Nice to know another fellow Supernatural fan turned to gay Asian dramas as well 😂😂 I love that! I haven't been this excited about a bl since...well this may actually be the first time! Kinnporsche is actually really good!
Yesss! I've been watching BLs since early in 2018 or so, and they have come a really long way. Ironically, my very first BL was a censored Chinese one (Advance Bravely), but I fell in love with all the fanfic tropes brought to life on the screen. I didn't even know what BL was at the time, but as soon as I posted about it here literally dozens of people let me know about the genre. Apparently we're all zealots when we fall down the BL rabbit hole.
I only sporadically posted about them on Tumblr because we were getting so much content from the spn fandom.
Yet the true turning point for me when I decided to post about them more freely was the night that the Supernatural finale aired, November 19 2020. Everyone here was mourning that finale (which I still haven't watched) because of how dirty it did Cas, and particularly Dean. Yet that same day the finale to I Told Sunset About You also aired AND IT WAS GLORIOUS. Literally some of the best TV ever with beautiful cinematography, A+ acting, amazing lead chemistry, and it told the story of two queer boys finding their way into a romantic relationship with each other. It was just so... hopeful. I thought it could be a salve to the fandom that had been so gutted by a horrible ending. So I spammed my dash with ITSAY posts, and that's all she wrote.
I love the same things about BLs that I do about kdramas -- fun tropes I'd previously only read in romance novels or fanfic, and contained plot arcs (a series usually runs for a single season and has a beginning, middle, and end). Short run times (a whole series usually takes only 2 to 4 months to air, at most) mean that I will LITERALLY NEVER HAVE TO FEEL BETRAYED BY A TERRIBLE ENDING EVER AGAIN. A few BLs do have bad endings, but 1) I'm spoiled about them by the fandom before I start watching them so I can just choose not to watch it, and 2) the fact that I only invested a few months of my life (at most) into the fan experience greatly lessens the size of the wound from any perceived betrayal.
Basically, I love BL and kdramas so much, they're basically the only media I consume these days unless something from the west seems particularly awesome (like Heartstopper or OFMD). I also love how the fandom for BL and kdramas is literally a fandom for those entire industries, instead of just a single particular show. We all jump from show to show as they air, watching multiple shows at a time. And there's so many shows to chose from, you really can prioritize only watching the shows that resonate with you. It's like a banquet hall of tables filled with food to feed our queer little romance-loving hearts!
Before I discovered BL, I felt like I was starving eating only the queer content scraps we get in the west. I invested in shows with ships that never went anywhere like Sherlock and Merlin and Hawaii Five 0 and Supernatural and Vikings. Every couple of years, I'd find a new show to feed me slightly better queer scraps because of queer showrunners and incredible storytelling like Hannibal. I very very occasionally gorged on the few shows with actually positive queer content like Queer as Folk and Black Sails and Sense8.
Imagine my delight when I realized that countries like Thailand, Korea, Taiwan, and Japan were literally churning out legitimately queer shows in quantities I couldn't keep up with even if I'd wanted to!!!
I am simply so full and satisfied these days. And with shows like Kinnporsche and Not Me stretching the very definition of the genre this year, I feel like we're only going to keep getting a better variety of shows to indulge in.
jacobvanloon
blakekathryn
theartofmadeline
