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khaothanawat · 1 year

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My School President wants to subvert your expectations

(or: if you're not watching this show, you're missing out on something wonderful)

...so. I am supposed to work today, but I don't wanna and also i rewatched all four episodes of My School President last night and if I don't let out as many feelings as possible about it I might explode because I am unhinged.

so I wrote a 4,700+ word essay i'm so sorry oh my god I spent hours writing this good lord

episode 1 / the introduction

episode 1 plays out mostly as a traditional high school series might. we have gun, who is not the greatest student, but who loves music and, even more than that, loves music club - which revolves around his friends and the band they’re in. it is, as we’ll learn a few episodes down the line, his “safe zone”, and the one place in school where he’s found love and acceptance.

we also have tinn, who is the son of the incredibly strict principal and who himself is a fantastic student, good looking, admired by all the other students. he gets voted in as school president, and thus has complete control over the fate of all the school clubs - including, of course, the principal’s least favourite club (on account of how its members keep failing their classes and almost burning down the school), the music club.

the dynamic between tinn and gun is familiar to us - it’s a rivalry, with one side being very charming if a little ridiculous and the other being a traditional tsundere-type character - stern and not particularly forthcoming or unforgiving at first glance. we see little hints though, very early on, that tinn, despite his exterior, gets drawn into gunn’s music.

the end of episode 1 is our first real insight that not everything is going to go quite as expected - thanks so a slow reveal that tinn has doodled a little picture of gun singing, and written next to it the words “you’re cute. so damn cute. cuter than anyone in the world.”

it’s a well-used trope in BL romances to have the handsome, tsundere character be secretly a MASSIVE SIMP for his love interest. we’ve seen this in previous GMMTV shows, with a mid-series reveal that the tsundere has been wildly in love and putting up a ridiculous front the entire time. What MSP is turning on its head is not the fact that Tinn has feelings, but the decision to reveal it in episode 1. the traditional mid-series reveal allows romantic tension to develop in the story, the will-they-won’t-they of each moment existing because we don’t know for certain that the tsundere character has feelings. the reveal is usually used after the first kiss, when the tension is no longer needed by the narrative.

MSP deciding to remove that tension entirely completely changes the way they need to build the romance between tinn and gun, as well as subverting our own expectations around what we’re watching. tinn is no longer cool and detached and stern - he’s awkward and adorable and… completely insane, honestly, he’s just absolutely unhinged. he does not know what he’s doing and has somehow boxed himself into pretending to be a tsundere in his secret quest to help gun save the music club.

now, the tension in the story is whether tinn can get gun to stop hating him - and if, how and when gun will develop feelings for tinn.

(yeah yeah yeah yes, we the viewers know that they’ll end up together, but that’s beside the point)

I can't believe this got so out of hand that I need to use a cut - let's kEEP GOING I GUESS

episode 2 / in which we are made aware that all is truly not what it seems

episode 2 introduces us to another trope - the “secret correspondant” trope. only, of course, it’s not a secret here. we see tinn posing as ‘nong lion’ and messaging the music club to try and help them with their problem (and side note - MSP has the same structure as Bad Buddy, wherein episodes are self-contained stories; an obstacle appears and is resolved in the same episode). in fact, the show turns the trope on its head even further by having gun almost immediately suspect tinn, only to get conveniently thrown off the scent by tinn’s bestie for the restie, and the owner of the sole braincell on the show, tiw. and even beyond that, tinn does a terrible job at hiding the fact that he’s ‘nong lion’, but the show just mines this for comedy, because a huge running line in the show is that the members of the music club are, bless them, absolute dummies.

even so, the episode culminates in tinn openly helping gun in-person (on a stage in front of a bunch of other people, no less!!) and then openly vowing to help the music club win the hot wave contest.

which isn’t a super selfless move - tinn is told earlier that evening by an old music club alumni that music club members can’t date unless they win the hot wave contest. of course, one of the very first things we learn about the music club in the show is that it’s former leader lost the hot wave contest because of his girlfriend, so it seems possible that maybe that rule doesn’t actually exist anymore. but that’s for a later time.

episode 3 / remember episode 2? lets do that again but MORE

episode 3 of my school president takes the concept of subverting expectations and turns it into a whole-ass episode (and it’s perfect).

episode 3 opens with tinn going on another adorable little meltdown about how cute gun is, only for gun to be standing right there listening. another trope again, but this time - i have to wonder whether gun realises what has happened. the narrative has told us over and over that he’s sort of a dummy - the remainder of episode 3 revolves heavily around this, in fact. but he did suspect tinn of being nong lion in episode 2, he’s not always completely obtuse, and he explicitly asks tinn who he was talking about, before waving away the conversation entirely because he has more important hot wave-related things to discuss. this is one of the many instances we see of tinn conflating his own fantasies with reality - something that will become infinitely more prevalent this episode.

speaking of: tinn has to tutor gun. we see them sitting at a table and tinn has somehow made calculus sexy by drawing a heart with equations. they move closer, almost kiss and then- it is, of course, just a figment of tinn’s wild imagination. in reality, he’s yelling at gun for being a gay who can’t math. this is the first time the show tells us to be on our guard in this episode, because tinn’s little mind is going wild and not everything we see will be real.

eventually, tiw suggests they (tinn and gun) move in to his sibling’s apartment for a week to study because tiw is a romantic mastermind, and then, when tinn panics because he does not know how to be a normal person around gun, tiw suggests tinn recreate classic BL tropes with gun. like in bad buddy, tiw says. tiw played by mark pakin, who was in bad buddy. tiw who says that his favourite actor in bad buddy is mark pakin. i’ve gotten off track a little. except i HAVEN’T because -

ok, MSP is written by the same writers as Bad Buddy and directed by one of the assistant directors of Bad Buddy (and 1000 Stars), director au. this is au’s first full director role, but he’s obviously been working closely with backbone of GMMTV aof and aof appears a number of times in the MSP special episode to discuss the process of making the show, which would maybe indicate he had a decent hand in the show - or at the very least, has had a hand in helping au develop his own skills (and to be clear, au worked as part of the writing team for years before this, so he’s not new to the business by any means) (not me speculating on aof’s own staff career growth plans loool). i think it’s not a stretch to say that MSP has a very BB feel to it, and i’m so endlessly impressed that it has managed to maintain that so far whilst also forging its own identity as a show. it doesn’t feel like a carbon copy, or a poor imitation - it feels very much like it’s telling it’s own story, but it’s using a something that BB used super successfully to do so, which is the subversion of tropes. MSP goes one step further with that though, and uses it differently (helped by the fact that because BB is set in college and MSP is in high school, the tropes are naturally a lot less… well. horny.)

MY POINT BEING that that Bad Buddy call out was deliberate. they didn’t use the show just bc they had mark pakin saying the line - i think it’s likely that they felt it necessary to add in mark’s line 4th wall breaking line about himself because it was his character making the reference, but they want us to know what they’re doing. they’re referencing Bad Buddy because this show is, in a way, a spiritual successor to BB - it likely wouldn’t exist as it does if BB didn’t already exist (and wasn’t a huge hit). in the very next scene, we get a reference to the band scrubb, which is a huge 2gether reference - and, looping this all back to the creative team, au was a screenwriter for Still 2gether and aof created/directed Still 2gether. tinn’s character is a direct play on sarawat in 2gether - he is, in so many ways, sarawat, but the narrative is using him in a different way.

oh my god i legit wanted to write a one sentence post about this show how did i get here

OK GETTING BACK TO EPISODE 3 oh my god

episode 3 shows us over and over that tinn creates these vivid fantasies about being in classic romantic scenarios with gun that he then tries to turn into reality, pet tiw’s instruction - only for the reality to be a lot less romantic. in his one actual, real-life chance to get close to gun (the ballroom dance) where he’s not just trying to recreate something from a BL series, he gets so overwhelmed and nervous that he can’t dance at all, which we’re told through the loud and quick sound of his heartbeat.

and then, part way through the episode, the show starts bait-and-switching us.

first: tinn sees gun with food on his lip and fantasises about brushing it away with his thumb (an absolute romance series staple). gun licks it away before tinn can do any of that, because of course he does - but then tinn gets food on his lips and gun reaches over to brush it away. finally, tinn has ended up in a romance series moment with gun, only it wasn’t one of his own deliberate creation. it just happened.

second: tinn and gun talk at the swimming pool about themselves - finally. they’ve been living together for a week, but we don’t see them often having conversations about who they are. gun talks about seeing the music club as his ‘safe zone’. tinn explains why he became school president (to support people’s dreams). gun tells him that that’s such a handsome answer, then asks “have you used that line to hit on anyone?” tinn replies: “you.” we expect by now that it’s another fantasy moment, because we’ve been duped by the show with these moments multiple times by now, but once again the show twists things. the moment is real, tinn really says “you” and it hangs between them for a moment before he quickly changes the subject. but it’s the clearest declaration either of them have made. we don’t know what gun is feeling by this stage, however we do know that gun is in fact the one who gave them a Classic Romance Moment of brushing away food. it’s the show telling us that, whether he realises it yet or not, he’s in this too.

the third bait and switch is the Big One, except it’s not at all: we reach the ballroom dance midterm and tinn is trying to get out of dancing altogether - he still isn’t sure he can do it, he still feels overwhelmed when he tries to dance with gun, his heart races too hard and fast. gun refuses to listen to him and makes him get up. he tells tinn to close his eyes and says “let me help you”. tinn closes his eyes and suddenly the sports hall fades away - he and gun are in beautiful suits, they’re in the music club room (gun’s safe zone!), gun’s band chinzilla is playing and he and gun are dancing. throughout the episode we’ve heard tiny portions of the melody of the ballroom dance song, but now finally we hear the whole song, performed by chinzilla. as they dance together, the scene flashes between the fantasy dance, their practice dance by the pool and crucially, the actual dance that’s happening in the sports hall. as the dance comes to an end, we realise that even though we saw it happen in tinn’s fantasy, it was happening in real life too. the way they danced in tinn’s fantasy was how they really danced - staring into one another’s eyes, smiling at each other, looking completely lost in the moment. gun said “let me help you” and entered tinn’s fantasy with him. gun said “let me help you” and he’s telling us, the viewers, that tinn isn’t going to make this romance happen alone (even with the help of tiw). tinn can’t create romance moments when gun isn’t on the same page.

the final bait and switch happens in a series of parts: prior to the ballroom dance midterm, on the night after they go swimming, gun makes tinn share the bed (rather than the Bad Buddy reference sleeping arrangement they’ve been doing all week). tinn, because he’s a lunatic, asks if he can stare into gun’s eyes and gun obliges. after a moment, we hear the heartbeats again - but it’s gun that looks away and decides to go to sleep.

the episode ends, after the ballroom dance, with gun and tinn having a small moment together outside the school. gun tries to give tinn back the pencil case he borrowed earlier, because he of course does not own a pencil case. it’s one that says “i think about you” on it that gun has, obviously, doodled all over. specifically, he has drawn a cute little monster and written the name ‘tinn’ with a bunch of arrows pointed at it. you think about who now, gun? anyway, tinn tells gun to keep it, because what high school student doesn’t have a pencil case oh my god gun - and they hold hands over the pencil case for a moment. until the tinn’s mother the principal comes out of her office and tinn very gently drops gun’s hands. that’s not relevant to this, i just think it’s Big Foreshadowing. anyway. tinn leaves with his mother and gun is left standing there, staring after him. and once again, we hear the heartbeats. they’re gun’s, because of course they are. we get a flashback to the night before, to tinn staring into gun’s eyes and looking away, and we know for certain that that was gun’s heartbeat and not tinn’s, and that it’s happening again now. bait and switch - tinn’s heartbeats followed us through the whole episode, only for us to end on gun’s heartbeat, and a confirmation that yes, he’s feeling it all too.

again, the show is revealing things early. no longer do we have the tension of whether gun feels something too - now we have the tension of whether gun is going to do anything about it, or acknowledge it at all.

we're only up to episode 4 by now, and I wouldn't say that episode 4 turned much on its head that hadn't already been set up before, but I do think it serves as a way to start building up a number of new plot points, so I'm going to talk about that a little, just so that I can revisit this later once more episodes have aired.

episode 4 / resetting expectations (...sort of?)

episode 4 of my school president introduces us to a new character: tinn's original rival, sound, who joins the music club (because of course tinn has a rival).

I think it's actually really key to point out a tiny scene that happens at the beginning of episode 4, as the show is starting to lay out the plots for the episode. gun and the band are looking for a solo guitarist (hence the eventual introduction of sound). he puts posters up on a notice board. tinn comes along and, because he's a dweeb, mentions that people need permission from the school council to put up posters. gun sighs and obediently starts to take the posters down, before tinn dives in and says that he'll let gun put them up anyway, he'll make a 'special exception'. real smooth, kid.

anyway, this fascinates me, because it's such a good display of how much their relationship has changed by this point. tinn and gun have had a surprising number of scenes together in front of this notice board - mostly with gun fighting back against tinn trying to enforce the school rules as school council president. here we see gun not fight, but immediately give into tinn instead (even though tinn had no desire to win, he's just got so little game oh my god this boy has NO GAME i'm obsessed with him). gun looks thrilled when tinn lets him put up the posters anyway - he respects tinn's word enough now that he wasn't going to fight, which is so the opposite of the gun we've seen so far. it's just a really interesting story beat to throw in.

they have a little moment again (in real life) (initiated by tinn) and gun's heartbeats from episode 3 appear once more, reminding us that gun is also Feeling Things. gun runs away in a flustered panic.

(tinn, it must be said, genuinely has no idea what's going on in gun's head. because tinn is a dummy.)

from here, the dual plot lines of the episode play out pretty traditionally. story A sees gun quit the music club and tinn take the opportunity to get closer to him now that he's not beholden to the no-dating-before-hot-wave rule that definitely still exists. they do get closer. in fact, they go on an accidental date, flirt heavily over some imaginary cake, and tinn finds a position for gun in the student council that would allow him to sing and play music, story B sees sound take over the music club, who are unfocused and not actually using their practice sessions to practice, only to be a tiny teen tyrant about it. the band beg gun to come back. gun feels as though the band will have a better chance to win hot wave without him. tinn sees this happen and convinces gun to go back to the music club, because that's clearly where his happiness lies. even if gun being in the music club will inevitably put the absolutely real and very much something gun definitely is aware of no-dating-before-hot-wave rule back into play.

gun rejoins the music club, but lets sound stay (sound, to be clear, mostly joined because he thought it would piss off tinn, but we start getting the indication by the end that he could also maybe find friendship and support in the club, just as the others did). they have their traditional bbq pork meal together to celebrate being back together. it's sacred.

so, it's all fairly cut and dry - and we as viewers probably already knew where these plots were heading and that the main issues would be resolved in this episode, thanks to the self-contained episode structure of the show.

until we see gun grab a bunch of the pork and run off, away from the bbq, yelling that he'll be back soon. he goes, of course, to tinn. he, quite crucially, claims that the group have finished eating and that there was some food left over and he just wondered whether tinn might want it - once again, we as viewers know this is a lie, and are left in possession in much more knowledge than the characters in the scene. gun is making up an excuse to bring tinn food, and to hang out with tinn. if the question this episode was 'gun is having feelings for tinn; what will he do with them?', then we saw moments over the course of the entire episode that answered that. gun, unlike tinn, has apparently an abundance of game (if anything he's a little too dangerous, frankly). he jumps both feet forward into flirting with tinn, and manages to conveniently set up scenarios in which he can do that - successfully, unlike tinn in episode 3. where he's a little more in control, we don't get a return of the panicked heartbeats from the beginning of the episode.

maybe tinn had put this flirting all episode down to the fact that gun was no longer in the music club. it's not really made clear. however, now gun is back in the club, and he's abandoned the sacred bbq pork time to have a nivea micellar moment with tinn (once again, gun successfully initiating a BL romantic moment in real life, because gun is the only one here with game). he gets tinn to take a photo of them together, and so they stand pressed shoulder to shoulder, hands touching. they're smiling at each other, and the camera jumps back and forth between the way they're looking at one another and their hands. tinn, probably emboldened by how much gun has put himself out there across the entire episode, starts to move his pinky finger closer. his hand is shaking, but we see them over and over barely looking at the camera because they're too busy smiling sweetly at each other, as tinn's finger twitches closer and closer - the slowest build up in the world, as we wonder whether he'll get the guts to do it. and then finally, finally, tinn loops his pinky around gun's, and gun responds in kind, and we see a shot of them taking the photo, they're fingers out of shot but entwined.

this is almost par for the course by now - how quickly this show has put tinn and gun on a playing field of both having feelings for the other, and both being at least somewhat aware that those feelings could be reciprocated.

episode 5 and beyond / is this show impossible to predict?

it's not really something we get to see too often, the very cautious build into something more. the next episode preview doesn't really tell us anything about how that develops (but rather that gun has a lot of other stuff going on, apparently). i think this becomes it's own question - now that MSP have turned the traditional BL pacing on its head (akin to the way Bad Buddy did it before), what do they do next. with BB, we very quickly saw that the obstacles between the lead characters were almost entirely external - it's the basis of the entire show. they couldn't be together because no one wanted them to be. it made the pacing of the romance make complete sense.

with MSP, we're going in much more blindly. the boys are already on a similar page and there's no obvious obstacles between them outside of the definitely very real no-dating-before-hot-wave rule that no one in the present day music club has even spoken about or mentioned (yet?). what this suggests to me, and why this is so fascinating, is that we therefore don't necessarily know the basic conceit of the plot from here on out.

yes, we want to see how tinn and gun ultimately admit their feelings for one another, but at episode 4 of 12, the show has already done most of the work in getting them there. inevitably, we need to be faced with obstacles and there have been a small number of hints, maybe, at the things that could go wrong for them, but it's fascinating because those hints have been very sparse.

there's the perceived rivalry of the music club and the school council - which tinn has accidentally perpetuated a bunch of times, because he's a dummy. episode 4 reminds us conveniently that this is still seen to exist outside of tinn and gun's gay little bubble, when we see the two random students discussing it in the hall (this is of course also how sound ends up joining the club). it's not a particularly violent rivalry though - we're not at Bad Buddy drop kick into the chest two seconds away from breaking out into a sharks and jets style dance number. i wouldn't say it's rife for conflict, but that's sort of the thing: it's almost impossible to predict at this point what will happen. we know that chinzilla will probably perform at hot wave, and at some point tinn and gun will probably kiss. beyond that? it's anyone's guess.

another obvious obstacle that has been (honestly quite lightly) is the principal - we are literally introduced to tinn's pov in episode 2 by the concept of his mother coming in between him and gun, when he dreams about gun turning into her. he's lied to her a number of times in the name of helping gun. her character is generally quite fascinating, because she's a near-constant antagonistic presence, but it's clear she has huge amounts of love and care for her son, and she's trying to do her best by her students. she's also really frugal though - in episode 2 we learn that she and her husband would argue because she felt that music was an unnecessarily expensive hobby. a real subtle moment that i'm sure won't come back in any fashion later down the line...

the other obvious one is of course the no-dating-before-hot-wave rule which, sure, might be real, but might even become an issue in some form or another even if it's not. the reason the music club lost hot wave the year before, as we know, was because the last leader was distracted on stage by his girlfriend. this is how we meet the music club in episode 1, and we see gun vowing to win hot wave next year, because he knows it's what will save the music club.

it seems as though episode 5 is about to introduce new conflicts too, or expand upon things that have really only been very barely hinted at. but, if I know anything it's that promos are unreliable, so only time will tell how that plays ou.

it's important though, in my opinion, that the show really hasn't hit us over the head with anything here yet (except the very real very current day hot wave rule that very much definitely exists - and even then, it has only been mentioned a handful of times at most between tinn and tiw, usually as an occasional reminder to the audience more than a constant driving force for tinn's actions). these are obstacles, but they ultimately haven't been shown to cause too much issue to tinn and gun's story - or at least, tinn and gun have successfully navigated everything with almost no pushback, hence the fact that they're both sailing through their own romantic storyline at a pace faster than an olympic runner.

there's not really an ending to this post yet, because we're only at episode 4. I'm not particularly committed to any theory about where this could go (except the one about the hot wave rule being real YOU CAN'T CONVINCE ME IT'S REAL AU), but from a storytelling perspective alone: this show needs a conflict. the assumption it gave us and then systematically tore apart across the first four episodes was that the conflict would be around tinn and gun realising their own feelings for one another, because that's how these shows go. that's not the central conflict in MSP. the central conflict is... uh... one of these other things. or maybe a secret different thing. i don't know. come back to me in like 6 weeks.

#my school president #tinn x gun #the total word count for this is 4787 words and um. Um.#no more meta this week bc I have written 3 posts in the space of like 5 days and they've all been exponentially more unhinged than the last #actually I blame gmmtv for not giving us a MSP episode this week because I just think. if the promise of episode 5 was around the corner...#then well. this probably wouldn't have happened.#anyway if you do have like... an hour spare and decide to read this...#pls let me know your thoughts ALSO THINGS YOU DISAGREE ON BC I WANNA KNOW THAT TOO!!!#I realise this is the evident work of a lunatic but I swear I love when other people make observations I've missed and can change my mind #show: my school president #msp: meta #ship: msp: tinn x gun

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