Not to b like this bc I know i have mutuals who say this (and I love you and i know it comes from a good place 😘) but I think it is okay to engage in "character erasure" especially in the HP fandom.
I don't engage with characters I don't like, and frankly, I'd rather have someone who loathes a character that I personally love just sort of leave 'em alone anyway. I mean, you don't have to, obviously, because fandom discourse is fun, but like, if someone really hates a character, why should they feel compelled to include them in their fics/art? Idk, maybe it's just because I have my little fandom corner that I'm comfortable saying this...
But if you feel like your fave gets left out, then might I suggest creating more art of them? Or fic? Or metas? Sometimes sharing what you like about a character instead of trying to shame people into feeling bad about not liking them is a better way to get people on your side.
Idk, just my two cents. Also, so I don't get eviscerated, I do know that some characters are ignored because of societal biases and prejudices, but I also think that making people feel guilty about that isn't a great way to sell a character. I mean, if you want your fave to be more popular, show folks what makes them great!
Thoughts on Love Mechanics: (very long and rambling)
I loved the first half of the series. The lead actors, War and Yin, are fabulous and have great chemistry, whether sexual, angry, playful, comedic. I just really like War's face and the way he uses his eyes and his smile. I find him compelling and charismatic. I also liked almost all of the side characters. Many of them didn't have a big part, or were mostly there for comedy or to move the plot along, but they still felt like fully realized people who were living their own interesting lives off-screen. (Perhaps it's because the series grew out of a set of interconnected stories, I haven't watched them yet.)
More thoughts, both praise and critique, below the cut. (Includes tons of spoilers):
I'm fairly new to BL, although I've read a lot of romance, including queer (mostly m/m) romance, and a lot of fanfiction. These, it seems, have overlapping tropes/arcs/conventions as BL but are not exactly the same. (I've learned a lot about BL conventions from @absolutebl's posts here.)
I've been binging BL shows this summer, and I'm starting to think I really dislike the traditional strong sense/uke dynamic. (Maybe I'll make another post of which shows I like and dislike.)
So basically, I like up until Mark sees Ploy kissing Vee because the VeeMark dynamic feels interesting and ever shifting. After that they seem to switch to a more standard seme/uke dynamic with bonus miscommunication, which I found frustrating, annoying and boring.
I'm only 20 minutes into episode 9, which I turned off because I was so bored with the pervert boxer plot line. So hopefully it will improve with the last episode and a half, but I'm afraid the show lost the courage of its messiness and went for standardization.
Love Mechanics caught my attention from the beginning. I like that the show begins with a drunken, dubiously consensual hookup, where Mark thinks he's fucking another person, and Vee is cheating on his girlfriend. It's chaotic, it's hot, the actors commit to the physicality of the sex scene, which I'm discovering is often not the case for BLs.
I liked Mark's immature pursuit of Bar, and the mean sneering way that War portrayed that. I liked that the conflict after that is that they don't want to be cheating but they are incredibly drawn to each other. I even liked all the implausible coincidences that threw them together over and over, so their connection felt like it developed naturally. Yes, Vee should have figured his shit out with his girlfriend, but it felt naturally messy that he didn't. He was young, in his first LTR, loved her but it seemed like he was somewhat passive in starting the relationship with her. I liked that it felt like he both still loved Ploy and at the same time was falling for Mark. That felt messy and real.
I even liked the plot twist of Ploy cheating on Vee; it didn't feel like a cop-out to excuse Vee's cheating but instead something that added complexity to the decisions Vee and Mark had to make. Should Vee look any closer at his relationship with Ploy, or just ignore it and coast on the giddy feeling of in love. (He choose ignore.) Should Mark tell Vee that he saw Ploy with another man? It might clear the way for Mark to be with him, but then again Mark is so uncertain of what Vee actually wants and would choose. Mark and Vee never talk about the cheating, almost never talk about Ploy. It's a terrible idea, it's messy and it's fascinating to watch.
I even liked the soap opera plot twists of the anniversary and the promise to tell and the car accident. Unbelievable, yes, but the characters felt believable so I was happy to have the hand of fate/scriptwriters maneuvering them into situations.
I liked the tension between their desire to be public about their relationship and the need to hide and protect it. I even liked Yawah's scheming, although normally that kind of thing annoys me. I think because a) it felt like it added useful tension and b) because Yiwaa felt like a real person, someone young, who made her way as a woman in an overwhelming male space by being dominant and a leader and who genuine wanted to protect her friends but was clumsy about how.
But then after that kiss the scriptwriters' choices mostly did not hold up for me. Yes it made sense that Mark felt hurt and betrayed, but the fact that no one told him Vee hadn't kissed her felt so contrived to add drama. And there was so much drama to be had without that "miscommunication!" Yes, he was hurt and this was a repeat of the last time Vee failed to keep his promise and so I get why he wouldn't want to hear from Vee. But Vee kept pushing at all of Mark's other boundaries, why wouldn't he just blurt out it he didn't kiss her! Or text him or something. It doesn't make sense for the pushiness we've seen in Vee to be so passive about this one thing.
It would still make sense for Mark to break up with Vee even knowing the truth about the kiss. He could decide that Vee has let him down too many time and he doesn't trust him anyway. That would totally be in character and create more tension without having them act like idiots. And the tension would higher because it was based on something real. Of course they have trust issues! They began with deceptions and lies and cheating and continued all that way.
My first choice would actually have been to have Vee kiss Ploy back when she kissed. Perhaps that's too much of a deviation from a one-true-love main couple for standard BL, but I think that would of created some fascinating tension for Mark and Vee to resolve and brought up the buried issues in their relationship (the ones that the show seems like it's just going to ignore and paper over).
It feels in character for Vee to have kissed back - he still has love and care for Ploy, even if it's not romantic any more, and he has a track record of bad sexual decision-making under intense emotions, and it was an intense day for him. I don't think he would sleep with her, but it's so easy to kiss somebody back who you used to kiss all the time.
And it gives Mark a much more plausible and compelling arc. As is, it feels like he's stopping up his ears and refusing to listen. And Vee has fucked up before, but in this case he's actually done nothing wrong! He's helping a friend who's being abused. Mark can be selfish (i like that about the character) but he seems like he would at least care about Ploy being safe even if she is his "rival." This storyline makes Mark feel more childish than I think he is.
A real kiss would give him a real reason to feel betrayed and hurt, real things Vee needed to do to repair them and hopefully force them to work through their real issues.
It would push them to figure out what they really mean to each other. It could push Vee to look at why he stayed with with Ploy for so long and why he was leaving her now. It could push them to look at a relationship that was an affair, was breaking someone else's trust, and figure out how to trust each other after that.
A real kiss could also force the screenwriters to acknowledge the looming specter of cheating. So far, the series hasn't acknowledged the cheating at all post-Ploy, and I'm actually quite annoyed by that. Not because I think cheaters need to be punished but because it was a big deal to them both and it should affect them! They felt guilty about it! It shaped how they related to each other! They hid it from their friends! Mark's hometown bf cheated on him! He had trust issues and wants people to keep their promises!
Vee's gf cheated on him! And I assume Vee had some thoughts and emotions around accepting all her "I'm sorrys" while hiding his own cheating from her, but the show never brings it up. It's so weird! I assumed for a while that they were repressing those feelings and it would come out later, but now it looks like the show is headed somewhere else and the drunken hookup and emotional affair will be treated like any other meet-cute and all the interesting juicy emotions to come out of it will be swept aside. How boring. Hopefully I'm wrong.
(Now, I don't know how they address those issues, other than the generic and boring "talk about it." It's hard! Probably that's why the series swerved away.)
The show replaces this honest reckoning with a generic (at least to me) quest for Vee to win Mark back. Mark gets to be either passive (accepting sunscreen and towel coverage) or resistant (enlisting his ex to try and scare Vee away.)
Some of its cute (the shitty old truck and the inadequate breakfast). Some of it infuriates me (the pervert boxer brought in at the 11th hour to give Vee something to protect Mark from.) War and Yin are good enough actors to make the character feel consistent and real. Their chemistry continues to sparkle. Their eyes can still break my heart. But this is so disconnected from their earlier story that we might as well be in a whole new series. Regardless of how I feel about this type of seme/uke dynamic in general (I hate it!) it has nothing to do with these characters or what they need to resolve.
Hopefully this is just a detour, but I fear it's the endpoint.
I was also going to write more about my dislike of this kind of seme/uke dynamic, but this is already super long and rambling. In sum, a) it's a distillation of my least favorite heterosexual relationship dynamic. b) I personally find that kind of boundary crossing and bossiness enraging. c) from what I see it creates a love interest whose main or even sole personality trait is the desire to win the uke, which I find makes an incredibly boring and yet also annoying character. d) and it makes the tension between the main characters a dully one-dimensional demand-resist.
