ABL, hello! I finished my second rewatch of Ailongnhai and I have a linguistics question please? You have done an incredibly wonderful and indepth post previously on SCOY and Daisy & Touch regarding particle use and pronouns, which I loved reading and understanding the culture a little better. Coming back to watch ALN a second time made me realise that Ai is also using kha with Nhai. While Nhai accepts this and calling Ai hubby (if Ping wasn't as cute and endearing as he is, I would've had to cringe out), I'm interested to hear whether this is a regular occurrence (the kha usage, not hubby ugh) as I feel like I haven't heard it before in many shows - or whether this is specific to how Ai views/wants Nhai to act accordingly with him, and as a result we get the gradual softening over the series?
Yes, but the level to which Ai uses it is very queer coded. Like he "learned this from the gay dad's" kinda thing. It's pretty household and private, when Ai trots it out in public it's pure claiming. He is making A POINT to Nhai and others.
Kha is a real softening (its most common use by men is on much younger girls in a sibling way, see Pete do this with Ai's niece in Love By Chance), so it's usually only used (by a BL lead on a BL lead) to tease (and even then ja is more likely) or in private if the other half is significantly sweeter (or the kha user wants him to behave in a more needy manner). Kha implies under this context "I will look after you because I like you but also because you need looking after, you clearly can't take care of yourself."
So I could see Dino eventually using kha with Rak. Or trying to.
But Pat would never even attempt this with Pran (Bad Buddy) evcept as a big joke. I wouldn't put a ha past them (in private) though.
Another example might be DeanPharm. Pharm is the kind of character who might take a kha from a boyfriend, and Dean would use it on him if they'd worked that out, but because of Dean's formal reserved personality, the most likely would be ha, and then only in private. Dean doesn't have anything to prove, he knows their dynamic perfectly well.
Ai is almost entirely defined by a need to prove himself, his claim, his relationship, his gayness.
If Solo was the older character he likely would have used kha with Gui in Oxygen, but he's too young.
I guess what I am saying is you need the right character synamic to use this one.
It tends to work best and most naturally with a non-tsundere uke character. If Pete and Ai didn't have such a vast class difference between them, Ai might have gone to kha eventually with him. But the act of using kha ALSO softens the speaker, so the speaker has to be very confident in himself and his status to use it. Or very uncaring about others' perceptions of him.
I keep thinking of Dino similar to Ai. But that show has only just started. We shall see were it goes.