#reloved

[thisautistic]

[byemambo]

Eye fucking, figuratively and literally.

YEAR CHOTRITUD AS DON

Reloved (2025)

[negrowhat]

Okay ThanAkin are a mess. But Don and Pond?????????????????????

They're probs going to be a hot mess to but hey at least their smashing.

[heretherebedork]

Well, guess I might have to watch the special episode? Sigh.

[pointlesscandies]

I love Than and the way he’s handling Akin suddenly coming back into his life. Akin left him—just vanished one day with no explanation. I can’t imagine how much that hurt, and clearly it still does. But instead of shutting down or running from it when they cross paths again, Than goes, “No. What you did sucked. I deserve an explanation.” And then proceeds to pull full Looney Tunes–level antics to get the truth out of him.

[gotmehookedonthekpop]

Man, I'm glad they locked the door.

[maybe-boys-do-love]

You wanna know why I stan my avoidant BL leads so hard? Why I stan the guys who jump to conclusions and don't talk it out and have so much suspicion and insecurity they can't bring themselves to fully commit to the relationship? Why I tolerate them being ten times worse when they feel things falling apart and ghost? Why my heart goes out to the guys like Akin in Reloved, Jiwoo in To My Star, Tamtawan in The Ex-Morning, or Phupha in ATOTS, or so, so, so many others? Well, babe, that's gay culture.

Not in a celebratory sense. Poor communication about the nature of the relationship is the reality for a lot of gay men. For whatever psychological reasons (I could make my hypotheses and many others already have), this behavior is prominent for gay men, leading to a lot of confusion and pain within the dating scene. Many queer men also do not find themselves proud they behave that way but still do it despite themselves, and that self-betrayal builds shame upon shame. How do you climb out of that hole your digging yourself? Most of the prominent gay self-help books (The Velvet Rage, The Best Little Boy in the World, Straight Jacket) attempt to address that central issue of the gay experience: gay shame and its manifestations.

The new season of The Boyfriend on Netflix, a Japanese gay dating reality show, is such an interesting pairing with Reloved, because the contestants of the Netflix series are discussing outright their experiences with the same issues being hated on by BL fiction watchers. The third season of His Man, the Korean gay dating reality show, had a similar drama among the contestants. So many BL-fans seem to assert these kinds of ghostings and miscommunications are some sort of contrived plot that should spell the end of the romantic couple, but it's much closer to reality than imagined.

I spill a lot of words defending BL as a legitimate queer genre, but I'm not interested in defending all kinds of BL fan engagement as compassionate toward queer men. I'm tired of seeing the ignorance around this specific character-type and plot line. You don't have to like it. But posting in the tags of a show each week to complain about this queer character behavior as if it shouldn't be depicted is rude to fans of the show, at best, and verging on homophobic, at worst. I'm not defending the behavior depicted--it hurts to have someone do that shit to you. I am, however, defending the option and even the need for the gay romance genre to depict those characters and let the characters' and audiences process it without demonizing them or saying they are unworthy of love or reconciliation. You want to have your gays in fiction? Well, you aren't actually getting gays unless your getting some of the gay mess, too.

[dribs-and-drabbles]

OHMYGOD is my goddamn clown-ass theory version of events actually going to be correct?!?