Friend Forever
or maybe?
Friends Forever
I don’t know. Mydramalist has the grammatically correct Friends Forever but everywhere else has the singular, so... if you’re trying to find it to watch "Friend Forever” seems to work better as a search term.
And there are what? Maybe a handful of us here watching it?
I don’t care.
I’m gonna waffle on about it anyway.
7 episodes in and it’s charming.
So Friends Forever is basically Love Sick + LBC (AePete & TumTar represent) with a dash of Make it Right thrown in.
We basically have two main couples: Tan & Oil and Sea & Tin.
Shall we break them down by trope?
Sure why not, how else am I going to distract myself right now?
P’Tan & Oil
Playing on the step-brothers who fall in love trope (90s Yaoi has a lot to answer for) this is at least not TumTar level taboo. Oil is the son of a next door neighbor who ends up living with P’Tan and his mother. Then Oil goes abroad. Oil returns years later to find his beloved P’Tan now sad and isolated after his mom died.
Oil is beautiful and sweet, and the classic uke that everyone wants. They even allow him to be a little femme, which is rare in a BL (insert polite queer clapping here). Oil returns to high school and resumes living with P’Tan partly in order to save P’Tan from his own misery. P’Tan is the older cool kid, and struggling with his non-brotherly affections for Oil, and... well, we all know this story. Right?
The actors have perfectly decent chemistry, although I am kinda over the innocent prettiest perfect babe that everyone wants.
So instead, can we PLEASE talk about:
Sea & Tin
ARE EVERYTHING!!!
I’m sorry to all the LBC2 supes out there, but this is now my Tin:
I will accept no substitutes where pure metals are concerned. Yes, we do indeed have another creamy faced rich kid Tin but so much sweeter than the original.
Okay, I admit it. I have a terrible weakness for other-side-of-the-track romances. Ae & Pete are my favorite BL pair partly because of the class/wealth differences between them. And because they flip the power dynamic, so the rich kid is the uke and the poor kid is the seme.
Sea & Tin are doing the same thing. It’s GREAT.
Sea is really poor and wins a music scholarship to a prestigious high school. Tin is really rich and also falls hard and fast and totally for Sea.
The pining is King-level strong with this Tin.
There is some sort of contrived rich kid divide with Tin caught in the middle as the Maria to Sea’s “when you’re a Jet, your a Jet all the way...” Yeah you know what I mean. Sea and the music kids are the poor dorks, and against them are the rich bullies. Sweetling Tin is torn by his loyalties. TORN I TELL YOU.
Oh noes, will school cliques tear them apart?
The teen angst of it all!
Pine babies!
PINE!
There’s also maybe some femme fatal or homme fatal shenanigans coming down the pipeline, or possibly that’s just white noise. None of this matters because...
Tin & Sea are ADORABLE.
We got a few nice executions of tropes already too, including feed me & sleep on my shoulder.
Words of Caution
I don’t know Friend Forever’s source material, so I don’t know if it is going to end happily. Season ones of high school set BL do not have good track records in this regard, so there is that to consider before you get attached.
The captioning is epically bad, even for Thai BL. I mean, like REALLY awful. This is a not a starter level Thai BL. If you don’t know at least enough Thai to correct miss-gendered pronouns and some basic nouns as you listen/read, some scenes may make very little sense.
Will SOMEONE please teach Thailand ESLs that English also has a singular gender neutral third person pronoun? It’s they/them and it works fine.
Will You Like Friend Forever?
If you enjoyed Love By Chance specifically for AePete or are generally a fan of high school set BL like Love Sick, Make it Right, or My Dear Loser’s b-plot then this is for you.
