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They kept challenging him 😂

My Golden Blood and how they mucked up the ending…

Yes, I know you loved it. Yes, everyone is soooo hot! NO, I’m not changing the title. They ruined it, and here’s why!

We Deserved a Better Goodbye

You know that one friend that always dates guys that are bad for them? And then when the relationship inevitably falls apart they come crying to you asking where it all went wrong and how they missed the signs? This is what that felt like. It felt like the bad boyfriend. Like that thing you know you shouldn’t want and you say it’s just for a little while and it’s going to get better… then it does for a moment, but then completely misses the mark in the end.

For a show that built its core around sacrifice, destiny, and the impossible costs of love, the ending felt shockingly plain. They built up this whole storyline on how the only way this all was going to come to an end was if Tong died, was if Mark lost his soulmate, and then they played the Uno reverse and we’re all just supposed to go along with this nuttery?

The whole point of Thara’s madness and Natan’s insolence was Tong’s blood. Then Tong dies, his blood in play for a different person and the sacrifice he makes is turned into a party favor instead of a final act. I was mad! I’m still mad! And to realize, only in the end, that Mark was capable of turning people this entire time wasn’t just annoying, it was a slap in the face! What about Tonkla? Why wasn’t this an option for him?

The ending was, quite literally, rainbows, sunshine and a picnic under the stars with no one pushing back, asking questions or fighting off Mark and Tong. We went from Thara putting Tong on a ceremonial alter to Mark and him making out in their new corner office, in their new lab that was going to make copies of golden blood so that every vampire could live a brand new life. I’m bored just recapping this. I cannot believe we lived through that.

We were ready for the heartbreak. We were prepared to cry. But instead of lingering in the emotional consequences of Tong's death or Mark's devastation, we were yanked out and placed into a post-trauma domestic fantasy. A clean lab. A new golden blood child for Tong to oversee. A Paris trip. The final act felt like it was written for a different show altogether. The pacing didn’t allow any time to process the death, let alone earn the resurrection. We deserved to mourn. We deserved to feel it. Instead, the show tossed out our emotions for a 50c “come back to life” gift card.

Tong’s Resurrection: Cheap trick or Emotional Cop-Out?

There is no greater betrayal to an emotionally charged arc than undermining its stakes. Tong's death was brutal. Painful. Necessary. At least, we thought it was. But apparently it was optional all along. Listen, I know a lot of vampire show will use the ‘and then he came back to life’ bit so that the storyline can continue but the story was, quite literally, at the end! Tong gave his life for the greater good. Mark killed the love of his life, possibly the only person he would ever be able to feel that way for, for the greater good. The Flower Shop Lady (FSL) turned on the person she loved for the greater good. Nakan lost his life in the pursuit of the greater good.

Of all those people, why was the only human in play the one that got to come back from the great beyond? FSL had her neck snapped. When has that ever been a death sentence for any other vampire show except for this one? Nakan was accidentally stabbed by the knife intended for Thara because Mark didn’t realize his own strength in the moment but he wasn’t run through the way Thara was so why couldn’t he have been healed? Why was the one whose blood was literally drained from their body, with no pre-existing condition that would help him be reborn in any shape or form, the only one that was salvageable?

If you answered “The Power of Love” you belong in the naughty corner for the rest of the year because NO!

When Tong asked Mark to end it, it was a final act of their star-crossed fate. When Mark did it, it was a moment of unimaginable loss. But then, seconds later, Tong is back? No explanation, no price paid to the piper? It turned what should have been the show's most powerful scene into a “what have I been watching” moment. If Mark could turn him all along, why wait? Why hesitate? Why build an entire plot around grief and choice, only to discard it as unnecessary in the final ten minutes? This was less resurrection and more narrative sabotage.

The Power Vacuum Nobody Cared to Fill

Thara's death should have been the start of a new era. The fall of a regime that terrorized golden bloods and manipulated generations of vampires. But instead of unpacking what this shift in power meant, the show gave us a sterile utopia with no tension and zero resistance. Did the old council vanish into smoke? Did no one question the new leadership? Mark and Tong simply assumed control, unchallenged, as if the vampire world had been waiting patiently for their love to solve centuries worth of chaos.

A power vacuum that vast should not have been filled so quietly. It deserved a little push-back, somebody trying to forcefully take the throne, maybe even a hint of civil unrest. Instead, we got silence. There was tension between Nakan’s followers and Thara’s murder mob. There was unrest between the factions and an understanding that they would probably never get along but now that both Nakan and Thara are 6-feet-under, no one is questioning Mark and Tong’s leadership? No one wants to know how Mark and Tong were able to walk away, unscathed, from the day everything fell apart and we all accept that the two factions are now harmoniously backing Mark and Tong – the end? Madness!

Now, I know that Mark is responsible for taking out a good chunk of both Thara and Nakan’s followers from the last few episodes. But for there to be no one to jump up and say they disagree, that they will not conform, is strange for any society, no matter how imaginary. You know what I like to imagine happened? Mark lost his marbles! Mark lost it from losing everyone he cared about and in his grief, he created this fantasy world where he and Tong lived happily ever after with no fighting, and fun trips around the world and their love story being all that it could have been. That is how the story ended for me, at this point, because what we got was a little insulting.

That Lab, That Child, That Dumb Eiffel Tower Scene

No one was asking for a sequel to "Spy Kids: Vampire Division," and yet, the show ends with Mark and Tong in a pristine lab, developing synthetic golden blood, mentoring a new orphan, and flipping through travel brochures.

That shift was so jarring, it felt like a badly written fanfiction. Why was Tong entrusted with a golden blood child after everything? Why was the lab not swarming with the remnants of Thara’s loyalists? Why did Mark suddenly speak French? And why - dear heavens, WHY - did we need an upside-down Eiffel Tower kiss scene to prove they’re still quirky lovers?

They went right on back to the building that Thara had been basically living in and none of her followers tried to burn the place to the ground? They gave Tong his biggest temptation as a gift, a chance at family, a do-over? What was the purpose of that child being under their care? Why did no one think all that would do was pin a giant target on that baby’s back? I’m also questioning their need to tell people about the golden blood because, as much as I get wanting to let the vamps have a sense of normalcy again, you’ve essentially opened the flood gates for everyone to go hunt down and drain any golden blood they can find. They swabbed a petri dish for Thara’s new replacement and they sat back as though what they had done made sense!

Wouldn’t it have made better sense to destroy the living memory of the golden bloods altogether? Or even frame it as some kind of toxic mutation, something deadly to vampires, or even something akin to a curse? Why was this the only plan they formulated, and why was it entrusted to the very predators who once hunted golden bloods into extinction?

The entire idea of the show centered around golden blood as a double-edged sword. It made people targets. It put them in danger. For most of the series, it was a curse disguised as a medical illness. And then, inexplicably, it wasn’t. Mark and Tong waltz into Thara’s old lab, cook up synthetic golden blood, and act as if they’ve just solved vampirism. No caution. No guardrails. Just open access to the most hunted blood type in history. Instead of treating it like the volatile power it had proven to be, the show softened its edges until it felt like nothing more than a sci-fi serum. It didn’t align with the world they’d built. It didn't add up and, at this point, I'm not sure why I was expecting it to.

Mark Deserved Better Than a Plot Twist Redemption

Mark’s entire storyline hinged on guilt and love, on how far he was willing to go to protect Tong and make amends for his past, though – if we are being completely honest – his mistakes are mostly from things Thara made him do so it is a little hard to fault him here.

He says as much near the end of episode 8 where he and Tong are having a screaming match about safety and he reveals “I am afraid you won’t understand me, afraid you won’t trust me, afraid I won’t get to be with you” or something to that effect. So Mark’s decision to kill Tong was shattering. It solidified the gravity of their reality.

But when that act was reversed almost immediately, Mark’s sacrifice was rendered meaningless. He didn’t get to mourn. He didn’t get to change. He just reset. The opportunity to let him evolve post-loss was right there—he could have become a different kind of leader, one shaped by love and grief. But instead, the show skipped that growth and handed him back everything. Safe. Undamaged. No life lessons learnt other than If I wait long enough, I get a redo!

We were primed for heartbreak. Tong’s death was sacrificial. Final. The kind of tragedy that should echo across every frame that follows. But the show blinked. It couldn’t commit. And in its hesitation, it took the fangs out of its own tragedy.

Sometimes, the most powerful stories are the ones that don’t flinch from the pain. That allow a character’s end to be meaningful not because they’re brought back, but because they’re remembered. Letting Tong die and stay dead would have forced the story to grow up. It would have elevated Mark’s arc, possibly deepened his beliefs, and honored the gravity of what had been lost. But the show chose comfort over consequence. And that was the real tragedy.

What Even Happened to Nakan and the Flower Shop Lady (FSL)

Remember Nakan? The immortal wild card with a heart? Remember the Flower Shop Lady? The unexpected badass with her own quiet losses? But do you remember their funerals? Their eulogies? Their legacy? No? That’s because the show didn’t bother giving them any.

Nakan died, ran through by the hand ending Thara that had no understanding of its new found strength, and no one even mentioned him in the wrap-up. FSL died fighting someone she had devoted her life to serving, someone she trusted. They were more than side characters. They were the backbone of the resistance and the beating heart of the narrative, and their absence left a void. But the story didn’t offer closure, just absence. Their deaths deserved more than a cut-to-black. They deserved to be recognized, memorialized and missed. They deserved to matter. They deserved to be remembered.

So, would the show have been better off with another episode? Maybe space and time to mourn everyone lost and feel the weight of this new world Mark and Tong had created?

Short answer: yes. Long answer: it desperately needed one. The rapid pace of the finale robbed us of consequences, closure, and character development. Just one more episode could have unpacked Tong’s resurrection, everyone’s deaths, Mark’s ascension to leader of the vampires. Could have let Mark grieve properly. Could have shown us the world reacting to a post-Thara era. Could have given us room to remember FSL and Nakan. We needed space to feel.

Instead, we got a montage and the damned Eiffel Tower. The writers tried to land a plane, at full speed, in the desert, with no runway. Maybe another episode could have served as a bridge, a transitional space for the story to take a breath and gather itself. Without it, the ending felt like a rough cut of something greater that never got the chance to exist.

Picture this: Tong stays dead. Mark leads his life rebuilding a functionally broken system, going all the places he knows Tong would have loved and living for the both of them. Maybe it hurts. Maybe it heals. But damn, what an ending that would’ve been.

The Atypical Family

It starts and ends in smoke and flames!

You know, not all fairytales start with love. Some start with burning buildings, a fake relationship and just enough chaos to leave a school burnt to cinder in your wake. Or so I’ve heard.

It’s easy to say what it is that a situation requires or what you could or would have done differently if you were standing on the outskirts, looking in. It’s easier, still, to make a decision when you’ve already seen the future and know what the full picture is. And wouldn’t it be something special if you could alter the past to fix whatever issues cropped up from your full picture view of your future?

Now, imagine if your family had the ability to alter time, space and luck due to having superpowers… what limits would there be to what you could accomplish?

This drama starts off kind of depressy-stressy, okay? From the first episode we are introduced to this family that supposedly had superpowers, and are a part of a lineage of individuals who have had superpowers, but for some reason or other their powers have stopped working.

The one who was able to see the future in her dreams becomes an insomniac. The one who was able to fly becomes too overweight to do so. The one who was able to go back to the happiest moments in his past can no longer time travel due to a bout of depression. The one who nobody knows can read minds is too afraid to look anyone in the eye in order to do exactly that.

Their entire family fortune rests on them being able to manipulate their powers, to use them to bring riches and wealth home but with their powers on the fritz, that’s easier said than done.

‘Lifestyle diseases’ I believe they refer to them as. Their powers being on the fritz, their inability to figure out how to make them work? The family refers to these as lifestyle diseases as a way to wave responsibility away from themselves and rather onto circumstance and fate.

Then, one day, the time traveler finds himself able to travel back in time when he meets a woman who confounds him. I mean, he has no intention of coming out of his hovel to play dress up with this woman because he is grieving the loss of his wife, but he’s also unsure of why she keeps saying she’s met him and why she insists that he was so much nicer to her then.

Obviously he dismisses her ludicrous claims because the only way he could have already ‘met’ her was if he’d either left the house or time traveled. The former wasn’t something he was all that eager to do and the latter made absolutely no sense because she also insists that he helped her up off the floor which would be unimaginable because the limitation to his powers is that he cannot, and has not ever been able to, make physical contact with the past. He can’t touch anything and nothing can touch him. So, for this random woman to be saying what she’s saying is not just insane - it’s impossible.

That, however, is not the most insane part in all this. No. That would be the part where he decides to just flat out tell this stranger of a woman that he and his family have superpowers.

I don’t know if you could hear my palm hit my forehead from where you’re at because it was loud enough.

The reason I’m completely at a loss for why he would do this is because it turns out that her family are a bunch of con artists! He just let a house full of con artists know that he and his family are essentially golden geese – which is what mommy con artists refers to them as – in a bid to drive this one person away only to find that this revelation would make her cling to him even more. Not that she wants to though. Her family is looking for a score, something that will set their books in the black, and they think this family is ripe for the picking. The end goal? Their 50-million-won complex that is currently the family’s only stream of income.

Before we move on, I need you to keep in mind that the genetic material in this family is so otherworldly, they might as well be aliens. And they keep popping out babies with superpowers, too. So, everyone’s powers, up to now, have limitations – as previously discussed. Their last and most recent child is able to retrieve things from the past and bring them to his immediate future… so what is his limitation? Because, this baby could singlehandedly unravel space and time! If he picks the right person up at the wrong moment, he could make it so that he wasn’t even born, for example. I NEED ANSWERS! Keep this little tidbit of information in mind for later, though.

Now, you would think that being aware that you are being used would make it so that you wouldn’t fall head over heels for the person using you, but apparently Bok Gwiju – our male lead – wasn’t informed of this because he doesn’t just fall head over heels, he falls time over burning building!

The story of these two love birds seems to be a tangled mess between the future and the past with the Do Dahae – the female lead – telling Gwiju that she was saved from a burning building when she was a high school senior. He comes to realize that that was the same fire that took the life of one of his best friends while also falling on the day that his daughter was born.

On that day Gwiju had the day off to go and see the birth of his daughter and found out there was a fire at a nearby high school, but was too late getting there and one of his closest friends had gotten pinned under falling debris and perished.

This was, in no way, his fault by any stretch of the imagination but Gwiju found a way to blame himself. Maybe if he had gotten there sooner, maybe if he’d left the hospital a minute earlier… maybe, maybe, maybe! And what was once a very happy memory – him holding his daughter for the first time, the smile on his wife’s face – became a challenge of space and time. A challenge to himself to see if he could have gotten there any other way.

The only problem with this challenge was that his powers became unstable. Any time he so much as thought of his daughter’s birth he would get sucked back to that moment and, being who he is, Gwiju wouldn’t be able to enjoy just being there with his daughter, watching his family grow. Instead he would be filled with this inexplicable need to figure out if he could undo that day, if he could finally change his limitation, if he could finally circumvent fate.

It didn’t work…

What it did do was drive his wife to the brink of madness. She was fully aware of the family secret and that was the only reason she stayed as long as she had, but she couldn’t do it anymore. One day, driving though a busy tunnel, the wife tried to appeal to Gwiju, tried to make him see reason. Tried and tried and failed at every turn until she had to lay down an ultimatum. Either he stops travelling back to that moment and actually live in the present with her and their daughter or the next time he vanished, they wouldn’t be there when he got back.

I do not, however, think that either of them expected that threat to come to fruition as soon as it did or in the manner that it did.

Another one of Gwiju’s limitation, though this seems obvious enough all its own, is that whenever and wherever he time travelled from is where he would return to.

So if, for example, he’d gotten into an argument with his wife while they were driving down a busy road, blipped into the past and while he was gone the car got into a wreck, when he returned he would find himself – uninjured – in his seat, in the wreck.

And that is exactly what ends up happening. He finds himself sitting in a car with the windshield, windows, doors, everything destroyed, his wife missing from the driver’s seat, his daughter wailing in the back of the car that is now hanging precariously over the edge of … something!

That day was the day the depression set it.

That was the day he would lose his ability to go anywhere in time as the one thing that had been tethering him was now gone from his life.

Gwiju sunk so deep into his depression, he couldn’t even look his daughter in the eye. In all fairness, Bok Ina wasn’t exactly looking to be affectionate with her dad either. You see, they both blamed themselves for the events of that day.

Ina blamed herself because she thought her question – the one she had asked her mother in the car after accidentally using her powers to read her mom’s mind – was the reason her mom got so distracted that she wasn’t paying attention to the road and they ended up in the wreck.

Gwiju blames himself because he thinks if he hadn’t gone to the past in that moment, if he had stayed put, if they weren’t arguing, if he was able to engage more with the present instead of the past then none of this would have happened to begin with. They might not have even been on that road at all.

None of that change the events of that day though, but Gwiju and Ina turned into two ships passing on open waters.

Luckily, they lived with Gwiju’s family – his mother, father and older sister – so Ina had some measure of support but she grew up too fast, tried her hardest to shrink so she would occupy the least amount of space in her family and just tried to make it one day at a time.

Her father, however, turned to drinking. I suppose he felt he might find his powers, or answers, or his wife, or her memory at the bottom of a bottle but he was usually ten bottles deep by the end of a day and no powers to speak of.

This is how Dahae finds the family. She is introduced to them through working in a massage parlor when the granmama comes in looking to ‘relax’. No one wants to touch her because she becomes irate almost immediately during sessions but Dahae had a plan to get started on, so she slipped a sleeping pill into granny’s tea before starting her massage.

Granny konked out during her massage and thought Dahae was the second coming of Christ when she woke up because finally FINALLY! she’d had a dream… and in that dream, Dahae was getting awfully cozy with her son. And far be it from granny to stand in the way of fate.

Granny gets it in her head that her son and her masseuse need to have a meet-cute so she invites Dahae to her house for her next massage. The house she shares with her recluse son who almost never leaves his room except to get more alcohol. The house where the remainder of their family fortune is stored… and so the mind games begin.

Every time Dahae knocks granny out with her ‘special’ tea, she goes snooping through the house.

She gets sussed out by Gwiju's older sister almost immediately but Gwiju tries to ignore it because this isn’t his problem and he doesn’t really want to be involved. One day, however, she says something about seeing him in a department store, how he had held her hand and helped her up off the floor but then vanished before she could thank him.

That catches his attention. He almost never leaves the house, so why would he have been in a department store? He doesn’t like physical contact since the loss of his wife, so why would he be touching her? If he had gone with her to the store, why would he have left her there? And, more importantly, where would he have vanished to?

That last question is what holds his attention the longest because it is improbable, impossible even, but also sowing a seed of hope in him he didn’t know would flourish as quickly as it does. Because, does this mean he’s getting his powers back?

He does, inevitably, get his powers back after we’ve been through about a dozen different tropes. And he certainly finds himself in love with Dahae, but with that revelation comes a whole bag of other complications.

Gwiju’s powers return and they are different from before. Some of his limitations fall away.

He is now able to interact with the past, perhaps even change things. However, he can only go back to the moments where he was happy with Dahae. She is, seemingly, his missing puzzle piece and he finds himself able to do things in her past – in his ‘future’ – that he had never been able to before.

Together, they come to realize a very important fact about the fire at the school. The fire that took Gwiju’s friend. The fire that Dahae was trapped in.

But, in discovering this, there also comes the realization that one, if not both of them, may not make it past the night Gwiju is able to travel back to that fateful day. Because, as with all things, nothing is without a price.

Well, one of them truly doesn’t make it back but they get retrieved from the past by a time travelling baby five years later and I’m yet to get answers on what limitations he has because he has to be the most dangerous member of his entire bloodline…

So, my question stands. If your family had the ability to manipulate space, time and luck… what limit’s would there be to what you could accomplish?

respectthepetty

12 Anticipated Thai BLs for 2025

As usual, I'm excited for ALL the GLs (Cranium, Only You, 3 Minutes 2 Love, Reverse with You, Buy My Boss, Let's Kick this Love, No Romeo, and so many more!), but I'm making my annual list of the BLs I'm excited for this year with brief reasons why I'm looking forward to them, and it includes some I've previously mentioned in my GMMTV 2025 Hot Tops. However, I must first look back at my 2024 list and see if those BLs were worth my anticipation:

The Next Prince - I still haven't gotten it, so 2025 better be the year!

Jack & Joker: U Steal My Heart - Great! Amazing! Loved it!

Spare Me Your Mercy - We don't talk about her.

Wandee Goodday - I have my issues, but it was a fun ride. *wink*

Choco Milk Shake 2 - The production team said it was never planned, you know, like a liar.

Time of Fever - Beautiful! Astounding! I NEED MORE!

My Doctor/Mr. Doctor - I'm probably never getting it. I need a moment to collect myself.

Live in Love - I was only showing up for the colors, and it delivered them plus a lot more crazy nonsense.

Red Peafowl - It was all a lie, and apparently we are never getting it.

Love Upon a Time - I don't want to talk about what happened, but I better get it this year!

Love Puzzle - Probably not getting it, and I'm not okay about it.

Peaceful Property - Fantastic! Divine! Best thing I watched this year!

Sunset x Vibes - I showed up for MosBank, and I got MosBank, so I was thrilled!

The Heart Killers - I'm having the time of my life!

Bonus: Your Dear Daddy - WHERE IS MY MAN FLUKE?! GIVE HIM TO ME RIGHT NOW!

Now time for this year's list!

Honorable Mention: MosBank & JoongDunk

I will show up every year excited about the same thing — my ships! I'm getting Joong and Dunk in Dare You to Death if they don't get divorced before then, and I'm getting Mos and Bank in Be My (Soul)Mate if they aren't busy planning a wedding by then. I know JoongDunk's piece is about murders and making out which are two of my favorite things, but I don't even know what the plot is for MosBank's series because all I know is it isn't Big Dragon 2, but it doesn't matter anyway since I'm always happy to see my favorites!

A Dog and a Plane

2024 came for my throat and my heart with some really heavy shows, and in comparison to the rest of this list, I'm banking on this show to be my one bright spot in 2025. I need at least one show to make me laugh while it's ripping out my heart, and I think this is the show for the job.

Goddess Bless You From Death

This show scares me, and it might give me nightmares, but it involves murders and making out, so I'm effing with los espookys for this one. Y'all can have Khemjira though. I ain't that brave.

My Sweetheart Jom

Saint, in a BL again. That's it. That's the reason.

Memoir of Rati

I expect only happy endings from GMMTV, but I'm worried about this one's ending, yet I must see what happens. It has history, politics, and class dynamics, so as much as I'm happy to see Great, Inn, Aou, and Boom in this, I'm also very nervous.

Love Carved in the Moonlight

It seemed like poly was a possibility, which I know is a lie, but also, this looked beautiful, and I'm not just referring to the men. It's another period piece, so I might just be in for a Thai history lesson in 2025.

I'm the Most Beautiful Count

People are upset that the pilot trailer seemed to make light of the source material, but I have faith this adaptation will do justice to the webtoon and give us a leading man worth fighting for.

Interminable

I sense a lengthy series brewing from Idol Factory for this one, so I think we might not see it until later this year or 2026, but I also think it will be worth the wait since there's no way Billy and Babe won't make me teary-eyed with a plot like this.

Ticket to Heaven

It involves Catholicism; therefore, it will hurt me. However, as a Catholic, the Church has instilled in me that if it isn't painful, then it isn't good for me, so if the show makes me cry every episode, I think the Church would approve.

Knock Out

It's Gym Bros BL adjacent meaning men will be in a gym, half-naked, and working out, which is good enough for me! Also, they're color coded, so who am I to deny small blessings?

The Wicked Game

We are getting two GLs and a BL about bodyguards falling in love with their clients, but just like all the vampire series we were supposed to get in 2024 yet only got two, I'm wondering who will be first and how they will turn out. I think all of them will be great, but I am especially looking forward to Daou getting bruised up for love.

Love of Silom

Up and Poom were a surprise for me in 2024 with My Stand-In, so from what I know about the plot dealing with a cop and a single dad, I think they will do just as great with their second series as they did with the first. I am patently waiting to be in my feels again because of them.

Me & Who

I need to watch Big kiss men like I need air. I need to watch Big gently place his hand on another man's neck like I need water. I need this show. Now.

Bonus: Mandate

Did anyone watch 2012's Political Animals with Sebastain Stan who played TJ Hammond, the bisexual son of the former President of the United States and the current Secretary of State, who had a secret affair with an older married and closeted US Senator?

Anyone? No?

Well, can I get something similar, Thailand? Is that too much to ask? I don't know, but I'm going to ask for it anyway! Let me have it! Give me what I deserve.

le-trash-prince

Update on Change2561’s Original Schedule: Pit Babe 2 coming in April

Sailub: Boy's Journey Outing will air its first episode on Friday, January 31, at 10:45 PM on ONE31.

Pooh: Following that is what everyone's been waiting for-Pit Babe 2! We'll get to see it this April.

Nut: After that, meet Nut, Ping, Pop, and Lee in I Am the Most Beautiful Count.

Pavel: Wrapping up the year with Goddess Bless You From Death, featuring Pavel, Pooh, Michael, TopTen, and P'Sing, ready to shoot their arrows straight into your heart!

(trans source)

onlyrainbowshipstbh

Namtan via her Insta!

lal-wine

Namtan talking about her identity as a queer person and what it means to her that more GL series are coming out.

มิติที่หลากหลายของน้ำตาล-ทิพนารี นักแสดงสาวยุคใหม่ผู้เปี่ยมด้วยเสน่ห์และความเป็นตัวของตัวเอง กับแฟชั่นเซ็ต Bvlgari Serpeni Viper

I Stand, You Stand, We All Stand for My Stand In

Second chances are what you make of them. And sometimes what you make of them is the exact same mistake that caused you to need a second chance in the first place. We are, all of us, blessed with a certain amount of self-preservation, usually enough to ensure we don’t accidentally walk head long into a wall, but some people are not quite as blessed as the rest of us and so they do things that would make you question rationality because, you see, common sense isn’t all that common.

Being in love is usually deemed a cornerstone moment in life. A moment where the stars align, and the universe suddenly makes some semblance of sense. But what would happen if you were to fall in love with a part of someone, a feature, and then later realized that the feature you fell for does not belong to the person you thought it did? Well, I’d like to believe that you would be greatly disappointed by that knowledge and the resounding heartache from that revelation, but I don’t think you’d be outright crazed… would you?

Well, that isn’t what Ming thought was prudent. Upon finding out that the back he’d been drooling over for years actually belonged to a man who no longer wanted anything to do with him, he lost his right mind… but I’m getting ahead of myself. This story isn’t entirely about Ming, it’s mostly about Joe.

Joe has the worst case of bad luck this side of Pluto and it seems he’s okay with letting patterns repeat themselves.

Joe is a ray of sunshine. He is the brightest, sunniest, cutsie-est person in the known universe and he’s got the brains of a golden retriever seeing a new tennis ball. Joe is an orphan. Joe is also a stunt double for a well-known celebrity. The celebrity is a little douche canoe, but I’ll get into that a little later. The celebrity has a soon-to-be brother-in-law named Ming. Ming is secretly in love with said celebrity. The celebrity is pretending not to know about this little crush and starts dating Ming’s sister… DRAAAMAAA!

Ming finds out that Joe is the celebrity’s stunt double after accidentally hugging this man in a dressing room because he confused him with his crush. Joe has a raging crush on Ming and is not afraid to show it. Ming and Joe start hanging out, Joe sneezes a lot when they hang out (hahaha, iykyk), and – as expected – Joe develops feelings for Ming and, though Ming feels the same, he refuses to admit it and instead decides it would make more sense to push Joe away.

While all of this is happening, Mr. Celebrity is feeling high and mighty now that he is about to marry into a stupid rich family and decides to start treating the director of the new movie he’s supposed to be in like garbage. So, the director, having had it with that idiot, decides to promote Joe to the lead of the movie and toss the celebrity to the side.

Tong, the celebrity, is not pleased with this development and decides to sabotage Joe via Ming. See, by the time this all goes down Joe has established that Ming is using him as a replacement, a place holder, for his true love – or who he thinks he’s in love with – Tong. Joe makes it clear he wants no part in being Tong’s ‘stand in’ both on and off the big screen. Ming, who clearly has never been taught boundaries in life, does not do well with being rejected and decides it would be best if Joe never debuts on the big screen and, in doing so, helps Tong secure his position in the movie he’d been flip-flopping all over not three minutes earlier.

How does Ming accomplish this? Well, by kidnapping Joe, of course. He keeps Joe locked up during the most important moment of his career and because of this Joe loses his position in the movie, as well as the trust of the industry. He’s blackballed by the time he can even get word out that he’s still alive because everyone thinks he just bailed. Once it is made clear that Joe no longer has a place in the industry in above board roles, he finds a job in a not so legal production where he ends up flying over the edge of a cliff and meeting a swift end…

Except that’s not the end! Joe wakes up a couple of years later in the body of another person named Joe – what are the odds? – and this guy is also in the entertainment industry though in much smaller productions. No, seriously, what are the actual odds!?

Joe 1 now has to navigate the life of Joe 2 with the memories and emotions of his old body but the face and family of this new body. You’d think with this second chance Joe would find himself a nice, quiet office job, get working and keep his head down but instead – right there in the hospital – Joe reconnects with someone from his first life who draws him back into the industry.

Now, because Joe was in a coma for as long as he was, his new/old mom racked up debt and, in order to keep her safe and make the debt go away, he starts agreeing to do things that put him squarely back where he was to begin with… in the celebrity’s shadow and in Ming’s crosshairs. This time around, however, he has the foresight to not let himself fall head-over-heels for someone who he believes is clearly not in love with him and so he is cold and distant, even as he begins playing the role of Ming’s mistress. Ming, on the other hand, fully believes new Joe is old Joe with a new face, and even though that’s true, how could anyone admit to that? How would you even go about explaining that in a rational, believable way?

Now, even though Ming fully believed that the new guy was his old love, he couldn’t prove it, and he also didn’t really want to believe it because that would mean admitting that Joe died, in large part, due to what he and Tong did to his career. Ming wanted to be able to look Joe in the face, his old face – that is, and tell him how sorry he was that he did that to him. He wanted Joe to see the torment that he’d been going through and in that vein, Ming did something he swore up and down that he would never even consider doing. He jumped into the entertainment industry with the hopes that Joe would see his face on the big screen, or the dozen and one billboards he was on and think “Now might be a great time to reconnect with that guy who used and abused me again, just to see if we can start something new from the ashes of my destroyed life,” I suppose. But fate dealt the both of them a different hand and with that came a new set of rules to this game called life.

There was only one person who knew for certain, from jump, that Joe was Joe and that person technically had nothing to do with Joe. I’m going to refer to him as the Mountain Spirit Man because there is truly no other reasonable way to describe this person. He is a shaman, who lives out in the woods or up a mountain, or something.

Either way, he has a foot in both in the world of the living and the world of the dead, so he likely knew about this wandering spirit but I doubt it would have raised any flags for him if Ming had not – "coincidentally" – found him and started hounding him about Joe’s whereabouts because his body had still not been found after he went flying over a ledge from a motorbike stunt he’d been attempting for that shady-as-all-hell company.

Anyway, the Mountain Spirit Man is the one that tells Ming that Joe is here but also not here, which is why Ming started suspecting new Joe of being old Joe, and I can't imagine the name helped either.

Joe, actively, tries to convince everyone in his life that he’s a hapless little stand-in but soon the cracks start forming and his former self starts shining through.

First, with his stunt work, then with this association to Ming – because that was always going to cause a stir – and finally with him visiting the graves of his former parents. That last one is when he gets caught by his friends and has to explain, in full, how in the hell all this happened… like he would even have a clue how to explain his soul jumping into the body of a dude who unalived himself and left his body up for grabs.

At this point, everyone and their mothers – everyone who is important anyway – know that Joe is Joe and are acting accordingly. And by accordingly, I mean Ming is his love-bombing, sugar coating self, Joe’s one friend is still pining after him and the other friend is warning him away from Ming’s family for fear that what happened before would happen again and Tong is spitting with rage at the fact that Ming is no longer worshipping at his alter.

The 'holier than thou' prick that he is, Tong decides to take it out on Joe… for no freaking reason other than that he is the closest person to Ming at the moment.

So, now we’ve circled around to Tong. Tong has always been aware of his effect on Ming but he liked that he could string him along more than anything else. Everything that he said had been met with an enthusiastic “Yes, P’Tong!” from his dutiful fan.

From requests for money to asking Ming to kidnap a stunt double so his career would be preserved, but nothing was lower than when Tong tried to use his unborn child as a bargaining chip with his in-laws after he royally screwed up and had some very bad people coming for his head.

Tong had been making bad deals, with money he didn’t have, for projects that never quite materialized. Because of this, he was in constant need of large amounts of cash. Now that Ming was no longer chasing after him, and his now wife wasn’t given free reign of the greater family finances, he went the loan shark route to getting his borrowed riches and used his career as leverage.

When even that wasn’t panning out the way it should have been, the loan sharks got fed up with playing nice and they told Tong they wanted their money – with interest – or his head on a pike. Tong tried getting Ming on his side, Ming said: “I warned you, you’re on your own!” So, Tong goes to Joe, hoping he can convince Ming to ‘see reason’ and they end up being ambushed by the loan shark’s lackies who end up taking Joe in place of Tong because they just look so damned similar from the back.

Anyway, they go into hostage negotiations and things do not turn out the way they were supposed to and then Joe ends up being shot which lands him back in the ‘in between’. The places between life and death. Here, he is given the option to pass on, to go into the light and hopefully be reborn far, FAR away from all these people and the dangers they represent but Joe hears Ming pleading with him and regardless of anything else going on in life – or death, apparently – Joe would do just about anything to be with Ming. So, he jumps back into his body, and they live happily ever after…

I hated it! I hated this ending!

There are almost no consequences other than the loan sharks being taken to jail.

Tong’s money problems are solved by Ming’s dad – who turned out to only really hate Ming and Joe’s relationship because of how broken Ming was the first time Joe disappeared. Ming’s sister forgives Tong even after that man threw divorce in her face and then used their unborn child as a bargaining chip to try and extort money out of Ming. Joe forgives Tong for constantly treating him like trash and then putting his life in danger AGAIN. Joe had already forgiven Ming by the time he gets kidnapped, so there’s also that. The only thing missing here was glitter and a bright pink bow! How was everything just so perfectly tied off?

Anyway, I suppose that’s what second chances signify, right? The opportunity to be forgiven with the understanding that things will change for the better. And hopefully, they'll stay that way.

A Shop For Killers

There is an age old question that lingers amongst most of us every waking moment of our lives. Well, two questions really. What would you be willing to do for the people you love and what would you be willing to do for some money? These questions define a great deal of how we conduct ourselves, how we interact with the world around us, and how far we are willing to push ourselves to get things done. But, let’s say the circumstances change and you find out that the person responsible for killing your family has just killed the only other person you had left and they are now after you. You don’t know who they are, why they are after you, how they even know about you and who the actual hell the person you’ve been living with for most of your life really is. Now, how far are you willing to go to get answers to those questions?

The series opens on what looks like a sleepy, mountain side village. A warning is blaring over a loud speaker informing residents that live munitions military training will be conducted until evening and not to try and approach the area where the training is taking place to avoid being caught in cross fire. There are men leisurely walking in tall, thick brush – heavy artillery in hand, not to mention a sniper located a few miles away, ready and waiting. Cut to a house that has had its exterior walls blown damn near clean off, windows shattered – general disarray. But this make no sense. Why would some random house, that does not look like it is on a military base, have been caught in the cross fire of a military drill? Is that what’s really what’s going on? No! The answer is no. There is no drill. There are no military officers. None of that. So why then is the house in shambles? Who are the men approaching said house and why are they armed to the teeth? Why is there a sniper rifle pointed directly into the house’s living area? Are they hunting for someone, perhaps? A convict? A seasoned criminal with the extensive knowledge to protect and defend themselves against this many assailants? Someone with a background so gruesome that there needs to be more than 7 people at any given time coming after them? Nope! They are currently after a young woman who very recently lost her last remaining family member. Someone who has no history of being needlessly violent and she is definitely not a threat enough to require and small militia coming after her but here we are, I guess. A young woman who is currently holed up in the house they’ve shot up. A young woman whose uncle is a former member of said militia and let’s just say the militia wasn’t all that happy about letting him walk.

But he’s dead now so why attack? They were after him and he is now gone, the niece can’t possibly be a threat because she didn’t really even know her uncle, apparently, and she hadn’t even been living with him the past few years. So if the assumption is that she is a threat because he was a threat, why the theatrics? Why not just gas the house or wait for her out in public? Why not send someone in to deliver something to her ‘from her uncle’? Why the gun show? Because her uncle had been training her, her whole life. To her, it may have seemed like bonding between uncle and niece, but he had been preparing her for this moment her entire life, it seems. He taught her how to use blind spots to her advantage, how to read the angle of an incoming bullet and when she wanted to move out he made her a deal “if you can land a hit on me, you can move out’. She never really stood a chance but one of her uncle’s friends started training her and she was then skilled in hand to hand combat. She’d been training her whole life but I highly doubt she’d thought this would be the reason her uncle had been preparing her all along. That is secondary to the problem at hand though. There is still a sniper shooting at her and she is cornered. She needs to get out of her corner and either find a way to defend herself, that one dude in the other corner and the lady with the bullet hole in her arm in the other other corner, or find cover for all three of them. So it’s a godsend when she finds a sniper rifle of her very own tucked into the bottom of the living room couch. Now the playing field is fair, no?

Military training for some means the opportunity to serve their country followed by a quick return to civilian life. But for others it’s a gateway, a tunnel into the darkest parts of humanity. Some find redemption in these parts, a purpose, while others find excitement and entertainment. Guns, explosions, blood, the cries and screams of those upon whom you’ve inflicted pain. Some see this thinly veiled hell as their home, as their comfort, while others are there to get a job done and go back to pretending they aren’t the thing that go bump in the night for everybody else. Until, one day, the hunter becomes the hunted.

The discovery of Murthehelp brings in a whole new layer of problems for Jeong Ji An, our main character. The manner in which it was discovered is sketch as all get out for a world of its own reasons but that does not detract from the fact that it exists and is more than likely the reason Ji An is being hunted and Jeong Jin Man, her uncle, was killed. You may be thinking something along the lines of “well I thought he died because of his association with the militia” and although that is true, it is not the entire reason. See, Jin Man had crafted something of an empire for himself. He would sell military grand arsenal to anyone with the right credentials and bank balance. He even had a system for the types of buyers he had and the kinds of materials and services they regularly needed. Some just needed guns, some needed spyware, some needed only clean-up, some needed the full package and each of his buyers fell into one of three categories with the following codes: red (killers), purple (spies), yellow (clean-up) and there was an additional code that was reserved though it didn’t seem to be for buyers. Code green which consisted of only two people – Jin Man and Ji An.

Jin Man had created Murthehelp after having left the militia as a way to make a profit from his skills while also not really having to leave home. But that begs the question, ‘if there’s an essentials store for killers owned by this man living in the middle of just about nowhere, where the actual hell is the physical store front?’ And that was probably what the shooters coming after Ji An wanted to know as well. Maybe they wanted to destroy the market place? Maybe they wanted keys to the kingdom? Or maybe they just wanted revenge for Jin Man turning his back on them. Either way, this store front was now the centre of the proverbial universe and Ji An didn’t even know where it actually was. Yet another thing she’d been kept in the dark about.

The rules for having access to Murthehelp were simple. “Those who have received codes from Murthehelp may never attack code green. If someone disobeys this and attacks code green, everyone with a code must risk their lives to protect code green.” And turns out code green are essentially the operators of Murthehelp, and now that the uncle is no longer with us this makes Ji An the operator and owner of an illegal store front for the world’s most dangerous predators and it seems some of them have thrown the rule book out the window. So now the games begin?

In this day and age, there are a dozen and one ways to upend someone’s life. Figure out their daily routine, mess with the small things until they feel like they are losing their minds or, quite simply, blow a hole into their living room while trying to snipe them from a distance. You know, basic things. If you were on the receiving end of this treatment, you’d probably be asking yourself “why?” Why am I being shot at? Why is there a weird lady who says she knows my uncle, bleeding all over my house, telling me he helped her with things I know he’d never be caught dead doing? Why is there a sniper rifle under the couch? And, most importantly, why is there a website on my uncle’s computer that says he was selling illegal materials to dangerous people on the internet and what all does that have to do with his death? Could we then argue that we never actually knew anything about anyone we thought we did and to assume that everything is and has been a lie in such an instance?

Jin Man made only one fundamental error in the ten years since he left the militia and started his life anew. He trusted someone outside of his circle without vetting them first. A young man from the village approaches Jin Man one day and asks for a job. Any odd job would do; he just needs something to keep his hands busy while he prepares to go back to college. Bae Jeong Min was a former classmate of Ji An’s so, I suppose, Jin Man felt it was okay to let him in a touch. Then Jeong Min told Jin Man that he could help streamline his operations by opening up a website for him to display his merchandise – he was selling farming tools, as far as anyone who wasn’t in the know was supposed to know. Then one day, out of the blue, Jeong Min threatens Jin Man and makes him kill himself in a manner that would make it look like he committed suicide. Well, that escalated quickly but there is a backstory there. Come to find out that Jeong Min had been tasked, or threatened, to infiltrate Jin Man’s operation and get the entry codes and location of Murthehelp. Jeong Min is the reason that Ji An’s uncle is dead but he is currently playing the dotting friend trying to keep her from falling apart while she peels back the layers of who her uncle actually was – all information he was already privy to.

And just to add insult to injury, Jeong Min was one of Ji An’s bullies while they were in school and Ji An was still mute from the trauma she’d gone through. Jeong Min had tasked his friends with locking Ji An in a storage shed and leaving her in there for hours before calling her uncle to report the ‘bullies’ for their awful behavior and essentially cementing his position in Jin Man and Ji An’s eyes as a savior. So when they finally find the shop, get inside and find some weirdo sitting in the dark looking over cameras of the inside of the house, the inside of Ji An’s bedroom, Jeong Min is incensed for his ‘friend’ and goes to bat for her. Once they have incapacitated ‘Brother’ – the dude watching everyone on live feed, Jeong Min lets his mask drop as he now has exactly what he needs and he no longer needs to play nice. This part really ticked me off because it seems that Ji An’s executive functions have abandoned her. She isn’t, for a second, wondering why her uncle would let a weirdo living under their house and watching them through spy cams STAY on the damned property? She instead trusts some dude she hasn’t even smelt in well over 10 years!? SAY LIE!

There is one other fundamental rule for Murthehelp. One rule that cannot be ignored and one that is almost immediately dismissed – someone, either the operator or the ‘shop keep’ (Brother, also to be referred to as the mole man – due to his aversion to the sun and him living underground for the past decade), has to physically be inside the shop AT ALL TIMES. This is non-negotiable. If someone, who is authorized, is not inside the store it goes into lockdown and begins the process of shutting down and self-destructing. Safety precautions and all that. So when the mole man leaves to go and defend the house from the oncoming killers and then Ji An, after laying a beating on Jeong Min for essentially killing her uncle then stringing her along, LEAVES THE SHOP to also try and help with the onslaught in the house, the mole man is not pleased with this new development but they need to fight off tankers, the Temu version of a Korean Navy Seal team and robo-dogs now so there really isn’t any time to be going over why leaving the shop, located in a bunker below the shed behind the main house, was the worst idea possible. Also, Ji An is skilled enough at defending herself – under regular circumstances – but what exactly was she thinking she was going to be able to do going back into the house without back up or additional ammo or really anything useful? They are going up against armed mercenaries and she’s going in there with wit and determination?

The human psyche is a very strange thing. It can help you block out the worst things that have ever happened to you or it can hyper-focus on them to the point where those things become your reality. This show gave us two perspectives on this phenomenon.

The first being our main character. Someone who lost her family, watched her protector get killed in her family home, climbed out a second storey window, got hit by a van, was hunted in a hospital, hid in a mortuary freezer where her mother’s body was being kept, went mute from the trauma of it all, moved away from the home and neighborhood she knew and loved and was bullied by her new classmates due to her muteness. She grew into a strong individual who fought daily with her trauma and won. She came out the other end of her battle with anxiety and loss, not to mention the lies spun around that loss, but she seemingly blocked a lot of it out in order to survive. Her uncle, in an attempt to help he cope with her lose and trauma, equated her with a lion on the brink of death being hunted by a pack of hyenas smelling a free meal. “Only the weak bark, the strong don’t” he says, long before he became aware that Ji An’s parents had been executed at his mother’s memorial service, now forcing both he and Ji An to have to be strong. “Whatever makes you scared, keep your eyes open and face it,” He says this right before all of her worst nightmares manifest themselves. In a moment, she would lose her entire childhood, her sense of security and any hope of a normal future experience, but they didn’t know that yet. Not until that fateful phone call.

The second being our main bad guy who seems to have cloaked himself in madness and the blood of his victims. This person revels in the pain and destruction he causes. He lives for the fear and the torment but also for the anger he causes those around him who expect better of him – which is poorly thought out on their part, but that’s neither here nor there. Bale, the reason behind Ji An being hunted, the reason behind her uncle’s death, the reason behind her parents and grand mother’s death. Bale, the man who walked into a house full of civilians, while on mission to retrieve one individual, and decided that everyone else was free target practice. Bale was what you would expect darkness to look like. He embodied concealed chaos and he hid it well, until he felt like he didn’t have to anymore because no one would try and stop him anyway. Bale may have had horrible things happen to him in the past, which caused him to act out in this manner, or he may very well have been the bad thing that happened as he was just born this way. We will never truly know what his story was… So then, what would you be willing to do for the truth?

Thank you to everyone who got me to 50 likes!

#50 likes #tumblr milestone #thank you

Blank 'We Can Never Have Peace' The Series (Season 2)

Fair warning, there are SPOILERS littered throughout. Hell, this entire post is basically telling you what all went on so if that is not what you are looking for please run now and save yourself from my scathing report – hehe.

For clarity I will be referring to the characters as follows:

Aneung – Neung/Aneung

Khun Neung – Khun/ Khun Neung

Piengfah – Fah/ Peingfah

Aneung’s Grandmother – Granny

Khun Neung’s Grandmother - Granmama

Chet – demon/idiot/warden/Chet... (I'm sure I missed a few but, oh well)

It is now the end of an era… that’s a little dramatic to say but if you’ve lived through Blank, alongside the rest of us, then you may understand where I’m coming from with this. This show put us through the ringer and I can’t even complain about it. But there are points of concern, things I can absolutely say I took issue with and one of my main problems throughout this show was an idiot named CHET.

There are few things in the world that have the ability to incite fury within me and the mere mention of that man’s name can set me off like a baking soda volcano with a shook up cola bottle. I have a hatred so deep for that man that I would set my soul on fire if I were told that I would be born into his bloodline… I hate that man so much that I almost broke my computer screen trying to deal with his sheer AUDACITY!

And, look, I get it. Okay? I understand. He isn’t real… but the fact of the matter is there is a Chet in every one of our families. He may not be the dad or the uncle or the brother, hell, he may not even be a he but there is a CHET in all our families and the irritation I feel when I think about that fact makes my skin itch like I just got a vacation sun burn (iykyk).

Alright, now that we’ve gotten the formalities out of the way, let’s get down to business. This second season, blessed as it was, was WAY. TOO. SHORT! Everything felt like we were moving at light speed just to get to the end and the end was… something. And, no, I’m not referring to the beach scene after the hospital. I’m referring to the beach scene AFTER THAT. You know, the one where Anueng and Khun were completely different people. I understood wanting to “age” the characters, to show progression and to give a timeline to their love story. I got all that. But the characters they choose threw me off a little. I accidentally jumped to the end – ‘accidentally’ – and I was worried they’d introduced a new couple without any of us knowing it. I went back through the first part of the episode trying to find them only to figure out that it was the older versions of Aneung and Khun Neung.

It was jarring, to say the least. I feel as though they could have gone about making us aware that time had passed with those two in a different way. Because, and I’m being critical here, they made Aneung’s actor three – if not more – inches taller than she was when we left off and we, the audience, were expected to just accept that that made sense? Where? How? I’m trying to be imaginative here, but how did any of this hit the storyboards, in a room full of people, and everyone went “Oh, it’s been a few years and a 22-year-old woman grew another three inches? Yeah, that tracks…” Excuse the ever loving heck out of me, but WHAT!? I feel as though they could have done some cosmetic changes, put them in different environments, hell, just put “A FEW YEARS LATER” on the screen and carried on with Faye and Yoko to wrap up the story. Instead, I’m sat here wondering if the production company was chemistry testing those two ladies at the end for some other show they plan to produce. What was the purpose of changing the actors? And yes, I’m complaining a lot right now, but that is only because I had really high hopes for this show.

Anyway, let’s dive into the storyline.

So, the story picks up the day after Khun tells Neung to leave in an effort to ‘protect’ her. Life is still hitting her hard and she is now moved back into her family’s palace, sans Sam, sans Granmama, sans Song. She’s in this big estate filled with the memories of all she’s lost all on her own and her heart aches for what could have been. And then she gets a phone call, in the middle of the night, informing her that Neung is out on the town, getting trashed and raising hell. Now, because all of Neung’s family have entrusted her with Neung’s care, Khun cannot just say that they are now in a weird, emotionally charged predicament – of her own making – and just call it quits. She has to get up and go fix what she broke, and it seems all she’s been looking for was the opportunity to do so. But it also seems that Neung took the break up way worse than Khun did and decided that a descent into madness was fitting for how she was feeling and she does not skimp.

She was doing all the bad girl things now that she wasn’t tied down. She was staying out late, drinking and dancing with boys, not to mention not contacting her gran. She was basically a delinquent.

And when she is found, on a school night, in a night club, drunk out of her mind and damn near being felt up by some random college dude, Khun just about loses her mind. She immediately claims ownership and carts Neung out of there – not without some token resistance, of course. When they make it back to the palace, they hash it out, kiss it out and then fall asleep in each other’s arms… only for them to wake up the next morning with Neung having vengeance on the brain. She’s still sour about how Khun ended their relationship and she decides that she can do the same.

She repeats, almost word for word, what Khun said to her. To ‘pretend last night never happened’ and move forward as they were. Khun, not really knowing how far she can push the issue, decided to take a step back from it all and allow Neung the space she seems to crave. We all know that she doesn’t actually want space, she wants a chase, but that is neither here nor there because Neung ends up losing at this game she initiated.

Neung wanted Khun to feel jealous, to understand what life would be like without her there and is instead met with how Khun flirts with people who aren’t her. Khun makes Neung jealous of one of her own friends, the same friend that Neung had been using to try and make Khun jealous. She started a fire fight with no ammunition, hoping she could pick bullets up along the way, and Khun came fully prepared with a military grade arsenal. The poor poppet never really stood a chance.

Now, outside of this one fight, there isn’t really a conflict between them. Their conflict bleeds over from season one. Khun believes Neung is too young to know what she wants and in a few years she will be tossed to the side when Neung finally ‘finds herself.’ Neung is not having it, this time around, and latches on like a barnacle to a turtle shell. She will not be thrown into the depths all on her own a second time. All is well with these two, if you don’t bring Neung’s family drama into consideration. They are living their best secret-love-story lives and it seems nothing can pop their bubble. Until daddy dearest starts popping up and inviting himself into their personal space and nothing is sacred anymore.

This is where my rage begins to boil over. This is where Chet exists… I mean, he inserts himself in almost every other thing Neung does – or tries to do – and makes demands of her like he’s been there this whole time and they should seem normal to her at this point but it is within the family unit that Chet thrives, where he finds power and back up. Chet, on his own, is an annoyance that we can usually ignore or circumvent. Usually Neung lets Khun deal with Chet because she’s been doing it since forever so she knows how to make him go away, but in the family unit Chet has granny’s support. And granny has Neung’s ear. Things are now complicated but they navigate it. When Chet oversteps, Khun brings him back to Earth but when Chet starts to suspect that there is something else going on between Neung and Khun, all bets are off. Chet calls Fah back to Thailand to test the waters, then Chet flat out accuses Khun, and the cats out of the bag because Khun may be a lot of things but a liar isn’t one of them.

But before we get into how things went wrong, let’s go back to why we despise Chet.

Chet spends the majority of this show spewing random, differing degrees of homophobic rhetoric. He doesn’t like Neung’s new college friend because she seems too boyish to him and, according to his two functioning brain cells, apparently this makes her contagious because he wants Neung to stop being friends with her so she doesn’t ‘catch the gay’ from the too boyish friend….

Can you hear my eyes roll all the way into the back of my skull? No?

Alright, how about when Chet decides to bring up Neung’s friend choices in front of her grandmother, who is also a raging homophobe, and they try to gang up on Neung. Because Chet couldn’t convince Neung on his own, he decides to get back up from literally the only person who gives a damn about his opinion in this entire show. Then – because it gets worse – he decides that since Neung and Khun are ‘getting along so well’ now would be a great time to revisit his and Khun’s possible marriage. He proposes. To Khun. In front of Neung. Without consulting either of them. His justification? Khun would make a great stepmother for Neung and they’ve grown up now so the issues that caused Khun to run from the wedding the first time must have gone off into the stratosphere seeing as how HE couldn’t possibly have been the problem.

And when Khun rejects this proposal, shocked Pikachu face!

This is where I believe Chet started suspecting something else was going on with Khun. Maybe he didn’t suspect that she was in love with his daughter – who he’s been aware of for the blink of an eye – but he certainly thinks she is with someone else because that would make much more sense than the fact that she’s just not that into him, I suppose.

When he can’t get Khun to marry him, he inevitably turns his attentions back to Neung which makes the poor baby even more uncomfortable with him. She hasn’t known him all that long and he is talking at her like she has no mind or thoughts of her own. He talks about what he wants for her like his thoughts are blueprints to be followed rather than talking points. He has injected himself into Neung’s life like a bad vaccine and the effects are opposite to what he was hoping because, again, NOBODY LIKES HIS PRESENCE! I don’t know how else I can say this. Chet is that one mosquito you hear just as you’ve settled in bed and you’ve switched off the lights. Just as you think you are at peace, he starts buzzing around, trying to suck the life out you… and then disaster strikes.

Neung and Khun get caught.

Piengfah comes in like a sleeper agent because, as per freaking usual, these parents are not engaged with the raising of their child until it is time to inconvenience said child by throwing their thoughts at her and expecting her to be excited about their hair brain ideas.

Let us all remind ourselves of how we ended up here, shall we?

Piengfah was in love with Khun and got rejected. Chet was in love with Khun but – from what I’ve gathered – said nothing. Fah and Chet make a baby and Khun tells Fah, out of concern, to abort said baby as this may slow down or altogether stop the progression of her life. Fah has the baby but her own mother is not pleased with this development and even worse is the fact that Piengfah refuses to tell her mother who the baby daddy actually is.

Granny decides that Thailand is clearly too much for Fah and sends her overseas to go get her shit together and she raises the baby. Chet is left unaware of the existence of said baby. Chet is set to marry Khun due to an arrangement by Khun’s granmama and Chet’s family. Chet is pleased with this arrangement, Khun is not. She runs from the wedding and effectively cuts off Chet and her gran.

Baby Neung is wrapped in bubble wrap by granny because gods forbid she turns out like her dear darling mother. Jump forward about 20 years and Neung bumps into Khun in the market – INSTA LOVE. Khun and Neung get close, then Khun falls in love. Fah makes a reappearance to rub into Khun’s face that she is Neung’s mother. Chet finally finds out about the daughter he’s had under his nose this whole time.

Chet starts love bombing this poor girl but also he really REALLY wants her to get a DNA test to prove she’s actually his kid. Neung couldn’t care less about what Chet wants and is only concerned about what Khun wants. Chet and Fah become privy to how attached to Khun Neung is and they think they can use this to their advantage but Khun is already off the deep end at this point and she has no intentions of doing things that Neung’s now helicopter parents want when that is clearly not what she wants.

Piengfah realizes that the only way any of this works is if they give Neung some space and Chet thinks space means being a puff of air away from one another. And, lastly, Chet thinks parenting is calling in your child’s grandmother any time she won’t do exactly what you want her to, when you want her to, how you want her to and with no resistance or questioning.

Chet is the most irritating character I have had the pleasure of watching and I watched Khun’s gran make a complete fool of herself and Sam’s betrothed Kirk in GAP the series and in Season 1 of Blank.

Now, because Chet has never been taught how to deal with rejection or situations that he finds averse to his morally skewed compass he doesn’t know how to properly deal with his only child being in love with a woman. And he certainly cannot wrap his brain around that other woman being his ex-fiancé. And his last brain cell is holding on to dear life when it has to process that his child won her over where he couldn’t.

So, like any untrained and untamed animal, he lashes out. At Khun. In her own damned palace. Then he demands that Khun and Neung not come into contact with one another. Gets Piengfah and granny to back him up and they all devise a plan for Neung to go live with Piengfah overseas somewhere and hopefully – and I shit you not – GROW OUT OF BEING GAY. This move only works because they have finally hit Khun where it hurts. She has been fighting with the idea that Neung is too young for her this entire time and now she has three other people telling her that she is not worthy, that she’s too old, that she is sucking the youth out of their “baby” and if she really loves her then she’ll let Neung go and let her make her own choices.

The irony there is not lost on me and I hope it isn’t lost on you either.

Just as Neung is about to leave for brighter skies with Piengfah, Khun has a ‘come to Jesus’ moment and decides to pour her heart out on live radio, for the whole nation to hear, about how in love she is and how her heart is breaking from having to be separated from the only person she has ever wanted for herself in this life. Neung hears this message and, because the demon and his minions had forced separation between the lovers, she makes a run for it. Hoping against hope that the prison sentence she had been serving for the past few days can finally come to an end when she is, "unexpectedly", hit by a car.

TROPE TIME – she’s in a coma now.

So, because she was on the phone with Neung when the accident happened, Khun is the first to arrive at the hospital… somehow… I mean, the accident happened right in front of Neung’s gran’s house so the warden and the guards should have been the first at the hospital but, I digress. When they do eventually get to the hospital, all they are is enraged at Khun for luring their baby to her possible death, and scared shitless for Neung. They blame Khun for them needing to be scared and then they try and pin the whole accident on her. Khun, like anybody else in life, has a breaking point and this comment pushes her over.

She starts firing back. She asks them why they felt they needed to come between two people who just loved each other. She asks how they can accuse her of being the reason Neung was out on that street when the car came barreling towards her when they were the ones keeping her prisoner. She asks what she’s ever done to deserve their ire. Asks how it can be wrong to love someone. Asks how she can be solely to blame when the only person who ever actually heard Neung, actually listened to Neung, was her? Crickets! Until granny comes in, on her sanctimonious rocket ship, and slaps Khun across the face before telling her to kick rocks.

I’m over it at this point. This whole family can go jump off the nearest bridge.

Khun takes a page out of Neung’s book and refuses to be tossed by the way side. She wears everyone – save Chet, until MUCH later – down with her sheer devotion. She shows up, reads to, talks to, pleads and begs with Neung to just open her eyes. And then she does. She opens her eyes and the first thing she does is make a phone call?

Look, I’m as confused as you at this part but the director, producer and creator all thought this worked so we’re going with it.

Neung wakes up, calls that same radio station in hopes that Khun is listening and confesses as well. Lays their love story bare for the country to hear. And, by some miracle, Khun is listening to the radio station at that exact moment and B-lines is straight for Neung’s room. They hug, they kiss, they hug some more and then Neung is walking out of that hospital with her arms around the woman she loves and her family supporting them all the way. Heavens, how I wish it had just ended there! It would have been sappy, it would have been sickly sweet, but it would have made a world of sense more than switching the actors at the last moment – YES I’M STILL ON THIS!

Like I said in the beginning, I wish the show was longer. I wish we had more time with these characters. I am in love with the chemistry that all the characters have with one another. This cast really sold this plot and Faye and Yoko were the perfect actors for their roles.

The only question I guess I have at the end of all this is does love really have an expiration date like Khun has been stressing this whole time or is the love of the right person infinite and unending like Neung has been saying since the very beginning?

Marry My Husband, Bestie?

Best friends are the family we choose. The people we want to talk to about all the things happening in our lives and the ones who come to us when they are in need. When you choose a best friend you are saying to the universe “This is my person”. The same could be said for marriage. You are choosing your partner, choosing who to spend your life with, choosing who you will love and care for however long you are together. So, what happens when you find out that the universe wants to cut the time you have with these people short? What happens when the universe decides to hand you a reset button to redo the last 10 years of your life? Would you take it? Even at the risk of losing your best friend? Your husband? The only family you had left?

The Betrayal

On a beautiful spring day there sits a woman, in a hospital gown, looking out an open window at the abundance of cherry blossoms. A petal slowly descends towards her and just as she’s about to reach out and grab it a woman walks over and slams the window closed. The woman, dressed in a pencil skirt, red heels, and an off white blouse, walks over to her best friend and they talk. They seem like they care for each other. Though one is clearly ill and in pain and the other a vibrant contrast, they seem happy to be in each other’s presence. When the time comes, the friend leaves and our patient stays and is administered medication through an IV.

All is going well until she is informed that her medical bills have not been paid and as such she will have to leave the hospital if they are not paid in time. She tries to get ahold of her husband, to no avail, and so she decides it may be best to just go home and get the money herself. She pulls herself together and gets into a cab outside the hospital, lets the driver know where she is going, and makes her way home. The driver, perhaps intuiting how much pain his client is in, decides to take her on a more scenic ride so she can enjoy the cherry blossoms a bit more and gives her a whole spiel on how there isn’t only one way to get to your destination. Kang Ji Won, our main character, gets out of the cab in front of her house and the driver gives her back the money she had given him for the cab ride. Tells her to keep it for a rainy day. Ji Won is probably going over how few of those are left for her but she takes the bill back after some convincing - not noticing the blue ink, heart shaped mark in the corner – and walks up into her building.

When she gets to the door of her apartment, the lock is broken. The lock, she had asked her husband a dozen and one times to fix, sits broken still. She doesn’t let her frustration get the better of her as she walks into the apartment. She’s about to take her shoes off when she notices a pair of red high heels sitting next to her husband’s shoes. She walks into the house, stealthy as is possible, and hears hushed voices coming from their bedroom.

A voice stating that they are just waiting for her to die, another asking if they should move that process along. Banter…over her death. She walks closer still to the bedroom door and sees, laying in her marital bed, her husband and her best friend. All hell breaks loose! The husband – Park Min Hwan – clearly done with pretending to care for his wife, yells at her about why she came home. The best friend – Jung Su Min – uncaring that she has been sleeping with her best friend’s husband, asks her why she’s so selfish and why she can’t just let the living go on living even as she stands at deaths door. In the end Ji Won lays in a pool of blood after her husband pushes her and she falls in their living room and hits her head on the glass coffee table in the middle of the room. THE END!

Second Chances?

Actually, that was just the beginning. Ji Won opens her eyes and they are a little fuzzy. A voice in front of her tells her to put her glasses on and she recognizes it but also doesn’t understand what is happening. She puts her glasses back on and comes face to face with the eyes of the man who killed her and she starts swinging! She is fighting for her life except he isn’t fighting her this time. He seems confused as to why she’s attacking him. Eventually he gets fed up and, just as he’s about to throw his own punches, a hand grabs his wrist and pulls the two apart. The confusion starts to lift and Ji Won realizes she’s not in their apartment but at work and all her colleagues are looking at her like she’s a few spanners short of a tool box. And, honestly, she feels the same.

For a time, nothing seems to be adding up until Ji Won makes it back to her apartment where she starts to believe that she’s been sent back in time. 10 years, to be exact. Back to a time before she was married to that leech of a man, a time before she found out that her supposed best friend was actually just a snake in the grass, a time before she’d been sick and dying. She had been given the opportunity to do it all over again. She could choose not to marry this man, choose to not entertain this friend, choose to just run off somewhere and start over. But she soon realizes that won’t be as easy as she had once thought it could be.

There are rules to her being given this opportunity. Rules that she is going to have to learn the hard way. Rules like ‘if something has already happened before then it has to happen again’. She learns this rule in two segments.

The first being the day she reappeared in the office, the day she was attacking her boyfriend. In her first life Ji Won got a burn on her forearm from a kettle falling and nearly scalding her face. She’d used her arm to deflect the kettle and had ended up with a severe burn on her wrist. In this new timeline, her manager Mr. Yu, takes the hit from the kettle for her so Ji Won doesn’t have that scar now but she later realizes that Mr. Yu does have a scar. The exact same scar in the exact same place that hers had been. She, at first, chalks this up to just being coincidence. That is, until – the second segment – she remembers that she was going to get an injury on her knee from a stack of printer paper boxes in the break room when she attempted to stop a mug from falling and shattering. She saves the mug, doesn’t get injured by the boxes and is thinking she basically has a cheat code for this new life when, after leaving the break room, someone pushing a cart with an office cupboard on it bumps into her and she ends up with that exact same injury in that exact same place as before except it was inflicted in a different way.

The rule is now almost tangible as it dawns on her. Everything that happened before has to happen again, the way it happened before… it just doesn’t have to happen to her. She has to find someone to take all her bad luck from her first life so she can live a more fruitful life this time around. And who better to take her misfortune than her lying, scheming, snake in the grass best friend? The rules seem simple enough. A life for a life, a marriage for a marriage, a death for a death. Now all Ji Won had to do was get her best friend to want to take her husband because, much like any other bottom feeder, Ji Won’s bestie only ever seemed to be interested in taking what was already hers.

Hell Hath No Fury…

Ji Won had always planned to live a quiet life. After losing her mother to an affair and then later losing her father to cancer, she just wanted to start her own family, settle down and finally feel a little bit of stability. She would accept any form of kindness because, having lived in a small town and having her mother abandon her family while she was so young, it was in short supply.

She accepted Su Min’s version of kindness because she was convinced that Su Min was the only person who would truly care for her as everyone else in her small hometown became cold towards her over time. She accepted Min Hwan’s version of kindness because she was desperate for stability, going so far as to believe that if she didn’t accept him she may never get the chance at a marriage and a family again. This desperation, this meekness, is what gave the distinct impression to Ji Won’s boyfriend and best friend that she would be an easy target.

She was easy enough to lie to, so an affair wouldn’t be that hard to hide. She was easy to lie to, so getting others to bully her based on other lies was a cake walk to accomplish.

Ji Won’s disdain for her would be husband/killer is almost palpable. But, in order for her plan to work, she’d have to fake it until she makes it and this would prove almost stress-free because as easy as it is to read her pure hatred for this man on her face, it is duly easy to notice that he is so full of himself he could never even begin to imagine that the woman he’s dating wants absolutely nothing to do with him.

At first, upon realizing that she’s been granted this second chance, Ji Won immediately broke up with him. Which would have worked out great if he wasn’t psychotic and hell bent on being the only one to dictate the terms and conditions of their relationship. Before the rule dawned on Ji Won, she called it quits and ended up being yelled at and physically assaulted – in public – for being ‘overly emotional’. After realizing the rule, Ji Won had to swallow her pride and essentially crawl back to this man even though she just about jumped out of her own skin any time he so much as looked at her. But she could do this, she had to! She was going to live her life to the fullest and if that meant that she had to play around with this man – who had already proven himself willing to and capable of killing her – for a little while, then so be it.

All she had to do was get Min Hwan to marry Su Min. So, she got to planning on how to make their relationship seem perfect on the outside while actively avoiding any alone time with Min Hwan. She had to get Su Min to believe that Min Hwan was a prime candidate for marriage because that was the only way that Su Min would invest any time into trying to tempt him away from Ji Won. And so the mind games began. Ji Won would constantly talk Min Hwan up and effectively made no time for Su Min because the best way to get Su Min to act was to take her toys away from her. The reactive tantrum that followed would have Su Min trying to lure Min Hwan away from Ji Won as a sort of punishment, not realizing that she would be playing straight into Ji Won’s hands.

Changing Fates

Ji Won figured that in order for her fate to move to Su Min she would need Su Min’s cooperation, even if she didn’t realize that that was what was happening. She asks Su Min if she would mind helping her take out some trash. Su Min, not realizing that the trash in question was actually Min Hwan, happily agreed to help her friend on the condition that Ji Won go out to dinner with her the coming Saturday for a girl’s night.

Ji Won is hesitant because now she has a playbook on all the nasty little set ups and traps that Su Min has in store for her. Su Min had intended for Ji Won to show up under-dressed to a nice Korean BBQ spot only to find out that the restaurant was hosting their high school reunion. All her old classmate, her bullies, would see her dressed that way and assume the worst of her.

Again.

Since they met, Su Min had been playing up her ‘woe is me’ act to anyone who would listen. She’d had everyone convinced that Ji Won was basically the devil incarnate and that she was leeching off of her and dear darling Su Min was just too nice to tell her to go away. In her first life Ji Won hadn’t understood why everyone hated her so fiercely but this time around she was going to give Su Min a taste of her own medicine. When the night of the reunion rolled around Ji Won showed up in a flowing white gown, gold heels, designer earrings and a brand new hairdo. She looked ready to walk a runway and Su Min – and the rest of their class – sat with their jaws on the floor because, according to Su Min, Ji Won was struggling to make a life for herself without being given a lending hand.

That was not the image that was being presented to them though and upon further – more hostile – conversation it was discovered that Su Min had been lying about practically everything but Ji Won came with receipts and put those lies to bed. That was when Su Min’s web started unraveling. That would be the beginning of Su Min’s psychotic break where she began to realize that she may be losing control over Ji Won and, in turn, all the people she had been lying to about their relationship in a bid to garner sympathy for herself.

There were other moments – both before and after the reunion – when Ji Won upstaged and embarrassed Su Min by using her own tactics against her. Like the cafeteria. Su Min had grown accustomed to not being denied by Ji Won so, when one day during lunch Ji Won refused to eat out with Su Min and instead proposed that they eat in the cafeteria, the little demon spawn saw it fit to bring Ji Won down a peg because how dare she be denied the food she wanted by this person who she’d walked all over their entire ‘friendship’.

Ji Won remembered this incident perfectly. Su Min had been ahead of her in the cafeteria line, had piled her tray high with the reddest, the sauciest kimchi available and then she’d ‘tripped’ and landed on Ji Won. Her tray, accidentally tipping over and dumping that bright red juice all over Ji Won’s face in an attempt to help her wipe it off.

Ji Won would be prepared this time. When Su Min got in line ahead of her in the cafeteria, yet again piling her tray high, she watched with a sick kind of satisfaction at the fact that her friend hadn’t changed so she shouldn’t feel too bad about paying her back for all the crap she’d been put through. Su Min turned around after filling her tray, intending to shoulder check Ji Won, walked way too close to Ji Won and instead of meeting her friend’s shoulder Su Min was left with dead air as Ji Won moved out of her way, way too late for Su Min to right herself, and all that red sauce went directly onto Min Hwan’s very expensive designer shirt.

This time, instead of Ji Won being covered in cafeteria food, delivered by her darling best friend, it was her boyfriend who caught the back end of fate and Ji Won had to fight the smirk from crawling onto her face as she thought of those two taking all the hits and all the falls for her going forward. This would also prove to be a way to get Su Min and Min Hwan closer as now Su Min felt she owed him for his ruined shirt.

Ji Won remembered all the moments where she would sacrifice her comfort in order to make Su Min happy and all those came to an end because – again – making Su Min think that she was losing control over Ji Won would be the best way to get her to take the trash out. And the trash in question was making an even bigger mess of itself. In their first life Min Hwan had quit his job after successfully trading stocks ONCE and thinking that that was his life’s calling. In an attempt to duplicate that drop of luck, Min Hwan had gotten loan after loan, even borrowing money from Ji Won to ‘invest in their futures’.

This time around, Ji Won had invested in the winning stocks and then – according to the boyfriend – guilt tripped Min Hwan into dropping those stocks. But, because Ji Won essentially had insider knowledge now, she told him not to pull out on all his stocks. She would borrow him more money, make him more confident, in investing in a losing company. And the horse allowed itself to be led around by its nose. Because Ji Won had invested in those stocks the fate of that windfall would now be hers to claim and, because of the rules, Min Hwan would lose everything just as he had caused Ji Won to lose everything in the past.

Then, of course, there was winning against Su Min at the company retreat where, at first, Su Min had been able to win the prestige of sleeping in the glamping van while Ji Won slept in a tent and Min Hwan had been delegated a sleeping bag. This time around Ji Won got the camper and Su Min got the tent and that was also the night that Su Min and Min Hwan finally did the nasty. Essentially cementing that relationship in the eyes of both Su Min and Ji Won.

Su Min, having assumed that Min Hwan would leave Ji Won for her after they got freaky in the forest, was shocked when Min Hwan - thinking that his pee pee was made of gold - told her he wasn’t leaving Ji Won but that there was enough of him for the both of them and they could all just share. Obviously this didn’t sit well with Ji Won but it seemed to infuriate Su Min more because this effectively meant that she was still losing to Ji Won even when her bestie wasn’t even trying.

This blossoming relationship between Su Min and Min Hwan would lead to them making mistakes at work that would end with Min Hwan being downgraded from his position in the team he, Ji Won and Su Min had all been a part of at work to another, lower ranking team, and Su Min being fired altogether. But, of course, she wasn’t one to leave quietly because by the time she is set to leave everyone in the office is aware, or at least speculating, that she was the one sleeping with her best friend’s boyfriend and her reputation is essentially in tatters.

Before she leaves, Su Min creates a fake Insta account, in Ji Won’s name, discrediting the allegations leveled against her for the mistakes made by her and Min Hwan while they were at a work site together and further denying that she had been sleeping with her besties mans without her consent – essentially saying that Ji Won was aware of their relationship and wished them well. Ji Won, fed up with taking the blame for Su Min’s stupidity, did not take this lying down and embarrassed Su Min in front of the entire company and the customers that were almost killed because of the mistakes those two made.

This, however, is when Su Min thinks it pertinent to point out that she is pregnant with Min Hwan’s baby thinking it would garner sympathy from Ji Won… How that train of thought came to be, how she believed that telling her bestie she was pregnant with her boyfriend’s baby was going to work out in her favor is beyond me – well technically fiancé at this point, because Min Hwan had proposed! This is a lie, though, because Ji Won knows that Min Hwan cannot get anyone pregnant so unless Su Min was also cheating on Min Hwan there was not a chance in hell that she was pregnant and with this revelation, Su Min realized she had lost all control over Ji Won and their long standing friendship. Ji Won was now also free of Min Hwan as he’d been exposed as a cheater.

Now, you’re probably wondering how this all ties back into the rules and that part is pretty devious. See, because Min Hwan had so much debt to pay off, he needed a quick influx of cash. His mother had promised to buy him a house when he got married so he figured he just needed to convince Ji Won to marry him. When Ji Won exposed his cheating, that income avenue went flying out the window. When he heard that Su Min was pregnant, he figured he could use that to his advantage and just marry her instead. His mother would get the grandchild she’d always wanted, he would get the money from the house his mother had promised to buy him and Su Min would get her play thing. Everyone gets exactly what they need.

Except Su Min isn’t pregnant, mommy is not buying them a house immediately and Min Hwan is still under a mountain of debt and he’s also about to get fired for harassing Ji Won at work which will drive him and Su Min into the arms of someone so much worse than Su Min could have ever hoped to be.

Wildest Dreams?

There are some truly amazing and heart-warming moments in this drama because, contrary to what the show wants you to believe, this story is not just about betrayal and heartbreak and the occasional murder attempt.

There is a rather large romance b-plot going on with our main character and her office manager – who just so happens to be the grandson of the company’s owner, also to be referred to as the future owner of the company.

During a good portion of this show, Mr. Yu had been showing up for Ji Won in ways that you would expect a boyfriend or, dare I say, a husband to do but in her initial life she and Mr. Yu very rarely interacted with each other. She actually thought he was rather standoffish in her first life and now that she knows what she does, Ji Won is realizing that Mr. Yu had been looking out for her, from the very beginning in his own ‘I’ve secretly loved you since I first met you but now you’re with this douche-canoe and I’m not sure I can get in the way of what looks like your happiness’ kind of way. However, there are some things about him that are questionable – like all the information he has about things that are going to happen to Ji Won – and we are all very curious about how he knows what he knows and why him of all people?

Ji Won was finally living the dream she’d had for her future because she'd gotten rid of the dead weight in her life and she could finally move forward with her new man. But there’s enough angst to go around because what’s that one law of physics? Nothing ever goes well without something going horribly wrong? Equal and opposing forces and all that.

At first Ji Won figured that once she got Min Hwan and Su Min together that they would be each other’s problem and her fate would transfer to them. That is obviously not how that goes, or I wouldn’t be saying anything about it. Ji Won finds out that one of her new best friends, Mrs. Yang, is married to a cheating freeloader – just like she was – who is making her life a living hell – just like Min Hwan was – and has been diagnosed with cancer – JUST. LIKE. SHE. WAS! Her fate didn’t go to Su Min and Min Hwan, it went to Mrs. Yang and her husband.

When Ji Won realized this she had to make a decision, which wasn’t really much of a decision, on whether she seduces Min Hwan to put her fate back squarely where it belongs or to let Mrs. Yang carry the burden of her future. She chooses the former, only to be informed that Min Hwan is already cheating on Su Min with Mr. Yu’s ex-fiancé.

You are probably a little lost at this point so let me catch you up:

Mr. Yu is the son of a conglomerate family, which means he will be expected to marry someone of equal or greater wealth in order to keep the business among the richy-riches or whatever.

Mr. Yu, in the first time line, is more than willing to go along with this because he was in love with Ji Won but then hadn’t told her and then she got married, then she got sick, then she died! There was no catching any breaks for this poor guy. In this time line he lets his grandfather know that he doesn’t really feel up to marrying who his grandpappy chose and he would do whatever it took to end the ‘arrangement’ amicably but there was really no reason to go on assuming that that version of events would pan out.

Again, this should have been fine but this is K-DRAMA land and nothing is ever as it seems. Turns out Mr. Yu’s former to-be is extremely invested in him. So invested, in fact, that in the first time line she beat a woman to within an inch of her life for looking at Mr. Yu “the wrong way” and now, what? We were all expecting her to just let this man go with no actual reasoning?

But there was a reason, wasn’t there?

Mr. Yu had finally found his shiny spine and wanted nothing to do with Yura – which only served to make him more attractive to her as this was who she’d always wanted him to be for her – but Yura was not the type to have things dictated to her. Yura, seemingly the much richer female version of Min Hwan, did not do well with rejection. She was so bad with rejection, in fact, that she left her home in Japan, flew to South Korean, just so she could look Ji Won in the eye and, very casually, inform her that Mr. Yu was actually hers.

But, like I said, equal and opposing forces.

Ji Won may have been a lot less financially endowed than Yura but she had something - or rather, someone - of equal, or greater, force to Yura backing her up. Granted, she had a moment where she was about to let Mr. Yu go, not wanting to be like Su Min and encroaching on someone else’s relationship but Mr. Yu made it very clear that he’d broken it off with Yura and he was in Ji Won’s corner – even if she didn’t particularly like him for putting her in this situation at the moment.

Ji Won would only believe that Mr. Yu and Yura are no longer a thing when her other new best friend – who just so happens to be Mr. Yu’s little sister – explains why Mr. Yu agreed to marry Yura in the first place. That is when the claws come out and Ji Won starts really fighting for her future with this person she hadn’t known had been in love with her all along. And it is all well and good for Ji Won to be fighting for their future but there is one thing that neither of them can fight against and Mr. Yu seems to have resigned himself to fate, even after fighting Yura tooth and nail to make sure that she didn’t end up hurting Ji Won.

Actually, scratch that, Yura attempted to put Ji Won in the ground multiple times! First, she’d approached Su Min thinking that the best friend would have a way to get Ji Won away from Mr. Yu, which only ended up making Su Min looking even more unhinged as she was confronted with the fact that Ji Won had left her with the trash, upgraded and was now living it up because Mr. Yu had just gifted Ji Won 8 billion bucks in assets.

The jealousy that ate at Su Min when she realized this was damn near tangible. She looked ready to explode when she found this out but, bully for her, Ji Won was no longer entertaining her idiocy.

When Yura couldn’t use Su Min to get to Ji Won, she tried using Min Hwan. Making sure to alert him to the fact the Mr. Yu gave Ji Won things he was never able to, and would never be able to, give her and it hit at his ego and turned him into a worse version of himself… which is hard to imagine because this man is already the living, breathing, embodiment of sewage.

Remember when I said Min Hwan would get fired for attacking Ji Won? This was that! He turned into a stalker, then harassed Ji Won at work – basically blaming her for their break up – and when that didn’t get the message across, he turned her into prey.

After blacking out their shared office space when everyone else had gone home and Ji Won was working late he’d snuck up on her, hunted her, tossed her around and then almost unalived her by strangulation but – as always – Mr. Yu to the rescue.

Mr. Yu got there just in time to fling Min Hwan away from Ji Won like he was a paperweight and then got the both of them – himself and Min Hwan – thrown in prison. Once Min Hwan got out the next day, he found out just how far into the shitter his life had gone all from not staying away from Ji Won.

Well, when the obvious options didn’t pan out, Yura tried the nuclear approach and decided to involve Ji Won’s mother! Ji Won’s mother, who had run off with SU MIN’s FATHER, was now back in the picture trying to play up being a redeemable person and when that failed Yura decided to cut her loses and just have them unalive Ji Won all at once.

Again, FAILURE!

You’d think she would have gotten the message by now but it seems logic is an elusive entity. When that plan fails, Yura wants to clean house. There can be no traces of her involvement in any of these acts which means everyone involved needs to turn up missing, ASAP. This also fails! This woman just sucks at executions because her plans are amazing and the only problems are the people she puts her faith in to follow through with said plans which makes her a shit judge of character but that’s not a trait we have to worry about for long as she takes the fate of someone else soon enough and peace falls upon the land.

Sugar Daddy Says What?

‘I’m your allowance, use me’ is not a statement any of us expects to hear. Out in the woods. On a company retreat. From our anyone, least of all our manager, while he’s pulling his shirt down to reveal his pecs to us but that is exactly what Mr. Yu had said to Ji Won after showing her the little blue ink, heart-shaped birth mark?, on his chest. But it wasn’t a birth mark.

As a matter of fact, it looked oddly familiar to Ji Won and this was because that same push of fate that had thrown her 10 years into the past, had done the same with Mr. Yu.

Why this mark? This was the mark that Ji Won’s father would put on his gifts to her – easily one of the most identifiable markers her father could have left on anything.

What is this mark doing on Mr. Yu then? Well, it is around this time we find out that Ji Won’s father had essentially been playing time travelling cupid from the great beyond because he sent Mr. Yu back expressly to protect Ji Won in this new reality but also because he knew that Mr. Yu had been in love with Ji Won in their first life.

This explains A LOT.

Why Mr. Yu had been so disdainful of Min Hwan and Su Min, why he knew so much about things that would happen to Ji Won, why he always put himself between Ji Won and Min Hwan no matter what it would look like to people who weren’t in the know. It explains why, even after being pushed away, Mr. Yu continually fought to be by Ji Won’s side but there was one thing he wasn’t fighting for – his own life!

The rules that apply to Ji Won apply to him as well because he had also died in his first life which meant that in order for him to go on living in this new reality he had to find someone to take his fate for him as well. Someone would have to die, in a car accident, for Mr. Yu to be able to go on living.

Mr. Yu is content to be ‘used’ by Ji Won to get a leg up in whatever she needs but Ji Won is trying to figure out how he’s going to survive. He’s resigned himself to fate to the point where he is willing his fortune to Ji Won and his cat. This man is essentially saying ‘I’ve had a good run’ before the starting bell has even gone off.

To an extent, I understood that he didn’t want to hand deliver someone’s death to them so he was just going to be with Ji Won for as long as he could be, but Ji Won had just finally found stability in his arms and she wasn’t ready to let that slip through her fingers.

Fate takes this decision out of their hands though when, after being confronted with the consequences of her actions, Yura gets arrested for all the nonsense she had been engaged in and ends up in a car accident trying to escape the country before the charges stuck. On the day of Yura’s accident, Mr. Yu’s tattoo mysteriously disappears, perhaps relaying from the great beyond that he no longer had to live as an allowance but could finally enjoy his second chance.

And their future finally begins with them getting married, then having their twins, then another baby and, on the anniversary of the day that Ji Won died in 10 years’ time, they went to see an exhibition on cherry blossoms. Why they didn’t just stand outside under a cherry blossom tree, I don’t know but that is their story.

There were moments when I wondered if maybe the show was going too far in certain aspects, like Su Min’s personality and how awful she was, only for them to bring it all back together with the fact that she had been jealous of the fact that when Ji Won’s mom and her dad ran off together her mother had begun treating her like a burden while Ji Won’s father did everything in his power to fill in the gaps. Su Min’s entire personality hinged on the fact that she was jealous that they weren’t all miserable like she was.

Min Hwan, on the other hand, had been coddled to the point of it becoming a problem. His mother was the worst kind of enabler and she went on blaming Ji Won for everything that happened and would end up happening to him because it was all Ji Won’s fault that they broke up and Min Hwan ended up with Su Min to begin with. Honestly, the mental gymnastics to have to go through in order to make heads or tails of some of these trains of thought are astonishing.

In the end, we get our hard earned – HARD EARNED – happily ever after but there remains an existential question here. Would you be willing to pass your fate onto someone else knowing full well it was going to kill them?

Would you be able to live with yourself, with no guilt, knowing what you did about how someone else was going to die because you had already lived it?

Would you try to defy fate or help it along, or would you just accept that this was how things were and you just didn’t have it in you to make someone else live through that?

guzhufuren

upcoming thai ql prayer circle 🤝🤝🤝

lane-ys-world

I just saw Wuju and I just want to know if we are actually still expecting that to materialize? The release has been pushed SOOOO many times... JeffBarcode aren't even with BOC anymore... Are we really still thinking this is going to happen?

#JeffCode #jeff satur #barcode tinnasit #BeOnC #wuju bakery #Hayang Studio #thaibl #kbl #kimchay #korean bl #bl series

phoen1xr0se

Source: Sundae Kids

fortpeat

At long last 🌈🥹🥹

heretherebedork

Mawin my BELOVED this poor boy is trying so hard but he's so nervous and I love him so, so much.

MY BABY. Mawin! Beloved child! This boy has such a crush and he's trying so hard and I just want to give him a hug and promise him he's good enough.

And Ton is such a good friend. He's doing his best to build his friend up and support him!

lane-ys-world

Mawin deserves to be with someone who loves him back... I hope they don't rob us of that.

Death's Game - Where Death toys with you until she's bored...

“The most painful death to a mortal, is one that is foreseen”

In every culture there is a certain disdain for suicidal ideation. So much so that most religious or cultural leaders will warn that the afterlife will more than likely be unpleasant if one chooses to cut their life short as that is not in the plans of their maker(s).

Nothing, and I mean absolutely nothing, could have prepared me for what happened in this drama.

Death is usually portrayed as a formless entity. It is something that happens, not something that speaks and breaths. It is certainly not something that dolls out punishment… is it? In most utterances death is an event, an occurrence, something that life heads towards or culminates to. There are not many cases where death, itself, is given a face.

The last drama I can correlate this one to is Doom At Your Service, but Doom (Myul Mang) was more the end of all there was. The end of a day, the end of a life cycle, the end of a memory. Not so much death.

In this drama, Death has a face, a name and a mean streak a mile wide. There is one subtle catch though. You only ever meet Death when she comes for you. You are never intended to meet Death before the time she has set forth. You do not control the timing of the end of your life, that is her function and she takes her work very seriously.

“You are guilty of coming to find me before I came to find you.”

So, what happens when an individual decides that they can no longer take their existence and chooses to exit stage left? Death. And when you meet her she gets to choose the punishment for not just throwing away your life but also making her work overtime because you weren’t meant to meet as yet. So, in retribution for your insolence, she gives you a choice… find a way to live or into the fiery pits you go. So now the question becomes “How do I live when I’ve already died?”

On a sunny day we see a man walking, cellphone in hand with a big smile on his face, down a busy street. He seems excited about the day and it’s infectious. Choi Yi Jae, our main character, is going into an internship interview today and is feeling pretty freaking chipper about it. This is the opportunity of a lifetime and he has no intention of squandering it.

He’s nearly to the building his interview is set to be in when someone runs past him, into oncoming traffic, stopping in the middle of the busy street and getting hit by a car. The impact forces the man to fall back onto the pavement, right in front of Yi Jae, and he inevitably passes on. This causes Yi Jae immense emotional turmoil and he flunks his interview.

Seven years go by and life doesn’t seem to be getting any better. His latest interview has not panned out, he is suspecting his girlfriend of cheating and his landlord throws him out for being behind on rent. Nothing seems to be going how he wants it to be, so he decides he’s about had it and he jumps off the ledge of a high-rise…

But then he wakes up on a plane?

“Humans always struggle to live only after they die, not while they are still alive…”

Turns out, he’d met Death and the terms of his punishment had been set out. His punishment was that he would be sent back to Earth twelve times. He would be expected to adopt the lives of the bodies he inhabits and if he could survive the imminent threat of death in that body, Death would allow him to finish living that life and dodge going to hell altogether. Sounds easy enough, right? All he has to do is live. All he has to do is survive.

This concept seems easy enough on paper but in practice, Yi Jae realizes how deep the waters he’s treading actually are. There are some rules that Death makes him aware of before sending him back the first time: He’s not allowed to kill anyone and he is not allowed to kill himself.

In his first life Yi Jae seemed obsessed with the idea of making money. He felt that the culmination of wealth would be the only way he could prove his worth and so that was all he focused on. He needed to get the best internship at the best company, land the best job in said company and work his way up the corporate ladder and, when that didn’t pan out exactly how he wanted it to, he started to spiral. So, you would think with the massive do-over he’s been granted he would just try to enjoy living but, alas, that is not to be because you can take the man off of his destructive path but apparently all you’ll be doing is giving him another chance at running down that same path.

So it begins...

“Do you still think death is the end of it all? This is only the beginning…”

Life one, he is placed in the body of a CEO on a plane that is set to explode. He fails at that life. Life two, the body of an extreme sports enthusiast mid-air, with no parachute. Fails at that one too. Life three, a high school student who was about to jump off a building because of how badly he was being bullied. He almost succeeds with this one but inevitably gets his head bashed in by his bully. Life four, he is put into the life of a mafia enforcer who is being interrogated for theft and kidnapping. The body of a national boxing prospect turned murder convict, a baby that was abused by their parents, a model that gets hit by a car, a serial killer that gets killed by another serial killer, a police officer who dives off a roof to protect his partner, and so on.

In a good sixty percent (60%) of these lives he died due to greed but he kept weaving the lives together. Any time he died he would reincarnate with the distinct thought that if he could make money in this life then he would live well in the next life. Until his target shifted from money to revenge.

Yi Jae was constantly being warned by Death. The purpose of your reincarnation is to live, he was told. Try not to focus so hard on Earthly luxuries and just live, he was warned. He was even warned that the closer he got to his final reincarnation, the more painful the death would be. He took all this for granted and just kept on messing up over a bag of money. A bag, might I add, he inevitably gives away anyhow!

By the time he has decided that he actually wants to live, that he’s ready to try and power through this thing called life, he’s just about forgotten who he actually is. He’s been in so many different bodies, been called so many different names, looked at so many different faces in the mirror that remembering who he is is proving difficult. And back to the spiral we go.

“But if you manage to avoid the deaths they face, you could carry on living…”

Death gives him one final warning at the end of his eleventh (11th) reincarnation. This final reincarnation would hurt the worst. He didn’t believe it, nor did he much care until he looked in the mirror and saw, gazing back at him, a set of eyes so similar to his own.

His last life would be that of his mother. She had already passed away and he was now left to live the life of the person he had hurt the most in his first life. Before waking up in this last life Yi Jae had resigned himself to going to hell, to ending this torment as quickly as possible but he could not bring himself to end it quickly in this body, in this his last chance at dodging hell, because he knew that his mother would have never wanted him to give up that easily. But would he be able to live this life with the threat of death constantly hanging over his head? Would this be the life that made it possible for him to understand why Death was so angered by his disregard of his own life or of the lives he impacted with his choice? Or would this be the life that tipped him further over the edge, now that he was truly alone?

“Your soul will enter the bodies of 12 people facing imminent death. And you will end up dying regardless of which body you wake up in…”

In his seventh (7th) life he decides that he wants to tell his ex-girlfriend what really happened to him because he was confronted with her grief for the first time. Unable to hold himself back, he approached her with a new name, a new face, but he knew what would interest her. He told her a story, his story, but as though he were coming up with a novel – fiction.

He told her of all his past lives, laid out how and where and when he had met Death, explained how he was still trying to just survive… but all this as though it was fictitious, as though he were planning out a storyline for a character. She engaged, intrigued by this insane story but she kept him at arm’s length. To her, he was a fan with an interesting story to tell and she wanted to help him plan it out so he could write it well. She was still grieving, still processing the mere thought of her lost love so there was no way she was even entertaining the idea of this man as anything other than a project, a welcomed distraction.

Days after meeting one another, Yi Jae decides that he cannot keep lying to her any more so he comes clean. He tries to break it to her as gently as is possible that the main character of this story he’s been telling her is actually him. She doesn’t believe him, at first, but then he starts recounting things that only the two of them would know – inside jokes, future plans, the works. She believes him and for a split second we all forget that this isn’t some great love story but actually the seventh circle of hell - however we are quickly brought back to our senses when they get pancaked against a nearby wall by a drunk driver.

The driver steps out of his car after reversing away from the lovers who are now sprawled on the pavement and, almost nonchalantly, tells his passenger to make the mess go away.

Yi Jae, feeling disheartened, angry and aggrieved hears this and realizes that the driver is without remorse.

The driver just so happens to be the owner of the company that Yi Jae was meant to interview at seven years ago. But then, from his past lives, Yi Jae starts to recount other moments with this exact person. A moment from when he was a mafia enforcer being told to put a bomb on an airplane that would end up killing a CEO… a moment from when he was an extreme sports enthusiast where he was offered an obscene amount of money to dive out of a plane without a parachute… a moment from when he was a boxer where he was offered the opportunity to become nationally recognized if he took the fall for someone else’s crime…

Slowly but surely Yi Jae comes to the conclusion that this man is a monster and that monster has just taken the life of the person he loved and he was going to do whatever it took to get back at him for it.

So, when Yi Jae is reborn as a serial killer, he sets a trap for the monster and watches as he goes from predator to prey.

“The pain that death brings you will only get worse from now on”

The deaths the Yi Jae had to endure were almost biblical. For the life where he felt he could outsmart death, he was burned alive – essentially being given a taste of hell. For the life when he felt bigger than death, like he was invincible, he was quickly and painfully brought back to Earth. For the lives where his ego got the best of him, he died from head trauma. For the life where he was too trusting, he died from a knife to the gut. He died in ways that make the audience question what the point of everything is.

If he’s going to die even when he’s trying to help someone, when he’s trying to save someone, when he’s trying to be the good guy, what is the purpose of anything at all?

It is only in his final life, where he stops trying so hard to do anything at all that he finally gets to live. His punishment there? Living isn’t really living if you’re constantly looking over your shoulder waiting for death to come knocking. The constant fear of when he would keel over or when he would be struck by lightning kept him from engaging with others for fear that they weren’t trustworthy or that they would inevitably die because of him. His punishment was realizing the depths of the fear, the sadness, the sheer loneliness he inflicted on the people he loved by jumping off that building and in the end he was the one who was left all alone.

When this drama starts the quote “The most painful death to a mortal, is one that is foreseen” is written on the opening screen. If you really think this statement over, there truly is nothing quite as terrifying as knowing that your death is near and you have no way to change or stop it from happening. You are bound to go crazy, to a point, trying to figure out when it could be or what you could do to circumvent it. But knowing that death is coming and accepting that death is coming are two completely different trains of thought. Knowing that something is coming gives one the idea to try fix, change, plan for the coming event. Accepting that something is coming is living in each moment as though it were your last, because what if it is…?

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