on nuengdiao, who should not be taken lightly
nuengdiao is someone who i think is constantly underestimated, but who absolutely poses a much bigger threat than it seems. he’s sharper than a lot of the other characters seem to expect of him, and that gives him huge amounts of leeway to make small little moves for himself - but comes at the cost of being treated like a child, something that he is clearly fighting against.
he seems a little naive, maybe, at first glance - but nuengdiao is clearly pretty clued in to the things happening around him. in episode 1, he was already very much aware of why palm was living with them. in episode 2, we see him systematically finding ways to con the people around him into doing what he wanted them to. a lot of the time, that includes tricking palm into being less diligently subservient.
i keep thinking about the scene by the food stall in episode 2, after palm saves the old vendor. nueng has palm roll him up some food, then asks “if i asked you to make me 100 more, would you?”, knowing palm would not only agree but probably would sit down and actually do it too. when palm does agree, he has him roll another one (the way that palm likes to eat them), and then demands that palm eat it instead. it’s this neat little full circle moment from the beginning of the episode, where nueng had tried to get palm to eat breakfast with him. he realises that if he’s going to get palm to act in a way that isn’t The Way He’s Supposed To Act, then he needs to be a little conniving about it. simply telling palm to loosen up around him isn’t going to get palm to comply.
really, no one else around nuengdiao seems innately inclined to listen to any of his requests - he has to make cute little eyes at his mother and concoct a whole story that will allow palm to be able to use their pool. again - nueng is finding ways to let palm be more comfortable through scheming and deception, because it’s the only thing that seems to work. demanding chanon follow orders is the only way he’s able to let palm ride in the car with him - and we see he has to do it repeatedly. he has to play the game to get what he wants.
we know he’s smart - it’s one of the very first things we learn about him in fact, when his father explains why nuengdiao is ready to start learning about the business. at the beginning of episode 3, nueng makes a case for his own intelligence to palm. he says that the only thing a person cannot lose is their own mind (which palm then counters with an incredible “well, what if you get hit on the head?”) - he values his own sharpness and he’s not quiet about this either. he boasts a number of times to palm about how skilfully he plays people to get his own way.
and we do see him finding ways to gain the upper hand again and again - in episode 3, after being pranked at school again, he specifically targets phum, one of the few people who has actually been nice to him. he bugs his own necklace, leaves his own locker open, just to prove what he’d already suspected - that phum had been attacking him all along.
he says later to palm that he feels he should be put into danger sometimes, that he should get beaten up a little, because how else will he ever learn. that’s fascinating too - that he takes physical attacks as a learning experience. he has so little desire to be sheltered, although you’d maybe believe he doesn’t quite understand how the world works well enough to be making an informed decision there. that’s maybe part of nueng’s point though - he wants to know more, to understand more, to experience more, because for him, knowledge is power and ignorance is the thing that puts him more at risk than anything.
he even says explicitly to ben that the thing he needs most in life is for someone to believe in him, who won’t treat him as though he’s weak. nueng has a level of confidence in his own abilities that no one else seems to. or at least - he has a confidence that being put through challenges will only help him grow stronger.
nueng also doesn’t trust people in general. he scolds palm a little in episode 3 for making him cautious of ben, but i think it’d maybe be a stretch to say that he was in complete trust of ben before that. even though he acts as though he trusts ben - he does tell him about palm, it’s only because ben caught them getting into the same car and asked the right questions that he does so. palm asks nuengdiao about it later, signalling that ben has broken his own promise to nueng. nueng also picks up quite clearly on ben’s lie that nueng had described palm as a servant, when we know that nueng had explicitly used the word “friend”. by this point, nueng is presumably well aware that ben is operating on his own agenda.
(side note: i’m still convinced that ben’s agenda is just “gay, eighteen years old, and crushing on a boy”, rather than anything super nefarious - he feels too suspicious for me to suspect him, even if he is a pretty slippery guy)
even before nueng is alerted of this though, we’re shown a scene of him probing chopper for information, trying to get a handle on who ben is and how far he can be trusted. chopper explicitly says to not get too close to him, although he immediately waves off his own words right after.
we know that nueng’s good at deception - he spoke in a super friendly way to phum, quite literally at the exact same time as he was laying down a trap to eventually catch him. the last scene in episode 3 between ben and nueng is interesting, because nueng has clearly used ben in some way to gather information on what had happened to phum and palm. he thanks him and says absolutely nothing about the fact that he knows ben betrayed his trust. i feel like he’s maybe still playing ben a little, like he’s played every single other character on the show so far (although for palm specifically, it has always been in either a teasing manner or for palm’s own benefit).
maybe nueng wants to be able to trust ben - but if ben is slippery then nueng is even more so, in a much more subtle way - taking nueng at face value on anything seems like an unexpectedly dangerous game to play.
