ABO Desire Deep Dive Diatribe
As I type this, it has been a few days since the final episode of Desire aired and I have... a lot, to say.
Frankly, I should have done a trash watch from the start. But it took 5 episodes for me to realize what a dumpster fire phenomena this was, and by then it was too late. Live and learn burn.
As a result, I must write a whole thesis on the following formula aka the design of this damn show:
psychotic obsession + delicious toxicity
- chronic neglect of side dish
/ by the sheer madness of this show existing at all
In Case You're Here for Brevity
(What DO you take me for?)
I loved this Very Silly Show in the worst possible way. And I do mean worst. It really was like watching fanfic brought to life.
Good fic but still... rough in places, in need of a solid edit past, littered with forgotten threads, dropped characters, tired tropes, and weak development.
The main pair is a work of gd art.
The filming quality is solid.
The wardrobe department is unhinged and has issues with shirts (absent or awful, only 2 options).
Generally, most of the acting had a lot in common with vintage sleds: cold, hard, wooden, and stiff, but still somehow a fun ride. (Yes yes, reminds me of my sex life, too.)
For what it was (remarkable) and that it existed at all (unprecedented) and how much I enjoyed the experience (despite myself), I went outside of my comfort zone when rating this darn thing.
I admit, Desire is an 8/10 show, but I personally am compelled to give it a 9/10 on pure entertainment value.
And without question Desire is an icon of our BL times. 2025 will forever be remembered as the year China put mpreg on our screens.
Thank you sirs, may we have another?
Yes it's trash, but some of us chose to lie on top of this trash heap and look to the stars.
But by the seven fires of this hellsite, was I so relieved when it ended. It's bloody exhausting.
And now, your actual review of this damn show:
Close on the herculean strides of Revenged Love, China continued its historic 2025 run on the international BL market with the first true ABO mpreg piece.
There is some semblance of story = about a boy who falls in love with an alpha (top of food chain) right before he manifests as an enigma (secret extra-special tippy-top of food chain) and then obsessively stalks/courts the object of his devotion though means both fair and foul (mostly foul) for the next decade. Why so secretive and manipulative?
No reason, just Hua Yong being Hua Yong.
This show focuses on Hua Yong, a perfect sociopath ult babygirl, being a violent, unchecked, conniving, psychotic monster so pretty he will hurt your teeth, intent on possessing, owning, and sexing-up one increasingly confused alpha. (I know honey, we were all confused, it's okay, you're safe. No one else is. But you are.)
And when our little psycho wins? We likey! (So does the alpha.) Somehow everyone, including the audience, has also become toxic trash along with Hua Yong. Fun fun.
There is actual on screen kissing (yes, from China) combined with some of the world's hottest shirt suspenders and some the world's ugliest shirts.
Oh... there is a nod at an intriguing side couple who ended up being mere set dressing.
And there is also actual ON SCREEN mpreg.
(Which broke Tumblr. But we like that.)
Plus China aired this by distributing through Hong Kong to a Taiwanese platform and if that isn't How Dare levels of malarkey I don't know what is.
And I haven't even gotten to the Cpop boy group component.
What can I really say about this show?
This show would have been sublimely fucked up and utterly ridiculous even without the ABO trappings, but the world-building actually added to my enjoyment (and I am not an omegaverse stan).
However, there is a ton of Basil Exposition to wade through during the first 3-5 episodes. If you are not familiar with omegaverse or dystopian alt-reality info-dumping... it's going to tax you eternal.
If utter fascination with Hua Yong gliding sveltely down marble stairs and primly torturing all the wettest-eyed omegas can't hold you through the opening episodes, don't bother with this show.
I liked our sweetie Alpha Sheng but it's Hua Yong who rules (and drives) this show. Hua Yong = the most beautiful little obsessive stalker pouty ruthless gremlin ever to swish around in silk pyjamas. If you don't find him riveting from the moment he wades through that pool in the opening scene, you're not gonna like Desire.
If you decide to risk it, please know that this show is very very gorgeous, unbelievably toxic, and completely NUTS. This is the CBL KinnPorsche no one thought to ask for. Only this is KP stripped of all grit, sanitized within an inch of it's life, made larger and icier and very very precise.
All your triggers will be hit with this, we are in dark territory: stalking, obsession, possession, threat, blackmail, dubious consent, and more.
There is a large dose of willful misunderstanding, plus a hand being torn off, and (for some labubullshit reason) stuffed teddybears are adhered to perfectly innocent shirts (that did not deserve such treatment).
Look, that shirt was a trigger for me. And then they had to go and do it again, outside of the flashback. In the future! LIKE THEY STAYED IN FASHION FOR YEARS. Untenable.
I adored Desire for the wild ride and tried not to get bogged down with the details.
Here I am typing away... tunneling into the details.
The point is… that it exists at all. Desire is very meta. It is it's own mpreg. Most of us spend most of the time it was airing staring at it in wonder and thinking “How were you born? How do you even exist?”
So putting aside how I felt about it, I am going to talk about why Desire is, against all odds, actually important and crazy in the history of BL. As the self proclaimed most bonkers pundit chronicler of BL's abject nonsense, I feel compelled to make a statement. And also, I need a post to point people at when they ask me about this damn show in the future.
Me explaining Desire to a non-BL non-Ao3 friend.
Friend’s eyes getting bigger and bigger and bigger.
(I actually had to go into everything I am about to cover in this post. It took me half and hour of excited flappy hands.)
Eventually the friend says, “I think I must watch this.”
Me, “Oh no! It’s not good, it’s just a miracle of the modern age.”
Hua Yong - aforementioned gorgeous manipulative sociopath ult-babygirl psycho monster prone to wearing silk PJs and stalking one (and only one) alpha. (He's been doing if for 15 years. Talk about imprinting.) He is so fucking EXTRA I can’t even.
Sheng Shao You - our lovely v confused alpha prince that everyone loves (despite bad shirt choices), but Hua Yong loves/needs/demands/wants most of all.
Gao Tu - punching bag omega everyone roots for, first mpreg on BL's screens (more on this later). Giving major What's Up with Secretary Gao feels. (Skulks off to pun island in a cloud of smug.)
Shen Wen Lang - the alpha responsible for the above, and also Hua Yong's worstie.
mpreg - a dude getting pregnant, but specifically in the context of mate bonds, marking (bite), and mating pheromones, heat/rut, knotting/slick, and whole lot more keywords invented in one very dirty corner of the internet
ABO - Alpha Beta Omega (impregator, duds, impregnated) another way of saying omegaverse
Omegaverse - a setting for smexy erotica, usually m/m, that features a stratified society with an ABO structure and other expected tropes like: fated mates, irresistible pull, non-consensual mating, and... mpreg!
The history - omegaverse ABO & mpreg
It's all started with shifter smut....
Back in the days when yaoi was distributed through nefarious means and rarely translated, when the very first "live action yaoi" were being produced in Japan, when Korea was dabbling with gay shorts, and Thailand had no thought to pretty boys kissing pretty boys as a soft power, a very odd series of events began to occur.
Look: The internet was young.
First there was m/m slash fiction. Mostly with Kirk/Spock then other characters. Basically one mission: make them gay.
(In our defense, there were barely any gay characters on TV, we had to make our own fun back then. Whole cloth queer, rah rah rah.)
And then people thought to themselves, they thought, "what the world needs is gay werewolves."
Well, sometimes. Sometimes it was trash. But that is the way of writing.
And via the evolution of fixation and fetishization, the knotting concept (comes from dog & wolf peens) as well as heats & ruts became hot and smexy in our times, and the whole shifting into an animal became less interesting. (Be we kept tropes like sniff test and irresistible pheromones, mating urges, fated mates, and the like.)
No one pees to mark their territory anymore though... well, not exactly.
We liked the knotting bit. V kinky. Being stuck in your lover.
We liked the heat bit. Make the uke omega boys produce their own lube slick and also not be able to say no.
We like the rut bit. Make the seme alpha unable to resist and refuse to take no for an answer.
Win win on the whole sanctified r*p* mating front.
All permission is a go for obsession, stalking, extreme possession because hormones/smell/mating instinct/fate bond "made me do it."
And apparently we ALSO like the idea of our innocent boys getting all preggo from said heat/rut.
Poop babies is the answer and the mechanics. Poop babies. Okay? Nothing more shall be said on this subject. I dislike the mechanics of regular babies, I'm not going into the finer details of poop babies. Guess what? There is a whole huge section of AO3 just waiting for you.
(This is where fandom lost me, but hey, I'm always interested in the warped side of human fetishization, attraction, and kinks, especially if it intersects with nerds, queers, and imagination. Get down with your bad selves and your poop babies A03.)
All of which is to say, ABO and omegaverse were the unnatural evolution of the early gay shifter erotica.
And we ended up with CHINA doing a LIVE ACTION of it all, and no I do not actually know how we got here AT ALL.
What is this reality?
What's my purpose in life?
How did I get here?
Back up, what have we done?
Tiny voice from the sidelines: Where are the women?
Some ABOs are written for a dystopia where women have been wiped out and hence the need for mpreg. Desire, weirdly, was not. (Would have made things a lot easier on themselves.) When women do exist, they also fall into Alpha, Beta, Omega.
And no, I do NOT know how female Alpha's work under this set of circumstances. Although I'd find that a lot more interesting then poop babies.
The history of the mpreg tropes - Film sphere
Now before you get all complainy about the fact that Gao Tu was not, in fact, the first man to be pregnant on screen, we are all very well aware of that. We can all use IMDB, just like you, baby party pooper. Also, some of us knew all about (or, to our sins, watched) Junior (1994), Children of Men (2006), or even Hiyama Kentaro no Ninshin (2022).
But Gao Tu IS the first to be mpreg, in the original sense of the trope and the creation of the term mpreg. His is not the first male pregnancy, but it is the first mpreg.
So, yes, there have been other men pregnant in cinema, and there have been other references to mpreg in BL, but this is the first depiction of the trope of mpreg on our screens.
It is a double red line day.
The history of the tropes - BL sphere
As someone here once said "never forget Babe & Charlie called each other Mama & Papa in Pit Babe so that Gao Tu could get mourning sickness and Sheng Shao You could almost miscarry."
(Also Pavel constantly eluding, during fan service, to getting pregnant. A very Pavel thing to do. Boy is internet savvy with a capital S tear Alpha.)
Which is just to say, yes, Pit Babe's original IP is an omegaverse sports romance. But for some reason Thailand wasn't brave enough to lean into the ABO of it all.
We remain sad about this.
(And so, apparently, does Pavel. Buck up honey, what with the wild success of Desire maybe you'll be barfing into sinks in Pit Babe 3?)
The history of Chinese BL
So I have a whole blog post about this (old and dated, especially now).
The important bits are as follows:
China was on a BL production trajectory to compare with Taiwan... at first. So the kind of BL they, by rights, should be producing right now, would be something like a combo of 2023 Korean + Taiwanese style BL. But their BL did not evolve like that of others. So they basically could not get to this state.
Instead this is what happened:
2016-2017 - CCP cracks down on gay/queer Chinese YT bloggers, throws a bunch of them and bigger/pro-published danmei authors into prison. Shows like Addicted and Advance Bravely were cut short and pulled from distribution. Actors careers were impacted from "playing gay." Other Chinese BLs lose distribution, die in post production, and many disappear from streaming sites.
2017-2023 - China does produce a few BLs but they are either censored bromances, or if boys kiss = they get killed, or otherwise have separation, ambiguous, or tragic endings. (The "if you gay, you suffer" policy.)
2024 - BUT ALSO Meet You at the Blossom and few odd CBLs actually air, end happy, and have kisses.
2024 - AND THEN The On1y One tortures BL fans with no resolution, and none likely.
2025 - CCP starts throwing fanfic and danmei authors into prison again, mostly younger women this time, under their anti-p*rn legislation.
2025 - BUT ALSO China produces Revenged Love, and then distributes it in a rushed panic via Singapore to an international market airing it on Japanese & Taiwanese platforms. Everyone is shocked and expects it to be canceled any second. It is a tense af watching experience. But it lands. Happily! The actors sky rocket to fame. And yes people inside China are absolutely watching it. Including stellar true-to-form kisses (and more).
2025 - BUT ALSO a Kill the Gays dramarama called Kill to Love airs, which is on brand EXCEPT the leads go on doing couple branded fan service for MONTHS after. Real Thai-style fan service. For a Kill The Gays show!?!
No one understands what tf is happening. Least of all me.
2025 - Desire airs. In sedate unhurried way. Just one episode after another, on schedule, like they aren't rewiring everyone's brains and expectations around what can be done in a BL, and who can do it.
2025 - Desire's production company IN CHINA turns the 4 leads into a Cpop group (allowing them to promote this BL inside China but not actually ever have to talk about the BL itself - clever. Because they not promoting THAT gay stuff, they singing and dancing and shilling perfume.) And the actors sky rocket to fame... again.
(Just as a rule, FYI, BL outside of Thailand: The more famous they get the less likely we get a 2nd seasons. Not that we are ever likely to get 2nd seasons from China.)
I cannot reiterate how wild it is that China, of all countries, were the first to produce an actual honest-to-goodness omegaverse. With mpreg on screen.
I will never recover from this shock.
However it is still China. Desire may be a mad mad mad warped poop baby of a show, but while there are kisses, there are still no decent kisses - eh, Hey Jude, just make it mad.
(Just go to Thailand and Taiwan for your kisses, no one is ever going to beat them at their own game. And frankly, China is never gonna try. They rarely kiss well, even in their het stuff.)
I watched this show on both Gaga and Viki. I think Viki has better subs that better translated the ABO worldbuild into English. But there are strengths and weaknesses to both platforms' respective subs.
The first few eps really do have massive amounts of info dumping. But after that it's "manipulation as a love language" all day every day... and night.
The secretary core/beta assistants are a hoot. I want an Upstairs Downstairs of them dealing with their idiot bosses. It kinda feels like they’re the true masterminds of all relationships. They must be having vicarious fun with all of these hormone-crazed whack-doodle power-hungry (or utterly disempowered) alphas. Just the betas shuffling paperwork, making coffee, and kvetching about what dumbarses their superiors are. I watch it.
It’s hilarious how little work CEOs in Asian dramas actually do. There’s a lot of walking around in suits, playing on phones, passing each other clipboards, and occasionally flipping though a file.
Of course Gao Tu (the omega disguising himself as a beta) is my favorite character. I’ve always been a fan of cross dressing. Don't get too attached tho, his story arc doesn't get much resolution.
Be warned: Shen Wen Lang (his clueless alpha) will never gain a clue or a brain cell. The actor will never be any less uncomfortably stiff. And there will be no kissing for them.
But that said, Shen Wen Lang and Hua Yong's worstie relationship is pretty darn excellent. Lots of fun to watch that one.
Sit back and enjoy Hua Yong's lies. He is so darn pretty, who cares if evil? He can do whatever he wants. Also, do not apply logic, it will never make sense, because he is certifiably insane. No sense or sanity in that pretty little brain. He has 2 brain cells that know only 2 things: manipulation and Sheng Shao You.
At the start, Desire does not feel unhinged, it feels quite tailored and controlled. I prefer my CBL a bit more like Revenged Love (the Taiwanese side) with crunchy edges. At first this show feels more KBL-esk. Don't worry, all the edges will get very very fried. (But the kitchen stays white and immaculate.)
Moment of rut snark: I guess when dudes get PMS everybody talks about how admirably intense it is at the business cocktail party.
Beware Episode 9 for it is toxic and full of pheromone marks flaring, plus all the rutting dub con (and worse) one could ever desire. *big sigh* Everyone got all messed up by this episode. Over this episode. Because of this episode. The characters in this episode.
From ep 9 on, I pretty much spent every ep kicking my feet, flailing about, and squealing. I love the main couple and their were warped little power dynamic. So damn kinky. Oh the glorious toxicity of it all.
Us = crying screaming puking our guts out. The mpreg boys = pale milk-water maidens delicately coughing into sinks and lying decorously in bed pining for the fjords. Their husbands = clutching pearls.
The final episode was lackluster. At the last gasp they gave us our little gay families but they ultimately misused the excellent side pair.
Half the fandom was basically, as @landonofish so aptly put it:
"i feel like ive been bamboozled... finally watched abo desire and what the hell do u mean broke traumatized secretary x omega-hating emotionally stunted ceo was only the sideplot and the main plot was a couple of psychos and their pharmaceutical research?!"
I too was a bit disgruntled that Desire let us down in the 11th hour.
BUT read the diatribe I just wrote above.
I kinda feel like I have to.
My goodness gracious, what a glorious ride it was.
Ultimately do I recommend it?
Well YES, but with approximately 4000 words of reservations.
My MDL review is here but I left out the whole history section because MDL's parent company is (duh duh duh dum) Chinese.
