#lovesick 2014

[applesdefinitely]

but it's just fish and ocean down there

[blbeloved]

Is Physique Inflation Ruining *BL?

If consuming a steady media diet of images of wall to wall hegemonic masculinity is destructive to straight men’s self esteem, to the extent it gives them body dysmorphia, chemical addiction and eating disorders, what do you think is happening to queer men’s psyche when all the leading men in the BL they predominantly consume are suddenly Masc4Masc?

The answer should be more than obvious straight off the rip, but you can also see the impact in the increasing frequency of queer men on social media (finally catching up with women’s sentiments) who are complaining more and more that Thai BLs are just not hitting like they used to. I’ve spoken elsewhere about the ever narrowing representation of male-male intimacy here, a worldview now so entrenched in certain BL industries there was a huge uproar when a Chinese BL creator team refused to replicate this shortcoming in the finale of Revenged Love. The narrowing of representations of what male looks like down to how this would be represented in the west is a huge problem on its own.

I don’t know what is this man’s orientation but A. K. Savage is in Clinical Psychology, Fitness, and is and a fantasy writer who centers male characters. In this video he’s taking on the issue of Physique Inflation as a problem in the *writing community* by exploring a term all of us have been seeing but many struggle to make the connections with the quality declines in media that take this route to mediocrity.

Link to full video in comments.

This previously untheorised phenomenon in BL live-action discourse, clearly influenced by western filmmaking (like everything else that diminishes BL) is one I do notice in Thai BL but not Thai Lakorn, so it doesn’t seem to be a Thai media problem per se. Personally, since 2021 whenever I see muscular men shirtless on the poster or in the trailer I instinctively know that particular BL is getting ready to disappoint before I had a term for what was going on. An entire graveyard of flops gives credence to my hunch, to those with the ability to spot patterns, that conservative visuals are meant to compensate for the lack of any radical narrative and I haven’t been proven wrong yet. Only now my suspicions have been confirmed as to exactly where that phenomenon arises from - not from the BL community but from the hegemonised elites managing the most prolific BL TV industries instead.

How Physique Inflation isn’t blatantly obvious to gay Directors of BL adaptations who turn our most popular ships into bodybuilding twins (Adachi had a sixpack in Cherry MagicTH y’all), and the terrible impact it would have on queer men watching their series, is mind blowing to everyone. Or is it …?

- Censorship is More than the Absence of Sex Scenes -

A couple of years ago I was re-watching the OG Lovesick the Series 2014 with some BL fandom friends and noticing how lovely and natural everyone was and how confident in their bodies, facial looks and their acting abilities those young actors were way back then.

One unforgettable scene is when the femme-presenting cheering squad had a crisis of confidence about their looks and mannerisms; it was the engineering jocks who assure them how vital their presence was just as they are and the cheer team came back after to thank them for the psychologically affirming support with a present. How often can we see such sentiments in a BL script today?

To this day many international fans don’t even grasp why *Engineering*, a highly gendered, male dominated and exclusionary profession, has been repeatedly centered by Thai BL authors and instead keep demanding TBL move away from deconstructing this bastion of patriarchal hegemony - not a single clue 🤦‍♀️ .

That Lovesick rewatch also made me remark how if Love By Chance were made today Ae would’ve had to have been bigger and a lot more muscular and had gone through all kinds of special make up and even cosmetic procedures to make him appear more like the hyper masculine male ideal you see on Western TV.

What post-LBC BL hits has Perth been the star in since he embarked on his masculinisation tour? The fact he hasn’t had a hit like LBC is not because of his looks but because the best actor in Asia cannot out-act a mediocre script.

Lately I’ve been watching a great reactor react to Until We Meet Again and the same thought comes up. First how beautiful and gorgeous everyone looks with their own faces, noses and no unnecessary false teeth, and how relaxed and assured they are in their natural bodies that looked like perfectly healthy, young and active Asian people with high self-esteem and obvious cultural pride.

Compared with the years since Cvid, it is certainly the case that the more artificial features and mandatory muscularity that we see in visual storytelling on BL screens the worse is the quality of the production.

- The Return of the Male Gaze in BL is Ideological Censorship -

The reimposition of the male gaze where it resolutely doesn’t belong also says something about the specific forms of censorship creeping into Thai BLs. This isn’t even that the principal audience is asking for this because from the time they started interviewing women about male body preferences it was never for the hyper masculine norm men are more likely to embrace because of colonisation and patriarchal conditioning. Women and girls are indoctrinated into masculinity worship too but it doesn’t have the same visual hold on them as minority men who are excluded from what masculinity means, and this departure is even greater among women in BL circles.

This particular visual preoccupation, which is actually opposed to the aesthetics of the BL Canon and even Asian masculinties, reflects the wishes and desires like everything else in a BL of the decision makers behind the camera - the Director who is directing and of the companies and investors who are paying for normativity to take pride of place in a BL.

They’re opting to participate in an ostensibly transformative sphere but still favour the logic of a conservative, anti-queer, foreign media mainstream. Bringing back the male gaze is not something that comes from male DNA, it is a reactionary political stance that is white, western and straight. This means anyone indoctrinated into unacknowledged male supremacy can perform it and express a bias towards masculinity performance, describing it as a “preference” despite its harms.

The peak irony of this particular development is that China’s censoring authorities have been demanding particular visuals but the stubborn response from Chinese BL creators of screen adaptations is a resounding No in the one country where blind critics try to tell us tell us censorship is everything and is the defining feature of every dangai that reaches the screen.

But in supposedly “uncensored” BL industries this norm has been self-imposed in the exact same post-2021 period and in the complete absence of official state sanction! Thai Directors are doing willingly - installing reactionary propaganda in their storytelling, that which Chinese BL Directors are going to great lengths in defying institutional pressure by refusing to do. Look around you for the past year since Dangai production resumed and tell me who blinked first.

In order to be emancipatory, in order to be substantively ideologically and politically transgressive, BL must actively resist the dominance of hegemonic ideologies and practices, not comply with them, even if they’re accepted as warped preferences within elite hierarchies of the oppressed communities in question themselves.

[blbeloved]

Lovesick the Series is 10 Years Old and Still Peerless in Thai BL.

I was chatting this week with some BL friends in our Killer and Healer discord on the subject of old-time BLs and why they’re superior.

After discussing the staying power of SOTUS and why it ought to be considered the real *organic* hit on the list of Thai BL YouTube Releases and not 2Gether (2Gether rose to statistical prominence under artificially created one-off circumstances and was never considered a critical success), I suggested an even stronger case can be made for the OG Lovesick Series of 2014 as the true King of Thai BL.

If 2Gether at 90M views can be considered an all-time-great when it benefited primarily from being released during a planetary event the world experiences only every 100 years, creating ideal viewing conditions when even Hollywood was producing nothing, then what can we call Lovesick which benefitted from no ideal market conditions, no global media marketing, had unknown actors but still racks up half 2Gether’s *total* series views in a Single episode - 43 Million views - of an episode that remains unsubbed to this day?

I counted past 100 Million YT views before I got tired and stopped.

Surely that’s the actual Thai BL masterpiece territory?

More than 40 million YT views - and we haven’t even started counting Lovesick’s terrestrial TV and Netflix (the only ones with subs for years) views, in an episode released at a time of no BL trending model, no bot farms or free female fandom labour, and no explicit sex scenes.

I also note with great satisfaction that the much derided (a hate campaign to diminish Unforgotten Night relative to that other Thai mafia series that was airing simultaneously) Unforgotten Night was as popular on YT - only one of Four airing platforms for this series, as BLs that enjoyed a lot more commercially manufactured hype such as Bad Buddy, or a critical BL success such as Until We Meet Again created by Director New Siwaj at the height of his creative genius.

This suggests that not only is Unforgotten Night a more successful production than 95% of all Thai BL but is likely the most popular Mafia BL of all time (sorry HIStory3 Trapped). But I digress.

Perhaps you’re wondering why this particular episode of Lovesick The Series was being watched and is still being re-watched when we already forget the names and plots of hundreds of other Thai BLs?

It’s all about the BL of that era being true to its roots and embarking on creation for purpose ie to meet a human need, rather than creation whose value is in its singular ability to generate financial profits.

In the current BL Exploitation Era nothing matters more than money - maximum profits for the corporate owners of the much degraded IPs for the least inputs invested; not quality storytelling, not viewers’ or fans’ mental health, not even the future career of actors brought low by their experience of BL mediocrity, and certainly not queer liberation.

That episode 18 was one of the emotional turning points of the entire tapestry of Phun and Noh’s (there are five other gay boys in Lovesick not including The Angels) meaningful and unforgettable gay love story out of over 50 episodes in total (just watch the BL cut which a few dedicated fans have taken the time to edit and sub). It features the two boys deepening their intimacy together by expanding their care, understanding, knowledge, respect, responsibility and trust in and for each other - all the essential ingredients one needs for love at any age. They work through their individual and joint challenges as a team and they support each other through mental pain, emotional collapse and eventual triumphant recovery.

You know what else that YT BL chart-toppers lists suggest to me looking at the vast falloff in interest among fujoshis between a sex-focussed series like Only Friends and all the Thai BL greats. Take a look 🔝 for yourself and see.

The viewers’ interest cliff OF falls off of is more consequential than the ones encountered by Wei Ying and Lin Shu - combined 🤣.

And they say “sex sells” 🙄. Another reminder that we should *never* take our understanding of artistic value or human sexuality from a western, capitalist commercial slogan designed to exploit the alienated and the vulnerable.

Lovesick, the Ultimate Thai BL Series, you will always be great!

Sādhu 🙏🏼 🙇‍♀️🙏🏼 สาธุ 🙏🏼 🙇‍♀️🙏🏼.

[thebluezoneofalonelygirl]

So I have been watching Lovesick 2024. Lovesick was my first BL back in 2014 so seeing this show being remade brings a lot of memories. So far I would say it’s a good remake, but I wish it had the same OST than back then. And something about the actor that plays Phun bothers me. But then again these are newbies so im sure theyll improve with time

[elextranjerobukowski-blog]

Una de las mejores series de Netflix. Lastima que nadie prácticamente nadie sepa que existe. Lovesick, 2014.