i watched i promised you the moon episode 3 last night and... wow. i have A LOT of thoughts. just to get this off my chest, here’s what i thought about teh being dumb.
my genuine first reaction was “oh my he’s a dumbass”- i always thought he was a bit of a dumbass but in a cute way. he’d sometimes say or do something that made me think... could you really not think twice? but this... tHIS. is just peak dumbass.
and this might be a bit of an “unpopular opinion”, but i felt as if it was a tiny bit out of character. while i do think the episode (and the show in general) has excellent writing, i just can’t get past this one tiny point that i noticed. as soon as i saw that scene i just keep thinking... teh? why and how would teh do this? and i understand and i totally got how the episode showed how teh’s view of jai changed (when their knees touched during the play, when he looked at jai when they were hiding from the security and the way his heart beat faster when they were hugging during that exercise). and i get... that. sure, feelings change, it’s more than natural (i have a LOT more to say about this, but i’ll refrain myself for the sake of the length of this post). but what made it weird to me is that, since i told sunset about you, we were shown a teh that was emotional even though he tried not to show it. who fell deep and hard for oh-aew and thought about him constantly and was reminded of him by every little thing. a teh who was, more than anything, afraid of change. we saw that when he told hoon he was afraid of coming out to his mother in fear of her reaction (which he thought would undoubtedly lead to a change in her love for him). we saw it in his reaction when he wasn’t accepted to his first choice of university, which forced him to settle for another uni and completely change any plans he had made- actual plans and imaginary ones. even his realisation that he didn’t hate coconut anymore, simply because it reminded him of oh-aew (which was almost devastating as it forced teh to think about his feelings for oh-aew), is a prime example of this.
and this theme continued in i promised you the moon. some examples are the way he was determined to sleep at oh-aew’s house, even if it’d make him late to class (a fact he was only ready to accept when oh-aew comforted him and “gave him permission”). we saw it in his reaction to oh-aew deciding to change his major- which affected the plans teh had made up for the two of them (starring in a play/movie together, etc.) and likewise in his reaction to khim telling him she’ll be a flight attendant, which made him think about why someone like her (who he admired for her perseverance) would give up on her dreams. and more recently in episode 3, in his entry in the logbook in which he writes (paraphrased) “i told oh-aew i would love him no matter how much he changed, but i feel different”. clearly his promise to oh-aew was one out of love and admiration, but i believe he’d never thought oh-aew would “change this much”. and all of these things had really made me believe that teh not only dislikes but also fears change. partly because of the fear of the unknown future, but also because how comfortable he feels doing and knowing and loving what he has all this time (acting, oh-aew, imagining a future of acting with oh-aew).
i would’ve never thought teh would cheat so “easily”. i expected him to reject jai or at least push him away after the first kiss in shame and confusion. i think this is mainly because i have a very vivid memory of teh- jittery and confused after slowly but surely (but at the same time suddenly) realising his feelings for oh-aew and thus having to come to terms with being in love with a boy, and somehow having to tell this to the girl he was seeing. and to now show his feelings for jai- which, like i said, could be real and natural- in such a calm and collected manner compared to teh of a few years ago is... strange, to say the least.
like i said, i do think the writing is excellent and that’s what makes it even more heartbreaking. because it wasn’t out of nowhere (also definitely not what i’m trying to claim). there was a very steady and realistic, not overly dramatised build-up. but i do think my hyper-fixation on this specific point made that i am still confused. this is just what stuck with me after watching the episode and i can’t stop thinking about it...
