Today's polish reminded me of sparkling pool water! (Is that a thing?😂) It has a teal blue base with a green shimmer. Sounds so simple right? But that shimmer is so incredibly glowy and beautiful in every single kind of light and the base color is so saturated and bright. Looking at it in the bottle, I figured it was going to be sheer. So I was shocked that it was completely opaque in two coats. It does show brush strokes a bit and didn't self level super well, but I'm willing to look past that for a color this gorgeous. This is River Styx from Mooncat.
Real cokeheads will remember that coke did release a Georgia peach flavour a few years back. I don't remember if they were any good, I mostly remember that they were expensive, being sold in glass bottles at the grocery store.
This isn't the Georgian peach flavour, this is the one they sell in China. As with all coke products, the flavour is exactly as described, it's coke but it tastes a lil like peach. I like peach, so I was of course primed to like this.
The perfect drink for building my mobile fighter GF13-001NHII master gundam: Master Asia from G Gundam. This is my first master grade kit and it's far more complex than the HG kits. Supposedly this was one of the last Gundam lines to use nail components so I've had to dig out the Phillip's head for this assembly.
This delicious coke product gave me the energy needed to complete his left arm so for that I'm gonna give it A tier.
God I really like this item. It is the much, much more successful younger brother to Contagion, scaling off of your damage and activating with no needed input from the player (looking at you Sharp Straw). At a certain damage point this is almost guaranteed room clears. This item won't win you a run, but it'll definitely make it a lot easier and a lot better. The *only* thing I can say against it is that the visual poison effect it gives can sometimes lag games, especially on switch. All in all, this is a solid A tier item.
Also Minecrafter will be moved to D tier. It being an active item *really* drops it for me.
DISTRIBUTION: Extensive (North America, South America, Eurasia, Africa)
NOTABLE ATTRIBUTES:
Short, strong saber teeth capable of both gripping and stabbing
Large, powerful incisor teeth that interlock to create a vice or beartrap bite
Evidence suggests pack hunting behavior and caching food for later, implying high intelligence
Non-retractile claws grant increased traction and speed when running
Gracile body with hyena-like proportions which allows for high-speed pursuits
Huge eyes and nasal passages similar to modern cheetahs, creating excellent vision and increased oxygen intake when sprinting
Bite force comparable to modern cats (much higher than the “dirk-toothed” sabercat lineage)
WEAKNESSES:
Physically smaller and weaker due to slender build
Unable to do severe damage with paw swipes or climb efficiently, due to non-retractile claws that become worn down when running
A very formidable group with an impressive paper record, homotherium cats may not be the biggest, but certainly have a strong argument for being the baddest. Their near global distribution and relatively long run is a testament to their efficiency as pursuit predators. As another testament to their effectiveness, isotopic analysis of their bones show that they were regularly killing and eating mammoths, one of the largest animals in any terrestrial ecosystem. All of this suggests that they operated in coordinated groups as a well-oiled killing machine. Even in areas where they had to contend with bigger, nastier cats like lions and smilodon cats, homotherium established themselves as capable and efficient predators. However, due to their overall lack of bulk and raw power, they often found themselves as less than apex predators, and most species were overshadowed by their bigger, meaner felid cousins.
Other character(s) i enjoyed: …we'll circle back to this one
Overall review:
A fluffy everybody-lives Romeo and Juliet remix but also an allegory for homophobia and rejecting the inheritance of trauma? Sure, why not.
Nothing particularly stood out to me about the camerawork, but it's at least very competently produced and edited…visually. We'll get to the audio later, but a couple of the songs are catchy. The set design feels lived in. It's yet another story set at a university, but i literally do not care how many gay college stories the industry comes up with from now until the end of time. It's nice to see new ideas, but if you can do it well, why mess with a trope that gets the job done?
The biggest thing this show does right is the absolutely frenetic chemistry between Pran and Pat. Whatever their emotional frequency is at, it absolutely radiates from the screen. The writing is a decent foundation for the characters; the acting simply blasts it directly over the top. As the soundtrack and voiceover will remind you incessantly, this is a classic enemies-who-don't-want-to-be to lovers-who-can't-be-anything-else progression, with a couple small twists for added flavor. Their flashback scenes really round out the characters and help explain why they can't seem to stop circling one another. Even before Pat realizes he's down bad, the audience knows exactly why he would fall for Pran despite their family feud.
Their story arc is nothing we haven't seen in the past five hundred or so years of dramatic romances, but the tone of Bad Buddy strikes hits a sweet spot for me personally: It's lighthearted, sometimes intense, and occasionally it gives naïve camp—but it's always deeply earnest, and everything gets resolved before anyone gets too hurt. The play-within-a-play trope will always get me (shoutout to my boy Hamlet), and that damn gun showing up in episode 8 is so very stupid in the best possible way.
The parents' storyline (hinted at by the uhhhh title of the show, in case that wasn't clear! love that some of y'all thought Wai was the Big Bad™ for some reason though) is great, and they do a very good job keeping the background tension alive, particularly after Pran's outing when the rival faculties storyline quickly stops mattering. That betrayal, when it finally comes out, is compelling without being overly sympathetic, and it serves the show's theme of rejecting the burdens others demand that you carry. The parents' quiet but very incomplete growth in the finale, particularly for Pran's mom, is equal parts heartwarming and eyeroll-worthy, which is probably the most realistic part of the show.
Speaking of themes, Bad Buddy wants to say a lot. It's very Romeo and Juliet, yes, but there's also a lot about, say, the relationship between capitalism, environmentalism, and sectarian violence in Southeast Asia. (You really shouldn't pretend this is the central conflict, but you wanted to read it that way, the material is technically there!) In terms of the themes the writers cared more openly about, we can start with sexual identity and the political utility of coming out. This is where Bad Buddy takes a strident and surprisingly nuanced position: If coming out is a problem, then take pride in lying through your teeth to everyone who makes it difficult. The finale was a very weird episode of television, but as a manifesto i kind of love the practical position it takes. A lot of the new wave of LGBTQ+ media in general basically takes it as a given that coming out is a Narrative Milestone that must be done to advance your story and cannot be taken back, and Bad Buddy straight up tells its audience that actually, strategic retreat into the closet is fine if you think you need it. There is no shame if you aren't ashamed, and if you can, make sure you have fun while you do it. I don't know if i fully believe it in the way Bad Buddy presents it, but i do love a hot take, and i understand the real-world utility of that message.
The other major theme is more complex and is kind of its own twist on the story of Romeo and Juliet, and it concerns the political relationships between individuals and their communities, and where the burden lies on changing ourselves versus changing the world around us. They make it very ham-fistedly obvious in the last two episodes, but it's kind of omnipresent, and it ties together the environmental themes (surprise! they're actually important) with the themes around homophobia and intergenerational trauma. The last episode espouses an almost word-for-word do-no-harm-take-no-shit ethical code, but i think the rest of the show is more interesting than that. Sometimes it's important to change the way we see ourselves in order to engage with the world (see: Pat, bisexual and Pran, proud boyfriend) and sometimes it's important, even virtuous, to interrupt the cycles of violence that we take for granted (see: stopping friends from fighting, replacing the bus stop, calling out abusive parents, joining anarcho-primitivist fishing communes, etc). You are always changing the world and the world is also always changing you. You are sometimes the world you change.
Our B-couple Ink x Pha storyline is only one of two lesbian pairings in BL productions i've enjoyed so far, and i would like to see additional sapphic girlbosses going forward, thank you. Pha in particular is an excellent disaster gay when she's around Ink. I love that their secret food delivery arc parallels Pat and Pran's but tweaks just enough details that Pha's initial disappointment when she finds out it's Ink...feels good feels organic. And their height difference being played as a genderbent trope from the genre they're appearing in while the height difference between the leads is played down? Good shit. Wanted more.
Finally, i just want to return to and emphasize the point that Pat and Pran are the emotional core of Bad Buddy, and they truly do carry this story even when it feels like its other characters are not quite hitting the mark. Their willingness to trust their feelings, their soft but still (relatively) serious scenes wherein they reaffirm how much they care about each other, the chaotic energy they have when they can finally give into their love—this is a couple you never have doubts rooting for. Even though their character growth is fairly minor (Pran gets less neurotic, Pat gets more bisexual), you get the sense that, after the curtains close, these two are going to be just fine. Their relationship is balanced and subversive, and they have fun doing it. Bad Buddy also does what a lot of the girls refuse to do and delivers knockout kiss after knockout kiss with reckless abandon. There is no artificial scarcity of love. These bitches gay good for them etc.
I had a good time, but:
Toward the end, the story is almost as frenetic as the chemistry between the leads. Starting around episode 9 it really feels like they wrote one scene at a time with only a vague sense that the story would eventually have an ending.
As an allegory for homophobia (which, bafflingly, i have seen some of y'all say is absent from the story, to which i say: it's right there—literally the day that Pat and Pran become neighbors and their parents both pray for them, as infants, to have girlfriends. there's no heteronormativity (or dramatic irony in this scene for that matter) without homophobia. argue with your mother), the story does not do a very good job establishing what the consequences are for Pat and Pran "coming out" as lovers. Why do their friends behave the way they do when they find out, and then why do they start behaving differently? Why do ALL the students suddenly start behaving differently? It's unclear. What are the material consequences of the parents finding out about their relationship while they're still in school? We don't ever find out; they go on vacation. Why do they continue the "breakup" after graduation? Because staying in the closet is sometimes Good, Actually! And i see what the show is doing in each of these moments, i do: The writers and director had a lot of ideas for cute moments and other important messages they wanted to get across. It's just very weird that Bad Buddy wants one of its overall themes to be about not taking up others' burdens when the only burden that seems consistent within the story (the inability to claim each other as lovers) is also the one Pat and Pran seemingly take up of their own free will, for years, for no clear reason other than to please their parents, who are the unambiguous antagonists. And speaking of years…
I am allergic to large timeskips. They're suspiciously tidy…and cover up far too many sins.
Let's stop the car here for a second. I've only watched a handful of Backaof projects and Bad Buddy reminds me a lot of Dark Blue Kiss (2019) in how it builds to a resolution that doesn't quite resolve. Between the two of them, Bad Buddy's finale is more willing to accept that the characters have grown and certain changes are inevitable, but my own tinfoil-hat theory is that this director uses final episodes to squeeze in soothing reminders that the (unsustainable, not ideal) dynamic that originally drew us to the characters is Never Actually Going Away. This uneasy, almost cynical tension between character growth and stagnation is specifically present in a lot of Thai BL, probably because it makes churning out sequels and spinoffs easier if your show is a hit but your writers can't think of new things for the characters to do. Backaof seems to want his characters to grow as people, which is why his shows don't bore me, but a hint of that cynicism always seems to creep back in at the very end. I'm gonna leave that here for now—but if i do get around to rambling about Dark Blue Kiss or literally any other show, we'll get back to it. Hop back in the car.
It's cute that we got a sapphic side story with no weird undercurrents in a show with decent production value, but Ink and Pha should've been allowed to kiss on the lips at least briefly. Ah, well.
Audio quality is usually fine, but occasionally it feels like someone was asleep at the wheel. Sometimes it's completely blown-out, other times nearly inaudible, and Bad Buddy loves a moment where the diegetic music clashes with the soundtrack. Not a big deal but careful with the volume.
Character(s) entitled to financial compensation: This show isn't particularly cruel to any of its characters so this doesn't really apply. But let's take a moment to acknowledge that Wai and Korn are begging for a little extra pizzazz in the way their characters are written, especially toward the end, where apparently the writers want us to intuit a lot of character development happening just offscreen. Korn will beat up people he barely knows for clout but then is also suddenly very sweet and conscientious. What's up with that? And Wai has impulse control issues and the world's shortest fuse but then he…doesn't? The actors do a fine job on the scant writing they're given, but the people are asking: Are these characters or are they plot devices? I wish these two felt a little more lived in and fleshed out. And teasing this pairing without following through was rude.
Conclusion: I didn't think i would say this much about this very sweet, very good show, but it looks like I Had Some Thoughts. I complain because when i care about anything this much, all of its little flaws become very important to me. If you think any of my critiques mean i don't love this show down? you got me fucked up. The first eight episodes of Bad Buddy are S-tier fluff with the perfect amount of low-stakes drama, and the last few, while not perfect, ain't half bad if you let yourself go for the ride. They say you never forget your first, and even though this show introduced me to a whole world of bingeable gay content over the past month, there's something special about Pat and Pran that will probably have me coming back again and again. I had a good fucking time. Also, lesbians.
If you have thoughts that i didn't, feel free to tack on your preferred hot takes, and if you want to hear more about every show i've forced myself to watch over this winter semi-quarantine uhhh engage with this post and i'll talk about why Together With Me (2017) is PEAK television lmk
