Tag game. Original idea from @dramalove247. Thanks for the tag @dropthedemiurge
Rules: Share two (ql) tropes you enjoy and one you don’t.
Mine are Thai BL specific.
Some have cited the uke’s role as a stand-in for female audiences as a reason for the mass appeal of BL. The trope of the lost woman, popping up in the Thai BL genre since Love of Siam in 2007, tackles that head-on. The uke protagonist is spiritually linked to a woman whose existence he somehow replaces (or vice versa in the case of The Shipper). In the western medical model’s strict division between gender and sexuality and many identity and political rights arguments that emerged from it, this is SO problematic. But the Thai model does not draw such strict divisions.
I felt so validated the first time I encountered it in BL. It represents felt experiences for queer people. First, it demonstrates how queer sexuality is a part of gender deviation. There are gendered expressions and desires that queer people feel compelled toward, which are not just about attraction to a specific gender. And the resistance to admitting the effeminate proclivities of queer boys can derive from some pretty misogynistic pressures.
Second, the lost woman trope serves as an allegory for the grief of an individual, their families, and society more broadly over someone’s failure to fulfill expected (gendered) roles. Someone can have a sense that they have stolen a life that they weren’t supposed to have, and others can feel real disruption from the unexpected queer positioning. How do we make peace with that dissonance?
Finally, the lost woman trope creates a shared space between transness, queer sexualities, and BL engagement practices. It demands one grapples with wanting gendered experiences that weren’t assigned to you, whether you’re a female reader relating to the uke or a queer reader who feels there’s a home in gender expressions society didn’t freely offer you. The lost woman trope serves as the transitional bridge connecting the two.
To borrow from my Love Sick review: Thai BL utilizes its massive casts of boys to create frames overflowing with jostling teenage bodies stacked in rows of bleachers, piled on one another grabbing at pizza and gaming, or jamming in the band room. In Love Sick from 2014 they slow down the scene or set it as a montage and play the bittersweet theme over top with its lyrics about both the good and the bad passing us by until they're only memories, and I broke into tears every time. It's a beautifully sentimental evocation of the friendship between boys, and especially that skinship that's denied to so many male friendships elsewhere because of more repressive ideas about masculinity--double that for queer boys fearing the implications of guy-to-guy touch.
Without banging us over the head, these series show us the stakes for their queer characters through these friendships. Belonging to a bigger group means so much here and the possibility of exclusion or loss if a line is crossed often weighs invisibly on the coming out narratives or love confessions. In the subtext, characters are terrified of losing this platonic intimacy; the friends to go through the bad and good times with. Have you ever lost a friend? What about a whole host of them?
But if they’re the danger, the friend groups are also the boon. The gentle release that occurs as they accept the changes one of their members undergoes are pure bliss to watch—a promise that toxic masculinity need not rule the roost or pervade the world. Instead, boys being boys can be a compassionate camaraderie.
Honestly Imma go with the same thing as @dropthedemiurge
The accidental kiss does nothing for me, and I cannot defend it even with all my generosity for the history of the genre and the blatant signaling it often calls for. Dubcon drunk kissing I will go to bat for, but the accidental kiss for me is both too much (an indirect kiss or a hand touch or something at least have the erotics of ambiguity) and too little (there are typically no feelings involved at the point of the direct kiss so it literally means nothing on an emotional level). No thank you.
Tagging @williamrikers @paulinamakes and @befuddledcinnamonroll
