It’s time for my annual post reflecting on all of the shows I watched this year and how I’m feeling about the genre. I’ve been doing this for four years now, and you can go back to read the posts from 2024, 2023, and 2022, , but I’ll warn you that it might make you sad because I did not have that great a time this year by comparison. In typical years, I engage with well over 80 productions. This year I ended at 56, with 40 shows complete and 16 dropped. It’s hard to ignore how the state of global politics has affected culture, and especially the funding of niche media like BL. Let’s get into it.
Japan Delivered Mostly Losses This Year
In a strange observation, Japan made up more than half of all shows I completed, but I can really only say I liked two of them this year in The Summer Hikaru Died for its handling of queer grief and Even Though We’re Adults for its exploration of divorce and lesbian homewrecking. Most of the shows this year felt extremely underbaked or incomplete. Worse, many showed shades of better shows from previous years.
In 10 Things I Want To Do Before I Turn 40 we hoped and failed to find the things we loved in Old Fashion Cupcake, only to be completely disappointed by a completely implaccable protagonist. In Love Begins in the World of If we hoped to tap into similar feelings of Perfect Propose, only to be completely let down by a rushed conclusion. In School Trip: Joined a Group I’m Not Close To we hoped to find some resonance with I Cannot Reach You, only to meet a dull show whose protagonist could not react to the weirdly intense energy coming from his seme.
To make matters worse, we had four (4) terrible sequels this year in A Man Who Defies the World of BL Final, At 25:00 in Akasaka Season 2, I Became the Main Role of a BL Drama Season 2, and Ayaka is in Love with Hiroko! 2nd Stage. Every single one of these shows betrayed their characters and their themes. I wasn’t expecting Minato’s Laundromat 2 to be a prelude of things to come!
Looking at my overall ratings, the Japanese BL I liked the most this year was tied with Stay By My Side After the Rain and Punks Triangle, and I unfortunately found both of these shows to be undercooked and missing key moments of growth with our protagonists. This is not a banner year.
The most interesting Japanese note of the year is actually in how much we had access to that wasn’t traditional BL. Though we are still reliant on fansubbers for many of the best works like When I Was a Child Everything Was Fine, we had all the kinds of educational dramas we never see in BL land like Chosen Home, Two Husbands One Wife, Your Divorce is Served!, and Kita-kun Our Shared Love.
I’d like to say I hope this year will be a blip in the long run, but the current situation in Japan does not bode well for the future of queer media there.
China is Up, and Everyone Else is Down
China is back with multiple projects this year…none of which I felt compelled to watch. The backlog of toxic danmei has been pushing through and it just doesn’t appeal to me. As such, I’m not sure if I’m exactly happy that Chinese teams have been skirting the rules to get their projects published.
As for the rest of the wider region, we had a pretty cool show about actors come out of Singapore with The Sparkle in Your Eye.
From Taiwan, I really enjoyed Fragrance of the First Flower Season 2, which finally gave me closure. I also really enjoyed the friends to lovers story in Secret Lover.
Finally, I finished six BLs from Korea, but the only one I enjoyed was made in 2023 in Heesu in Class 2. It was apparently controversial to like the Korean drama about the coming out experience, and I will remain salty. Unfortunately, Heesu is the best thing Korea released this year by a longshot, and I’m extremely concerned by the complete disaster of works coming out of Strongberry at this point.
Thailand’s Consolidation Continues Apace, And It Sucks
If I were to sum up the state of Thai BL this year it would be, “GMMTV sucking up all the talent in the industry and then doing absolutely fucking nothing worthwhile with it.” They’ve achieved a stranglehold on the industry, the quality of all of their work continues to drop as the pushes to monetize increase. I only finished seven shows from Thailand this year, and only one of them was from GMMTV. Despite the 20+ shows they release each year, I have felt absolutely no FOMO about this.
The biggest disappointments of the year for me were Shine and The Wicked Game. I’ve grown tired of the wealth worship that dominates Thai BL, and I can no longer continue to support Be On Cloud’s work. Shine was the last straw, and I am really disgusted by the politics of the show that they went out of their way to position as political. With The Wicked Game, I just reached a point where this particular brand of stupid melodrama just doesn’t work for me anymore.
On the positive end of this mixed back we have Khemjira and Gelboys. I really loved the casts in both of these shows, and I especially loved the cinematography in Gelboys. That they shot all of Gelboys on iphones is giving me hope about what is still possible in Thailand. I wanted to mention both of these shows together because I think these two used their onscreen intimacy really well to tell us about their characters.
Of special note this year is Mandate. This political drama is still the most compelling thing I saw from Thailand this year, and I will keep mentioning it in all of my posts about this year. Ignore all the talk about the politics of Shine and their making of a queer work and not a BL (lies). Watch Mandate and grapple with Thai people’s angst about their parliamentary system.
Canada Takes the Win This Year
Without Heated Rivalry, we’d have little positive m/m or BL media to talk about at the end of 2025. I will be classifying this show as Canadian BL, and the earnestness and sincerity of this show makes it the overall winner of the year. It’s so funny watching some of the commentary around this show, because we’ve seen versions of this commentary around BL for decades.
I admire a lot of what Jacob Tierney has done with this show, and some of the things people say about him aren’t that different from the kinds of things people said about Aof after Bad Buddy, or Boss after I Told Sunset About You. Like with most of the good BL adaptations, they made good changes to the source material, and honored the things readers enjoyed the most. They got super enthusiastic newer actors, and weren’t embarrassed about the work.
As a result, we had a really fun show in the English-speaking world. It’s been a lot experiencing the kinds of discourse that Asian queers likely experience over every big BL in their home countries, and so it’s made me even more sympathetic for the out queer fans we have in our English-speaking BL spaces. I’m eager to see what two more years looks like for this show, how much the viewership changes, and what kinds of projects follow from this. There have been many adaptations of m/m works before, but this is the first one we’ve really seen blow up for being this earnestly horny.
Well, that will wrap us up this year. I think this is definitely the worst year I’ve ever had with BL because I’ve gotten spoiled by the previous six years. Hopefully next year’s review is more upbeat.
