Jack O' Frost - episode 5

first half of this episode: i am so pissed at Fumiya that I have to keep taking breaks. I'm having a hard time wanting Ritsu to end up with him, his keeping basic facts about Ritsu's life from Ritsu feels like such a massive betrayal of trust that I can't see any way back from it. Certainly if someone did that to me I could not have them be part of my life anymore. In stories I'm often willing to tolerate behavior from characters I wouldn't in my own life, but I think because, as @bengiyo said, Ritsu has already told him (and us!) he hates it when people lie and hide things from him, I can't really imagine a happy ending with them together, no matter how much Fumiya apologizes. I find myself rooting for Ritsu to dump his ass and have a triumphant self-empowered ending, a la The First Wives Club. Or possibily end up back with his ex-boyfriend, but I didn't really feel a spark there, and only ship them out of desperation to keep Ritsu out of Fumiya's hands.

Jack o' Frost saw Old Fashion Cupcake and went: bet. Sure our hand-held long take is only 3 minutes, but we've got nudity and extended making out. Sorry Jo'F, OFC did it better, but that's like trying to beat Simone Biles on floor. It served a very different purpose in the film (memory instead of climatic revelation) and it still was an excellent scene.

The whole birthday flashback did remind me about what Ritsu sees in Fumiya. He's charmingly sweet, and it's understandable that he misses his boyfriend and want him around more, even though he should just COMMUNICATE instead of dropping awkward hints.

And the moment leading up to kiss was really hot. Both actors are very good in the series, and really conveyed the shift from comfortably relaxed to I need you NOW. That tongue lick... the way Fumiya was devouring Ritsu with his eyes... oh my lord 🥵

ok, fun times are over, for them and for us. Fumiya, stop passive-aggressively slamming dishes.

i thought this was another 3 minute long take, but it turns out there was a cut in the middle (perhaps it was supposed to be, but didn't quite work out?) Even so, impressive work from the actors and camera operator. The rising tension in the scene had me on the edge of my seat. I also feel like they choose exactly the right amount of this fight to reveal at the very beginning of the series, just enough for us to get a vague impression of a breakup without actually understanding it yet. It made this 5th episode reveal all the more powerful.

I'm sorry Fumiya, but I'm firmly on Ritsu's side in this one. I'm not saying that Ritsu is perfect; I can understand how his forgetfulness and absorption in his work can be frustrating. And probably if I had only seen this one moment in their relationship I would be more tolerant, but now this is just more evidence of Fumiya's refusal/inability to communicate. He has all these unstated expectations that he's not telling Ritsu, then all of a sudden blows up about them.

Speaking about communication, Fumiya better be telling Ritsu all this and not just remember it in his own damn head.

Ok, phew, apparently he did.

This show is really grappling with how fucked up Fumiya's decision is, which I appreciate. And Ritsu sees things the same way I do, thank god. I really do love him.

I do think the series is quite good. I think I'm not really reacting to it as a BL, actually, which may be why its' been hard for me to figure out what I think of it. There is a wide range of what a BL can be, but this feels a little outside that box. Although it's about their relationship, it really feels like the center of the story is about Fumiya's journey to (hopefully) grow up, and be ready to be in a relationship. It's about learning how to be in a relationship, not about finding love, even though there's an illusion of it being a story about falling in love, since for Ritsu it feels like that. But that's only an illusion, a fantasy world, for both us and for Fumiyo.

It's just really hard for me to see him as capable of being a good partner if he so easily tries to erase Ritsu's agency in their relationship. Like, I sympathize with him being scared, and jumping at a chance for a do-over, but they fact that he actually went through with the lie tells me that he's not really seeing Ritsu as a person, just a paper doll to manipulate into living out his fantasies of domestic bliss.

I wonder how they're going to resolve this in 24 minutes next week. I'm not holding my breath for them giving an ending that satisfies me, although I think I'll consider this a good show regardless. But I will be very impressed if they manage to pull it off. I think for me there will need to be a time skip, and clear evidence of Fumiya really reckoning with how fucked up his mindset was. And Ritsu needs to be the one to approach him again.

Alternatively, I think I would be happy with an ending where they don't get back together, although this show has enough of a romance feel that I don't expect that's the direction it's heading in.

Fun facts - well, very-slightly-to-mildly-to-not-at-all interesting facts - related to comedians’ names:

- One time on No More Jockeys, Mark Watson, Tim Key, and Alex Horne spent a minute or so discussing the fact that Angela Barnes has the most Christmassy name out of all the comedians, because Angels are in the nativity story, and Jesus was born in a barn. They were so pleased with themselves for working this out, until they remembered Jarred Christmas. And Noel Fielding.

- When I Google the name “Joe Thomas” from Canada with no VPN on, most of the top results are about an American football player by that name. When I Google the same thing with a VPN making my computer think it’s in England, most of the top results are about the comedian and actor.

- In the absolutely terrible show – truly my biggest guilty pleasure, the worst show I’ve ever enjoyed – Roast Battle, Johnny Vegas goes on with Phil Ellis, a guy who’s never been on TV before or since. This guy went really hard, saying something about his wife leaving which had apparently actually happened recently, and none of that bothered Johnny Vegas at all. Until the guy brought up the fact that his name is actually Michael Pennington, at which point Johnny told him to shut up and sounded like he genuinely meant it. Like a kid at school who doesn’t want their embarrassing middle name said out loud.

- I assumed for ages that Rhod Gilbert’s full name was Roderick or Rodney, and only learned fairly recently that it’s Rhodri. That’ll teach me to make Anglicized assumptions. On the subject of Celtic names being Anglicized, David O’Doherty has a bit on one of his albums about how forms that don’t let you put punctuation in a name leave out a lot of Irish people, and I noticed he always signs his own posts “do’d” even though I called him “DOD” because that’s what everyone called him in Never Mind the Buzzcocks’ YouTube comments. That’s why I started calling him DO’D; I figure that whether he does it as some sort of statement about not wanting the Irish apostrophe erased, or whether it’s just for no reason, may as well call people what they want to be called. I do not, however, extend that to finding the special character every time I want to write Dara Ó Briain’s name.

- Alan Coren, the guy who used to be on The News Quiz a lot, was the father of Victoria Coren Mitchell. That’s not really a fact about names, it’s just that their shared name should have made me realize it a lot sooner. For someone who collects Britcom-related facts for no reason, I learned that one way too recently.

- Russell Joseph Howard and Jon Joel Richardson both have middle names that can be shortened to Joe. Which is not particularly interesting, but they discovered it, I think, four separate times on their radio show. One of their middle names would come up in passing, and then the other would say, “Oh that’s almost like my middle name”, and then they’d discuss it. I can believe they genuinely forgot that until the next time it came up, because it’s not that interesting a fact, and for them ages had passed, while for me it had only been a week since I went through the 126 hours of that radio show ridiculously quickly. After the first time, every time middle names were mentioned I’d tell my phone, “Yes, your middle names are slightly similar, now work that out and get on with it.” The fourth time it happened, Jon said, “Have we had this conversation before?” and Russell said, “I don’t think so.”

- On a slightly similar note of two comedians who were close friends having middle names overlap, Daniel Kitson’s middle name is John. This would only be a slightly interesting fact if John Oliver’s middle name were Daniel, which it isn’t, it’s William. However, Daniel Kitson did name himself William in several different shows, including one that had two separate versions of himself, both named William. Clearly he feels that his name was meant to be William, subconsciously understanding that we were meant to have the mildly interesting fact of his and John Oliver’s names overlapping.

- Jon Richardson and Richard Osman’s names being Richard and Richard’s son – something Alex Horne pointed out once on Taskmaster season 2 but I think it was good enough so he could have got away with it at least a couple more times since it was a joke about both their names and their heights – means the time they were a Catsdown team and Jimmy did his shitty autocue put-downs of Jon and Richard told him to stop, it looked like:

- Charlie Brooker is not a stage name; it’s a shortened version of his actual first name. And that actual first name is Charleton.

- Similarly, Al is a shortened version of Al Murray’s real first name, which is Alastair.

- Barratt’s his middle name. His full name is Julian Barratt Pettifer. I see why he doesn’t go by that.

- It is absolutely ridiculous that the fan-agreed portmanteau for The Mighty Boosh is Noelian, when FieldRat is right there.

- On the subject of portmanteaus, season 12 is the Taskmaster season in which both teams can have their names put together easily: Victorialan and Morguziree. No other season has teams that can be referenced by one name that easily, and I should know, as I’ve written summaries of episodes from a bunch of seasons and it’s a lot easier when there’s an easy team name like that, instead of writing out “the team of two” or “Josh, Roisin, and Romesh” every time. I mean, I guess “Josh, Roisin, and Romesh” is a bad example because their season does have one that works: Frankey. But season 12 is the only one where you can do that really easily with both teams.

- I assumed for ages that Jo Brand’s first name was short for Joanne, but it isn’t, it’s Josephine. Which I thought was cool, because that name was outdated even by the time Jo Brand was born, you don’t hear it often, and it reminds me of my favourite character from a book I loved as a kid: Jo March (it was a plot point that she went by this instead of Josephine, to sound like more of a tomboy, which I of course liked) from Little Women. I found this even cooler when I read Jo Brand’s book, and learned that her parents actually named her Josephine after Jo March. She has an outdated name because she’s named after a character in a book from 1868.

- Frank Skinner’s real first name is Chris. Christopher Graham Collins, in fact, meaning the name “Frank Skinner” bears no relation to the name of the man who briefly married the 17-year-old girl who was his student when he lectured at her college. Not all the facts are fun.

- You know that annoying thing where whenever you write the name David Walliams, you have to make sure you didn’t accidentally write “David Williams”, since “Williams” is an actual name and Walliams is not? Well it turns out that “David Williams” is his real name, and “Walliams” is a stage name. So that annoying thing where it’s hard to spell his name right didn’t even have to be the case! This is the 578th most significant way in which David Walliams did not have to be as annoying as he actually is.