#thai ql

[poetry-protest-pornography]

Apparently, a lot of Thai QL (and adjacent) actors have been doing the SOS hand signal as a bit in social media content, and were recently called out for it and so an apology spree happened.

Like, a lot of people were doing this. A bunch of GMM actors, Freen, Engfa and dozens of others.

I guess it's been a trend in Thailand for a while to use it as a joking "get me outta here" thing for everyday annoyances?

I'm not sure how much I buy into the "I didn't know it was an important thing" bit when enough of the meaning of the gesture managed to make it through, but I do want to believe that none of these people thought it was funny to use a gesture created for victims of domestic violence as shorthand for "ugh, my friend is so annoying, help me lol", so I guess I'm choosing to take them at face value for the moment instead of cancelling half of GMM's roster and a bunch of other people whose acting I follow 🙃🤷🏼‍♀️🙃

[a-sweet-old-bl-sleuth]

Overture

As sands fell, words silenced and hearts changed, a musician’s first death neared. And it didn’t stop at one person. Bards lost their souls, businesses lost their bag.

The new world called to the past, yearning for a simpler time. People sought poetry in a ocean of disparagement. Serenades made a comeback; budding love hidden in the warmth of a gaze, or a confession buried in a waltz of voices. Duets returned to prominence, and executives weren’t going to miss out. But they overlooked something.

Emotions were no longer disguised in crowds. Every love story, every heartbreak was a crack in the castle of glass. The facade of the fantastical lives idols lived had never been more vulnerable. Acceptance had become mainstream, but it couldn’t shield against every brick thrown. And what was coming for them was a meteor shower.

Hearts change, but they never stop feeling. Stories, like water, would always find their way through.

But how many would survive the sea of fire and make it to the surface on the other side?

[stilesinwonderland]

2026 Mid-year QL Check-in

YAY NEW TAG GAME!!! Thanks for tagging me @karebear923 luv u xoxox <3

1. Number of QLs you've watched so far:

This is SO embarrassing compared to last year’s numbers but I’ve actually only completed 8 😭 (bc I got into those short dramas from china that are really bad but really addictive LMAO) BUT I do have like 6 that I started but just didn’t finish because they were currently airing and I never watched the last few eps when they came out. But I WILL complete them 🙂‍↕️ (eventually)

2. Best QL you've watched so far:

LUAT!! And it might even be my top ever, or in my top 3 at least. Such a beautiful, beautiful show.

3. QL that you want to watch but haven't gotten around to yet:

I heard Fake Fact Lips was amazing so I did want to start that one!

I’m going to be beat up eventually by Karen if I don’t watch My Beautiful Man so I have to say that too 🙂‍↕️😂

4. QL that was the biggest disappointment for you:

I have to say Dare You To Death just because they were the worst detectives I’ve ever seen. But at least it made it hilarious to watch 💀

5. Most anticipated QL for the second half of the year:

Oh no this is impossible for me to choose bc it’s betraying my faves no matter what I pick 😰 but honestly— I think im looking forward to KengNamping’s new show Still Holding Up Like the Moon! The acting looks SOOOOO good!!!!

6. Biggest surprise/favourite new actor:

I will take this as favorite new actor to me and it’s JJ from Domundi 🥹 he is so funny and sweet and bakes treats for his fans when they come to visit them! He was treated so meanly when he paired with Net which was unfair when he’s so sweet like he is >:(

7. Newest fictional crush:

PHOPPPPPPPPPPPPP THAT’S MY MAN even though @karebear923 and I are currently fighting for Net, she WILL lose 💪🏻

The sweetest, gentlest man alive.

8. Favourite QL that made you happy:

Okay but I feel like I had to answer Me and Thee??? If LUAT didnt exist, Me and Thee would have been a sweep for a lot of these questions because Pond is my man.

9. Favourite QL that made you cry:

Tie between Love Upon a Time and Goddess Bless You From Death ngl, but LUAT was…phew

10: QLs you need to watch by the end of the year:

Okay okay, of the upcomings (if they come out as planned 🙄) and others I need to watch that I can think of:

-Plan B to U (bounprem)

-The Invisible Dragon (firstkhao)

-Peach and Me (pondphuwin)

-30 Days of Us (netjj)

-how to survive my CEO (joongdunk)

-Let Free the Curse of Taekwondo

OKAY IM TAGGING (sorry if you’ve done it already): @pointlesscandies, @biii-pbrigade, @gay-wrongs-activist, @withingerly, @peach-thee, and anyone else who wants to do it, and say that I tagged you!!! I’d love to see your answers 🙂‍↕️

[maybe-boys-do-love]

Greetings! I enjoy your blog quite a bit. Dinner conversation tonight included a question about the international audience breakdown for Thai QL - who else in the world watches it, basically, and where are they? - and while I said there's probably no easy way for most of us to come by that information, I thought that if anybody around here knew where to look, it would be you.

@flowerbeasblog and @clairedaring are the ratings trackers that i know of here, but i think they mostly focus on the tv ratings in thailand.

gmmtv posts their social media trending countries infographics after each episode of their series on their instagram page, and Ticket to Heaven recently broke the company's record for number of countries a series was trending in (trending at number 1 in over 130 different countries). TTH was def a global hit but some of these trending numbers can be skewed-heavily by fan pushes (and both G4 and the previous record-holder Me & Thee's PondPhuwin fandom have strong organization and strategizing for their fandom's social media), so they don't necessarily reflect equivalent viewership numbers.

There is general discourse in the Thai television industry about how strong gmmtv and bl's perform on streaming services compared to traditional lakorn, which has impacted investment, but again, not by region.

Domundi sometimes announces when they have broken a record--i.e. khemjira as the most popularly streamed Thai series on whatever platform it was on--but i don't know that they regularly post them anywhere.

Thomas Baudinette has specifically written about Japan's Thai BL boom after 2gether in his book, with more data to back it up than most writing about international viewership. There are also academic essays I've read about viewership of Thai BL in the Philippines (it's huge there), China, and Indonesia. They aren't recent, though, and I don't remember them including specific numbers. Brazil and Peru are also notable for larger audiences. And this is entirely anecdotal but I feel like I just see a lot of Germans in Thai BL spaces online and on podcasts lol. I'd really like to see more research about African and Caribbean viewership cuz countries from those regions are REALLY often listed in gmmtv's top trending lists, and I've always been curious if it's just a vpn situation or real or what?

idk other ways to tell. television ratings have been generally hard to gauge at all in the streaming platform era. Platforms like netflix have had no requirement to report their viewership data and have been speculated to skew the information when they choose to announce it.

If anyone else has more info, go ahead and tack it on!

[pandasmagorica]

The Edge of Horizon, episode 4

Taking these notes so I don't have to log in until the episode is done. I have a feeling this episode is going to be all over my timeline. I continue to love this series, even with the dubcon.

Neither Phob nor Tinn are good at hiding their feelings, are they? But somehow, Phob can't see it in Tinn, even though photographer Jan can see through both of them.

Still, when Phob's mom - who can also see right through Phob - says "The sky is high and the ground is low," Phob says "It doesn't always have to be like that." And it works on two levels, Phob's interrupted relationship with Tinn and the potentially dangerous work Phob is doing toward a more just society. Love this series! (At least Phob's mom is now trying to be kind and no longer yelling at him.)

Content warning for some noncon and dubcon kissing and marking during the episode.

So many coincidental sightings and discoveries in this series. Yes, I know this is a lakorn. I can deal with it.

Ooh, Siri and Jan using "ha" with each other instead of "kaa"! (And pleased I've learned enough about Thai particles to recognize this, thanks to @absolutebl.)

And love how Siri uses the old Asking for a friend ruse. Listen, Siri, you know you and Tinn can use each other as beards so you can pursue the relationship you really want to pursue (although Siri might still need to have some kids to get your father to shut up). Very bold on Siri's part to effectively out yourself to your father.

Dad to Tinn: Did Phob say anything suspicious. Tinn to dad: We didn't talk much. (How true, I'm roaring with laughter at that one.)

Soldiers openly talking to royals about the tribulations of the common people. Things are tense! Thank you to @absoluteBL for referring us to the historical record. Wild to see it dramatized as a love story.

[pandasmagorica]

2026 Mid-year QL Check-in

Tagged by @hyeoni-comb (hyeoni-comb's check-in). hoo-boy, I actually have to do some work for this one as I don't track when I watched something, so have to dig thru my posts. But it's an interesting ask so I'm going to go ahead with it. And glad to see someone with numbers in the same range as me so I don't feel quite as intimidated. Salute to all of us who can only watch so many QLs and get so far behind on what is out there.

1) Number of QLs you've watched so far:

finished, not a rewatch: 13

dropped: 4

on hold: 2 (long-term, maybe forever)

currently watching: 1

rewatched from previous years: 3

rewatched from this year: if instant rewatches count, 1, otherwise 0

2) Best QL you've watched in 2026 so far:

The Lie We Lived In (Korea), so many twists and turns, never a dull moment, fine acting, over the top ending. Yeah, many plot holes but it was the series so far this year that has most engaged me. Content warning for violence.

Honorary mention to Wishing Upon the Shooting Stars. It could have been best but it rushed and failed to fully set up the ending. Content warning for queasy camera work in the episode 1 and 9 cold opens and brief violence.

3) QL that you want to watch but haven't gotten around to yet:

Goddess Bless You From Death but either it needs to show up on a streaming service I subscribe to or I have to believe China won't install spyware on my computer.

4) QL that was the biggest disappointment for you:

Ticket to Heaven. For a series where the acting was so good, it was glacially slow and didn't set up the psych ending well.

5) Most anticipated QL for the second half of the year:

That's a trick question, since we don't even know out of the dozens of shows GMMTV and Domundi trailered, which ones are actually going to be made. That's before we even get to whether they get released on a service they subscribe to. But I'd say Hug Hlee the Musical - it looks like so much fun ala Rainbow Prince.

6) Biggest surprise favorite new actor (debut or new to you):

Gosh, I can barely recognize most actors let alone pick a favorite. But I'll go with Tsao Lan who played Angela (Wan Zhe's mother) on Wishing Upon the Shooting Stars. She's a great comic actor and she delighted me. Wish she'd gotten a lot more screen time.

7) Newest fictional crush:

Li Wan Zhe (except the jerky never knew Xiang Yong version).

8) Favorite QL that made you happy:

Wooju Bakery was just so off the wall silly I was laughing from beginning to end.

9) Favorite QL that made you cry:

Sorry to say, I don't think any QLs this half year made me cry. Some QLs do make me cry but for some reason didn't work that particular magic on me recently. Maybe Our Dining Table? But I don't remember enough of it to be sure. This is coming from someone who can cry at the opening credits.

10) What QLs do you need to watch by the end of the year?

I feel so overwhelmed by the number of QLs out there now that I can't even anticipate. But among the ones I have access to, possibly The Therapy Game, Love Is Better the Second Time Around, and A Winter Sun OMG Such a Long Title. Oh, and I need to rewatch Eternal Yesterday and maybe, hmmm, Bad Buddy?

Bonus question:

11) Any classics?

Funny you should ask. Yes!

Love of Siam, movie, classic Thai QL.

East Palace West Palace, movie, underground Chinese QL that dates back all the way to 1996, hadn't seen it in a while, wasn't sure it was a QL, could have simply been queer, but after watching it, yes, definitely a QL, although it might be a spoiler to say so.

[maybe-boys-do-love]

An argument could even be made that, because Thai TV is so straight-jacketed in its ability to provide the sort of overt political discursive material requisite for the provision of a functional liberal public sphere, popular programming has in many ways come to assume an even more significant role in practices of TV-mediated public meaning-making and civic exchange. In her fascinating anthropological research on mass media and Thai national identity, Annette Hamilton contends that popular Thai audiences frequently use fictional media as a central source of coded political critique and counter-discourse. Given the highly controlled information environment of Thai broadcasting and its often paternalistic elitism where the ‘views of important and educated people are the only ones that count’ (Hamilton 2002a: 298), Hamilton suggests ‘ordinary’ Thai audiences engage in a form of dual cultural interpretation, outwardly receiving the ‘official’ discourse of Thai media but then reprocessing a counter-discourse of their own. ‘Precisely because everyone knows the news is not what is really happening,’ she writes, watching TV ‘becomes a major act of cultural interpretation’ whereby audiences ‘re-interpret or deconstruct’ official discourse using ‘hidden narratives… as explanatory frameworks’ (Hamilton 2002a: 292). These hidden narratives stem from a range of sources and assume multiple forms, from gossip and folklore to popular mysticism, but Hamilton singles out fictional narrative media as a particularly fertile site for this practice of popular reinterpretation. Television and film texts enable ‘the creation of a para-discourse’ where narratives are ‘interpreted as being “about” something else – for example, a wealthy eldest son in a current Chinese drama who is having marital problems could be coded for a subject of conversation about the Crown Prince’. In this way, she writes, ‘television and film narratives...take their place within a vast signifying chain’ of Thai public discursivity, ‘meaning much more than they would seem to do at a literal level’ and constituting a common cultural repertoire and ‘a shared consciousness’ among popular Thai audiences (Hamilton 2002b: 165)."

Brett Farmer, "Battling Angels and Golden Orange Blossoms: Thai Television and/as the Popular Public Sphere," in Television Histories in Asia: Issues and Contexts, ed. Jinna Tay and Graeme Turner, 2015

[gay-rules]

I think its a bad sign that im in the "for you" tab more than my dash these days. So I think a lot of blogs i follow are dead or not in line with my interests.

So maybe like/comment and ill check your blog out, and maybe check mine out. Stuff im looking for idk:

QLs , either past or currently airing i dont mind

Bonus for a GL over BL ratio heh

BTS, as i was just @ the arirang concert and back on that kpop a little

artists/singers/actors in general