and I actually began to enjoy them -- not only for how ridiculous they are, but I also recognized that that was the first time in the show that we see Pharm establishing boundaries. Of course, we see Pharm in his blushing maiden era forming boundaries with his P'Deeeean. But the way he's very clear with Alex, putting up as many walls as necessarily, and being exact in his communication that he likes someone else and is VERY not into dating Alex -- Pharm showed clarity and strength there. While Dean clearly liked to care for Pharm and treat Pharm as his younger companion -- Pharm also had agency, and knew he owned his agency, and I liked how that agency was first demonstrated vis à vis Alex.

5) I totally forgot about this, but -- I think it was the second time they had breakfast together in Pharm's condo? the third? that scene where Pharm's wearing the yellow shirt and he drops the bowl -- remember when Pharm asks Dean if he's mixed-race? I don't think I still understand the meaning of that. I'm guessing Pharm is asking if Dean is Thai-Chinese? I want to think on this more, because -- in episode 16, when Pharm goes to his uncle's/grandpa's house, it is clear that the house is a Thai-Chinese household. There are banners with Chinese script on the walls. I wonder if that was meant to indicate that Pharm was under the impression that he himself (Pharm) was fully ethnic Thai -- but with his relationship to his dad's side of the family being more revealed, it would turn out that Pharm himself was also "mixed." I did think it was cute that Pharm said, "I like it" to Dean after Dean's answer -- another instance where Pharm was being clearly flirty, despite the whole blushing maiden thing.

6) I did not appreciate the first time around, how good Ohm Thitiwat's acting was in the car scene when he's processing Korn's suicide. At the end of the series, I was so taken by the condo scene that I failed to give props to other intense moments, and that car scene was one of them. When Dean arrives at the building where Pharm and Sin lived next to each other -- a part of me wondered if he had originally intended to visit Sin, before hesitating to knock on Pharm's door. I'm not sure, and I wasn't sure after this rewatch. But that was a hell of a recognition moment on the part of Ohm's acting, and it was really damn good. (In fact -- it was my thinking about that car scene, and my wanting to watch it again, that prompted these rewatches in the first place.)

7) It may have been a little confusing, but: I really liked that the Korn x Intouch flashbacks were never presented in chronological order. I liked that the show had Dean and Pharm piece together their dreams and nightmares to come to a collective understanding about the trajectory of Korn and Intouch's relationship, even before Dean receives the background information from Sin. I know I was always a little confused during my first watch as to what moment in time I was watching with Korn and Intouch, but I recognize now that that was a reflection simply of when Pharm and Dean were receiving the same information themselves -- and I liked that the viewer was going through the same process that Dean and Pharm were going through.

8) At the way beginning of the series -- episode 2, maybe? episode 3? -- I like that Dean slyly figures out where to park himself on campus to see Pharm coming out of class. This is before the electric transformer explosion. Dean already was so swayed by Pharm. So cute.

9) I think it first struck me as a touch weird that Manaow and Del (Dean's sister!) were the admins of the DeanPharm chat group. But now that I can think more about it -- I wonder if they were doing that maybe as a way to help Pharm through his hesitancy and protect him from the fans. That being said: one of my absolute favorite moments was when Del first leans about Dean's first sleepover at Pharm's condo -- the way she jumps up and down and tries to calm her smile down. I was CRAAACKING up.

10) Maybe it's because I'm Indian, and used to very large and complicated families, that the relationship between Dean being a part of Intouch's family and having Korn's spirit, and vice versa with Pharm, wasn't confusing to me. But what really got me during my first rewatch was: Fluke Natouch's just INCREDIBLE acting when Pharm first meets Intouch's sister/Dean's grandmother, and Intouch's niece/Dean's mother. When I first watched the scene of Pharm meeting Dean's grandmother, a number of friends commented on loving that scene as well. GOD. It struck me as hard the second time around as the first time. And I think I was even MORE moved the second time around to see Pharm meeting Dean's mother.

Dean's mother had to process a LOT in the moment that she met Pharm. She had to process that her son had a boyfriend, that that boyfriend was there in her house in the first place, and that she'd have to tell her husband (Dean's dad) that their son's boyfriend was sleeping over. AND, that was all BEFORE Pharm had his reaction to Dean's mom once he was finally awake and processing things again. And THEN, she knew that Dean HIMSELF would have to tell his dad the next day and ask for his blessing. Moms have to go through a lot (do I ever know that life), but that was a LOT for Dean's mom, and god, I just gained a new appreciation for those scenes and how Dean and Pharm managed the whole damn thing together. (Also, now that I've seen The Love of Siam, as well as, of course, KinnPorsche -- and, OH, Be My Favorite, too! Kob Songsit. LEGENDARY BL DAD!)

11) My initial flip-out on the condo scene still stands. During my rewatch, I rewound it, like... three times? Fuck, man. One of the BEST BL scenes, ever, ever.

12) I loved taking my time to watch the very final scene, when Dean and Pharm have had the same dream of Korn and Intouch thanking them, and they get back together. I really loved paying attention to how all the Post-Its came back, the meaning of Never Forget, all the little notes and memories of when they had first met. Intouch's ring, the very first note Pharm wrote to Dean, all of it. Dean was such a sentimental simp from the start.

(Because I'm on such a DeanPharm kick -- and I know this is against better advice, but -- I'm considering a fast watch of Between Us just to see DeanPharm's conclusion. I know! The side couples are supposed to be chaotic, but, but. Once I get more time.)

13) Last note. Again, when I have time again, I'm wanting to write a Big Meta on separation. I've noted in some of the most important GMMTV BLs, that separation is often a key theme. But I think Pharm asking for a break was also incredibly key, and keyed into his continued commitment to setting boundaries. I think I probably fell most for Pharm as a character with him doing this -- strange, I know, since I love DeanPharm incessantly, but his standing up for clarity for his feelings meant so much for the internal strength he had gained by surviving the ordeal they had gone through. He was going to stick to his guns to make sure the relationship was authentic FOR HIM, and he did just that.

GOD, THIS WAS CATHARTIC! If you read this, thanks for going through this with me! I'm addicted to writing and this was a fun break in the midst of life chaos. I promise the OGMMTVC will hopefully continue without interruption, but that being said -- I'm watching Not Me, slowly, and having a great time with it. But UWMA is my woobie at the moment, and I just love having fallen in love with this show.

51 notes · View notes

blbeloved · 2 months

Text

Another satisfied customer

Killer and Healer is SO GOOD, the chemistry, cinematography and the acting. THE ENDING!!😫😭 I was SHOCKED.

#killer and healer #chinese bl #chen yuzhi #jiang yuelou #romance my ass

11 notes · View notes

blbeloved · 2 months

Text

It's the first #ValentinesDay we're subjected to multiple livestreamed genocides by belligerent imperialists

To raise spirits a🧵of in-love, anti-imperial, revolutionary, feminist, queers using brawn and brains to achieve not just individual but COLLECTIVE GRATIFICATION ❤️

#NirvanaInFire

They start out as the most important in each other’s world, separated by tyranny, 13 years and hidden identity

One must deceive the other, the second must fight even his Royal father, bringing down the government to get justice for 70K of the impugned Chiyan Army

#KillerAndHealer

Amidst war and chaos the country is not yet rid of corrupt fascists of the Kuomintang regime or the scar opium has etched deeply into the body politic

Enter two communist gays who heal each other’s souls, overcoming tragedy and creating a new City of Light

#Jumong

Just another day on the job of resisting the Han Empire and building a new nation of Goguryeo is a perfect time to meet the love of your life

HyeopBo and SaYong are indispensable to their respective military and titan leaders but become even more essential together

#TheDevilJudge

What starts as personal revenge for both men ends up subverting systemic injustice among South Korean political elites who’re in cahoots with billionaire capitalists and their paid thugs

#LawfulHusbands ❤️story also deals with depression; child abuse; disability

Click the Twitter link for the video that accompany each title https://x.com/BLLoversLink/status/1757823419972735017?s=20

#valentines day #nirvana in fire #killer and healer #Jumong #the devil judge #collective gratification #revolutionary queers #communist gays #anti imperialist BLs

5 notes · View notes

blbeloved · 2 months

Text

Happy Valentines to all YueZhi shippers!

If you’d like to share your greetings, fanfics, fanarts and fmv’s with other fans there’s a Killer and Healer Discord where everyone’s welcome https://discord.gg/AmkAjedW

#killer and healer #Jiang YueLou #Chen YuZhi #mao zi jun #yi bo chen #ian yi #valentines day

1 note · View note

blbeloved · 3 months

Text

93K notes · View notes

blbeloved · 3 months

Text

Killer and Healer is SO GOOD, the chemistry, cinematography and the acting. THE ENDING!!😫😭 I was SHOCKED.

11 notes · View notes

blbeloved · 3 months

Text

Last Twilight, episode 12: final reflections

Wow. It took me all of this past weekend to process this finale, notwithstanding the usual life craziness that has dogged me lately.

Let me preface this whole thing by saying that I'm confused by what I watched. I'd say that, overall -- I actually quite liked this series, and I especially, absolutely ADORED JimmySea, Namtan, and Mark, and their acting. JimmySea kicked major ass, and I really hope they get another big and complicated show to chew on.

I also want to say that between episodes 11 and 12, I felt that I saw uncharacteristic editing clunkiness from Aof Noppharnach and his team that left a lot of necessary emotional and ethical processing on the cutting room floor. I think that's what's ultimately making me feel uneasy about the process of watching this, but -- funnily enough, I'm not nearly as "angry" about the ending as I was with other bad shows that fell apart in their last quarter recently. It was obvious that MhokDay were going to get together.

But I needed to walk a few more steps with them on their journey to that end.

Before I got my eyes on the finale, a few reactions on social media, from Tumblr to Twitter gave me the case of the jibbles. Namely: that the story of Last Twilight would have worked better if Day had stayed blind through the end.

I wasn't really understanding how that construction could work without walking through some sort of ethical minefield.

Now that I've seen the finale -- especially that infamous 4/4 segment -- I understand better what those arguments were saying.

Yet, I'm still dogged by a kind of ethical confusion here. And maybe that was one of the points of this finale, another one of Aof Noppharnach's perhaps now-famous-or-infamous emotionally inconclusive endings.

To me, there are two ethical potholes that this show stumbled on:

1) The ethics WITHIN the fictional piece itself for a character to not depict the process of considering the various fates he might face vis à vis a potentially reversible impairment, and

2) The ethics of a REAL audience ultimately wanting a different outcome for a fictional character to NOT have an impairment reversed.

TL;DR — I don’t think Last Twilight spent enough time having Day consider the permanence or impermanence of the various fates he faced, including permanent blindness. I don’t think the characters, and as such, the audience, spent enough time understanding that a corneal transplant was always going to be Day’s endgame.

Last Twilight was marketed as a show focused on disability, on a man going blind in a society that prioritizes the able-bodied, and how he would adjust to his disability, and of course (this being GMMTV), his falling in love. As fans, we were prepared to receive a whole show about a character with a disability, not as a side pairing, à la Heart and Li Ming in Moonlight Chicken.

It so happened that Day's visual impairment was corneal deterioration -- a condition that could lead to permanent blindness, and thus qualify him for a corneal transplant.

What I'm struggling with is the crux of the ethical dilemma that this show was ALWAYS going to have to deal with: that a corneal impairment of the kind that Day experienced, in the prime of his life, could very well be reversed with surgery, a surgery that has tremendous success rates.

As such -- as we got that clarification in drips throughout the series -- this show was actually not ONLY going to be about the newfound adjustment of a recently-impaired man to an ableist society. It was ALWAYS going to have this door of ANOTHER major change, the reversal of the impairment, just slightly cracked open. I'm not sure that I, as a viewer, was fully prepared for this, even as Night and Mae Mhon spoke about "eye donations" as givens in the middle of the series. I believe the show needed to be much louder, earlier, about the "hope" that Day could "go back" to "living a normal life," instead of framing the high majority of the show around his adjustments to his impairment.

As we went through Day's adjustment to life outside of his room, I believe we needed to hear, FROM DAY HIMSELF, that a corneal transplant was a conclusion that HE believed in, that HE wanted. A failure of this series was that we unfortunately only heard that from his family members, leaving us to only ASSUME that the conclusion of the reversal of his impairment was ALSO Day's intention.

For a story that was very much about an individual's developing agency and self-advocacy: I believe I needed to hear from Day himself that he was good and ready for the final surgery. I only assume that was the case, as I saw his own body and mind in the hospital. But I believe, for dramatic success, that I could have used a basic, "I'm ready," from him, to make segment 4/4 more complete and contextual, against the story of adjustment and resilience we had so far seen before then.

And what a story of adjustment and resilience we had gotten, as Day had established a full career for himself, without Mhok next to him, during one of the time jumps of episode 12.

For my sake, as I process what I watched this weekend, I want to come to grips with what I thought were the major themes of this show, and see if I can come to some sort of sensible conclusion about what happened here.

This show was focused on:

1) the romance between Day and Mhok, 2) Mhok's caretaking and companionship being the lever to help Day out of his room and back into the world from which he had retreated after the onset of his visual impairment, 3) Day slowly learning how to function again in a society that prioritizes the able-bodied vis à vis his visual impairment, 4) Day learning how to self-advocate for himself in the face of those who condescend to him and/or keep him trapped in compassion bias postures,

and more that I'm sure I'm missing, but those are the themes that resonated the most with me.

I think the general feeling on Tumblr is that, save for the romance, that themes 3 and 4 were contradicted out of existence in the face of the sudden flip to the surgery of segment 4/4.

I think not hearing from Day himself that he was ready and willing for the surgery was a lost moment. I don't believe Day was ever acting as if he would choose anything else OTHER than surgery throughout the series. BUT, AT THE SAME TIME: what we had watched prior to 4/4 was his story of adjustment.

My biggest ethical concern here, vis à vis the audience reactions that I've read, is that NO ONE -- in fiction or in real life -- owes me a story of heroism. If there is an individual who has been impaired since birth, or is dealing with a degenerative condition later in their life, and has the opportunity to address or reverse the condition, who am I to say that that individual SHOULD NOT address their condition?

For me, this is huge. I believe this is a huge ethical dilemma that Last Twilight ultimately does not face. I wish this series had been much more centered, earlier on, about the utter REALITY that Day could have his condition reversed by surgery, in words he'd say himself, rather than assumptions made for him, on behalf of his family, who.... I presume were established to be some sort of legal conservators for him, as Mhon continued to be the one to receive eye donation text messages.

(I concede that I don't know if this is a more common set-up for disabled individuals in Thailand, as I would assume in the States, that Day himself would have been the one to receive that message directly.)

For this show to have seemed emotionally and artistically complete: I needed to hear from Day himself that surgery was an endgame that he was banking his hopes on. I also needed to understand, much more statistically clearly vis à vis the show, of the absolute risks that Day faced towards having permanent blindness for the rest of his life. Because the show ALSO needed to focus on the establishment of the romance between Mhok and Day, we missed out on the show taking time to explain to us, the viewers, of the absolute risks that Day faced in any of these scenarios -- and thus, we would have had MUCH more context into the nuances of the resilience that Day needed to establish for himself as he re-adjusted to society, with his numerous fates lying before him.

I'm going to borrow the words of @hallowpen in their final review here, to say that this show at the end needed much more "breathing room." I think @hallowpen is so right in saying it like this, because these two factors that I just laid out, geez -- the first 7/8ths of the series being about Day's social adjustment against the utter suddenness of the successful surgery and his sudden jump back to what's been translated as his "normal life" -- just clash so tonally. (I do wonder if we're getting as nuanced a translation on "normal" as we could be.)

I think this is about the most confused final review of a show that I've written. There is an ethical heaviness to all of this that's weighing on me, that I think I still need time to comb through.

I also feel that I simply do not know enough, by way of my lack of cultural competency into how Thai society approaches issues of public and private health, if Day’s unseen choice to get the surgery would have been a given among majority Thai audiences, AND that majority Thai audiences would not have asked for the kind of internal debates that I think the show could have used.

I feel thrilled that Day can see Poomjai/Mee, after making that wish in episode 11.

But I think, if this show was about a journey for someone to learn how to successfully advocate for his own agency -- that, at the very end, I needed to see that agency exercised, by him, to get to the part of the reversal of the impairment that I assumed he wanted.

Again: Day doesn't owe me his story of heroism. If fiction doesn't want to give me that, from a character with a recent impairment, I don't have the right to ask for it.

But the missing bits of artistry to get me, the viewer, to only an assumption, has led me to surprising ethical places, that will leave me wondering about what happened in this series for a long time.

165 notes · View notes

blbeloved · 3 months

Text

Very good analysis of the elephant in the room. The narrative does not have a very good analysis of power just like they do not even entertain the idea of justice. One cannot have love based on such injustice and inequality. At the end of the episode I felt they really do not have a chance in hell of succeeding in a long-term relationship and that’s a huge let down.

We have to start thinking about the reason there is this persistent lapse in terms of resolution of conflict in a way that the central conflict is side-stepped usually with a time skip (BBS, MLC) rather than resolved, because they do not come from nowhere, and why is it that some directors keep making these exact same mistakes

Care is the most fundamental part of love, but it must also be reciprocal; it was neither of these things and where it is held up for us to admire it, it is seen as something exceptional rather than a standard requirement - as well as a joy of relationships, that change, intensify and ebb with the flows of life together. Even to hear a mother who has raised a child to his 20s, which means a lifetime of care, to say to someone that there is a difference between being a caregiver and being a lover. That is such a reactionary and so unqueer thing to even say, even from a bad mother as she was supposed to be.

Seeing this same ideology play out again really took me back to MLC when Wen handed off his still recuperating ex-boyfriend to be cared for by his sister, who was already looking after two young children, whereas he himself had zero caring responsibilities. There are some serious, persistent gender issues with some writers/directors’ work that need unpacking. That really rubbed me the wrong way, and I felt the same with the conclusion and some of the ongoing themes in Last Twilight that many others feel even if they can’t put their finger on why it felt so unsatisfactory. It’s the politics.

I think some people in GMM need to go and attend some seminars about gender and justice in the home; about caring labour; and masculinity and love because this is not it.

Ohhhh, my god. Yeah, I have only myself to blame for the way Last Twilight played me in regards to the MorkDay relationship. Because the Night & Day relationship was right there as foreshadowing. And I realize that I've harped repeatedly on the way the narrative framed the accident that damaged Day's vision, but now I realize that it provides a (unintentional?) parallel to the trainwreck of Mork and Day's relationship as it actually plays out vs. the way the narrative treats it.

Day never, not once, accepts any culpability in the accident that damaged his vision, even though he was the one driving the car. None of the other characters challenge his framing that the accident was Night's fault. The narrative, itself, doesn't challenge his framing that the accident was Night's fault. Yes, his reckless driving is shown to be in response to an action of Night's, but not once is Day made to take ownership of and accept responsibility for his own actions and how he responds, which includes driving with his head practically under the dashboard, at night, with other cars on the road. Nobody made Day do that except Day, himself. Significantly, we never hear anything about anyone in the other vehicle or how they may have been injured (or killed?), and I have to wonder how much of that is down to Day's privileged socioeconomic status. (If it had been Mork driving that car, how likely is it that he would have ended up ... well. In jail?)

Neither does Day accept any responsibility for the damage to his relationship with Mork - or the emotional damage he deals to Mork, himself - when he unilaterally breaks things off after figuring out Mork lied about the job opportunity in Hawaii. None of the other characters challenge his framing that Mork has committed the cardinal sin of pitying Day. The narrative, itself, doesn't challenge his framing that Mork has committed the cardinal sin of pitying Day - in fact, it doubles down by making Mork apologize for it in the final episode. Yes, Day's response to Mork lying about the job is in character for him, but Day is never made to take ownership of and accept responsibility for how he responds, including 1) jumping to conclusions about Mork's reasons or 2) withdrawing emotional support from his boyfriend in the wake of Mork's admission of ongoing trauma. Given context clues we get prior to Day jumping to his conclusions, it's clear that Mork had unresolved trauma from his sister's death. But Day mows him down for supposedly pitying Day as surely as if he'd hit him with a car, shuts down any explanation Mork tries to give and withdraws any hope of a mutually supportive relationship by refusing to do the least bit of emotional labor on Mork's behalf, instead banishing him from Day's life. We then get an upbeat montage of Day living his best life without Mork, but significantly, we see nothing about what Mork is going through or dealing with during this same time period.

Day treats both of these men in his life - men who are in some of the closest relationships he can have: a brother, a lover - terribly, while shrugging off his own part in the physical and emotional injuries he blames them for. He never apologizes to either of them for hurting them by lashing out. Instead, he magnanimously forgives both of them for how they've hurt him and expects the relationships to pick up from there as if everything is fine. And indeed, in neither case does the narrative seem to think that he needs to do any work to make up for how he treats them.

Which also leads me to: Maybe in some ways, the accident stands in for the way that Day - and his mother - hold it against Night for not being the supportive big brother they think he ought to have been. But Mork's storyline shows us that it never would have mattered how supportive a big brother Night was, because Mork was repeatedly, exhaustively supportive of Day, and all it took was one misstep for Day to kick Mork to the curb and literally block him out of his life for three years until Mork, himself, came back and pushed the issue while accepting full blame onto himself. Sure, Day wrote that editor's note in the book, but he also doted on that gd fish that Night got him, while at the same time being the most heinous asshole he could possibly be both to and about Night. So if he's going to treat Mork the way he did, why should I think he would treat Night any differently than he did the minute Night made a single mistake, no matter if Night had been (in his eyes) perfect in the past?

I think I'm supposed to believe that Day has learned and grown during his time with a disability - I guess that's one thing I'm supposed to take away from his little speech at the beginning of the finale and maybe from him helping that dude across the street in the surprise gotcha in the last part of the ep? But if I look at what the series actually shows me of how he treats the people in his life, I have no proof that he's not just the same self-centered asshole he started out as - the self-centered asshole he admits to being at one point. Which would be fine - no disabled person is required to be a saint, purified and exalted into inspiration porn by their disability. It's just that 1) the show seems to be trying to sell me on the idea that he's not the same self-centered asshole he started out as, and 2) the show seems to be trying to sell me on the idea that any relationship Mork has with him isn't going to be toxically imbalanced.

And I'm not buying.

136 notes · View notes

blbeloved · 3 months

Text

So many parallels between #TheDevilJudge and that other magnificent 2021 Asian“Bromance”#KillerAndHealer.

Down to the ending scene with both couples staring heart-eyes at each other from a distance, just because 💁🏽‍♂️

Captivating plot, savage twists, well-drawn female villains, criminal masterminds, men who would die for the man they love. Intimate touches, emotional hugs, caresses - lots. Both couples look after a daughter together and care for a fat white cat

Both leads are lawmen on a radical course to deliver justice in lawless times, irreversibly changing the lives of all who love them. Their love stories begin in conflict because of differing moral visions about justice and the value of human life

Both leading men’s psyches are profoundly shaped by shared themes: trauma as child orphans; daddy issues; cruel injustice; found family. These all inform their sense of responsibility to defend and protect the weak-by any means necessary

All the BL literacies - codes that empower BL fans to “queer” normative romance tropes, were present, providing cascades of “moe”. The way the male leads’ character arcs explicitly target their evolving masculinity especially in the way they treat women as equals, is to be applauded.

Female villains are the other significant characters to get the BL treatment in The Devil Judge and Killer And Healer. Compellingly drawn, with a supreme sense of their own righteous power, they exercise bold, autonomous choices, including knowing when to withdraw from the game

Is there anything left to say about the 🔥🔥 chemistry between the touchy-feely leads whose only weakness is one man? Killer And Healer and The Devil Judge master what is often neglected in more explicit contemporary BLs, that much of the power of liveaction BL is in leaving room for imagination

Killer And Healer has the edge because unrequited female love is well handled - unambiguously and elegantly allowing the woman to continue her own journey, dignity and agency intact. Killer And Healer mlm couples are devoted to the men they love with no narrative deviation

Both are original screenplays BL fans loved so much they demanded the continuation of these amazing characters in their lives. The Devil Judge got a Manhwa.

Killer And Healer got a Canon Novel, an Audio Drama and an Official Post-Finale 26-min video with the explicit scenes that were too gay for censors

Killer and Healer is on YouTube and The Devil Judge is on Netflix

47 notes · View notes

blbeloved · 3 months

Text

You know, this isn’t the thing that fucks me up the most about BL/“yaoi”/fujoshi discourse, but it’s high up there so I’m going to say it.

It took me my whole lifetime to accept the fact that I’m a feminine guy. Every time I was laughed at for being girly, nonviolent, called a sissy, bitch, or worse, it hurt like hell. And when I realized I was attracted to boys, that was when I started to question whether I was a real man. It felt like a stab to the gut.

I was there, little teenage me, reading BL, because I couldn’t connect with anything else I knew of. Straight romance didn’t do anything for me. I watched Brokeback Mountain and liked it, but I couldn’t relate to almost any part of it. Gei Comi (“bara”) wasn’t my taste back then — I wanted to see boys who looked a bit like me, not big hunky adults with facial hair! So I fell back to BL.

And you people on here complain about “straight girls squeeing and saying ‘my sinful gay babies!!!’” — guess what, I was around when you actually DID see fangirls say this type of thing. I was there consuming BL and slash by the truckful, ignoring the occasional homophobic comments from the author/uploader. I saw all the hate every other corner of fandom threw at BL fans, and you know what.

None of that hate was because they had homophobic attitudes.

It was purely because “yaoi is for stupid girls”, and they were “ruining the source material with their dirty gay hands”.

If girls touched anything that was “meant for boys”, including male characters themselves, it was “dirtied”, “ruined”. (Sounds familiar?)

And the boys who liked BL? Who preferred a romantic manga about androgynous guys slowly falling in love, with cherry blossoms being swept by the wind in the background, rather than just watching gay porn featuring masculine men? We weren’t “real men”.

If you thought there isn’t a fuckton of toxic masculinity in the gay male community, boy do I have news for you. Feminine, camp, flamboyant men, they all “made gays look bad”. Because of us, cishet people wouldn’t accept gay men as “real men”, so there were attempts to exclude us to protect the reputation of the unoffensive, masculine macho gays.

Obviously, it didn’t work, but damn if it didn’t make me and guys like me feel horrible that even other gay guys hated us.

It took me a long time to accept myself. Little mid-to-late-teens me, with light hypogonadism that stunted my growth and made me look very feminine. Before I started taking hormones per my endocrinologist’s advice, I barely had appetite to eat decently. I only lost my baby cheeks and started gaining muscle mass a year or so into hormone treatment.

Me, still flaming gay.

As I grew up, came out, and made queer friends, I became less and less dependent on BL for self-esteem and entertainment. But BL fans were slowly being more accepted in animanga fandom (or at least, people made peace with the fact that we weren’t going anywhere). Same for slash shippers in western fandoms. I was so happy to see all the M/M content. I was so happy to see a space where girls could share their passion (including erotica) and support each other.

When they learned that a gay guy liked the same things as them, they were ecstatic. They never shamed me for sharing their “girly” interests. I had serious conversations with them when they said insensitive or ignorant things, but it was becoming less and less necessary to do so. Fans were becoming progressively more conscious of queer issues.

And now.

Now,

“Yaoi is for cishet girls.”

“You must be lying about being a gay man. You’re obviously a straight girl.”

“Nasty fujoshits.”

“If you have more m/m than m/f or f/f ships, you’re fetishizing mlm.”

Good fucking lord.

It’s so transparent. You feel so self-righteous expressing hate for women (plenty of whom are queer, but yeah, straight women too!) having interests, and god forbid, sometimes sexual interests (gasp!).

You dress it up as “concern for MLM” in the hopes that people will sympathize with your campaign to shame and harass women, men and gender non-conforming folk for daring to like content “not meant for them”, just like 2ch and 4chan dudebros in the mid-2000’s.

It makes me sick to the stomach.

Don’t pretend this is about homophobia. You don’t go after the exact same content if it’s made by “real men” featuring masculine macho “real men”.

You’ve heard of seme/uke tropes? Get ready for aggressive tops and “bottom bitches”! “Fetishizing Asian men”? Well, good thing that gay dudes have rice queens, and on the other end of the spectrum, “no fats, femmes or asians”. Transphobic themes? Some men consider “sh*male” or “tr*nny” to be porn categories! But neither anti-fujoshi nor transphobic gay men will talk about trans men — they’re “not real men”, after all, just “straight women invading gay spaces”.

And let’s not get into the rape, abuse, incest, racism, sexism, violence, and plethora of other problematic things that cis gay men portray in gei comi, original fic and fanfic — it puts dark BL and fic written by anyone else to shame.

But it’s okay, because it’s “real men” creating and consuming it, right?

Look, I get it. You want to seem like you’re doing good and fighting for queer men. I’ll hazard you even were fujoshi/fudanshi before and are ashamed of how you acted back then.

But all that you’re doing is misusing terms of a language you don’t know, from a culture you’re not part of and fandoms you don’t participate in, speaking over gay men and Asian fans, othering Asian people, and fostering an environment in which harassment of innocent fans is encouraged and marginalized people are used as scapegoats.

I feel for the trans guys, who go to fandoms to escape the hate and transphobia from the world, only to be misgendered and send hateful messages in the spaces they wanted to have fun in. Who are already accused of “faking it”, of not being “real men”, by bigots in the real world, and now have to face the same horrible things in fandom.

I feel for the queer girls, some of whom may not even be attracted to men, but to whom BL and/or slash means a lot. Who often don’t even have female characters to relate to, much less queer female characters, or simply can’t relate to them very well for a variety of complex reasons. They seek refuge in fandom, only to be misoriented, called “cishet”, having their identity erased to push an agenda.

And I feel for the straight, cis girls, who put genuine effort into educating themselves on queer issues, for whom fandom was a welcoming space where they could finally share their interests and be themselves, be allowed to have sexual interests… and now are being called perverts, deviants, and being told that they taint everything they touch.

And as much as it pisses me off to be called “basically a cishet girl”, it doesn’t get to me. At present, I’m secure in the knowledge that I am a real man, despite being gay, despite being feminine, despite liking BL. I am comfortable with myself and my identity.

But little teenage me would have been devastated.

Hey, anti-fujoshi? I don’t need your faux-activism. Kindly take your misogyny, efemmiphobia, transphobia and identity politics and leave us alone. Or —OR! Listen to the people you’re supposedly trying to protect.

Sincerely,

a gay, Asian, fem, queer as fuck fudanshi.

10K notes · View notes

blbeloved · 3 months

Note

Same same same

For the ship ask game: Kang Seo Joon and Han Ji Woo from To My Star

I see what you're doing here and I respect the troublemaking.

This is another complicated one for me. I like To My Star but struggle with couples where I feel like the relationship is deeply unbalanced, and this pair kinda takes the cake in that respect.

I don't dislike Ji Woo, but I find him to be very frustrating, and I don't think I would ever tell a friend to date him IRL. He is too selfish, too internally focused, too contained, and frankly, too willing to be cruel out of a sense of self preservation. None of those things make him a bad person, but they do make him a bad partner, and this show never convinced me he truly learned and would not pull this kinda shit again the next time he's feeling low.

I struggled with Seo Joon for different reasons, because I didn't feel like the show gave me the grounding I needed to understand why he was so invested in Ji Woo and so willing to torpedo his entire life to chase after someone who treated him that poorly. I like what I know of Seo Joon--his loyalty, his bravery, his earnestness and willingness to let go of ego--but I don't feel like I ever got to the root of who he is to sufficiently understand why he made the choices he did. I also find him to be a little too much of a fantasy to feel real as a character, and I think this show was striving to feel more grounded in reality so that just didn't entirely come together for me.

Ultimately, I think this show miscalibrated on the happiness to horrors ratio for this relationship. While I enjoyed the future montage of cute couple moments as much as the next girlie, I didn't see enough of what made them work to convince me they could weather new problems in the future. And that's why they're not a fav for me.

Send me a ship and I'll share my thoughts about it

17 notes · View notes

blbeloved · 4 months

Text

BLs That Heal

Tough times all around so #FujinHaven did an informal survey of BLs fans find healing, help them feel better about themselves, more calm and optimistic

The titles,grouped by theme, are rich in emotions and intimacy; inspiring; absorbing; cathartic and humorous too

Healing for those dealing with loss, shame and grief:

#Egoist 🇯🇵

#EternalYesterday 🇯🇵

#GameBoysTheSeries 🇵🇭

#HesComingToMe 🇹🇭

#OneRoomAngel 🇯🇵

Oxytocin drips:

#MySchoolPresident 🇹🇭

#HIStory3Trapped 🇹🇼

#CherryMagic 🇯🇵

#ALeagueOfNobleman 🇨🇳

Serotonin boosters:

#LoveSick 🇹🇭

#AdvanceBravely 🇨🇳

#LoveInTranslation 🇹🇭

#Addicted 🇨🇳

Soft Tops:

#SemanticError 🇰🇷

#MyRide 🇹🇭

#LoveByChance 🇹🇭

#UnforgottenNight

#SecretCrushOnYou 🇹🇭

Can’t cry but really want to cry and it will all be worth it:

#KillerAndHealer 🇨🇳

#NirvanaInFire 🇨🇳

#TheUntamed 🇨🇳

#ToSirWithLove 🇹🇭

#HanhPhucXaBay 🇻🇳

#UntilWeMeetAgain 🇹🇭

Visuals and Vibes:

#DinosaurLove 🇹🇭

#MrCinderella 🇻🇳

#BoysLockdown 🇵🇭

#2Gether 🇹🇭

#HelloStranger 🇵🇭

Lots of laughs and smiles:

#WinterBegonia 🇨🇳

#BonAppetit 🇰🇷

#StupidGenius 🇻🇳

#BoyNextDoor 🇰🇷

Enjoy the list and check out the first feminist reviews of live-action BL at Fujin Haven blog https://fujinhaven.portfolial.com

98 notes · View notes

blbeloved · 5 months

Text

BLs That Heal

Tough times all around so #FujinHaven did an informal survey of BLs fans find healing, help them feel better about themselves, more calm and optimistic

The titles,grouped by theme, are rich in emotions and intimacy; inspiring; absorbing; cathartic and humorous too

Healing for those dealing with loss, shame and grief:

#Egoist 🇯🇵

#EternalYesterday 🇯🇵

#GameBoysTheSeries 🇵🇭

#HesComingToMe 🇹🇭

#OneRoomAngel 🇯🇵

Oxytocin drips:

#MySchoolPresident 🇹🇭

#HIStory3Trapped 🇹🇼

#CherryMagic 🇯🇵

#ALeagueOfNobleman 🇨🇳

Serotonin boosters:

#LoveSick 🇹🇭

#AdvanceBravely 🇨🇳

#LoveInTranslation 🇹🇭

#Addicted 🇨🇳

Soft Tops:

#SemanticError 🇰🇷

#MyRide 🇹🇭

#LoveByChance 🇹🇭

#UnforgottenNight

#SecretCrushOnYou 🇹🇭

Can’t cry but really want to cry and it will all be worth it:

#KillerAndHealer 🇨🇳

#NirvanaInFire 🇨🇳

#TheUntamed 🇨🇳

#ToSirWithLove 🇹🇭

#HanhPhucXaBay 🇻🇳

#UntilWeMeetAgain 🇹🇭

Visuals and Vibes:

#DinosaurLove 🇹🇭

#MrCinderella 🇻🇳

#BoysLockdown 🇵🇭

#2Gether 🇹🇭

#HelloStranger 🇵🇭

Lots of laughs and smiles:

#WinterBegonia 🇨🇳

#BonAppetit 🇰🇷

#StupidGenius 🇻🇳

#BoyNextDoor 🇰🇷

Enjoy the list and check out the first feminist reviews of live-action BL at Fujin Haven blog https://fujinhaven.portfolial.com

98 notes · View notes

blbeloved · 5 months

Text

It’s been 3 years and I’m drawing again thanks to KH. Can finally show this off after some sleepless nights. My countryside sunset for Yuelou and Yuzhi although it does look like sunrise but that’s all I could manage ok. ;_;

43 notes · View notes

blbeloved · 6 months

Text

Enjoyed this very entertaining podcast on Wedding Plan and agree with pretty much everything about the hosts’ assessment, but in terms of some of the meta and industry remarks, I think I diverge a bit.

I agree that the way the Seme role is interpreted (it’s not BL if there’s no Seme-Uke dynamic) in WP, is perhaps a barrier for many international fans because of patriarchal conditioning around hegemonic masculinity as well as the way western media typically portrays gay heroes, means many people did not feel attracted to Lom’s character.

I don’t believe it’s the way the Uke is portrayed, since feisty, bossy and self aware Ukes (who Do Not Represent Women in Asian BL cultures) are a staple in Asian BL for decades, from every single BL producing country https://x.com/BLLoversLink/status/1654385301605761024?s=20. It is rare, however, that we see a Seme - certainly in Thai BL, portrayed as anything other than hegemonically masculine

And as you said there’s a lot of criticism of Mame’s previous work comes and this is because when one enters international fandom those are just the inherited rules - we’re supposed to hate the only female director in the Thai industry -Mame because of misogynistic projection, but not the queer men and certainly not gay directors who have the last word in BL series and who proudly attached their names to series she wrote or produced, or even when in separate series these gay male directors eg as in Lovely Writer, do the exact same and even worst things than Mame is pilloried for. Kinn Porsche the series and Only Friends are recent examples. Again this is not a discourse happening among Thai or Asian fans. For US fans especially I recommend spending some time understanding how Asian people currently living in Asia experience and analyse these works https://x.com/BLLoversLink/status/1613817016598634497?s=20

Finally in terms of intercultural analysis of media products going in with a more reparative lens by prioritising the point of view from the queer Asian creators perspective is really useful practice too https://x.com/BLLoversLink/status/1635142092937895943?s=20. I personally use this approach to revisit TTTS and others from that studio while not being within my personal interests, explains what story the creators are telling and why Asian fans love them the way they do.

In Your Lavender: The Wedding Plan Episode

AND WE'RE BACK!

We originally planned to discuss Wedding Plan alongside a few other shows but abandoned that quickly when we realized we both had a lot to say about this show. Come join us as we discuss whether MAME has shown growth, what it means that the lavender marriage term has existed for over 130 years, the importance of lesbians in this story, and the fundamental nature of the closet.

If you've been missing how heated Ben gets, now's your chance!

Timestamps

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

01:16 - Intro 03:00 - Wedding Plan and MAME's Previous Crimes 15:18 - Realities of the Closet and Fandom Misunderstanding of the Show 29:23 - Things We Love About Wedding Plan and Final Ratings 37:26 - And Another Thing! The Wedding Plan Special

The Conversation Transcripts!

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

We will endeavor to make the transcripts available when the episodes launch, and it is our goal to make them available for past episodes. When transcripts are available, we will attach them to the episode post (like this one) and put the transcript behind a Read More cut to cut down on scrolling.

Please send our volunteers your thanks!

01:16 - Intro

NiNi

Welcome, welcome. [sighs] Go ahead.

Ben

Oh no, it's fine, you said welcome, I'm not going to do it this time. They won't get it for the Wedding Plan episode.

NiNi

[laughs] All right. Welcome, welcome to the—

Ben

I'm just kidding! And we're back!

[both laugh]

NiNi

Welcome! to the episode that was supposed to be a secret admirers episode, but instead is now the Wedding Plan episode, because everything else was a bit crap. We wanted to talk about this because we could not believe that this came fully formed from the head of MAME, of all the creatives. We were shocked, I think, but…the fandom was also kind of shocked, and we'll delve a little bit into how that played out when we get into the segment but, when I looked at the trailer I was like, ‘mm, okay, this could be cute.’ Did not expect to be…devastated, emotionally [laughs] at certain points.

Ben

I don't really think I watched the trailer properly. I went in a little bit hostile, because MAME’s got a whole thing for boundary crossing. And I was worried going in that this show was just going to be about some rich guy punking around his wedding planner, and then like, cheating on his wife. And that's not the show we got at all.

NiNi

Let’s dive into it so you can hear what we had to say!

03:00 - Wedding Plan and MAME’s previous crimes

NiNi

We are talking all things Wedding Plan. Now Ben, you and I had agreed sometime back that no matter what happened we were never going to talk about a MAME show on the podcast. And here we are [laughs] talking about a MAME show! And there's a really good reason for that.

Let's start by talking about what Wedding Plan is about. Ben, do the honors.

Ben

Wedding Plan is a story about a wedding planner named Namnuea, who is the ace at his event planning company, and a fan of McDonald's, who very much sponsored this show. He is tasked with planning the wedding for a very attractive man and his soon-to-be wife. Complications ensue immediately, because their wedding is coming up in three months and these two have no idea what they want to do for their wedding, and only the groom is the one making the choices.

We can tell very quickly that the groom, Sailom, is flirting with Namnuea; Namnuea is not stupid and picks up on this. The attraction between them is very mutual, but the complications around him being a client and a groom frustrate Namnuea. The reveals that eventually come out make this show to be way more than just a closet case trying to hit on his wedding planner.

NiNi

Reveal the reveals, because I feel like it's impossible to talk about this show in any meaningful way without knowing what the twist is.

Ben

Right! So Sailom and Yiwa, his bride, are in a lavender wedding. So for well over one hundred and forty years, we've had a term to describe queer people choosing to present themselves as heterosexually entwined for mutual benefit and safety. In this case, Sailom and Yiwa hail from fairly wealthy families that are extremely restrictive. The two of them recognized their own queerness at a very young age, and understood that they needed to hide that information. While on a trip in Europe the two of them recognized the queerness in each other when they both had a strong emotional reaction to seeing two women publicly kiss. And then became each other's best fucking friends for life, and decided to protect each other. Yiwa ends up developing a very meaningful romance with a woman named Marine, and she convinces Sailom to marry her so that they can both get out from under their families. They have a long-term plan to divorce.

So when Sailom is flirting with Namnuea, Yiwa is 100% aware of it, and extremely supportive of it, because she doesn't want her friend, who she treats like a brother, to be lonely all the time.

NiNi

That basically sums it up in terms of the mechanics of the plot. But guys, the reason that we're here talking about a MAME show, is, this hit me right in the fucking throat, man. It was so real, in a way that I've never gotten from a MAME show. It felt like MAME almost apologizing to BL for some of the shit that she's done? It felt like MAME trying to gain some understanding and learn some shit, and show that she had learned some shit?

Ben

Just so that we get a bunch of stuff out on the table for listeners: what are some things that MAME has done that you think she should apologize for? [laughs]

NiNi

Ah, [laughs] where do I even begin? MAME work tends to lean very heavily into…traumatizing already traumatized people? I have mixed feelings about a lot of MAME’s work. There are sometimes I'm just like, oh fuck you. And then there's sometimes where they're like, I see where you're trying to go with this but you didn't have the skill. And then there are times I'm just like, ma’am, get the hell out. Something like this that I don't have any mixed feelings about, I just feel strongly positive about it…it's never happened to me before with her work, not ever. And it made me recalibrate in my head—a little bit, because it's still only one show—maybe where I should place MAME as a creative.

Ben

I have a list.

[both laugh]

NiNi

Go on ahead! Read!

Ben

Let's start with Love By Chance. There are four goddamn couples in Love By Chance. Only one couple is remotely stable! We really only talk about Ae and Pete, because we do not need to talk about the other three. MAME loves to question the line between crossing boundaries and romance. There’s Tin and Can, who were the focus of Love By Chance 2—

NiNi

Which I did not watch.

Ben

Then there's Kengkla and Techno, and Kengkla is paying Techno's brother for information on him to eventually date rape him—I mean, that happened in Love By Chance! Then there's Tum and Tar, who are brothers, and Tar was a victim of horrendous acts by a character from TharnType. Moving on to TharnType, a show that I will not watch, for multiple reasons, some of them fandom related that we are not going to get into in this podcast. But the idea that Tharn is going to teach Type that he's actually into men without his consent? Yikes. I don't care how it ends up resolving. The wall is real fucking high for me on that one.

Ben

Didn't they have a spinoff with the other guys from Don't Say No? I'm not talking about that. Then we get to Love in the Air, which I mostly enjoyed, but why do both of the ukes in that show have to get kidnapped in their final episodes? [laughs] Why? It's so unnecessary! Rain and Sky were straight up kidnapped as the final complication of their show. It's insane.

NiNi

I did not watch Love in the Air. So every time you say that I'm just like, ‘that's a thing that actually happened?’

Ben

So this is the difference with Wedding Plan. Wedding Plan is so straightforward. There is no major complication to Wedding Plan. Everything that happens in this show flows naturally from the base conceit that two people involved in a lavender wedding are dealing with some difficulties and frustrations as that approaches, and then make logical choices for their characters, in response to everything that's going on.

And it kind of surprised me how much I ended up really loving this show. It's interesting for me that Yiwa and Marine’s relationship is the reason why the wedding is occurring. I've never really cared about heterosexual weddings in a lot of these shows and stories that I watch, but I feel so much about the way Lom and Yiwa care about each other and protect each other. Lom is agreeing to this sham wedding that's going to eventually lead to a bunch of complications in his life, because he's trying to protect his friend.

Normally in a story like this, there'd be all this tension about the groom struggling with his sexual identity, and what he wants for himself, and the girl's going to get hurt along the way—‘he feels loyal to the girl, we can't just do her like that!’ In this show, Lom is withholding information about the specifics about his relationship with Yiwa from Namnuea because he's protecting her. The crux of the romantic drama of this show was about a gay man in the closet protecting a gay woman in the closet.

NiNi

Yiwa and Marine's relationship is the key to the whole story, but the relationship between Yiwa and Sailom is the core relationship. The fact that they're doing this for each other, the fact that they care about each other so deeply, the fact that they basically decided long ago that they were the people who mattered to each other…and then as people come into their lives who are maybe somebody they might be interested in building a life with, it becomes a decision for everybody as to whether this person gets let in. I would have loved to see how it went when Yiwa decided that she wanted to be with Marine. I understand that's not the point of this particular story, but I would have been fascinated to see how that played out.

By the time we join the story Marine’s on the inside. She's 100% bought in. Marine has made the decision to be in the closet with Yiwa, which is sad in one way, but it's so freeing for them in another, because of what Sailom has done for them. They can be happy. And they are happy! They're happy and they're in love, and they're part of this family of the two of them and Sailom. It made me smile just watching them be with each other as a family unit. And then Lom meeting Nuea. When you're going to bring somebody into a secret like that, you have to be 100% sure. And not just you, everybody has to be on board with it. [laughs] It's not polyamorous, but it's—polyamoresque [laughs] I guess is the best way to describe it. Everybody has to be on board with what's happening. It's not just a question of ‘do I like this person?’ It's a question of ‘is this person a safe person?’ It's a question of ‘do the other people involved in this like this person?’ It's a question of ‘is this a person who I can share this secret with?’ but it's also, as it comes down to later in the story, a question of Lom knowing that he couldn't ask. He couldn't ask Nuea to be a part of the secret. He could just tell Nuea what was happening, and he could just hope and pray—and I don't even think that he dared to hope. And I think that's what the crying was about when Nuea decided that he was going to become part of the family? Lom broke down when Nuea said to him, ‘I'm going to help you keep your secret.’ Because he knew he couldn't ask it of him. And the fact that he freely offered it just brought Lom to tears.

15:18 - Realities of the closet and fandom misunderstanding the show

NiNi

This show is amazing. The show is emotionally sound, the show is beautiful, and I got so mad [laughs] watching this show get misunderstood. And if I was mad, Ben was incandescent. [laughs]

Ben, you take the floor and tell ‘em why you mad, son.

Ben

I'm going to talk about the closet for a little bit. It felt like a lot of the people who are reacting to this show have not been in the closet. I was in the closet for 11 years. Your brain does not work in the same way on the inside, and I'm going to say frankly to anybody who thought Lom should have told Namnuea a lot sooner than he did? When you've been in the closet for 13 years, you do not tell someone you have a crush on, in two months of knowing them. Not when the stakes are as high as they are. The reason they're in the closet is because there will be severe and painful consequences for failing to maintain a heteronormative status quo.

The big thing that separates Lom from Namnuea is, Namnuea is out. The truth about who Namnuea is cannot harm him. Namnuea develops feelings for Lom, and tells his boss. And she says, ‘there's nothing wrong with you having a crush on the guy, like he's hot. You know what the professional boundaries are though, do you need me to step in and take care of this for you?’ and Namnuea said no. When Namnuea fell for Lom, before they hooked up, he called his mom and said, ‘mom I think I fucked up.’ And she's like, ‘sometimes we fuck up baby boy, come home if you need me.’ And after he hooked up with Lom that's what he did! He went home, and he told his mom flat out: ‘the thing I told you about? Yeah I think I went too far.’ And she held him, and let him be a mess about it, because she understood that he already knew that he put himself in a really untenable situation, and she didn't pile on. They protected him. Namnuea can be honest about who he is, and whenever he tells the people who matter to him about something that happened, they close ranks around him and protect him. At the point at which Lom is trying to chase after Namnuea, every woman in his life pulled out their claws and was ready to slit that man's throat. They were all ready to throw hands with this man!

But when you're in the closet, your brain doesn't work right. You are under constant surveillance to maintain the heteronormative veneer over your life. The show does not make this hypothetical. Their friends and family are snapping pictures of them in public, and questioning every relationship they have with someone other than Lom and Yiwa. Lom is sitting at the table with Marine—Yiwa stepped away for a work call, and someone’s snapping a photo like, ‘why is Lom on a date with this other girl? She's trying to steal Lom from your daughter.’ Or ‘I saw Yiwa hanging out with her best friend, are they gay? I took some pictures and now I'm telling your mom.’ When you look at the reason why these two are so vigilant about being in the closet, that's literally what they're experiencing! It's super heavy-handed in this show, but it is exactly the kind of shit that I lived through. Being in the closet because you know that there are consequences and there are dangers breeds hypervigilance.

And I'm going to say it really plainly: all of the really negative takes I saw about Lom that were really unsympathetic to what this man went through? Made me, as a 30-something year old gay man who survived being closeted, really extremely uncomfortable. And I really need you to reckon with whatever you were going through that made you turn on a closeted gay man, and view him as the evil aggressor party in this particular relationship. Because goddamn!

The reason why he chose Namnuea to be his wedding planner was because he had a crush on him! And when you're in the closet you need plausible deniability. Lom is toeing the line. He can hang out with Namnuea and flirt with him, because he's talking to his wedding planner. Nobody's going to question him being around a gay man, because he's his wedding planner! And that's what the homos do, is they plan events for the rest of us! Because they're very good at it. The reason why he's being an irritating client is because he wants Namnuea to talk to him more. If he's a good client, Namnuea’s not gonna talk to him! Because Namnuea’s professional, and busy.

And Lom admits it. He says in episode…6 I believe, because I just rewatched again, that hiring Namnuea was just, in his mind, a little bit of fun before he got married. He would flirt with the guy that he had a crush on, even if it's a little fucked up to do that, and have a little fun before his wedding. He was not expecting to fall in love with Namnuea. But he's got a competency kink! And Namnuea is so good at his job. And he likes his job! He likes seeing people happy at the things that he planned for them, and he takes care of people. Lom loves these things in Namnuea. This even played out in their sex. He was happy that Namnuea was not a virgin. Very tasteful, sir.

NiNi

It being MAME, I will confess, that up until maybe somewhere around the beginning to middle of episode 4? I wasn't sure where they were going with this.

Ben

Let me tell you, I was waiting for her to do some convoluted bullshit as of episode 7. [laughs] They're like, ‘the bride’s run off!’ and I'm like, there's really only one way this should play out. Closeted people make plans. Yiwa is also not stupid. There’s this moment in episode 6—and this is again intentional, the editing on this show is actually really crisp. We get the really poignant scene on the bridge, where Lom talks about the knowing, and Namnuea’s like, ‘we need to fuck right now.’ And then, if you have access to iQiYi, they did! And then we get the scene where Namnuea agrees to be in the relationship, and all that that means.

The very next scene is Yiwa’s mom showing up at Marine's apartment to accost her and slap her. Which is immediately followed by Yiwa running back to the condo, and the way she enters that apartment? She genuinely thought that Marine might have left her. For as happy as they seem, Yiwa never underestimates or undervalues the stress that she's putting Marine under. When she enters the room and Marine hasn't run away, but is just laying in bed, clearly spent from all of this? That's the moment that breaks Yiwa. And then we flash forward three weeks to the wedding, and she's run off with Marine and leaves a note.

Lom knows her! He was not phased by this at all, when—after he's done putting on his jilted groom act, he's laughing. He's like, ‘I know what that cheeky girl did, I can't believe she did this without telling me. Look at this stupid note! I can read between the lines.’ [laughs] And then they call her, and she's like, ‘I knew you would understand my note. That's my boy, don't fuck this up! I'll take this on for you.’ Yiwa takes on the social pariah role here, of being the lesbian who ran away the day of the wedding, leaving Lom at the altar, ‘how dare she?’

The power here is that Yiwa doesn't give a fuck anymore. That's the whole thing about heteronormative shame: it only matters where you can exert that influence over people. Yiwa and Marine said, we cannot exist the way we want to, so we are leaving and going somewhere else. That is a choice a lot of us choose to make: to leave our home communities, to go build community with other people elsewhere. And then she gives Lom the ability to spin that, to soft launch his relationship with Nuea. Because they don't come out as a couple for like six months after that. They put on the act of Lom being a drunken mess for months—he's fine. He's just spraying alcohol on himself and then going to work with his hair unkempt.

NiNi

Episode 7’s so delightful. But anyway, continue.

Ben

And he's just hanging out with Nuea, and he just tells people, ‘yeah, we bonded over the wedding stuff because we had a lot of work to do really quickly for the wedding, and you know he felt sympathy for me afterwards. And he took care of me at a really difficult time, and I feel comfortable with him. I loved Yiwa, she was the only woman I was ever willing to marry.’

Not a lie! But also not the exact truth.

NiNi

I loved the big lie at the end, because it was basically Lom, Yiwa, and everybody in the situation putting two giant middle fingers up at their society, and the people around them. Aside from the people who, as you rightly said, would have protected them anyway. So all the women in Nuea’s life, and the people who he works with at the wedding planning company—basically the people who earned the right to know the truth know the truth. And everybody else gets two giant fucking middle fingers and the big lie.

Ben

It's a little bit like the ending with Bad Buddy, about them breaking up publicly but still being together? It's the same question: who is allowed to know? Something for you to think about, if you didn't get this show and you hated Lom and all this sort of stuff—ask yourself if the queer people in your life trust you. Would you be brought in? Would you be trusted with this information? Lom's mother realizes along the way what was going on the whole time, because she's not stupid. And she says quite plainly—because Lom has not properly come out to her yet, he's been hinting at it, he's like, I feel comfortable with him—and she says, ‘I'm still doing what I need to do to process this, but just promise me you won't leave.’

What she recognized is that she was playing a zero sum game that she could lose. That her son could make the same choice as Yiwa. She recognized that he and Yiwa were likely withholding important information about themselves, from their parents, for a really long time. And that can be really unsettling. It's something I went through in my family when I started coming out, that people were very put off by how I just…hid hugely important portions of my life from them, for most of my life. And she recognized that if she pushed too hard, she would get nothing.

NiNi

It really is the Bad Buddy conundrum, because this is where their parents are at the end, where they know, but if they're not willing to fully be on board? Then they don't get to fully know. And they don't get to be fully involved. Lom's mom knows, but until and unless she's willing to wholeheartedly accept Nuea there will always be now, at this point, a barrier between her and her son. All she can ask of him is that he doesn't leave. But beyond that, she doesn't get to ask anything of him, until and unless she is ready to fully accept every part of who he is. I can't believe that came from MAME's pen.

29:23 - Things we love about Wedding Plan and final ratings

Ben

Something else I really love—I really love the community around Nuea, particularly his family. I love when he goes back to Chiang Mai, and he sees that his little cousin is also out and proud now and has a hot boyfriend. And I love that Sun, Ryu’s boyfriend, is immediately engaged in in-law solidarity with Sailom. Nuea’s family hates him, and he's like, ‘valid.’ Like, ‘If you want to stay here, you got to work.’ ‘Okay.’ And he just works. Nuea's family is protecting Nuea from someone who they think doesn't respect him. Everything mean that they're doing to Sailom is because they are protecting Nuea, and it's really not that much, what they're asking. They're basically just giving him a difficult time, until Nuea decides what to do with him. But Sun is helping him the whole time, he's like, ‘this family's very difficult, I got you bro.’ And that pairs really well with the phone call that Nuea has with Yiwa and Marine, where Yiwa is like, ‘Lom and I do love each other. That is my ride or die: it's been me and him for a long time. I'm not going to pretend that he is not the most important man in my life, but he's not who I'm building my future with.’

And I love that for Yiwa and Sailom, it is love between them. The heteros just misread it. They don't have to fake an admiration for each other. I love that Marine talks to Nuea, and talks about the sincerity of their feelings, and how she's okay, at this point. Because she's the only person that Nuea can really accept any sort of perspective from, and I'm really glad that they had that moment and that was just them.

NiNi

I love that in that moment she doesn't try to convince him of anything. She just says, ‘I can't tell you what to do. This is a crazy situation: here's what I accepted about this, here's why I accepted it. These people are good people.’

Ben

Right! She says their love is sincere.

NiNi

‘Yeah, but whatever decision you make I completely get, because I made my choice. You're gonna have to make your own choice as well.’ She spoke to Nuea very candidly, and I truly appreciated that, and I think that Nuea definitely appreciated that too.

Ben

I love the reveal about Sailom's hands always being cold because he was nervous.

NiNi

Ehhhh [laughs] It was one of those romance things that I'm just like ‘eh!’ about, but it was adorable. It was.

Ben

I really like Pak in this role. A lot of the times when MAME writes her ukes, they tend to be a little bit on the demure side, and they usually need a stern counterbalancing presence for them? I really like that Nuea did not need that at all. I also liked how queer Namnuea felt. He very much feels like a gay boy.

NiNi

I love stories about love and family, and this is one of the ultimate love and family stories. For me, and I can't believe I'm saying this, when it comes to love and family, it's going maybe a half step behind Moonlight Chicken this year for me? I can't believe that just came out of my mouth about a MAME show. But that's really truly how I feel about it. For me, it was a 10.

Ben

I ended up giving this show a 9.5. It's one of the ones that's going to linger with me for a while, and I think a big part of it was just how much everyone else really hated the show. I think we went into this show with a lot of MAME blinders on—I knowingly went into the show hostile. I don't really like a lot of what MAME does. But, respectfully, watching a MAME show—the writer famous for writing romances about boundary crossing—and being mad that her characters are crossing boundaries? Is a little bit disingenuous of a place to write your criticism from. That's her shtick.

Nuea crosses those boundaries too! Nuea had agency, and I really resent the way a lot of the takes damsel him and make him seem powerless. He's not! He is the one with all the power here. It's why Sailom is pouring everything he can into, every time he says ‘I like you, Nuea.’ Sailom is such a sap, and y'all really hated that man. And I really need y'all to reckon with that. Like if you listened to us and you hated Sailom, please, examine your life. [laughs]

NiNi

I have a smidge of sympathy up until episode 4, for anybody who struggled a little bit with Sailom. But only up until episode 4. Because somewhere to the beginning, middle of episode 4, it was very clear what they were driving towards? And then at the end of episode 4 when Sailom and Nuea hook up for the first time, I said to myself, ‘Okay. I see where this is going.’ And then when they get to Chiang Mai, and Sailom finally tells Nuea what happens, because Marine and Yiwa have given their okay, and Nuea said, ‘Duh. Clearly that's what's going on, I already knew that.’ Nuea wasn't fooled by Sailom.

Ben

No, Nuea basically guessed 90% of it accurately. The only thing he didn't really guess, was that they were both in on it. Let me say this as well while we're here: in terms of queer solidarity, Namnuea never once outed Yiwa when he caught her out with Marine. He did not mention that once. Not at all. He ain't tell none of his hoes. He ain’t tell none of his people. He caught those two out, was like ‘oh shit, is my gaydar broken?’ And then he didn't say shit about that. He didn't even hold that up in his whole thing with Sailom. And I respect the fuck out of that man for that, because that’s not his thing to say.

NiNi

The show is amazing.

Ben

It really is.

NiNi

It's, for me, an easy cruise into some type of VIIB Award at the end of the year.

Ben

It's gonna be a difficult year for us, when we're sorting out acknowledging the incredible work that's been done, but this is one of them.

NiNi

Delightful, emotional, deeply gratifying, deeply satisfying. Ben gave this a 9.5, I gave it a 10, let's call it a 9.75.

Ben

It can get a 10 from The Conversation.

NiNi

You heard it here first, folks: Ben says it can get a 10 from The Conversation. MAME gets a 10 from us, and nobody is more surprised than us—

Ben

It’s true.

NiNi

—that that is a thing that happened [laughs] on this show.

Ben

I feel so intense about this show. I get so mad about the discourse around Sailom. He's one of those characters, like, if you don't like him? I don't like you. Fuck off.

[both laugh]

NiNi

And that’s…a word!

37:26 - And another thing! The Wedding Plan special

Ben

And we're back! I have so much more to say, I am not through. [laughs]

NiNi

So before we get into Ben's ‘and another thing!...’ Let's talk a little bit about the Wedding Plan special, because there was a special episode, that cost $8.

Ben

[laughs] I paid $7 for my rental.

NiNi

However much it costs, it costs money. Which I'm slightly salty about because MAME had McDonald's money on this, she didn't need ours.

Ben

In her defense, she has done this on literally every show. Except for Love by Chance…and Don't Say No.

NiNi

McDonald's money. That's all I'm going to say.

Ben

And she cashed in! Good for her.

NiNi

[laughs] Anyway, so let's talk a little bit about the Wedding Plan special. Ben, tell the people what it was about.

Ben

The show's fucking called Wedding Plan. It was the fucking wedding, guys, let’s—we're not going to beat around the fucking bush on this one. It was the wedding for the gays! It was really beautiful. The basic premise is, the guys have been dating properly for what feels like a year, year and a half at this point. They're taking a trip to go back to see Namnuea's family. Before they leave, they have one final check-in with Lom's mom, where she meets Nuea properly as Lom's boyfriend. She doesn't take it very well, but Sailom does not give a shit.

Meanwhile Sailom is working with Wiwa Square to organize a secret wedding for Namnuea. Hilariously, Im still does not like Sailom, and I thought that was an excellent character detail. So they go and travel back to the north, and Sailom has Nuea taking him around—I think they were in Chiang Mai?—to check out sites and locations while everyone else has moved to Namnuea's house to set up for this wedding that Namnuea doesn't know about. Lom proposes to him, they end up having the wedding the next day. It's this incredibly beautiful ceremony, it’s very traditional Thai, I believe. There's more I want to say about some of the stuff that happened at the wedding, but that's the basic premise: Lom organizes a wedding for Namnuea, and his friends plan it in secret. Which I actually think is lovely for a wedding planner, that he didn't have to plan his own wedding.

NiNi

That's the crux of it. You guys know, I am not the one the two or the three for these weddings. I believe in marriage. I believe in the importance of marriage. I am generally not a fan of the weddings. But, this one? It was beautiful, I do have to say. It was a beautiful wedding, everything around the wedding was beautiful. When I was talking about Wedding Plan in the main part of the show, I was talking about how much I love love and family. And that was what the wedding episode was about, it was love and family. Yiwa and Marine were there at the wedding, being Sailom's family, because while his mom is starting to come around to Nuea, she's still not there yet. So she doesn't get to be a part of this. So Yiwa and Marine are his family. They show up for him. They are hosting on his behalf. It's beautiful. It's just so beautiful.

Ben

I did not praise Pakpai enough in our recording; Pakpai’s reaction, as Nuea, to Yiwa appearing before him, for this wedding that he had just found out about? Is one of the most perfect expressions I’ve seen all year.

NiNi

Because he hasn't seen them since they left for England.

Ben

I am a gay boy who believes in community. And believes in gay people taking care of each other. And that means that I have worked in solidarity with lesbians. And it is such a beautiful thing for me, in this year of really good shows, to see two lesbians in a critical role in the lives of gay men. There's something so special about the unconditional, ride or die love between Yiwa and Lom, and how that extends to Marine and Nuea, and creates this very special little family unit. I cannot overstate how important it is to me that Nuea almost cried because he was overwhelmed with emotion getting to see Yiwa in front of him again, and for a wedding that he had just found out about. That was his first reaction: awe, and then he burst into tears because he loved her so much and had missed her for that long. That is so beautiful!

As for the other things in the special…The ceremony itself is really beautiful. There's a lot of really great moments in there. There's this very special moment between Namnuea and Im, where she comes to pay respects, and he takes her hand, and he says ‘I love you’ in this way that conveys a very special history between the two of them? That sent me over the edge and I burst into tears right away. [laughs] I do not know what those two have been through together, but that ‘I love you’ was one of the most effective I love yous I have ever experienced in this genre, and it was not between romantic leads at all.

NiNi

We always go up for the non-romantic I love yous in BL. lt's the Jim and Li Ming thing all over again. Namnuea’s co-workers being there for him at his wedding, the way that they put it together for him, the way that Marine and Yiwa stepped in to be Lom's family, the way Nuea’s actual family stepped in as well. There's a gorgeous scene, after the actual wedding ceremony, where they do—I suppose this is another traditional part of a Thai wedding, which is a bedding?—where Nuea's parents are with them in the room, and talking to them about love and commitment and marriage, and that's the part that put me into tears.

Ben

It was really funny, because like we had not really seen any of the dads in the show. Moms were a big deal in the show. Nuea’s dad is just this sweet man! It was overwhelming for me, how just beautifully sweet this man was, and the way he was pouring love out to Sailom, because he's like, ‘I never thought Nuea would get to have this.’ Nuea, the wedding planner, who spends so much of his time trying to make sure other people's dreams come true? I was floored by his dad just being there: ‘I just wanted my son to be happy, and I'm so thankful that you were able to do that for him.’ And I was like, ‘I don't know who you are sir, but good job!’

NiNi

It was really really gorgeous, and just so many other things…also the stuff that's happening between Sailom and Nuea. The way that Sailom proposes, and the way that Nuea knew it was coming but he still got surprised by the way that it happened? That was gorgeous. And then again, after the wedding and after the bedding, when it's just the two of them in the room, and Nuea does the thing where he pays respect to his husband? And says that that's something that he always wanted to do? The way that these two take marriage so seriously, and especially the way that Nuea feels about it. Because like I said, Nuea is a wedding planner; he sees weddings every day. He sees these rituals and ceremonies and everything every day. And I can just imagine him sitting thinking to himself, ‘one day, one day, and this is something that I want to do with my husband, and this is something that I want to do with my husband’—I can just imagine that. And then meeting Sailom and falling in love with Sailom and actually getting to marry Sailom, and being able to do that, and the way that he is so emotional about that. Mmh! Got me right in the feels.

The reason that I tend not to like weddings is because a lot of the time I find them so artificial, so stage managed and overproduced. I'm talking about this not just in terms of weddings in fiction, but weddings in real life. So, watching something so sincere, something so genuine, something so personal… t’s a production, yes, all weddings are, but it was real! Everything about it was so real, it was so emotional, it was so…[sigh] it was great. It was fantastic. I thoroughly enjoyed that. I cried more than once watching the special. It just added to the joy of discovering Wedding Plan and this whole little universe and these characters.

Ben

There was a lot of little stuff happening around that. Like, one of the things that I think MAME is actually pretty good at, is really caring about her supporting cast in a useful way? She's very good about understanding why that character is there. There's Yiwa and Marine getting to have a private moment, being a little bit sad that they didn't get to have this, a Thai wedding with the people who love them around them. And I like that they got to have, like a quiet bitter moment about that. And I like that they didn't put that on Lom and Nuea, it's not something that they need to be consoled about, it's just one of those things that hurts about being queer sometimes, and that's part of the choice they made. They did take on that hurt, to give the boys a chance to be together, but it still hurt, and I like that the show never forgot that. This show cared about its lesbians, they mattered to this story, they weren't there just to check off boxes to make sure that we covered all of our bases. They were still telling their story.

I love Sun and Ryu listening at their goddamn bedroom, and then having to be chased off. Great comedy. But also I loved it, I loved that there were younger gays excited about gays slightly older than them getting to have their moment together. It was such a special execution of that.

I genuinely like that the Wedding Plan special episode is treated as a special episode. I like where the show ends for itself. I like thinking about the wedding as a special epilogue for the story, and not necessarily as the actual finale of the story. I think it's better as epilogue content.

NiNi

I have to agree! So all in all, when it comes down to Wedding Plan, looking back at it now, I think we definitely stand by how we felt about it. I think that… I have, you know Ben has, gotten even more in love with it? And even more, I think, defensive and vocal about it, because it's good! It's just good. And I don't like people saying it's not! That's it for me.

Ben

This is the number 4 or 5 show of the year for me.

NiNi

Yeah, there you have it.

Ben

Currently it's behind—in no specific order because we're not at the VIIB Awards yet—Moonlight Chicken, My School President, La Pluie, and probably The Eighth Sense? It's that good!

I am in this genre for queer cinephile reasons. I am here to connect with people for gay reasons. I'm not in this for, like, taboo, or to see cute boys kiss each other because it's titillating in and of itself. I exist as a queer person, it informs my decisions on the regular, and it was such a relief to see characters that were not incidentally gay, so that we can imagine two idols bumpin’ uglies.

I really love Sailom and Namnuea so much. Sailom got updated to blorbo status so quickly. Every week I'll just send NiNi a gif of Sailom and be like, ‘they really hated this man!’

[both laugh]

NiNi

He's not even kidding, this literally happens.

Ben

[laughs] It’ll just, just be a great gif that somebody made of Sailom and I’ll be like, ‘they really hated this man!’

Something else I want to say quite plainly here, and I would like you, as listeners of the podcast to reckon with this—and I would really like to talk about this, so please talk to me on Tumblr about this: Part of why I think Wedding Plan did not hit for people, is that Namnuea doesn't look like a girl, and doesn't behave like a girl. He behaves like a kind of femme man, and he feels very gay, in a way that is distinctly masculine. Additionally, the show doesn't really conform to a seme-uke dynamic very well, because Namnuea does seme things—like I noticed in episode 2 that he does a kabedon on Sailom. And I know that bothered a lot of the people who are obsessed with loyalty to the tropes. Namnuea is so self-assured, and I don't necessarily think that that resonated for the people who are in this for BL reasons and for regular romance beats. And I wonder a lot if that was their big problem.

I would really like to have a secondary conversation with the folks who listen to us about this particular dynamic, because I do think it's worth us unpacking why people—as much shit that gets talked about MAME—refused to engage with the show. This is legitimately one of the top queer narratives of the year. And we snubbed this show. I have watched people talk shit about MAME and her writing for five fucking years, and when she writes a whole show that is basically the byproduct of all of our feedback, we snubbed it! When MAME returns to her roots, I don't want to hear none of y’all who snubbed Wedding Plan saying a goddamn thing about her.

NiNi

I'm so mad at you for saying when MAME returns to her roots. Like this was clearly a fluke.

Ben

She's gonna be like Jafar! She's going to be like, ‘let's see how snakelike I can be, bitches!’

NiNi

So you definitely are of the view that this is not a change for MAME, this is just a detour.

Ben

I don't know! I don't know, like I was not expecting Wedding Plan. This show has so much goddamn heart to it, and it was gay! In a real way!

NiNi

I think you need to start subscribing to my vibes-based scoring method.

Ben

What? Absolutely not!

[both laugh]

Nah, it's always about the recommends. Legitimately, it's a 10 recommend. Everyone needs to go fucking watch this show. This is essential viewing for this year. This show represents a fascinating growth point for MAME; because we've criticized her for five years and she made something that is one of the most wholesome gay things I have ever watched in the genre. And we snubbed it, and threw it away.

To the cast of Wedding Plan: you all did a fantastic job, and I hope you all had a really fun time together. I want to thank every single one of you for the work you all did, because you all collectively created one of the most compelling community support systems I've ever seen in queer TV, truly. Especially to all of the women who are on that cast. BL women get messed around a lot, and don't often get to do a lot of great stuff, and every single one of you did a fantastic job.

NiNi

That is going to wrap us up on the Wedding Plan episode. We out! Say bye to the people, Ben.

Ben

Y’all better watch this fucking show. Peace.

[both laugh]

126 notes · View notes