#tmotb

[zeejade88]

"No matter what happens, don't let go of my hand."

The Miracle of Teddy Bear, ep 9

[zeejade88]

He's in love, your honour

Me and Tofu:

[zeejade88]

"Love isn't about doing something for someone. It's about putting your heart into it."

[red-hibiscus]

I yearn to experience The Miracle of Teddy Bear for the first time again. To feel all of those emotions and messages in their full glory and intent.

That and the show is exhausting idk if I could ever watch it again.

[wei-ying-kexing-apologist]

I am being so so sincere when I say that Episode 10 of The Miracle of Teddy Bear has just secured a spot as one of my favorite BL episodes of all time.

What a fucking compelling, complex, brilliant, and contained piece of work. I am really really loving the dimensionality they bring to Nut and the way that he engages in his relationship with Tofu and his mother in this show as a whole and in this episode especially. Seeing Mathana so calmly, sweetly, and sincerely inquiring about Tofu and Nut’s feeling towards one another, in a way that felt completely absent of judgment only to immediately be met by Nut’s anger was fucking phenominal! The Miracle of Teddy Bear has been handling trauma, and trauma response so brilliantly across the entire show, but Episode 10 was a stand out example of how the writing for this show and Job’s performance as Nut really add so much nuance and flavor to this story and this character. 

I feel like so many BLs are hesitant to let their romantic leads harbor a lot of anger, but not The Miracle of Teddy Bear, Nut’s anger is explosive and it is fast. Nut can go from zero to one hundred in a blink of an eye, in a step, in a breath and that all stems from Nut’s history as a survivor of abuse. His father was extremely abusive, and incredibly homophobic, and his mother was a victim of that abuse as well and as a result was unable to protect Nut from all the shit his father put him through. And she was raised in a generation that was told there were rules and was never allowed to question them. She learned pink is for girls and blue is for boys and does not have any answer to a question of “but why?” nor does she have the space in the household with Sib to ask that question herself and realize there is no legitimate answer.

I believe that Nut is fundamentally a good person, but I absolutely adored how much of this episode really navigated us through Nut being an absolute piece of shit to his mother, his friends and their family, and his partner as a result of his history as a survivor of abuse while also showing us this timid, terrified, simp of a high school boy having his first romance. Especially because for me it really highlights how much of this anger that Nut has stems directly from whatever events ended his relationship with Tarn. At no point in the flashback to a very short, and incredibly sweet BL within a BL have we seen Nut angry, he is only capable of fear that his family will find out that he is gay. It runs so counter to the hair trigger rage Nut carries with him in adulthood. When I saw the way Nut behaved at Gen’s house, I legitimately had a moment where I was just so incredibly thankful that Gen’s parents are as kind as they are and seem to constantly provide love and support to Nut even when he is being a terrible guest and misbehaving at the table because his anger runs so deep he does not have a handle on it. 

From a writing and messaging perspective (I feel the need to clarify lest you think I support this kind of behavior in real live) I love, love, loved that Nut was using Tofu without Tofu’s permission and in many cases to the detriment of Tofu’s own comfort to the point where Tofu actually breaks in his own dedication to Nut and has to drag him outside to talk to him about generational trauma and the ways in which he is perpetuating cycles of abuse in his own household. Because that is a fundamental message of this show. Mathana and Saen are manipulated out of their relationship by Jan, Mathana feels pressure to get married because of her mother’s perceptions of the role of women in society, and as a result marries Sib who she doesn’t love, which contributes, I think, in part to Sib’s future abuse of his family because he knows his wife is in love with his brother and not him, with a major contributor to the Sib’s violence in the household being the perceptions of masculinity. 

Side note: One of my absolute favorite recurring motifs in this episode was the use of bars to make everyone feel trapped in the flashbacks of abuse.

This episode shows us the ways in which Nut has internalized some of the beliefs of his father, when he tells Tofu essentially that his mother failed to steer him away from being gay, when that is obviously an impossible task, and so expertly lets the anger of this episode be fueled by those beliefs, the resentment and frustration that stems from Nut having to serve some level of caregiver role to his mother because of her mental health, and Nut’s current inability to see the bigger picture and understand that his mother was also a victim of domestic violence in that household who did not have the ability to stand up for herself and her child all at the same time. And it is also so easy to understand why Nut is not able to see his mother as a victim in every absolutely heartbreaking flashback we get to little baby Nut looking up at his mother while he is being abused just absolutely hoping that she will do something more than stand there and watch it happen.

Nut is trying so desperately to get a reaction out of his mother, to prove that this anger that he has, that this pain that he carries from this piece of history we don’t even have the full story for yet is real, is justified, and that change and healing cannot happen. But it can. We haven’t even seen the events that lead to Nut’s break-up with Tarn yet and we’re already getting so much information about it from the way that Nut enters that coming out scene already fighting, already assuming his mother will have a problem, screaming at her and not giving her any opportunity to speak. And then getting mad at her when she doesn’t say anything about him being physically intimate with Tofu in front of her. Which I’ve already said was incredibly well written because Nut is so focused on his own anger it takes time for him to understand what he is doing to Tofu. 

And even when he leaves, when he goes to Gen, when he hears the reason and the sense, and admits to the fact that he was in the wrong, that unjustified justified anger doesn’t go away magically, his behavior isn’t automatically fixed. He knows that he put Tofu in an uncomfortable position, and then continues to do it anyway because there is no one that can drive you to anger faster than a parent. And I for one am so grateful this show is letting Nut leave shrapnel in his wake. 

I am truly so impressed with this episode and with the entire show so far. If you did not jump on the Miracle of Teddy Bear train when @lurkingshan and @twig-tea were watching it a few weeks ago, please take this as a sign you should attempt it. I know it’s long, but GODDAMN IT IS SO FUCKING GOOD.

[recidivae]

я всегда один/i am always alone.

because sometimes you read chapter 20 of boopboopbi's TMOTB and you need to make a thing real quick.