Bed Friend
Overall, I really liked this show! Uea and King felt like very fully realized characters to me. They were interesting, flawed, very human in their reactions to each other and the stressful situations the show put them through. The actors had excellent chemistry and really made me believe in their connection. For me, the peak of the series was episode 6 - it was the height of the tension between them, just after we started seeing that they had something real, and featured the only pre-finale bed scene that actually felt deeply intimate and sexy to me (this is not a knock, I think this was quite intentional on the part of the show).
After that, some of the plotting got a little dicey, with very serious conflicts suddenly getting dealt with far too conveniently. I didnât like rich boy King just making a few phone calls and neatly dispatching all of Ueaâs abusers; those resolutions didnât feel equal to the magnitude of the trauma we were taken through with Uea. And there were a few instances, like the confession scene at the end of episode 8, where I believe the translations were bad because the emotions and reactions of the characters just were not lining up with what my subs claimed they were saying. But even with those quibbles, the core relationship stayed solid and I believed in their emotional development, and I appreciated that the show took some time getting back to their physical connection once they decided to be serious about each other, and that we got to see Uea essentially adopted into Kingâs family. The finale was just a horny epilogue (Iâm making fetch happen @shortpplfedup) and fluff fest, which felt earned for this show more than most.
Many smarter people than me have already done a ton of thorough analysis on this show, so Iâm just gonna reblog folks like @wen-kexing-apologist instead of attempting to break it down myself. But I do want to weigh in on a couple things that were on my mind as I tracked reactions (with help from excellent weekly recaps from @bengiyo and @waitmyturtles) and considered whether I wanted to watch:
Is it realistic for this much terrible shit to happen to one character?
Does this feel like trauma porn?
On the first question, let me just say it unequivocally: YES. I have personal and family experience with a lot of the types of trauma Uea went through, which I wonât get into because⌠I donât wanna. If you donât, and therefore find it hard to believe a parent could be that awful, or that this many predators could find one person, I am glad for you. But the truth of the matter is that yes, some parents are really that hateful toward their children, and itâs quite common for victims of abuse to be perpetually targeted over the course of their life. Abusers have some sort of uncanny radar for vulnerable people.
On the second question, I wonât speak for anyone else, but for me the trauma depicted in this show did not feel gratuitous or exploitative. Ueaâs experiences, and their effect on his mental health and ability to connect with others, were taken seriously. King, while certainly not perfect, treated him with respect and supported him as soon and as much as he could with the opportunities he was granted. We got to see Uea find some peace, make a new family for himself, and truly start to heal. If youâre going to lean on trauma to drive characterization and relationship development, this is the way it should be done.
This show gets two thumbs up from me, and I will be enthusiastically seated for Middlemanâs Love.
