Ben and Nini's Conversations

Main blog for The Conversation Podcast

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Brought to you by @bengiyo and @shortpplfedup, The Conversation is a podcast all about Asian BL/GL/QL and other queer media, coming at you from a film crit perspective. We swan in when we can to shoot the shit on faves, flops and trends, artistry and industry nerdery, and also crack and simping, because we contain multitudes.

You can find us and listen on Zencastr, Spotify, iHeartRadio and Apple Podcasts. Feel free to hop in our inbox to ask questions and leave comments, or scroll down on Spotify and leave them there!

Credits:

Ben (@bengiyo) is our executive producer. NiNi (@shortpplfedup) is our editor. Shan (@lurkingshan) is our associate producer. Our theme music is Dedication by Ron Gelinas Chillout Lounge (Music promoted by https://www.free-stock-music.com)

[the-conversation-pod]

Summer 2025 Lagniappe

AND WE'RE BACK

NiNi and Ben returned the booth with @lurkingshan to answer some questions from our inbox and award the Girl, You Tried award for the season. Despite this whole season of our podcast running long, join us for a robust conversation about the Theory of Love Romcom Rewatch project, discuss the state of current BL, and debate the meaning of what it means for a show to try.

Lagniappe by @Ben and NiNi

Ben, NiNi and Shan answer your questions and award the Girl Who Tried. Episode transcript available here. 00:00 Welcome 00:55 Introductio

Lagniappe

Podcast Episode · The Conversation · 10/06/2025 · 1h 14m

Lagniappe - The Conversation | iHeart

<p>Ben, NiNi and Shan answer your questions and award the Girl Who Tried.</p><p>Episode transcript available here.</p><p>00:00 Welcome</p><p

Timestamps

The timestamps will now correspond with chapters on Spotify for easier navigation.

00:00 - Welcome 00:55 - Introduction 02:32 - Inbox: Addicted, and Other Early BL 19:13 - Inbox: BL and Queer Cinema 23:36 - The Theory of Love RomCom Rewatch 38:51 - Girl, You Tried 01:08:04 - Outro: One Fuck Of A Year So Far

The Conversation Transcripts!

Thanks to the continued efforts of @lurkingshan as an editor and proofreader, we are able to bring you transcripts of the episodes.

Please send our volunteers your thanks!

00:00 Welcome

NiNi

Welcome to The Conversation, the Queer Media And Brown Liquor Podcast.

Ben

I'm Ben, the media critic.

NiNi

I’m NiNi, the VIIBs queen.

Ben

And we are your drunk Caribbean uncle and auntie who are sitting on the porch in the rocking chairs.

NiNi

We’re here to talk queer film and dramas, with a special focus on Asian QL.

Ben

So if you like to dive deep into queer stories…

NiNi

If you like cracked out takes on art and commerce in queer media…

Ben

If you just enjoy simping for attractive people…

NiNi

We believe in simping!

Ben

Tune in!

00:55 - Introduction

Ben 

And we're back. It's been… a long season for us. We've been in and out, but honestly, we actually haven't watched that much, and we haven't even talked about that much. Right before we were recording this session we were trying to get our notes together, and we realized that the arc of this season of our podcast is barely about the last four or five months of BL. 

We covered an old BL that will never die. Two GLs that most people are never gonna watch. Two Western shows in a fandom that mostly only wants to talk about Asian shows. And then we watched Gelboys and Heesu and had a lot to say about that.

NiNi 

Yep. That's been the year. [Ben laughs]And like, I felt bad. We put out episodes in January and February, then nothing ‘til May. And then June was The Untamed. And then our next episodes went out in August. That's where we are. We're doing fantastic.

Ben 

We’re doing great. 

Shan 

Wow. A spotty year.

Ben

But don't worry, Shan is still here! [laughs] Say hi, Shan.

Shan 

Shan is always still here. You'll never have the chance to miss me.

Ben

I know some of you have asked us, like, directly what's going on with us. NiNi was hella busy, I was busy, there's a lot going on. 

But also, we've been struggling, y'all. The shows are mid, we're not gonna pretend they're not. And we're not gonna get out here and just moan about shows at you guys. It's not how we like to roll.

02:32 - Inbox: Addicted, and Other Early BL

NiNi solicited some questions from the audience. One of which is too long and will become its own podcast episode at some point.

NiNi 

Yeah. Again, we're such big name fans. We're getting to our inbox six plus months after the questions came in. 

We love y'all. We really do.

Ben 

[laughs] It's the real Tumblr experience.

NiNi 

All right, so let's start with the question. Shan, wanna take us in?

Shan 

All right, our first question is from @lollygirlpops and they write:

“Hello, hello, I've been playing catch up on the pod having found you by chance via a reblog, possibly a @lurkingshan reblog,” —thanks for this shout out @lollygirlpops—”and I'm just having the best time. First of all, please allow me to simp for this podcast. Adore you, adore your insights. You really make me sit up and pay attention.

I'm now so much more critical when watching these shows and I tend to mostly only watch the shows you endorse” —and a nice little parenthetical here— “(Hello, She Loves to Cook and She Loves to Eat, you beautiful thing) I'd never have found if not for The Conversation.”

We love that. They continue:

“So thank you for being truly brilliant. Also, I'm still a little bit of a newbie when it comes to BL. I'm working my way through my early BL syllabus and recently watched the original Addicted. I was genuinely surprised by how much I liked this. I can't recall if you've ever touched on this show, but I'd love to know what you make of it if you've ever watched it. And what do you make of earlier BL in general? Is quality improving all the time? Thanks for being great.”

NiNi 

I feel like I want to tackle the second half of that question before the first half.

Shan 

Yeah.

Ben 

First, thank you for listening to us and watching She Loves to Cook and She Loves to Eat. Anytime somebody tells us they watched a show because of us, it makes all of this worth it. Nothing makes me happier than people going, “Wow, that show you recommended? It was actually pretty good.”

As for the generalized question, is quality improving all the time? The short answer is no.

Shan 

Hell no.

Ben 

The long answer is yes. But that requires a very long answer. [laughs]

NiNi 

This is a longform podcast.

Ben 

So, like all types of media, you get ebbs and flows. Freedom is given to creatives who every now and then do something really spectacular. And then people will try to build on that and iterate upon that. But eventually the people with money have figured out what makes enough money and then tries to skim as much of it as they can. And that's when things get worse and start to decline. 

We are very much experiencing that right now in the genre. It's hard to not acknowledge that the overall uncertainty that everyone is facing on the global scene has an impact on the shows you want to watch. That's all I'm going to say about that, but this has been a very difficult year. Genuinely, this is one of the worst years in BL I've experienced since maybe 2017. 

That's kind of weird to say when we're getting still a large volume of shows overall. I just don't think a lot of them are very good. I don't really have a lot of standouts from this year that I think are worth hyping about. The thing about progress is it's not a straight line and it requires a lot of constant effort. And it's a question about what do you consider to be quality? Like if we're measuring the success of BL about the willingness of boys in the genre to kiss each other, then sure, I guess we've gotten better than where we started, in terms of just actors being willing to suck face. 

If we're talking about the willingness of production companies to spend money, sure, I think a lot of the shows look better and sound better than they did 10 years ago. But for me, I think the storytelling in the genre has taken a pretty big hit in the last year. 

That's me, though. I'm here for gay reasons, not boy fantasy reasons.

NiNi 

I think that long arc wise, in terms of production quality, definitely. In terms of acting quality, actually for the most part, yes. In terms of story quality, it's a mixed bag, a much more mixed bag than I would expect. As the niche has gotten broader and some things have gotten more popular I think some of the storytelling has fallen a little bit by the wayside. The art and the commerce are balancing differently right now and it does show. 

For me, that means that when something stands out, it really stands out, like it makes it easier for it to stand out. You're not caught up in the dross. So it's easier to find the gold. But overall, to put it to you this way, this year I've gone back to sort of my OG stance. I probably haven't watched more than 15 shows so far. I might end the year between 15 and 20, which is how I started watching BL. The last two years have been an anomaly where I've watched a lot more than that. But this year I feel myself heading back down to normal levels. So in terms of my enjoyment of the genre, I'm having a slightly better time than Ben and Shan are this year, but not by much. 

Shan, what about you? What are your thoughts?

Shan 

Yeah, I agree with both of you. it's not really a matter of BL as a genre being better or worse compared to the past. It's just that the problems are different. In the past, the problems were more about not being able to get funding for productions, and low production values, and very green actors who were not yet comfortable with BL as a thing culturally. We're past all that, that's great, but there are new and in some ways much more insidious and complex problems now in the genre, now that it has become profitable, now that capitalism has gotten its hands on it and is the main point of these shows at this point. 

So no, I would not say things have gotten better. I think they've gotten different and in some ways worse. 

NiNi 

My God. I just realized that we're living in Lovely Writer.

Shan

You know, I wouldn't mind if we actually were. If Kao wants to wander on by, I wouldn’t be mad about it.

Ben 

Girl, That man is making so much money as a model he ain't worried about us right now. 

[Ben and Shan laugh]

Shan 

He's abandoned us. Oh man, Kao I miss you, bud.

I think we should talk a little bit about @lollygirlpop's other question, which was about Addicted, a television show that has quite a bit of infamy just because of the circumstances around it, but that I think is maybe not something we consider upper echelon BL. It's really just the circumstances of the show that made it notable.

A little bit of background for folks who don't know: Addicted is a Chinese BL web series that aired in 2016. And it is essentially the show that ushered in the current era of gay censorship crackdown in China. It was, I think, something like the second most viewed show on iQIYI at the time that it was airing, wildly popular, beyond expectations. And of course, that came with some consequences. 

The show was actually explicitly depicting romance between two boys. They did kiss on screen. And the episode in which they had their first sexual encounter is the episode where the show got yanked off the air, banned from continuing and finishing its run. And the two lead actors in the show were blacklisted by the Chinese government. Like literally, they put out the word that they were not to be hired for anything, that they were not to be promoted. Some of the promotional stuff they had filmed for the show got yanked and was never allowed to air. Those actors struggled to work for quite a long time, although they've started to rebound very recently. 

The show got a lot more attention and became famous for what happened to it, and the wave of anti-queer censorship that it ushered in for Chinese dramas.

NiNi 

So I watched Addicted when I started watching BL. I don't know if you all remember my BL story, but I basically ran through like one from every country to get a cross section of what was out there. And Addicted was the Chinese BL that I found to watch. There was all this hype around it. And I remember thinking to myself, what is the hype about?

I was not a fan of Addicted. It was not my cup of tea. Based on what else I've seen of Chinese BL, especially now that there's been a little bit of a Chinese BL resurgence, this is sort of the nature of Chinese BL and I'm not entirely sure I'm a fan of that. 

For me, was just kind like, okay, what's this about? This is what this about? Pass. I didn't even know about all the controversy until much later. I didn't realize it got yanked off the air because to me it didn't feel like it ended in the middle. It just felt like it ended. It wasn't for me.

Ben

So the difficulty I faced was I watched this show in era, which means I didn't finish it because finding shows was a lot more complicated back then. I'm very happy for the new BL fans who get pissy if a show is not free on YouTube for them. Back in my day, we had to walk uphill both ways to find our motherfucking shows. 

NiNi 

—In the snow!

Ben 

Let me tell you—in the snow. We were heavily reliant on fan subs back in the day, and they were inconsistent, to put it politely. Very much love and respect to all the people trying to make these shows accessible to us. It just was very difficult sometimes. And this is one of those shows I think I got maybe two or three episodes in, was a little confused, could not find the show, learned about all the controversial stuff, and then just sort of put it aside and never went back to it.

Also, I had read commentary about themes in the show that made me not want to watch it. They readapted the show with Stay With Me like two years ago? And following the week to week commentary on that was also…uninspiring for me. 

So my primary feelings about Addicted are: it's really tragic that one of the most populous countries in the world shut down a whole form of storytelling over the show. And I felt really bad for the actors who I'm thankful we can say are working again. It felt really shitty that these guys’ careers got ended for trying to do a good job with the work that they were given.

NiNi 

Didn't they also make a Thai version of Addicted this year?

Shan 

Yeah, they did, and it sucked. 

Ben 

Man, I forgot that that happened. Holy shit! [laughs]

Shan

Please do not remember, you will not be happy with your memories. 

So, I liked Addicted better than Ben or NiNi did. I'm a little bit more tolerant, I think, of some of the mainstays of Chinese BL. I've read a lot of danmei. It doesn't phase me quite as much, although I can't endorse it, really. It kinda is what it is and you can either rock with it or you can't, and I don't judge anyone who doesn't want to. 

The Chinese are a bit sexually repressed. And that comes out in some real weird ways in the way they write sex. This is not only for gay sex. It is also true of the way they write heterosexual sex.

Ben 

I want you all to know that I did successfully pressure Shan into watching some movies with me this year. And we watched In the Mood for Love and Shan was so mad about it. [laughs]

Shan 

I was pissed off. I'm still mad! I don't even need that energy right now. 

Whenever you have a culture of people who are encouraged to repress their natural desires, you're going to get some weirdness in the way that they write romance and sex. That is always present in Chinese drama and particularly in a Chinese gay drama, in a BL, you're gonna see some weird stuff. You're gonna see violence presented as romantic. You're gonna see a lot of old cliches about wanting to force people to accept their true nature through sexual violence. That kind of stuff is in the mix. 

This story also is technically a stepbrothers story, although the two of them are only kind of incidentally stepbrothers. Neither of them ever lived together as brothers. Their parents got together after they had already met each other. So, it's not the kind of stepbrothers story where there's an actual family unit that's being disrupted. It's just kind of, I think, more of like a trope hook.

Ben 

That was Shan clarifying for me. 

Shan 

Yes, that was for Ben. 

Ben

This is one of my hugest squicks.

Shan

They cast good actors in this show. They are good at what they do. They represent the characters well and they had good chemistry. I believed that they were into each other. I believed the romance and I thought that the show overall was pretty decent, production wise. It had a good idea of what it wanted to do. There were some moments in the show that still really stick with me, like important character and relationship moments. The show also used music really well, and I think it was bold of them to have them kiss on screen, have them have sex on screen. It unfortunately led to this huge backlash, but it was a bold thing to do at the time. 

I will say, I watched the show and then my insatiable curiosity got me. I was like, well, the show didn't get to finish. So let me go find the novel and read it. Oh, my friends, I do not recommend that anyone read this novel. Oh my god. I mention it specifically because if you think that there were squicks or tropes that you find distasteful or problematic aspects of the show, I will tell you that they improved on that book like a hundredfold. No exaggeration. The book is horrific. That is my one word summary: horrific. Please do not read it if you have any sensitivities about any of this stuff. 

The show, I think, is a successful adaptation that got to the core of what was compelling about that book and the relationship that it depicted and brought it to life on screen without using most of the worst shit that was in that book. So I do give the creators of that show props. 

I wish they had gotten to finish what they started. I feel like if the show hadn't been banned, it would have been briefly popular and then probably faded. But because it got banned, because the story got cut off abruptly in the way that it did, it became an important symbol for BL and for queer rights in China. That's why, in my opinion, it has endured and that's why people still watch it.

NiNi 

Quick round robin question to sort of tie off that question. What is your favorite OG, probably terrible in terms of production quality and acting, but you love it anyway? 

Shan 

TharnType.

NiNi 

Benjamin?

Ben 

Man, that's hard.

Shan 

Is it? I mean, maybe it's hard to pick one, but you definitely have some.

NiNi 

I mean, I thought you would go straight for Make it Right.

Shan 

Same, I'm like, Ben, it’s Make it Right! [laughs]

Ben 

I mean, my heart is saying Make it Right, but I was like, let me at least consider what else was going on at the time. 

The actual answer is Make it Right. The most ridiculous experience is Lovesick. One of the benefits of being a new fan is how organized the fandom historians are about stuff now. When you decide to watch Lovesick, you know you're gonna watch 48 episodes. In 2017, I did not know! I watched the first season and was like, oh, that was kinda cute. Oh, there's more? How fun! I was 14 episodes into the second season. I’m like, “This doesn’t feel like it’s wrapping up anytime soon! What is happening?”

I remember this so clearly. I was at the Toronto International Film Festival with one of my best friends and one of their friends. Having a blast. And I remember walking around with them and having like a real emotional crisis over this. I was like, I don't think I've ever gotten tired of watching gay media before, but I really think I'm tired of watching the show. This was around episode 22 of Lovesick season two. I was like, I don't know how to feel about this. Like I'm tired of this. [laughs]

NiNi

Episode 22, you had 14 more to go.

Ben

It was like a question mark about when this fucking show was gonna end.

Shan 

I could not live that way. I need to know what I'm signing up for.

Legitimately the answer is Make it Right. Despite how bad it is, the gay ideas inside of Make it Right are some of best of the era.

NiNi 

Okay, well, y'all know the answer to mine, so I'm not even gonna say it.

Shan 

We will say it for the benefit of the people.

It's Love by Chance.

Ben 

Is it Love by Chance?

NiNi 

Definitely Love by Chance.

Ben 

Love by Chance is also a great choice. I really hate that fucking New Siwaj gets to get two points in that response. That's incredible.

NiNi 

We said OG! And that's what we meant. OGs.

19:13 - Inbox: BL and Queer Cinema

Shan

Let's go to the next question, shall we? Okay, this one's long, so strap in, folks. All right. 

Ben 

It's from Harry, so have a good time with it. 

Shan

This one's from Harry, or @hazmatilda on Tumblr. They write: 

“Ben! NiNi! Next season soon! Yay! I've been a loyal listener since you first announced the project and have thoroughly enjoyed hearing your opinions and seeing the way the pod has transformed over the past couple of years!”

Had some good conversations with a friend about the QL sphere recently - she's a queer cinephile, and while she was visiting we watched a back to back viewing of The Iron Ladies (2000) and Eating Papaw on the Seashore (2022) for quite the evening! They don't have a lot of respect for the shows I watch, despite me managing to get them to watch one or two over the years, and then more during her visit. (Something about the BL sphere being solely fujos in their 20s...)” Yeah, I've heard that one. 

“But talking about the pod may have convinced her that there is valuable discussion to be had. Which, I guess, is a win? The ep where you talked about Marahuyo Project (which is one of my favourite shows) specifically piqued their interest, which was a favourite discussion of mine too, especially as we were able to watch the show together. I appreciate the work you do! 

I feel like this QL season was one with a lot of interesting stories, but not many stuck the landing. Certainly looking forward to hearing you talk about ThamePo if that's on your list. As an interfan, and one who is not in any of the more extreme fan circles, seeing the way the show tackled a (toxic? overbearing? business as usual?) fanbase was enlightening, specifically in the expectations and roles of the fanbase for creators. Certainly something to be said about the industry there. I know you don't have an awful lot of faith in GMMTV helming BLs in Thailand right now, but I feel like I'm more concerned with the way they are (or aren't) protecting their talents... Idol culture also popped up in Gelboys, which is defs a show I'm keen to hear you talk about if you plan to! 

I also finally watched Theory of Love after last season, and have enjoyed following the related cinema challenge. Can't say it's my favourite OffGun outing, but certainly my favourite part of fandom is the ensuing conversation and meta! 

Also, See Your Love! Finally a disability BL that didn't drop the ball? Such high hopes for Pluto in the regard, especially from the first couple of eps... Oh well.” Wow, I love these show reviews, Harry. These are great. 

“Not many questions on my end for you today, but I did just want to pop in for the first time and share my love and some thoughts! Keen as for the winter season (despite it meaning my summer is leaving... It's cooling down and I am not happy.) 

I hope you guys had a somewhat restful break, despite. Well. Everything. 

- Harry”

Thank you, Harry. I'll just note that we are getting to your question kind of late. So the season has changed, but we appreciate it.

NiNi 

I mean, we're getting to the question so late it might have come back around to being accurate. Like, winter is coming. Summer is leaving.

Shan

Winter is coming!

Ben 

I love Harry so much. I'm so glad you messaged us. Harry and I have had quite a few fun discussions over the years. I'm very glad you got your friend to watch some of BL, but your friend is correct. If they're a queer cinephile, BL is not concerned with queer truth as its primary reason. If you're here as a queer cinephile, it's a pain in the ass. 

The only thing I will say to your friend is you can't just dunk on BL as fujos in their 20s because there are fujos in their 70s who still love Star Trek. Fujos will always be fujos. They're underpinning a lot of this. It's a complicated experience to be a fan of this genre. You gotta share space with a lot of people you weren't expecting to share it with.

NiNi 

Isn't that just the experience of fandom overall? You're just gonna be sharing space with people who do not see the things the same way you see the things. And that can be incredibly annoying and has been for us sometimes. But also, we are meant to be a big tent, I guess.

Ben 

That is not a universal opinion. [laughs]

Shan

Let's close the tent, let's keep it nice and small.

NiNi 

Look, the tent is at least big enough to fit me and Shan. 

Shan

There you go. 

NiNi

That's a fairly big tent, I think. 

Shan

It’s a fairly big tent!

Ben

I'm really glad you got your friend to watch Marahuyo Project. That's a good one to show a queer cinephile. I think your friend probably actually gets some enjoyment out of Oppan, too. 

NiNi 

I think your friends should look at our VIIBs list for standout queer narratives and watch those. I think they would enjoy those.

Ben 

Basically, check in with us once a year. We'll tell your friend what's worth watching.

24:09 - The Theory of Love RomCom Rewatch

NiNi 

Harry mentioned the Theory of Love Cinema Challenge. I want to dive into that a little bit. Y'all know I am not a fan of Theory of Love. Shan has gotten Ben to rewatch it and change his opinion. It will not happen for me.

Ben

TWICE. Shan got me to watch this goddamn show fucking twice.

[NiNi laughs]

Shan 

I want to say that the second rewatch was entirely his fault.

Ben 

I made the foolish mistake of musing on this podcast where Shan could hear it—

Shan 

[laughs] Never do that if you don't want to be embroiled in a project.

Ben 

—on the idea of a Theory of Love rewatch where we actually watched the films that were the thematic thrust of the episodes of the show. There's 13 movies for 13 episodes. Shan was like, “That sounds great. I love a project. We also have nothing else good to watch. Let's do that.” 

So we went and watched all 13 films with each episode over the course of just over four months with some of our homies. You can look at the #tol romcom rewatch tag on Tumblr and view our joy and dismay and horror at this project. 

We watched Dear Dakonda, a pretty famous Thai film. We watched Love Actually, an unfortunately famous Western Christmas movie. We watched Friends with Benefits, an American romcom with Mila Kunis and the original thief Justin Timberlake. We watched Crazy Stupid Love. We watched 10 Things I Hate About You. We watched Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. We watched Flipped. We watched The Proposal.

Shan 

—I'm gonna get mad.

Ben

—The Last Moment. Begin Again—I actually like that one. He's Just Not That Into You. My Girl—another famous Thai movie. And Stand By Me, a fairly famous American film.

Let's not get into all the reviews of these films. 

Shan 

We could be here all night.

Ben

I will say this much, as someone who likes film, this was a very worthwhile project. This was a really interesting look at a bunch of the kind of movies that a wannabe cinephile who can't read—  

NiNi 

—What? [Shan laughs]

Ben

—would select.This is such a healing experience for me.I can finally let go of Third. [NiNi laughs] That boy is so stupid and he has such terrible taste in film. [Ben and Shan laugh] The best film on this list was one Khai selected.

Shan 

Yep! That was my favorite part of the rewatch, when we finally got to a good movie and we realized it was Khai's pick, not Third’s. [laughs]

Ben 

Third is a romcom trash girly—his is not me dunking on romcoms; we watched some good romcoms in this list. Third has horrible taste in romcoms and does not know how to watch a movie.

Shan 

Inside the show, Theory of Love, Third is a film reviewer. He is watching and referencing these movies that are on our romcom rewatch list. And each of the episodes of Theory of Love is named after the corresponding movie. That's how we actually know which movies Third likes and what he thinks of these movies. And it's not just that he has bad taste. He's a horrible meta analyst and critic. He did not understand most of these movies. 

This is actually intentional in the story. Third is a hopeless romantic who's a little bit dumb and in love with his own misery. And he's taking all the wrong lessons from these romcoms he's obsessed with.

Ben

He clearly never finished 10 Things I Hate About You. 

I'm gonna go through some quick hits. Dear Dakanda: I was really impressed with the film, but overall, I hated the main character and the core themes of that movie. I think it's a deeply troubling film. And Thai people, we should reflect. 

That being said, there's a lot of horrible American and Canadian ones on here. 

Shan 

Yeah, we got lots to go around.

Ben

The next one was Love Actually. The fact that I will have that horrible song stuck in my head for the rest of my life is a real travesty.

NiNi 

Welcome, welcome to the experience.

Ben

I hate that movie. 

I can't believe, like I finally get to the iconic scene with the fucking cards in that movie. And it is the most fucked up thing of all time.

Shan 

You never knew the context of that scene!

Ben

I never knew the context and I don't care. I’m spoiling it for anybody who’s never seen it.

NiNi 

Leave it to them. Everybody should discover this movie for themselves. Can I just mention though this is a bad movie, I don't hate it.

Shan 

You know what, NiNi, that is the least surprising thing you've ever said to us. [laughs]

NiNi 

We all know that I enjoy some absolute trash. 

Shan 

See?

Ben 

Where is the Harlem Nights gif? I need it right now.

NiNi 

Is it a trash movie? Yes. Do I enjoy it? Parts of it.

Shan

We watched these movies with a group of friends and one of our friends wrote such a scathing take down (@solitaryandwandering) of this movie. [Ben and Shan laugh] We’ll link it because it's so good.

You should just go read some of the reviews of these films that we wrote. It was very fun.

Ben 

We watched Friends with Benefits—not a terrible movie, but gets most of the normal romcom things wrong by misunderstanding its core characters and hating its girls. 

We watched Crazy Stupid Love. Is that the one that had Ryan Gosling in it? 

Shan 

That was one of the better movies to come along.

NiNi 

That’s a good movie! 

Ben

That movie was way better than I expected.

Shan 

Yeah, it was one of the better ones. 

Ben

I was surprised. Third did not understand it at all.

Shan

No, he didn't.

Ben 

He clearly was just using all these movies because they had titles that were allowing him to be dramatic. He did not watch these movies.

Shan 

[laughs] Yes. Third’s analysis of this film is on the level of, like, “Love, it's so crazy and stupid.” Like that's it. [Ben laughs] That's all he has to say. That's the level of meta analysis he's bringing to the table.

Ben 

I hate that boy so much now, let me tell you. And he's the screenwriter for their company? 

Ben 

I don't believe it. 

We watched 10 Things I Hate About You—a pretty decent Shakespeare adaptation, honestly. Very good use of a lot of young talent at the time that went on to have pretty decent acting careers. 

We watched Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, one of the most incredible sci-fi romance movies I've ever seen in my life. 

NiNi 

I am always telling people to watch that movie. Always.

Ben

Also, Mark Ruffalo is always willing to give us bulge in movies. Thank you always, sir.

NiNi

I can't stand your ass. [Shan laughs] No, but seriously, Eternal Sunshine is one of the movies that I am constantly recommending to people. I think it is one of the best movies I've ever seen.

Shan 

It's really good, and it was linked to the episode of Theory of Love where we get a perspective flip. It was really beautifully done. I was incredibly impressed by the screenwriting for the show in the first half and how all of these movies that we watched tied in so clearly thematically to the episodes of the show and the things that were happening in the relationships.

Eternal Sunshine is all about that grief of a relationship lost and trying to recover from that and making a drastic choice because it's so hard. And this is the pinnacle episode of Theory of Love where we get the perspective switch, we find out what's been going on the whole time and we see Khai start to grieve the mistakes that he's made in the relationship that he's lost.

That was probably my favorite week of the whole project. The movie was so good. The tie-ins to the episode were so clear. One of my favorite episodes of the show. In the second half of the show, I do have to unfortunately report that the thematic ties between the films and the show started to fall apart a little bit. 

Ben 

It's just all bad. 

Shan

From here on out. [laughs]

Ben

That's not true. There's like one good film in the back half of this. 

But the next one we watched was Flipped. And this one sucked the second most. 

Shan

I'm just viscerally mad now hearing the title.

Ben

This was one of the absolute worst films I have ever watched in my life. 

Shan

Horrible. 

Ben

And this is Third's favorite film.

Shan

His fucking favorite movie. He says it a million times!

Ben

It is the most asinine, tedious film I have ever watched. It's bad and Third should be ashamed of himself. [Shan laughs]

We watched The Proposal. That's the Sandy B and— 

Shan 

—That was actually pretty good, too.

Ben

—which one of the Ryans is that?

Shan

Reynolds.

Ben 

There you go. That one was a lot of fun to watch, but kind of dark because it's an immigration romance.

Shan 

The immigration piece of it hit weird in 2025. Not gonna lie. But it's a cute movie.

Ben

It has Sandy B. She's good. She can't save every film that she's in. 

NiNi 

How dare you? [Everyone laughs] Speed 2: Speed on a Boat.

Ben

I said what I said!

NiNi

Too speedy, too oceanic. How dare you?

Ben 

I said what the fuck I said. She has owned it herself and was like, I should not have said yes. Keanu warned me and said, don't do it girl.

The next, ninth film was The Last Moment, which is only on here because clearly GMM was like, we need to put one of our movies in this little show.

Shan 

Yeah, they must have forced it because it does not belong at all.

Ben 

It is probably the worst film on this list. 

Shan

Oh, I hated it. 

Ben

And I will never get over Piss Boy in my life. I will not be providing context for that. That is a trigger just for the people who watch that with us.

Shan 

You don't want to know! Don't ever watch that film. Not that you will. We had to go through some trials to even find it to watch. 

Ben 

We watched Begin Again. That has Mark Ruffalo and...

Shan

Keira Knightley.

Ben 

I actually love Keira Knightley a lot and I think she and Mark are fantastic in this movie. Holy shit, this was legit. Of all the films that we watched, Eternal Sunshine is the one I'm most grateful that I watched, but this was honestly the sleeper movie of the entire project for me. I was not expecting to be as enamored with this movie as I ended up being. This was an excellent romcom.

And I really don't want to spoil it. If you're ever in the mood for a romcom, go watch this. It'll be good for you. 

Shan 

It's a music movie that has good music.

NiNi 

I see that it's by the same people who wrote Once and I love Once so I will definitely be taking this one in.

Ben 

It is an incredible movie. Like, I was deeply emotionally moved by it.

Shan 

Yeah, we were all really into it more than we expected to be.

Ben 

And then we watched He's Just Not That Into You, one of the WORST FILMS of the project! This is like the number three worst film we watched! Holy shit!

Shan 

We knew that one was going to be bad, though. It's based on that terrible book that was really popular in the early 2000s that's just basically negging women. Horrible.

Ben 

I can't believe they used Justin Long that way.

Shan 

There was a shocking, well, I won't call it shocking, but there was quite an abundance of deeply misogynistic films on this list.

Ben 

We watched My Girl, a very famous Thai film. I really loved the nostalgia of this particular film project a lot. 

Shan 

Yeah, it's one of those classic “adult looks back on their childhood and reminisces” and to be clear, no relation at all to the English My Girl film, just similar name.

Ben 

It was an excellent film. I have some issues with the adult section of it, but the nostalgia section, fantastic. 

Shan

Yeah, the kid stuff was awesome.

Ben 

The kid actors were great.

And then we finished off with fucking Stand By Me. Oh my God. 

Ben

This film is famous only because River Phoenix and Will Wheaton awoke many things in lot of young people. But this is a dark, really mean film.

Shan 

I don't like it. I hated it. I actually, like, viscerally hated it. I had trouble watching it, which doesn't usually happen to me. Mmmm. Not for me.

Ben

So our final thoughts, was the project worth it for us? Yes. Should any of you actually do what we suggested? Probably not.

[NiNi laughs, followed by Ben and Shan]

Shan 

I think it's really fun if you are the type of person who enjoys unpacking the context and influences around the media that you enjoy. I do think it was a way to get more insight into the characters in Theory of Love, which was fun for me because that's a show that I already really love and it added a new layer. But some of these movies are not good. So don't put yourself through that if you are, like, really committed to the bit in the way that we are.

Ben 

Feel free to just read our reviews and decide if you actually want to watch the films.

If you're a big fan of Thai BL, I actually think it would be very beneficial to watch Dear Dakanda and My Girl. I think it would be helpful in general to engage with more mainstream Thai film, especially that was made before 2010, because that's the films that informed a lot of the creators that you're fond of now. 

You do not need to watch The Last Moment and deal with Piss Boy.

Shan 

Please don't. I beg you, don't do it.

NiNi

I will suggest that people watch Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, 10 Things I Hate About You ,Crazy Stupid Love.

Shan 

I wanna just double down on endorsing Begin Again. I think a lot of people haven't seen that film and it was surprisingly great.

Ben 

It really was. I think of all the films I watched in this one, Eternal Sunshine and Begin Again are the two that I am most glad that I watched.

Shan 

I got one final question for Ben. We've now come to the end of two Theory of Love rewatches, and I feel like you evolved a bit on each. Where are you sitting now with it?

Ben

Third… is… trash. [NiNi and Shan laugh] Like there's a part of me that actually doesn't want Khai to make the turn because I don't think Third deserves it. I think Third is a pretty horrible friend. It's notable, when they did their pandemic special, that they clearly realized they lost the audience on Third and they tried to do a bunch of repair work to show that Third was growing out of this ball of resentment that he was.

Shan 

Mmhmm.

Ben 

These were a horrible group of boys. 

NiNi

Exactly! These are bad friends!

Ben 

Third really lost me on this outing. Khai becomes more sympathetic each time I watch the show. I know that's hard to believe, NiNi, but honestly, he's the only character who's written in such a way that they actually experience an arc. His character actually internalizes the events that happen to him and tries to change his behavior. And that's really frustrating to recognize in the third watch that Third himself never experiences a moment of personal growth in all of this.

Shan 

Mmhmm. I'm telling you, Khai is the hero of this show.

Ben 

It's a tough pill to swallow, but all of us who overidentified with Third, we got some soul searching to do. We got some baggage to unpack. 

Shan 

Work on your drama therapy, people.

Ben

Myself included. Like I watched this when I was like 27, I'm 35 now, I have grown. I am not that boy anymore

Shan 

It’s great to see, bestie. I believe in drama therapy. It's real. 

Anyway, thank you for the question, Harry. It was a fun project for us to do, and it was fun to have people follow along.

38:51 - Girl, You Tried

Shan 

We're going to get to a couple of the other notes that Harry left.

NiNi 

We are now headed into the last part of our lagniappe episode, our signature segment called Girl, You Tried. 

This season has encompassed most of the year, and, uh, it's been bad. 

Shan 

Mhmm. NiNi, these girls are not trying.

NiNi 

They're not trying at all. It's so hard to pick any that are even attempting.

Going back to the original point of Girl, You Tried, it is all about shows with a good idea and terrible execution, but some of these girls are not trying. The ideas are not there. We came up with a list of three that we could stretch to say that they tried. I actually enjoyed all three of these, Shan and Ben have other thoughts. 

So the three nominees for the first two thirds of this year's Girl, You Tried are ThamePo from GMMTV, Us the Series, a GMMTV GL, and When it Rains, it Pours—Futtari Doshubari from Japan. 

Since Harry asked us about ThamePo, I will let Shan go first because she has thoughts.

Shan 

My experience with ThamePo was actually pretty fun for me. I watched it in a way that was correct for me, which is I did not watch it week to week with everybody. I tend to get pretty frustrated with GMMTV BLs when I watch them weekly. 

So I took a different approach this time. I said, you know what, I'm gonna wait. If at the end people are still saying they really like the show, I'm gonna binge it. When shows have pacing issues or when there is some messiness in the writing or things just don't progress in a way that feels satisfying, I can get over that much better when I'm binging than when I am watching week to week and having a lot of time to ruminate and get frustrated in between episodes. So I watched ThamePo in a binge and it was actually pretty fun. 

I enjoyed the show. I certainly did not experience the fervor about it that many people seemed to. It didn't strike me as a show that quote unquote invented romance. I did not think that the main pair and their story was as compelling as many people seemed to think. It was just a perfectly okay, middle of the road romance for me. I liked the romance parts of the show. I liked the group dynamics and the friendships.

What I didn't really vibe with was anything about the idol industry. The show just got that super, super wrong, like catastrophically crazy wrong. And it bothered me through the entire show. None of the plots that were about the idol industry really made any sense. The main characters that were rooted in the industry, like, the group's boss and the people around them, their motives and actions didn't really make sense. I thought the music and the performances were bad. 

But I did enjoy, like, the main thrust of the romance. I was really into Lego's character was my favorite. I just thought he was fun. So I had fun with it. It wasn't that deep for me. And it certainly didn't stick with me in the way that some of the classic GMMTV BLs I love did. But I thought it was a perfectly good show. They did try. It had really good production values.

NiNi 

It was a Parbdee show.

Shan 

And it looked like it, like they clearly put money into this. The whole look of the show was gorgeous. There was so much cool stuff going on in the visuals and the costumes. I really enjoyed just visually watching it. I definitely think it's a show that deserves acknowledgement for its effort to tell a decent story. 

NiNi 

Yeah, I watched it week to week. So I had a different experience from Shan on this. I enjoyed the romance. I thought it was a pretty good slow burn. Watching it week to week was excruciating in a good way. I love the theme song. I listened to it almost every day.

I am not steeped in idol industry stuff. So that stuff stood out to me less than it would have stood out to Shan, who is really, really immersed in this stuff. I overall had a good time with this show. It was gorgeous to look at and it sounded really good.

I think that they put effort into it. They did trs. 

Shan 

Did Ben Watch ThamePo? You didn't, right?

NiNi

Ben did not watch ThamePo.

Ben 

I sure didn't! [laughs]

Shan

I didn't think so, but I just wanted to double check.

Ben 

I will say this for ThamePo. I thought the two leads had very nice lips, based upon the gifs I saw.

NiNi 

[laughs] Ben’s Lip Watch.

Shan 

They took good care of those lips.

Ben 

I didn't see a single #LipWatch2025 moment in any gifs and you know what? I'll take it. But all of the mooning and screaming about these boys didn't speak to anything interesting happening from a queer perspective in this show. So, I felt no desire to watch it. And I do not feel any FOMO.

NiNi 

I think that's fair. Because even when I was watching it, I was like, I don't necessarily think that anybody else needs to watch it, but I'm having a good time.

Shan 

The things the show does well are not things that really matter to you, Ben. So I think that was the right call for you. 

Ben 

I feel like if I had watched it, I'd just be irritated at this point. So it's probably for the best.

NiNi

Moving on to the next nominee. I think this is one that only I watched, which was Us the Series, which is a GMMTV GL with Emi and Bonnie. I love Emi Thasorn. So I was definitely inclined to watch this. 

The show kind of, in Trini parlance, hit us a six for a nine. Like the way it was promo’d was actually not what the show was about. It was more of a family trauma narrative. I actually got really into the show. I think that all the acting was great. I think that the underlying story was great. There is a terrible parent who is not forgiven, Shan will be happy to know.

Ben 

So what is the story, girl?

Shan 

Well, yes, this is my experience of this show. I watched episode one and I was repulsed by it and I stopped watching the show. 

Ben 

Like, that's all I remember, and I remember Twig gritting their teeth through the whole show.

Shan 

Me and several of our friends watched it together and were like, no thank you. Goodbye.

Ben 

So like, what was the story here?

NiNi 

Let me see if I can pull together a explanation. 

Ben

You put it on this list, girl! You gotsta!

NiNi

I think the reason that Shan, and Twig, and the others hated the show is that it starts with a big lie and you think that the show is just gonna be about the romance. So the big lie in the beginning is one of the things that you're just like, oh no.

But actually, the big lie goes away fairly early and the romance actually is done and dusted fairly early. And the rest of the story is about Bonnie's character, who is the little sister of Sing Harit's character. They have this terrible father who has been cheating on his wife their entire lives. They have multiple siblings out there. One of their siblings is actively trying to ruin their lives, which is how the big lie happened, because she was working with the girl who was with Sing and eventually fell in love with Bonnie. That part went away really quickly, because she was like, no, I actually like this girl. I'm going to tell her the truth. I'm not going to be part of your thing. And then homegirl goes off the rails.

And that was actually the majority of it. Homegirl went off the rails and Sing's character trying to be the glue that holds his family together and basically having a nervous breakdown over it. 

Shan 

Wow. That is really not as advertised.

NiNi 

It was advertised as like this love triangle or that basically that Emi's character was with Sing's character and then cheated on him with his sister, which is not what happened at all. It really is more of a family trauma narrative. A lot of it is about Sing's character basically having this slow motion, nervous breakdown.

Bonnie's character has left the family at the beginning of the story, she's living on her own. She will not go back. Her father slept with her teacher and had a kid and nobody wants it to tell the mom. It was a giant familial mess. But in the end, not only is the father not forgiven, I think he actually does something that ends him in prison. So there's a lot there that nobody really expected. 

But in terms of the actual two romances there's Emi and Bonnie and there's View and Mim, who is Bonnie and Sing's half-sister in the story. Those are actually pretty good, solid romances. Emi and Bonnie have great chemistry. View plays an amazing lesbian when you give her the right script.

I quite enjoyed it. I don't think it's for everybody, but I also want people to know that it is not as advertised.

Shan 

I guess they thought that something that looks more like a salacious GL cheating plot would attract more attention, but that's what turned a lot of people off of it, I think.

NiNi 

Emi's character doesn't actually cheat on Sing's character. She breaks up with him when she realizes that she's in love with his sister.

The terrible promotion is the part where they did not try, but on the actual story, they tried, they tried and they genuinely, on most of it, succeeded. 

Okay, so that moves us on to the final nominee for the Girl Who Tried this season. And there is definitely a split decision on this one. When it Rains, it Pours—Futtari Doshubari.

Shan 

Here we had like the opposite, NiNi, where me and Ben watched this week to week and you binged it literally like just this weekend. 

Ben, you watched this one and thought about it quite a lot. Do you wanna give the overview?

Ben 

Sure. When it Rains, it Pours is an adult romance story where two guys who work at the same company end up becoming unexpected pen pals because of a typo in an email address, and end up using each other sort of as a journal to dump about the frustrations they're having in their relationships. Our more optimistic guy has been with his longtime girlfriend and she seems to be increasingly sex repulsed. This is leading to distance in their relationship and causing him a great deal of uncertainty and frustration. Our other guy is gay and in a very strange cohabitation with his childhood friend who seems determined to take care of him but will absolutely, in no uncertain terms, fuck him at all. 

The two of them get steadily closer in their emails and then eventually realize that they've been emailing each other, which turns into them hanging out with each other more. And in the building frustration and loneliness they're feeling, they end up finding a connection in each other and then deciding to go forward with the emotional affair they've been having for a while and turn it into a full-on sexual affair. This eventually leads to both of their relationships blowing up and in the aftermath the two of them are going to maybe try to be together. 

This should have been a pretty solid show for us to talk about. Unfortunately, the week to week experience of this show led to a lot of frustration that I think you were spared, NiNi. I noticed you had like a really positive experience at a specific moment. And I went back and read our commentary at the moment. And basically we had your response and then had it ripped because the book readers were like, that's a cop out from the show because this is the story these guys were actually telling.

I think that's the consistent problem with this particular show. It withholds key moments and leaves them off screen for the audience to determine what happens there. I don't enjoy the constant emotional ambiguity that I was left with when it comes to this show. More specifically, because sex was such an important sticking point for both of the characters for why they were so willing to get involved in an affair, I really think this show being a little chaste about its sex was not a good choice. 

I also think that they did a bad job with the gay pair, because I think they really did a disservice to the Fujisawa character. Which is not fair, because they actually did a great job with the Kaori character, because I actually really loved the breakup scene in particular. I think that character was given a great deal of grace by the narrative overall, and I think that that section of the story landed the most cleanly for me.

Shan

This one is a tricky one to unpack and talk about because there's a novel, there's what the show ended up doing, and then there's what I actually hoped the show was going to do, which is neither of those things. So, there's a few different versions of the show swimming around in my head and the more I learned about the novel the more I kind of thought, hmm, I don't think I would have liked that novel. 

In the book, Fujisawa is very much an evil mustache twirling villain. Which is not something that I would have been interested in. So I am glad that the show changed that. I just don't think that the ways that the show changed the narrative actually landed very well because as Ben said, there was a lot of ambiguity in the changes that they made that was not intended to be there. That ended up becoming most evident and unfortunate in the dubious consent, non-consensual, however you want to call it, sex scene that was depicted in the penultimate episode that was in the book a violent sexual assault. 

We went to talk to folks after the episode and learned that there were so many different interpretations of what happened in that scene and nobody was entirely sure what we were supposed to think happened or what it meant. Which is really not good when you're talking about something as serious as assault from an abusive character. So that made me pretty uncomfortable. 

I just was really disappointed that that was the direction the story went because what I found most compelling about this show when it started was that it seemed to be about these two relationships where it wasn't that anybody was villainous. It was just that the desires of the people in these relationships were mismatched. They were trying to force these long-term relationships that weren't working because they wanted different things than their partners. I really liked that as an idea to unpack, and I liked, too, that our two main characters did not actually deal with those things in a healthy way, and that led them to make the decision to cheat. I thought that that felt very human and very realistic in terms of how affairs like that tend to happen. 

That's part of why I was extremely disappointed when they turned the gay side of that equation into a straight up, like, abusive controlling stalker situation. That really undercuts what I thought we were doing here. And it's just not what I wanna be watching. And then on top of that, they added ambiguity where there wasn't supposed to be ambiguity, and that created a lot of confusion and muddled their messaging a bit. I see what they were trying to do, I think. But the show for me was kind of a weird experience all the way through. There were always parts of it that I found compelling, and there were always parts of it that I didn't think were working. So it never fully clicked for me. 

I appreciated, though, that there was clearly a lot of thought that the creators were trying to do something interesting here. There was a lot of care that went into, like, the visuals of the show. It just never came together for me. And the way the last few episodes played out with a lot of major important scenes and important themes from the book being removed but not fully and leading to this weird ambiguity. 

I agree with Ben that them not including the actual pivotal sex scene of the book is a head scratcher. They kind of had them go from entering an affair with ambiguous or unclear feelings for each other into just like a snap of a finger, suddenly they're passionately in love, but we didn't see any of that because they cut it all out of the story. That was a big miss for me. 

I did really like the Kaori breakup scene and I liked the way that her arc was handled all the way through. It's a show that I think belongs in the Girl, You Tried consideration because it did try. It did do some interesting things, but it just didn't cohere. And it certainly did not provide a consistent experience for the people who watched it.

NiNi 

This is actually the first time we've gotten to talk about it, because I literally just finished it today. But I think that I benefit from a few different things. One, that I binged it, I think is definitely changes the tenor of a lot of it for me. Two, that I'm just coming off of editing our conversation about Heesu in Class 2, and three, I have sort of developed a level at which I approach Japanese drama that doesn't for me read ambiguity so much as reticence to portray certain things. I also was not engaged in any of the conversation around it. I was not familiar with the story. I didn't know anything about the novel. I went into it completely blind. I had no expectations whatsoever. And I think that that genuinely put me in a place to just be able to receive it, take it in just based on myself, I guess, and come to a conclusion that way. 

So for me, when I watched it, I don't see any gaps. Normally, and Shan had pointed this out to me, I am good at filling in gaps where I see them, which is why I have a slightly better time with some shows than Ben and Shan do, but there's a difference between filling in gaps and there not being gaps for me and from my view of watching the story, I didn't find any gaps. That's my personal opinion.

Ben 

So I guess that's the big question then for you, where you think we're describing gaps, what did you read?

NiNi 

Shan talked about one around like the pivotal sex scene, which I assume is the sex between Sei and Fujiwara, yes?

Shan 

Yeah, but not the part that we saw in the show. In the novel, they have the first very awkward sex, which is what we saw, and then after that, they have their emotional moment together. And that is when they start having real sex, good sex, passionate sex, and that is very intense and goes on for days. That is the part that the show cut out.

Ben 

And that's what explains why he gets so sprung for the boy.

Shan 

Yeah, that is when they actually passionately fall in love with each other, which is something that was not actually on screen in the show.

NiNi 

To me, they fell in love before that. So that by the time they actually got to the sex it was a pivotal moment for them, yes, but not in terms of their emotions. For me, I'm seeing them having the emotional affair the entire time. And so the physical affair, when it comes, it's this turning point, but it doesn't do it for me.

Ben 

This is the BL gay divide, and this is why I'm so angry about this particular part. This is a show about a gay man and a straight man getting together. I don't think glossing over the sexual awakening component of that is acceptable at all.

I'm not willing to just hand wave that as, well they were already having the emotional affair so the sex doesn't matter. It actually does because so much about what they were doing was wrapped up in notions of identity.

Glossing over what may have happened between Fujisawa and Sei is unacceptable, as well. One of them was absolutely refusing to have sex and then maybe tries to have sex, maybe tries to force sex, maybe rapes his boyfriend, maybe they have awkward bad sex finally. We're not entirely certain. But we know that both of them are kind of over it and emotionally spent the day after that. 

This is a show where the sexual tension between the four main characters was critical to their characters and it was not well managed for me.

Shan 

I'll just add, Ben mentioned earlier that like, for some of us, there was a more positive reaction and then we learned more about the book and then changed. That's not how I experienced it. I was disappointed the whole time. [laughs] From the jump, I was just like, uh-uh, nope, that was not it. They did not nail that. 

I did not see what I needed to see for Hagiwara. For me, it was very startling to go from Hagiwara's uncertainty and still figuring out if he wanted this to then all of a sudden he is obsessively into Sei to the point where he's falling apart. Like that literally was a two minute transition on screen. And for me, I need to actually see that. I need to see him have the sexual awakening. I need to see him then tip into a more serious and passionate love. And I need to see that play out to the point where he starts to lose his grip. That's just not stuff you can skip for me.

NiNi 

I think I definitely have a different view of that and that's maybe because of the way that I think about sex. But I take your points, both of you. 

Ben

You call yourself the sex and story girl. This was a show about sex and they didn't have it.

NiNi 

But that's exactly the thing. I didn't think the show was about sex because for me, the fact that they're not having sex with their partners, it's about the emotional pain of rejection more than it is about the physical desire for sex.

Ben 

Which is why when they finally get the sex, it's supposed to be about how do they respond to affirmation.

NiNi 

The scene when they're having sex when Sei tells Hagiwara, if they don't want this body or whatever it is that he says to him, that really hit me. I felt that incredibly emotional because it was to me validating. The show's about sex but it's also not about sex and I probably just under-indexed on the amount that it was about sex for me.

Shan 

That's gonna have to be a your mileage very much varies. I can never excuse a show making the entire narrative about sex and then copping out when it comes time to actually show the sex. The only sex that we saw between them was the awkward sex. We didn't see the good sex. So that doesn't resonate to me at all as an argument.

NiNi 

For everything that you guys have said, I completely see where you're coming from on this. I just had a totally different reaction to the show.

Shan 

Yeah, that's fair.

Ben 

I am going to reiterate that I just don't agree with that at all. I think it's completely unacceptable. This is one of those things where I'm actually kind of gay furious because Hagiwara's sexual awakening is important. If the show wants us to believe that he got sprung from this boy after a great dicking over the course of a weekend, like we don't have to see, like, them boinking per se, but like there are many artful ways to accomplish that. 

The fact that Fujisawa would never touch that boy, him finally touching that boy, and that whole sequence being a little bit ambiguous and everybody not being certain what happened there is also extremely unacceptable for me. On top of that, making his whole reticence about the boy about some sort of really fucked up tragic loyalty because he feels guilty about maybe being the reason his parents died? Not good. 

Shan 

Yeah, I did not like that backstory.

Ben 

This is one of the rare times I was with the aro-ace girlies. There's a really fascinating concept of devotion here that I think is being twisted badly. And the fact that like him finally having sex was about him sort of losing this feeling of possession, that needed to be fully played out. And I think the show cut away too fast on that. I'm just extremely frustrated about this entire experience.

Shan

You're more mad about it than I thought you were. I think you've gotten more mad over time. [laughs]

NiNi 

Okay, so those are our three options for the Girl, Who Tried. And now we get to pick one.

Shan

How do we pick one from this little list here?

Ben

I don’t even know. I'm not giving it to Us, though, because I don't like this one just being something else entirely. That's frustrating. Prepping your audience for what they're going into and then giving them something else, that's bad. [laughs]

Shan 

[laughs] I'll say the marketing team tried something. I don't know if it was a smart thing.

Ben 

Like, at least for like ThamePo, I was like, okay, it looks like everybody got what they wanted out of that. whatever.

Shan 

If they had advertised it as a family drama, most people would not have bothered to watch it. I would have watched it, but most people would not have.

NiNi 

And because of that, I don't think that that could be the Girl Who Tried.

Shan 

I get that. Thinking about ThamePo versus When It Rains it Pours, they're such different shows.

Ben 

I think ThamePo has an argument in that they were trying to do an idol romance and it seems like the audience connected to that even if everybody who gives a shit about actual idol stories were like, what the fuck. 

Shan

[laughs] Yeah, if you know about the idol industry, it's a tough show.

Ben 

So I find myself resistant because I don't want to praise GMMTV for giving milquetoast idol commentary when they're the primary source of this shit.

Shan 

It did get something right that Only Boo! got very wrong in that when the idols had to choose between their relationships and their careers, and they chose their relationships, there were actual consequences for that. 

Ben 

Okay, that's a point. I'll give them that.

Shan

They saw the error that they made in Only Boo! and did correct at least that part of it. Certainly they didn't land it perfectly, but I was glad that they improved on that.

NiNi 

Okay, so we have one show that's kinda eh and another show that actively angered people. So which one? [laughs]

Ben 

I feel like I want to give it to the show that pissed me off because my anger is specific. [Shan laughs] When it comes to When It Rains it Pours, like the arc is complete. We're not arguing about whether or not the show completed the story it was telling or whether or not it was doing what it was actually doing. The difficulty with this show is at key moments they left the audience hanging and then we have to sort of decide what actually happened in a way that gets us to the next scene. That's a specific frustration.

I keep going to the Kaori breakup scene. There's two key things she does in that scene that I really like. She talks about how she read the messages and while she was upset, one of the things that she noted was that despite everything, he never once said anything bad about her. And two, she told him to break up with her. She's letting him be the one who ends it. Even though he had an emotional affair and then a physical affair with someone else, she owned how she let him down and set him up for that. I think it's really significant that she's willing to be the one who was in the wrong TM and give him the position of the one ending the relationship.

Shan 

I think that the creative team behind this show was really trying to do something here. I think they cared about it and I think that they succeeded in some ways in creating compelling characters, creating compelling dynamics. 

I mean, the only reason you get mad about something is because you're invested in it, right? You wouldn't even get mad if you didn't care. The spirit of the Girl You Tried is a show that had good ideas and had good intent and had some real effort in the production that just maybe missed the mark here and there and didn't quite land it. That to me is what When It Rains it Pours is. So it feels like the right pick for me.

NiNi 

It's better to talk about something that failed in an interesting way. And I think that based on what you guys are saying for you, it failed in a way that was at least discussable.

Shan

I think that’s right.

Ben 

We had a lot to say, let me tell you. [laughs]

Shan 

We sure had lot. I think it succeeded more for some people than others, but for the people for whom it failed, it was an interesting thing to discuss. There was a lot to unpack about why it didn't work. So I think that's right.

NiNi 

I just want to point out people we are in August. And this is the first Girl You Tried we have gotten to all year.

Ben 

It's a bad year, folks. I'm sorry.

Shan 

Yikes.

Ben 

The best show we had this year was made two years ago. That's how bad things are. [Shan laughs]

NiNi 

So the Girl Who Tried is When It Rains it Pours. Congratulations, dubious honor. 

You will go into the hopper for our Girl You Tried of the Year. You will probably win it considering there's nothing else happening.

01:08:04 - Outro: One Fuck Of A Year So Far

Shan

Wow, end of summer is here and here we are.

Ben 

I'm sad.

We can't end on a sad note. Let's find something to be happy about. Is there anything interesting that you guys have watched in the last few weeks? Give me anything at all that made you happy.

Shan 

Anything interesting... I am stalling for time...

Ben 

I'm looking at my list.

Shan

[laughs] I am too, it's not looking great.

Ben

Pluem got us to start watching Rearrange. We’re one episode in. I can't say shit about a Thai BL one episode in.

Shan

But you did like the first episode. 

Ben 

I did, I think there were some good ideas in the first episode. This was hella gay. So I'm kind of into that.

Shan 

I think, NiNi, we can give a shout out to Good Boy, which is a kdrama that we enjoyed watching quite a lot. The ending did not live up to our expectations. We had a good time watching it for most of the show. 

NiNi 

We did in fact. [laughs]

Shan 

We are stretching here. We're doing our best to come up with things. Let's see. What else? [laughs]

Ben 

Shine is very pretty even if I'm feeling rather dubious about how every episode it goes, “But what if rich people are sad too?”

NiNi 

I still think that that is not actually the message.

Shan 

I really hope that you're right, NiNi.

Ben 

It isn't. But the problem is like every episode they go “You say rich people are bad and poor people are good. Is that fair?” They have asked that question in every single fucking episode.

NiNi 

Yes, they have, but also they had the greatest intellectual foreplay of all time with two guys sending each other coded messages through romance books in the library.

Shan

I did see gifs of that. It piqued my interest. I was like, who is this tall drink of water flirting through books? But I shan't be watching this show until we get to the end and I am assured that it doesn't totally blow the class themes, because y'all know how I am. 

NiNi 

I had a good time with a Star Trek episode a couple of weeks ago. Unfortunately, the last one was kind of a downer

Ben 

You talking about the one where they put Kirk in charge? My dad really liked that one. He said it reminded him of the first day he was a principal.

I'm getting this in here before we go. You cannot have Kirk and Spock on screen together and they constantly doing No Homo shit around them the whole time. 

[NiNi laughs]

This season of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds is the most weirdly No Homo shit I have seen from Star Trek in a long time. It is genuinely uncomfortable. My dad, who is normally not even aware of this, is texting me like, what's up with all this straight shit? [Everyone laughs]

Shan

Wow, okay, so you know that's bad.

Ben 

My father, an OG Star Trek fan who was not aware of any of the Spirk shit, was like, what's going on with all of this making Spock have a girlfriend every episode stuff? 

And I'm like, thank you, Dad. It's a lot, isn't it? [Ben and Shan laugh]

Shan

Well, I didn't know this. This is a good update. I like to be at the very edge of the periphery of Star Trek, just having a very general knowledge of what's happening and never venturing in myself. 

NiNi 

Good to know. 

Shan

So thank you for the update. 

I will say this about the state of current dramas. I have retreated to rewatching Hometown Cha Cha Cha. That's where I'm at. 

Ben 

Wow. For people who want the gay update from me, I was trying to be super invested in 10 things I Want to do Before I Turn 40 and also trying to be super invested in Stay By My Side After The Rain. These are two shows that I really want to love, and unfortunately they just keep being so fucking weird.

Shan 

It's true. [Ben and Shan laugh] I feel really bad, NiNi, because Ben's trying so hard to like these shows and they're just bad. They're not good.

NiNi 

This is a rough year. I feel like the energy of the entire planet right now is misaligned.

Shan 

I'm with you, something's not right.

Ben

It's not good. It's not good. We're all struggling. It's not fun.

NiNi 

Yeah, there's very little fun to be had out here right now. I don't know, stay safe out there people.

Shan

I'm praying to the Sing My Crush gods. Please, just drop a show on us out of nowhere. Please, we need it.

[Ben laughs]

NiNi

The only thing I have left on my list right now is 25 Ji Akasaka De part 2. And the way that this year has been going…

Ben

We didn't even talk about it but I Became the Main Role of a BL Drama had a second season and it was barely about the leads at all. And when it finally was about them, it undercut its own core theme. The first show fucking ended on, “I want to like you as a man, not as an Aoyanagi Hajime fan.” And then the fucking end of season two, it's like, “The only thing I'm good at being is an Aoyanagi Hajime fan.” 

“Okay, well, let's have sex.” No! Bad! [laughs]

Shan

I was pissed. We were so mad. Like don't come back just to destroy the things we love. Just stay gone, okay? I swear to God, if the 25 Ji one does it too, I'm gonna lose it.

Ben 

We might have to retire for real real, not for play play.

NiNi 

Maybe we'll go on hiatus. I don't know about retire.

Ben 

I mean, I functionally have. I was so mad after the Heesu response that I took BL out of my header. I don't actually describe myself as a BL blog anymore.

Shan 

He's mad at that fandom.

Ben 

I cannot be associated with a fandom that thought that that show was horrible. There's a lot I can disagree with—the parts of BL that the girls are here for, I'm not always here for those things, but you know, more power to that we can share the space. No. At the point at which we're saying that this show is bad and convincing other would-be fans that this show is bad, we have failed. I don't wanna hear shit about how BL amplifies queer voices if we're saying that this show is bad. All of you can go fuck yourselves on that one.

Shan 

Woo, that's a great note to end on.

NiNi 

I mean, there isn't anything more to say. With that, we out. See us when you see us.

Shan

No promises of when that will be.

Ben 

No promises we'll be back anytime soon. We might check in at the end of the year for awards. [laughs]

NiNi 

We've got a couple of things on the horizon if we can get the scheduling lined up. Not about any actual shows, though. We're gonna do some industry deep dive stuff and then head into the end of the year. Womp.

Okay, all right. And with that, we out! Say bye to the people, Shan.

Shan 

Bye, people.

NiNi 

Say bye to the people, Ben.

Ben 

Peace!

[the-conversation-pod]

Senior Prom Square Dance: Gelboys and Heesu in Class 2

AND WE'RE BACK

NiNi and Ben returned the booth with @lurkingshan and @waitmyturtles to discuss the love rhombus, teenage love in the modern age, the horrors of social media, and that one Zoom call from hell. We'll be unpacking the way the Gelboys all made each other worse in their quest for a dopamine hit, and how effectively Heesu in Class 2 used all of its elements to tell a coming out narrative.

Senior Prom Square Dance by @Ben and NiNi

Our knees hurt and the music is too loud. Ben, NiNi, Shan and friend of the pod Turtles talk Gelboys and Heesu In Class 2. Episode transcri

Senior Prom Square Dance

Podcast Episode · The Conversation · 09/11/2025 · 1h 42m

Senior Prom Square Dance - The Conversation | iHeart

<p>Our knees hurt and the music is too loud. Ben, NiNi, Shan and friend of the pod Turtles talk <em>Gelboys</em> and <em>Heesu In Class 2</e

Timestamps

The timestamps will now correspond with chapters on Spotify for easier navigation.

00:00 - Welcome 00:55 - Introduction 08:36 - Gelboys: A Portrait of Modern Youth 17:32 - Gelboys: Technology, Loneliness and Distraction 30:58 - Gelboys: Our Not-So-Fab Four 40:30 - Gelboys: Perspectives On The Ending 44:28 - Gelboys: Final Thoughts and Ratings 53:17 - Heesu In Class 2 01:00:41 - Heesu In Class 2: The Story Is Storying 01:09:55 - Heesu In Class 2: Friendship, Family, Queerness and Acceptance 01:24:57 - Heesu In Class 2: On Seungwon 01:28:06 - Heesu In Class 2: The Galloping Disk Horse, Final Thoughts and Ratings 01:38:31 - Outro: Things Are Dire

The Conversation Transcripts!

Thanks to the continued efforts of @lurkingshan as an editor and proofreader, we are able to bring you transcripts of the episodes.

Please send our volunteers your thanks!

00:00 - Welcome

NiNi

Welcome to The Conversation, the Queer Media And Brown Liquor Podcast.

Ben

I'm Ben, the media critic.

NiNi

I’m NiNi, the VIIBs queen.

Ben

And we are your drunk Caribbean uncle and auntie who are sitting on the porch in the rocking chairs.

NiNi

We’re here to talk queer film and dramas, with a special focus on Asian QL.

Ben

So if you like to dive deep into queer stories…

NiNi

If you like cracked out takes on art and commerce in queer media…

Ben

If you just enjoy simping for attractive people…

NiNi

We believe in simping!

Ben

Tune in!

00:55 - Introduction

Ben 

And we're back. It's been a long time since we were back in the booth. We brought some friends along. Welcome back, Shan. Say hi, Shan.

Shan 

Hi, people.

Ben 

We've also brought our friend Turtles along, of the blog @waitmyturtles. Say hi, Turtles.

Turtles 

Hey, everybody. I haven't been on the podcast this year, so happy 2025.

Ben 

Yes, and what a year it is. [snirks, NiNi laughs]

NiNi 

Oof! 

Shan 

The Year of Trash! [Ben and Turtles laugh] I feel that people should know that we're coming in salty and hot.

[Ben and NiNi laugh]

NiNi 

All you need to know about this year is that it is almost August and we have put out exactly two episodes, and they were both about The Untamed. 

Ben 

Holy shit!

Shan 

Doesn't that just say it all?

Turtles

That says everything.

Ben 

We're talking about two of the shows we did manage to like this year. We're going to talk about Gelboys from Thailand, and we're gonna talk about Heesu in Class 2 from Korea. 

Before we get into that. It's been a while since we had Turtles on the podcast. Turtles, you have been doing one of the longest-running BL projects, trying to do a proper historical watch of Thai BL focused on GMMTV. Where are you now and how's it going?

Turtles 

So, thanks for checking in on my Old GMMTV Challenge project. Life takes a huge hit out of this kind of undertaking. And I'm very lucky to have a busy life with a family and kids. And those kids get older, and they demand a lot more time. So, I've only watched a couple shows this year.

I started the year out fabulously with a little side series called my Lakorn Corner, where I watched some very impactful, either queer shows or shows that had queer themes in them. They included The Fallen Leaf, Khun Chai/To Sir With Love, Laws of Attraction, and The Miracle of Teddy Bear. I am behind on writing about those shows.

I got a posts that I need to write about the rise of the GL genre, which now in 2025, it's really its own established thing. And maybe even arguably from a marketing perspective, more popular than the shows with the guys. And to NiNi's very anticipated excitement before the end of the year, I will watch My School President for the very first time.

NiNi 

Thank you. Please, dear God.

Shan 

It's been like two years of NiNi waiting for you to watch that show.

Turtles 

I feel uncomfortably too old to truly enjoy GemFourth, but I'm going do my best. 

Right after I finish My School President, I'm going to ruin the moment by doing a speed watch of My Love Mix Up Thailand— 

Ben 

—For fuck's sake.

Turtles

—to report on GemFourth before the Catholic show— 

NiNi 

—Don't do it! Don't do it!

Turtles

—and it's gonna be great and I'm gonna drink so much alcohol and it's gonna be really bad.

Ben 

Will Turtles watch My School President before Fourth's hair finishes growing back?

Turtles

I think it's already back. 

Shan 

Definitely. You know how fast that short boy hair grows? No, the hair is already back.

Turtles (03:58)

You gotta look at his LV ads. I think it's already back. It's like more fluffy again.

Shan 

Turtles 

Those, like, pre-21-years-of-age hair hormones, man. But anyway, yeah, this old cougar is going to be watching some GemFourth. Watch out.

[Ben and NiNi laugh]

Ben

Not a cougar!

NiNi 

Why are you like this, Turtles, why?

Turtles 

It's Friday, I got a blue bottle, highly caffeinated coffee that should have some alcohol in it, but it doesn't. Shame on me.

Thanks for having me back on the pod. 

Ben

We love you so much. 

Turtles

I love all y'all.

Ben

Thank you for joining us.

Before we get into both of these shows, we're going to be talking about the way dramas, particularly Asian dramas, like to use the concept of the love rhombus. In Gelboys, we follow four different boys and the complicated relationships between each other. And Heesu in Class 2, we've got what eventually shakes out to two different couples as well. So before we get into the show discussion, we want Shan to provide some drama perspective on this very tried and true storytelling tool.

Shan 

So there is, I think most popular in kdrama but used across Asian dramas, a romance structure that I always refer to as the love rhombus. Which is, there are four characters introduced at the start of the story. You might have a couple obvious leads and a couple obvious sides. You might have four leads. It can vary a little bit, but the thing that characterizes it as the love rhombus is they have these multi-directional lines of attraction, affection, love for each other, that are not mutual at the start. It's kind of like the classic, “he loves her, she loves him, he loves somebody else,” these messy things where everybody likes somebody different and nobody is attuned to the person that likes them.

It naturally creates a lot of back and forth drama, comedy, lots of opportunities for messy relationship development. And eventually, over the course of a story, these love lines get sorted out. So you'll see people getting confused, people realizing that the one they like doesn't like them and moving on from that, catching on eventually to the fact that somebody else does like them and hey, maybe actually they do like that person. And then you end up with two happy couples at the end and hopefully nobody feeling bitter about it.

It's not a typical structure that we see for BL. Normally in BL, we see really clear and non-mixy romances. You normally have a main romance, you have a side romance or multiple side romances, and they don't normally mix because a lot of BL is based around, like, this idea of pairs that are going to be very clearly the ones meant for each other and in their own story that runs parallel to the other couple's story the whole time. These two shows that we're gonna talk about today didn't stay in that typical BL lane and instead veered into the love rhombus.

NiNi 

The love rhombus, the way that it usually plays out, lends itself kind of perfectly to youth romance because this is the time when everybody's hormones are bubbling and nobody really knows what they're doing. These are two stories that are focused heavily on that kind of back and forth of youth romance.

Shan is our Korean drama expert. Turtles has been doing this project on Thai drama. So we wanted to sort of look at how these two cultures are looking at both the love rhombus and youth romance.

Ben 

Before we move on, since you are more familiar with the concept of the love rhombus, for each of you, you have like one or two examples of some of your favorite executions outside of BL?

Shan 

Aw, Ben, you always give me the opportunity to talk about Coffee Prince and I appreciate it every single day.

Ben

I got you, fam, don't you worry!

Shan

Of course, Coffee Prince is my favorite love rhombus. Part of what makes, I think, a love rhombus a good story structure is that you get to see a little bit of messiness in the relationships.

You want the characters to be confused about who likes who and wondering if their feelings are returned and figuring out that they like someone they didn't think they liked. Coffee Prince has all of that in spades, even though the messy hets, as we like to refer to them, in that show are kind of annoying. They play a really crucial role in the story and really support the themes and the development of the main relationship.

Ben 

NiNi?

NiNi 

You put me on the spot and suddenly I can't remember ever having watched a show in my life.

Ben 

She said, I've never watched a show in my life.

[Turtles laughs]

Ben 

Go ahead, Turtles.

Turtles

I also have never watched a show in my life. I can't think of an example outside of the BL world that fits what Shan described so well.

08:36 - Gelboys: A Portrait of Modern Youth

NiNi

Okay, so let's move on into the first show that we're going to talk about, Gelboys from Thailand. 

Ben, what is Gelboys about?

Ben

Gelboys is about how everybody who worked on I Told Sunset About You and I Promised You the Moon should still keep working. 

Gelboys is a show about a group of high schoolers inside of Bangkok who are all very obsessed with each other, and have enough disposable income to make their lives worse over it. We were sponsored by Spotify and the Bangkok transportation system, and you are not gonna forget it while watching this show.

NiNi 

Not when me and Ben here. Public transportation for the win! [Ben and NiNi Laugh]

Shan 

Good!

Ben

Fou4mod is very much a typical teenager in that he's got a lot of big feelings about love and he's looking for a strong sense of belonging in his relationship. We begin with him breaking up with his girlfriend who doesn't really wanna be his girlfriend. She wants to have this whole “we're just friends who mess around” dynamic and he's just not that comfortable with the uncertainty of that. He breaks up with her, is incredibly dramatic about it in public, and then he gets on the Thai equivalent of Teeny Bop Grindr and starts looking for boys. Eventually, at his school, he starts vibing with this other boy who's clearly trying to play with him. He decides he's going to try and play a player and then proceeds to embarrass himself.

Meanwhile, the boy who he's fiending after is obsessed with his own friend, and Fou4Mod's best friend is secretly in love with him as well. Everybody seems to only fall for each other at the exact wrong time, and they never find themselves in correct alignment. It’s a hot mess.

Shan 

And they do their nails a lot.

Turtles

A lot.

Ben 

These boys were really fascinating to me because there's a lot of wealth aspirational stuff in a lot of the Thai BL romances, where we have a poor-ish person and an ultra-wealthy person as the two people we're dealing with. This was surprising for me in that we were dealing with a bunch of kids whose families were decently off, it felt like. These kids had money to spend on trolling each other getting their nails done, they had a garage band, they could order from the apps, and go out and do things. It felt like these kids had disposable income to blow. Like they went to Blackpink concerts, or at least Lisa's solo concerts. 

What do the three of you think in general about the presentation of these boys middle-class-ish status in the show?

Turtles

From the Southeast Asian read, I think that there's somewhat of a cultural demand in a lot of Southeast Asia to present higher level or middle class socioeconomic ranges. It's certainly aspirational, it's content that sells. But when we think about the socioeconomic environment that was presented in Gelboys, I think the range itself was meant to nail the middle that is the majority of the audience that's watching the show. I think that the way that the show is being presented, and to whom the show is being presented, it was supposed to be most reflective of that one moment. 

If I have money, I'm going to be spending it on all of this technology that I need to plug in in my classrooms and get on the wifi and be surrounded by devices and covering my ears with headphones, and I’m sharing playlists with my courtier or my beloved or whatever as we're getting our nails done. I think it would have been out of touch both in terms of the story itself, and in terms of who the stroll is being presented to, to fuck with those economic ranges.

Shan 

I was very struck by how much money these boys were spending. They have expensive hobbies. They own guitars. They own gaming systems. They are kpop stans and they buy like kpop stans. That's a whole economy we can talk about. They spend a lot of money getting their nails done. They have a ton of disposable income and none of them work.

Ben 

Chan moping over $500 worth of miniatures. “The boy won't talk to me.”

Shan 

Seriously, the amount of money that they spent in this show was kind of insane considering how young they are and that none of them have jobs. And we saw that they're not rich-rich. Baabin's family seems to own a family restaurant. We didn't get a ton of insight into everybody's family, but the depiction was more like they were kind of comfortably middle-class, not like wealthy-wealthy. And yet the show had this ridiculous amount of spending happening for them with no real story mechanism to address where they were getting all that money from. You just kind of assume their parents must give them really generous allowance or something. 

So, because I care about class depiction, because I'm always curious about this stuff, I do kind of wish the show had actually been a little bit more explicit about where all of that money was coming from, how they were able to spend so extravagantly for kids without jobs. I think that Turtles is probably onto something and that there is a little bit of aspiration in the way they were depicted spending money like that. Like it's to communicate to the audience that these kids are whatever morality and values you want to attach to families that have a comfortable level of income.

Turtles 

When I was watching Gelboys, I think I watched it, absorbed it, and didn't really do a separate kind of economic analysis of where these kids were coming from. They spend a lot of time in malls, they do spend a lot of time shopping, they have their own instruments, all of that stuff. But also, I'm thinking of Fou4Mod’s overcrowded house where the floor was covered with products and his mom and his family are all doing live streams selling products. You actually saw the family, at least his family working. 

And then Chian’s, he's alone and his family is away. So we know there's a middle class, maybe an upper middle class conversation going on. Fou4Mod's house, it's a very well lived-in house. The kitchen is crowded. It's small.

I think now that I'm thinking about it more, their ability to spend is one thing. What they're spending on is something else.

Shan

Yeah.

Turtles

I think for the audience that's watching it, the way that they spent money that they had would be spent exactly the way that the audience would expect them to spend it.

Shan 

hey're clearly not meant to be wealthy-wealthy, but they're spending so much and they own and possess and continue to buy every single episode so many expensive things. And so it seems like part of the intentional commentary of the show, because the show is a lot about mindless consumption. The kind of mindless way that they engage in social media, in the way that they're always looking for something to consume. I think that this was part of that. I don't think it's an accident.

NiNi 

There is some delineation between the characters. Going back to the idea of looking at youth culture in Bangkok in particular and what is considered important in youth culture and what these kids are actually spending the money that they do have from whatever source they get it on is really fascinating. 

We see Fou4Mod during the course of the show swap phones with his sister, because his sister has an iPhone. He asks his mom to get him one, and she says no. So he swaps phones with his sister so that he can get an iPhone. It's things like that that really add to the whole consideration of about the restless consumption of youth culture. That's something that's universal and unending, timeless. Like when I was their age, it was the same thing. We were in the mall. We didn't really have any money, but we were in the mall, we'd save up whatever we had and buy CDs, and cheap sneakers, and t-shirts and all these kinds of things. But it was about showing that you could afford to, however you got the money, that you could go out and hang out and do the things that everybody else is doing and consume in the way that everybody else is consuming. It was all of a piece of growing up, and that doesn't seem to have changed from the time I was a teenager to these kids who spend all their time on Spotify…playlist. 

Oh my god. I felt so old watching this show sometimes, I do have to say, like really, really old. 

Shan 

Especially you, who doesn't use social media at all. 

NiNi

I don’t! [laughs]

Turtles 

I've been snapping my fingers at every single thing that NiNi has been saying, including and especially feeling so old when watching the show.

17:32 - Gelboys: Technology, Loneliness and Distraction

Ben 

I really want to talk about the technology of this because, as I was watching episode two with Emily last night, we reflected on how excessively-young these characters felt. I don't envy these kids being young with Instagram.

NiNi 

My idea of literal hell. I was lucky to be a teenager before Facebook was even a gleam. And I was at the beginning end of the internet. So we didn't have social media, but we had Instant Messenger and Black Planet and all of these things.

Shan 

My God, Black Planet. Wow. Throwback.

NiNi

We didn't have social media in the way people understand it now.

Ben 

My very first form of social media was Hi5 and MySpace. The sad story about this is we didn't actually use social media when I was in high school, but because I was a Katrina refugee, we all got social media because we were trying to organically find everybody.

NiNi 

I hadn't even thought about that. Like, at the point that that happened, I was in college.

Ben

Can you imagine dealing with the MySpace Top 8 friends drama when you're a refugee trying to figure out where you belong in the world? [laughs]

NiNi 

No, oh my god.

Shan 

It sounds horrible.

NiNi 

Listen, that Top 8 ended friendships.

Ben 

I was thinking about the Close Friends feature of Instagram and how they use it. That's what that triggered in me. Like the same tactical deployment of the Close Friends reels that they were doing on IG was the same kind of torment we were doing to each other with MySpace Top 8 friends and AOL vague posting.

Shan 

The vague status setting was my favorite.

Ben 

Exactly.

NiNi 

Oh my god,Instant Messenger statuses, like, were your entire being. Like you had to get exactly the right status so that everybody knew what was going on with you.

Shan 

I always had song lyrics in my status, of course.

Ben 

Of course you did.

Shan 

It was very on brand.

Ben

All right, who were your top women that you were using for your messages? Alanis, obviously, who else? [Everyone laughs]

NiNi 

You don't know my struggles, Ben!

Shan 

No, you don't understand. When I was an emo teenager, I did not listen to any pop music. It was only alternative rock.

Turtles 

Oh my god.

Shan

I was insufferable as a teenager.

Ben

I listened to a lot of Live and Bush when I was 16. [laughs]

NiNi

I was in the Caribbean listening to a lot of reggae so my statuses came from like Beanie Man, Buju Bantan and like a bunch of stuff. It was mostly raunchy.

Ben

We're all of a certain age. Social media felt separate from our lived lives for the most part when we were teenagers. I think what scares me so much about young people today, and this affected me even when I was a teacher, is these kids never get a break from each other. It's always happening to them. 

Whatever drama is happening in person is also happening online. There is no reprieve for these kids from the constant anxiety that they inflict upon each other.

Turtles 

That's right. It's 100% true and my kids are about to cross that threshold.

Ben 

That's one of reasons why I actually wanted to bring you on to talk about Gelboys, is because you're a mom of young kids and this is something that you're going to have to contend with or currently contending with because even your young children are likely on the precipice of being subjected to this crap.

Turtles

My kids are certainly not on social media. God help me. They're too young for that, but the dopamine reward cycle of YouTube kids videos, which is literally the worst app that we have my kids on right now. I absolutely hate it. My kids love it. They can switch them, they can fast forward, they can go back. It creates a dopamine reward cycle, alters their brain chemistry literally, and it's really difficult to establish parenting boundaries, settings, rules, all around the practice of using that. 

For the Gelboys, we can very easily assume that they grew up on their phones. It wasn't just social media. It was the actual usage of the phone itself. The need for these guys to always be connected to something, to your point, Ben, but connected to what? Connected to each other? If we remember, there was this one scene where Chian was really lonely. He was in that shared game room space with his friends, most of whom were doing homework or doing shared projects together. And he was just on his phone and he was pulling up iQIYI and he was watching dramas and his eyes were sort of flicking away. He was looking for a hit. That's the brain chemistry of young people these days, of probably every single person that's listening to this podcast.

I had just graduated college when Facebook was becoming a thing that all of us needed to be on in order to be connected. And then just in a rapid few years, it became a crutch. But our brains hadn't been altered like that. Our brains had been altered in other ways. We were still using landlines, and then those landlines turned into cell phones, and people were bemoaning the rise of those technologies.

NiNi 

Don't forget the pager era. 

Turtles 

Oh girl. The beepers, the beepers in class, like every day. Are you a drug dealer? Get out of here.

Shan 

I want to say I'm sorry to any youths listening to this right now, because we are just talking gibberish to you. You cannot understand anything that we're saying. [NiNi laughs]

Turtles 

And also to the youth that are listening to this, your brain chemistry has been altered. Read still in focus, go on a retreat, fix yourself, these technologies are having deep psychological impacts. And what we saw in Gelboys was the constant need for a hit.

I loved the way the show turned the need of the hit from technology, from consumption to, in part, to human relations. How we got there in the end, I quibbled about that a bit, narratively speaking, but it got there. A point of the show was human relationships are just as important as all of the consumption and all of the confusion and all of the chaos that we're depicting in the show.

NiNi 

I'm just going to touch on three things that you said in there, Turtles, that really also hit me when I was watching Gelboys. The first one was loneliness. The loneliness factor was just so huge. You could feel these kids reaching out for something. All of this connection that they have with each other through these apps and spending all this time being out there in the world hanging off of each other. They're puppy piling and they're all so lonely at the same time. It's really crazy to watch. 

The second thing that you brought up there was this idea of distraction, of your eyes sliding away from life into something else that is gonna keep your brain going away from the things that you maybe should be thinking about onto just something that you don't have to think about too much.

The third thing, when Turtles and I had originally talked about Gelboys, Turtles had really glommed onto something in the idea of youth and ephemerality that really hit me. This fact that all of this stuff that they're doing is so of the moment. It's so in the moment. It's so disposable.

Ben 

That's why I love the nails as a gimmick, because the nails grow out and you have to replace them.

Shan 

Yep.

Turtles 

100%.

NiNi 

It's constantly turning over all the time. Like the moment is here and then it's gone. So even when these kids completely embarrass each other or embarrass themselves on social media, five minutes later, these kids are onto something else.

Crazy. It's just like this endless, endless, constant cycle and churn. It really freaked me out in some ways, Like to me, this just looked like a version of hell. My teenage years were like, we had our own things for sure. I'm not going to be here like, “Oh, well, in my day, shit was better.” It wasn't. It was different. But the thing that really scares me about these kids now is just watching how fast everything turns over all the time. It's terrifying.

Shan 

I think it ties nicely into the last aspect of the cultural touchstones of the show that we haven't really talked about yet, which is the kpop stanning part of these boys' lives. Which is very much for a lot of fans connected to those emotions that you're talking about, NiNi, to that sense of loneliness. Wanting to tie yourself to something that feels more lasting, and also the short-term dopamine hits that you get from being a fan of a group, a musician, whatever, that is always putting something out there that you can respond to. 

And so it makes perfect sense to me that these boys would be stans, would be people who glom onto a group or an idol and make them part of their identity, who invest part of themselves and their own emotions in the success of this stranger, this famous person, who they feel a connection to and who they can kind of live vicariously through. They are invested in things like charting and accomplishments. Like there's a whole long scene in this about Baabin and a lot of the other boys around them, like, contributing to an attempt to make Blackpink, who is the group they stan, make their new song chart. They're trying to get what's called a PAK in kpop terminology—means perfect all kill—which means you're number one on all charts simultaneously. That's a really big picture goal that doesn't actually matter to your life at all, but gives you a sense of achievement when you can accomplish it for somebody else. And then gives you that kind of emotional high that we're talking about these boys seeking.

NiNi 

Also that sense of community because it's something that you're doing in collaboration with other people, and you feel less alone on top of everything else.

Ben 

For the people who don't engage with kpop who are listening to us, this is no different from little boys watching Dragon Ball Z trying to give their energy to the spirit bomb.

Shan 

Fandom is the same in all forms. Sports obsession is a form of fandom.

Ben 

I'm watching volleyball right now!

Shan

You sure are! Always!

Turtles 

Yes, girl, yes!

Ben

Right now!

NiNi 

You are always watching volleyball.

Shan

Uou’re always watching volleyball, right?

So it makes perfect sense for them to be fandom types. And as I was telling Ben as I was giving him some background about kpop, it makes perfect sense for them to be Blackpink stans in particular, because Blackpink has a Thai member, Lisa. So, very, very popular in Thailand just by the nature of her being in the group. And also Blackpink has an aesthetic and a fandom vibe that very much draws catty gay boys. So when I saw that they were Blackpink fans, I was like, that's exactly right. That is perfect. Good job show!

Turtles 

Shan, the way that you just described the work that goes into kpop and the sort of burst of reward of achieving something. There were a couple of intimate scenes in Gelboys, that absolutely speaks to you know, the le petit mort of it all— 

Shan 

Mmhmm. 100% it does.

Turtles

—the orgasmic quality.

I'm just realizing we're talking about hit after dopamine hit after hormonal hit after dopamine hit after hormonal hit. The spectrum of life as one big hit is exactly the way that technology in so many different ways has influenced the way that the youth need to live their lives. 

Yet again, I'm gonna go back to what I love about the show so much. In the end, it was the old fashioned hits. It was the relief of loneliness, the emotional connection between two people, and the physical intimate connection between two people that ends up being the most enduring. 

But man, yes, Shan, to your point about the work of being a fan, what is the reward that you get in the end? It's virtual, it's ephemeral, it's not tangible, but they still feel accomplished at doing it, and it's a little bit orgasmic when you think about it.

Shan

Yes, I will say sometimes helping your group achieve a PAK or a Billboard All-Kill is better than sex.

Turtles 

I'm gonna steal from Subway Takes and say 100% disagree.

NiNi 

Just to slide from Turtle's last point about taking those dopamine hits and those orgasmic moments into the real world, and what that does to the love relationships, going back to the beginning of this conversation to the love rhombus itself and how it all plays out. These kids are doing the same thing that they're doing online in the real world. So they're chasing these dopamine hits. The way that they feel about each other is probably one of the most enduring things, but even that's changing. And they are also not over-indexing on any one person. 

The whole story even gets started because these kids don't want to commit. Fou4Mod meets Chian. He likes Chian. Chian's stringing Fou4Mod along because he really likes Bua. Bua is stringing him along. We find out later kind of a little knowingly, Bua clearly enjoys the attention that he gets from Chian. But also, he is looking for friends and he figures that this is the way that he can find friends, like Chian is his friend because Chian wants to fuck him. But as far as he's concerned, he can hold that to the side and actually have somebody who seemingly cares about him and puts their effort and energy into him. That's a form of dopamine hit. 

And that's a dopamine hit that Fou4Mod is looking for when he goes off looking for a boyfriend. He wants somebody to be his person, to give him those dopamine hits that Bua is getting from Chian and from his TikTok fans. Baabin is collecting those little dopamine hits in his little Fou4Mod folder on his phone where he screenshots all the moments that they have in chat. I can't remember how many screenshots were in this— 

Ben 

—It was over 400.

NiNi

—it was a lot, yeah.

30:58 - Gelboys: Our Not-So-Fab Four

Ben

We've got four boys and there are four of us. Does everybody want to pick a boy and deconstruct their arc?

Shan, you're getting Bua. It’s okay. [laughs]

Shan 

YES! I WON! [NiNi laughs]

Shan 

Who wants to start tackling the mess of Fou4Mod?

Ben 

It's NiNi. NiNi's getting Fou4Mod.

NiNi 

It's like you know me. 

Shan

I love how you asked and then just gave us our assignments.

Ben 

Look, we don't have a lot of time. Turtles, how you feel about talking about Chian?

Turtles

I wanna slap that boy upside the head is what I wanna say about Chian!

Ben

We’ll get to you third. I’m going first! Let's talk about Baabin! [Shan and NiNi laugh]

Shan

Of course, his favorite boy, Baabin, gets to go first.

Ben

We're gonna take our obligatory ITSAY Mention section a little early here. The Bas character from I Told Sunset About You— 

Shan 

—There it is.

Ben

—who served a specific function in that story to be, like, a better boy than Teh. Oh’s not choosing him because Teh is special to him. And they went, we realize you all did not realize what Bas was, and many of you have not let go that that boy should have won, let's show you why he couldn't win if he was a real person. And they gave us Baabin to show that. 

Baabin, in so many ways, is the worst of all of them. Because he's so self-flagellatingly mean about the whole endeavor. Baabin is part of Fou4Mod's group and his band, and he's secretly in love with Fou4Mod. Fou4Mod ends up using Baabin to make Chian jealous, Baabin eventually gets really frustrated about this. However, at every opportunity that Baabin had to step forward and be something more for Fou4Mod, he got chickenshit about it and then backed off instead. By the time he has a chance to be something more with Fou4Mod, he intentionally shoves him at Chian just so he can maintain his self-righteous pining about it. It's awful! 

Over the course of this, ends up running into Bua to tell Bua to leave Chian alone so that Fou4Mod and them can be togethe—insane behavior. And then ends up developing this sort of secret friendship with Bua. And this turns into a genuine attraction between him and Bua—which actually ends up allowing the show to explore some interesting sexual dynamics in a way that I thought was really tasteful, where like these two would be verse if they actually got their shit together. 

But Baabin is obsessed with his own misery, which is the cardinal sin of every piner. I’m also talking about myself here. He is, in my opinion, the worst of all of them, because he would rather hate Fou4Mod for not loving him back than tell Fou4Mod that he loves him. That is at the core what is wrong with every unrepentant and unreformed piner out there. They don't want to confess to people because they're terrified of the consequence of rejection, or in many cases what actual acceptance would mean. They just won't face it and they just tear themselves apart as a result. 

We can't even give Baabin the “what if he's not gay” safety net for why he won't say what needs to be said. Instead, he's just an asshole who is being in many ways cruel to his own friend because he's unwilling to face the reality of what his friend not liking him or actually liking him back could actually mean. I don't think we're meant to feel sorry for Baabin in this case. We're meant to appreciate that his unwillingness to say what needs to be said is inherently what's wrong with him.

Unlike the Bas character from ITSAY, Bas did speak up! That’s part of why he was better! These characters are not the same, but there are obvious allusions that I thought were really compelling to work with.

Are you ready, NiNi, to talk about Fou4Mod, our primary character?

NiNi 

My mess of a child. Fou4Mod is definitely the spiritual successor to my baby Teh Krittikorn Saetan. Just dying to be chose, and will not do actually anything that is going to be sensible in this whole mix. Makes every mistake known to the 17 year old about getting chose. 

It was delightful to watch, honestly. I was having moments of, “Ooh, you gotta walk that off,” “Oh no baby, don't do that.” Especially when he started essentially begging Chian for a shot. When Chian starts stringing him along, he's like, “I don't want to be like a thing.” And he's like, okay, well, I'll enter this situationship with you, knowing very full and goddamn well you do not want a situationship, it put me in mind of some moments in my own, my own misspent youth.

I love that boy. Nobody can ever say anything bad about that boy in front of me.

Ben

Let’s go to Chian.

Turtles 

When I think about Chian, I think about power dynamics. The power that he had vis-a-vis Fou4Mod and Bua throughout the show. Fou4Mod gave Chian power. Chian gave Bua power. Seeing Chian kind of negotiate through those different power dynamics. And I think that the ending kind of fumbled that a little bit. I don't know that the ending necessarily tied the power dynamic knots as well as it could have. 

But Chian, he's somebody that grew up a little bit in the show. I liked that he graduated, I liked that he went to college. He moved in with new people. He was living in a much smaller place in his dorm. He was negotiating with his roommates, he was developing and sort of expanding his social life just a tiny little bit but still drawn to those things that he was still very much attached to in high school. On the one hand, so cool to watch. On the other hand, to NiNi's excellent points ugh, pain. you can't expect a kid to immediately start, quote, growing up as soon as he moves out of the house and starts going to college or university. But I was kind of pulling for Chian to make those changes and cut some of those ties that he had with the attachments that he had before going to university. 

So he was deliciously frustrating. Was his arc fully satisfying for me at the end? Not completely. I think narratively those stories could have been told a little bit better. But overall, he deserves a smack on the upside of his head, but also a big hug, because I'm a mom and I can't help myself.

Ben 

All right, Shan, go in and let have.

Shan 

Can we just, like, acknowledge that nobody expected Bua to be the sleeper agent of the show, but he totally was. 

Ben 

We did not, and yet he won. Him and his lesbian moms won.

Shan 

They sure did. 

NiNi

His lesbian ex-wives moms.

Shan

So like, Bua was always the other in this show. He is mixed race. He looks different from everybody else. He doesn't go to the same school as everybody else. He kind of does his own thing. There were multiple episodes of the show before we even figured out  literally how he spent his time. We were like, what does this kid do? He doesn't seem to go to school. Like, what is his deal?

He was kind of in the role of like keeping Chian in his fishbowl. He was keeping him on the hook because he liked the attention of having somebody who liked him, but he didn't like him back. And that was clear. And at the same time, I don't think he was particularly malicious in doing that. I think it was just the way that he had figured out to keep someone's attention on him. He wasn't a kid who was intentionally trying to fuck with somebody. He was just kind of confused and a little bit of a mess and he wanted the attention, but then he didn't want the attention and kind of going back and forth on it like that.

What makes Bua so special in this show is that he actually changed over the course of this narrative. He recognized that the behavioral patterns he was engaging in were not serving him and he broke the pattern, which is something nobody else in this show managed to do.

Ben

He's the only one who apologized in the whole fucking show.

Turtles

Yep, fabulously said.

Shan 

Right. So he won the narrative, basically, by breaking the cycle and saying to Baabin, after he realized that he genuinely liked him, what he wanted from him. He didn't pretend to be cool like the other characters did. He had, like, a whole emotional meltdown that was about his insecurity about how he looks different than everybody else that really just hurt my heart, honestly, like putting in the contacts and trying to dye his hair and all of that. He was the only boy in this story who was honest and said what he felt and said what he wanted and didn't just let it slide when the person he was trying to communicate with was giving him bullshit. 

And that is why, ultimately, I think he ended up in the healthiest place at the end of the story. He was in a good relationship. He was happy. He had broken free of the patterns that were actually toxic for his life. And it's another reason, honestly, why I really dislike the ending, because Bua's journey and the reward that he got at the end of that was completely undercut by how the show ended the other relationship, which is unfortunate. But his arc as a character was fantastic. And I don't think when this show started anyone could have predicted that that would be the case, but it is what happened.

40:30 - Gelboys: Perspectives On The Ending

Ben 

Let's talk about that ending.

Shan 

Yeah, let's get into it.

Ben 

I genuinely wanted all of these boys to break up and was baffled that they stayed together. That only makes sense in the era of fan service and getting these Y girls to go to fucking concerts for these boys.

Turtles 

Yep.

Shan

It didn't make sense. It wasn't honest to the narrative. The better ending would have been all of them ending up single.

Turtles 

And a second season of watching them grow into understanding themselves and each other.

Ben 

Right? They could have had a second chance romance season. Goddamn it! [NiNi and Turtles laugh]

Turtles 

Sing it, sister.

NiNi 

It was very clear to me that Chian and Fou4Mod getting together was the beginning of another season of hell. And so I was fine with that particular ending.

Shan 

It's not actually what the show communicated though, to be clear. The show gave them a happy ending and also gave Bua and Baabin a happy ending. Truly, it did not feel honest to the narrative. Bua was the only boy who broke out of the toxic patterns. There could have been some power in him being better off than the other boys at the end, but that's not what they did. They just kind of shoved them all into the same, “yay, happy couples” box at the end.

Ben 

I generally think what stands out to me is that we don't see a lot of this show like constantly recirculating on socials. And I feel like undercutting their ending has hurt the staying power of this show. I think everybody felt a little bit disconnected from how this thing ended. There's really nothing to hang on to long-term with this one.

NiNi 

There's also something to be said about fandom and ephemerality. This year I found that when I look at what people are reblogging and the gifsets that are coming back up, it's all older shows. Nothing from the past few years.

Ben 

‘Cause they were good.

Turtles 

I do spend a lot of time lurking on Twitter and getting a lot of my BL news and whatnot from Twitter from all over Asia. I do get a good number of tweets in Thai from Thailand. The reputation of Gelboys is a little bit more art house, which surprises me, because I think that the marketing was meant to not have the show be an art house show. But I think it's being seen like that, obviously with Boss as the director.

Boss is an art guy. Up until that ending, the show was telling the stories of toxicity so fucking well. We were all twisting and turning watching the show and the ending just didn't nail it. But the reputation of the show that I'm seeing on Twitter is that it has sort of an art house reputation that the fan girls maybe can't completely get around.

Shan 

I think what's challenging for Gelboys in the BL fan landscape is that it didn't lend itself very well to shipping, particularly with the main quote unquote couple, Fou4Mod and Chian. Like, the girls didn't like them.

NiNi

They did not. They really did not.

Turtles 

And the girls had pain about it, too.

Shan 

So all the shipping energy went to Bua and Baabin in the end. They ended up the much more popular ship from the show. And it hasn't stuck from what I can see in the same way that I Told Sunset About You did in terms of not just being considered, like, elevated art or whatever, but being considered one of the mainstays of Thai BL genre.

Turtles 

That's a good point. The novelty of I Told Sunset About You, in regards to its quality, the script, the narrative, you're right, kind of lent itself to a far more enduring kind of reputation that fans could glom onto in a different way. I think there were a lot of people who had expected to glom onto Gelboys from that shipping perspective while also being served a quality show, and then the stories of toxicity kind of took that away from the ability of the Y girls to just sit back and relax, both with the shipping ability and with the quality of show.

Shan 

Mmhmm.

Ben 

Unfortunately, we don't have time to talk about BL fandom and how they process toxic tropes today because we have a lot of other things to cover and I will save that salt for another day.

44:28 - Gelboys: Final Thoughts and Ratings

Ben 

Before we wrap up the segment, everyone's favorite what the fuck moment from this fucking show. 

NiNi, we'll start with you.

NiNi 

It's that Zoom call! [Shan snickers] That Zoom call from hell! My god, that Zoom call was so bad, Bua literally pissed himself! It was terrible! I wanted to die. I wasn't even in it, and I felt like I was in it. 

Boss Kuno, hats off to you, sir. You have a way of doing this to me.

Ben 

Turtles, what's your favorite what the fuck moment from this show?

Turtles 

I gotta tell you, NiNi said it, 10 out of 10, no notes. You pee your pants, you got my vote.

Shan 

Obviously that Zoom call from hell was horrific for all of us, but in the interest of variety, I will offer another cringe moment, which was I cannot believe that Baabin left the fucking Blackpink concert. I can't believe it—

Turtles 

Cosigned. Also cosigned. My god.

Shan

He worked so hard to get tickets— 

NiNi 

—After all of that, well after everything he went through.

Ben

—To go watch his crush confess. Holy shit.

Shan

—to see his Lisa. And then he just ran out. 

I couldn't, I was so upset. I was like, “bro, don't do it!”

Turtles 

You know, Shan, that moment brings us back to what we started this conversation about, which is economics. He left the money on the table.

Shan 

He left money, time, effort, energy, emotion, he left it all on the table. And for what?

Turtles 

Kids these days.

Ben

Shan said you're a bad Blink. Get out of here. [Everyone laughs]

Since you all doubled and tripled down on the Zoom call, I'm taking multiple. 

Number one, Fou4Mod using AI generation tools to make a video of him and his friend making out because— 

Shan 

—You're so right.

Ben

—she wouldn't commit to him and posting that on fucking Facebook. 

Turtles 

—Cancel him.

Ben

That is disgusting and evil to the extreme. I will never forgive that boy.

Turtles 

And she gave it back to him good.

Shan 

She did.

Ben 

Number two, Chian of all people asking ChatGPT to help him with his relationship problems.

NiNi 

Listen…

Ben

I'm so scared for the youth. 

Turtles 

I gotta tell you, that's a thing. 

Shan

It's not just the youth. 

Turtles

Everybody’s doing it.

Shan

I've got a disturbing number of middle-aged women using ChatGPT for therapy. It's a real problem.

Ben 

Holy shit.

Turtles

Ben, I'm gonna break your heart a little bit. In the English translated manga, What Did You Eat Yesterday? there's a reference to a secretary at Shiro's law firm who says you can use ChatGPT to make you happy. 

Shan 

No!

Shan

This is universal, it's almost universal at this point.

Ben 

NiNi, I want you to note this moment down in the histories and annals of our podcast. 

Shan 

It wasn't Ben who brought it up.

Ben

One, someone brought up What Did You Eat Yesterday? before me for once. And they brought it up in a way that was only designed to hurt me. 

Turtles 

Sorry about that, Ben. Love you.

Ben

I'll remember this moment the next time we hang out. You will pay for this moment. [Everyone laughs]

Turtles 

Don't blame me, don't blame me!

[Ben laughs]

NiNi 

So all of that said, how are we rating Boss Kuno's city mice as balanced against his country mice?

Ben 

I'm going first! He's getting a 9 because he filmed this whole fucking thing with his homies on cell phones. 

Shan

God, we didn’t even talk about that!

Ben

I think that was one of the coolest things they did. ‘Cause this is a very, like Gen Alpha, Gen Z cast. And they were also filming in a lot of public spaces a lot. And it's really notable that because they filmed this on iPhones and everybody's used to people filming everyone and everything constantly. But it's so normal for, like, teenagers to be annoying on the street filming themselves now that nobody cares that they're filming one of the most important shows of the year around them at SIAM Center. If you were watching a show like this in the 90s, like people in the street be like, what the fuck are they filming? What the fuck is going on? 

Shan

You just made me think of that scene where they're taking selfies and they're doing all these crazy poses. [laughs]

NiNi 

We're not even gonna have time to talk about the production on this show because it is insane. Do yourself a favor and just go look at it. It is wild what they were able to do.

Shan 

And just look at it and remind yourself that the whole thing was shot on iPhones. It's crazy.

Ben

I want to give this show a 9 for a lot of different reasons. Let's give us some of the gay reasons. I think it was interesting for this show to do the youth thing of not really wanting to define the kid's sexuality by even talking about it, despite the obvious queerness of the whole cast. And I actually like the way the show used sex and intimacy, how quick Chian was the reach for Fou4Mod's dick rather than have an earnest conversation with him. That was one of the most effectively gay things I've seen out of Thailand in a really long time. 

I also liked the way the show managed to protect its actors, but still get an interesting sexual component done when Bua and Baabin were trying to figure out their dynamic and were playing around trying different positions with all of their clothes on.

There's a lot of things in the show that I really liked. However, I just can't let the disappointment of this ending go. This was very close to being an all-timer for me. And I don't really like the economic choice they make at the end to pull back and not make the audience grapple with the inevitability of these boys tormenting each other. It just doesn't make the show stick with me as a result. 

Turtles, what about you? How are you rating this under your complicated criteria?

Turtles

I don't usually do number ratings, letter grades or anything. It's really just about what shows am I reblogging and looking at GIFs on. And there's not a lot of traction at least on Tumblr regarding the creation of nostalgia around the show yet. This conversation is bringing back a lot of really good feelings that I had while watching it. 

My mom view of watching the show is that I really wanted to give each of these guys a hug, no matter how much I wanted to smack all of them upside the head. I felt that there was so much more growing up that these guys needed to do, I would argue these characters were narratively successful if I felt that way.

But I gotta agree with you, Ben, that my memories of the show are tainted by that ending. The actors did a fantastic job. It was the script and it was the economic gain of this new agency being able to sell these guys as two ships. These guys have deals left and right. They're doing fashion shoots. They're doing product placements, they're actually at the malls where they were filming, doing their little product presentations and whatnot. They're achieving that goal. And that's the reality of the industry these days, all of these shows are really meant to be end games for these guys ending up into pairs that get to be sold.

Ben

So that's four mom hugs, four mom slaps, and a big ass frown.

Turtles

That's right. Well said.

NiNi

I think that works out to like an 8 and a half.

Ben 

Yeah, it sounds like an 8.5.

Turtles 

Look, maybe a little bit lower. I think if I did numbers, I'd give it probably a 7.5.

Ben

Hell yeah! That’s what I’m talking about!

Shan 

Get in there, Turtles!

Turtles 

That's the feeling is good, but I'm not thinking only about the beginning and the middle of the show. Gotta average it out.

Ben

Shandler!

Shan 

I was so excited to get another show from Boss. I was very impressed by the quality of the production. But man, did it bum me out hard when I saw the branded pair shit interfering with this show, too. Gelboys in my emotional landscape was supposed to be my refuge from branded pair nonsense in the Thai BL world. And it really broke my heart that that ended up interfering with the narrative in this show, too. It definitely tainted the show for me. 

I'm very impressed by the production. I really liked the actors. I was very into a lot of the aesthetics of the show. I did really like Bua's arc. And I liked a lot of the messiness of the show. I liked that the boys felt like real teenagers.

But it really, really felt to me in the end, like the show kind of betrayed itself for commercial reasons. And that's always gonna be a big thumbs down from me. So I think I'm landing on giving it, like, an 8.5. It's a good show. It could have been a great show. 

Getting out the coulda been a 10 bat as per usual and lamenting.

Ben 

There she is, shaking in the corner.

NiNi?

NiNi 

Well y'all know how I roll. For an ending to really ruin something for me, I really have to not be able to vibe with the ending. I was able to vibe with this ending. Is it perfect ending? No. Is it exactly the ending I would have wanted? No. Does it bum me out? It actually doesn't. Ding it for sure. So I'll end up somewhere around a 9.

It was a 10 at the moment that Zoom call happened and then the ending really maybe take that down to like a 9.5 and I'll drop it down to a 9 because I feel like I wanted a little bit more of it.

Ben 

That results in an 8.5 from The Conversation.

53:17 - Heesu In Class 2

NiNi 

Now that we have ventilated our spleens on Gelboys, it's time to move into Heesu in Class 2.

Ben, what is Heesu in Class 2 about?

Ben

About how I will always love gay shows the most when the gays are being terrible because they’re in the closet. 

Heesu in Class 2 is about a young man named Lee Heesu. He has three older sisters and he has developed a reputation at school for being a good listener who gives good dating advice despite being a single virgin who's never been with anyone ever. He has a huge, long-time crush on his best friend, Ju Chanyoung, who is incredibly popular with the ladies and who is always agreeing to date these girls until they basically just get bored with his sort of nonchalant attitude to hanging out with them.

Heesu's life is complicated when Chanyoung seems to really hit it off with a young lady at his cram school named Choi Jiyu. Heesu, feeling like he might actually lose Chanyoung, becomes competitive about this and conspires to have his neighbor, Kim Seongwon, try to pursue Jiyu as a competitor. Hijinks ensue because Kim Seongwon does not have a crush on Choi Jiyu, his old friend. He actually has a crush on Heesu and Heesu is unfortunately quite oblivious about this. 

We spend the show dealing with the complications of our two gay boys being reluctant to confess their feelings for homophobia reasons, while Jiyu is navigating becoming a public idol, and Ju Chanyoung is dealing with some familiar stress about his desire to take tennis seriously—which his family doesn't support.

I think I covered that pretty good. Anything else I need to say? 

Shan 

Yeah, you got it.

NiNi 

Pretty much nailed it.

Ben 

I try! It's really important to me to get these things right, because it's important that we talk about what the show actually did.

Shan

You're getting worked up already? [laughs]

Ben 

I’m already worked up. Before we get into the nitty gritty of this, Turtles is an extremely busy mom carrying a lot of responsibilities. She was unable to stick with us for this section, but she delivered a motherfucking word that we will have at the end as we wrap up. 

Shan

This show was so familiar to me right from the start because I am a kdrama viewer. I am familiar with the narrative structure that was deployed here. And I know how kdramas work, in that you have to have a little bit of patience. Kdramas take a few episodes to get their story set up, to get all their characters in place, to establish all the relationships and themes. And then right around the middle of the show is when they usually kind of heat up and then sprint to the end. And so, I was not bored as some people were in the early episodes. 

I loved that the show was deploying these really classic kdrama tropes in service of a narrative that was really centering a young queer man's experience of his queerness, of the anxiety of not being out and his fear of being outed, his fear of the people he loves seeing him differently. I understood that it was doing something a little different from most BL in that it wanted to show a really holistic view of Heesu's life. This show was not focused solely or even primarily on one romance. 

It was really about his coming of age as a young gay man, his coming into himself, his developing the courage and the comfort that he could come out to the people he cared about, that he could cope with the feelings he had for his best friend that he knew were not going to be returned in the same way. And also as part of that developing new friendships, getting closer with his sisters, falling for a new boy who actually could return his affection. 

It was very much about his experience as a queer person. The show was interested in every aspect of his life, not just the romance. I think that for folks who only or primarily watch BL, maybe that was a little bit confusing.

Ben 

NiNi, I want to go to you. Shan and I are nursing a lot of fandom experience feelings we have that are going to be hard to extricate from our responses here. But you came to the show sort of late. We bullied you into watching it.

NiNi 

You did not bully me into watching it. I intended to watch it. I just needed to know it was actually gonna be gay. You guys said it was gay and so I watched it.

Ben 

So what was your experience watching this?

NiNi

Me and Shan are always giggling about our kdrama muscles because we both watch a lot of kdrama. So when some of these KBLs come out with that kdrama structure and BL fandom is finding it a little hard to parse them because that's not the framework that they're accustomed to, we're just like, well, no. It's kdrama. It's gonna follow K-drama structure. The way that Heesu and Chanyoung in particular interact, and all the sturm und drang around confessing, that's very kdrama. So I was having a blast. 

I recently just watched Light On Me finally after Ben shit on me in the Diamond League for not having watched it. 

Ben 

A huge win for all of the K-BL fans. We finally got NiNi to watch it.

NiNi 

So when I was watching Heesu I saw a lot of parallels between Light On Me and Heesu—they're not similar in a lot of ways. But one way that they are pretty similar is structure and that focus on confessing as being really important to not just the narrative but also the character development. What it says about a character to confess their feelings. It's huge.

So I really enjoyed having those two experiences, not back to back exactly, but very close to each other. And then adding onto it, I was instantly dialed in from the moment that I realized that Heesu Knew. He's narrating and talking about the way that he has to hide, the things that he can't say to people, and you see how it affects his relationship with Chanyoung, who is his best friend, and that's a runner throughout the whole show. I love that shit. Feed it to me.

Ben 

Quick aside! Shan made a great point about being a fan and your idol’s success feeling like your success. Since we mentioned Light On Me, Kang You Seok is thriving right now. 

NiNi 

—Thriving so much. He is in everything. Everything.

Ben

We won, we won!

Shan

I am so proud of him. He's everywhere.

Ben 

We did it. That's our win.

NiNi 

He was in biggest kdrama of the year this year. 

Shan 

Yes, he was in Tangerines. He was in Hospital Playlist 2. Two of the biggest, most watched dramas of the year. He is continuing to be cast. 

Shan

He's killing it. 

NiNi

Not Hospital Playlist 2, Resident Playbook.

Shan 

Oh my God, wow, that was a real wishful thinking moment. Resident Playbook. You right, though.

Ben 

We did it, gays! We got our boy into the mainstream.

Shan 

Good job, everybody.

01:00:41 - Heesu In Class 2: The Story Is Storying

Ben 

The first week of the show does this great job of setting up the stakes of the whole situation. Heesu loves Chanyoung, Seongwon loves Heesu, Chanyoung, we'll just say loves Jiyu. Heesu thinks like we've got a circle here where Seongwon loves Jiyu and there's like a real chance here. 

I love that the dynamics were so clear for us from the beginning. There's so much noise in Gelboys. That's a big part of the experience, there's so many distractions and so much shit being blasted at you. We have the opposite experience in Heesu where every character has a clear narrative purpose, down to Chanyoung and Heesu's friend, Hoseok, who's there to be the other male glue of their dynamic who ends up suffering because the two of them have been not well. Like ep 6 or 7, he's like, did you guys make up? And Heesu's like, well, we're not fighting. I love that because that's how it is for men.

One of my favorite things this show did at the end of episode 4, Heesu gets a threatening message as he's lamenting that Chanyoung and Jiyu are getting closer. He basically gets an anonymous message saying, “You better get over Chanyoung or I'm gonna out you, bitch.” I loved that this show made the audience sit with the homophobic threat of being outed and then was not in a hurry to resolve that. That's part of the long list of things that I think that the show did that made queerness feel accessible.

I think it's important that we talk about the fact that all these characters had a purpose in Heesu's story.

NiNi 

One of the criticisms is, they put so much time on this whole Chanyoung and Jiyu thing, but the way that that feeds into Heesu and Seongwon’s story is really interesting because it parallels it in a way, it contrasts with it in a way, and it also interacts with it in a way. It touches the story in multiple different ways.

We've got the contrast of the whole Seongwon and Heesu thing. Jiyu and Chanyoung, the confession for them is easy because it's what everybody expects. But Seongwon is terrified to confess to Heesu because he doesn't know what he's gonna get on the other end of that confession. It's not just a question of whether Heesu will accept or reject him. It's also a question of is he gonna tell somebody else? What are people gonna think? All of these other things that he has to consider that makes confessing for him fraught in a way that it isn't for Jiyu. 

And then he and Jiyu are friends. And because of the nature of their friendship, she was holding his secret for him. She's not telling anybody his business. She's telling him, you have to confess because you are messing up my life. But at the same time, she is not confessing for him because it is not her place to tell anybody who he is. She never outs him even when it's to affect her own relationship with Chanyoung.

So we talked about the intersection and the contrast. Now we're talking about the two relationships parallel. Chanyoung has had all these girlfriends because these girls like him and he shrugs his shoulders and goes whatever, but he's never actually liked somebody back and he's never put effort into a relationship. Heesu has never really put effort into his relationship with Chanyoung, he and Chanyoung have this relationship that is on a maintenance level because he is so afraid to tell Chanyoung about himself. That same fear that Seongwon has is holding Heesu back. 

It's just like this delicious stew and to me, you don't get that without the very clear het relationship interacting with the very clear gay relationship. You couldn't get that from two queer relationships. It had to be a het relationship to make that contrast, to make the parallel, to make the intersection work. So I'm sorry. I am not mad at the hets. Not this time.

Shan 

Nope, they belonged in the story. They had a clear place and a clear purpose. 

NiNi 

They're sweet!

Shan

[Chanyoung]'s a good friend. He tried his best to understand Heesu, to look out for him, to take care of him. He noticed when Heesu was upset. He didn't know how he could help him because he wouldn't tell him anything. That's not his fault. 

Shan 

I love that when Heesu did finally come out and confess his feelings to him, he didn't react perfectly in that moment. He's not always gonna have the right answer, but he's genuine and he cares. 

And Jiyu is awesome. You know who Jiyu reminds me of? Jane from Knock Knock Boys.

NiNi 

It's Yihwa best girl all over again.

Shan 

Right? It's that ride or die bestie who loves you and is always on your side, but is also going to call you on your shit. She was such a good friend to Seongwon through all the nonsense that he was putting her and her relationship through. She was frank with him and she was honest with him, but she let him take his time that he needed. They are good friends. They are a cute couple and they have a really clear purpose in this story that supports the queer narrative. 

And they're not the only characters in the story that function that way. Heesu's sisters all have a similar narrative function. We learn about their quirks and their romantic struggles because they do the same thing in reflecting back to Heesu some of the struggles that he's going through from a different perspective. The story is really, really well written. Everything has its place and its purpose, and all the characters are so likeable.

Ben 

So I guess we're just going to come straight out and say the popular response to this show is to dunk on it, call it queerphobic in some way, call it queerbait in other ways and insinuate somehow that this show hurts gay people.  

Shan 

Ridiculous.

Ben 

I genuinely don't understand. Like, I don't know if our goal of watching BL is to scream at the screen and go sing for me, my angel of music. But like, this is not the vibe that I can really be part of.

With this particular show, the dynamics are so compelling. Heesu has a crush on his friend. His friend is very popular with girls. He basically hisses at girls until they get over him. And then he feels challenged by Chanyoung having a real connection to another girl. This challenges the sort of delulu world he's trapped in of “Maybe my straight friend actually likes me. Because sometimes he glances at me the right way at the right time, and I can ride that for a little while and imagine that he might actually choose me. I won't say anything because I know he won't, but I'm gonna ride that high.” Because he pays so much attention to Chanyoung and likes him so much, he recognizes that Chanyoung genuinely likes someone. This is actually an incredibly sad moment. 

It was really hurtful to me to see a lot of folks just not really get the tragedy of the gay person who loves their straight friend, and sees them falling in love, and at some level is resentful of it and can't root for them. You're their boy. They're relying on you. As Chanyoung is falling for Jiyu, the first person he goes to, anytime he has big feelings about Jiyu, is Heesu. That's supposed to be his boy to help him sort out his feelings and check him on the shit when he's trying to get it with this girl. And instead Heesu is actively working against him the whole time. I don't know that everybody watching really appreciated that.

Like, I get that webtoon!Chanyoung knew Heesu was gay the whole time and was only trying to date all of these girls in the hopes that Heesu would get over him. To be clear: I think that's also fucking horrible.

NiNi 

That's really mean.

Ben

I like that they decided to make Heesu the mean one here. Chanyoung and Jiyu like each other for really genuine organic reasons. He does something nice for her, which causes her to pay attention to him. This becomes a positive feedback loop and the attraction between them is obvious and palpable. The straight couple in the show had, like, a full romance arc. You're supposed to be sad that the gay boys did not get to have the whole arc, too. And the reason why they don't get to have the whole arc is because they're homos. That's the point!

I've talked about this a lot on the podcast. I didn't get to date properly in high school. You're supposed to lament that. Like, this show is meant to be useful as far as I'm concerned. It's a way for queer viewers to soft launch coming out to their families. Like it's serving the role that Degrassi served for me. We watched all of the Marco arc when I was a teenager just so I could gauge how my family would handle me coming out to them. And that's why I waited a few years. If your family watching this show can't empathize with Heesu, maybe don't come out to those people. 

NiNi 

Literally Seongwon says to Jiyu, “It's not the same way for me that it is for you.” He says those words. It's not even an allusion at that point. They put it in the mouth of the character and had them say it.

Shan 

It’s in the text. Yes.

01:09:55 - Heesu In Class 2: Friendship, Family, Queerness and Acceptance

Ben

What's so sad about this show from another perspective is that Heesu is violating the male bond between him and Chanyoung. Chanyoung doesn't know why, he just knows Heesu doesn't seem to want to hang out with him anymore. Heesu will not really talk to him about important things that are going on, like the fact that he likes a girl for the first time, or that he doesn't really want to stay around his family anymore. 

This is all really difficult stuff, and Heesu is not there for his best friend when his best friend needs him. And Chanyoung doesn't really get mad at Heesu about it for a long time. He tries to go like, maybe I left Heesu hanging. Maybe I'm not the one who's been forthright enough. He's actively trying to be more open with Heesu, to be more present for him, to tell him more things about what's going on. Maybe thinking maybe I let him down in some way by maybe holding back on something. 

This culminates in Chanyoung breaking Jiyu's agreement and telling Heesu that they're serious, and Heesu does not respond kindly in that moment. Heesu really fucking let Chanyoung down at a really important male moment. “Hey, I really like this girl and we're going together.” It's like a huge moment. And Heesu fucking failed in that moment really fucking badly. I was horrified at that moment where Heesu's face dropped and he just walked away from Chanyoung. He didn't even try and pretend. So like, when Chanyoung was a little bit overwhelmed later and left, I wasn't like, “Oh there Chanyoung, he's such a bad friend.” Heesu had already let him down in a huge male way. I loved the mirroring of that moment. 

As a man who grew up around men who loves men dearly, Heesu really fucked up in that moment. It's no wonder that Hoseok was worried about him and Chanyoung for the rest of the show.

Shan 

This gets into a theme that we've talked a lot about over the last year or so around how sometimes being the tortured piner actually makes you the asshole because you become really selfish. You become really fixated on your own desires and your own unrequited feelings and you stop actually seeing the person that you claim to love. Heesu was so fixated on what he wants from Chanyoung that he is not actually seeing Chanyoung for who he is and being a good friend to him because he's too caught up in his own hurt disappointment about what he can't have with him. 

I really love that the show went there with this, that it let him be a bad friend for a little while and then let him figure out what he was doing and correct it and come out of it and repair that friendship. And it let Chanyoung also not be perfect with him. That's why it felt like a real friendship between two people who genuinely love each other but can't be exactly what the other needs.

That felt so great to me just to see something so real depicted in one of these shows that are so often in a bubble. Not just a no homophobia bubble, but like a non-reality bubble. I really like that they were not afraid to let these characters be flawed.

NiNi 

Listen, when Chanyoung told Heesu, “I tell you everything and you don't tell me anything.”

Ben 

He was right!

Shan

He was right.

Ben 

That's one of the things that I love so much about this show.

NiNi 

He literally was saying. He's like, “You are my friend, I love you, but I don't know you because you don't let me.”

Ben 

I love how every plot line in this show is built around queer closeted allegory. Like, what's the most important thing that gay people have on their side? Lesbians. Lesbians are the first step to Heesu's own self-acceptance and coming out process. The little lesbian who comes to check in with him is how Heesu first broaches the entire idea of queerness with his sisters, who share a meaningful look that tells you either they already suspected about Heesu in some way, or that they were gonna have to have a conversation when he wasn't around.

Later on, it's Seongwon's mom being a late in life lesbian that is one of the first signs to Heesu that queer adults even exist. That's a real experience growing up. Like you feel like you're the only queer person in the world. I loved that someone having two moms is a huge step for Heesu as well. 

Lesbians, you've done so much for us for so long. I love you all so much.

NiNi 

On the topic of Seongwon’s moms. I loved that runner of his mom actually discussing with him, like, how out. He seems to have worked through whatever feeling he might have about his mom having left his dad and being in a lesbian relationship. Like in his head his family is fine but there's still that external factor that he's not 100% sure of and that also the mom is not 100% sure of. And I love that she checks in with him about it. Like, “Okay, I'm not ashamed of myself. I know you're not ashamed of me. But also, I know where we are and I need you to tell me what the guardrails around here are because this is gonna affect you much more than it's gonna affect me at this moment.”

Ben 

Y'all watch more kdrama than me. That felt highly unusual and incredibly special. I was not expecting the mom to ask her son how out do they want to be.

Shan 

You get so few depictions of queerness in kdrama. A scene like that is certainly not common. That felt meaningful to me.

NiNi

Definitely not common.

Ben 

That’s not a small sequence either. And again, everybody has a role to play here. Like, Jiyu being an anonymous singer who's going through an audition process now, she's got to basically come out as a singer to people. It's like an intended, not perfect, allegory for the coming out experience. Having everybody suddenly talking about you, having to face that. But about how Jiyu can't have what she wants if she doesn't come out. This is true for Heesu, too. He can't go out with the boy that he likes if he's not willing to be perceived by people doing that. 

Chanyoung wants to go into tennis seriously despite not committing his whole life to it exclusively the way he should have. I mean, his dad's not wrong about that. But his dad is horrible about it and literally is throwing the kid's shit away and forcing him to leave home so he can do the thing that's important to him. An obvious queer allegory. And who does Chanyoung land with? He lands with his closest friend who can handle this sort of shit. That's also super queer. 

Heesu's sisters are dealing with their own relationship struggles that help Heesu face some things. His oldest sister was dating her best friend. They agreed to go abroad together, I think to America probably, and she got cold feet at the last minute and didn't go with him. And then she decides late in the show that she's gonna leave her job, she's gonna take up that study abroad path that they were gonna go down together. She's gonna go support her friend. ‘Cause she says, regardless of what we are to each other, romance or not, he's my best friend and I let him down and I'm gonna go make up for that. 

Middle sister's is also dating one of her best friends, but she's not actually into her friend romantically. And she's tormenting this poor boy because she can't give him the emotional support that he needs from a partner. And she seems to be kind of a mean girlfriend about it, too.

NiNi 

It was kind of also a parallel to Heesu's crush on Chanyoung. what happened with Heejae is they had been in this relationship for a really long time and they had actually lost those feelings for each other, but momentum was keeping them going in the relationship until her boyfriend decided that he was gonna cut it off and then she went into panic. She's like, “We've been doing this so long. What am I gonna do now?” 

And that's paralleling, sort of, Heesu's crush on Chanyoung. It's been going on for such a long time. It had become a part of him at that point. And so the idea of letting go of it is what really sent him into this spiral. Like he acknowledged to himself like later down that his feelings for Chanyoung had changed but he could not let go of them even as he acknowledged that they had changed. Which is what the whole confession thing was about, he had to release that secret, he had to tell Chanyoung what the problem was to get past all of that. 

And that was paralleling with Heejae, she and the boyfriend had to have that conversation even after he dumped her. Kdrama really indexes on having those conversations. When people break up, it's not considered a breakup until they've agreed to break up. You can't just dump me. It has to be agreed to.

Shan 

It's one of the strongest Korean cultural beliefs, right? You can't move on until you've confessed, until you've gotten it off your chest, until you've talked it through and figured out everybody's feelings. So I wasn't surprised to see it here. 

And I was glad they needed those moments of catharsis. Heesu standing in that dark room, having shrouded himself in darkness like that to confess. 

NiNi 

A fucking moment.

Shan

That was such a powerful visual to see that just that small shaft of light finally making its way in as he finally got it off his chest. 

We haven't talked that much about the show's use of space and the stars as a metaphor but it was so well done, it's very artful in ways that you don't often see in BL. This show really cared about its ideas and its themes and it's shown through not just the storytelling and the narrative, but in the visuals that they use throughout.

Ben 

I felt so seen by this show giving the closeted gay boy a really nerdy, kind of solitary hobby and having him wax poetic about it over his own dramas. Such a great choice. 

One of the things I liked with the sisters, I actually liked that Heesin was so amorous and always confessing to boys because the social politics of how you portray queer people in Korea doesn't seem to really allow for femme presentation. And I really liked Heesin as somebody who just can't hold it in. I like that she's there subtly to stand in for the femme types who just cannot hide. And I love that she says it explicitly. Like, why do you always confess? “I just have to. I can't hold it in.”  

NiNi 

The fact that it works at the end.

Ben

I love that she actually wasn't prepared for it to work, either. That was so fun.

Shan 

She was a great character. And I really liked that Heesu had different relationships with each of his sisters. Like the nature of each of his sibling relationships was a little different. The way he talked to each of them was different. The way they relied on him or took care of him was different. As someone with a lot of siblings, that is so real.

Ben 

I like that most of their sibling beef was over food. That was fun.

Shan 

That's very real, too. [Ben laughs]

NiNi 

Makes 100% sense as somebody with siblings, absolutely that's how it rolls. We're mad at you when you're upset. You don't need to be upset right now.

Ben 

Let's talk about that coming out sequence. When Heesu finally decides to come out it's not a surprise to me that it's Heesin that he comes out to. 

Shan 

Mmhmm, same.

Ben

I love the way he comes out, too. 

He's like, I had a crush on a boy. And I have a new crush on another boy. I think all of my future crushes are gonna be on boys. Wow, look at this show acknowledging that the boy you love in high school is not the only boy you will ever love. Holy shit.

Shan 

I was also not surprised it was her that he confessed to. She's closest in age. She's the freest. She's the most emotionally open. It made sense to me that she was the one he felt safest going to first.

NiNi 

I loved her reaction.

Ben 

I love her trying to follow her training. She's like, “Right, I gotta tap him and reassure him. We still love you, little brother.” [Everyone laughs]

Shan 

You can see her being like, “All right, remember those articles you've read. What are the steps?”

Ben 

She's like, “Don't fuck this up.”

Shan

Because you know she already knew and she like read up on how she needed to respond when he finally told her.

NiNi 

Mmhmm. They discussed it. The sisters all discussed it.

Ben 

It's time for a gay media moment. There's this moment in The Fosters, a show from ABC Family, now Freeform, in which Lena, who is the black lesbian school administrator mom, has this interaction with her dad. She came out as a teenager and her family was very supportive. And he has this incredible moment with her where he says, “I think sometimes about when you came out to us and we said we still love you. We still love you. What a horrible thing to say to your child. Like we meant well, but doesn't that imply that we could have chosen to do otherwise? We never could have. What I wish we had said to you instead was, thank you so much for telling me this important thing about yourself. And I can't wait to meet the person that you want to share your life with.”

I'm okay with this moment not being the kind of things I would like to see someone say in an ideal circumstance, because that's sort of the point. Like, again, if you think about this show as soft launching your kids might be gay to the wider Korean audience, I like that this show is full of so many imperfect moments with how people handle the queerness. A lot of people are gonna fuck up dealing with queer people in their lives. I love that this show is full of imperfect moments that people then try to rectify. 

Like Chanyoung doesn't handle Heesu coming out to him very well, because he felt cornered and overwhelmed. And then when Heesu comes to see him later, he's mad at him. He's hitting tennis balls at him. Like, “Why didn't you prepare me in some way? I feel like I fucked up badly as your friend.” He feels bad that he let his friend down. He didn't make that moment about Heesu somehow letting him down. He got frustrated that he let Heesu down and he was still resentful of the way Heesu had been holding back with him for so long. 

I love that Jiyu handles all of her stress in life by meddling in gay affairs. She is every girl who I ever trusted growing up. [Everyone laughs] Is there something wrong in your life, Jiyu? Sure is. So what are you doing? I'm making these gay boys go on a date. Got it. All right. I pissed off one of my gay friends by saying he should just come out and he read me for filth over that. What am I doing? I'm coming out as a singer today. Okay.

[NiNi laughs]

01:24:57 - Heesu In Class 2: On Seungwon

Shan

I feel like we haven't talked enough about Seongwon. He's the more quiet, understated character in this, but he's also a great character. I love that he is kind of fixated right from the start on what he wants. And his arc is about finding the courage to speak it. As much as Heesu was not being honest with Chanyoung, Seongwon’s not being honest with Heesu. 

That is a big part of why Jiyu was trying to intervene and encourage him to speak his truth because he needed to. He was stuck. He struggled so much with saying the thing and putting a name to it, which made it harder for Heesu to understand where he was coming from and to recognize his own feelings.

I really just liked the way that whole arc played out and that they both had to find their courage to be honest.

Ben

Seongwon knows Heesu likes Chanyoung. And so it's not that Heesu couldn't choose him. There's this particular drama when you're the only queer kids in the school of like, yeah, I guess you guys are your only available option for gay outlets or whatever. But that also puts this huge pressure of like, what if it doesn't work? What if that turns messy too? What if I end up outing Heesu? It's more hurtful to be like, okay, this guy's gay too, but he clearly doesn't know this about me, which means clearly there's something wrong with me ‘cause I can tell about him. Maybe he can already tell about me, but he doesn't want it. So he's going after this guy instead. 

Like, his crush is played by Ahn Ji Ho. Have you seen Ahn Ji Ho’s shoulders? I would be nervous if I was Seongwon about whether or not that boy would be actually interested in me. I love that Heesu won't come out because he doesn't know how Chanyoung will take it. And I love that Seongwon won't come out even though he has a mom who would probably be okay with it and he likes a boy who's clearly also queer. There's a lot of realities to face for coming out. That's gonna be nerve wracking. And what if Heesu doesn't want it? So now he's come out and embarrassed another person who's not ready to come out. And now he's gotta deal with all of that shit, too. None of that is easy. 

And I loved the way they framed it for that boy. I loved the kind of, like, messy lying thing he did too by stealing someone else's attempt to flirt with Heesu. That was also pretty fucked up for an otherwise very kind character.

NiNi 

I like the way that it all gets wrapped up at the end, though. Despite the fact that the stakes for him seem to be pretty low, his parents are going to be fine with it, he actually likes another boy that he knows is queer. When they're figuring out how to express their relationship, they're like, well, we can't hold hands. It's cool if I put my arm around your shoulder because you've done that with Chanyoung before. That's a nice little subtle hint that even though all of these other things are not concerns for him, they're still the world that he has to think about.

Ben

Also, shout out to this show for putting gays in the background. On one of the sequences where they're kind of chilling while the boys are playing soccer, there are clearly some gay boys hugged up on each other. Good job, background gays, not getting caught up in this fucking drama. [laughs]

01:28:06 - Heesu In Class 2: The Galloping Disk Horse, Final Thoughts and Ratings

NiNi 

It is a beautiful little show. I think that if you're watching it with BL goggles, you will probably be disappointed. But if you allow yourself to enjoy it as a queer drama, I think that you will let yourself sink into it and you will feel the vibe of all the things that we've been seeing. 

I always say, are you here for a ship or a story? If you're here for a ship, you're not gonna have a good time with this. If you're here for a story, then yeah.

Ben

I’m gonna address the elephant in the room: They were never gonna kiss in the show, guys. They just don't kiss in Korean youth programming.

NiNi 

Gay or straight.

Shan 

This is a high school show.

NiNi

There are very few Korean high school dramas in which characters kiss. Almost never happens.

Shan 

It's completely in line with mainstream kdrama standards. So there's just no real leg to stand on there for accusing the show of bias.

Ben 

Did they kiss in the show? No. But was the show about queerness? Hell yeah. There's no heterosexual explanation for the entire arc of the story.

Shan 

The show was very explicitly queer. They said the words out loud. The whole plot was about it.

We've been kind of dancing around it a little bit, but I will just say that the experience of watching this show surrounded by the discourse that it inspired was one of the worst instances of cognitive dissonance in my life. I could not understand the shit people were saying about this show. People got way off the mark with their criticisms. Listen. Y'all know me. I'm a critical bitch. I'm the first to ding a show when there are flaws, and this is not a perfect show. But that's not what was going on in the discourse here. There was some real weird mental gymnastics happening. 

It was upsetting, genuinely, to be watching this show and see how good its intentions clearly were, how carefully and lovingly it was made, and to see the way that it was treated by people. It was one of my worst experiences ever in BL fandom. I will not get over it, and I am not letting it go.

Ben 

This show ended officially on April 26th. We're recording this session at the end of July. I haven't really written about BL in three months as a result of it. Like, one of my last big pieces was about how I don't even know if I want to associate myself as a critic with BL anymore. Because if this is the nature of our fandom experience, I don't know that this is something I want to be associated with. 

I'm sorry, I'm gonna say it plainly. We spent the whole section here talking about how everything in the show spoke to queerness and the experience of being closeted. This is while the show was being called homophobic on Tumblr, on MDL, on Twitter, on YouTube, on IG. It's baffling.

It feels weird to be in a room of people who are seemingly mad at BL when it isn't sexually titillating for them. It's an awkward place to be as a queer critic.

Shan 

It feels like a lot of the BL audience is coming to these shows not for genuine stories about queer people, but for some other kind of dopamine hit. And then they're taking it out on the shows when the shows prioritize a genuine queer narrative over whatever it is that they're seeking.

NiNi 

People will always criticize something and they will always have a leg to stand on in criticizing things from whatever lens they have. My thing has always been don't be intellectually dishonest about it. One of my favorite Tumblr users I often disagree with, but they are so honest about where they stand and where they're coming from when they criticize a show that I love or when they love a show that I hate that I can't be mad because they're very clearly being intellectually honest about where their interest in the genre lies, what they want to get out of it and what they enjoy. I can have dialogue with that user because we are both coming from an intellectually honest place. 

It's intellectual dishonesty that bugs me. Don't piss on my head and tell me it's raining, ever. Because I'm gonna see it and I'm gonna call you on it. You can be mad, you can critique, you can be upset. You're perfectly within your rights to bitch about a show I love. But do not be intellectually dishonest while you do it.

Ben 

Before she had to go, we asked Turtles for her thoughts on the show overall and her thoughts on this discourse.

[flashback whoosh noise]

While we still have you on the recording, I just want you to answer, like, two big questions for us. How did you feel about Heesu as a show? And what are your thoughts on how fandom really did not like the show?

Turtles 

This has not been the year of super stellar shows. I'm not the fan that the industry across Asia markets towards—a middle-aged mom, but not a lot of time. So the show has to be really good in order for me to spend my precious time on it. I think that Heesu is a really good show. From a construction perspective, from editing decisions to scripting decisions, it's not the actual top show. I would quibble. I wasn't planning on watching it. I didn't see it a lot on my dash. I was actually a little bit bored when I first started it. It didn't grab me. I think that there were some pacing and scripting issues that led to me sort of being a little bit slow to glom onto the issues that the show was really meant to focus on. 

I think the second half of the show solved all of that for me. The second half of the show and the crystallization of all the conflicts, the love rhombus. The show just took off like a jet plane for me, and I was suddenly really invested.

Ben, you wrote about the context of all of the different social constellations, no pun intended, but actually pun intended—

Ben 

—A great pun! Good job, friend!

Turtles

—I think that that's what the show is meant to reflect on exactly, the constellations of Heesu's life. So, I don't want to give the haters any leeway, to be honest. I think they misinterpreted the first half. And that translated into their really misplaced complaints that the show was focusing more on the het couple, that this was a heteronormative narrative. The bus was missed on those interpretations. 

We had a young gay high school student that was trying to figure his shit out. He had different individual experiences of the different individuals in his life and their shit that was going on. And the show did pay attention to each one of those individuals, each one of those sisters, to Jiyu, to Chanyoung. Each of those individual stories was so important regarding the comfort that he needed in order to come out. We needed each of those stories because they were contextual and important to the life that Heesu was living at the moment that he decided to first come out to his sister. This was a queer story through and through.

Heesu gave us the life of a young man that needed to take his time. And so I'm being a little bit unfair to Heesu as a character myself in complaining about the pace of the first half of the show. So let me hold myself accountable. Heesu needed that time in the first half of the show to sort himself the fuck out so that by the time he's sitting in that chair on his roof coming out to his sister that he could feel comfortable doing so. The show told a whole story for me of the struggle of a young gay man coming to terms with himself and feeling comfortable with himself, not only about coming out, but about finding love in his life and being brave enough to do it. 

In the end, I have to take off a couple of points because I do feel like there were some narrative drags there. And so I would probably, if you wanted me to give a number for Heesu, I'd probably give it a 9. But in terms of the feeling I got after I finished the show, the feeling itself was a 10. 

In regards to fans putting the show down, I'm really worried about what fandom is asking gay characters to do for them as far as being entertainment and not being emotionally and holistically authentic. Heesu was authentic and a fabulous story told of a life that's about to be lived a lot more happily.

NiNi 

Okay, so with that we can definitely wrap up this episode because I don't know if anything else needs to be said!

Shan 

Very well said.

Ben 

Wow, well bestie, you killed it. 

[whoosh back to the present sound]

Ben 

All right, let's wrap this bad boy up. Ratings! 

NiNi, we're going to you first.

NiNi 

It was a 10 for me personally. I had a great time. I did not really have any notes.

Ben 

Shan?

Shan 

I gave it a 9.5. 

Ben

[snickers] There it is. I love you.

Shan

It had a few flaws that, in an environment where we could have had good, rational, productive conversations about the show, I would have been interested in unpacking more with the fandom, but we had the environment we had. So I was not interested in talking about any of that. 

It's a great show. People should watch it. I love it.

Ben 

I also gave the show a 10. It's in the realm of everybody should watch this. Beyond it having really solid acting, really attractive actors, having a good plot, really well executed presentation overall, I think it's really fascinating as an adaptation of an existing work, because the original source material is really limited in its scope, and they had to expand this into an eight episode drama of over 45 minutes. That's not an easy task.

And it was compelling from a queer perspective. It's worthwhile to watch from a variety of different angles. I think everybody gets value out of watching it.

NiNi 

So that would be 10, 10, 9.5.

Ben 

And a 9 from Turtles.

NiNi

I'm exercising producer privilege. It's a 10 from The Conversation.

Ben

Heh heh. That's right. 

Shan 

I accept it.

Ben

It gets a petty 10 from us. Die mad about it.

Shan

A petty 10! Yes! [Everyone laughs]

01:38:31 - Outro: Things Are Dire

Shan

I wanna say as we're wrapping up, that discussing these two shows that actually had ideas and things to say has been such a fucking treat. After the last six months—

Ben

Seven months, seven months!

Shan

—seven months of this horrid year. Worst BL year I have experienced. Bar none.

Ben 

Twig and I were talking about this. We haven't had a BL year this bad since maybe 2017, maybe 2016. It's quieter in fandom. People are moving on. The genre is in shambles. It is milking us for all we're worth and not delivering on compelling narratives.

These shows are just not the moment. And it's really sad to watch. Every single company in the genre is floundering in some way. Our favorite creative team who gave us I Told Sunset About You, I Promised You the Moon, My Ambulance, and a bunch of other shit. We looked at their new show and we were like, “Ooh, you have to choose commerce, huh? Yeesh. Yikes.”

Shan

Right?

Ben 

This is the only show from Korea that we thought was worth talking about in the entire year on this podcast. There's not another Thai BL I wanna talk about at all this year on the show. Taiwan ain't done anything I wanna talk about on this show. Japan ain't done anything I wanna talk about on this show—

Shan 

That one's a real knife to the heart. 

It's been a bad year. There are still shows coming out, but they're just not good. I'm happy for folks who are still finding things to like and still having a good time. I have left that era. I am so burnt out on these terrible shows. I am so sick of watching stories made by people who don't care about stories.

NiNi 

I’m having a little more fun than you guys are, but not by much.

Ben 

A lot of people are not like me and Twig who were like, we will die on the gay hill. If they get bored with BL, they just move on.

Shan 

They have.

Ben 

I don't know what space that leaves for the next wave of fans to come in. It's not a good look. BL is in trouble, y'all. And I think there is a much longer conversation to be had. The way we went from seeing BL as uplifting for queerness to now basically preying on queerness.

NiNi 

And that is a conversation that we are going to have in an upcoming episode. When is it upcoming? TBD! 

[Ben laughs]

NiNi

But we will be having it before this year is over. 

Shan

Don't worry about  it.

NiNi

That is going to wrap us up on whatever we're going to name this episode. I've apparently been banned from naming episodes. The last two ones are going to go up with the names that I chose for them and y'all will die mad about it. Since then I've been banned from titling episodes. 

Ben 

This is some sort of queer coming of age.

NiNi

Some kind of youth romance title thing. 

With that, we out. Say bye to the people, Shan.

Shan 

Bye, people!

NiNi

Say bye to the people, Ben.

Ben

Peace!

[the-conversation-pod]

American Toxic Yaoi: Interview With the Vampire and Fellow Travelers

AND WE'RE BACK

NiNi and Ben returned the booth with @wei-ying-kexing-apologist to discuss two of our favorite recent examples of American prestige television tackling queer themes. This was a fun departure as we get to discuss shows about relationships that functionally fail(ed). It's not often that we get to spend a whole episode on decades of tragedies when we discuss BL.

Join us as we discuss multi-era-spanning bottom dementia in AMC's Interview With the Vampire and Showtime's Fellow Travelers.

American Toxic Yaoi by @Ben and NiNi

Prestige TV is gay now! Historical bottom dementia is on the menu as we tackle two different era-spanning toxic romances. Ben, NiNi and frie

American Toxic Yaoi

Podcast Episode · The Conversation · 09/04/2025 · 1h 32m

American Toxic Yaoi - The Conversation | iHeart

<p>Prestige TV is gay now! Historical bottom dementia is on the menu as we tackle two different era-spanning toxic romances. Ben, NiNi and f

Timestamps

The timestamps will now correspond with chapters on Spotify for easier navigation.

00:00 - Welcome 00:55 - Introduction 02:25 - Interview With The Vampire 12:27 - IWTV: The Vampire Mythos 17:28 - IWTV: The Best Bits 21:35 - IWTV: Claudia 26:55 - IWTV: Queerness in the Story 36:19 - IWTV: Gay Paree 41:24 - IWTV: Final Thoughts and Ratings 51:16 - Fellow Travelers 01:04:44 - Fellow Travelers: Hurt People Hurt People 01:13:22 - Fellow Travelers: The Saga of Hawk and Tim 01:21:20 - Fellow Travelers: Final Thoughts and Ratings 01:28:38 - Outro: More Toxic Tales Please!

The Conversation Transcripts!

Thanks to the continued efforts of @lurkingshan (and @wei-ying-kexing-apologist for this and past episodes) as an editor and proofreader, we are able to bring you transcripts of the episodes.

Please send our volunteers your thanks!

00:00 - Welcome

NiNi

Welcome to The Conversation, the Queer Media and Brown Liquor Podcast.

Ben

I'm Ben, the media critic.

NiNi

I’m NiNi, the VIIBs queen.

Ben

And we are your drunk Caribbean uncle and auntie who are sitting on the porch in the rocking chairs.

NiNi

We’re here to talk queer film and dramas, with a special focus on Asian QL.

Ben

So if you like deep dives into queer stories…

NiNi

If you like cracked out takes on art and commerce in queer media…

Ben

If you just enjoy simping for attractive people…

NiNi

We believe in simping!

Ben

Tune in!

[transition music]

00:55 - Introduction

Ben 

And we're back.

NiNi 

Ooh, you came in hot there, Ben. Try it again.

Ben

And we're back.

NiNi 

[laughs] Just like these couples.

[Ben and Nini laugh]

Ben 

That’s right, let’s try and save it. We return to the booth—finally—to discuss some Western content. Everybody who's here for BL, you can sign off now. 

We are here tonight with our good friend Captain Hands. Say hi, Captain.

Captain Hands 

Hi, Captain Hands.

Ben 

Captain Hands, who graciously offered to complete the transcripts from the early days of the show, has joined us at the end of that long project to not talk about BL and instead talk about people who would definitely post through their divorces if they had access to socials.

We're gonna be talking about the AMC Interview with the Vampire and Showtime's Fellow Travelers.

NiNi 

These are the most divorced people that you will ever see on screen. I was unprepared, honestly, for both times that I sat down to watch these things. It's like, “Oh, people are talking about this. This should be fun.” Only to be hit with some of the most toxic shit I've ever seen in my life. And I ate. it. the. fuck. up.

[jazzy transition music]

00:02:27 - Interview With The Vampire

Ben

Captain Hands is the reason I actually started watching Interview. You started posting aggressively about it. And I was like, “what's going on?”

Captain Hands 

The show's fucking phenomenal, so I needed everybody to see it.

Ben 

What's your familiarity with Anne Rice's work and why did you pick up the show?

Captain Hands

I don't have any familiarity with Anne Rice outside of, like, generally vague knowledge.

Ben 

Well, she's very Catholic.

Captain Hands 

The scene in the church at the end of one was not at all like a hint towards that…

NiNi 

[Laugh] Hoo hoo hoo, boy.

Ben

So you hadn't watched the Brad Pitt [film].

Captain Hands 

Not really any familiarity with the source material at all, film or books. I think just everyone at some point around me was talking about Interview and I was like, “Well, I love Jacob Anderson and I love gay people, so…this should go well.” 

And then it did go very, very well.

NiNi 

A winning combination. I, of course, was aware of the Brad Pitt/Tom Cruise version of Interview. I have never actually watched it all the way through. Like, I've seen bits and pieces of it over the years. I have never actually read any of the Anne Rice vampire books, so this for me is the definitive version of the story.

Ben

So I've watched the Brad and Tom film. I guess I'll do the basic setup.

So, in the modern era, vampire Louis de Pointe du Lac invites older renowned journalist Daniel Molloy to sit down and have an interview with him where he's gonna talk about his experiences as a vampire and primarily his feelings about his ex— [laughs]

NiNi 

So many feelings.

Ben

—Lestat de Lioncourt. In the AMC show, we pass back and forth between the interview in the present and the events of the past. And we're meant to question constantly Louis' recollection of the past, because it's framed around a lot of his big feelings about everything that happened. Louis was a successful businessman in an older era of New Orleans. He gets pursued by the vampire Lestat and eventually turned by him and the two have a toxic relationship for decades that ends pretty badly for both of them, but especially Lestat. And then Louis goes on to try and live after him.

Man, it's so difficult to talk about all of this without, like, trying to give everything away.

NiNi 

Yeah, you don't want to, yeah, you don't want to immediately give away where this story goes, but I feel like there's no way to talk around the events of the story.

Ben

Let's just own some of the major events. Massive spoilers to follow. 

Louis is pursued by Lestat. Their relationship is good at first, but it sours. Louis, being a man of his era, thinks a baby can fix their relationship. They eventually turn a young girl into a vampire as well. This is okay at first, but this also goes bad after a while because Claudia is an aging person trapped in a child's body.

Eventually, as things sour with Lestat, Claudia convinces Louis that they have to kill him to get out of being under his thumb. They attempt to kill Lestat, are mostly successful, and then in the second season they go off to Europe to be depressed together.

Louis ends up with the vampire Armand, who we eventually learn was also once with Lestat. Big problems unfold as the Paris Coven is not happy with the New Orleans vampires and their bullshit. Put them on a sham trial and then we find out why Claudia isn't around anymore in a truly horrific scene expertly performed by Delainey Hayles.

NiNi 

Listen y'all, Ben's, like. underselling it here. This shit is wild. It is crazy, it is tragic, it is toxic, it is psychologically horrifying. I took psychic damage watching this show in the best way possible.

Ben 

Captain Hands, you said you were coming to this unfamiliar with any Interview lore. What is your experience following Louis’ recollections? What hooks you into this? What are you so compelled by in the first place?

Captain Hands 

I just love a good mess. And that whole relationship— [laugh]

NiNi

Yup

Captain Hands

—is so fucked in such a fun way. Watching the way that Louis and Lestat navigate their relationship, both the points where it is good and the points especially where it's super, super bad. 

Casting Jacob Anderson and having Louis be Black was, like, a really interesting thing. I think that you then get an extra level of complexity to the dynamic between Louis and Lestat. I love a good toxic relationship. I don't think there's enough super strong portrayals of that type of complexity. It's so clear that they love each other and they can't really get enough of each other and they are driving each other up the fucking wall. I think you get so much more juicy content out of that type of dynamic where, like, you can't actually get away from the problems because you don't fully want to get away from the person.

NiNi 

Some of the problems and some of the toxicity comes from just sheer grinding day in day out longevity of the relationship. Maybe if they had taken a few years break away from each other at any point during this, maybe they would not have absolutely, like, created the messiest mess that you have ever seen in your life. But the fact that they're immortal and they're gay in a time when both of those things mean that they have to live a more or less secret life, which means that all they really have is each other day in, day out, every day for decades. Like, yeah… murder is bound to happen.

Captain Hands 

Yeah. I think it's interesting, too, especially in stories like this, where you have that immortality aspect and the super strength and all this other stuff that you're gonna get just inherently more violent outbursts. To see the kind of fights that happened between Louis and Lestat and how utterly they were beat to shit is something that you're not gonna see as often in other content because, like, that would have killed anybody, but they're just vibing. 

Looking at Claudia and her anger and the way that she just goes and fucking murders everybody because she's having a really hard time navigating being as young as she is and being a vampire and all of the stuff that has changed in her life and then seeing that type of anger exists in both Louis and Lestat as well and the ways in which that ties them together is really interesting. Those explosions I just feel are bound to happen when you get the type of emotional immaturity that you have in someone like Lestat who should really know better by now with how old he is, but alas.

Ben 

There's a lot to say on that front. I'm so sorry for NiNi in the editing room later.

NiNi

I just edited The Untamed. I am untouchable at this moment. Bring it on. [laughs]

Ben 

[laughs] Let's start with the adaptation component of this. So much about, like, putting them in New Orleans was just so fucking fun for mec ‘cause I'm from here. It was so cool to see the city in this particular time period and how much they gave a shit about it. Making Louis Black and Creole required them to move the story forward about 40 years. This changes the dynamics significantly. In the source material, Louis's family is former plantation owners. So he's like declining old money-ish when Lestat finds him. In the 1910s version of Louis we get in the show we have far more interesting dynamics with him having to navigate the triune racial structure that New Orleans lost after the Civil War. 

Making Louis French and Black and urban adds this really incredible layer. Louis's family is doing what they can to maintain the particular type of wealth they have here. And Louis is essentially tasked with dealing with the ugly work of his family to maintain that. I find the fact that the closeted gay son is also doing ugly work on behalf of the family a really compelling aspect for when Lestat finds him. 

On top of the whole vampire transformation thing, one of the aspects of their toxicity that I think is so compelling and why the story works so much—we know they break up. Like, everything we're seeing is the past. There's no real rooting for anybody in like I hope they work it out way whenever you're in the past because we explicitly know that they don't. ShippingTM doesn't work in the traditional sense of you expect the story to resolve this, at least in the past. There's hope for the future. Like vampire Lestat: The Rock Star is season three. I'm excited to see how they adapt that section.

[jazzy transition music]

00:12:27 - IWTV: The Vampire Mythos

Captain Hands 

I always love monstrosity as a symbol for queerness. To have gay vampires is just right in my wheelhouse.

Ben 

One of the most compelling things about the vampirism of this is that it essentially traps the person in the moment of their death, which is an ugly place for most people to be; which is what's so inherently wrong with Louis. When Lestat finds Louis in the church, he is at the end of his rope. Louis, who is deeply unwell, is going to spend his internal afterlife trapped in the moments where he was facing doubt, facing extreme feelings of self-harm. And he is always going to be there because one of the biggest things we learned about vampires is that they don't gain new skills after they die. 

They have the skills that they had when they died. It's why Lestat is always mad about music because he can't create anything new. This is also its own kind of Hell. All of these people are trapped in some of their worst moments for the rest of their lives. And there really is no reasonable path for them to genuinely improve themselves. We know, having seen two seasons now, that Louis has many terrifyingly dark moments where he wanted to hurt himself or tried to hurt himself.

NiNi 

Aside from that idea of them being stuck in the moment that they died with their mental and emotional state, they're also stuck in their grudges. When you think about all of the vampire characters, they are totally stuck in having the same grudges that they had when they died and those grudges animating them. Lestat is never gonna get over the primal wound of being abandoned. Louis is never gonna get over the primal wound of being shunned. Claudia is never gonna get over the primal wound of being left for dead. 

These are the things that they're essentially grappling with throughout the rest of their eternal lives. And the minute any of them comes even close to maybe healing that primal wound, it's basically the end for them. The whole thing is just a fucking mess. 

How do you even heal from something like that? You don't, which is really interesting to me because we're looking back at this tale from a point in the future. We're seeing a Louis who is seemingly calm and controlled and has ascended beyond all his petty trivial concerns—

Ben 

Have you looked at that man's eyes? He crazy as hell! [laughs]

NiNi

[laughs] —hold on, that's why I said seemingly, seemingly.

Captain Hands

It's always worse when they get calm. I feel like it's always more chilling once it's like, “Oh, you seem extremely put together.”

NiNi 

But he's not, he's appearing that way. But the fact that he's even doing this fucking interview and spending hours and hours talking about his apparently-dead ex. 

Ben 

In front of his new boo.

NiNi 

Yeah, like, you've been with the new boo longer than you were with the old boo, and you're still talking about the old boo. You're still talking about your ex, when we've been together for almost a hundred goddamn years.

What am I supposed to do with this if I am Armand? And then, fast forwarding again to the future of the future, finding out later on that maybe Louis wasn't being entirely truthful either with himself or with Molloy about that relationship. He gave a version of it that put everything on Lestat. And then at the end you start to see that version crumble a little bit. Listen, psychic damage watching this show.

I feel like I can't even talk about it in a coherent way because all I want to do is point at certain scenes and scream out loud.

Captain Hands 

I have the same problem where, like, if something's really good, I can't form coherent thoughts around it. Because my mind is just, like, blown. I do think something that is really important to this story, especially because it is as toxic as it is, is the fact that it is a first person telling. Nobody's a reliable narrator.

Louis can put all of it on Lestat but we know that that's not true by the end. It is an additional sign of toxicity to me, Louis spending all of this time with Molloy just trying to immortalize his particular version of events.

NiNi 

Especially once we find out what happened to Maloy after the original interview.

[jazzy transition music]

00:17:28 - IWTV: The Best Bits

Ben

I know for NiNi, you watched it all as, like, basically one experience. But for Captain Hands and me, we watched this in two distinct seasons of television. And I haven't had such a positive experience with the second season of an American show since like Black Sails. We end the first season with them murdering LestatTM, and then fucking off to Europe in the middle of the Second World War.

We know that Louis isn't capable of actually finishing off Lestat. We know that that's gonna be a pain point in his relationship with Claudia. Because we had really only been given Louis' point of view and specific excerpts from Claudia, I was not too keen on reconciliation of some sort between Louis and Lestat. 

In the second season, being given greater insight into some of Lestat's motivations and realizing how much Louis was wrong about, adds this really compelling transformation for me as a viewer, where they finally reunite in the middle of a hurricane in New Orleans—unsubtle imagery.

These two messy ass homos. The Mississippi River is one of the most dangerous rivers to jump in to in the world. Louis swam across that river to go beat that man’s ass because of a record he sent him.

Captain Hands 

They're just so fun to watch. Like, this has to be a TV show because if this were real, I would just be following these people around with popcorn as my daily entertainment.

Ben 

Lestat is such a mess. The fact that he's like got his side piece in front of Louis…absolutely insane. And then he got the nerve to be jealous [chuckles] if Louis tries it with some other dude.

NiNi 

[Laughing] I have literally, like, seen this happen in real life and it was so entertaining. 

Ben 

I keep thinking about the Claudia character, I think, the most. I think one of the things that plays better for me this time around is how much more regard for Claudia I have. And I really think it comes down to the strength of both performances and also making her just a little bit older to let an older actress play the horror of that whole scenario. I keep getting haunted by some of Claudia's final monologue. Goddamn, I wish I had the clip handy.

NiNi 

Ben's definitely gonna find the clip and link to it.

Ben 

Don't you worry, I sure will. It's just so good. Like her final fuck you to the whole crowd is so good.

One of the things that's really compelling about this story is how fucking stupid Louis is. Like, he lived together with Lestat for literal decades, asked not a damn question about any vampire shit. And then they end up in Europe and start getting their asses handed to them.

NiNi 

Louis was basically a trophy wife.

Ben 

He really was.

NiNi 

Didn't even make sure to get a will or nothing. No life insurance.

Ben 

They are in Europe looking for connection and a sense of purpose. Claudia is trying to find other vampires. And then she asked Louis legitimately, like, “Are you here with me?” And he's looking at the fucking hallucination of Lestat and is talking to him instead. I'm never getting over that sequence in the back of that truck.

NiNi 

He was really talking to Lestat when Claudia is asking him a question and she really thinks that he's talking to her and I want to scratch everybody's eyes out.

[Laughs]

00:21:35 - IWTV: Claudia

Ben 

Captain Hands! I want you to reflect on the Claudia narrative in particular. From being turned by these guys, reveling in the power, recognizing the box that she's kept in. Her first attempt to flee to Europe. The way that that ends on two different ugly fronts. And then their journey to Paris. That's a whole lot.

Captain Hands

I'm so happy to talk about her because she is undoubtedly my favorite character and so fundamentally the most tragic character, at least to me in all of this.

I think it's really interesting to have this young Black girl on the verge of womanhood in a pretty poor area now suddenly gain a bunch of power and have the ability to enact that power against other people. And she's also trapped as this like 16, 17 year old girl forever.

NiNi

I think that they turned her at 14, which is even worse.

Captain Hands 

Even worse, ‘cause then she's looked at as a child her whole life. That has to be simply the most frustrating possible thing to develop mentally and never be looked at as an adult; never have complete autonomy. She didn't ask to be turned, she was turned against her consent.

She was used as, like, a toy basically for like Louis and Lestat to fawn over as a bandage for their super fucked-up relationship. She does not have a lot of guidance and she has a lot of anger. And so she goes on a killing spree that nobody really helps her through. 

That cut to the river when all the bodies come floating up? Just a really good visual metaphor for how much pain and, like, rage she's in and how much she is taking that out on people around her who can't fight back the way that Louis and Lestat can fight back.

Claudia and Louis end up having this type of special relationship because they can read each other's minds and Lestat is out of that. I think it's especially important in this version where Louis and Claudia are both Black and Lestat is white and rich and powerful and French and not Creole and not from New Orleans and all of these other things that like really keeps Lestat outside of their little world in ways that I don't think Lestat likes, because I think Lestat likes to get his little fingers in fucking everything…and feels like he has a right to it as well. 

She just wants to be loved, and I do think she is. But I think that love is hidden behind the love that Louis and Lestat have for each other and the toxicity that they have towards each other. Man, I'd get tired too. Like I think Claudia's just fucking over it by the end because who wouldn't be seeing what happens?

Even when they go to Europe, after Claudia does some truly genius fucking double crossing and manages to pull off this thing with drugging people to try to get Lestat killed. They're still not safe because not only are they in a fucking war, they’re vampires in a place that's super against vampires and actually believes that they exist. How do you find safety in that?

And then you get to Paris and she has an opportunity to finally kind of be more independent and she finds Madeleine and she joins the troupe. And she's still fucking stuck, like 50 years she has to wait to play a role in this theater, and then she's stuck playing a fucking baby. So she never gets a chance to be seen as an adult, except for by Madeline and then they die… And that's just fucking awful.

Ben 

In the source material, she is turned at the age of five.

Captain Hands 

Oh no. Fuck.

Ben 

So replay the whole show you've seen, but make her a five year old.

Captain Hands 

That's fucked up.

NiNi 

That is fucked up. Anne Rice is from Hell, y’all.

Ben 

Ahahaha!

Captain Hands

The thing that's really interesting with Claudia as a character is she's dying when we meet her and then she's turned immortal. But she's been dead this entire time. Like the second we start this show, she’s been dead this whole time and there's literally nothing that saved her. She's just been on a delay. Very Eternal Yesterday style, eventually she's just gonna haunt this narrative. It doesn't matter that she's upright and breathing right now, her time is very limited and there's nothing that Louis can do to stop Claudia from dying. 

I think that's what brings Louis and Lestat back together at the end. Armand does not care for Claudia. I think my favorite scene in the entire show so far is when Claudia dies and Lestat's reaction to watching his daughter turn to dust. Putting that in the context of Anne Rice losing a daughter at five of leukemia and then making a vampire book, which so heavily involves blood. And then having Claudia in the original, like, be five years old. I think a lot of it is just this exploration of grief on Anne Rice's part.

00:26:04 - IWTV: Queerness in the Story

Ben

I find the… queerness of the show in particular so compelling for me. Like, Louis is closeted on so many fronts. Even despite ostensibly being out now, you can still feel the psychological walls that he's having to tread around whenever he does anything.

Like even when he stresses “This is the vampire Armand, the love of my life,” you can feel the shaky uncertainty that comes with growing up queer and closeted. So painful. I don't know how Jacob found that. He’s good. Goddamn.

Captain Hands 

He's so fucking good.

NiNi 

One of the things that I do like about Louis and Armand is that they are presenting themselves as, you know, the “proper gays” the “proper vampires.” They do things the “proper” way.

They're not threatening, they're not scary, they're very civilized, you know?

Captain Hands 

Sure, they'll make eye contact while they drink the blood of a rat in front of you, but otherwise.

NiNi 

There's a certain type of queer person who is very much about not scaring the normies. And I feel like a lot of what Armand and Louis are trying to present to Molloy is that idea of not scaring the normies.

Even the fact that Louis is sharing this story with Molloy and he wants the story to be out there, he really wants to be seen as quote unquote, “as normal as everybody else,” which is a queer metaphor. The whole, “I am not a scary monster. I am a man of taste and refinement” kind of thing.

It hit me so hard. Even when you look at their surroundings, you know, like, what is the set design telling me about these people right now? And it's very high art, very austere, very severe, very refined, but so cold. It's like a mausoleum.

Captain Hands

Truly.

NiNi 

And you contrast that with the house that you shared with Lestat night and day chalk and cheese. It's like you met the new boo and you're just trying to cast away all the things about yourself that you were part of the old relationship, you're trying to make yourself into a new human being through your relationship with this new person. But it's not working because wherever you go, there you fucking are.

Ben 

See, but what's so interesting about this is Armand's inability to say no to Louis because for all of the rule-following that they do, making this interview and outing their entire existence is the biggest no-no. Why is Louis doing this? It's because he wants to die and he is creating conflict with other vampires because he wants to die. Also, he wants to see Lestat again.

This is how he accomplishes that.

Captain Hands 

The line that Louis has about being thankful that the last sunset he saw was marred by his brother jumping off a roof, so he's never felt the pain of missing a sunrise in like the hundred plus years that he's lived is just so heartbreaking.

NiNi 

We didn't even talk about his brother. Oh my god.

Captain Hands 

Yeah.

NiNi 

Listen people, psychic damage.

Ben

He loses his family so quickly. Like he ends up distanced from them within 10 or 20 years of becoming a vampire because it's obvious that there's something wrong with him. He also almost ate his nephew or his niece.

NiNi

He did try to hold on to his family for actually so long, but as you mentioned Ben, he was already sort of half in half out of them. His family's very religious, they know he's queer, but they turn the blind eye to it until they can't turn a blind eye to it anymore. Not only is he showing up with this man, it's this white man, it's this French white man, you know what I mean? 

There's so much that in the end they can't turn a blind eye to but he keeps trying to stay connected to them to hold on to his humanity and little by little it all slips away until he, like you said, tries to eat his niece and then he realizes that he can't hold on to it anymore he has to let it go, he has to let those relationships go.

Ben 

I'm also super invested in what's happening immediately in the present with Daniel. The fact that this is their second interview, that the first interview was broken up, that there are questions about what happened during the first interview; that Daniel is sick and they know it, but now they want to finish the interview. That he's having to navigate this incredibly dangerous scenario with two incredibly-powerful, deeply-unstable beings.

Like I'm never mad when we skip out of the past and Louis' ongoing self-righteous monologuing to focus on the present and Daniel.

NiNi 

[Laughing] Oh my god!

Sidebar. Louis' whole shtick is so insufferable. It just makes you want to stab him through the eye. Dude, get over your fucking self. Oh my god. Okay I had to get that out of my system. Go ahead.

Ben 

My favorite piece of behind the scenes content is when Armand is doing the whole, like, “Rashid” cosplay for the first season. We see Assad Zaman holding like a fucking iPad. He was legit playing games on that iPad [chuckling] because he was just chilling in a lot of these scenes.

NiNi

God. 

Captain Hands

A nice behind the scenes tip, Armand playing games in the first season, like, that puts a lot of distance between him and actually paying attention to anything that Louis' saying. 

Ben 

Exactly.

Captain Hands

I'm so sorry to the Tumblr user whose username I don't remember, but they did a really cool screenshot of like...

Ben

Gonna give me a research project.

Captain Hands 

Louis and Lestat sharing a coffin and then, like, Armand and Louis sharing a bed and how much distance is between Louis and Armand versus how close Lestat and Louis are. 

As you were saying, NiNi, the set design just really speaks to, like, the warmth and the closeness. I would not say that house is, like, maximalist but it's definitely more so than Armand and Louise penthouse.

Ben 

Armand will never say “Come to coffin.”

Captain Hands 

Exactly. In the middle of that you have the 80s with Armand and Louis' apartment with Molloy's first interview.

NiNi 

I did not really grok into the set design of that apartment.

Ben 

It wasn't really their apartment. It was more like a dump house.

NiNi 

Yeah, it doesn't feel germane to their lives. It doesn't feel like their home. It feels like a place where they were. 

Ben

It feels like the 80s. It's just the place where you go to shoot up.

Captain Hands 

Mm-hmm.

NiNi 

[laughs]

Ben 

I'm not even being funny. Like that's legit what that house was. It was a place for Louis to fuck boys and sometimes eat them.

Captain Hands 

Eat them and eat them.

Ben

[chuckles] Yes.

NiNi

I'm going to insert a rimshot sound effect right here. [Rimshot.]

Haha. Incredible.

NiNi

Sorry, I'm 12 tonight. 

Ben

These relationships just don't work, but in really interesting ways. Like, Louis will clearly never be happy with Armand, but he'll also never be settled with Lestat, despite his inability to get over him.

Okay, I gotta talk about Sam Reid now. [sighs] Sam Reid is my favorite performer in this whole series. No disrespect to Jacob Anderson. Jacob Anderson is an incredible, monster talent at accent and voice work. But he gets to basically play Louis straight. Louis is an incredibly tortured character and Jacob gets to lean into how fucked up and tortured the Louis character is. 

But what's so monstrous about Lestat isn't just the fact that he is selfish and cruel. It’s that he's a fucking clown about it. Like, Lestat is so French about his sense of humor. He behaves like he's a fucking mime half the time. I'm so compelled by Sam's performance as Lestat—especially hallucination Lestat. Sam knows exactly what he's doing because Lestat is an evil clown and he knows it. And Lestat knows it, which is even more fun.

NiNi

Lestat is very focused on seeming cavalier and brave le danger. He's the ultimate poser. Everything with him is, “Oh, it’s ironic.” He is the poster boy for the modern era honestly. I can't wait to see him be a rock star.

Captain Hands 

He’s gonna do great. 

NiNi

He's gonna do fantastic.

Captain Hands

Lestat deserves to be high on cocaine 24/7.

NiNi 

I mean, does cocaine even get vampires high? Question. Anyway, he's doing this whole act to hide the abandoned child within. It's very much a, “I don't really care. It's fine, I'm so cool. Just let me wear my leather jacket and smoke this cigarette. I am le tired. I think I will have sex with my sister.”

Ben's right, it's very French. And like, he's fucking crushing it, honestly. He's doing amazing, sweetie. Good job.

Captain Hands 

Yeah, you can tell he's having a lot of fun.

[Jazzy transition music]

00:36:19 - IWTV: Gay Paree

Captain Hands

I think it's interesting too that Louis and Claudia end up in Paris without Lestat. I would be interested to see their dynamic with Lestat, who is French, being in France.

Ben 

He never would have taken them.

NiNi 

He would have never taken them there, first of all. And second thing, I find it really compelling that Paris is where they went because they know that's where Lestat is from and they're looking for other vampires. Lestat warned them about other vampires and they went directly to his home looking for other vampires. It's almost like they were daring him.

I was like, “My God, really? Y'all are not even subtle about this.” They were both obsessed with him to the point that they had to go to the source. They found the source and the source was Hell and it got Claudia killed. 

Ben 

There's so much about Paris, the fact that Armand has always hated that he is constantly put in charge of other vampires. He despises it. Like he is wallowing when Lestat finds him. And Lestat's like, “I refuse to be gay and sad. Y'all can cut this ugly shit out right now, take a shower, put on some fucking colors and we can go do other shit.”

Armand was waiting for someone to blow that up for him. He's always waiting for someone else to take charge of the scenario he's in. We get this whole situation with the Paris coven where they were all just, like, morose assholes and Lestat's like “We can at least have fun with this, embrace the clown in you and join my theater.” And then he leaves that because he gets bored or whatever, he fucks off to do something else. 

They stumble into this later and we get Ben Daniel's fantastic Santiago, who is over Armand's bullshit and wants to take control. Has to get rid of Louis and Claudia as a result. Puts them on trial for violating vampire laws. The fact that they did that in front of a crowd of actual people.

Incredible cinema.

NiNi 

The whole Theatre de Vampire is wild. The fact that it exists, the fact of what they do like honestly Claudia looking at their show with her eyes like saucers? I got it because I couldn't believe that they were this bold but that sounds very much like what Lestat would have put them up to because as you said, Ben he is a fucking clown and he would have enjoyed rubbing people faces in something like that. Armand being in charge of this little fucking freak show is wilder because as you point out, he doesn't want to be. When Santiago makes the attempt to take over he was like “Fine you can have it, it's okay I will go back to not being in charge. I will be really happy with that.” But Santiago didn't believe him.

That's the problem. It's always the problem. Nobody will believe that he doesn't want to be in charge. So they keep fucking with him when he's just trying to give it up. He doesn't want to be in charge in his relationship with Louis either, but he has to be.

Captain Hands

He's the one person who shows up for the group project.

NiNi 

He hates that this is who he is, but he cannot stop himself.

Ben 

Like everyone in this story.

I really love when Daniel has pieced together enough that he's able to unlock for Louis the truth that Lestat saved him in that whole sham trial shit.

NiNi 

The fact that Armand was behind all of it.

Captain Hands 

Mm-hmm.

NiNi 

I mean let's talk about your reveals here. When I realized that, I realized how fucking unreliable a narrator everybody in the story is. Nobody is telling anybody else anything close to the truth over hundreds and hundreds of years and I am obsessed with it.

Just obsessed with these fucking crazy liars who are doing this because they are bored. You live for hundreds of years, you've run out of shit to do. So you start fucking with each other. Everybody is looking for something new and interesting to happen to perk up their little nipples and they can't get it!

Captain Hands

[Laughing]

NiNi 

[Laughing] It's so like... it's tragic, don't get me wrong, but it's also fucking ridiculous.

Captain Hands

It's a farce, which is perfect.

Going into Daniel's stuff, it's fun watching him just be so fucking over these vampires and their bullshit.

NiNi 

And then he becomes one.

Captain Hands 

He's throwing cunt around like nobody else. He's doing great. If there's anybody built to be a vampire, it is Daniel Molloy, and I will stand behind that.

Ben

[Cackles] Eric Bogosian has played gay before and he's like “I'm ready. I will do whatever they want me to do.”

Captain Hands

He's like, “Old man yaoi? Yes.”

Ben 

I'm so happy for him.

00:41:24 - IWTV: Final Thoughts and Ratings

Ben

So, before we get into hopes for season three, I want everybody to highlight their favorite tragic story from this series.

Start with you, NiNi. What's your favorite tragedy?

NiNi 

Fucking Claudia.

Ben

Which Claudia tragedy?

NiNi

[Laughs] I mean, can we just look at it as one never-ending until it ends tragedy?

Ben

That's the whole show, baby. Specify.

NiNi 

She's born, she suffers, she's undead. She's not just stuck in the body of a child as her brain gets older, she's stuck in puberty. Of all the periods of life to be stuck in. No wonder she feels she's going crazy at all times. She finally, finally, after so many years has made a bid for some level of autonomy and the minute she does that, everybody around her conspires to snatch it away.

And then she is put on a show trial for shit she didn't do and then killed. Like, fuck. It would have been kinder if they had let her die in the fire, honestly. 

Captain Hands

Oh, yeah.

NiNi

That's the real tragedy of it. The fact that Louis thought he was saving her, but he actually condemned her to Hell. Oooooh God, psychic fucking damage.

Ben 

Captain Hands, favorite tragedy in the show?

Captain Hands 

I'm gonna say Louis' brother. That is, I think, such a foundational part of how Louis approaches his vampirism. And I think that it's the starting point of the tragedy. I'm sure that he feels like he failed his brother. His brother is the first person to really pick up on and just straight up to his face say that he knows something's going on.

His brother was institutionalized by their father and the only reason that he is not locked up going even more insane is because their dad is not there and Louis has some level of control over the family now. And then to have his brother just walk off the roof is just such a horrible thing and it fundamentally changes the way that his family sees Louis.

NiNi 

How about you Ben. Why don't you depress us now?

Ben 

Oh I’ve been waiting, don’t you worry. My favorite tragedy in this is that despite essentially winning what every gay wants: Louis will be forever in his prime. He will be forever hot, forever wealthy, and immune to many other things that are gonna befall gays in the 100 years he's been alive.

He will never be happy and his existence comes at the expense of other gay people who are looking for connection.

NiNi 

I have taken more psychic damage. Thank you. Oh my God. 

Ben

[Evil chuckle]

Captain Hands 

I’m thinking about AIDS especially. Vampires deal entirely in blood but probably won't, almost certainly can't get AIDS or HIV.

Ben

I am really hoping that we look at the epidemic in the next season. One of the interesting things we got out of the time in war torn Europe was that the quality of blood was making the vampires sick as well.

NiNi 

Making them sick and making them crazy. Especially in Eastern Europe where they were at first. All the vampires that they did meet were weak and nuts. And not like nuts in a fancy way like Lestat.

Ben

I think a lot about that vampire who was turning people because she needed a coven, but they were all unwell.

Captain Hands

Is she the one that threw herself in the fire? 

NiNi 

Yep.

Ben

Mostly so she can fuck with Claudia.

Captain Hands

Because Claudia's not been fucked with enough.

Ben

Well since we know we're getting a season three and maybe four, what is everybody looking forward to?

NiNi

Like I said, I'm not really familiar with the source material, so I'm just looking forward to what other fresh hells they are going to unleash upon us. I'm particularly interested in what happens now that Louis and Armand have broken up. Now that everything is out in the open. Now that Molloy is a vampire. Now that it's clear that Lestat is coming back into the story in an active way.

I'm curious to see how all those threads get pulled together.

Captain Hands

I… am so excited for Daniel to throw his hat into the messy ring. We saw him when he was younger and he was partying. He was not a super put together person. But by the time you get to him when he's doing the interviews, he's very capable of just super hardcore judging everything and putting the pieces together.

And I just think vampirism turns people stupid. So I'm really excited to see him like slut it up, stir up the drama, get in fights with people. I just want him to have the best fucking life and I'm ready for him to go stupid, go crazy.

Ben 

Daniel was so annoyed that he made Armand break his rule.

NiNi

I need you to speak directly into the microphone, Benjamin.

Ban

I need Eric Bogotian and Assad Zaman to make out and fuck nasty on this show. Eric is ready—

Captain Hands

He's so ready.

Ben

—and Assad is ready. I need it to happen.

But from a plot perspective, I'm really excited about Lestat setting the record straight. Like Louis had his time. He's done his whole interview talking shit about me and our dead child. I'm excited to see what Lestat has to say in response to all that. 

NiNi

To see what happens after the hurricane.

Captain Hands 

There wasn't a script for that ending and we don't know, and I don't think anybody in the crew either know—like only Sam and Jacob know what Louis and Lestat said to each other in that moment and I think that's really fucking cool.

NiNi 

Okay, let's rate this bad boy. Captain Hands, what are you rating Interview with the Vampire?

Captain Hands 

I mean, it's a 10 for me. High caliber entertainment.

NiNi 

Benjamin?

Ben 

I think on my like scale of who should watch this, it's probably formally like a 9.5, because this is a deeply unpleasant show about so many really deeply unwell people. The show doesn't really ever pretend that it's not about that, and so I think for the conversation, I'll give it a 10.

NiNi 

On a scale of pure batshit it's a 10 baby, oh my god, literally I could not stop watching it.

Captain Hands

I think this show deserves a 10 just for the levitating gay sex scene.

NiNi 

I mean that was quality, but I think that Armand reveal bumps it up to an 11 for me honestly.

Ben 

Let's take a brief aside about the damn levitating gay sex.

NiNi

[laughing]

Ben

Like as a visual, the levitating gay sex is great Louis is finally connecting to this man in a real way and he's found something that's higher than the stuff that he's found before. But also, I gotta be honest with as much pearl clutching as there was around this show around how explicitly gay it was.

I was like, “This? This is what y'all got your titties all tied up about? I've watched The Novelist. I've seen Mood Indigo. This is what y'all got all pearl clutchy about? Whatever.”

NiNi

I've watched The Cornered Mouse Dreams Of Cheese, y'all ain't got nothing.

Ben 

We gotta remind people we're a BL podcast. [laughs]

NiNi 

Honestly the thing that gets me about this show and why I bumped it up to 11 is like Ben said these people are deeply unwell and they have literal eternity to fuck with each other. They have eternity to make up like crazy shit to do to each other and then do it just for their amusement. So I am very very excited to see what crazy shit they're gonna do next.

So if I give it an 11, and Captain Hands gives it a 10, and Ben gives it a 9, then it's a 10 from The Conversation.

Ben

It is a show that I think is one of those pieces of queer TV that you're gonna wanna have engaged with. I think it's gonna be formative for a lot of viewers.

NiNi

Anyway, we have been talking about Interview with the Vampire for an hour and a half, let's move on. 

Captain Hands

I'm amazed it only took an hour and a half, because we didn't talk about like half of the shit we could have talked about.

Ben 

I feel like if we had done, like, a season by season, it’d be a little bit easier to talk about.

NiNi

Yeah, that's the hard part about discussing these multi-season shows. But also, what's the use, really, in talking about the events in Interview? The events are what they are. What's really important is the absolute nutcase behaviour that these characters are exhibiting. That's what's really important.

Ben 

Before we go on, mega shout out to Ben Daniels for not getting his ass handed to him by Jacob Anderson, Sam Reed, and Assad Zaman. Holy shit, did he put on an incredible performance at Santiago.

NiNi 

Like whole-pussy-in kind of behavior, like, Ben Daniels delivered. He was having a whale of a time. His stomach is full of the scenery because he chewed it all up. It was an incredible performance. If you watch nothing else, go and find this first scene when Claudia and Louis go to the Theatre de Vampire and watch Ben Daniels do the monologue...like INSANE.

00:51:16 - Fellow Travelers

NiNi 

Now that we're done talking about the crazy vampires, let's talk about some insane toxic humans. 

Ben, let's talk about Fellow Travelers. Tell the people what Fellow Travelers is about.

Ben 

Fellow Travelers is based on a book written in, like, the early 2000s in which we followed two political operatives working in government in the McCarthy era. We followed them in their lives through to the 80s in the height of the AIDS crisis. That's the simple overview. 

We follow Hawkins Fuller, who goes by Hawk. He is a war hero who fought in Germany in World War II. He now works as a political operative for a powerful progressive senator, and is ultra-closeted and a total top. He becomes interested in a young man who is new to Washington. His name is Tim Laughlin. He is a Catholic struggling with his queerness, and is really into the conviction of Joseph McCarthy—that Joseph McCarthy. Anyway, Hawk fucks him enough that he gets over that.

We follow their troublesome relationship across about 30 years and we have to deal with Hawk, who is this ultra-American vision maintaining his closet for decades, and Tim's genuine inability to do that. And the fact that both of these guys love each other and really just cannot get over each other.

Hawkins Fuller is played by the incredible Matt Bomer, one of my favorite white gays.

If you are a homo who wants to see Matt Bomer cry for gay reasons, please go watch Papi Chulo and then message me on Tumblr. I'll be waiting for you all to find me. 

The beautiful heartthrob, Jonathan Bailey, is playing Tim Laughlin. 

Supporting the white gays of this, we have Jelani Alladin playing Marcus Gaines, who is a Black writer and also a total top and friend of Hawk's, a reporter in the era who is struggling with his pro-Black politics and the inherent masculinity of the era. He is in a relationship with Frankie Hines, played by Noah Ricketts, who is a drag queen of the era and is clearly Experiencing Gender. Hawk is also married to Senator Smith's daughter Lucy Smith, played by Allison Williams, who I really like in this role. 

I knew about this show for a long time, because I am a queer cinephile. It's hard not to know that Matt Bomer and Jonathan Bailey were fucking every episode on this show in 2023. And the white gays and white girl, what we would call BL fans, were losing their minds over it. But I wasn't in the mood at the time. I did not even know there were Black plot lines present in this story. Or that Stormé had a role in this.

Stormé DeLavere played a role in the Stonewall events. Did not expect them to pop up in this. I sat up immediately, “Hold on!” I did not know that there was any Black people in this show at all. It says a lot about the fandom, unfortunately. I did not know that there were meaningful Black storylines in this show until I started watching it. I woulda watched this a lot sooner if you had told me about Marcus and Frankie.

I also did not know that the show went all the way into the 80s. I thought it was going to be eight episodes of McCarthy era gays growling at each other and having unsafe sex the whole time. We start off in the 50s, we get into the complexities of McCarthy, the queer rumors around him, Roy Cohn, that motherfucker and all of his documented bullshit. And then we move into the 60s and the anti-war movement and the complexities of the 70s. Hawk is closeted and married. He has a son who is probably queer as well, who never feels connected to his dad.

I really love that we got to see 30 years of complex mess with these guys and that the show really cared about the interiority of that existence. 

NiNi, you are finally free of higher education for now, and I'm like, “Stop everything! Here's Jelani Alladin's back. I need you to watch the show immediately.”

NiNi 

Ben did what everybody does on Tumblr when they want you to watch something. They seduce you with gifs.

Ben 

I showed you Jelani Alladin's ample back and you watched the show. What's your experience watching this? ‘Cause you've watched a lot more of this era of TV from America than I have.

NiNi 

One of the tags that's going on this episode is prestige TV is gay now! So because of the era that the show starts in, of course it's drawing comparisons to golden era TV shows like Mad Men, especially with the character of Hawk because Hawk is the ultimate sort of Don Draper-y kind of character. It's obviously pulling connections from there. But as you get more into the story, it's just like, “oh, this is not that.” They use that to sort of suck you in, which I thought was really clever.

People don't want to think, I think, about the very real history that's shown here. They want to think of this time that the show starts in, at least, as some kind of a magical history where everything was better. So, putting this period in a gay story is just showing you that no, everything was actually shit. I mean, you've got a literal gay guy working for McCarthy in an era when McCarthy was hunting. And that's not an exaggeration. Hunting gay people. Hunting them, hounding them. People went to jail, people lost their jobs, people lost their livelihoods, some people lost their lives. That always gets swept under the rug when you're looking at TV that's depicting this era. So looking at this era from a queer lens is like, “no, no, the shit's always been like this. You were just insulated from it.”

And especially then as they start going through the eras, you get into 60s proper, you get into the 70s, you get a little bit of the 80s, and you see how the bullshit continued and continued and continued, even as it “got better.”

That was what stuck with me. Aside from the severely toxic relationship at the center of this.

Ben

Captain Hands.

Captain Hands 

I think I just kept coming back to Hawk being alone at the end of all of this and how tragic it is that Hawk and Tim only got a couple of moments with years in between. It made me really happy to see Marcus and Frankie living together and taking care of a kid because Marcus finally started to be more open in ways that Hawk was never really able to do. 

The thing I got out of this the most was the loneliness of the masculinity. How Hawk and Marcus were so scared of being seen as queer comparing that to Tim and especially Frankie, the characters that can't hide and can't pass or refuse to do so are so fucking brave and are living a life that is far more authentic to themselves.

Ben

I really like having them in the show for that comparison. I like that we got to use Marcus's passion for Black intellectualism to highlight the fact that McCarthy and them went after motherfucking Langston Hughes during their anti-gay, anti-communist sentiments. And if you don't know who the fuck Langston Hughes is, you better ask somebody.

I find myself thinking a lot about the fact that Hawk has no actual political motives. And that's what makes him such a useful political operative. The fact that Tim actually does have political goals is what makes him such a [chuckles] terrible political operative. 

The sequence in which they subject Hawk to the polygraph test. And he's like, “the fundamental of it is they want you to feel shame so they get to react to that. As long as I don't feel shame—

Captain Hands

Says the most ashamed man.

Ben 

—they can't catch me.” He is able in that moment to use his own personal righteousness to shield himself. That's so specific and I understand it completely. I am obsessed with that man. I also think a lot about Mary and Caroline and how, when they got into trouble, Hawk executed a plan instantly. And Tim was like, “Mary will never do that. They love each other.” You're about to learn something important about Mary. Caroline ends up being sent back to the Midwest to go marry a man and pop out babies. And then Mary becomes a Congresswoman and is out now.

I think about Marcus and how he wants to impress his dad. So he gets this job at the Washington Post, and he ends up super unhappy there because he knows he's not making a difference. His life doesn't work out for him the way he wanted either. Whatever he wanted to write about, he never reached the people he wanted. And I think an unspoken part of that is his inability to write authentically about himself is likely what holds back his writing fundamentally.

When their gay bar gets raided, they're trying to run out. Frankie wants to help Stormé because she falls. And she calls out to Marcus for help. And Marcus just turns around and walks away and pretends like he doesn't see anything. They have a racially charged moment at this restaurant that Frankie's performing at. They don't want to let this big Black ass into their restaurant. And they're like, “Absolutely not. We've got enough homos in here tonight.” They don’t say homos.

Frankie is like, they called both of us fags when we did this. And then when he writes about it, he doesn't write about Frankie or his connection to him; this is, I think, fundamentally the flaw in Marcus's writing.

NiNi 

The reason why he can never write something truly great is that he absolutely cannot be honest. He can't get to the heart of the matter because he can never let himself be. And there’s so many different reasons for that as the years go by. First it was his father. He was basically living his life for his father. It's all about making his father proud, which is why he leaves a Black publication where he was really doing some good to move to the Post and get shit on just so he could be the Black guy at the Post. Because that's what his father saw as progress. That's why he's drawn to Langston Hughes. His ideas of progress are not about being the one Black guy. His ideas of progress are community-based. 

But he subsumes those to society to his father's ideas to everything else. He is never truly honest with himself. Even coming down towards the end—this is after his father's died—he's openly living with Frankie, but he and Frankie are still fighting about this because he's still not being honest and still not being true to himself even as he lives with a man, even as he's raising a gay kid.

He's still hiding. He still can't show himself and that's why his writing can never rise to the level that he knows it could be at, which is why he never gets where he wants to go. It's actually quite tragic.

Captain Hands

Marcus and Hawk, I think for me, are the most tragic characters in this because of their complete inability to be vulnerable and take that risk.

01:04:44 - Fellow Travelers: Hurt People Hurt People

Ben 

It's also so sad in Hawk's case because he inflicts this upon his family. I feel bad for the Lucy character because she knows what's going on but the structures of her era put her in this awkward place where she sort of just has to go along with it. Hawk tells his dad on his dad's deathbed to go fuck himself. So Hawk doesn't have access to independent wealth. And part of why he ends up marrying Lucy Smith is to marry into the Senator's family.

Senator Smith is clearly based upon another senator during the McCarthy era. His son is arrested for soliciting sex from men, caught during a raid, and he's pressured to back off, and he ends up killing himself.

Hawk has this heroic view of Senator Smith in his mind and Senator Smith was super homophobic. His son was gay and he immediately killed himself. 

Captain Hands 

The irony of the last sentence he writes in his fucking statement being “fight for America” and then he just shoots himself and I'm like, “Dude, for real?”

Ben 

Hawk, a Known Gay, jerked off with the senator's son, put that man into conversion therapy and then he disappeared from the narrative.

NiNi 

My stomach hurts when I think about that. He did that to him, and he didn't feel no type of way about it either. He didn't feel conflicted, he didn't feel guilty, he felt literally no type of way about it.

Captain Hands 

The image right after that is Hawk standing in front of the car with this giant American flag flying above his head. 

Ben 

That's the second gay man that he's turned over into a situation where they're clearly gonna die.

NiNi 

Let's talk about Eddie. Poor, poor Eddie.

Ben 

We lost Eddie so fast, I'm so sad.

To be fair, Eddie was not smart and Eddie was going to cause big problems for him. But also we just spent an hour and a half talking about a vampire show where these guys get to live forever off of the corpses of the gay men they leave behind them. Yikes!

NiNi 

I was already taking psychic damage from this episode and that just made it worse.

Ben

Hehehehehe

Captain Hands 

I have a lot of thoughts about Roy Cohn because he's gay and he is a huge part of this manhunt for all these queer people in government. He is ruining people's lives with no remorse.

NiNi 

Even as he secures special treatment for his own boy toy.

Ben 

Those events are real too, like Roy Cohn died very not long ago.

Captain Hands 

But nobody sells Cohn out. It is wild to me that Cohn's going on this witch hunt and so many people in Washington know this man is gay and they don't out him.

I don't know how I feel about that.

NiNi 

It’s more grotesque for the fact that it was true. Like this is a semi-dramatized tale but all the stuff about Cohn is 100% true [laughs]. That shit that actually happened and that's the part I just can't even stomach. I'm watching that interview with Cohn in the 80s where he still, after all this time, he still refuses. He's like, “Look at me, how could I be homosexual? I'm a man.” It's really interesting that the period that the show ends in is the Regan era.

Captain Hands

I think it's just a good demonstration of how this is continuously repeating. So it's McCarthy, it's Reagan, it's Trump now. It's not like this is new. It just never ends. Something I really enjoyed about the exploration of the McCarthy era investigations into whether or not people were gay. So many things were absolutely ridiculous. Like, “Can you walk for me?” They raided underwear drawers. This is ridiculous. What is that telling you? This is such a stupid thing. And it got people—like people killed themselves.

It just is like such a good insight into these, ways in which authoritarianism, fascism, all of this stuff is so fucking ridiculous.

Ben 

Let’s talk about how Hawk failed his son.

He is not close to his son because his son knows that his dad is a motherfucking liar and never feels really secure in that relationship. He meets Tim and the two of them bond. And Tim's like, “You have a very smart son. He's a little sensitive.” We know what that means.

Captain Hands

He wants to be a poet. We know what that means.

Ben 

Hawk is never able to reach his own son properly and they lose his son to drugs. And this is what finally breaks Hawk to the point that he finally reaches out to Tim for help, and Tim talks to Lucy about it. I really like that Lucy knows about Tim and spends her entire marriage with Hawk resenting him. I get that in her mind if she beats Tim, she'll win Hawk, but that's not what's going on here. At the end of Tim's life, she finally understands this. 

And I love the way Tim, who is a fairly empathetic individual, will not give ground to her. Like he calls her Mrs. Fuller the whole time to make the point of, “However you feel you had him.” She's like, “no, I didn't.” And he's like, “fuck you.” I loved that final conversation between.

NiNi 

I love that it ends with both of them realizing what they already knew.

Ben 

That Hawk hurt both of them.

NiNi

Hawk is a fucking bastard. Both of them are just like, “yeah, it's not your fault, it's his fault.” They come to a rapprochement at the end. And then Lucy Smith leaves Hawk.

Captain Hands 

Good for her.

Ben

Happy for her.

Captain Hands 

I have so many feelings about Jackson as a character, and the aftermath of Jackson's death. Because I have a harm reduction background, I'm always very grateful when shows don't demonize drug users. Jackson dying because of a heroin overdose is straight up a tragedy and there is nothing about the way that he died that is played as anything but that. I was really appreciative of, like, the card that Tim sent and the positive things he said about Jackson in that card. Lucy acknowledging how difficult it is for her to get out of bed, Hawk utilizing drugs to try to, like, avoid having to feel anything about his son, and the breakdown that he has on Fire Island when he sees the picture that his plug pulled out of his drawer.

Ben 

Okay, he has a name. His name is Craig.

Captain Hands

The picture that Craig [chuckles] pulls out of his drawer.

NiNi 

The whole sequence on Fire Island is just devastating. I completely understand why after that, Tim never wanted to see him again. It was just such a violation.

Captain Hands 

I think they portrayed Tim's now background with the social work super well. Hawk being like, “I'm going to put your name on the deed.” And Tim going, “Are you going to kill yourself?” Because that's the way you handled that kind of conversation. He's looking at Hawk giving away these massive things, trying to offload his private space on Fire Island, the place where he can be arguably the most himself trying to pass it on to Tim.

We know partially so that his name's not on the deed, but Tim is looking at the amount of drugs that Hawk is doing and the reckless behavior that he's exhibiting and the ways in which he is starting to give away items. To see those warning signs and do what you're trained to do.

Ben 

I think refusing to take the offer was the best thing he could have done for Hawk in that moment.

01:13:22 - Fellow Travelers: The Saga of Hawk and Tim

Ben 

NiNi, you're the sex in story girl. We had a total top going verse for Tim.

NiNi 

On the day of McCarthy's funeral—

Ben 

On the day of McCarthy's funeral.

NiNi 

Poetic. When I saw that he decided to bottom for Tim that time I was just like, “Oh, they're not coming out of this one. This is the end of it for them. This is his quote-unquote final gift.” This is the end of their relationship as far as he's concerned. And we also know from the whole thing with Mary and Caroline how he was gonna do it. So when I saw it happen, I was like, “we're at the end,” and then Fire Island.

Ben 

It’s the cabin first and then Fire Island.

Captain Hands 

Yeah, hiding from the law.

NiNi

And then he goes to jail anyway.

Captain Hands 

The other time that he has a fight with Hawk, he joins the fucking army. Like this man has to get himself as far away from Hawk as possible because he has no ability to control himself. The first time he goes into the goddamn trenches and the second time he goes behind bars!

Ben 

“Promise you won't write.” What a line.

NiNi 

It's not just that he gets as far away from Hawk as possible, he also gets into dangerous situations. It feels like an ideation honestly. It feels like he's telling himself, “If I can't have you then it's the end for me.” Because I mean the army and jail at those specific times, those are highly dangerous situations for a queer man. There was no guarantee that he was gonna come out of either of those things alive.

Captain Hands 

That feels like a Catholic guilt thing for him.

Ben 

It sure is! I know my people people when I see them. But I also understand the obsession, there's this intense loyalty that I think he feels for Hawk. And I get why, like Hawk's a war hero. He led men into battle. He has a magnetism about him that you feel drawn to. 

Captain Hands 

Something that has continuously played in my head since I finished the show is how many times the line, “I'm bulletproof” or “you’re bulletproof” was uttered either from Hawk or towards Hawk. And he has a literal fucking bullet wound, well shrapnel wound. He's not untouchable. He just hides it very well

Ben 

I'm so glad that at the very end, Tim got to use Hawk to advance his political goals. It feels like the right ending for them. And I like that Tim gave Hawk a kind exit.

NiNi 

Was it really though? I don't know. 

Ben

I think it was. I think it's as kind as you're gonna be.

NiNi

Yeah, it was kinder than it needed to be, that is true. But also one of the first things you see in the show is the older Hawk at this party where he's celebrating his appointment to ambassador.

Then you go back and realize literally how long this has been a dream of his and how everything that he did was because he was fixated on this idea that one day he would be free. 

Ben 

Mm-hmm.

NiNi

Not realizing that he had the opportunity to be free the entire time. 

Ben

And that's the whole point about Frankie and Tim having sustainable lives in California. Hawk could have had that too.

NiNi 

Exactly, but he has this dream of moving to Italy and being an ambassador and doing the dream in this specific way. And he couldn't bend from that to the point that it destroyed basically his only chances at happiness. And now he comes to the end. He's finally gotten this thing that he spent 30 years grasping at. And what does he do? 

He finally realizes somewhere in him that it's not gonna do fuck all for him and he runs off to take care of his dying ex.

Ben 

I did enjoy, in the taking care of Tim portion, that Hawk had done enough reading about transmission that he wasn't panicked.

Captain Hands 

That made me super excited, from the medical point. Him being pretty chill about coming into contact with Tim’s blood. I was so fucking happy that that happened.

NiNi

We haven't really talked about the sheer toxicity of this relationship between Tim and Hawk. Like, we've touched around the edges of it. But, don't be mistaken, this man spent 30 years being gaslit by Hawk. [laughs] 30 whole years.

Ben 

—He knew it the whole time—

NiNi 

—being gaslit and manipulated and he knew it the entire time and he still, until the end, could not really walk away. Diabolical.

Ben 

See, I don't know that I would call it diabolical because Tim expected all of this the whole time. Like it hurts that it happens anyway. But Hawk consistently showed him that despite how clear it was that he was important to Hawk, Hawk's image was the most important thing to him. He was explicit about it. That's what makes it so inherently tragic. Tim knows it intellectually the whole time, but he can't help but be drawn to him anyway.

Captain Hands

I’m trying to decide if Tim is a “I can fix him” guy or if he’s just so caught up in this illusion that he just buries his head in the sand. 

Ben 

No, Tim is a “he’ll change for me” type. 

NiNi

I don’t know that I agree with that. I think Tim knows that Hawk isn’t going to change as much as he maybe hopes that he will. And part of him likes that Hawk is not going to change. Like he might be miserable but at least he knows what he’s getting. He knows he can’t fix whatever is wrong with Hawk. He knows that much. But he also is willingly gaslit the entire time. He knows that Hawk is never going to be what he wants him to be. Anything he tells himself about Hawk changing, he knows is a lie. He's lying to himself and he knows that he's lying to himself. It's what he has to tell himself.

Ben 

It's important to note that Tim walks away from Hawk each time. Like until the very last time Tim is the one doing the walking away.

NiNi 

But he's also always the one who comes back.

Ben

But Hawk's also the one reaching out to him each time.

NiNi

They're in this twisted sort of codependent crazy relationship where Tim walks away, he swears he's done, Hawk doesn't even really reach out; he just appears on the periphery somehow of Tim's life and Tim comes running back and Hawk is very specific about how he appears around the periphery.

Like somebody tells him that Tim's in trouble and he drops everything and tries to fix it behind the scenes, but in such a way that it's clear that he's the one who's fixing it, so that Tim is forced to come back… and Tim doesn't fight going back either. He goes back and he remembers why he left in the first place, but then it's years later.

I mean those periods get shorter and shorter every time. But he's mesmerized by Hawk and he can't let it go. And he will lie to himself in order to not let it go.

01:21:20 - Fellow Travelers: Final Thoughts and Ratings

NiNi 

Final thoughts on Fellow Travelers.

Ben

I cried so hard when they put Tim on the AIDS quilt. That hurt me. I was down for forty minutes. 

Captain Hands 

Yeah, that was fucking rough. 

Ben

I feel like the Harvey Milk stuff was a little forced.

NiNi 

Yeah, I don't think that it really fit with the narrative that they were telling. Like I understand that they wanted to get Marcus to the point where he would finally put his body in the fight, and he literally did that by shielding Jerome literally with his body from the police batons, but they forced that a little bit.

Ben 

You cannot write a character like Marcus, who has very valid reasons for distrusting the role of white people in the movement, and just trying to force it out at this point. It just did not feel right to me.

Like I understand that a big part of the show is putting things in the historical context and I understand that Harvey Milk was also an incredibly charismatic person. I understand how a bunch of people active in the era would feel kinship with him because apparently he had that kind of electric quality. But I just really did not really enjoy the tacked on feeling of Frankie's like, “I really like Harvey and now he's dead.”

NiNi 

I feel like because they put these people in the direct orbit of figures like Cohn, McCarthy, and Stormé, that they also wanted to put them in the direct orbit of Milk, which is why they made Frankie know him personally. It doesn't feel natural in the way that the other parts of this felt natural.

Ben 

Especially because Tim is away with Hawk during these events.

Captain Hands 

From my perspective as somebody who was not around for any of this, like I knew Harvey Milk was assassinated. I don't know about the fucking Twinkie- I think some of it was like also to root in history for viewers who are not necessarily as aware of the history. 

I learned so much about the McCarthy area and so much about the 80s so I can see the Harvey Milk assassination being put in there just as a way to tell you how much time has passed between the last time we were in the 80s and the next time we're in the 80s. It does feel very underdeveloped if they're trying to have Frankie grieve somebody he said was a friend we, like, don't ever see him interact with Milk.

NiNi 

Yeah, I just felt like if they were gonna do that, either they should have cast Milk and brought him into the story, or they should have left it as sort of a background event that the characters are reacting to, not so personally, but more as a societal thing.

Ben 

I respect the impulse, but I'm flagging it as a little weird and a little forced.

Captain Hands?

Captain Hands 

I really loved this show. I think the performances were phenomenal. I really loved the way that they were able to show how lonely Hawk was because he was so scared. And I really am super appreciative of them having a character like Frankie in there constantly pushing Marcus in ways that I don't think Tim ever really did for Hawk. I like the parallels.

Ben

My final thoughts on Fellow Travelers are, I'm very glad that Matt Bomer and Jonathan Bailey put so much ass out there that they introduced a whole generation of people to the concept of queer elders and the idea that queer political history, at least in the United States of America, goes back far further than Gaga releasing Born This Way.

NiNi 

Sir, you didn't have to go there.

Ben 

No shade to Gaga.

NiNi 

You did not have to go there.

Ben

I also want to thank Jelani Alladin and Noah Ricketts for the work they did as Marcus and Frankie. I'm so glad that this show became a vehicle to say things that we've been saying that femmes have always been the stronger ones. I am also really glad that Marcus's arc ends with him questioning whether or not he can be a good enough father to Jerome.

Captain Hands 

I cried so hard at the “you are innocent” scene.

NiNi

Ooh, chills.

Captain Hands 

I also love that the last time we really see Marcus, he's handcuffing himself on stage and he's fully joining into queer protest. Hawk's never going to do that. The biggest thing Hawk has ever done and probably will ever do is tell his daughter that Tim is the man that he loved and she fucking knows that.

Ben 

She does, but I think it's important for him.

NiNi

It's important not just for her to hear it from him, but for him to say it to her. I like to think that after we leave him in the story, things get better for him because now he's able to be honest.

Ben 

He's an old gay now. He's got work to do.

NiNi 

Marcus and Frankie are still in the story, so maybe they pull him into it.

I do have to shout out Matt Boomer and Jonathan Bailey because both of these men are openly gay they made their bones playing the straight romantic hero and then they're like, “we are gonna do this really gay fucking show because it's important to us. Y'all need to understand that we play straight boys, but we are not straight boys. Y'all need to understand who we are. “And then they went and put their whole pussy in. My final thoughts are honestly thank you for this story. It's a great story.

Ben 

Ratings!

NiNi 

I am going to give it a 9 because the Milk thing really did land funky and also while I am mostly satisfied with where Marcus and Frankie end up, I would have liked to see more closure to their side of the story.

Captain Hands 

I think I'm similarly at like a 9. It was phenomenally performed and also it was very clear to me that there were gaps in the writing where they kind of just set whole characters aside for a while. Like I don't think Marcus and Frankie were as fleshed out as they could have been. Mary disappeared straight up for like three episodes. I was like, “did we forget about Mary?”

Ben 

There wasn't much to say...

Captain Hands 

Which sucks, lesbians are so important…anyway, it’s a 9.

Ben

It's a 9 for me. I understand why Tim and Hawk are drawn to each other, but Hawk hurts Tim so consistently and I don't really think Tim got enough out of being with Hawk to warrant the 30 years of obsession. 

NiNi

Okay, so three nines, that's gonna be in 9 from The Conversation for Fellow Travelers.

01:28:38 - Outro: More Toxic Tales Please!

NiNi

There are some definite parallels between these two tales. Long-term relationships are hell anyway. They're worse when you are with a pathological lunatic. That's one. Two, people who live in guilt for whatever reason are never going to be truly happy until they release that guilt. That is where Tim landed for me and that is what I hope that Louis gets.

Ben 

What we can take away from this is that: one, there's a lot of room in queer storytelling for more than just saccharin “he was a boy, he was a boy.” Also, BL does not have to just be a young man's game, because Matt Bomer was 45 filming this.

NiNi

That ass is 22 at best. [Laughs]

Ben 

Let me not get too lost into that. There is so much room in our genre for complex stories about long-term companionship, the struggles they're in, and also separation. These are two shows about guys who really genuinely just didn't work. And I think it's intriguing to reflect on the lives of queer people and what those lives cost them; what it takes to make things work or not work. It's compelling sometimes to look at relationships that are failing and reflect on the kind of partner you might want to be.

I'm so glad that we got really interesting stories about separation and not being able to be there for your partner. Because if you're watching this and you're sad about the way Marcus could never be the type of writer he wanted to be and be with Frankie or how Hawk could never be with Tim or how Louis and Lestat despite loving each other more than anything in the world consistently ruin each other.

You have the opportunity in your own relationships to not be these guys, and I think that's beautiful.

Captain Hands 

I think both of these shows are really great examples of complex queerness, both in the ways in which people approach and engage in their own queerness and just in the way that queer people are portrayed. And that is something that is really important to me because I feel like we are still in a point where we want to try to tie everything off in a pretty little bow. I think there's some fear around adding flaws into queer stories. And I think that both of these shows are evidence that you can make complex, toxic characters who are queer.

NiNi

That is going to wrap us up on what are we gonna call this? I'm gonna call it American Toxic Yaoi. Say bye to the people, Captain Hands

Captain Hands 

Bye! Thanks for listening to me.

NiNi

Say bye to the people, Ben.

Ben 

Peace!

[the-conversation-pod]

Thank you @italianpersonwithashippersheart and everyone who got us to 1000 reblogs!

[the-conversation-pod]

American Toxic Yaoi: Interview With the Vampire and Fellow Travelers

AND WE'RE BACK

NiNi and Ben returned the booth with @wei-ying-kexing-apologist to discuss two of our favorite recent examples of American prestige television tackling queer themes. This was a fun departure as we get to discuss shows about relationships that functionally fail(ed). It's not often that we get to spend a whole episode on decades of tragedies when we discuss BL.

Join us as we discuss multi-era-spanning bottom dementia in AMC's Interview With the Vampire and Showtime's Fellow Travelers.

American Toxic Yaoi by @Ben and NiNi

Prestige TV is gay now! Historical bottom dementia is on the menu as we tackle two different era-spanning toxic romances. Ben, NiNi and frie

American Toxic Yaoi

Podcast Episode · The Conversation · 09/04/2025 · 1h 32m

American Toxic Yaoi - The Conversation | iHeart

<p>Prestige TV is gay now! Historical bottom dementia is on the menu as we tackle two different era-spanning toxic romances. Ben, NiNi and f

Timestamps

The timestamps will now correspond with chapters on Spotify for easier navigation.

00:00 - Welcome 00:55 - Introduction 02:25 - Interview With The Vampire 12:27 - IWTV: The Vampire Mythos 17:28 - IWTV: The Best Bits 21:35 - IWTV: Claudia 26:55 - IWTV: Queerness in the Story 36:19 - IWTV: Gay Paree 41:24 - IWTV: Final Thoughts and Ratings 51:16 - Fellow Travelers 01:04:44 - Fellow Travelers: Hurt People Hurt People 01:13:22 - Fellow Travelers: The Saga of Hawk and Tim 01:21:20 - Fellow Travelers: Final Thoughts and Ratings 01:28:38 - Outro: More Toxic Tales Please!

The Conversation Transcripts!

Thanks to the continued efforts of @lurkingshan (and @wei-ying-kexing-apologist for this and past episodes) as an editor and proofreader, we are able to bring you transcripts of the episodes.

Please send our volunteers your thanks!

00:00 - Welcome

NiNi

Welcome to The Conversation, the Queer Media and Brown Liquor Podcast.

Ben

I'm Ben, the media critic.

NiNi

I’m NiNi, the VIIBs queen.

Ben

And we are your drunk Caribbean uncle and auntie who are sitting on the porch in the rocking chairs.

NiNi

We’re here to talk queer film and dramas, with a special focus on Asian QL.

Ben

So if you like deep dives into queer stories…

NiNi

If you like cracked out takes on art and commerce in queer media…

Ben

If you just enjoy simping for attractive people…

NiNi

We believe in simping!

Ben

Tune in!

[transition music]

00:55 - Introduction

Ben 

And we're back.

NiNi 

Ooh, you came in hot there, Ben. Try it again.

Ben

And we're back.

NiNi 

[laughs] Just like these couples.

[Ben and Nini laugh]

Ben 

That’s right, let’s try and save it. We return to the booth—finally—to discuss some Western content. Everybody who's here for BL, you can sign off now. 

We are here tonight with our good friend Captain Hands. Say hi, Captain.

Captain Hands 

Hi, Captain Hands.

Ben 

Captain Hands, who graciously offered to complete the transcripts from the early days of the show, has joined us at the end of that long project to not talk about BL and instead talk about people who would definitely post through their divorces if they had access to socials.

We're gonna be talking about the AMC Interview with the Vampire and Showtime's Fellow Travelers.

NiNi 

These are the most divorced people that you will ever see on screen. I was unprepared, honestly, for both times that I sat down to watch these things. It's like, “Oh, people are talking about this. This should be fun.” Only to be hit with some of the most toxic shit I've ever seen in my life. And I ate. it. the. fuck. up.

[jazzy transition music]

00:02:27 - Interview With The Vampire

Ben

Captain Hands is the reason I actually started watching Interview. You started posting aggressively about it. And I was like, “what's going on?”

Captain Hands 

The show's fucking phenomenal, so I needed everybody to see it.

Ben 

What's your familiarity with Anne Rice's work and why did you pick up the show?

Captain Hands

I don't have any familiarity with Anne Rice outside of, like, generally vague knowledge.

Ben 

Well, she's very Catholic.

Captain Hands 

The scene in the church at the end of one was not at all like a hint towards that…

NiNi 

[Laugh] Hoo hoo hoo, boy.

Ben

So you hadn't watched the Brad Pitt [film].

Captain Hands 

Not really any familiarity with the source material at all, film or books. I think just everyone at some point around me was talking about Interview and I was like, “Well, I love Jacob Anderson and I love gay people, so…this should go well.” 

And then it did go very, very well.

NiNi 

A winning combination. I, of course, was aware of the Brad Pitt/Tom Cruise version of Interview. I have never actually watched it all the way through. Like, I've seen bits and pieces of it over the years. I have never actually read any of the Anne Rice vampire books, so this for me is the definitive version of the story.

Ben

So I've watched the Brad and Tom film. I guess I'll do the basic setup.

So, in the modern era, vampire Louis de Pointe du Lac invites older renowned journalist Daniel Molloy to sit down and have an interview with him where he's gonna talk about his experiences as a vampire and primarily his feelings about his ex— [laughs]

NiNi 

So many feelings.

Ben

—Lestat de Lioncourt. In the AMC show, we pass back and forth between the interview in the present and the events of the past. And we're meant to question constantly Louis' recollection of the past, because it's framed around a lot of his big feelings about everything that happened. Louis was a successful businessman in an older era of New Orleans. He gets pursued by the vampire Lestat and eventually turned by him and the two have a toxic relationship for decades that ends pretty badly for both of them, but especially Lestat. And then Louis goes on to try and live after him.

Man, it's so difficult to talk about all of this without, like, trying to give everything away.

NiNi 

Yeah, you don't want to, yeah, you don't want to immediately give away where this story goes, but I feel like there's no way to talk around the events of the story.

Ben

Let's just own some of the major events. Massive spoilers to follow. 

Louis is pursued by Lestat. Their relationship is good at first, but it sours. Louis, being a man of his era, thinks a baby can fix their relationship. They eventually turn a young girl into a vampire as well. This is okay at first, but this also goes bad after a while because Claudia is an aging person trapped in a child's body.

Eventually, as things sour with Lestat, Claudia convinces Louis that they have to kill him to get out of being under his thumb. They attempt to kill Lestat, are mostly successful, and then in the second season they go off to Europe to be depressed together.

Louis ends up with the vampire Armand, who we eventually learn was also once with Lestat. Big problems unfold as the Paris Coven is not happy with the New Orleans vampires and their bullshit. Put them on a sham trial and then we find out why Claudia isn't around anymore in a truly horrific scene expertly performed by Delainey Hayles.

NiNi 

Listen y'all, Ben's, like. underselling it here. This shit is wild. It is crazy, it is tragic, it is toxic, it is psychologically horrifying. I took psychic damage watching this show in the best way possible.

Ben 

Captain Hands, you said you were coming to this unfamiliar with any Interview lore. What is your experience following Louis’ recollections? What hooks you into this? What are you so compelled by in the first place?

Captain Hands 

I just love a good mess. And that whole relationship— [laugh]

NiNi

Yup

Captain Hands

—is so fucked in such a fun way. Watching the way that Louis and Lestat navigate their relationship, both the points where it is good and the points especially where it's super, super bad. 

Casting Jacob Anderson and having Louis be Black was, like, a really interesting thing. I think that you then get an extra level of complexity to the dynamic between Louis and Lestat. I love a good toxic relationship. I don't think there's enough super strong portrayals of that type of complexity. It's so clear that they love each other and they can't really get enough of each other and they are driving each other up the fucking wall. I think you get so much more juicy content out of that type of dynamic where, like, you can't actually get away from the problems because you don't fully want to get away from the person.

NiNi 

Some of the problems and some of the toxicity comes from just sheer grinding day in day out longevity of the relationship. Maybe if they had taken a few years break away from each other at any point during this, maybe they would not have absolutely, like, created the messiest mess that you have ever seen in your life. But the fact that they're immortal and they're gay in a time when both of those things mean that they have to live a more or less secret life, which means that all they really have is each other day in, day out, every day for decades. Like, yeah… murder is bound to happen.

Captain Hands 

Yeah. I think it's interesting, too, especially in stories like this, where you have that immortality aspect and the super strength and all this other stuff that you're gonna get just inherently more violent outbursts. To see the kind of fights that happened between Louis and Lestat and how utterly they were beat to shit is something that you're not gonna see as often in other content because, like, that would have killed anybody, but they're just vibing. 

Looking at Claudia and her anger and the way that she just goes and fucking murders everybody because she's having a really hard time navigating being as young as she is and being a vampire and all of the stuff that has changed in her life and then seeing that type of anger exists in both Louis and Lestat as well and the ways in which that ties them together is really interesting. Those explosions I just feel are bound to happen when you get the type of emotional immaturity that you have in someone like Lestat who should really know better by now with how old he is, but alas.

Ben 

There's a lot to say on that front. I'm so sorry for NiNi in the editing room later.

NiNi

I just edited The Untamed. I am untouchable at this moment. Bring it on. [laughs]

Ben 

[laughs] Let's start with the adaptation component of this. So much about, like, putting them in New Orleans was just so fucking fun for mec ‘cause I'm from here. It was so cool to see the city in this particular time period and how much they gave a shit about it. Making Louis Black and Creole required them to move the story forward about 40 years. This changes the dynamics significantly. In the source material, Louis's family is former plantation owners. So he's like declining old money-ish when Lestat finds him. In the 1910s version of Louis we get in the show we have far more interesting dynamics with him having to navigate the triune racial structure that New Orleans lost after the Civil War. 

Making Louis French and Black and urban adds this really incredible layer. Louis's family is doing what they can to maintain the particular type of wealth they have here. And Louis is essentially tasked with dealing with the ugly work of his family to maintain that. I find the fact that the closeted gay son is also doing ugly work on behalf of the family a really compelling aspect for when Lestat finds him. 

On top of the whole vampire transformation thing, one of the aspects of their toxicity that I think is so compelling and why the story works so much—we know they break up. Like, everything we're seeing is the past. There's no real rooting for anybody in like I hope they work it out way whenever you're in the past because we explicitly know that they don't. ShippingTM doesn't work in the traditional sense of you expect the story to resolve this, at least in the past. There's hope for the future. Like vampire Lestat: The Rock Star is season three. I'm excited to see how they adapt that section.

[jazzy transition music]

00:12:27 - IWTV: The Vampire Mythos

Captain Hands 

I always love monstrosity as a symbol for queerness. To have gay vampires is just right in my wheelhouse.

Ben 

One of the most compelling things about the vampirism of this is that it essentially traps the person in the moment of their death, which is an ugly place for most people to be; which is what's so inherently wrong with Louis. When Lestat finds Louis in the church, he is at the end of his rope. Louis, who is deeply unwell, is going to spend his internal afterlife trapped in the moments where he was facing doubt, facing extreme feelings of self-harm. And he is always going to be there because one of the biggest things we learned about vampires is that they don't gain new skills after they die. 

They have the skills that they had when they died. It's why Lestat is always mad about music because he can't create anything new. This is also its own kind of Hell. All of these people are trapped in some of their worst moments for the rest of their lives. And there really is no reasonable path for them to genuinely improve themselves. We know, having seen two seasons now, that Louis has many terrifyingly dark moments where he wanted to hurt himself or tried to hurt himself.

NiNi 

Aside from that idea of them being stuck in the moment that they died with their mental and emotional state, they're also stuck in their grudges. When you think about all of the vampire characters, they are totally stuck in having the same grudges that they had when they died and those grudges animating them. Lestat is never gonna get over the primal wound of being abandoned. Louis is never gonna get over the primal wound of being shunned. Claudia is never gonna get over the primal wound of being left for dead. 

These are the things that they're essentially grappling with throughout the rest of their eternal lives. And the minute any of them comes even close to maybe healing that primal wound, it's basically the end for them. The whole thing is just a fucking mess. 

How do you even heal from something like that? You don't, which is really interesting to me because we're looking back at this tale from a point in the future. We're seeing a Louis who is seemingly calm and controlled and has ascended beyond all his petty trivial concerns—

Ben 

Have you looked at that man's eyes? He crazy as hell! [laughs]

NiNi

[laughs] —hold on, that's why I said seemingly, seemingly.

Captain Hands

It's always worse when they get calm. I feel like it's always more chilling once it's like, “Oh, you seem extremely put together.”

NiNi 

But he's not, he's appearing that way. But the fact that he's even doing this fucking interview and spending hours and hours talking about his apparently-dead ex. 

Ben 

In front of his new boo.

NiNi 

Yeah, like, you've been with the new boo longer than you were with the old boo, and you're still talking about the old boo. You're still talking about your ex, when we've been together for almost a hundred goddamn years.

What am I supposed to do with this if I am Armand? And then, fast forwarding again to the future of the future, finding out later on that maybe Louis wasn't being entirely truthful either with himself or with Molloy about that relationship. He gave a version of it that put everything on Lestat. And then at the end you start to see that version crumble a little bit. Listen, psychic damage watching this show.

I feel like I can't even talk about it in a coherent way because all I want to do is point at certain scenes and scream out loud.

Captain Hands 

I have the same problem where, like, if something's really good, I can't form coherent thoughts around it. Because my mind is just, like, blown. I do think something that is really important to this story, especially because it is as toxic as it is, is the fact that it is a first person telling. Nobody's a reliable narrator.

Louis can put all of it on Lestat but we know that that's not true by the end. It is an additional sign of toxicity to me, Louis spending all of this time with Molloy just trying to immortalize his particular version of events.

NiNi 

Especially once we find out what happened to Maloy after the original interview.

[jazzy transition music]

00:17:28 - IWTV: The Best Bits

Ben

I know for NiNi, you watched it all as, like, basically one experience. But for Captain Hands and me, we watched this in two distinct seasons of television. And I haven't had such a positive experience with the second season of an American show since like Black Sails. We end the first season with them murdering LestatTM, and then fucking off to Europe in the middle of the Second World War.

We know that Louis isn't capable of actually finishing off Lestat. We know that that's gonna be a pain point in his relationship with Claudia. Because we had really only been given Louis' point of view and specific excerpts from Claudia, I was not too keen on reconciliation of some sort between Louis and Lestat. 

In the second season, being given greater insight into some of Lestat's motivations and realizing how much Louis was wrong about, adds this really compelling transformation for me as a viewer, where they finally reunite in the middle of a hurricane in New Orleans—unsubtle imagery.

These two messy ass homos. The Mississippi River is one of the most dangerous rivers to jump in to in the world. Louis swam across that river to go beat that man’s ass because of a record he sent him.

Captain Hands 

They're just so fun to watch. Like, this has to be a TV show because if this were real, I would just be following these people around with popcorn as my daily entertainment.

Ben 

Lestat is such a mess. The fact that he's like got his side piece in front of Louis…absolutely insane. And then he got the nerve to be jealous [chuckles] if Louis tries it with some other dude.

NiNi 

[Laughing] I have literally, like, seen this happen in real life and it was so entertaining. 

Ben 

I keep thinking about the Claudia character, I think, the most. I think one of the things that plays better for me this time around is how much more regard for Claudia I have. And I really think it comes down to the strength of both performances and also making her just a little bit older to let an older actress play the horror of that whole scenario. I keep getting haunted by some of Claudia's final monologue. Goddamn, I wish I had the clip handy.

NiNi 

Ben's definitely gonna find the clip and link to it.

Ben 

Don't you worry, I sure will. It's just so good. Like her final fuck you to the whole crowd is so good.

One of the things that's really compelling about this story is how fucking stupid Louis is. Like, he lived together with Lestat for literal decades, asked not a damn question about any vampire shit. And then they end up in Europe and start getting their asses handed to them.

NiNi 

Louis was basically a trophy wife.

Ben 

He really was.

NiNi 

Didn't even make sure to get a will or nothing. No life insurance.

Ben 

They are in Europe looking for connection and a sense of purpose. Claudia is trying to find other vampires. And then she asked Louis legitimately, like, “Are you here with me?” And he's looking at the fucking hallucination of Lestat and is talking to him instead. I'm never getting over that sequence in the back of that truck.

NiNi 

He was really talking to Lestat when Claudia is asking him a question and she really thinks that he's talking to her and I want to scratch everybody's eyes out.

[Laughs]

00:21:35 - IWTV: Claudia

Ben 

Captain Hands! I want you to reflect on the Claudia narrative in particular. From being turned by these guys, reveling in the power, recognizing the box that she's kept in. Her first attempt to flee to Europe. The way that that ends on two different ugly fronts. And then their journey to Paris. That's a whole lot.

Captain Hands

I'm so happy to talk about her because she is undoubtedly my favorite character and so fundamentally the most tragic character, at least to me in all of this.

I think it's really interesting to have this young Black girl on the verge of womanhood in a pretty poor area now suddenly gain a bunch of power and have the ability to enact that power against other people. And she's also trapped as this like 16, 17 year old girl forever.

NiNi

I think that they turned her at 14, which is even worse.

Captain Hands 

Even worse, ‘cause then she's looked at as a child her whole life. That has to be simply the most frustrating possible thing to develop mentally and never be looked at as an adult; never have complete autonomy. She didn't ask to be turned, she was turned against her consent.

She was used as, like, a toy basically for like Louis and Lestat to fawn over as a bandage for their super fucked-up relationship. She does not have a lot of guidance and she has a lot of anger. And so she goes on a killing spree that nobody really helps her through. 

That cut to the river when all the bodies come floating up? Just a really good visual metaphor for how much pain and, like, rage she's in and how much she is taking that out on people around her who can't fight back the way that Louis and Lestat can fight back.

Claudia and Louis end up having this type of special relationship because they can read each other's minds and Lestat is out of that. I think it's especially important in this version where Louis and Claudia are both Black and Lestat is white and rich and powerful and French and not Creole and not from New Orleans and all of these other things that like really keeps Lestat outside of their little world in ways that I don't think Lestat likes, because I think Lestat likes to get his little fingers in fucking everything…and feels like he has a right to it as well. 

She just wants to be loved, and I do think she is. But I think that love is hidden behind the love that Louis and Lestat have for each other and the toxicity that they have towards each other. Man, I'd get tired too. Like I think Claudia's just fucking over it by the end because who wouldn't be seeing what happens?

Even when they go to Europe, after Claudia does some truly genius fucking double crossing and manages to pull off this thing with drugging people to try to get Lestat killed. They're still not safe because not only are they in a fucking war, they’re vampires in a place that's super against vampires and actually believes that they exist. How do you find safety in that?

And then you get to Paris and she has an opportunity to finally kind of be more independent and she finds Madeleine and she joins the troupe. And she's still fucking stuck, like 50 years she has to wait to play a role in this theater, and then she's stuck playing a fucking baby. So she never gets a chance to be seen as an adult, except for by Madeline and then they die… And that's just fucking awful.

Ben 

In the source material, she is turned at the age of five.

Captain Hands 

Oh no. Fuck.

Ben 

So replay the whole show you've seen, but make her a five year old.

Captain Hands 

That's fucked up.

NiNi 

That is fucked up. Anne Rice is from Hell, y’all.

Ben 

Ahahaha!

Captain Hands

The thing that's really interesting with Claudia as a character is she's dying when we meet her and then she's turned immortal. But she's been dead this entire time. Like the second we start this show, she’s been dead this whole time and there's literally nothing that saved her. She's just been on a delay. Very Eternal Yesterday style, eventually she's just gonna haunt this narrative. It doesn't matter that she's upright and breathing right now, her time is very limited and there's nothing that Louis can do to stop Claudia from dying. 

I think that's what brings Louis and Lestat back together at the end. Armand does not care for Claudia. I think my favorite scene in the entire show so far is when Claudia dies and Lestat's reaction to watching his daughter turn to dust. Putting that in the context of Anne Rice losing a daughter at five of leukemia and then making a vampire book, which so heavily involves blood. And then having Claudia in the original, like, be five years old. I think a lot of it is just this exploration of grief on Anne Rice's part.

00:26:04 - IWTV: Queerness in the Story

Ben

I find the… queerness of the show in particular so compelling for me. Like, Louis is closeted on so many fronts. Even despite ostensibly being out now, you can still feel the psychological walls that he's having to tread around whenever he does anything.

Like even when he stresses “This is the vampire Armand, the love of my life,” you can feel the shaky uncertainty that comes with growing up queer and closeted. So painful. I don't know how Jacob found that. He’s good. Goddamn.

Captain Hands 

He's so fucking good.

NiNi 

One of the things that I do like about Louis and Armand is that they are presenting themselves as, you know, the “proper gays” the “proper vampires.” They do things the “proper” way.

They're not threatening, they're not scary, they're very civilized, you know?

Captain Hands 

Sure, they'll make eye contact while they drink the blood of a rat in front of you, but otherwise.

NiNi 

There's a certain type of queer person who is very much about not scaring the normies. And I feel like a lot of what Armand and Louis are trying to present to Molloy is that idea of not scaring the normies.

Even the fact that Louis is sharing this story with Molloy and he wants the story to be out there, he really wants to be seen as quote unquote, “as normal as everybody else,” which is a queer metaphor. The whole, “I am not a scary monster. I am a man of taste and refinement” kind of thing.

It hit me so hard. Even when you look at their surroundings, you know, like, what is the set design telling me about these people right now? And it's very high art, very austere, very severe, very refined, but so cold. It's like a mausoleum.

Captain Hands

Truly.

NiNi 

And you contrast that with the house that you shared with Lestat night and day chalk and cheese. It's like you met the new boo and you're just trying to cast away all the things about yourself that you were part of the old relationship, you're trying to make yourself into a new human being through your relationship with this new person. But it's not working because wherever you go, there you fucking are.

Ben 

See, but what's so interesting about this is Armand's inability to say no to Louis because for all of the rule-following that they do, making this interview and outing their entire existence is the biggest no-no. Why is Louis doing this? It's because he wants to die and he is creating conflict with other vampires because he wants to die. Also, he wants to see Lestat again.

This is how he accomplishes that.

Captain Hands 

The line that Louis has about being thankful that the last sunset he saw was marred by his brother jumping off a roof, so he's never felt the pain of missing a sunrise in like the hundred plus years that he's lived is just so heartbreaking.

NiNi 

We didn't even talk about his brother. Oh my god.

Captain Hands 

Yeah.

NiNi 

Listen people, psychic damage.

Ben

He loses his family so quickly. Like he ends up distanced from them within 10 or 20 years of becoming a vampire because it's obvious that there's something wrong with him. He also almost ate his nephew or his niece.

NiNi

He did try to hold on to his family for actually so long, but as you mentioned Ben, he was already sort of half in half out of them. His family's very religious, they know he's queer, but they turn the blind eye to it until they can't turn a blind eye to it anymore. Not only is he showing up with this man, it's this white man, it's this French white man, you know what I mean? 

There's so much that in the end they can't turn a blind eye to but he keeps trying to stay connected to them to hold on to his humanity and little by little it all slips away until he, like you said, tries to eat his niece and then he realizes that he can't hold on to it anymore he has to let it go, he has to let those relationships go.

Ben 

I'm also super invested in what's happening immediately in the present with Daniel. The fact that this is their second interview, that the first interview was broken up, that there are questions about what happened during the first interview; that Daniel is sick and they know it, but now they want to finish the interview. That he's having to navigate this incredibly dangerous scenario with two incredibly-powerful, deeply-unstable beings.

Like I'm never mad when we skip out of the past and Louis' ongoing self-righteous monologuing to focus on the present and Daniel.

NiNi 

[Laughing] Oh my god!

Sidebar. Louis' whole shtick is so insufferable. It just makes you want to stab him through the eye. Dude, get over your fucking self. Oh my god. Okay I had to get that out of my system. Go ahead.

Ben 

My favorite piece of behind the scenes content is when Armand is doing the whole, like, “Rashid” cosplay for the first season. We see Assad Zaman holding like a fucking iPad. He was legit playing games on that iPad [chuckling] because he was just chilling in a lot of these scenes.

NiNi

God. 

Captain Hands

A nice behind the scenes tip, Armand playing games in the first season, like, that puts a lot of distance between him and actually paying attention to anything that Louis' saying. 

Ben 

Exactly.

Captain Hands

I'm so sorry to the Tumblr user whose username I don't remember, but they did a really cool screenshot of like...

Ben

Gonna give me a research project.

Captain Hands 

Louis and Lestat sharing a coffin and then, like, Armand and Louis sharing a bed and how much distance is between Louis and Armand versus how close Lestat and Louis are. 

As you were saying, NiNi, the set design just really speaks to, like, the warmth and the closeness. I would not say that house is, like, maximalist but it's definitely more so than Armand and Louise penthouse.

Ben 

Armand will never say “Come to coffin.”

Captain Hands 

Exactly. In the middle of that you have the 80s with Armand and Louis' apartment with Molloy's first interview.

NiNi 

I did not really grok into the set design of that apartment.

Ben 

It wasn't really their apartment. It was more like a dump house.

NiNi 

Yeah, it doesn't feel germane to their lives. It doesn't feel like their home. It feels like a place where they were. 

Ben

It feels like the 80s. It's just the place where you go to shoot up.

Captain Hands 

Mm-hmm.

NiNi 

[laughs]

Ben 

I'm not even being funny. Like that's legit what that house was. It was a place for Louis to fuck boys and sometimes eat them.

Captain Hands 

Eat them and eat them.

Ben

[chuckles] Yes.

NiNi

I'm going to insert a rimshot sound effect right here. [Rimshot.]

Haha. Incredible.

NiNi

Sorry, I'm 12 tonight. 

Ben

These relationships just don't work, but in really interesting ways. Like, Louis will clearly never be happy with Armand, but he'll also never be settled with Lestat, despite his inability to get over him.

Okay, I gotta talk about Sam Reid now. [sighs] Sam Reid is my favorite performer in this whole series. No disrespect to Jacob Anderson. Jacob Anderson is an incredible, monster talent at accent and voice work. But he gets to basically play Louis straight. Louis is an incredibly tortured character and Jacob gets to lean into how fucked up and tortured the Louis character is. 

But what's so monstrous about Lestat isn't just the fact that he is selfish and cruel. It’s that he's a fucking clown about it. Like, Lestat is so French about his sense of humor. He behaves like he's a fucking mime half the time. I'm so compelled by Sam's performance as Lestat—especially hallucination Lestat. Sam knows exactly what he's doing because Lestat is an evil clown and he knows it. And Lestat knows it, which is even more fun.

NiNi

Lestat is very focused on seeming cavalier and brave le danger. He's the ultimate poser. Everything with him is, “Oh, it’s ironic.” He is the poster boy for the modern era honestly. I can't wait to see him be a rock star.

Captain Hands 

He’s gonna do great. 

NiNi

He's gonna do fantastic.

Captain Hands

Lestat deserves to be high on cocaine 24/7.

NiNi 

I mean, does cocaine even get vampires high? Question. Anyway, he's doing this whole act to hide the abandoned child within. It's very much a, “I don't really care. It's fine, I'm so cool. Just let me wear my leather jacket and smoke this cigarette. I am le tired. I think I will have sex with my sister.”

Ben's right, it's very French. And like, he's fucking crushing it, honestly. He's doing amazing, sweetie. Good job.

Captain Hands 

Yeah, you can tell he's having a lot of fun.

[Jazzy transition music]

00:36:19 - IWTV: Gay Paree

Captain Hands

I think it's interesting too that Louis and Claudia end up in Paris without Lestat. I would be interested to see their dynamic with Lestat, who is French, being in France.

Ben 

He never would have taken them.

NiNi 

He would have never taken them there, first of all. And second thing, I find it really compelling that Paris is where they went because they know that's where Lestat is from and they're looking for other vampires. Lestat warned them about other vampires and they went directly to his home looking for other vampires. It's almost like they were daring him.

I was like, “My God, really? Y'all are not even subtle about this.” They were both obsessed with him to the point that they had to go to the source. They found the source and the source was Hell and it got Claudia killed. 

Ben 

There's so much about Paris, the fact that Armand has always hated that he is constantly put in charge of other vampires. He despises it. Like he is wallowing when Lestat finds him. And Lestat's like, “I refuse to be gay and sad. Y'all can cut this ugly shit out right now, take a shower, put on some fucking colors and we can go do other shit.”

Armand was waiting for someone to blow that up for him. He's always waiting for someone else to take charge of the scenario he's in. We get this whole situation with the Paris coven where they were all just, like, morose assholes and Lestat's like “We can at least have fun with this, embrace the clown in you and join my theater.” And then he leaves that because he gets bored or whatever, he fucks off to do something else. 

They stumble into this later and we get Ben Daniel's fantastic Santiago, who is over Armand's bullshit and wants to take control. Has to get rid of Louis and Claudia as a result. Puts them on trial for violating vampire laws. The fact that they did that in front of a crowd of actual people.

Incredible cinema.

NiNi 

The whole Theatre de Vampire is wild. The fact that it exists, the fact of what they do like honestly Claudia looking at their show with her eyes like saucers? I got it because I couldn't believe that they were this bold but that sounds very much like what Lestat would have put them up to because as you said, Ben he is a fucking clown and he would have enjoyed rubbing people faces in something like that. Armand being in charge of this little fucking freak show is wilder because as you point out, he doesn't want to be. When Santiago makes the attempt to take over he was like “Fine you can have it, it's okay I will go back to not being in charge. I will be really happy with that.” But Santiago didn't believe him.

That's the problem. It's always the problem. Nobody will believe that he doesn't want to be in charge. So they keep fucking with him when he's just trying to give it up. He doesn't want to be in charge in his relationship with Louis either, but he has to be.

Captain Hands

He's the one person who shows up for the group project.

NiNi 

He hates that this is who he is, but he cannot stop himself.

Ben 

Like everyone in this story.

I really love when Daniel has pieced together enough that he's able to unlock for Louis the truth that Lestat saved him in that whole sham trial shit.

NiNi 

The fact that Armand was behind all of it.

Captain Hands 

Mm-hmm.

NiNi 

I mean let's talk about your reveals here. When I realized that, I realized how fucking unreliable a narrator everybody in the story is. Nobody is telling anybody else anything close to the truth over hundreds and hundreds of years and I am obsessed with it.

Just obsessed with these fucking crazy liars who are doing this because they are bored. You live for hundreds of years, you've run out of shit to do. So you start fucking with each other. Everybody is looking for something new and interesting to happen to perk up their little nipples and they can't get it!

Captain Hands

[Laughing]

NiNi 

[Laughing] It's so like... it's tragic, don't get me wrong, but it's also fucking ridiculous.

Captain Hands

It's a farce, which is perfect.

Going into Daniel's stuff, it's fun watching him just be so fucking over these vampires and their bullshit.

NiNi 

And then he becomes one.

Captain Hands 

He's throwing cunt around like nobody else. He's doing great. If there's anybody built to be a vampire, it is Daniel Molloy, and I will stand behind that.

Ben

[Cackles] Eric Bogosian has played gay before and he's like “I'm ready. I will do whatever they want me to do.”

Captain Hands

He's like, “Old man yaoi? Yes.”

Ben 

I'm so happy for him.

00:41:24 - IWTV: Final Thoughts and Ratings

Ben

So, before we get into hopes for season three, I want everybody to highlight their favorite tragic story from this series.

Start with you, NiNi. What's your favorite tragedy?

NiNi 

Fucking Claudia.

Ben

Which Claudia tragedy?

NiNi

[Laughs] I mean, can we just look at it as one never-ending until it ends tragedy?

Ben

That's the whole show, baby. Specify.

NiNi 

She's born, she suffers, she's undead. She's not just stuck in the body of a child as her brain gets older, she's stuck in puberty. Of all the periods of life to be stuck in. No wonder she feels she's going crazy at all times. She finally, finally, after so many years has made a bid for some level of autonomy and the minute she does that, everybody around her conspires to snatch it away.

And then she is put on a show trial for shit she didn't do and then killed. Like, fuck. It would have been kinder if they had let her die in the fire, honestly. 

Captain Hands

Oh, yeah.

NiNi

That's the real tragedy of it. The fact that Louis thought he was saving her, but he actually condemned her to Hell. Oooooh God, psychic fucking damage.

Ben 

Captain Hands, favorite tragedy in the show?

Captain Hands 

I'm gonna say Louis' brother. That is, I think, such a foundational part of how Louis approaches his vampirism. And I think that it's the starting point of the tragedy. I'm sure that he feels like he failed his brother. His brother is the first person to really pick up on and just straight up to his face say that he knows something's going on.

His brother was institutionalized by their father and the only reason that he is not locked up going even more insane is because their dad is not there and Louis has some level of control over the family now. And then to have his brother just walk off the roof is just such a horrible thing and it fundamentally changes the way that his family sees Louis.

NiNi 

How about you Ben. Why don't you depress us now?

Ben 

Oh I’ve been waiting, don’t you worry. My favorite tragedy in this is that despite essentially winning what every gay wants: Louis will be forever in his prime. He will be forever hot, forever wealthy, and immune to many other things that are gonna befall gays in the 100 years he's been alive.

He will never be happy and his existence comes at the expense of other gay people who are looking for connection.

NiNi 

I have taken more psychic damage. Thank you. Oh my God. 

Ben

[Evil chuckle]

Captain Hands 

I’m thinking about AIDS especially. Vampires deal entirely in blood but probably won't, almost certainly can't get AIDS or HIV.

Ben

I am really hoping that we look at the epidemic in the next season. One of the interesting things we got out of the time in war torn Europe was that the quality of blood was making the vampires sick as well.

NiNi 

Making them sick and making them crazy. Especially in Eastern Europe where they were at first. All the vampires that they did meet were weak and nuts. And not like nuts in a fancy way like Lestat.

Ben

I think a lot about that vampire who was turning people because she needed a coven, but they were all unwell.

Captain Hands

Is she the one that threw herself in the fire? 

NiNi 

Yep.

Ben

Mostly so she can fuck with Claudia.

Captain Hands

Because Claudia's not been fucked with enough.

Ben

Well since we know we're getting a season three and maybe four, what is everybody looking forward to?

NiNi

Like I said, I'm not really familiar with the source material, so I'm just looking forward to what other fresh hells they are going to unleash upon us. I'm particularly interested in what happens now that Louis and Armand have broken up. Now that everything is out in the open. Now that Molloy is a vampire. Now that it's clear that Lestat is coming back into the story in an active way.

I'm curious to see how all those threads get pulled together.

Captain Hands

I… am so excited for Daniel to throw his hat into the messy ring. We saw him when he was younger and he was partying. He was not a super put together person. But by the time you get to him when he's doing the interviews, he's very capable of just super hardcore judging everything and putting the pieces together.

And I just think vampirism turns people stupid. So I'm really excited to see him like slut it up, stir up the drama, get in fights with people. I just want him to have the best fucking life and I'm ready for him to go stupid, go crazy.

Ben 

Daniel was so annoyed that he made Armand break his rule.

NiNi

I need you to speak directly into the microphone, Benjamin.

Ban

I need Eric Bogotian and Assad Zaman to make out and fuck nasty on this show. Eric is ready—

Captain Hands

He's so ready.

Ben

—and Assad is ready. I need it to happen.

But from a plot perspective, I'm really excited about Lestat setting the record straight. Like Louis had his time. He's done his whole interview talking shit about me and our dead child. I'm excited to see what Lestat has to say in response to all that. 

NiNi

To see what happens after the hurricane.

Captain Hands 

There wasn't a script for that ending and we don't know, and I don't think anybody in the crew either know—like only Sam and Jacob know what Louis and Lestat said to each other in that moment and I think that's really fucking cool.

NiNi 

Okay, let's rate this bad boy. Captain Hands, what are you rating Interview with the Vampire?

Captain Hands 

I mean, it's a 10 for me. High caliber entertainment.

NiNi 

Benjamin?

Ben 

I think on my like scale of who should watch this, it's probably formally like a 9.5, because this is a deeply unpleasant show about so many really deeply unwell people. The show doesn't really ever pretend that it's not about that, and so I think for the conversation, I'll give it a 10.

NiNi 

On a scale of pure batshit it's a 10 baby, oh my god, literally I could not stop watching it.

Captain Hands

I think this show deserves a 10 just for the levitating gay sex scene.

NiNi 

I mean that was quality, but I think that Armand reveal bumps it up to an 11 for me honestly.

Ben 

Let's take a brief aside about the damn levitating gay sex.

NiNi

[laughing]

Ben

Like as a visual, the levitating gay sex is great Louis is finally connecting to this man in a real way and he's found something that's higher than the stuff that he's found before. But also, I gotta be honest with as much pearl clutching as there was around this show around how explicitly gay it was.

I was like, “This? This is what y'all got your titties all tied up about? I've watched The Novelist. I've seen Mood Indigo. This is what y'all got all pearl clutchy about? Whatever.”

NiNi

I've watched The Cornered Mouse Dreams Of Cheese, y'all ain't got nothing.

Ben 

We gotta remind people we're a BL podcast. [laughs]

NiNi 

Honestly the thing that gets me about this show and why I bumped it up to 11 is like Ben said these people are deeply unwell and they have literal eternity to fuck with each other. They have eternity to make up like crazy shit to do to each other and then do it just for their amusement. So I am very very excited to see what crazy shit they're gonna do next.

So if I give it an 11, and Captain Hands gives it a 10, and Ben gives it a 9, then it's a 10 from The Conversation.

Ben

It is a show that I think is one of those pieces of queer TV that you're gonna wanna have engaged with. I think it's gonna be formative for a lot of viewers.

NiNi

Anyway, we have been talking about Interview with the Vampire for an hour and a half, let's move on. 

Captain Hands

I'm amazed it only took an hour and a half, because we didn't talk about like half of the shit we could have talked about.

Ben 

I feel like if we had done, like, a season by season, it’d be a little bit easier to talk about.

NiNi

Yeah, that's the hard part about discussing these multi-season shows. But also, what's the use, really, in talking about the events in Interview? The events are what they are. What's really important is the absolute nutcase behaviour that these characters are exhibiting. That's what's really important.

Ben 

Before we go on, mega shout out to Ben Daniels for not getting his ass handed to him by Jacob Anderson, Sam Reed, and Assad Zaman. Holy shit, did he put on an incredible performance at Santiago.

NiNi 

Like whole-pussy-in kind of behavior, like, Ben Daniels delivered. He was having a whale of a time. His stomach is full of the scenery because he chewed it all up. It was an incredible performance. If you watch nothing else, go and find this first scene when Claudia and Louis go to the Theatre de Vampire and watch Ben Daniels do the monologue...like INSANE.

00:51:16 - Fellow Travelers

NiNi 

Now that we're done talking about the crazy vampires, let's talk about some insane toxic humans. 

Ben, let's talk about Fellow Travelers. Tell the people what Fellow Travelers is about.

Ben 

Fellow Travelers is based on a book written in, like, the early 2000s in which we followed two political operatives working in government in the McCarthy era. We followed them in their lives through to the 80s in the height of the AIDS crisis. That's the simple overview. 

We follow Hawkins Fuller, who goes by Hawk. He is a war hero who fought in Germany in World War II. He now works as a political operative for a powerful progressive senator, and is ultra-closeted and a total top. He becomes interested in a young man who is new to Washington. His name is Tim Laughlin. He is a Catholic struggling with his queerness, and is really into the conviction of Joseph McCarthy—that Joseph McCarthy. Anyway, Hawk fucks him enough that he gets over that.

We follow their troublesome relationship across about 30 years and we have to deal with Hawk, who is this ultra-American vision maintaining his closet for decades, and Tim's genuine inability to do that. And the fact that both of these guys love each other and really just cannot get over each other.

Hawkins Fuller is played by the incredible Matt Bomer, one of my favorite white gays.

If you are a homo who wants to see Matt Bomer cry for gay reasons, please go watch Papi Chulo and then message me on Tumblr. I'll be waiting for you all to find me. 

The beautiful heartthrob, Jonathan Bailey, is playing Tim Laughlin. 

Supporting the white gays of this, we have Jelani Alladin playing Marcus Gaines, who is a Black writer and also a total top and friend of Hawk's, a reporter in the era who is struggling with his pro-Black politics and the inherent masculinity of the era. He is in a relationship with Frankie Hines, played by Noah Ricketts, who is a drag queen of the era and is clearly Experiencing Gender. Hawk is also married to Senator Smith's daughter Lucy Smith, played by Allison Williams, who I really like in this role. 

I knew about this show for a long time, because I am a queer cinephile. It's hard not to know that Matt Bomer and Jonathan Bailey were fucking every episode on this show in 2023. And the white gays and white girl, what we would call BL fans, were losing their minds over it. But I wasn't in the mood at the time. I did not even know there were Black plot lines present in this story. Or that Stormé had a role in this.

Stormé DeLavere played a role in the Stonewall events. Did not expect them to pop up in this. I sat up immediately, “Hold on!” I did not know that there was any Black people in this show at all. It says a lot about the fandom, unfortunately. I did not know that there were meaningful Black storylines in this show until I started watching it. I woulda watched this a lot sooner if you had told me about Marcus and Frankie.

I also did not know that the show went all the way into the 80s. I thought it was going to be eight episodes of McCarthy era gays growling at each other and having unsafe sex the whole time. We start off in the 50s, we get into the complexities of McCarthy, the queer rumors around him, Roy Cohn, that motherfucker and all of his documented bullshit. And then we move into the 60s and the anti-war movement and the complexities of the 70s. Hawk is closeted and married. He has a son who is probably queer as well, who never feels connected to his dad.

I really love that we got to see 30 years of complex mess with these guys and that the show really cared about the interiority of that existence. 

NiNi, you are finally free of higher education for now, and I'm like, “Stop everything! Here's Jelani Alladin's back. I need you to watch the show immediately.”

NiNi 

Ben did what everybody does on Tumblr when they want you to watch something. They seduce you with gifs.

Ben 

I showed you Jelani Alladin's ample back and you watched the show. What's your experience watching this? ‘Cause you've watched a lot more of this era of TV from America than I have.

NiNi 

One of the tags that's going on this episode is prestige TV is gay now! So because of the era that the show starts in, of course it's drawing comparisons to golden era TV shows like Mad Men, especially with the character of Hawk because Hawk is the ultimate sort of Don Draper-y kind of character. It's obviously pulling connections from there. But as you get more into the story, it's just like, “oh, this is not that.” They use that to sort of suck you in, which I thought was really clever.

People don't want to think, I think, about the very real history that's shown here. They want to think of this time that the show starts in, at least, as some kind of a magical history where everything was better. So, putting this period in a gay story is just showing you that no, everything was actually shit. I mean, you've got a literal gay guy working for McCarthy in an era when McCarthy was hunting. And that's not an exaggeration. Hunting gay people. Hunting them, hounding them. People went to jail, people lost their jobs, people lost their livelihoods, some people lost their lives. That always gets swept under the rug when you're looking at TV that's depicting this era. So looking at this era from a queer lens is like, “no, no, the shit's always been like this. You were just insulated from it.”

And especially then as they start going through the eras, you get into 60s proper, you get into the 70s, you get a little bit of the 80s, and you see how the bullshit continued and continued and continued, even as it “got better.”

That was what stuck with me. Aside from the severely toxic relationship at the center of this.

Ben

Captain Hands.

Captain Hands 

I think I just kept coming back to Hawk being alone at the end of all of this and how tragic it is that Hawk and Tim only got a couple of moments with years in between. It made me really happy to see Marcus and Frankie living together and taking care of a kid because Marcus finally started to be more open in ways that Hawk was never really able to do. 

The thing I got out of this the most was the loneliness of the masculinity. How Hawk and Marcus were so scared of being seen as queer comparing that to Tim and especially Frankie, the characters that can't hide and can't pass or refuse to do so are so fucking brave and are living a life that is far more authentic to themselves.

Ben

I really like having them in the show for that comparison. I like that we got to use Marcus's passion for Black intellectualism to highlight the fact that McCarthy and them went after motherfucking Langston Hughes during their anti-gay, anti-communist sentiments. And if you don't know who the fuck Langston Hughes is, you better ask somebody.

I find myself thinking a lot about the fact that Hawk has no actual political motives. And that's what makes him such a useful political operative. The fact that Tim actually does have political goals is what makes him such a [chuckles] terrible political operative. 

The sequence in which they subject Hawk to the polygraph test. And he's like, “the fundamental of it is they want you to feel shame so they get to react to that. As long as I don't feel shame—

Captain Hands

Says the most ashamed man.

Ben 

—they can't catch me.” He is able in that moment to use his own personal righteousness to shield himself. That's so specific and I understand it completely. I am obsessed with that man. I also think a lot about Mary and Caroline and how, when they got into trouble, Hawk executed a plan instantly. And Tim was like, “Mary will never do that. They love each other.” You're about to learn something important about Mary. Caroline ends up being sent back to the Midwest to go marry a man and pop out babies. And then Mary becomes a Congresswoman and is out now.

I think about Marcus and how he wants to impress his dad. So he gets this job at the Washington Post, and he ends up super unhappy there because he knows he's not making a difference. His life doesn't work out for him the way he wanted either. Whatever he wanted to write about, he never reached the people he wanted. And I think an unspoken part of that is his inability to write authentically about himself is likely what holds back his writing fundamentally.

When their gay bar gets raided, they're trying to run out. Frankie wants to help Stormé because she falls. And she calls out to Marcus for help. And Marcus just turns around and walks away and pretends like he doesn't see anything. They have a racially charged moment at this restaurant that Frankie's performing at. They don't want to let this big Black ass into their restaurant. And they're like, “Absolutely not. We've got enough homos in here tonight.” They don’t say homos.

Frankie is like, they called both of us fags when we did this. And then when he writes about it, he doesn't write about Frankie or his connection to him; this is, I think, fundamentally the flaw in Marcus's writing.

NiNi 

The reason why he can never write something truly great is that he absolutely cannot be honest. He can't get to the heart of the matter because he can never let himself be. And there’s so many different reasons for that as the years go by. First it was his father. He was basically living his life for his father. It's all about making his father proud, which is why he leaves a Black publication where he was really doing some good to move to the Post and get shit on just so he could be the Black guy at the Post. Because that's what his father saw as progress. That's why he's drawn to Langston Hughes. His ideas of progress are not about being the one Black guy. His ideas of progress are community-based. 

But he subsumes those to society to his father's ideas to everything else. He is never truly honest with himself. Even coming down towards the end—this is after his father's died—he's openly living with Frankie, but he and Frankie are still fighting about this because he's still not being honest and still not being true to himself even as he lives with a man, even as he's raising a gay kid.

He's still hiding. He still can't show himself and that's why his writing can never rise to the level that he knows it could be at, which is why he never gets where he wants to go. It's actually quite tragic.

Captain Hands

Marcus and Hawk, I think for me, are the most tragic characters in this because of their complete inability to be vulnerable and take that risk.

01:04:44 - Fellow Travelers: Hurt People Hurt People

Ben 

It's also so sad in Hawk's case because he inflicts this upon his family. I feel bad for the Lucy character because she knows what's going on but the structures of her era put her in this awkward place where she sort of just has to go along with it. Hawk tells his dad on his dad's deathbed to go fuck himself. So Hawk doesn't have access to independent wealth. And part of why he ends up marrying Lucy Smith is to marry into the Senator's family.

Senator Smith is clearly based upon another senator during the McCarthy era. His son is arrested for soliciting sex from men, caught during a raid, and he's pressured to back off, and he ends up killing himself.

Hawk has this heroic view of Senator Smith in his mind and Senator Smith was super homophobic. His son was gay and he immediately killed himself. 

Captain Hands 

The irony of the last sentence he writes in his fucking statement being “fight for America” and then he just shoots himself and I'm like, “Dude, for real?”

Ben 

Hawk, a Known Gay, jerked off with the senator's son, put that man into conversion therapy and then he disappeared from the narrative.

NiNi 

My stomach hurts when I think about that. He did that to him, and he didn't feel no type of way about it either. He didn't feel conflicted, he didn't feel guilty, he felt literally no type of way about it.

Captain Hands 

The image right after that is Hawk standing in front of the car with this giant American flag flying above his head. 

Ben 

That's the second gay man that he's turned over into a situation where they're clearly gonna die.

NiNi 

Let's talk about Eddie. Poor, poor Eddie.

Ben 

We lost Eddie so fast, I'm so sad.

To be fair, Eddie was not smart and Eddie was going to cause big problems for him. But also we just spent an hour and a half talking about a vampire show where these guys get to live forever off of the corpses of the gay men they leave behind them. Yikes!

NiNi 

I was already taking psychic damage from this episode and that just made it worse.

Ben

Hehehehehe

Captain Hands 

I have a lot of thoughts about Roy Cohn because he's gay and he is a huge part of this manhunt for all these queer people in government. He is ruining people's lives with no remorse.

NiNi 

Even as he secures special treatment for his own boy toy.

Ben 

Those events are real too, like Roy Cohn died very not long ago.

Captain Hands 

But nobody sells Cohn out. It is wild to me that Cohn's going on this witch hunt and so many people in Washington know this man is gay and they don't out him.

I don't know how I feel about that.

NiNi 

It’s more grotesque for the fact that it was true. Like this is a semi-dramatized tale but all the stuff about Cohn is 100% true [laughs]. That shit that actually happened and that's the part I just can't even stomach. I'm watching that interview with Cohn in the 80s where he still, after all this time, he still refuses. He's like, “Look at me, how could I be homosexual? I'm a man.” It's really interesting that the period that the show ends in is the Regan era.

Captain Hands

I think it's just a good demonstration of how this is continuously repeating. So it's McCarthy, it's Reagan, it's Trump now. It's not like this is new. It just never ends. Something I really enjoyed about the exploration of the McCarthy era investigations into whether or not people were gay. So many things were absolutely ridiculous. Like, “Can you walk for me?” They raided underwear drawers. This is ridiculous. What is that telling you? This is such a stupid thing. And it got people—like people killed themselves.

It just is like such a good insight into these, ways in which authoritarianism, fascism, all of this stuff is so fucking ridiculous.

Ben 

Let’s talk about how Hawk failed his son.

He is not close to his son because his son knows that his dad is a motherfucking liar and never feels really secure in that relationship. He meets Tim and the two of them bond. And Tim's like, “You have a very smart son. He's a little sensitive.” We know what that means.

Captain Hands

He wants to be a poet. We know what that means.

Ben 

Hawk is never able to reach his own son properly and they lose his son to drugs. And this is what finally breaks Hawk to the point that he finally reaches out to Tim for help, and Tim talks to Lucy about it. I really like that Lucy knows about Tim and spends her entire marriage with Hawk resenting him. I get that in her mind if she beats Tim, she'll win Hawk, but that's not what's going on here. At the end of Tim's life, she finally understands this. 

And I love the way Tim, who is a fairly empathetic individual, will not give ground to her. Like he calls her Mrs. Fuller the whole time to make the point of, “However you feel you had him.” She's like, “no, I didn't.” And he's like, “fuck you.” I loved that final conversation between.

NiNi 

I love that it ends with both of them realizing what they already knew.

Ben 

That Hawk hurt both of them.

NiNi

Hawk is a fucking bastard. Both of them are just like, “yeah, it's not your fault, it's his fault.” They come to a rapprochement at the end. And then Lucy Smith leaves Hawk.

Captain Hands 

Good for her.

Ben

Happy for her.

Captain Hands 

I have so many feelings about Jackson as a character, and the aftermath of Jackson's death. Because I have a harm reduction background, I'm always very grateful when shows don't demonize drug users. Jackson dying because of a heroin overdose is straight up a tragedy and there is nothing about the way that he died that is played as anything but that. I was really appreciative of, like, the card that Tim sent and the positive things he said about Jackson in that card. Lucy acknowledging how difficult it is for her to get out of bed, Hawk utilizing drugs to try to, like, avoid having to feel anything about his son, and the breakdown that he has on Fire Island when he sees the picture that his plug pulled out of his drawer.

Ben 

Okay, he has a name. His name is Craig.

Captain Hands

The picture that Craig [chuckles] pulls out of his drawer.

NiNi 

The whole sequence on Fire Island is just devastating. I completely understand why after that, Tim never wanted to see him again. It was just such a violation.

Captain Hands 

I think they portrayed Tim's now background with the social work super well. Hawk being like, “I'm going to put your name on the deed.” And Tim going, “Are you going to kill yourself?” Because that's the way you handled that kind of conversation. He's looking at Hawk giving away these massive things, trying to offload his private space on Fire Island, the place where he can be arguably the most himself trying to pass it on to Tim.

We know partially so that his name's not on the deed, but Tim is looking at the amount of drugs that Hawk is doing and the reckless behavior that he's exhibiting and the ways in which he is starting to give away items. To see those warning signs and do what you're trained to do.

Ben 

I think refusing to take the offer was the best thing he could have done for Hawk in that moment.

01:13:22 - Fellow Travelers: The Saga of Hawk and Tim

Ben 

NiNi, you're the sex in story girl. We had a total top going verse for Tim.

NiNi 

On the day of McCarthy's funeral—

Ben 

On the day of McCarthy's funeral.

NiNi 

Poetic. When I saw that he decided to bottom for Tim that time I was just like, “Oh, they're not coming out of this one. This is the end of it for them. This is his quote-unquote final gift.” This is the end of their relationship as far as he's concerned. And we also know from the whole thing with Mary and Caroline how he was gonna do it. So when I saw it happen, I was like, “we're at the end,” and then Fire Island.

Ben 

It’s the cabin first and then Fire Island.

Captain Hands 

Yeah, hiding from the law.

NiNi

And then he goes to jail anyway.

Captain Hands 

The other time that he has a fight with Hawk, he joins the fucking army. Like this man has to get himself as far away from Hawk as possible because he has no ability to control himself. The first time he goes into the goddamn trenches and the second time he goes behind bars!

Ben 

“Promise you won't write.” What a line.

NiNi 

It's not just that he gets as far away from Hawk as possible, he also gets into dangerous situations. It feels like an ideation honestly. It feels like he's telling himself, “If I can't have you then it's the end for me.” Because I mean the army and jail at those specific times, those are highly dangerous situations for a queer man. There was no guarantee that he was gonna come out of either of those things alive.

Captain Hands 

That feels like a Catholic guilt thing for him.

Ben 

It sure is! I know my people people when I see them. But I also understand the obsession, there's this intense loyalty that I think he feels for Hawk. And I get why, like Hawk's a war hero. He led men into battle. He has a magnetism about him that you feel drawn to. 

Captain Hands 

Something that has continuously played in my head since I finished the show is how many times the line, “I'm bulletproof” or “you’re bulletproof” was uttered either from Hawk or towards Hawk. And he has a literal fucking bullet wound, well shrapnel wound. He's not untouchable. He just hides it very well

Ben 

I'm so glad that at the very end, Tim got to use Hawk to advance his political goals. It feels like the right ending for them. And I like that Tim gave Hawk a kind exit.

NiNi 

Was it really though? I don't know. 

Ben

I think it was. I think it's as kind as you're gonna be.

NiNi

Yeah, it was kinder than it needed to be, that is true. But also one of the first things you see in the show is the older Hawk at this party where he's celebrating his appointment to ambassador.

Then you go back and realize literally how long this has been a dream of his and how everything that he did was because he was fixated on this idea that one day he would be free. 

Ben 

Mm-hmm.

NiNi

Not realizing that he had the opportunity to be free the entire time. 

Ben

And that's the whole point about Frankie and Tim having sustainable lives in California. Hawk could have had that too.

NiNi 

Exactly, but he has this dream of moving to Italy and being an ambassador and doing the dream in this specific way. And he couldn't bend from that to the point that it destroyed basically his only chances at happiness. And now he comes to the end. He's finally gotten this thing that he spent 30 years grasping at. And what does he do? 

He finally realizes somewhere in him that it's not gonna do fuck all for him and he runs off to take care of his dying ex.

Ben 

I did enjoy, in the taking care of Tim portion, that Hawk had done enough reading about transmission that he wasn't panicked.

Captain Hands 

That made me super excited, from the medical point. Him being pretty chill about coming into contact with Tim’s blood. I was so fucking happy that that happened.

NiNi

We haven't really talked about the sheer toxicity of this relationship between Tim and Hawk. Like, we've touched around the edges of it. But, don't be mistaken, this man spent 30 years being gaslit by Hawk. [laughs] 30 whole years.

Ben 

—He knew it the whole time—

NiNi 

—being gaslit and manipulated and he knew it the entire time and he still, until the end, could not really walk away. Diabolical.

Ben 

See, I don't know that I would call it diabolical because Tim expected all of this the whole time. Like it hurts that it happens anyway. But Hawk consistently showed him that despite how clear it was that he was important to Hawk, Hawk's image was the most important thing to him. He was explicit about it. That's what makes it so inherently tragic. Tim knows it intellectually the whole time, but he can't help but be drawn to him anyway.

Captain Hands

I’m trying to decide if Tim is a “I can fix him” guy or if he’s just so caught up in this illusion that he just buries his head in the sand. 

Ben 

No, Tim is a “he’ll change for me” type. 

NiNi

I don’t know that I agree with that. I think Tim knows that Hawk isn’t going to change as much as he maybe hopes that he will. And part of him likes that Hawk is not going to change. Like he might be miserable but at least he knows what he’s getting. He knows he can’t fix whatever is wrong with Hawk. He knows that much. But he also is willingly gaslit the entire time. He knows that Hawk is never going to be what he wants him to be. Anything he tells himself about Hawk changing, he knows is a lie. He's lying to himself and he knows that he's lying to himself. It's what he has to tell himself.

Ben 

It's important to note that Tim walks away from Hawk each time. Like until the very last time Tim is the one doing the walking away.

NiNi 

But he's also always the one who comes back.

Ben

But Hawk's also the one reaching out to him each time.

NiNi

They're in this twisted sort of codependent crazy relationship where Tim walks away, he swears he's done, Hawk doesn't even really reach out; he just appears on the periphery somehow of Tim's life and Tim comes running back and Hawk is very specific about how he appears around the periphery.

Like somebody tells him that Tim's in trouble and he drops everything and tries to fix it behind the scenes, but in such a way that it's clear that he's the one who's fixing it, so that Tim is forced to come back… and Tim doesn't fight going back either. He goes back and he remembers why he left in the first place, but then it's years later.

I mean those periods get shorter and shorter every time. But he's mesmerized by Hawk and he can't let it go. And he will lie to himself in order to not let it go.

01:21:20 - Fellow Travelers: Final Thoughts and Ratings

NiNi 

Final thoughts on Fellow Travelers.

Ben

I cried so hard when they put Tim on the AIDS quilt. That hurt me. I was down for forty minutes. 

Captain Hands 

Yeah, that was fucking rough. 

Ben

I feel like the Harvey Milk stuff was a little forced.

NiNi 

Yeah, I don't think that it really fit with the narrative that they were telling. Like I understand that they wanted to get Marcus to the point where he would finally put his body in the fight, and he literally did that by shielding Jerome literally with his body from the police batons, but they forced that a little bit.

Ben 

You cannot write a character like Marcus, who has very valid reasons for distrusting the role of white people in the movement, and just trying to force it out at this point. It just did not feel right to me.

Like I understand that a big part of the show is putting things in the historical context and I understand that Harvey Milk was also an incredibly charismatic person. I understand how a bunch of people active in the era would feel kinship with him because apparently he had that kind of electric quality. But I just really did not really enjoy the tacked on feeling of Frankie's like, “I really like Harvey and now he's dead.”

NiNi 

I feel like because they put these people in the direct orbit of figures like Cohn, McCarthy, and Stormé, that they also wanted to put them in the direct orbit of Milk, which is why they made Frankie know him personally. It doesn't feel natural in the way that the other parts of this felt natural.

Ben 

Especially because Tim is away with Hawk during these events.

Captain Hands 

From my perspective as somebody who was not around for any of this, like I knew Harvey Milk was assassinated. I don't know about the fucking Twinkie- I think some of it was like also to root in history for viewers who are not necessarily as aware of the history. 

I learned so much about the McCarthy area and so much about the 80s so I can see the Harvey Milk assassination being put in there just as a way to tell you how much time has passed between the last time we were in the 80s and the next time we're in the 80s. It does feel very underdeveloped if they're trying to have Frankie grieve somebody he said was a friend we, like, don't ever see him interact with Milk.

NiNi 

Yeah, I just felt like if they were gonna do that, either they should have cast Milk and brought him into the story, or they should have left it as sort of a background event that the characters are reacting to, not so personally, but more as a societal thing.

Ben 

I respect the impulse, but I'm flagging it as a little weird and a little forced.

Captain Hands?

Captain Hands 

I really loved this show. I think the performances were phenomenal. I really loved the way that they were able to show how lonely Hawk was because he was so scared. And I really am super appreciative of them having a character like Frankie in there constantly pushing Marcus in ways that I don't think Tim ever really did for Hawk. I like the parallels.

Ben

My final thoughts on Fellow Travelers are, I'm very glad that Matt Bomer and Jonathan Bailey put so much ass out there that they introduced a whole generation of people to the concept of queer elders and the idea that queer political history, at least in the United States of America, goes back far further than Gaga releasing Born This Way.

NiNi 

Sir, you didn't have to go there.

Ben 

No shade to Gaga.

NiNi 

You did not have to go there.

Ben

I also want to thank Jelani Alladin and Noah Ricketts for the work they did as Marcus and Frankie. I'm so glad that this show became a vehicle to say things that we've been saying that femmes have always been the stronger ones. I am also really glad that Marcus's arc ends with him questioning whether or not he can be a good enough father to Jerome.

Captain Hands 

I cried so hard at the “you are innocent” scene.

NiNi

Ooh, chills.

Captain Hands 

I also love that the last time we really see Marcus, he's handcuffing himself on stage and he's fully joining into queer protest. Hawk's never going to do that. The biggest thing Hawk has ever done and probably will ever do is tell his daughter that Tim is the man that he loved and she fucking knows that.

Ben 

She does, but I think it's important for him.

NiNi

It's important not just for her to hear it from him, but for him to say it to her. I like to think that after we leave him in the story, things get better for him because now he's able to be honest.

Ben 

He's an old gay now. He's got work to do.

NiNi 

Marcus and Frankie are still in the story, so maybe they pull him into it.

I do have to shout out Matt Boomer and Jonathan Bailey because both of these men are openly gay they made their bones playing the straight romantic hero and then they're like, “we are gonna do this really gay fucking show because it's important to us. Y'all need to understand that we play straight boys, but we are not straight boys. Y'all need to understand who we are. “And then they went and put their whole pussy in. My final thoughts are honestly thank you for this story. It's a great story.

Ben 

Ratings!

NiNi 

I am going to give it a 9 because the Milk thing really did land funky and also while I am mostly satisfied with where Marcus and Frankie end up, I would have liked to see more closure to their side of the story.

Captain Hands 

I think I'm similarly at like a 9. It was phenomenally performed and also it was very clear to me that there were gaps in the writing where they kind of just set whole characters aside for a while. Like I don't think Marcus and Frankie were as fleshed out as they could have been. Mary disappeared straight up for like three episodes. I was like, “did we forget about Mary?”

Ben 

There wasn't much to say...

Captain Hands 

Which sucks, lesbians are so important…anyway, it’s a 9.

Ben

It's a 9 for me. I understand why Tim and Hawk are drawn to each other, but Hawk hurts Tim so consistently and I don't really think Tim got enough out of being with Hawk to warrant the 30 years of obsession. 

NiNi

Okay, so three nines, that's gonna be in 9 from The Conversation for Fellow Travelers.

01:28:38 - Outro: More Toxic Tales Please!

NiNi

There are some definite parallels between these two tales. Long-term relationships are hell anyway. They're worse when you are with a pathological lunatic. That's one. Two, people who live in guilt for whatever reason are never going to be truly happy until they release that guilt. That is where Tim landed for me and that is what I hope that Louis gets.

Ben 

What we can take away from this is that: one, there's a lot of room in queer storytelling for more than just saccharin “he was a boy, he was a boy.” Also, BL does not have to just be a young man's game, because Matt Bomer was 45 filming this.

NiNi

That ass is 22 at best. [Laughs]

Ben 

Let me not get too lost into that. There is so much room in our genre for complex stories about long-term companionship, the struggles they're in, and also separation. These are two shows about guys who really genuinely just didn't work. And I think it's intriguing to reflect on the lives of queer people and what those lives cost them; what it takes to make things work or not work. It's compelling sometimes to look at relationships that are failing and reflect on the kind of partner you might want to be.

I'm so glad that we got really interesting stories about separation and not being able to be there for your partner. Because if you're watching this and you're sad about the way Marcus could never be the type of writer he wanted to be and be with Frankie or how Hawk could never be with Tim or how Louis and Lestat despite loving each other more than anything in the world consistently ruin each other.

You have the opportunity in your own relationships to not be these guys, and I think that's beautiful.

Captain Hands 

I think both of these shows are really great examples of complex queerness, both in the ways in which people approach and engage in their own queerness and just in the way that queer people are portrayed. And that is something that is really important to me because I feel like we are still in a point where we want to try to tie everything off in a pretty little bow. I think there's some fear around adding flaws into queer stories. And I think that both of these shows are evidence that you can make complex, toxic characters who are queer.

NiNi

That is going to wrap us up on what are we gonna call this? I'm gonna call it American Toxic Yaoi. Say bye to the people, Captain Hands

Captain Hands 

Bye! Thanks for listening to me.

NiNi

Say bye to the people, Ben.

Ben 

Peace!

[the-conversation-pod]

Scent of a Woman: Fragrance You Inherit and Fragrance of the First Flower

AND WE'RE BACK

NiNi and Ben finally got back into the booth with @twig-tea to discuss two of our favorite GL or lesbian projects in the past year. Join us as we unpack the difficulties of coming out later in life. Stick around for Twig gushing about beautiful women.

Scent Of A Woman by @Ben and NiNi

FINALLY SOME GOOD GL. Ben, NiNi and Twig talk Fragrance You Inherit and Fragrance of the First Flower. Episode transcript available here.

Scent Of A Woman

Podcast Episode · The Conversation · 08/21/2025 · 1h 1m

Scent Of A Woman - The Conversation | iHeart

<p>FINALLY SOME GOOD GL. Ben, NiNi and Twig talk <em>Fragrance You Inherit</em> and <em>Fragrance of the First Flower</em>.</p><p>Episode tr

Timestamps

The timestamps will now correspond with chapters on Spotify for easier navigation.

00:00 - Welcome 00:55 - Introduction 03:16 - Fragrance You Inherit 08:34 - Fragrance You Inherit: All About the Relationships 17:46 - Fragrance You Inherit: Sakura's Coming Out 21:50 - Fragrance You Inherit: On-chan 24:21 - Fragrance You Inherit: Final Thoughts and Ratings 29:08 - Fragrance of the First Flower 37:14 - Fragrance of the First Flower: A Friend and a Foe 45:22 - Fragrance of the First Flower: Life Life-ing Is Good Drama! 52:49 - Fragrance of the First Flower: Final Thoughts and Ratings 57:04 - Outro: Lesbians!

The Conversation Transcripts!

Thanks to the continued efforts of @lurkingshan as an editor and proofreader, we are able to bring you transcripts of the episodes.

Please send our volunteers your thanks!

00:00:00 - Welcome

NiNi

Welcome to The Conversation, the Queer Media And Brown Liquor Podcast.

Ben

I'm Ben, the media critic.

NiNi

I’m NiNi, the VIIBs queen.

Ben

And we are your drunk Caribbean uncle and auntie who are sitting on the porch in the rocking chairs.

NiNi

We’re here to talk queer film and dramas, with a special focus on Asian QL.

Ben

So if you like to dive deep into queer stories…

NiNi

If you like cracked out takes on art and commerce in queer media…

Ben

If you just enjoy simping for attractive people…

NiNi

We believe in simping!

Ben

Tune in!

00:55 Introduction

Ben 

And we're back. Tonight, we're talking about lesbians. It's time. It's gone too long. And thankfully, Japan and Taiwan offered us up something worth discussing. Tonight, we're talking about Fragrance You Inherit, and we're also talking about Fragrance of the First Flower.

Because we're gonna be discussing lesbians at length, we've brought our most powerful lesbian with us. Twig, say hello.

NiNi 

It's really truly accurate. [laughs]

Ben 

Everyone I know thinks I'm insane for having watched 300 BLs. Twig has watched over 600. She is the most powerful lesbian we know.

Twig 

I think we're at over 700 now.

Ben 

700 QLs from @twig-tea. Yeah, okay.

NiNi

She is our oracle.

Ben 

Before we start talking about the shows directly, Twig, since you have your spreadsheet in front of you, what's the ratio at this point of GL to BL?

NiNi 

How do you know she has her spreadsheet open in front of her?

Ben

She definitely has it in front of her, don't worry.

Twig 

I always have it open in front of me. [laughs]. I think about a hundred of the entries are GL now, so we're up to like a seventh, which is actually pretty impressive.

Ben 

One-to-six is the ratio. Oh my God.

Twig 

Listen, that is significant improvement over just a year ago.

Ben

I know, I was gonna say, like a year ago, I think it was one to 11. [laughs]

Twig 

[laughs] Yeah.

NiNi 

Hot damn! So yeah, we have finally started getting more GL. And we have been disappointed recently, but not by these two.

Twig 

Yeah, I think one of the things about GL fans is we were all hoping that we would skip the stage where a lot of crap was put out. [laughs]

Ben 

Instead we're speedrunning it.

NiNi 

[sings] That's just the way it is. 

[speaking] Oh my god. Not me singing. It's been a minute, folks, and we are on the edge of Pride Month, so I am deep in my feels. I've finally graduated, I'm free, and I'm having a mental breakdown. But it's all good in the hood. Don't mind me.

Ben 

She says as she's stumbling back into the booth, “Please record today!” [laughs] Okay.

NiNi

Like, I just need to get my head back on straight and talking to my friends is the best way to get my head back on straight.

03:16 -  Fragrance You Inherit

Ben 

Well on that note, let's head into Fragrance You Inherit.

NiNi 

This won one of our Standout Queer Narratives of the Year in the VIIB Awards for 2024. And we did say that we were gonna talk about it in more detail. So let's get into it. 

Ben, what is Fragrance You Inherit about?

Ben 

About how the child of your biggest love showing up at your house does not have to be the end of your entire world. In Fragrance You Inherit, our lead Sakura attends the wedding of her closest girl friend in college and is distraught that the woman she loves is marrying some guy.

NiNi 

Literally some dude as far as she's concerned.

Ben 

In her despair, she has an anonymous hookup with a man at a bar. This hookup leads to the birth of her son, Toki. She goes on to become a fairly excellent single mother. She and her son have a very communicative, supportive relationship, but she's never told him this important thing about herself.

One day he tells her while they're hanging out in the evening that he got a girlfriend and he wants her to meet her. So he brings over his girlfriend, Kanae, and Kanae is the spitting image of Mone, Sakura's friend. She learns that Kanae is indeed Mone's child and… kinda has a bit of a freak out over it internally. The kids want their moms to get along. And so she meets her friend for the first time in almost 15 years and is gonna spend the show working through her complex lingering feelings for Mone that she never got over while trying to deal with her son's growing uncertainty about things his mom isn't telling him. Other complications ensue.

NiNi 

Where do we even start with this magnificent piece of magnificence?

Ben 

Twig, you and I watched the show and were basically like sunbathing in it after each episode. Why don't you tell the people how it felt to watch this show?

Twig 

I keep using the word kind for this show and it's really the one that fits the best. It's gentle with its characters and it's gentle with the audience. It doesn't traumatize the audience when it could have. [laughs] Any of the drama that happens is relatively quickly handled and not overwrought. And that makes it sound boring but it's not boring at all, it's just really lovely. It's like taking a warm bath, you just get to hang out with these people who are just trying their best and not always perfect but really gentle and honest and interested in each other's well-being. And you get to see them grow together and you see their relationships build and it was just such a lovely show.

NiNi 

Lovely is a great way to describe it. I felt like you said, Twig, like they're all invested. Everybody had gone on to build a really happy life, and when Mone and Sakura re-entered each other's lives, they wanted those happy lives to continue, not just for themselves, but for each other as well. And so they navigate the fact that they had these incredibly strong feelings for each other and, in Sakura's case and maybe in Mone's case as well, still do. It could have gotten ugly, and it wasn't about any of that. It was this really gentle, really, like you said, kind way of dealing with these lingering feelings.

Twig 

Yeah, the choices that everyone makes in the show aren't necessarily perfect choices, but they're choices that they all own for being the choices that were right for them and that they're content with where they ended up because of it, which is such a rare thing to depict in shows. So many times the conflict of the show was about how the choices that people made were the wrong ones and they have to realize that. Whereas in this show, it's more about just having closure.

Ben 

The shows that I find that I enjoy the most are ones where the characters have a very strong internal motivation. What works so well about Fragrance You Inherit is every single character at every moment is trying to do the most decent thing they can with all the things they're trying to juggle. You might've expected this to be about Sakura and Mone throwing away their family lives and other relationships to pursue this long lost lesbian love between them that they never consummated properly. And it's not, it's about both of them recognizing that there was a thing there between them that they maybe could have done something with. They're, like Twig said, content with where they are in their lives now. And they're able to move past that. 

Jumping ahead, I really like that we end on Sakura properly completing her confession to Mone at their kids' wedding to each other. Like now that we've completed this very important familial ceremony, I will put this to bed finally.

08:34 - Fragrance You Inherit: All About the Relationships

Ben

Takeda Kouhei is in this show!

NiNi 

Yes, Takeda Kouhei is in the show playing Ryosuke, who is Sakura's best friend and listen, truly one of the great performances. I love Ryosuke so much and what he is for both Sakura and for Toki. 

Ben

On-chan!

NiNi

On-chan. He's a safe place for Toki when Toki is struggling. And he does it in a way that's not cloying. Like when Toki shows up at his house, he's like, “What are you doing here?” [laughs] But he's also incredibly kind to him, and sort of helps him navigate without spilling something that Sakura wants to tell Toki herself.

Twig 

One of the things that I really loved about this show was that, like Ben said, the characters were really driving the story. The web of interrelationships between all of the characters was important and the show treated them as important. The core of the narrative is about the lost or never quite got off the ground relationship between Sakura and Mone. That's what connects everybody together. The relationship between Sakura and Toki, that mother-son relationship is also a really huge part of the story. Toki and Kanae, Toki's relationship with Kanae as a first love, we get some of that. We get Toki wrestling with what his relationship with Sakura and what his history means for their relationship. And also what Sakura and Mone's relationship means for his relationship with Kanae. We get Kanae and Mone, the mother-daughter relationship, and Hirohiko, the father, we get his relationship with Kanae as well. Then On-chan, the friendship relationship with him and Sakura and the sort of mentorship relationship between him and Toki. Like literally everybody is interconnected. There's story with all of them.

Ben 

We get the initial setup of Sakura and her son seem to get along really well. Clearly she gay, but she ain't told him. All right, she probably gonna need to tell him at some point. Toki brings Kanae over and Sakura was running around the house trying to get ready because she wants to put on a good impression for her son's first big girlfriend that he wants to bring home. Incredibly endearing. Sakura has to sort of emotionally muscle through meeting the daughter of her first love who's also wearing the damn perfume that she gave her 15 years ago—this show came to torment lesbians in particular. [Twig laughs] And then the kids are like, well, we want our moms to meet. So she ends up hanging out with Mone and she's trying to do the right thing. Like, she's clearly nervous about meeting her again, but resolves after seeing her that she is ready to be a mom friend to her.

In any other show, we might've expected the husband to be secretly shitty. But like when we finally meet Hoshii Hirohiko, he's just a dork dad who loves his wife and his daughter. And they clearly love and respect him too. She tells him she's got a boyfriend and then she goes to sit on the couch and he's sitting behind the couch peeking over it like it's a fence or something like, “Wait, who is this boy? Tell me about him.”

NiNi 

It was very sweet.

Ben 

It's just so endearing.

Twig (11:51)

I mean, he gets a moment with Toki, too. 

Ben 

Where he's like, “Yeah, of course this boy is actually good. Goddamn it, I raised my daughter well.”

Twig 

Yeah. And then of course we get the incredibly important moment where Sakura realizes that she and Toki have the same taste in women. Very critical for a lesbian mom.

NiNi 

That was very cute, like she said the thing and I was like, does Toki already know? And then as the show goes on you realize no, he doesn't know but if she makes comments like this all the time that's why maybe he feels like there's things that he's not being told.

Ben 

The runner that's holding all of the major plot developments together is Toki wants to understand his mom. He recognizes fairly early that something about Kanae triggered something in his mom. He ends up investigating through, like, old yearbooks and old photos to realize that Sakura and Mone were friends 15 years ago. He's always been bothered that his mom doesn't have any friends other than On-chan.

And it's interesting watching Toki grapple with the loneliness that he's worried about for his mom. The fact that his mom doesn't really know who his dad is and has never lied to him about that plays into some of this and his own struggles with wanting to understand his mom. It was interesting with On-chan's role across the whole show because he was accidentally a problem for them. Fifteen years ago. 

Like, Mone liked that she was Sakura's, basically, only friend, met On-chan, totally misunderstood, and thought that Sakura and On-chan were dating—On-chan is asexual and aromantic—completely misunderstands this and ends up committing harder to Hoshii as a result. This continues to plague me. I feel so much about the fact that Mone was maybe interested in Sakura, but the way she commits to Hirohiko at the first sign of any sort of uncertainty tells us that it's probably for the best that they didn't go forth with this. ‘Cause there's a part of me that doesn't believe that Mone was gonna be able to handle being in a full-time relationship with a woman.

Twig 

Yeah, totally agree with that. I think that that's one of the really interesting things we see her grapple with in the present. She feels guilty about the way her friendship with Sakura ended. Sakura and Mone both sort of have in their head that they were the ones responsible for the ending of their friendship. They both have to come to terms with the part that they're responsible for separately and then together agree to both forgive each other where they're really forgiving themselves because neither of them were actually mad at the other one. 

NiNi 

I think there's, what it felt like to me was that Mone was maybe thinking that she had feelings for Sakura but then thinking that Sakura was with On-chan. In a way buried it on purpose like, “oh I shouldn't have these feelings.” And Sakura was kind of feeling the same way because it was this weird feedback loop. It was just like, “Oh, I shouldn't like this girl.” And Mone just double committed, as Ben said, to Hoshii in a way that felt very like, okay, I'm going to bury this piece of me because it seems to have messed up my friendship with Sakura.

And Sakura kind of went similarly about it, except that maybe Sakura had more of a sense of who she was. Part of the story in the present is Mone figuring out this thing about herself, that she thought that to feel the way that she did wasn't correct for her. And then realizing that no, actually, there is this part of her that did love Sakura and does love women. And she maybe doesn't need to explore this part of her life because she's happy. But now that she knows this thing about herself, she feels more at ease, it almost feels like.

Twig 

Yeah, she definitely wasn't ready as a teenager to grapple with any of that. She seemed relieved to bury it, whereas Sakura seemed to be more burdened by burying it.

NiNi 

I guess that's the difference between knowing and not knowing because I feel like Sakura knew whereas Mone maybe didn't really know.

Ben

I think one of the useful things to talk about there is less about the knowing and more about the role that confessing plays in people's lives. One of the most important things for your experience as a teenager is romantic rejection. And this is probably the thing that emotionally stunts queer people the most, because the tension and danger around confessing makes queer people sort of reject themselves preemptively. So they're never forced to deal with the other person saying no to you and then having to sort your relationship out after that. That's what makes me so sad about this particular story. Sakura doesn't really get over Mone for like 20 years. At that point, is she ready to face the lesbian dating pool in the Japanese equivalent of Tinder? Oh my God.

NiNi 

This is the question that I have based on the ending because when I watched it I sort of got the feeling not that they were saying no but that they were saying maybe sometime in the future. I wasn't exactly sure at the end of it what the story was trying to say precisely.

Twig 

I think It was definitely more about Sakura moving on than Sakura and Mone having a second chance. The way that we ended with the not yet, I did struggle with it a little bit. I think it's okay that it's not pat, that she wasn't quite ready, but I wanted to be able to see her fully move on and we didn't get to fully see that. But I felt it was still a satisfying ending for me.

NiNi 

Oh yeah, it was a satisfying ending. I was just a little unsure about where the ending wanted me to land, but that didn't make it any less satisfying to me.

17:46 - Fragrance You Inherit: Sakura's Coming Out

While Sakura's moving on was part of the ending, the other part of the ending was the release of this tension between Sakura and Toki. There's been this tension as Toki tries to figure out who his mom is, and that sort of affected his relationship with Kanae as well. There's this great scene that he has with Kanae where he kind of is trying to tell her without telling her because he realizes that it's not his thing to tell, but also he wants her to know that it's not that he's keeping a secret from her necessarily. He wants her to be part of his life. He wants to share these things with her, and making that clear to her while still maintaining his mother's ability to keep it a secret if she wants to. It was a very interesting tightrope that they walked there. 

I liked how seriously they took the relationship between Toki and Kanae, because they were taking it seriously and I think that young love is important and whether it goes on or it ends, how it happens is important. It was nice to see it also being taken very seriously by the narrative.

Twig 

Totally agree. I really appreciated the scenes where they had conversations about the relationship that showed that they were really putting work into it, that it was an effort on both of their parts that they wanted to make it work to show the sincerity and the seriousness of what they were embarking on together. And what you said about the way that Toki navigated the difficulty of having the knowledge about his mother and wanting to respect her right to share or not share that secret was so good. I thought one of my favorite things about the show is the way that it handles coming out as a concept. I thought it did a really good job of framing coming out as not something you owe anybody, but when you give that knowledge of yourself as a gift to the people who have earned it or who you love, it benefits your relationship as a whole and the world expands and is improved by it. 

I thought, like, that was just really beautifully said by the show and the multiple coming out scenes we got in it. It's very easy to make a show where there's pressure in the narrative to come out and where not coming out is treated as some sort of wrongdoing, and I thought that the show did a really good job of making it clear that Sakura was never a bad person or wrong for not having told that secret yet and at the same time showing how it expanded her relationship with her son and her mother when she did come out.

NiNi 

My gosh, the scene with her mother. 

Ben 

The way that they handled her finally saying to her mom what her mom clearly already knew was very well done.

NiNi

I wept. It was beautiful, honestly. The show is just unfailingly kind and gentle. Like, there so many points at which the show could have turned in a different direction and gotten more contentious. But instead, at every turn, it just chose to make everybody be trying to do the best that they absolutely could do in the moment that they were in, and showing that the people that they were in the moment with understood that they were doing the best that they could do as well. Everybody's coming at each other in every moment with grace, with an allowance for who they're dealing with and the love that they feel for that person.

It's not that people didn't necessarily get angry, because I think Toki got angry maybe once or twice, but it's just that that anger is not really directed at his mother. It's more directed at the situation and why they're all in the situation that they're in. And so when he has to have that conversation, yeah, he needs some time and space away from his mom to figure out what it is he wants to say, which is why he goes to On-chan. But when his mom does find him and they have that talk, he is not angry with her in the least. It's just really this beautiful thing that I really, really enjoyed watching. It felt very soothing to watch this show.

21:50 - Fragrance You Inherit: On-chan

NiNi

So who's everybody's favourite character and why is it On-chan?

Twig 

He really was the best.

Ben

We haven't had a gay uncle in this genre in so fucking long. And it was played by Takeda Kouhei, who everybody knows from Old Fashion Cupcake.

NiNi 

Love that man. He's so good.

Twig 

Just that close, long-standing friendship between a gay man and a lesbian woman. It’s something that made the show feel more relatably queer than a lot of QL does to me. People ask me, and I know they ask you Ben too, all the time, what makes something feel queer? Is it just that it's sad? Like sometimes, no, it's that we've got besties. 

A lot of the times in BL, the queer besties are just other people who also are going through that realization at the same time and it's nice On-chan knew he was gay before he and Sakura started talking and it was that mutual realization of “we're family” that made them be friends in the first place and part of why they kept each other company through all these years. That kind of knowing moment is the kind of thing that we don't often get in QL.

Ben 

What I think works so well for me about their friendship is that he's always holding her to account. Like, he'll be as nice about it as he can, but he will not let her just spout bullshit around him. He's always telling her the uncomfortable things she needs to hear. And it's the same with Toki when he shows up. It's like, “You just scared the shit out of your mom, kid. Let's resolve that first.”

NiNi 

I just love that when Toki shows up at his house the first thing he says to him is, “How do you know where I live?”

Ben 

[laughs] Like, he could've been entertaining. You're not supposed to show up unannounced, kid.

NiNi 

It was delightful because he's clearly a big part of Toki and Sakura's lives. Like, he's always in their space with them. But he was still shocked when Toki showed up at his house like, “Oh you're not supposed to be here.” [laughs] It was so realistic and delightful as somebody older whose friends have kids who are sort of in that space now, in that elder teenage space. Sometimes they'll come to me and I'll be like, “What are you doing here? Why am I the person that you're choosing to talk to about this? Shouldn't you go talk to somebody else?” And then you realize, oh no, I'm the auntie figure now. So I'm the person that they're gonna come to when they don't wanna talk to their mom. Just was just very recognizable and relatable.

24:21 - Fragrance You Inherit: Final Thoughts and Ratings

Ben 

So let's talk about the fact that this is not a queer romance and how people struggled with that as a concept, as usual. I bitch about this at least once a season. [Twig laughs] The importance of queer art that doesn't necessarily end in queer boinking.

Twig 

I have been feeling so many feelings this season in particular about how our stories are apparently only worth paying attention to if they're titillating to a straight audience, and fuck that. That's how I feel about that. Our stories are interesting and worth telling even if it's not actually about us fucking as the core. That doesn't make it any less queer. We have full lives that are about more than just having sex. Some of us don't even have sex at all. That doesn't make us any less queer. While it's sort of defined by who we want to fuck or fall in love with or spend time with, there are ripple effects in a lot of other aspects of our life. 

Those parts of our lives are also interesting and worth telling. We are full human beings. I guess sometimes it feels like you all forget that. [laughs] So, when people want to throw out a story because it's not about falling in love or having sex, I feel like I need to remind people that we're human beings who do more than that and that the other things we do are also important.

Ben 

We still need queer media about people in their 30s and older sorting their feelings out about shit that happened to them in their teens. That is important and significant.

NiNi 

My uncle has always said to me that queerness isn't just romance, it's not just sex, it's societal. And one of the things that I enjoy about both of the shows that we're talking about tonight is how societal it felt, like the romances or the feelings or the whatever are in there, but it's not necessarily about that. It's about everything around it. It's about every way it impacts people's lives. I truly appreciated that about these two shows. When I used to write more, I used to always say, "Are you here for a ship or a story?” And these two shows are definitely a story. It's about this entire little society of people, this little microcosm, this family that is just figuring out some things that go along with queerness.

Alright, so…

Ben 

RATINGS!

[Twig laughs]

Ben 

NiNi?

NiNi 

I gave it a 10 and an award.

Ben

Twig-tea?

Twig 

I feel like I gave it a 9.5.

NiNi 

Where did the .5 come off of?

Ben

The ambiguous ending.

Twig 

Yeah, yeah, even though it was satisfying if you have to ask, like, what exactly was that? This is just a smidge off, but honestly it was such a wonderful watch experience like, the watch experience itself was a 10.

NiNi 

Ben, how about you?

Ben 

I also gave it a 9.5 because I was a little bit miffed by the ambiguous ending. I didn't mind Mone and Sakura needing more time to sort that out. I didn't mind them wanting their kids to complete their arc before they decided to tackle theirs. But I found myself a little frustrated at the end that Sakura still feels like her lesbian existence is defined by her feelings. So that's the reason I gave it a 9.5. I think it's a little incomplete for me.

NiNi 

So I think we can give it a 9.5 from The Conversation. I mean, we gave it an award, people, you know we like it.

Ben 

We really want you all to watch it. We say this all the time. if you only watch BL, it rots your fucking brain and you just really cannot watch the genre properly because you're not always engaging with stories and themes that are being told. You’ve got to diversify your motherfucking bonds. Like, ou gotta watch other shit!

If you're a queer person who only wants to watch queer media, fine, I respect that. I'm all about it. I'm one of them people, too. You should watch something like this that's not just about whether or not queer people are gonna boink each other. This is a compelling narrative about a collection of queer people and how their own queer histories complicate and influence the lives of their children. This is an excellent show and a fairly short watch at that too. It's only six 20-minute episodes. You owe it to yourself to watch this.

29:08 - Fragrance of the First Flower

NiNi 

Okay, so now we are going to talk about Fragrance of the First Flower. I recently watched this, finally caught up and watched both seasons. But I think Ben and Twig, you guys watched the first season back when it aired originally and caught up with the second season this year, so maybe we can talk a little bit about the differing experiences we had, you guys with watching it in two tranches and me with watching it as a binge.

Ben

I have a weak memory of the first season, I'm realizing at this point. I remember the basics. So we've got two ladies. We got Yi Ming and Zhong Ting Ting. And Zhong Ting Ting and Yi Ming were volleyball players together in high school. The gayest thing they could possibly be. 

NiNi 

I saw the volleyball and I was like, this is why we're watching this. [laughs]

Ben 

I'm always watching volleyball at some point somewhere. Actually, right now I'm watching tennis.

NiNi 

I mean, it's just volleyball with racquets.

Ben 

Look, I'm all about sports with nets, so. They were very close in high school. There was clearly a lot of gay things going on there. Zhong Ting Ting was way more into it than Yi Ming was. And then Yi Ming is like, “Nah, I'm outta here.” And then she goes on to get heterosexually married to a guy. They have a child together who does have special needs.

She runs into Ting Ting again, according to the blurb, at a wedding. I do not remember this. And they rekindle some of their relationship in the first season. But once again, Yi Ming is not ready for this and calls things off with Ting Ting.

So that happens in 2021. And Twig and I are scratching our heads watching this like, well, that was mostly pretty solid, but kind of abrupt and weirdly unsatisfying. And so we just put it on the shelf for about four years. And then they're like, we're coming back. And we were like, “Oh sure, I guess.” 

When the show comes back, Yi Ming did divorce her husband, who is now realizing that being a sort of absent partner is not conducive to a sustainable long-term marriage in the modern era, and is trying now to work through things. He kind of thinks his ex-wife is going through a phase, but he grows. Yi Ming eventually tries to rekindle her relationship with Ting Ting. And we watch these two try and sort out what being a couple in their now 30s is supposed to look like. And it's kind of a mess and it's not a smooth ride for any of them. 

Do you have any caveats, Twig and NiNi?

Twig 

One of the things that made the first season a bit of a struggle, especially at the end, was the revelation that Ting Ting was also was in a relationship with a man at the time that she was pursuing Yi Ming, even knowing that Yi Ming was married with a child.

Ben 

Wait, she was? Holy shit!

Twig 

And that's the thing that makes Yi Ming go, know what? I can't handle this shit. I don't believe that you are ready to be with me as I blow my life apart because you're dating someone else. And Ting Ting's like, well you told me to. And she's like, yeah, but still.

The ending was just so unsatisfying and left us in such a frustrating place with the characters. You've set up that these characters have failed each other massively in this moment and then just left us. So I was so happy we got the second season and for me it actually did manage to bring it all back in and successfully and satisfactorily conclude. 

I am curious to hear your thoughts, NiNi, because I'm wondering how much the multiple years of sitting with what happened in season one helped me reconcile and be prepared for forgiving the characters through season two.

NiNi 

For me, because I watched it all as a whole, I didn't experience that feeling of dissatisfaction or unsatisfaction that you guys did. I just went straight into season two. So I didn't have to sit with that unfinished feeling.

I was just able to go through the entire story and it lines up pretty well. Yi Ming and Ting Ting, they run into each other at this wedding and then we get the first season more or less a series of flashbacks to their high school days when they were clearly into each other and sort of developing this relationship and then they get caught basically being affectionate in the street outside of school. They've built up this thing where after volleyball practice Ting Ting rides Yi Ming home on her bike, and they got really a little bit saucy for being outdoors, and they were seen and it became a whole thing and Yi Ming freaked out and sort of separated herself from Ting Ting and Yi Ming was older anyway so she left. 

She graduated, she moved on to college, she met this guy, she ended up marrying this guy and Ting Ting just kind of ended up floating a little bit. She didn't quite get herself together. Yi Ming has a job, she has a family, she has all this stuff and Ting Ting is in her 30s now in the second season trying to make a career out of music. She's in this band, this band is not doing great, she works part-time at a cafe, she doesn't really have a life path in the way that Yi Ming had. 

Yi Ming has now left her husband and she's like, okay, I'm ready to be with you, but is she? And the whole second season is really dealing with that idea of Yi Ming thinking that she's ready to be with Ting Ting, but not actually being ready to be with Ting Ting. And Ting Ting struggling with that because in her head, she's been there all along and she doesn't understand why Yi Ming is struggling with this so much. And it's not just the part where they are two women together, it's also just struggling with who Ting Ting is. The scene that I can't forget is when Ting Ting moves in with Yi Ming and starts unpacking her stuff. As Ting Ting unpacked something, Yi Ming packs it back away because Ting Ting has all this boho, like really colourful, kind of cluttery stuff and Yi Ming's space is very neutral and regimented and it almost feels like she can't make room for Ting Ting in her space at all, even as much as she wants her there. It was a really interesting scene that stuck with me all this time.

Twig 

Yeah, I love that scene too. One of the things that I really loved about this series, both seasons, is how both of these characters feel fully developed. We know who both of them are, even as they're figuring themselves out. Both of them have very clear and satisfying arcs. And it's not just about them coming to terms with being in a sapphic relationship. They also have to navigate their personalities and the situation, like what Ting Ting's role is in Yi Ming's child's life, for example. It wasn't done when they both were ready to be queer together. One of them is a very, like, uptight person and the other person is very laid back and, how do we make that work? They're in different points in their careers and how do we make that work? And we have different life goals and how do we make that work? A lot of things that they were struggling with were varied and all felt like parts of the larger whole of these characters.

NiNi 

I always love when characters in a relationship or getting into a relationship have sex and then it doesn't fix anything. Even as they're physically connected, Yi Ming is clearly struggling both with the being openly queer aspect of things and just being with Ting Ting, who is so different from her.

37:14 - Fragrance of the First Flower: A Friend and a Foe

NiNi

You see her navigating the struggles through the character of her boss and her boss's wife. Watching their relationship and trying to figure out how to be in a relationship with a woman from watching her boss’s wife. 

Ben 

I did not like that boss.

NiNi

[laughs] Why didn't you like the boss?

Twig

Because she was an astrology bitch?

Ben

Yeah, she was so serious about it. [NiNi laughs] Every time she showed up, I remember messaging Twig, like, “Oh lord, here she come again. Can she have one conversation she don't bring it up? Oh, we made it out of this conversation. Nope, there it is.” Every motherfucking time. Goddamn.

NiNi 

[laughs] This is why I always keep my own personal astrology bitch-ness away from Ben. [laughs]

I liked the boss. I liked that the boss was a wife girl, and open about it, and at first it shocked Yi Ming, but she was also really curious about it.

Ben 

Signaling to Yi Ming that she's also a lesbian by constantly talking about astrology  and the baby she's trying to get pregnant with. [NiNi laughs]

NiNi 

I just loved that whole storyline. Just watching Yi Ming look at the boss and the wife as a way to navigate things with Ting Ting and then realizing, okay, yes, they are also gay, but their relationship is not our relationship. That was incredibly satisfying to me.

Ben 

Yi Ming was not ready at the end of season one. And so she's broken up with her husband. She's gotten her own place. She's returned to the workforce. And now she feels like she can maybe try to do things with Ting Ting. There's a lot of gays like that. Shiro is one of those gays who had to get his whole life in order before he could possibly start doing things with other people. He needed the sense of security about his ability to take care of his own life. And I really liked the drama with Ting Ting working service jobs because in her heart she really wants to be a successful musician. I liked that that was something that she was struggling with trying to hold on to at one point she takes a reliable job. And this ends up being a huge tension point relationship with her band.

Twig

I really love Yi Ming working on those parts of herself before she's ready to have a relationship with Ting Ting, and then she looks up Ting Ting on social media and she basically creates a moment for them to start again. She sort of manufactures a moment then she chickens out a little bit. One of Yi Ming's main arcs that she needed to work on was that relationships are two people and she can't control it all herself. And so I loved that that didn't work, that Yi Ming working on getting herself to an established place was not good enough to make the relationship work. And Ting Ting trying to change herself into who she thought Yi Ming wanted her to be so that they could work also didn't work.

Both of them were sort of doing their own thing in their own corners to make this relationship work and it wasn't working and they were both so frustrated and got really angry with each other about how neither of them seemed to be recognizing the effort they were both putting into this relationship because neither of them were talking about it or realizing that the effort they were putting in was not actually the effort either of them wanted from each other. It was really well done.

NiNi 

One of the other little signals that I really enjoyed was the whole runner about the bar stools. Yi Ming told Ting Ting back in high school she wanted to be the kind of woman who had bar stools in her house. And Ting Ting held on to that for all those years and made sure they had the bar stools. And then Yi Ming kept them covered in plastic. It was such an interesting little runner watching them sort of fight-not fight about that. The fact that Yi Ming had the same problems with Ting Ting that she had with her ex-husband really sort of drove home the point that it wasn't just about finally coming out and being open and being herself. It was also about learning to be a person in a relationship with somebody else and let go of some things and learn to compromise on things and learn to recognize when somebody else needs space inside the relationship.

Ben

I'm still laughing at the whole, “Well we agreed that we wouldn't do things we don't like anymore. So I'm not gonna wash the dishes.” [everyone laughs]

NiNi 

I was a big fan of that moment.

Ben 

I can still hear her screaming Zhong Ting Ting after her.

I want, Twig, for you to talk a little bit about our romantic rival. WThis is honestly the part of the show that I really wanted to get a queer woman's commentary on because this feels like the kind of moment that does not work as well in male-male romance.

Twig 

First of all, Jia Xin was so hot. [Ben and Twig laugh] She came in swaggering with her guitar and her beautiful voice and her appreciation for Ting Ting's music and she's so hot. Sorry, words. Sorry I can't be rational about this, she was incredibly hot. 

NiNi 

Speak your truth, Twig, speak your truth.

Twig 

And I think it was important for the narrative that we be shown that Ting Ting had viable other choices because at that point in the story it really kind of felt like Ting Ting was clinging to a version of Yi Ming that she had in her head from when they were in high school, even though they'd already come together and come apart once before in their 20s, and Ting Ting was wrestling with that question, too. Like, do I still actually want to be with this person? And so Jia Xin coming in and representing who Ting Ting on paper might think she wanted was critical for Ting Ting realizing that no, I don't want the extremely hot lesbian who will go on the road with me and make music with me and have jam sessions and make eyes across the guitars. She plays me the song that she wrote about me, my god. [NiNi and Twig laugh]

NiNi 

Focus Twig, focus.

Twig

What was I saying? I mean like honestly shunning I'll get on your motorcycle and you can sing to me whenever you want.

But Ting Ting needed to have that experience to realize that what she had with Yi Ming was actually worth fighting for. I thought it was really effective use of a rival.

NiNi 

I'm really now questioning why Ting Ting went back to Yi Ming, but also you make some valid points.

Twig 

A lot of people had bad thoughts. But yeah, and I thought that was one of the things.

Ben 

The answer is always in the food. 

Twig 

Mmm, yes, that's right. That is correct.

Ben

When Ting Ting was going through a difficult place and they needed to bring food for support, Yi Ming was able to make food. Jia Xin was only able to buy it. That's it.

NiNi 

And this, ladies and gentlemen, is why he is the expert.

Ben 

But it's great. Jia Xin has like a stern confrontation with both of them because she's mad. She's trying to smash and both of these lesbians are getting on her fucking nerves.

Twig 

[laughs] I'm always compelled by the stories where people who are filling each other's weak spots and make each other better people find a way to get over the things that make it hard for them to be together and build something real, as opposed to the people who are very similar coming together. So for me, I didn't have the problem that I know some people in the audience might have had where Jia Xin seemed like the better choice, because Ting Ting wasn't driven in the same way by that relationship that she was with Yi Ming. It was a way to stagnate.

Ben 

And also two artists getting together, that's not good. It's not gonna work.

Twig 

My god, there's no way that would end well. The sex would be great and then everything would fall apart!

Ben 

I agree with that part. While she and Yi Ming were not together, and especially when they were fighting, they definitely should have fucked. At least twice.

Twig 

Yes.

NiNi 

I wasn't entirely certain that they didn't.

Ben 

They didn't. Ting Ting is way too loyal to the version of herself she's trying to be for Yi Ming. There's a kid she's trying to be dedicated to. She ain't fucking other women right now.

NiNi 

Sigh.

Twig 

That's okay, that's what AO3 is for.

45:22 - Fragrance of the First Flower: Life Life-ing Is Good Drama!

Ben 

Let's talk about the ex-husband. They did a lot of work in the last episode to show that this guy had done some growing on his own and I actually really respected the way they wrote his coming around to the situation, where it wasn't perfect but it was believable in a way that you could relax about.

Twig 

Yeah. The way that it all comes together was really satisfying for me because the work that Yi Ming does on her relationship with Ting Ting is what makes her able to have a better relationship with Ren Xiu. I thought that the show did a really good job of making that all work together, that Yi Ming realizing the way she needs to approach relationships was what allowed her and her ex-husband Ren Xiu to come to a place where you could imagine them having an amicable co-parenting future together in a way that didn't seem possible a few episodes into the second season. 

Obviously Ren Xiu also had to meet her halfway on that, and the show did a good job of making it believable that he was able to get to that place, too. And they were able to start to build something with Ren Xiu and Ting Ting. They were bonding a little over putting up a tent together and it was really sweet actually. They're never gonna be besties, but they were able to share a beer and that felt right.

NiNi 

I also thought it was funny that Ren Xiu tells Ting Ting he's also a guitarist. So I'm like, oh, Yi Ming has a type. It was fun and interesting. I liked the fact that Yi Ming had to get rid of all these compartments that she'd put up in her life, because her life is so compartmentalized. She's so busy trying to keep all the different parts of her life separate. And it's only breaking down those compartments and opening up her life to the people in it, like all the parts of her life, the people in her life that allows her to unclench basically and start to pull her life together into some kind of harmony.

Ben 

That's the part about this series that I liked the most. This is a show about two mediocre people trying to make a relationship work between them. Both of them are dissatisfied with the state of their lives. Ting Ting wants to be more of a more successful musician than she is. Yi Ming wants to be more than the housewife she's settled for being. And it's interesting watching these two's lives evolve over the pursuit of the things that are important to them and each other.

Yi Ming takes a job, gets clocked by her boss who decides that this little budding lesbian needs a friend. I'm gonna force her to be my friend through the power of astrology. I really liked the building complexity of creating a friend relationship with her boss, having to let Ren Xiu know that she was actually serious about Ting Ting, this is going to be a thing, not sacrificing her role as a parent, but also making it clear that she is not the sole parent for their son anymore. 

That's what I want out of my dramas! I want the drama to come from the people and the pursuit of the things that are important to them and be able to understand why these things are important to them.

Twig

Like, Ting Ting being a musician is not just set dressing, it's a part of who she is, part of her struggle, and the realities of being a struggling musician inform and affect her relationship. 

Ben 

Exactly.

NiNi 

And also affect her proposal. I just love that this show also features a double proposal–

Twig 

Double proposal is my favorite thing.

Ben 

Oh my god. We won, gays.

NiNi

–because that is the gayest thing. 

Twig 

I love a double proposal. The gayest of tropes, my favorite thing.

NiNi 

Man, and the fact that like Ting Ting let the band talk her into doing this big grand gesture version of it and she's halfway through it and she's like fuck no, not this. 

Twig 

[laughs] Abort! Abort!

NiNi

She literally in the middle of singing, mid-line she's like no. It was delightful.

I loved it so much. But I liked that the way that it ended the double proposal back at their old high school just the two of them felt like them. Like she let go of the idea of what it should be, which was one of the things that she was struggling with the entire time in the relationship and just allowed it to be what it was.

Ben 

Twig and I legit, we walked into this show, back to back trying to cover each other over this one. We were not sure going into this one and it was surprising how consistent the second season felt. They took 12 25-minute episodes and it didn't feel like they were spinning in circles or wasting our time. Like I really felt like there were good ideas that the show really wanted to explore. Even down to Yi Ming failing to take Ting Ting on a date she wanted to go on, ruining it with the awkward energy around it.

Twig 

And they got to play volleyball again!

Ben

We did get to see them play volleyball together again.

NiNi 

I would just like to point out that the only reason Ting Ting started playing volleyball is that she saw Yi Ming playing and she literally had a complete lesbian breakdown and was absolutely like, I need to be where she is at all times!

Twig 

Most realistic reason why anyone plays sports.

Ben

As she should. Exactly.

NiNi 

I know we talked about this as well when we talked about The Eighth Sense, how that little country twink was like, I'm gonna go join the surfing club. Can I swim? No.

Ben 

I'm gonna drown for some dick. I understand you, country twink. Man, I love that country twink. I haven't thought about him all week.

NiNi 

Like the beginning of all this is literally her staring open-mouthed as Yi Ming played volleyball. [laughs] Love it.

Twig 

Whomst among us has not? The thing that I loved about ending the show on the proposal was that it was such a great bookend for the start of the show. The wedding that Yi Ming and Ting Ting meet again at is next to a lesbian wedding. It was a good moment for Yi Ming to see two women getting married is just a thing that's happening. It sort of set her up to have her first reawakening in this third chance romance. 

Ben 

I like that before we got to those proposals, we had them taking a walk in the park, having a frank conversation about what marriage means to both of them. 

Twig 

Yes.

Ben

Yi Ming does not have a high estimation of marriage after her whole experience with Ren Xiu. So I really like that we didn't go into a double proposal without them voicing their doubts about it and also why it's important.

NiNi 

Yi Ming seeing this lesbian wedding right next to the wedding she's at and it being normalized is part of what allows her to let herself get into something with Ting Ting. It's sort of the catalyst for her reconnecting with Ting Ting and finally deciding to leave her husband and all of that. I think that if it hadn't been for this wedding and the fact that these two women were marrying each other to be seen as quote unquote normal, I don't know that Yi Ming would have gotten there otherwise.

Twig 

Agreed. And that's why I love that the series ends with them getting married and presumably being that for some other closeted lesbian. We can keep the cycle going.

NiNi

Love it!

52:49 - Fragrance of the First Flower: Final Thoughts and Ratings

NiNi

All right, so anything else that we want to mention about this before we get into the ratings?

Ben 

We did mention the band, right? And how incredible the Ting Ting friendship with them is.

NiNi 

It's delightful. They're fantastic. They know her. They know her type. They know her business. Their entire relationship is utterly delightful.

Twig 

We didn't talk about it much, but they're fantastic. I don’t know if we want to talk at all about the depiction of autism in the son.

NiNi 

I feel like what the show was trying to do there was make it explicable why Yi Ming was wound so tight about the son, why she was so protective of him into the point of maybe keeping him away from Ting Ting to an extent, because she doesn't know how Ting Ting is going to respond to her son, how her son is going to respond to Ting Ting. She's worried about how that's going to go. She doesn't see Ting Ting doing the work in the background. Ting Ting wants to figure this out together and she's sort of holding it so closely to herself because of this additional consideration that she asked of me because of her son being on the spectrum. To me, that's what the show sort of used it for more than having the ASD discussion.

Twig

It was the awareness of his need for schedule and predictable patterns. That was a realistic need that if she didn't meet, there would be consequences for him and in his behavior, so both he would be uncomfortable and he would make the rest of them uncomfortable by reacting. It did have practical implications that she had to seriously consider. 

My friend has a son who is autistic and nonverbal and I've seen her go through this exact consideration of where am I allowed to be selfish and where is it just unfair of me to put myself first when that puts my child either at risk or or makes things difficult for him? It's a struggle that all parents have, but when your kid is neurodivergent, it adds a layer of where the responsibility lies that they have to struggle with. I appreciated that that was a very real thing for her to grapple with, it wasn't just set dressing, it was used intentionally in the story to add to what she had to wrestle with in terms of the decision she was making about her life.

NiNi 

Okay, so ratings. Let's start with you, Ben. How did you rate this one?

Ben 

9, it's a solid show.

It's a solid 9 for me. I think it's for most people. I don't think it's for everyone.

NiNi 

Twig?

Twig 

Yeah, I gave it an 8.5 for very similar reasons. It's not a perfect show, but it does so many things really well. There is definitely some hangover of years of being like, have a season one. It was so close to being so great and then frustrating and so I'm still not over that frustration.

There are moments where the show could be a little tighter, could be a little less cheesy. It's mostly really great. It's not perfect, but it's so charming that in my heart, it's higher.

NiNi 

I give it a 9. I think it is a solid show, especially when it's viewed all together without the split in the middle. I agree that there were a couple of little hanging chads, so to speak. But overall, it's a solid show. It's well done. It's well thought through. It's very intentional, so 8.5, 9 that means it's gonna be a 9 from The Conversation. Great little show. 

Ben 

It's on GagaOOLala. Go support Gaga and watch their goddamn shows.

NiNi

As usual, we have not been paid by Gaga. I mean, if you guys want to. But we're always going to plug it. It's a great platform.

Twig

Can I say one last thing about the show? I just feel like we didn't say it. The show is really pretty.

Ben 

It really is. I think we really undersold that component. It's genuinely a very relaxing, very attractive show to watch.

Twig 

Yeah, I always feel like I need to call it out. I appreciate it. Production value is huzzah!

57:04 - Outro: Lesbians!

Ben 

So let's talk final commentary on lesbian life drama in the era of GL schlock we're getting right now. [NiNi and Ben laugh] GL is kind of going through the doldrums. For you, who's a long time queer cinephile who's been on the front end of the genre since the nineties, where are you sitting with GL and lesbian life dramas right now on our way out of this episode?

Twig 

I'm never gonna say that I'm unhappy that we have more content. My hope is that the fact that we're getting GL from more and larger production companies will make people realize that it exists. A lot of what's being made right now is falling into the same pattern of a few tried and tested authors getting adapted over and over. 

NiNi 

*COUGH* CHAO PLANOY.

Twig 

If you're not a fan of those tropes, then you're kind of shit out of luck.

I think the genre is still trying to figure out how GL is going to make money because the fervor for the ships has a different flavor to it than the BL ships. 

The other thing is honestly it feels like people are still not really convinced that it's popular even though every time one comes out, even if it's mediocre, it gets a million views. How big does the show need to get to prove that there's an audience there? The lesbian enjoyers are still out here trying to shout whenever something comes because they're so afraid it's gonna stop coming. 

So in that sense it's kind of nice to have enough being produced that it feels like we can be a little choosy as opposed to just have be happy that we're getting anything at all. But it really does feel like most of what's being made is like, make it fast, make it cheap, hit the tropes that people seem to think is necessary for GL, but like really isn't and I wish they'd stop. We don't need a big lie. We don't need amnesia in every show. We really don't.

NiNi 

She went there! So I guess the long and short of it is more of this.

Ben 

We deserve better. We deserve way better.

Twig 

Yeah. And so, when there are good shows, I feel really strongly about everyone going to watch them, please, because we need to drown out the other stuff. We need to show people that narrative and strong characterization and character-driven stories are also popular, because I want more of them.

NiNi 

More lesbian life drama, less Chaser Game W. Yes, I went there.

Ben 

Oh man, that's getting a second season!

Twig

We’re getting a season 2!

NiNi 

Chaser Game W already had a season 2.

Ben 

Wait, did that already happen?

NiNi 

Yes it did. 

Twig 

My god, it did.

NiNi

And it was terrible, I heard. Because I did not watch it.

Twig

Yeah, no, it was bad. I can't believe I said that and I've seen the season.

NiNi 

That tells you everything that you need to know.

Twig 

It really does.

Ben 

All we do is lose sometimes, I tell you! [Everyone laughs]

Twig 

We're also getting BL Main season 2, so know.

NiNi 

I mean, sometimes we win, sometimes we lose. Any final words, Ben?

Ben 

I am glad that despite how dry QL feels right now, we were able to have a lovely discussion about two projects with one of our friends that focused on stories about women. Because as Twig pointed out, despite how many women are enjoying the genre, not a lot of stories about them are being made.

NiNi 

That is going to wrap us up on, I'm calling it Scent of A Woman. Ben has told me that we are not calling it that. 

Ben 

We sure aren't.

NiNi

We will see who wins. [laughs] 

We out. Say bye to the people, Twig.

Twig 

Bye!

NiNi 

Say bye to the people, Ben.

Ben

Peace!

[the-conversation-pod]

Greetings and salutations Conversationalists! I know, I know, we owe you some eps. NiNi's headed back into the edit suite...tomorrow, because today she is standing in a block-wrapping line in Queens NY to eat Thai food and see Apo Nattawin (and others, but let's be real, she's there for one beautiful man🤣). If you're there, poke her on this post and come find her!

[the-conversation-pod]

The Untamed Episodes: The Second Life

AND WE'RE BACK

In Part 2 of our Untamed discussion, Ben, NiNi, Shan (@lurkingshan) and Bookworm (@neuroticbookworm) talk about our love for Jiang Cheng, our hatred for Meng Yao/Jin Guangyao, and why we will always hold out hope for more Chinese BL.

If you missed Part 1, you can check it out here.

The Untamed Episodes: The Second Life by @Ben and NiNi

In Part 2 of our Untamed discussion, Ben, NiNi, Shan and Bookworm talk our love for Jiang Cheng, our hatred for Meng Yao/Jin Guangyao, and w

The Untamed Episodes: The Second Life

Podcast Episode · The Conversation · 06/05/2025 · 1h 2m

The Untamed Episodes: The Second Life - The Conversation | iHeart

<p>In Part 2 of our <em>Untamed</em> discussion, Ben, NiNi, Shan and Bookworm talk our love for Jiang Cheng, our hatred for Meng Yao/Jin Gua

Timestamps

The timestamps will now correspond with chapters on Spotify for easier navigation.

00:00 - Welcome 00:55 - Intro: More Notes From The Future 01:45 - The Second Life 09:23 - The Second Life: The Fallout of Wei Wuxian's Choices 16:52 - The Second Life: Meng Yao's Dastardly Deeds 26:52 - The Second Life: The Tragedy of Wen Ning 32:35 - The Second Life: Two 'Fools' 37:41 - The Second Life: Various Random Musings 48:18 - Page to Screen (and Audio, and Anime, and Stage, and…) 56:59 - Afterlife: The Impact of The Untamed on BL and Fandom

The Conversation Transcripts!

Thanks to the continued efforts of @lurkingshan as an editor and proofreader, we are able to bring you transcripts of the episodes.

Please send our volunteers your thanks!

00:00:00 - Welcome

NiNi

Welcome to The Conversation, the Queer Media And Brown Liquor Podcast.

Ben

I'm Ben, the media critic.

NiNi

I’m NiNi, the VIIBs queen.

Ben

And we are your drunk Caribbean uncle and auntie who are sitting on the porch in the rocking chairs.

NiNi

We’re here to talk queer film and dramas, with a special focus on Asian QL.

Ben

So if you like to dive deep into queer stories…

NiNi

If you like cracked out takes on art and commerce in queer media…

Ben

If you just enjoy simping for attractive people…

NiNi

We believe in simping!

Ben

Tune in!

00:55 Intro: More Notes From the Future

Ben 

And we're back. We're gonna continue with our huge two part episode on The Untamed. We finally bullied NiNi into watching it. We got her into the booth with Shan and our good friend Bookworm. I really hope you listened to the last episode because we're going right into Wei Wuxian's second life. 

NiNi

The second life is so much fun. There's some stuff we talk about in here that I could have continued talking about forever. 

Ben

No more beehive commentary from you right now. 

NiNi 

No more beehives, but I just want the world to know that I love Jiang Cheng. 

Ben 

Ah, that poor boy. What a hot mess of a man. Angry purple man. 

NiNi 

My angry purple dream boat, how dare you. 

01:55 The Second Life

Ben 

On to the second life.

Shan 

So this is after Wei Wuxian is resurrected, 16 years after his death. The Jin clan is now holding the most power in the cultivation world. They have the chief cultivator position. Jin Guangyao has had a meteoric rise to power in the time Wei Wuxian has been gone. His father has died. He has gotten married. He has an heir. 

We also have a whole new generation of junior cultivators along for the ride with us, notably Jin Ling, the son of Jiang Yanli and Jin Zixuan. Lan Sizhui, whose identity is a mystery that's not very well concealed. [laughs] Although, we did not mention our beautiful A-Yuan in the first life, just know that we love him dearly.

Ben 

There's too many things to mention. I didn't even go off on an extended period about Madam Jiang beatin’ the shit out of people.

Shan 

I know, right. 

[all laugh]

NiNi

She was such a bitch, but she came through when it mattered, my God.

Shan 

There's so many characters here, but please know that we love them all dearly even if we haven’t gotten the chance to talk about them all. A-Yuan is very close in our hearts.

Ben

We would just be screaming his name for like five minutes.

Shan

Yes! [laughs] So Lan Sizhui is who we come back to in this new timeline and Lan Jingyi is also around, his best friend—his lifelong bosom companion, you might say. 

Major storylines in the second life. We, of course, have Wuxian getting resurrected in Mo Xuanyu’s body, although in the show it's just the same actor the whole time because they didn't want to do that to us mentally, which I appreciate. He is supposed to settle his grudges as part of that spiritual agreement for his resurrection. So he is pursuing the folks who harmed Mo Xuanyu. The big mystery unfolds with trying to figure out the last grudge that he holds. That aligns with unraveling the big mystery of the hidden foes from the first life.

Jin Guangyao, aka Meng Yao, is the villain behind most of the horrible things that happened in the first timeline. And also getting up to all kinds of other noxious shit like marrying his own sister, killing his own son because he's an incest baby, murdering his father via a gaggle of prostitutes, fucking him to death.

NiNi 

That's a thing that happened, people!

Shan 

Yeah, real normal stuff over there. And recruiting a number of folks to do his dirty work, including villains Su She and Xue Yang. He is a half brother to Mo Xuanyu and responsible for a lot of what he went through, as well. So he's just all up in the business. He also murdered Nie Mingjue and tricked Lan Xichen into being complicit in all of that. 

While that's happening, Wuxian is reunited with Wangji. They are following these clues.

Ben 

I'm sorry, we have to be clear that, like, by following the clues we mean Wei Wuxian wakes up. It's like, “Wow, this place sucks. Whoa, where'd that arm come from? All right, let's put this arm in a bag. Well, the arm’s pointing that way. I guess we're going there now.”

Shan 

That's only in the book, bestie.

Bookworm 

So, in the show it's actually just a sword spirit. 

Shan 

The book is way more gruesome. There’s, like, body parts, it’s a whole thing. The show is a little simpler.

Ben

Okay, yeah, they use a sword but it’s literally like, “oh okay, I guess we’re going east? All right.”

Shan

[laughs] Yeah, the sword points them in the direction they should go to follow some clues.

As Wangji and Wuxian work together to follow the sword spirit, unravel the mystery, the juniors are along for the ride. There is a very devastating arc in Yi City where they meet Xiao Xingchen and Song Lan, who we had briefly encountered in the first timeline, and unravel a whole plot about them being tormented by Xue Yang, who is fucking evil. Very much a fan favorite arc, I think.

Bookworm 

It is the best arc and this is also the most tragic arc.

Shan 

It's quite sad.

Bookworm 

Nobody knew what was going on. Everybody got tricked into it. 

Ben 

The Yi City arc is pretty brutal because we basically see how Meng Yao has orchestrated these complex events to torture and murder people he doesn’t like. Xue Yang does the same thing to two roaming cultivators—not boyfriends—which culminates in him turning one of them into a puppet akin to Wen Ning and then driving the other one to death by making him commit evil acts unknowingly. Which is… diabolical.

Shan

After the Yi City arc, that is when Wuxian and Wangji discover the truth of Nie Mingjue's death, which was very intentionally perpetuated by Meng Yao. By unraveling that, they caught on to his whole evil shit. This all culminates in a confrontation at Guanyin Temple where Meng Yao is fully unmasked, Nie Mingjue's corpse rises and is really out for some revenge—which, fair enough, I would be too. Jiang Cheng confronts Wei Wuxian after learning about the golden core transfer that he never consented to. And we finally learn that Nie Huaisang was actually the one who was behind Wei Wuxian's resurrection and orchestrated this whole mystery plot as a way to get revenge on Meng Yao for murdering his brother. 

While these plot things are happening, there are a couple emotional arcs going on. There is, of course, the continuation of the Jiang family drama and the tension between Jiang Cheng and Wei Wuxian, which is now complicated by the involvement of Jin Ling, who is Wei Wuxian's nephew and has grown up an orphan because of Wei Wuxian's behavior. Jiang Cheng needs to learn the truth about Wei Wuxian giving him his core. And they have to kind of work through all of their emotions about that, which don't come to any kind of satisfying resolution, because how the fuck could they?

And then finally, there is of course the reunion second chance romance between Wuxian and Wangi. Honestly, their adult romance is so great. Wuxian is resurrected. He immediately reconnects with Wangji. He's having some fascinating mix of memory loss and obliviousness that is his signature and some just emotional denial about the feelings between them. Wangji is having none of that. He is very clear on the fact that he is in love with this man, sticking to his side like glue and not letting anyone hurt him again. So they are traveling together while they solve this mystery. They're having all kinds of very fun ship moments, lots of cute stuff happening. Wangi's getting drunk a lot. 

Ben 

There's a piggyback scene.

Shan

There's definitely some piggybacking happening.

NiNi

There's a definite wedding. I mean, these guys have gotten married like at least three times in the show.

Shan 

Right, exchanging of chickens, very important stuff. [NiNi and Shan laugh] And, of course, standing together publicly in this second life in a way that Wangji was not able to do for Wuxian in the first life. He declares himself very much unambiguously on Wuxian's side in front of all the other clans. He does not give a shit anymore. 

And then of course we learn over the course of this arc that Sizhui is A-Yuan and that Wangji rescued him after Wuxian's death, brought him into the Lan clan and raised him. Wow, what a fuckin’ man. 

They end on an ambiguous note because this is a censored cdrama. [laughs] So instead of the book ending, which involves them getting married and fucking in a field, we get Lan Zhan—very out of character—deciding to become the chief cultivator [laughs] and Wuxian going to travel alone and them having an ambiguously implied reunion right at the very end of the show. But we all know that they got married and had a lot of sex. That's what happened. 

So, yeah. That is the second life in a nutshell.

09:33 The Second Life: The Fallout of Wei Wuxian's Choices

NiNi 

There are two or three really big things that stand out for me, in this arc. One is just seeing Wei Wuxian's regrets. He's looking back at his life like, wow, maybe I shouldn't have done that like that. Or, wow, I was such an arrogant kid, I should have thought about these things in a different way. You see him having regrets as he sees the outcomes of the choices that he made in his first life. 

Alongside that, the choices that he made in his first life have made him kind of a folk anti-hero. He's now the scary story that parents tell their kids about, “Be good or the Yiling Patriarch will come get you.” He's wearing another face, so people generally don't know it's him. So he gets to hear how people are talking about him 16 years later. And he's realizing, “Fuck, I was evil.”

Shan 

He's like, “I did kinda do a genocide. That was my bad.”

Ben 

We really should not downplay that this man literally killed thousands of cultivators.

Shan 

He sure did.

NiNi 

Thousands of people out of anger and arrogance. I mean, you saw how it built up because he really was just trying to mind his own business and everybody kept poking him, but he still killed thousands of people ‘cause he got mad.

Shan

These other clans that hate him, it's for a reason. It's ‘cause he killed all of their family members. It's not some minor petty grudge.

NiNi 

Well, in this arc, but when they hated him before, it was because he had power that they wanted and he wouldn't tell them how he got it.

Shan 

Yeah. In the second life, his reputation is in tatters and people hate him because he killed everybody they love. Which is fair, in my opinion.

NiNi 

It's absolutely fair, completely fair. Totally understand that. 

So that arc is a really interesting arc for me because it carries through all the various relationships. It carries through his relationship with Jiang Cheng because at the end when Jiang Cheng is like, well, what am I supposed to fucking do with this? Okay, you saved my life, but also, hi, got my entire family killed.

Shan 

Fully.

NiNi 

Am I supposed to thank you? I don't know what I'm supposed to do with this.

Shan 

Jiang Cheng was spitting nothin’ but facts in that temple.

NiNi 

Nothing but facts. He was a hundred percent  correct. And he's stuck in this place now because he loves Wei Wuxian. But at the same time, basically his family opened their home to this man and he got them all killed.

Ben

Objection!

Bookworm

Thank you, Ben. 

Ben 

Wei Wuxian did not murder the Jiang clan. The Wens did, and they were going to do it anyway. Wen Chao's active abuse of the hostages was a prelude to them eventually getting killed. When he left them in the cave like that, he intended for them all to die. Wei Wuxian is not the reason why the Wens sacked Lotus Pier. Madam Jiang may be mad because she believes that her husband is probably Wei Wuxian's father, unconfirmed.

Bookworm

Uh-huh.

NiNi 

Pretty much, yep.

Ben

But like, that boy is not the reason why the Wen Clan went on a tear to slaughter their way to more power.

Shan 

That's true. But he is culpable for Jiang Yanli’s death and that is the one that hurts the most.

Ben

Yes, that part he is.

Bookworm 

I also want to make it clear, like, she ran into a battlefield. That woman gave a month old child to somebody and then she just ran into a battlefield. [laughs]

Shan 

Listen, no one's saying Yanli was the smartest bulb. We're not with some of her choices, but NiNi's point, from Jiang Cheng's point of view, is correct.

Bookworm 

That's true. The facts and the emotions that he was spitting at that moment was very true. 

The reason why the story is so compelling is that you have all of these people who had taken very personal losses and they have very personal emotions that are connected to, basically, a political war for power. What are the motivations behind the people who ultimately want to be at the top? What will they do and how will they manipulate the narrative to just achieve that? If they get a scapegoat, all really good. I'm not saying that Wei Wuxian didn't do all of those things. He killed a whole bunch of people, and he was a dumbass who refused to talk to anybody. 

Ben

I'm just being clear that my client, who did kill thousands of people, [all laugh] did not specifically kill his own clan. He shot the sheriff, but he did not shoot the deputy. All right, let's be clear here.

[NiNi laughs] 

Shan 

Let's get back on track, folks. We got a lot of content to get through. 

The reason that Jiang Cheng's arc is so compelling is because, if you think about things from his perspective… like, wow, what the fuck happened to this kid? He was a teenager when his home was destroyed and his parents were murdered in front of him. His brother then—from his point of view—abandoned him, left the clan, to go protect a different family. Adopted new siblings that he prioritized over Jiang Cheng. Never explained himself. Started doing evil shit. Would not tell him anything about why he was doing these things. Ultimately started a battle that culminated in the death of their sister. And then jumped off a cliff. That is what Jiang Cheng's brother did to him, from his perspective. 

And so, it is not hard to understand why he both loves and hates him in equal measure, why he struggles so much to understand him and why he wants to forgive him, but he can't. And Wei Wuxian can never make it right. He made these huge mistakes that they can never come back from. They will never be able to trust each other and be close again.

Ben 

My favorite thing about Jiang Cheng is the emotional core of why he's so mad at Wei Wuxian is Wei Wuxian will never let him be useful. Jiang Cheng feels like he got no credit for getting them out of the cave. He loses his core because he was trying to save Wei Wuxian. He thought he was gonna die, and he doesn't get to have a noble death. He gets turned into a mundane person. 

Then Wei Wuxian helps him get his core back so he can continue to be a cultivator. But then something's clearly wrong with his brother, he then disappears. And they find him again. He's trying to rebuild his clan. Wei Wuxian is supposed to be helping him, but it's clearly not the same. And he can't get through to him. Basically every time he thought he was doing something for Wei Wuxian, Wei Wuxian was doing something for him. But he constantly feels undercut by the brother he admires’ own excellence and ego. Like, he feels like he is forever playing second to Wei Wuxian and he can't ever get over that because now he has Wei Wuxian's core. And he knows that now by the end of the story.

Shan 

Oof. That's some, like, real mind fuck stuff.

NiNi 

Now he's stuck wondering if all the things that he's been and done since then are because of him or because he has Wei Wuxian's core and therefore because he's Wei Wuxian. So he doesn't ever know if he's good enough, now.

Ben 

Exactly.

Shan

My God. Jiang Cheng, they will never make me hate you.

NiNi 

Never, never!

Bookworm 

Never.

Ben 

I understand that angry purple man.

18:13 The Second Life: Meng Yao's Dastardly Deeds

Shan 

I feel like Bookworm should talk a little bit about the way the Meng Yao and Nie Mingjue and Xichen stuff plays out in this arc, ‘cause I know you have a lot of strong feelings about it.

[Bookworm and Shan laugh]

Bookworm 

All right, let's get to it.

Ben 

I really love when I can hear her getting all of her notes together. 

Shan 

She's getting organized.

Ben

I have to organize my slide deck.

Bookworm

I got notes! All right, so in the second arc, we only start by knowing that Nie Mingjue died this horrible death and we have this mystery of his sword and the sword spirit and leading them around. They're just solving the mystery of this murder who, at the time, they did not know that it was a murder. It comes to heads when they go to the Jin headquarters and solve this mystery by basically having Wei Wuxian turn into this tiny paper man and go and perform—I think it's called Empathy—on Nie Mingjue's severed head that is in Jin Guangyao’s secret closet. I cannot believe there are people who defend this man. [laughs]

We get flashbacks of Wei Wuxian finding out exactly how Meng Yao manipulated Xichen into bringing Nie Mingjue and all of them into this sworn brothers pact sort of thing, after the war, and how he used that to slowly erode Nie Mingjue's composure using tainted music. And finally it breaks him. He runs away and the official account is that he is lost, but we know that Jin Guangyao cut his head off with his own sword and then just keep it in his closet. Like a very normal person. 

The way this is revealed, you see all of the major players trying to understand what actually happened and why Lan Wangji and Wei Wuxian chose to kind of have this confrontation with this man. And you can see how he pulls the thread in that scene so well. He orchestrated the action where Wei Wuxian pulls out the sword that was sealed because he lost his core and reveals his identity to everybody in attendance—who are all, we have already established, super mad at Wei Wuxian for killing all of their loved ones. And then you see him kind of imply that Lan Wangji has been seduced into helping Wei Wuxian. 

Ben 

He didn't use a homophobic slur, but we heard it.

Bookworm 

Right! Everybody kind of zeroes in on what Lan Wangji is going to do at this moment, and even Wei Wuxian expects him to remove himself from Wei Wuxian's side. He was worried about what this could mean to the Lan sect itself. So he was like, okay I’m just gonna fly solo from here. But it culminates, of course, with Lan Wangji standing by Wei Wuxian and declaring openly that he is gonna walk the single plank path in the dark till the end with him. Which is just, ah, so romantic. 

Jin Guangyao, he has basically very successfully isolated somebody who has a stellar reputation in the cultivation world within a matter of minutes. He questioned his motivations and he wanted that person to declare his allegiance. And when that person was forced to do it, that's it. That was almost a surgical precision of political strategy. That was insane.

Shan 

It was a real showcase for his skill set.

Ben 

On his back foot, he really won that entire encounter.

Bookworm

He did. That was a fight that Jing Guangyao a hundred percent won. I think at that point, everybody wanted to fight them. But obviously, we know that nobody's going to fight Lan Wangji.

So they then flee. We still have, like, two more showdowns after this, which is where he ultimately loses. But this one, Jin Guangyao a hundred percent won. Even if the cultivation world doesn't know that he was a villain at this point, we as an audience are very clearly shown that this was a man who can talk his way out of anything. That is exactly what he has done for so long, for almost 20 fucking years. He has talked his way to the top of a cultivation world. Like, he has risen from being an illegitimate child to the top position.

Shan

His methods are never to get his own hands dirty. His methods for framing Wei Wuxian in the first life, his methods for continuing to do his dirty deeds in the second life are through these villainous dudes that he recruits into his cause. Su She, who is a former Lan cultivator who has a lot of bitterness that he plays on. Xue Yang, who is another one of Jin Guangshan's illegitimate sons. The illegitimate sons are just all over this story. 

The way the story unfolds—and this is, I think, one of our probably biggest critiques of the show—they eventually end up pinning a lot of what Wei Wuxian ostensibly did in the first life on Su She as a second demonic cultivator who was controlling people when we thought Wei Wuxian was. That's a change from the book to the show. It's a change I hate a lot.

NiNi 

I think about it this way. If Wei Wuxian wasn't doing what he was doing, he wouldn't have created the cover that Su She had to do what he did. So I still blame it on Wei Wuxian.

Shan 

Yeah, I'm with you. I think the show wants to let him off a little bit, but I will not be doing that.

Ben 

I think one of the things that I find compelling about Meng Yao is because of his starting line, he will never be as powerful as someone like Wangji or Wei Wuxian or any of the other clan leaders and named characters in this story. It doesn't surprise me that he ends up teaming up with people who for whatever reason also cannot achieve those kinds of heights. Like, Su She’s just not as good as Wangji and he's envious of him. And he hates that Wangji won't acknowledge him. He hates that Wei Wuxian won't even remember his fucking name. 

Shan 

Wuxian every time: “Who are you?”

[NiNi laughs]

Bookworm 

It's so good!

NiNi 

So amazing.

Ben 

It's notable that the three of them who form this little evil trio all hold specific grudges about the way they feel disrespected. Everybody Meng Yao has killed, he kills because at one point or another, they called him the son of a prostitute. And he's like, “Well, I'm adding you to my list.”

Shan 

Fuck you, then. [laughs] You gonna die.

Ben

Mingjue originally shielded him and elevated him based upon his actual ability and merit. And Meng Yao took out one of his grievances in the middle of a battle and got caught doing it. That's when Mingjue turned against him.

It's the same thing for Su She. Like Su She wants to have his own clan be acknowledged after Cloud Recesses is destroyed. You can see this man's like, “now's my chance!”

NiNi 

But he just sucks. 

Ben

He does! 

Shan 

Yeah, he doesn't have the skills.

NiNi

He just sucks!

Ben

Even the Lan juniors are like, “You are bad. You do not know how to play your instrument.”

NiNi 

The fact that they use the fact that he sucks to hide him in the story as a villain until the very end. Like he's playing the song to attack wrong. But everybody just accepts that because he sucks, right? So of course he's playing the music wrong. He's playing it wrong on purpose, but everybody else just thinks that he sucks at it. Him sucking is how he hides in plain sight. I love that so much.

Ben 

Meng Yao's whole group is shittier versions of other people. Like, Su She is a shitty version [NiNi laughs] of Lan Zhan and Xue Yang is an insane shittier version of Wei Wuxian.

Shan

[laughs] It's true. They're like the sad little copycats who will never have glory.

Ben

That's what I think is so compelling about it. Like, how much of the story would have been solved by people just not being rude to Meng Yao.

NiNi

He would have found another reason.

Shan 

I gotta say, I don't think murder is a proportional response.

[NiNi laughs]

Bookworm 

Right. Exactly.

Ben 

How much is my finger worth? All of their lives! [all laugh] All of them!

NiNi 

Oh my God.

Bookworm 

[Xue] Yang was a fucking unhinged serial killer. Holy shit.

NiNi 

Psychopath.

Ben 

Let me tell you, that actor is my favorite of the whole series. I love his ridiculousness the whole time.

Shan 

That's a bold statement. My favorite actor in this is definitely Wang Yibo, who did so much with so little.

Ben

I'm being a little bit facetious there. Of the side characters—

Shan 

Fair enough.

Ben

—of the supporting characters, he's my favorite because they were like, what's the direction? “Just serve cunt.” “Got it.”

[all laugh]

Shan

And he's serving cunt, but we cannot overstate that he is by far the most fucked up evil dude in this story. What he does to Xiao Xingchen and Song Lan is disgusting.

Bookworm 

My god, yes, let's talk about that.

Ben 

We're gonna get into how evil this man is. But when he talked to Wei Wuxian, he's like, “I need your help with this sort of stuff.” And Wei Wuxian is like, “What the fuck? Why would I help you with that?” He's like, “Well, you started all this shit. What is your problem, dude?”

[Ben, NiNi and Shan laugh]

Shan 

It actually is really funny. He says, “come on, be my mentor.” And Wuxian’s like, “no, no, this is not what I'm doing. This is not connected to me.”

NiNi 

I would like very much not to be a part of this particular narrative.

Shan

Exactly!

Bookworm 

No!

Ben 

We have to talk about Wei Wuxian reflecting. “Is this the company I've collected? Hold on.”

Bookworm

Exactly! Like, holy shit, if this man thinks that I would help him, what does that say about me and my actions so far? 

Shan 

What have I been doing? Exactly.

Bookworm

Yes! What have I been doing?

30:56 The Second Life: The Tragedy of Wen Ning

Shan 

We haven't actually talked yet about what Wei Wuxian did to Wen Ning, and we should.

NiNi

Oh man. The tragedy of tragedies.

Ben 

So Wei Wuxian learns from Wen Qing that the Wen remnants are basically being tormented and experimented on by the Jin clan, who are trying to understand Wei Wuxian's demonic cultivation. When he arrives at this site, he loses his shit, sees that they've killed Wen Ning, and then revives Wen Ning as a puppet—that's the term that they use for, basically, his zombies—and sends Wen Ning on a tear beating the crap out of people. After which he tries to develop a method to restore Wen Ning's consciousness, but he has forever trapped this originally very kind boy in a perpetual state of undead. And he will forever be at the control of anyone who can produce the proper tunes to force him to go beat the shit out of people.

Shan

This is another thing that Wei Wuxian does without the consent of the person involved. He turns Wen Ning, who is a very gentle, loving soul, into a weapon, basically. He turns him into an indestructible ghost puppet who Wei Wuxian uses to perpetuate violence and who other people, we learn, can use to perpetuate violence. One of my biggest criticisms of the story—not just the show, but also the novel—is that it never unpacks what a violation that is on Wen Ning.

NiNi 

Basically, if he hadn't done what he did to Wen Ning, Jin Zixuan would still be alive.

Shan 

Yes, and Wen Ning would not be holding the guilt of having murdered him.

Bookworm

The Wen Ning situation is extremely tragic, but also there are two things that protected the Wen prisoners of war when they were sequestered in the Burial Mounds. One was the Yin Tally, the power of demonic cultivation or whatever. And the other, even though he was not intended for that purpose, once he was resurrected and once he was given the consciousness back and once people understood that he could be a weapon, I think it also protected them a little bit more. Around a year or so, they were able to survive on that mountain. And I really don't think in such a politically tense period, it would be possible to do that without a very obvious threat that they can just sort of unleash on people. It also backfired so spectacularly because his control can be just transferred to whoever wants to take it. 

The Wen Ning that we saw before he was transformed, this boy who tried to help everybody, was so sweet and very shy. Even when he wanted to learn things he was just sequestered. He was secluded, he didn't really interact with people because he knew that the Wen clan was not the greatest. You take that character and you turn him into basically just a walking nuke. 

Wei Wuxian: do first, think later. One of the things that really gets my goat is that after the massacre at the Qiongqi Path, he had the fucking audacity to go after Wen Ning. He woke up and he was like, “You murdered these people.” I will never forgive that man for that moment. I was like, what the hell are you talking about? OOF!

Shan 

It was brutal. Wen Ning's accidental murder of Jin Zixuan is what caused the entire Wen clan to turn themselves in and be exterminated. It is what led to Wen Ning being basically imprisoned and his mind taken over while Wei Wuxian was dead for 16 years. He was locked up with bolts in his fuckin’ head. They were experimenting on him. When Wei Wuxian was resurrected, he did liberate Wen Ning. But from there, Wen Ning had an extraordinarily lonely existence because he's the only one of his kind. His entire family is dead. 

And so, it was nice to see at the end him get some measure of peace by being reunited with A-Yuan again, finding Sizhui and being able to travel together and bond over their dead family and their connection to each other. But Wen Ning is indestructible and immortal and he is going to live a very lonely life. I wish the story had actually unpacked that in any way or Wei Wuxian had ever reckoned with his choices and how he harmed his friend.

NiNi 

To me the tragedy goes even further because the reason that Wen Ning is so protected at all by Wen Qing and others in the beginning is because he's already been hurt. When he was a child, he's already been attacked spiritually by, like, this fairy statue or whatever. So he's already weak. And in some ways it feels like Wei Wuxian thought that maybe he could make him strong, but he just ruined him even more. He does make him strong in a way that he wasn't strong before, but the tragedy of it is that he's a sweet, sweet kid that he turns into a monster. And Wen Ning never blames him for it. He is loyal to him till the end. 

Ben

Yeah, but again, how much of that is because he's been turned into a puppet or his natural tendency? We'll never know. 

Shan

We’ll never know. I love Wen Ning.

Ben

A lot of Wen Ning mentioned in this section, good job everybody!

38:07 The Second Life: Two “Fools”

NiNi 

If we’re talking about tragedy we gotta talk about the tragedy of Meng Yao and Lan Xichen at the end, because oh my god, he ruined that man. He destroyed him.

Bookworm 

All right, let's go! Round two!

Shan 

This is why I do not buy interpretations of canon that claim Meng Yao truly loved Xichen, because—

NiNi 

He did not.

Bookworm 

Mm-mm. Mm-mm.

Shan

—you do not do that to somebody you love. Absolutely not.

NiNi 

He loved that Lan Xichen loved him, but he did not love Lan Xichen.

Shan 

Exactly.

Bookworm 

He loved the influence that he had on Lan Xichen. He was so over the moon happy that he had this very influential man that he could just control and do whatever the fuck he wants with him.

Shan 

So this all culminated at Guanyin Temple when Nie Huaisang tricked Xichen, basically, into thinking Meng Yao was attacking him from behind. Xichen automatically activated his sword, stabbed Meng Yao. Meng Yao on his way out as he was dying, chose not to comfort Xichen, but instead to guilt trip him for killing him and not saving him. 

NiNi 

Walked down the fucking sword. He pushed the sword in deeper!

Bookworm 

He sure did.

NiNi 

Bitch!

Shan 

Brutal stuff, Xichen destroyed. We know that after this, he went into seclusion for several years to try to recover from the emotional blow of this happening to him. And that is how it was revealed that Nie Huaisang was the one behind all of this to get revenge for his brother.

NiNi

Xichen, man. Oh, my god.

Shan 

He’s tragic, but let’s talk about Huaisang. Oh my God, what a good reveal.

Bookworm 

Yes, let's talk about the only person who's really good at politics and only wanted to use it for own reasons, not for grabbing power or anything. I mean, it was implied at the end that he would rise to the top. That man knew how to play the game. But he would have just minded his own fucking business if nobody murdered his brother.

Ben

He just wanted to draw his porn and play with his fans.

Bookworm 

Yes! Yes!

NiNi

Gaslight gatekeep girlboss. That's what he was doing.

Shan 

He wanted to sit in the background gossiping, listening, collecting tea just for fun. But no, these bitches had to go murder his brother, and then he had to get involved.

Ben 

He understood what he was up against and his plan is really elegant and it works because he understands his friends. He knows that if Wei Wuxian comes back and you give him a little mystery to solve, this problem will sort itself out. [NiNi laughs]

Shan

He’s like, just point Wuxian at it! 

Ben

He's just like, all I need is to bring him back and Wangji has to find him first.

Bookworm

That’s it. 

Shan

And he gave them little nudges along the way to help them find the clues that they needed. He found and set up witnesses to be discovered. He was gathering all of the tea and making sure to strategically place it around where Wangji and Wuxian could find it.

Bookworm 

Do we see Nie Huaisang at the confrontation when all of this was unmasked by Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji at the Jin headquarters?

Shan 

He was not in the room.

NiNi 

He's not there. 

Bookworm 

See, so he saw the goddamn mess Jin Guangyao was able to make of that situation and then he was like, “you know what? I'm not gonna leave this to you bitches anymore.” And then he showed up at both the Burial Mounds and at the temple and he played both of those situations to how he wanted. He was like, “Su She, what are you doing? Why are you being weird?”

Shan 

The great thing about the reveal is when you go back and look at earlier scenes, he is in the background of so many crucial scenes where he is gathering information totally unobtrusively. You don't even notice he's there, but he is.

NiNi 

I notice, because I notice the fan. I always see the fan.

Ben

It's in the past too, like he's one of the people who picks up on the intensity of Wangji and Wei Wuxian's relationship. He doesn't have any aspirations about it, but he's clearly aware of it ‘cause he watches it happen.

NiNi 

Not just watches, I'm pretty sure that he showed Wei Wuxian the porn that he then shows to Lan Wangji. 

Ben 

He did.

Bookworm 

He did!

Shan

And there was that whole segment where he was tagging along on their date, bein’ a third wheel.

Bookworm 

That was so funny.

Ben 

He is relying upon them to help him achieve his ends here. But, like, they were also his friends.

Shan 

That is probably one of my favorite mystery reveals in drama. Very good shit.

Bookworm

Excellent. I remember being just gobsmacked with my jaw on the floor when I read the books and got to the reveal. Yeah, I just blacked out and my ears started ringing. I flashbacked everything that happened for the last five books and tried to figure out. It was so good. 

This is exactly why this show has really good rewatch value. Once you know all the information, you see from episode one how all of them connects. It's so satisfying.

44:14 The Second Life: Various Random Musings

NiNi 

Let's do the best moments in the second life in reverse. So, Ben, you go first.

Ben 

Wen Ning revealing the history of the core to Jiang Cheng. Honestly, the entire set of reveals around the end of the Yi City arc and the reveals at the Lotus Pier, because you get to see how fickle the politics of this era have been. As soon as some folks come forward with some information, everybody's like, “Oh my goodness me, oh no.” 

And I really love the confrontation where Jiang Cheng’s being a bitch again and Wen Ning is like, “I've had enough!” And reveals everything that's going on and you see how devastated Wangji is about this too, with him finally piecing together what was wrong with Wei Wuxian all this time. 

I also really like Wei Wuxian mentoring the juniors in Yi City. Because he's actually good at it. And it makes you sad for what Jiang Cheng was hoping he would get out of Wei Wuxian. Because Wei Wuxian actually is good with young people and good at teaching them stuff.

Shan 

He would have actually been a really good head disciple.

Ben 

Yeah, and it's what he wanted. He genuinely had no designs upon Jiang Cheng's legacy. He really wanted to just support him. He thought that maintaining the dynamic that their fathers had was going to be the best thing of his life. Which is what's so sad about it all.

NiNi 

I think my favorite moments actually are moments within those scenes that you're talking about. When everything goes down at Lotus Pier and Wen Ning spills the tea, there's a moment when Lan Wangji asks, “Was it painful?” And I just fucking broke. He's just found out that this man essentially sacrificed himself for his brother and never told anybody. And he's remembering all the times he got on his ass about it. And all he can think is, “Oh my god, did it hurt him when they did this, when he took out his core?” I was ruined, absolutely fucking ruined. 

And then the time that I giggled, I had a great time, is in the Yi City arc, when Lan Wangji is fighting Xue Yang and Wen Ning is fighting the puppets. And Wei Wuxian is like, well, what am I supposed to do? And then he sees the kids and he's like, “I can do that.” That was a great moment for me as well. 

But then my ultimate moment, and I've been obsessed with this moment since I saw it, is when they're back at Cloud Recesses after they've fled the Jin clan and Lan Xichen is hiding them. And he's talking to Wei Wuxian and Wei Wuxian is starting to think a little bit about what Lan Zhan means to him. And then Lan Zhan walks up, hair down and soft, with two bottles of Wuxian's favorite liquor. They should not be drinking in Cloud Recesses because it's one of their 3000 rules or whatever. He don't care. He loves his man. He missed his man. This man could get anything that he wants. So he comes up with two jugs of the Emperor's Smile and his hair all soft and sexy. And I'm like, “oh, they gone fuck tonight!” They did not, but they should have.

Shan 

[laughs] In our hearts they did.

Ben

Bookworm, favorite moments from the second life?

Bookworm 

One of my favorite movements is the one that I already talked about, the whole confrontation at the steps of the Jin manor when Lan Wangji says that he will walk the single plank path with Wei Wuxian. The reason why it's one of my favorites is, that line is the culmination of 16 years of regret. Lan Wangji was introduced to us as this extremely repressed and extremely by the book, follow the rules guy who grew up in this clan whose politics also seem to be, “We are not gonna do anything unless it becomes a direct and very visible active threat. We're not gonna get into the machinations of the dirty politics stuff. We're just gonna stay above it all.” And then this man sees how not commenting, not acting and letting it become a monster which they can then fight has consequences. And how him not questioning and blindly following all of those rules, how his entire upbringing basically led to the death and complete destruction of the love of his life. And then he had 16 fucking years in solitude regretting all of his actions. Then we finally see Wei Wuxian come back and we see the political world wanting to do the same thing once again to Wei Wuxian. He was like, “Bitch, no, not this time.” And he goes for it. That was such an amazing line and the whole arc of how it came about is why it's one of my favorites. 

Another one, this one's subtler. It's all the looks Jiang Cheng gives Wei Wuxian when they get to the Lotus Pier after their confrontation at the Burial Mounds. Like, he stops and looks at Wei Ying and Wen Ning before they enter, like, “Do you really think you can walk into this place?” And then Wen Ning just walks away. Then they get to the main hall and he turns around once again. And he's like, “Do you think I'm gonna let you into the throne room?”And then Wei Ying just sits on the steps without another word. 

That man is so good. Jiang Cheng’s actor.

Shan 

Let's put some respect on his name. Wang Zhuo Cheng is the actor's name and he is fantastic.

Bookworm 

Fantastic. So good. He is such a nuanced character and there's always at least three different emotions that he's feeling at any given moment. Every time it's just a complicated mess of things that's going on in his head and you can see him playing it out. The first time we see him interact with Wei Wuxian after he's resurrected, you see the doubt and you see that he suspects that this is Wei Wuxian. In that scene somewhere, there's a moment where you can see that he is hopeful but he's also just raging. You see that he's so mad and if he finds out that this is Wei Wuxian, he's gonna tear him apart. That's what that looks means. But he's also so sad that is what it has come to. That was his brother and now he wants to kill him, very rightfully so, but you see him just fighting all of those differing emotions inside him and you see it all on his face. 

Jiang Cheng, on the whole, that character is just extremely complicated, extremely tragic and he was played so beautifully.

Shan 

Y'all talked about some of my favorite moments already, but some additional ones that no one's mentioned yet. First of all, let me just give a shout out to second life Lan Wangji and his sense of humor. That man is fuckin’ funny. He is making fun of Wei Wuxian all the time after he's resurrected. It's so subtle, but it's so well done. I love every scene where he is basically mocking him for not remembering things from the past. [laughs] I love every scene where he's teasing him about, “Bitch, I know who you are because you played our love song as soon as you woke up.” But Wei Wuxian never figures it out. He does not understand that that is the reason Lan Wangji instantly knew who he was. I love all of those scenes.

NiNi 

And then at the end he's like, are we ever gonna give this song a title? And he's like, “Bitch, you really can't remember anything, do you?”

Shan 

Come on! [NiNi and Shan laughs] It already has a title.

Bookworm 

Obviously everybody would have caught it at this point, but in the first arc when they were stuck in the cave fighting the tortoise, when Wei Wuxian asks him what is the name of the song, you see him slowly drifting off, you see the scene blurring, but it is very clear that Lan Wangji mouths “Wangxian” at him, 

Shan 

Yeah, he says it. 

Bookworm

Which is is insane. Like how did they get it in?

Shan

I'm gonna give Wuxian a pass for not perceiving that because he was very feverish and passing out when he said it. When he resurrects in his second life, he doesn't know why he knows the song and he doesn't know where it's from. But it's, like, in his soul and he just plays it without even knowing why. That is why Wangji knows who he is immediately, despite the fact that in the book, he's in a completely different body. In the show, he's wearing that silly mask. All of the scenes connected to that are so funny to me. Obviously, there's a lot of comedy in the drunken shenanigans. 

The other part that I like about the second life arc is the moments where Wei Wuxian kind of gives himself away with his fantasies about Wangji. One of the most stark ones to me is, the only memory he has of his parents is of his mother riding the donkey while his dad leads the donkey down the road. And then we see Wuxian orchestrate recreating this moment with Wangji. He gets on Lil’ Apple and he has Wangji walking beside leading the donkey. And the show never actually comments on it, they just show you. It's so clear, like, in his mind, even when he is still not really fully clicked into his feelings, what his fantasies actually are about the life that he wants with Wangji. I love that. 

And then, this all culminates in the ultimate family moment of him realizing who Sizhui is. I fuckin’ love that scene at the end of the show where Sizhui runs up and tells Wei Wuxian that he knows who he is. And it finally clicks for Wuxian that this is A-Yuan. And without Lan Zhan saying a word, he puts it together that Wangji has rescued this kid who he was helping to raise in the Burial Mounds and raised him as his own son. And that he did that in large part for Wuxian. 

You just see the emotions over Wei Wuxian's face as he just puts this together and looks at Wangji. He starts crying. It's such a perfect, happy, joyful moment, him realizing A-Yuan is okay. He survived. He is this kid that he has already come to love as Sizhui, and then realizing that Wangji did that for him. It was beautiful. And then Sizhui clinging onto his leg and just being so happy to be reunited with his Xian-gege from his previous life. Such good shit! 

The show gives it away early on who Sizhui is. So it's not about a reveal there. It's about the emotional culmination of all of them finally putting together who they are to each other. One of my favorite moments in the whole show.

56:32 Page to Screen (and Audio, and Anime, and Stage, and...)

NiNi 

All right, we're three hours. We gotta wrap this up.

Ben 

The only thing I’ll mention in terms of other adaptations, there is an anime version of this, which better mimics the pacing and structure of the novelization. Also, the giggly version of Wei Wuxian that you get in the anime better reflects what I felt like I was reading. Though I do appreciate the way Xiao Zhan approached the character, who realized that all that giggling would be aggravating as hell. He instead does like a very peculiar smirk, which I think is a much better choice for the drama.

Shan

Yeah, it works better on the screen. In terms of story structure, I do prefer the novel structure. Intercutting between the present and flashbacks, it preserves the mysteries a lot better. The show, if you're paying close attention, you can solve everything far in advance because you're just given a lot more information in chronological order that you didn't have while reading the book. So, I do prefer the structure of the book for the mystery purpose. But the show, I think, made the right choices for a screen adaptation.

Bookworm 

We should probably talk about the ending.

Ben

I will say that I don't hate it. Considering the horrors that Twig and I have lived through in queer cinema and BL, they didn't brutally slaughter them or break them up in an unforgivable way at the end of the narrative. I think ending on an ambiguous note is one of the nicest things that this show did for these characters considering the censored nature of this. Everybody who follows any amount of lore knows this is based upon a novel that's way spicier. By not ending on a dour note, I think it makes the curious audience more likely to go read the novels if they want to see what the explicit romance looks like. And I think that's an overall good choice considering the obstacles they were up against. I don't think it's great, but I'm not mad about it. 

The whole show is censored, we know a romance is occurring, but technically one isn't.

Shan 

Bookworm, how did you feel about it?

Bookworm 

Like I said before, I am very used to watching stories culminate in a very ambiguous ending. I've seen so many movies, just ends in a shot of like, I don't know, two people standing staring into the distance. Like Ben said, you are aware that this is a censored BL. That is one of the things that impacts how you receive this ending a lot. 

I read the books first, I could see all of the things that they had to walk around to make this get through the censors but also make an effort to depict the romance in any way they can. When I got to the ending, I will be honest, I started screaming—

Shan 

You did, I was there. It was actual screaming.

Bookworm 

When he stopped Wei Ying, and Wei Ying turns around and they go into the song, I was heartbroken. I was so mad. At that point, I have all the information. I know that they're not gonna end how they ended in the books. But still, it was so heartbreaking to watch this man walk away from Wei Wuxian. It is such an out of character moment. There is no way the Lan Wangji that I read about and the Lan Wangji that was depicted in the show for so long would walk away from Wei Wuxian. 

When we eventually got to the end of the song and Lan Zhan calls Wei Wuxian’s name and he just turns around and we end on this frame where we assume that Wei Wuxian sees him and just breaks into the smile… there was no other ending where the art could survive and get to its audience.

I'm sad that we did not see the actual story, but it was left open to our imagination that Lan Wangji found him again and they're gonna get back together, and I was happy with that.

Shan

Almost every cdrama ends this way. And this includes het cdramas, not just queer ones. Where, if a character has been morally gray, if a character has used magic, if a character has done anything that precludes them from being a perfect, pure person, they're not going to get a happy ending. They're going to get an ambiguous ending. This is just how cdramas work. So, I read the ending as exactly what needed to happen to get this show to air. 

Absolutely, there's no way in hell that Wangji would ever become the chief cultivator because he fuckin’ hates clan politics and he's bad at it. No way that he would ever do this or that anyone would ever want him to. But I recognized that instantly as Chinese nationalism rearing its head for censorship reasons. He needed to devote himself to the state. He had to separate from Wei Wuxian because they weren't allowed to have a happy ending because they use magic and because they did morally gray things. Wei Wuxian had to go and wander the world alone to atone for his sins, quote unquote. These are all really classic censorship things.

I feel strongly that the creators of this show trusted the fans to know why they needed to do these things and to just brush off the pieces of it that don't make sense and understand the real ending. Outside of the trappings of the plot of what happened there, we saw them exchange these meaningful looks. They did a fucking duet together. And then we end on this beautiful scene of Wei Wuxian standing on a cliff playing their song and turning around after hearing Wangji call his name. And smiling as his eyes fill with tears. That is a gorgeous ending. I am so impressed that they were able to work that in in a way that would not preclude the other things they needed to do for censorship reasons.

NiNi 

I'm annoyed, I'm just gonna say it, but I also know why it happens. But the fact that it ends ambiguously is not what bothers me. I really just do not believe that Lan Wangji would ever take over the clan or that he would let Wei Wuxian leave while he did it. It just doesn't fly for me even with everything going on with Lan Xichen. To me they should have just ended where they see Wen Ning and Lan Sizhui off and then they could have just ridden off into the sunset. 

Shan

Yeah, they definitely could not do that for censorship reasons, but I hear you.

NiNi 

I know, I feel like that's the ending I would have been the most satisfied with. Even if the last shot of them was just of them there, standing together and Lan Wangji giving him that look that says we have to part or Wei Wuxian walking away and Lan Wangji standing there, even that would have been more ambiguous to me because I could have spun it in my head as “oh, he's just watching his man walk away and then he's going to run and catch up with him.” But the whole part where he goes back to the clan and he becomes the clan leader, that just doesn't fly with me.

Bookworm 

NiNi, you know what the fix for this is. You just have to read the books. That's the plug.

Shan 

Read the books and a long list of fanfic that I will be sending you later today.

Bookworm

Yes.

NiNi 

Already, Twig has provided, I have read the smutty parts of the books, thank you, Twig. So I have read the full and proper ending and I am quite satisfied with that. And Shan is gonna send me a list of fics, so I’m fine. I'm not a fic girl usually, but in this story it's absolutely necessary. Just too many gaps that I need to fill.

Shan

That's why there are 50,000 fanfics on AO3 for this show. [laughs]

Bookworm 

There are so many fanfics. At one point you read so many of them that you forget what's canon and what's fanon. That's how it goes.

NiNi 

I'm waiting for Shan to curate me a list.

Bookworm 

I do wanna include an earnest plug for the books, though. I think the creators want you to, they've done their best.

Shan 

Yeah, they want you to go there.

Bookworm 

Exactly, they want you to go to the books. And without spoiling much of it, if you want a little bit motivation to go to the books, Lan Wangji only gets drunk once in the show. It happens so many times in the books. 

NiNi 

More than once, more than once. He passes out a few times.

Shan 

He does, but there are more extended drunken shenanigan scenes in the book. There are several.

Bookworm

The wall slowly comes down. Wei Wuxian gets slowly just unraveled, trying to understand what the fuck is going on with Lan Zhan, why is he acting like this when he's drunk? Those are my favorite sequences and I hope it convinces you to go read the books.

NiNi 

Between now and May it's textbooks and case studies. After that we'll see what happens.

Bookworm 

I'm talking to the people, NiNi. I'm also in the same graduate school hell with you.

Ben 

Begging the listeners to go read the books.

Shan

Go read these damn books.

01:07:04 Afterlife: The Impact of The Untamed on BL and Fandom

Ben

We're living in the post-Untamed world. This show brought a shit ton of people to BL who had not been here before. And a bunch of people who had not engaged with Chinese daytime dramas, probably ever, genuinely started watching them after this. Despite how the censors may feel about a queer/not queer work being so popular, this show has had a huge impact on many people's willingness to engage with Chinese media. After the addicted stuff, we had basically written off China. And The Untamed, even five years later, continues to be the reason why people keep hoping that the Chinese creative teams will be able to get more stories to us.

The downside of all of this, fans are still super feverish about this. And AO3 ends up getting banned in China.

Shan 

There was, as always happens in fandom, people writing real person fiction about the actors instead of fan fiction about the characters. And Xiao Zhan's fans got very upset about people posting smutty real person fiction about him.

Ben 

We've talked about some of the fan issues with getting overly possessive about the idols and the actors. This is part of what the party cracked down on. After Word of Honor maybe pushed the envelope too far and the ensuing drama after that, we haven't really gotten much big Chinese BL since then. We started seeing more of it again last year, but there are still projects from, like, 2020 that have been shelved that we've been hoping get released to us. 

It's complicated because you can tell that the powers that be want the attention and tourism associated with it, but it doesn't conform to some of their civic management goals. It's not like the Chinese people are any different than everyone else in the world. They eat the fuck out of BL. Like, they're the primary consumers of 2gether. So, I don't know.

Shan 

There's been a real dearth of quality Chinese BL since. The few productions that started to come out last year are mostly being produced in other countries like in Singapore or in Hong Kong. We're starting to see danmei productions and adaptations happening in Thailand or in Taiwan, that's how these things are getting made now. 

Despite that, the fandom around this show is immense. It is not slowing down. The books have been out for 10 years. The show has been out for six years. New fans still find it every day. Create new fan works every day. New meta all the time. New fanfic all the time. It endures. This is a story that has really connected with people globally. It's something pretty amazing to see.

NiNi 

I would like to personally thank Xiao Zhan and Wang Yibo in particular. Because sirs, you did what you needed to do.

Shan 

Amen, sister.

NiNi 

And what you needed to do was break my heart on a regular basis and be extremely attractive while doing it. Good job.

Ben

I'm really surprised by how much the show succeeded. They did not have a lot of money. They were filming in kind of unsafe ways, two people literally died making this show. But it's kind of wild how much genuine talent they got on this production. Like, nobody's really slacking on this. It's a really impressive project considering this is a web drama.

It's hard to really give final thoughts on the show. I just end up incredibly impressed by what they managed to pull off.

NiNi 

I think to close, I will just say a short summary of everything we've just talked about as follows: The Untamed is a story about an itinerant, freelance, accidental genocidal maniac and the man who pays all his bills and defends his life. And it's amazing. And you should go watch it. That's all we have to say.

Shan

It's a must watch, I think, from The Conversation.

NiNi 

What's the point of even rating it? 

Ben 

Yeah, it's not one that I really wanna give a real rating to. Under the Ben scope, it'd be like a 9. Most people should watch it.

Shan 

Yeah, it kind of transcends that ratings thing that we normally do. If you care about BL, if you care about queer media, if you care about Asian drama, you should watch this show. It's foundational.

Bookworm 

This is a very carefully constructed narrative with so many moving parts. And I think that's the appeal. It just gives you so much to noodle on. Don't be scared that this will not be your cup of tea.

Shan

You'll find something to love.

Bookworm

There is so much going on that something will grab you and you will just be forever obsessed with the story. Go watch it or go read it and then come talk to us about it. Tag us.

NiNi

That is going to wrap us up after three hours and 20 minutes of unedited time on—

Ben 

I'm so hungry.

NiNI

—The Untamed.

Shan 

We did pretty good!

NiNi 

I've been chomping on grapes this entire time, thank god.

Bookworm 

I have to go make dinner. 

NiNi

Alright, we out. Say bye to the people, Bookworm.

Bookworm

Bye people!

NiNi 

Say bye to the people, Shan. 

Shan 

Bye, y'all.

NiNi

Say bye to the people, Ben.

Ben

Peace!

[the-conversation-pod]

The Untamed Episodes: The First Life

AND WE'RE BACK

It's been a hot minute since we dropped an episode, so we're back to talk about a project that has stuck in fandom for years. We finally got NiNi to watch The Untamed, so grab your snacks and come listen to her talk about everyone's hair along with our friends @lurkingshan and @neuroticbookworm. We'll be discussing censorship in media as we try to run through the big overview of Wei Wuxian's first life.

The Untamed Episodes: The First Life by @Ben and NiNi

It's 'the biggest goddamn BL in the world', and we're finally going to talk about it. Ben, NiNi, Shan and Bookworm talk The Untamed. In Part

The Untamed Episodes: The First Life

Podcast Episode · The Conversation · 05/29/2025 · 1h 12m

The Untamed Episodes: The First Life - The Conversation | iHeart

<p>It&#39;s &#39;the biggest goddamn BL in the world&#39;, and we&#39;re finally going to talk about it. Ben, NiNi, Shan and Bookworm talk <

Timestamps

The timestamps will now correspond with chapters on Spotify for easier navigation.

00:00:00 - Welcome 00:00:55 - Introduction 00:03:55 - Censorship in Media: A Global View 00:12:37 - The MoDaoZuShi Phenomenon 00:24:33 - The Big Picture 00:33:36 - The First Life 00:40:07 - The First Life: Thoughts and Impressions 00:46:21 - The First Life: WangXian and Other Fucked Up Love Stories 01:01:17 - The First Life: Various Random Musings 01:11:02 - Outro: Notes From the Future

The Conversation Transcripts!

Thanks to the continued efforts of @lurkingshan as an editor and proofreader, we are able to bring you transcripts of the episodes.

Please send our volunteers your thanks!

00:00:00 - Welcome

NiNi

Welcome to The Conversation, the Queer Media And Brown Liquor Podcast.

Ben

I'm Ben, the media critic.

NiNi

I’m NiNi, the VIIBs queen.

Ben

And we are your drunk Caribbean uncle and auntie who are sitting on the porch in the rocking chairs.

NiNi

We’re here to talk queer film and dramas, with a special focus on Asian QL.

Ben

So if you like to dive deep into queer stories…

NiNi

If you like cracked out takes on art and commerce in queer media…

Ben

If you just enjoy simping for attractive people…

NiNi

We believe in simping!

Ben

Tune in!

00:00:55 - Introduction

Ben 

And we're back. This week we're doing a little bit of a retrospective. We're gonna be covering The Untamed. Friend of the pod, pod team member, and troll of the pod, Shan—who is of course here. 

NiNi

Say hi, Shan.

Shan 

Hi, people!

Ben 

Shan mentioned during our Diamond League episode that this was a huge oversight in the pod's discussion history and so we successfully bullied NiNi into finally watching it. And she managed to watch the whole thing.

Shan 

I'm so impressed.

NiNi 

It was a struggle. It was a lot. There were some episodes in the middle where I was just like, ooh, okay, I'm just gonna have to push through. But I made it.

Shan 

You sure did.

Ben 

Because The Untamed is such a large project to discuss, we brought an additional clown along with us. Everyone welcome back Bookworm. 

Say hi, Bookworm.

Bookworm 

Hi people!

Ben 

Bookworm, despite how busy she is, has been following Shan's [laughs] recommended BLs list for like two years now. And then for about, like, a one month period, we completely lost Bookworm to reading all five of these books. And then during Christmas of ‘24, I think, you guys watched all of The Untamed in like a week.

Bookworm 

We did it in two weeks, I think. Six episodes a day.

NiNi 

That is commitment.

Shan

Bookworm has very short windows where she actually has a lot of free time. So we took advantage of the holiday season.

Bookworm 

She trapped me between Christmas and New Year's.

Shan 

I just strapped her to a chair, and said [Bookworm laughs] we're watching the episodes, let's go.

NiNi 

She's good at doing that. 

Bookworm 

Sure is. 

NiNi

That's how she got Ben to watch Goblin.

Bookworm

Wow, that was a moment. That was so good.

[NiNi laughs]

Shan 

I'm feeling really proud of my accomplishments.

[NiNi laughs]

Ben 

Goblin was at least better than Coffee Prince, ‘cause there was a moment when I was watching Coffee Prince, around like episode 10, where I'm like, I'm over this show!

[Ben and Shan laugh]

Shan 

He was so mad because he was waiting for the turn and it hadn't come yet and he was getting so frustrated.

NiNi 

Episode 10 of a kdrama? That's not when it happens. Come on!

Shan 

He just didn't understand the rhythms yet. He pushed through, and then he came around and ended up loving the show.

Ben 

Goblin did a much better job of not losing me during the episode 10 phenomenon because they had great Bonds Between Men content. Every time I'm like, “ooh, I'm getting a little tired of this modern angst shit,” they're like, “here's a scene from the past with that one guy you love.” There he is. There's my boy.

NiNi 

I think that's a good segue into what we're gonna talk about here, Bonds Between Men, because this is a show that works on multiple levels deliberately because of details that we're gonna talk about. So let's dive into talking about The Untamed.

00:04:14 - Censorship in Media: A Global View

Ben 

Normally on this show, as you all know, we would do like a “Ben, what the fuck is the show about?” and I'd give some kind of snarky blurb about it, and then we get into it. Because we're talking about the biggest Chinese BL that exists, we're gonna unpack a ton of the context around our understanding of Chinese censorship. 

Shan, you've done a bunch of the background on this one. Take us in.

Shan 

So first, just an acknowledgement up top that censorship exists in all media. That there are standards in every country that have to be met for anything that is aired, on public television in particular, in movies. This is not a thing that is unique to China. And most Asian dramas are censored to some extent according to whatever the social norms of their home country are. 

That said, Chinese censorship is especially strict. It's considered one of the worst state censorship models in the world. The Chinese Communist Party monitors everything that comes out. They're very often concerned with curtailing political opposition and promoting Chinese nationalism—if you include more of it, you can get away with doing stuff they don't like. They want to prevent negative depictions of Chinese history. They're also very often just doing basic morality policing around sex, in particular. So, even in heterosexual romance media, this applies. You see very little sex in cdramas, even when they're het. Angle kisses, stuff like that still exist even in het media. Of course this is even more severe for queer media. Typically, you're not even gonna see things like onscreen kisses in queer media out of China. 

They also put limits on things like magic, which is very relevant for the story we're gonna talk about today. It has to be depicted so as to avoid seeming more powerful than the state or promoting superstition. This is very often why characters who use magic are not really allowed to have happy endings. You can't show a character thriving because of their use of magic in Chinese media. So sometimes magic is changed out completely in these stories for quasi-scientific explanations, or magic is used and then the characters have ambiguous or sad endings in order to counterbalance that.

On top of those censorship norms, there's also law around pornography. Pornography is completely illegal in China. Technically, since the mid 2010s, homosexuality is not criminalized legally anymore in China, but there are a lot of really vague laws that still exist around abnormal sexual behavior, quote unquote, and obscenity, quote unquote, that allow for queer media to be targeted by censors. 

In terms of Chinese BL shows, there were a handful of them prior to The Untamed that did make it to air. Most of them adapted from novels—we'll get a little bit more into that in a minute. In 2017, in the middle of the airing of Addicted, is when the censorship crackdown on BL really took shape. That show was very popular and was actually depicting things like kisses between men and it immediately got terminated, yanked off the air, and then the censorship laws got much stricter. 

Y'all probably remember that, NiNi and Ben. I think you were around in fandom when that went down.

Ben 

I sure was.

NiNi 

I wasn't quite there yet, I watched Addicted after the fact and I didn't have the context.

Shan 

You were confused, right? [laughs] You're like, why is this show such a big deal?

Ben 

Both of those guys kind of disappeared from acting for years afterwards. 

Shan 

They got blacklisted. 

Ben

They're only just now starting to work again.

Shan

Yeah. So that show got yanked off mid-airing right after the first kiss aired on TV. And then after that, you never saw anything like that. Even the few Chinese BLs that managed to get released after that, you don't see things like on air kisses or acknowledgement of sex at all. 

It's hard for a lot of these shows to get made in the first place. Even after they get made, a lot of them don't end up going to air or they start airing and then get yanked off TV very quickly. There are many, many danmei adaptations sitting on the shelf in China. There are shows that have been made and will never get released. It's a really rough environment for creators who are trying to make this queer content and get it out in the world.

Ben 

Let's add some additional context, if we can, about censorship outside of China. Since we have two Americans and two non-Americans here. 

Bookworm or NiNi, do you have any specific cultural memories of censorship in media from your home countries? ‘Cause I have a few American ones I will of course bitch about.

NiNi 

I'm gonna let Bookworm go first because India and censorship? This is a big one.

Bookworm 

I know, right. So in India, the most prominent kind of censorship that I've noticed in media is almost a self-censorship by the creators themselves around things that deal with caste or religion, and we very rarely get homosexual depictions, but whatever we do get, it's almost always a tragedy. I've never seen a gay character have a happy ending in Indian media yet. When we have inter-caste romance depiction, for example, the story will struggle between the realities of how caste can affect these relationships and how it will be received and how difficult their lives will be made, and giving them a happy ending. In India, even though openly we say that it's bad and we shouldn't be clinging to the caste systems now in the 21st century, it's still there. And even though it's not said out loud, most of the powerful media producers and people who can fund this, they tend to be people who are from upper caste. So, if you make something that is openly against their caste, it's just never gonna come out. 

So, when I watched The Untamed, it was very relatable to watch something where they wanted to do more, but you can see that they just can't.

NiNi 

In Trinidad, we don't have a very big recorded media tradition. A lot of our art is theatre-based. And you can find pretty much most things in the theatre, but it's mostly for comedy sake so there's a lot of sex farce, that kind of thing. In terms of recorded media there isn't that much, but what there is, you don't really see, like, actors kiss that much. But that’s not a censorship thing because t's not like they would not be able to air that. It's just a question of the traditions being different. There's no standards boards or things like that, but we don't put very much on the air anyway.

Ben 

In America they would just lie. 

NiNi 

All men do is lie. [laughs]

Ben

They pretend that the advertisers or the nebulous white midwesterner won't want to watch things like Pose, or if a gay actor says something out of line they hurriedly cancel their show despite the show being really fucking good. Having to pick up the scraps that the establishment here is willing to make each year is incredibly frustrating. There's a lot to be said about top-down state level censorship, but I don't think it's inherently worse or better than this.

Shan 

Well yeah, there's state censorship and then there's censorship due to trying to attract sponsors and advertising dollars. But it ends up in the same kind of results of not having honest depictions in media. And I think American media is very susceptible to the latter.

NiNi 

There's also some interesting things there between how sex is censored and how violence is censored in Western media. I wouldn't say that it's not censored, but you can get away with a lot more violence than you can with sex.

Ben 

I have a lot of feelings about the MPAA, so we're not gonna get into that, but let's just point out that you can have somebody run through a building shooting up everybody and get a PG-13 rating as long as there's no blood. But if two gay people even look at each other too long, that's an R rating immediately.

Shan 

Rated R, mmhmm. This stuff is not new, it is not unique to any one country, it exists everywhere. But currently, in 2025, China has one of the strictest state censorship models. And so that's the context under which Chinese BL is made. And, the context under which The Untamed was released.

00:14:54 - The Mo Dao Zu Shi Phenomenon

Ben 

All right, now let's get into Mo Dao Zu Shi properly. This has been around for awhile.

Shan 

So, danmei is the term that is meant to describe Chinese literature that features male/male romance within a whole bunch of different genres. It's a very broad term, danmei. It just means male/male romance. These typically are published as web novels, usually serialized, written mostly by and targeted mostly to a female audience. 

Danmei exists in a kind of a gray space legally in China. It's both queer and pornographic, so it's technically not allowed, but there's not really an enforcement mechanism. The authors stay anonymous because of course, if they're caught publishing this stuff, there could be serious repercussions. 

A lot of danmei novels have become available in recent years to an international audience. First, via fan translations that were done just purely out of love. And then those translations got passed around via the online whisper network of international folks who were interested in these stories. And this genre became so popular that there are now official English translations of some of these books being made. There's a publishing company called Seven Seas that has acquired the rights for many of the most popular danmeis and are publishing them over time. And so that is how this book, Mo Dao Zu Shi, aka Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation, became much more widely available to an English speaking audience. 

This book originally started in 2015 and the writer is Mo Xiang Tong Xiu. It was so popular that it has been, over the years, translated into over a dozen languages. It was first passed around the international audience via a very popular fan translation, and then became officially published in English starting in 2021. Made the New York Times bestseller list, expanded the audience for this story even further. This is a story that is set in a genre called xianxia which is a popular Chinese media genre about humans in historical China who are called cultivators, which basically means that they do martial arts enhanced by magic. They have paranormal, spiritual, physical powers that help them achieve immortality.

This story was so popular that it's had a bunch of adaptations. It's had a webcomic, an audio drama, an animated series and a spinoff to that, an audio book, a mobile game, and of course, The Untamed, the live action show, which we are gonna be discussing today. And there are additional adaptations still being announced. We just found out that there's gonna be a Japanese stage adaptation in the theater, which I'm very curious to see what that's gonna be like. 

So this is an extremely popular story that has really gone global through fan word of mouth. It's a huge deal in terms of its reach and its enduring popularity with fans.

Ben 

You have no idea how much time Shan and Bookworm spent trying to get all of these notes in order. 

Shan 

It's a lot to cover! 

Ben

[laughs] We had a whole side thing with Twig about, like, a canceled international tour that was gonna happen before COVID.

Shan

I didn't even know about that.

Ben 

Let’s establish when everybody came to this. So, I came to The Untamed through normal Tumblr BL sphere around episode 25ish of the drama, I believe? 

Ben

Shan, when did you come to The Untamed?

Shan 

It's hard for me to remember now. I've been so up in this story’s business for years now that it's really hard for me to actually untangle in my brain when I got to certain versions of it and how. But I didn't watch it live. I definitely binged it after the whole thing was out. So I think I probably first watched the series in 2020 or 2021, read the novel and then watched the series again. I was watching a lot of Asian dramas. I had started getting into BL and Netflix just told me to watch this. They put it right on top and I was like, “oh this is interesting, I haven't seen anything quite like this before.” It's kind of remarkable that I'm just sitting over here in the United States and Netflix is telling me to watch this Chinese BL web series. 

This aired in China on Tencent Video. But it was so, so popular. It became one of the highest earning dramas of 2019. Over time, it passed 10 billion views. Netflix picked it up in late 2019, brought it to a much broader international audience. And that's how people like me saw it. This is a story that in both novel and show form spread fiercely by word of mouth. People just loved it so much that it kept getting picked up and brought to new audiences.

When did you first hear about this show, Bookworm?

Bookworm

I think I was just vaguely aware of a very long Chinese drama that was on Netflix. I possibly could have seen it on my recommendations before getting into watching BL at all. I started watching BL only in 2022. So I definitely was not in the fandom when this released live. 

So how I was introduced to this, the time was December 2023. And I just went to Shan’s DMs to talk about how my BTS bias was going to the military. And she was like, here you go. 

Shan 

Something to distract you. [laughs]

Bookworm 

“Here's a picture of this man who's so beautiful and always wears white for some reason. You can think about this man.” And it was like, “what do I do to know more about this man?” And she was like, “I know exactly where I should send you.” And she just directed me to all the books. So yeah, that's how I spent my 2023 holidays, just locked in my room like a gremlin inhaling all the books.

[Ben laughs]

Shan 

I did not remember that I showed you Wangji because V was going to the military. [laughs]

Bookworm

That's exactly what happened. You trapped a freshly grieving army wife!

NiNi 

it just amazes me how Shan is so good at tempting people. She knows exactly how to get people to do things. It's a little bit scary.

Bookworm 

The whole thing was done in 10 days. I genuinely don't think I slept for more than maybe four to five hours. [laughs]

Ben 

[laughs] You did not. You were talking to us in a haze. You screaming about sections.

Shan 

The thing about Bookworm is she also likes to live blog her book reading. So we were along for the ride. [laughs]

Bookworm 

That's right. Every time something happened, I bothered them. It's kind of their fault. Shan put me through it. Like, she has to suffer.

Shan 

I had to be there for emotional support after doing that to you.

Bookworm 

Exactly.

NiNi 

That's the thing, Shan's gonna, like, be the temptress that is seducing you with the apple, but then she'll be right there with you when you fall apart. [laughs]

Bookworm

Exactly.

Shan 

It's my duty.

Ben

NiNi, what did you know about this whole experience from just sort of seeing it in the background noise of BL constantly for the last five years before you sat down and engaged with it?

NiNi 

So I don't think it's any surprise to anybody who listens to this show that I don't watch cdrama, but this show is sort of inescapable. I have friends who are not BL fans, who are not Asian drama fans, who watch this and rave about it and talk about it all the time. This thing is a fucking monster and completely inescapable. And I was just like, “eh yes, I know everybody says it's good. It probably is really good. I don't know how I feel about censorship like this. I don't know if this is something I wanna watch, if it's gonna frustrate me.” I was aware of it out there in the world and aware of how big it was. But, “eh, not sure it's for me.” And then after the Diamond League, I was basically Shan’d into watching it. [laughs]

We're gonna use Shan’d from now on, like to Shan somebody.

Bookworm 

That is a good verb. We are gonna use that.

NiNi 

We're gonna coin a new term, to Shan somebody.

Shan 

I'm just here to enrich your lives with this amazing media that you need to see. And NiNi ended up enjoying this way more than I thought she would. So I was very pleased.

Ben 

We're gonna jump ahead slightly and tell on NiNi. NiNi is now watching Word of Honor.

[all laugh]

Shan 

She sure is!

Bookworm 

She is!

NiNi

I am. [laughs]

Shan

The evil plan is proceeding very nicely.

NiNi 

I will say though, Word of Honor is like the Passions to the Days of Our Lives that is The Untamed. 

Shan 

Yes! 

NiNi

And anybody who does not understand what that means, I'm so sorry for you.

Shan

It's exactly right.

Bookworm 

It's me. I'm the one who doesn't understand what that means, but it's fine.

Shan 

These are American soap operas that NiNi is referencing.

Ben

American soaps that have been on forever.

[Ben and Shan laugh]

NiNi 

Basically, Days of Our Lives is wild, Passions is lower quality and wilder.

Shan 

This show, this story, the book, all of it. It's ubiquitous if you hang out in fandom spaces online. You cannot avoid it if you are in those spaces. It is one of the biggest fandoms. It's certainly the biggest BL fandom on the internet.

Ben 

When we watched this in 2019, I was minding my own business, watchin’ shit like Until We Meet Again and Trapped. And then they started posting all these gif sets of all these Chinese boys with really long wigs and very clean outfits. There was a lot of screaming. I'm like, what the fuck is going on? Why is every goddamn lesbian on tumblr howling about this show?

Shan 

Why are the girls freaking out?

NiNi

And we all know from listening to this show that Ben listens when lesbians talk.

Shan 

That's right.

Ben 

I was like, I don't know what is happening, but every goddamn girl in BL is losing their minds over a censored Chinese BL in 2019. Have we not learned? [laughs] And they wouldn't shut the fuck up about it. And I'm like, all right, that's enough. Around episode 20 to 25. 

I got intrigued by the Bonds Between Men stuff. There are some gif sets at the time. Like, this looks like Man Angst. Hold on, I'm intrigued now. Let me go check this out. 

I remember going through The Untamed loop. Being kind of overwhelmed with details in the first few episodes. And then we went, “okay, we're in a flashback sequence. Guess we'll be here for like an episode or two.” We weren't. And then I ended up catching up with where the show was around episode 38, which was great timing for me. Like, I ended up catching up to the show right around the time we got into the present. And I was like, “I have context’ and then watched the rest of the show [laughs] live with everybody else and had a pretty good time. And then like a week after it finished, I ended up watching the show again. Because I feel like I needed to reprocess it.

I don't think I was prepared for how sticky the show has been for fandom itself. I guess I shouldn't have been because fandom really loves to fill in the blanks on stuff. That's their favorite thing. I grew up watching a lot of Chinese action and a lot of wuxia films, so I had a good time, but I was not expecting this to be the show for everyone. I like the show a fair amount, but I was very surprised by this becoming one of the biggest BLs of all time.

Shan 

It's not only the fill in the blank stuff, but it's also that there's just so many characters, so many relationships, so many dynamics that are just great fodder for meta and fanfic and just, thinking. There's just so much here and I think that's why it has endured for so long.

00:28:42 - The Big Picture

Ben

Okay, we are going to now attempt to talk about the show.

NiNi 

I'm glad you said attempt, bestie, because there's just so much here.

Shan 

Please don't get mad at us for whatever we inevitably leave out.

Ben 

Let's just get that out of the way. We will not be able to discuss everything that happens in a 50 episode drama adapted from a five book complex novel series. We will be covering some highlights of things that are interesting to us and doing some comparisons along the way.

This is a pretty big story and at its core, it's a mystery. So, if you've been holding off on watching this and you feel some kind of way about spoiler culture—I personally don't subscribe to it—but we will be talking about the details of this show for the rest of the episode. So, if you'd like to resume this later, go ahead and pause, grab a shit ton of snacks, go watch The Untamed, [laughs] and then come back.

[all laugh]

Bookworm 

Be prepared to not sleep for a long time.

NiNi

Two weeks is the bare minimum. 

Ben 

You have been warned. All right. So, The Untamed is primarily a story about a talented young cultivator named Wei Wuxian who was kind of in a high ranking role within one of these major clans that organize themselves around cultivation. They have a role in their society where they help manage supernatural phenomena and protect regular people from supernatural and ghost related bullshit. 

There is an expected way that you're supposed to practice and study cultivation. The most powerful clan who wears a lot of red is like, “that's it, we're taking over everything,” and then begins murdering everyone. A lot of things happen. Wei Wuxian ends up developing demonic cultivation in the book, rediscovers it in the show—we'll talk about that later—and helps the not-red clan defeat them, after which we end up in the complex politics that follow after a major power shift. 

Eventually Wei Wuxian dies in a major confrontation after he kills thousands of people, and then 16 years later in the show, he is brought back, reuniting with some of his close friends and allies—because this is a BL romance/not romance—as they go on an investigation to figure out why this cursed hand is trying to kill everybody. 

That is the simplest overview I can give of a very complicated show.

Shan 

You did good, bestie. That's about the best you could do.

NiNi 

I did not look at the timer when you started talking, so I do not know exactly how long that took.

Ben

It was about three minutes. I was trying to do it under three. There are a shit ton of characters in this. Wei Wuxian is a very likable protagonist with very clear relationship dynamics with every character. So there's a lot to really dig into.

Shan 

I think you should reiterate for folks what the experience of watching The Untamed is like. There's this very famous tweet that I think we should give some credit to that described it perfectly.

Ben 

We'll post the screenshot and a link to it in the transcript. Gavia Baker Whitelaw, is a film critic who runs her own podcast, she has her own Tumblr blog, I'll link to hers on here, she goes by @hellotailor. I'm a big fan of Gavia's writing, I really like the way she engages with media. Gavia went through the same experience as the rest of us in early 2020 of like, “what is this show?!” [laughs]

So Gavia starts watching The Untamed and is live blogging on Twitter. “What is this nonsense that I'm watching? What is happening?” And the user who went by Dr. Kate Wild at the time writes, “There's three stages to watching The Untamed. Stage one, this is nonsense. This is very bad.”

That's like episodes one and two.

“Stage two, this is quite watchable nonsense.” That's around episodes four to eight. 

And then “Stage three, I have never cared about anything more in my life.” [NiNi laughs] That happens for different people at different times. 

Shan

NiNi, it was taking her a while to get to stage three. And I said, “Don't worry, NiNi. Stage three comes for all of us at different times. You will get there.” And she did. [laughs]

Ben 

When was stage three for you, Shan?

Shan 

Okay, so first of all, I am a Lan Wangji devotee. I love that man. He owns my heart. So from episode one, as soon as he appeared, I was like, “okay, hell yeah, that's my guy. I'm here, I'm seated.” But in terms of when the story kinda took over my brain, I think that really happened for me during the arc where Wei Wuxian is liberating the Wen prisoners of war and he meets Lan Wangji on the Qiongqi Path in the rain and they have a very sad and tense conversation before Wangji decides to let him leave with the prisoners, but does not leave with him. 

That scene—which by the way is unique to the show—just drilled itself into my brain so deep and I was never normal again, ever, and I never will be. That was the point when stage three took root for me and I became obsessed with this media, and that obsession will last for my whole life.

Ben 

I think it was during the cave arc when Wei Wuxian made Lan Wangji vomit blood. I'm like, “that's way too fucking gay. I have to watch this little man for the rest of the show.” [laughs] 

Shan 

I feel like most people are super in by that sequence, too.

Ben

That whole section is pretty good though, between the handling of the hostage arc, the blow up in the cave, and then the sacking of Lotus Pier. That's a really strong section for people who really like historical political dramas. There's a really strong sense of inevitability at the point at which Wei Wuxian in particular is thrust into the situation, because he's not a passive person. But you can feel the next 15 episodes about to unfold.

Shan 

What about you, Bookworm?

Bookworm 

For me I think it's different because I read the books first and the books are structured quite differently from how the show is structured. So the show does it very linear. Once you jump into the flashbacks you just keep going for 33 episodes and then you emerge, as Ben said, with context. But in the books it interweaves between the present and the flashbacks and the structure kind of gives way to the author releasing information in like very small amounts to keep the tension and intrigue going. 

I'm just the kind of person who starts screaming from the very first moment a question appears on my book or on my show. Like if there is something that needs to be revealed, I need to have it. Just tell me. I don't care if it's a 50 episode show, I don't care if it's a 10 book series. I just start vibrating from the moment I see the puzzle that needs to be solved. 

So in the books, Wei Wuxian, when he's in Mo Xuanyu’s body, people are not gonna recognize him as Wei Wuxian. So he was just like coasting on that and he was doing all sorts of shenanigans with Lan Zhan. But we get to a point where Lan Zhan calls him Wei Ying and he just freezes and he's like, how did you know that it was me? And Lan Zhan just tells him, “You're gonna have to think for yourself.” And that's it. That was stage three.

Shan 

Classic. And that dynamic keeps coming up over and over again through the whole story.

Bookworm 

I was like, “oh my god, how did he know? Just tell me, just tell me!” So that was my stage three. 

What about you, NiNi? 

Shan 

NiNi’s came later, right?

NiNi 

Mine came very late. Stage three for me came when Wei Wuxian is hanging off the cliff and Lan Zhan is trying to save him. And this implacable man just breaks and his face just completely changes. And I'm just like, “okay, I'm in.” 

Shan 

Yeah, it was definitely Lan Zhan’s emotional break for you, right?

NiNi 

Oh, most definitely. From the outside, he appears controlled, even though it's very clear to anybody who's watching this show that this man is losing his mind at all times. And in this case, he just cracks. Because he's about to lose this man and he knows it. And that's when I was just like, “okay, I'm in.”

00:39:30 - The First Life

Ben 

We gotta get into the overall set of arcs that we went through in the show. Wei Wuxian is our viewpoint character and we've gotten really caught up in the romance between him and Wangji. But at the core, this is a political power drama where there's a lot of different players vying for control. Wei Wuxian is the wild card because he actually doesn't value political power that much. We at least need to establish, like, what does everybody else give a shit about.

Shan 

We're gonna divide this because there's two different time periods. So let's start with the first life of Wei Wuxian, the first time period. 

When the show starts, we are dropped into the story in a very confusing manner. Wei Wuxian is resurrected. He's in a new body 16 years after he died. He doesn't know why the fuck he's back or what's going on. He runs into lots of friends and allies and enemies and frenemies and he is running around like a chicken with his head cut off. He's confused. We're confused. You're not really supposed to understand what's going on in those first couple episodes, but there's actually a ton of information packed into them. As Ben said, once you have context, if you go back and watch them, there's so much information in those first couple episodes.

NiNi 

This is the “this is nonsense” stage.

Shan 

Exactly. This is the stage one. Where you're like, “What the fuck is going on? Why are all these people running around like this? I don't understand anything.” [laughs] It's intended to be kind of disorienting. 

Then you jump into this long flashback, which is about 30 episodes long. So you get the political power struggle between the great clans. There are five of them: the Jiang which Wei Wuxian is part of, the Lan, which Lan Wangji is part of, the Nie, the Jin, the Wen. That main political power struggle is driven by the Wens trying to do a hostile takeover of the other clans. They burn the Cloud Recesses, they storm the Unclean Realm, they sack Lotus Pier, and then the war—the Sunshot Campaign—is a response to that, the other clans joining hands to try to stop the Wens from trying to take over the cultivation world. Lots of complex dynamics between the clans going on there that we will not get into that culminates in this Battle of Nightless City.

Alongside that political power struggle, we have Wei Wuxian's rise to power and his fall from grace. He is incredibly smart. He's a cultivation prodigy. He is also not as reverent about the traditional ways of doing things. He's very interested in unorthodox cultivation methods, including demonic cultivation, which is very much looked down on. As the war played out and as the Wens take control, he was part of fighting them alongside his struggles with controlling his own power. He took great exception to the aftermath of the war, the treatment of the Wen prisoners of war, the more innocent Wen clan members who were not part of this, who are just regular folks or weak cultivators, medical cultivators who didn't actually hurt anyone but were treated badly because they were Wens by the other clans. So he intervened to protect those folks. That is what led to him retreating from the cultivation world to the Burial Mounds to live with the Wens, resurrecting Wen Ning and ultimately setting himself up to be a scapegoat and get ambushed by the other clans, because they were very unhappy with him.

Alongside that, we have a couple very personal storylines going on. One to do with Wei Wuxian's family relationships and the implosion of his clan family, the Jiang family. They are his adopted family, the heir, who is Jiang Cheng, and sister Jiang Yanli, these are his adoptive siblings. It's a very fraught family relationship. His adoptive mother resents him partly because of who his mother is and partly because he outshines her son, the sect heir. When Lotus Pier—their family home—is attacked, both of the Jiang parents die. The clan is basically decimated, Jiang Cheng loses his core, and Wei Wuxian decides to pull a real big noble idiocy. Sacrifice his own life, basically, for his brother, give him his core, tell nobody he did this, and then start cultivating on the demonic path to try to come up with another source of power as part of his survival. His relationship with his brother is, in particular, one of the most interesting and dynamic and complicated relationships of the show. And he has a very, very deep love for his adoptive sister, which of course ends up coming back to bite him when, as a result of him losing control of his powers and starting this battle at Nightless City, his sister is killed in the chaos. Huge traumatic event, causes him to go off the deep end and destroys his relationship with his brother. 

Alongside all that, one more big storyline, of course, is the unfulfilled romance between Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji. We get alongside all this political power struggle stuff, some actually really lovely moments of them. First, meeting each other as teens, Wei Wuxian very infatuated with Lan Zhan right from the beginning, but didn't really understand what his feelings meant. Lan Wangji, of course, did understand what the feelings meant [laughs] and was not happy about it. 

NiNi 

Oh he was so mad, friend. He was so pissed. He's like, “Why do I like this wastrel?”

[NiNi and Shan laugh]

Shan 

“Goddamn it! Why is it you?” 

So yeah, big gay panic on poor Wangji's side and big oblivious nonsense on Wuxian’s side. But then we see them over time bond over their shared values. They actually believe in a lot of the same core ideas. They end up doing adventures together. They defeat bad guys together. They survive together and support each other. They kind of develop, like, a deep friendship that on Wangji's side is always very consciously also romantic love and on Wuxian's side is a little bit more oblivious. 

When Wuxian loses his core and starts doing demonic cultivation, there is a divide that comes between them. Wangji does not understand these decisions. Wuxian will not tell him why he's doing any of this stuff. So they end up in this very tense dynamic where they're fighting all the time, but they don't wanna be fighting because they really care about each other. They spend some time together and attempt to reconnect, but of course everything ends in despair when Wei Wuxian basically jumps off the cliff after his sister dies at Nightless City and gives up on his life. And that is how the first life arc completes.

00:46:32 - The First Life: Thoughts and Impressions

Ben 

What I think works well with the drama, I personally like dropping us in and just being like, there's a lot of shit going on. You guys are gonna have to figure out a lot of shit over time. And I actually, in retrospect, like the very long 30-something episode flashback sequence. I think if they had tried to maintain the back and forth nature of the source material, the audience who maybe missed an episode or two here or there would be confused as hell. 

I also think it's a pretty clever choice because you start in the present and there's way too much shit going on. And then they flash back like, “so anyway, they're in school.” And everybody's like, “okay, I understand school. Let's meet some kids.” I think that's a really smart adaptation choice. Everybody may not understand what's going on in the world of cultivation, but everybody knows what it's like to be bored in a classroom with a stuffy old man telling you to write a bunch of rules down.

NiNi 

I kinda had the opposite reaction. I understand why they structured the story the way that they did, but for me, if they had started at Cloud Recesses, I would have been fine. And I feel like I would have had less of a who's on first kind of thing going. It took me a really long time to clue into what the story was even doing, because I was so confused. I didn't even understand that the Cloud Recesses stuff was a flashback at first. To me, if they had done the story more linearly, I would have gotten it. I understand why they did it the way that they did to set up a hook and to do this reverberation throughout the story of showing that these things happen over and over again. But for me, I would have been fine with a more linear narrative.

Shan 

Part of that is also just your unfamiliarity with cdrama tropes and, like, the signifiers of things like age and timeline shifts and class stuff. One thing I think is really funny, NiNi, is that you cued in so quickly to what the hair was telling you, which I thought was just so funny. [laughs]

NiNi 

This is the only reason I survived. I was reading the show and all the characters through the hairstyles. So I saw Wei Wuxian and his wild little tendrils and I was like, “okay, this guy's a rebel.” And then Lan Wangji with his very structured beehive. I was like, “okay, I know who you are, sir.” And then all the different characters, depending on how their hair was styled, I could get a sense of who they were as a character. If this person is mischievous, if they're playful, if they're, like, rules focused, I could get all of that through the hair. So that was actually really good. [laughs]

I could not remember anybody's names for the longest time. So I was in, like, the chat saying, “what is Beehive doing?” Or “Tendrils is acting a fool today.” And they would know exactly what I was talking about.  [laughs]

Shan 

It really worked for you. 

NiNi

It really did work.

Shan

NiNi was tracking as Wangji's beehive was getting bigger and bigger.

NiNi 

It was massive at one point. I was like, “oh, you are really trying to intimidate people now with this.” Like, that's what's happening here.

Shan 

It's true. Like, their hair changes with their status and with their age, right? So as Wangji attains higher status in the cultivation world, his hair pieces get more elaborate and huge. It's actually a very effective visual language.

NiNi 

It's like the Texas rule: the higher the hair, the closer to God.

Ben 

I mean, you're genuinely not wrong.

Shan 

No, it's real. I'm something that cued for you.

NiNi 

It really paid off for me at the end when Wangji comes to Wei Wuxian and his hair is all down and soft. I'm like, “oh my God, he's so in love.” 

Shan 

That's when NiNi just started melting. 

NiNi 

I did, I absolutely did. He had no beehive. He was entirely defenseless, basically, in front of this man. It's a great visual language for when you have this censorship that you can't say certain things and show certain things. Showing what was happening between the characters through the hair was very effective. For me, anyway.

Bookworm 

One of the key moments when NiNi really queued into the beehive and the tendrils thing was when, after Wei Wuxian was thrown into the Burial Mounds and Jiang Cheng and Lan Wangji was searching for him, he just walked up to the Wen headquarters and the reveal was just slowly, you see his hair and then he just keeps walking with his sword out and NiNi just was like, “Oh, he has the biggest hive I've ever seen. You guys are done for.” [laughs]

NiNi

Like, these motherfuckers are dead! 

Bookworm

Dead.

NiNi

His beehive is up there, okay—

Shan 

Beehive is up. The sword is out.

NiNi 

He came to kill somebody, that's what's happening right now. [laughs]

Ben 

I think what works so well for me with the show and especially on, like, secondary or tertiary watches, is because you start off being told this is a tragedy. It, I think, puts you in the right mood when you're watching the past stuff. The show opens with people literally fighting each other for a plot token. We're watching cultivators in the midst of a crisis literally stab each other to grasp what they hope will make them stronger than other people. So we're ready for everything that's gonna go wrong because of the opening sequence. It's very well structured and why I think the show got away with so much. We know Wei Wuxian’s gonna die. We know that his brother is gonna be furious with him at his death and we know that this guy who's wearing all these white clothes is gonna be very upset about it when that happens. This set me up very well to anticipate a lot of what was coming.

You end up meeting all these characters in the past and then some of these people are just straight up dead 16 years later. And it's like, well, how did these people die? I thought the war was over. And this leads to the next phase of power play stuff that's happening.

00:53:00 - The First Life: WangXian and Other Fucked Up Love Stories

Ben

While this drama is censored, there is all sorts of really fucked up gay energy all over this story. 

Shan 

Let's talk about how impressively they managed to communicate the romance without being able to show anything explicit.

NiNi 

The romances, because I clocked about four romances in this thing and I was told that I was correct, so I'm so proud of myself. [Nandy and Shan laugh] There's two het romances and two queer romances. The het romances are between Jiang Yanli and Jin Zixuan—

Ben 

I love that they low-key hated their brother-in-law. [NiNi laughs] Like, that's such an appropriate brother experience.

NiNi 

There was nothing low-key about it, bestie. High-key hated. 

Shan 

Zixuan is very immature. He likes Yanli, but he's embarrassed that he likes her. And so he's kind of mean to her. And she, for some fucking reason that I never understood, just really likes him anyway. Which is why her brothers hate him. They do eventually get married and for their extremely brief marriage seem to be happy together.

NiNi 

So brief, so sad. We'll get into that a little bit later.

Ben 

Their marriage is arranged originally by their parents because their families have been allies for at least a generation or two and this is an attempt to strengthen that, and so the parents want these two kids to like each other. It's actually beneficial for the political goals of the families that in the end the kids actually do like each other. But there's complications. People never understand Wei Wuxian's relationship with Yanli, people constantly misread his relationship with her. And then there's the genuine issue of of Jiang Cheng and Wei Wuxian fucking despising Zixuan for being such a dick to their sister all the time.

NiNi 

I keep thinking about the whole inn thing where he takes over the entire inn and they can't even get a room. It's so fucking dumb. And he's such an asshole about it. [laughs]

Bookworm 

This is the storyline where I was glad that this was here because amongst all the fighting and the flying and the magical shit happening, like fighting a giant tortoise and being generals in war and all of that, this is where you're like, “oh, they're teenagers. Oh, they're so stupid.” [laughs]

NiNi

That's so true! 

Shan 

It's a good reminder that they’re all teenagers.

Bookworm 

Every time Jiang Yanli gives a pass to that man, I'm like, “oh my god. What?”

Ben 

I'm like, “girl, him, really?”

NiNi

You're like, Yanli, stand up! Stand up, girl.

Shan

It gets even wilder in the context of the political power struggle going on and the scapegoating of Wei Wuxian because that's her fucking brother and the Jins are going after him! So it's very wild to me that Yanli decides to marry into the family that is actively hunting her brother. Like, girl.

Ben 

I get the sense that she never understood how serious that was and I think she felt like her one big tantrum solved the problem.

Shan 

I do think that they set this character up well for that to be believable. She is not a strong cultivator. She is not very involved in sect politics. She is a very caring person who just loves who she loves and doesn't really want to deal with the idea that they won't get along. So she just doesn't allow it to be true in her head. And Wei Wuxian loves her. So, he was never going to say to her, “I don't want you to marry that man who's trying [laughs] to hunt me.” Because he wants her to be happy. 

I think her character makes sense. But she's a character that I can never personally get on board with, because I'm just like, “girl, your choices are so bad.” 

Ben 

I feel for her the same way I feel about the messy hets in Coffee Prince. Like, we needed, like, another like pat but tragic het story to make sure that we could get away with this very queer story.

Shan 

That's a good segue to talk about the other very subtle mini romance between Jiang Cheng and Wen Qing. Not in the books, by the way, this was added only for the show. And I think Ben, when we were watching, you commented that you thought it was really there to add an additional layer of heterosexual plausibility and plausible deniability for the show.

NiNi 

I feel like that was part of it, yes, but that is also a romance that doesn't happen. Jiang Cheng is definitely in love with Wen Qing. Wen Qing feels sort of the same, but Wen Qing is also an incredibly practical woman and Jiang Cheng is not saying anything that is going to help her. Like at one point, after everything's gone down with the Wen clan he was just like, “You should leave your clan.” Which is basically him asking her to marry him, and she's like “Dude, really? How do you think this is gonna go? My clan killed your parents, you are the heir and then you're going to bring me there as your wife? That's not gonna work.”

Shan 

I thought it was a really good way to illustrate the rock and hard place that Jiang Cheng was between for all of this show. 

NiNi 

Oh my god, I love this character.

Shan 

Right? He did care about the Wens. He did wanna help. But politically, there was only so much he could do and what he could do was not enough. He knew that. She knew that. They had to accept that. Given the circumstances he was in with a mostly decimated clan, very young and suddenly thrust into having to lead and rebuild the Jiangs, he just didn't have the power and the resources to do something like offer protection to the Wens. He couldn't do it. And he was not willing to risk the total decimation of his clan in order to try.

That's why he and Wei Wuxian ultimately broke, right? Wei Wuxian knew that. Which is why he left the clan to do it on his own. It's really good conflict because you can see that people care and they wanna try, but they just can't do what they think they should or what they want to. Wuxian did do those things and he paid for it, big time.

Ben 

See, and this is why I like it so much. If we're gonna have to do gay tragedy in a story, I need hets to suffer too. [laughs] Nobody's happy! The Jiang family relationship sucks. The leader of the Jin clan is a womanizer and an abuser who doesn't give a shit about all of his bastards he leaves all over the place. He's a gross, nasty man. The only happy heterosexuals we had died within a year of having their baby. 

Ope, nope that's not fair. Mianmian’s doing okay. Good for her.

Bookworm

Mianmian’s doing great. How dare you! [Ben laughs]

Shan 

She's the one happy het person in this show. [NiNi laughs] She's the one.

Bookworm 

The only sensible one.

NiNi 

Because—

Ben 

She supported the gays. 

NiNi

Mianmian stood up for the gays, exactly.

Ben

That's right!

Bookworm 

Yes!

Shan 

And because she left the clan. She said, “Fuck this shit, I'm goin’ rogue” and did her own thing.

Ben

One of the reasons why I think some of the other censored stuff fails is they just don't have enough hetero plausible deniability in them. You have to give the straight audience a bone if you're trying to get stuff past the powers that be. 

Shan 

Let's talk about the third love story that is technically never explicitly confirmed in book canon, but that's in my opinion only because the book is from Wuxian's point of view and he doesn't have the visibility to see it. That is, of course, Meng Yao and Lan Xichen.

NiNi 

My God.

NiNi

The most tragic of all the tragedies.

Bookworm 

Oh no! No no no!

Shan 

Go off, Bookworm.

Bookworm 

I just don't agree with the tragic part of it because for somebody in Lan Xichen’s position, he is so oblivious. He was played like a fiddle by this man. This is, like, dialed to a hundred in the show because the way Meng Yao was played in the show, you see him on screen just smirking around. And I'm like, “This man, he doesn't have good intentions. You can't trust him!”

NiNi 

For me, that's the tragedy. The visual language and everything, like the acting is telling me this is a villain. But I trust Lan Xichen so much that when Lan Xichen trusts Meng Yeo, at first I'm just like, okay, well, there must be a reason. If he trusts him, maybe I'm reading this all wrong or maybe this is a plot because he trusts him so completely. And he is destroyed for that in the end. Like, absolutely destroyed.

Shan 

I actually love that reflection, NiNi. I think that's a really fair way to read it.

Bookworm 

I just want to quickly add that NiNi basically got Nie Mingjue’d into this. Like she basically did the same thing that Nie Mingjue did.

Shan 

[laughs] That's really true. Nie Mingjue, their other sworn brother, who goes along with trusting Meng Yao—even though he clearly doesn't—only because Xichen asks him to.

Bookworm 

And then he got his head chopped off for it!

NiNi 

He got got. [laughs]

Ben 

It's so fun watching people watch this show. NiNi's like, “ooh, I love this Dimples of Doom boy.” And I'm like, okay, she's falling for the dimples. And then he stabs the battalion commander in the middle of a battle. And NiNi's like, “oh, I guess I can't like this boy anymore.” [laughs]

NiNi 

Then he had a really good explanation for it. And I was just like, “okay, maybe I can.” This is the thing!

Shan

He's good at what he does.

Bookworm 

She saw that man stab the commander and then Mingjue called him into the room to throw him out of the sect, and do you remember what NiNi said? She said, “Can you at least treat this man for the stab wound before you throw him out of the sect?”

[all laugh]

NiNi 

By the end, I was like, no, you should have killed him. Banishment was too good. You would have saved a lot of people if you had just killed this man in that moment.

Ben 

I do not feel sorry for Xichen, because there were so many signs and he actively ignored all of them.

Bookworm 

Yes.

Shan 

We'll get into the second life arc, but like it took until the very, very end for him to accept, despite all the evidence he saw, despite everything he witnessed over two decades of being friends with this man. 

To be clear, Meng Yao, who becomes Jin Guangyao when he moves up in the world, he's married to a woman. But Xichen is basically in this hopeless love with him. They're both clan leaders. They cannot become a couple in a real way, because of their position in society. And because of that love, he is so susceptible to manipulation. He just believes whatever Meng Yao tells him, even if it doesn't make sense. He will believe Meng Yao's words over his own lyin’ eyes. 

Ben 

Wangji and Wei Wuxian: “We have evidence that this man is the most evil.” Xichen: “Okay, but have you considered that I love him? Jot that down.”

[all laugh]

Bookworm 

Oh, I hate him!

Shan 

That is exactly what it is! It’s so wild.

Bookworm 

Oh, my god.

NiNi 

That is not even an exaggeration, that is almost exactly how it goes down.

Bookworm 

I think it's a good connective theme between all three of these romances, that people have their own ways to separate the politics of the person that they like. And when they want to protect them, do they wanna choose diplomacy, do they wanna choose brute force, do they wanna choose compromise, what route do they take? You can see that Jiang Cheng, when he came to the proposal, he must know that that's not gonna happen. But you can see that there is this need to protect this woman who he knows is innocent. He also knows that he has this huge weight of clan politics, that he's now the clan leader and his clan is severely wounded and he has to make responsible choices to weigh between whether I choose my clan or whether I choose to do everything I could to protect this person, which is what I want to do in my heart.

My problem with Xichen is he doesn't really separate what the politics or the clan is going through and what Meng Yao is basically feeding him. You shouldn't be this gullible to a person who is basically another important figure in another clan that you know is doing just shady shit. You know they're having prisoners of war. You saw them use them for target practice. You saw them abuse the prisoners of war, beat them and kill them and all of that and this man is a part of that clan. Not just a part, he is pretty high up in the ladder. 

Ben 

He's also a known spy.

Shan

Yes!

NiNi

Exactly! Precisely!

Bookworm

I know! Exactly!

Shan

You're right, Xichen does not have an excuse. He witnessed this stuff with his own eyes.

Ben 

I don't care how prettily he blinks in frustration. He's stupid. [laughs]

NiNi

Bookworm, I found what you just said really entirely fascinating because I think that one of the reasons, then, that Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji works is that neither of them are directly in line to take over the clans. Wei Wuxian is an adoptee. He's not ever gonna take over the Jiang clan. So he does in some ways have to make his own way. And Lan Wangji is the second son. He also has to go his own way. So the politics for them, they're still the politics of clan loyalty and all of that, but they don't have the leadership responsibilities that all these other romances are involved with. 

So what they can do and particularly what Lan Wangji can do to protect Wei Wuxian is far beyond what any of the other romances can do to compromise, protect, whatever. Lan Wangji just basically decides, that's my man, and nobody's gonna touch him. Even when I am mad at him, even when I don't understand what he's doing, nobody is touchin’ that man, ‘cause that's my man.

01:10:06 - The First Life: Various Random Musings

Ben 

Before we leave the first life stuff, let's do a couple of quick hits. Favorite moments from the first life, starting with the school shit through the Battle of Nightless City.

Shan

My favorite moments tend to be tied to Wangji, of course, and his emotional landscape. So, the standout moments that feel really crucial to his character arc are where he reaches this emotional cliff that he falls over, and that happens for him several times. It happens when he is sitting with Wei Ying making a lantern—

Ben 

I knew she was gonna fuckin' say that.

[Ben and NiNi laugh]

Shan 

—and he draws him a rabbit on the lantern, which makes him smile. But the more important moment there is that he listens as Wuxian makes a vow for how he wants to live his life. And Wangji turns to him and looks at him like, “oh shit, I see you. I understand you now.” He agrees with the morality of the values that he holds. And that's a huge moment for him. They were in this stage where Wuxian was being a pest and Wangji was having his little gay panic and they were kind of adversarial with each other. And that moment really shifted things for him emotionally where he was like, “I understand him. We are actually on the same page about the things that matter. And I cannot go back to not knowing that.”

And then, as they have their adventures together and they get to know each other better, moments like in the cave with the tortoise, where Wangji kind of explicitly acknowledges his romantic feelings—not in a way that Wuxian can understand and receive, but he definitely does. And then the rain scene on Qiongqi Path, when he makes a choice to not stop Wuxian from leaving with the Wen prisoners of war, but also not join him. I think that was a huge moment for him where he came up against his own limitations about what he felt he could do for Wuxian. He was not actually willing to break from his clan and help him, but he didn't stand in his way. 

And then of course that all culminates in his attempts to bring Wuxian back into the cultivation world that ultimately go sideways because of the machinations of the Jins, and the moment where he is forced to let him go when he is falling off the cliff. That is the moment where his heart just shatters. And then, we'll pick up with him 16 years later and all his regrets.

Ben 

Alright, Shan, no crying yet. 

Shan 

I'm doing great.

Bookworm

Bookworm!

Bookworm

I will fight Shan for Lan Wangji if I have to.

NiNi 

I think we all will.

Shan 

Don't even try it.

Bookworm 

Most of my favorite moments will also be tied to Wangji. Shan already mentioned a lot of them, but we still have a couple. After we see Wei Wuxian lose his core, get thrown in the Burial Mounds and learn demonic cultivation, when he shows up in that Yiling supervisory office wearing red eyeliner and a black robe on—

Shan

It just naturally goes on, the evil spirits put the eyeliner on. 

[NiNi laughs]

Ben

It’s one of the many ghosts in the sword.

[all laugh]

Bookworm

Just full emo get up and gets his revenge on Wen Chao while Lan Zhan and Jiang Cheng is watching. That scene was very well depicted, it was very well shot, was very well acted. I really liked the tension of Lan Wangji realizing that something is different and you can see his heartbreak, you can see him calculating what's going on. You can see him just being so happy to finally see Wei Wuxian. He was gone for months and he just showed up in the middle of a war. And my man wanted to just, I don't know, grab him and kiss, but no, this guy wanted to murder. That was his first priority and it broke him. That is one of my favorite moments. I mean, obviously, I'm very normal. It's fine.

[NiNi and Shan laugh]

There was the moment after the archery competition. Phoenix Mountain Hunt. We see Wei Wuxian just lounging in a tree and Lan Zhan shows up and they finally, finally have this conversation where they try to ease some of the tension that they've been holding because of Wei Ying’s, like, reticence to engage with Lan Zhan, when he asks what is wrong and Lan Zhan going insane basically trying to figure out what is happening with Wei Wuxian, why he's not following the sword path, why he has turned to demonic cultivation. I think that that is one of the iconic moments in the show and of course it has a whole discourse about the “soulmates” translation. 

Shan

I think the actual word is zhiji and it doesn't have a direct literal English translation. So, no translation is really capturing it correctly.

Bookworm 

But it was translated as, I think, soulmate for the show.

Shan

Lifelong bosom companion!

NiNi 

And they were roommates!

Ben 

He's my boon companion.

Bookworm 

I really liked that conversation and how it diffused a little bit of that tension that they were holding, and then of course everything goes to shit. But at least they were happy for a brief moment.

NiNi 

I think for me, there's three things that tie together into a line. The two caves and then when Lan Wangji meets Wei Wuxian in Yiling Town and he invites him to come back to the Burial Mounds for dinner.

Ben 

There were two caves! [laughs] Oh my god!

Shan 

There were, that's legit.

Ben 

Goddamn, there are a lot of caves in this fucking story.

Bookworm 

The caves belong to the gays. It is what it is.

NiNi 

I think those three points in the story form a very interesting line because the first cave is the Cold Pond Cave and they meet up with Lan Wangji's ancestor who developed the Lan clan's signature martial arts magic style and she basically explains to them their mission, what they have to do, this thing about the plot MacGuffin, the Yin Iron. But it's so interesting to me, when they came out of the cave, it's like Wei Wuxian instinctively understood that they don't tell anybody about what happened in the cave. I found that was an interesting change and dynamic to their relationship and also very gay. 

And then when they're trapped in the cave with the Tortoise of Slaughter—

Ben 

She really could not get over that fucking name.

NiNi

I could not. [Ben and Shan laugh] The Tortoise of Slaughter, okay. Yeah, so they're fighting this thing and Wei Wuxian basically goes into its shell and finds this sword which is the first step on the path to his demonic cultivation. Everything that happens from the moment he touches that sword took him directly to his break with all the clans and ending up in the Burial Mounds in the first place so that when they see each other after such a long time apart, after everything, and he's just like, “Hey friend, how are you? Come to dinner at my house. You're gonna go fight a monster? Fuck that. Come over.” It's, like, basically like the “Hey big head” text of all time. And I was completely into it. 

Ben 

Hold on, I just got triggered.

[Ben and NiNi laugh]

NiNi 

It was such a romantic moment for me. You feel Lan Zhan's feelings the entire time, but it's really the first time that you feel Wei Wuxian's feelings for Lan Zhan and how they confuse him. He knows that he has these strong feelings and he wants Lan Zhan to be around him and in his life. But it's almost like, he doesn't know what to call it or at least he can't face what to call it.

Ben 

I like moments in the past where people's personal ethics and loyalty to people who have helped them directly makes them ignore the responsibilities they may have to their clan. So, the first one for me is when Wen Ning poisons his own clan to help Wei Wuxian rescue Jiang Cheng.

Shan

I knew it was going to be about Wen Ning. Ben loves Wen Ning.

Ben 

I really do. You mentioned him twice earlier and I held it in. 

Shan 

She did so good.

Ben 

That moment's earned. Because Wei Wuxian showed him regard and kindness earlier and he returned it in kind. 

The next big moment I like is Yanli's tantrum when she's like, you better keep my brother's name out your fucking mouth. Because that was really fun for a character who's been very reserved, who doesn't really challenge a lot of people. We have not really seen how all of the trauma they've survived directly impacted her. I really liked her in that moment, putting her foot down, like, “fuck you, I don't care.” You can see Wei Wuxian barely holding onto his control, and the only two things holding him back are his sister and his not-boyfriend. And then, like, within five episodes, neither of them will be present, and everything's gonna go to shit.

NiNi 

Yep, pretty much.

01:20:53 - Outro: Notes From the Future

Ben 

It's Ben and NiNi from the future! 

NiNi 

All the way in the future. So far in the future. 

Ben 

This episode is too fucking long. We're sorry, guys. We had a lot to say and we got Bookworm in the booth. It's also The Untamed. It's a very fucking long drama. So we're gonna take a pause here after the end of our discussion of Wei Wuxian's first life, and we'll pick up in the next episode with his second life. We appreciate you all for joining us. 

NiNi 

Yeah, we talk too much and so, there's gonna be two episodes. So see you guys in the next one! 

Say bye to the people, Ben. 

Ben

Peace! 

[the-conversation-pod]

Hello our patient Conversationalists! Aunty NiNi has finally graduated, then had to lay down for a week because old people need rest after doing young things. But we're back in the lab now cooking up some cool stuff for y'all. Soon my beauties, soon. In the meantime, our inbox is open, go ahead and drop us a question, comment, or even just a note saying how much you missed us.

Catch y'all in a bit!

Ben, NiNi and Shan

[the-conversation-pod]

Y'all out there? Been a minute.

NiNi's seasonal allergies have arrived which means that the longest winter ever is finally over. Auntie is also on a sprint to graduation so season 10 (TEN!) is not opening for business QUITE yet, but our inbox is! Drop us a question, or a comment, and it may be featured on the show!

See y'all soon(ish)

NiNi, Ben and Shan

[the-conversation-pod]

The Very Important Internet BL (VIIB) Awards 2024

AND WE'RE BACK

It's time for NiNi's and Ben's favorite annual tradition: our VIIB Awards! Come join us as we hand out awards for Acting, Ships, Immortal Technique, and Top Tings!

Then, stick around as we talk about our special class awards for queer works that don't necessarily qualify as QL.

We will include the Winner's List at the top of the transcript below (so scroll past it if you want to avoid spoilers).

The 2024 VIIB Awards by @Ben and NiNi

It’s our 3rd Annual Very Important Internet BL Awards and we’ve changed up our whole shit! Ben and NiNi talk the best things we watched all

The 2024 VIIB Awards

Podcast Episode · The Conversation · 02/06/2025 · 1h 8m

The 2024 VIIB Awards - The Conversation | iHeart

<p>It’s our 3rd Annual Very Important Internet BL Awards and we’ve changed up our whole shit! Ben and NiNi talk the best things we watched a

Timestamps

The timestamps will now correspond with chapters on Spotify for easier navigation.

00:00:00 - Welcome 00:00:55 - Introduction: It's Awards Season Once More 00:02:09 - Acting! 00:08:00 - Ships Ahoy! 00:16:31 - Immortal Technique 00:29:05 - Top Tings 00:41:43 - Special Class Awards 00:43:11 - Special Class: Honourable Mentions 00:47:36 - Special Class: Mark Pakin 6th Man Awards 00:51:13 - Special Class: Standout Queer Narratives 01:06:00 - Outro

The Conversation Transcripts!

Thanks to the continued efforts of @lurkingshan as an editor and proofreader, we are able to bring you transcripts of the episodes.

We will endeavor to make the transcripts available when the episodes launch, and it is our goal to make them available for past episodes (Coming soon thanks to @wen-kexing-apologist). When transcripts are available, we will attach them to the episode post (like this one) and put the transcript behind a Read More cut to cut down on scrolling.

Please send our volunteers your thanks!

Winners’ List:

Rising Star: Aungpao Ochiris Suwanacheep (Dynamite, Cooking Crush; Khaopan, My Love Mix Up, TH)

Best Cast: Modi (Wei Qian), Kurt Huang (Wei Zhi Yuan), Tammy Lin (Wei Li Li), Kim Jae Hoon (San Pang) (Unknown, TW)

Best Pair: Tay Tawan Vihokratana (Karan) and New Thitipoom Techa-apaikhun (Achi) (Cherry Magic Thailand, TH)

Best Actor: Lee Tae Vin (Tae Myung Ha, Love for Love’s Sake, KR)

Best Ghost Ship: Mawin/Ton (23.5, TH)

Best Friendship: Three Must-eat-eers: Prem, Dynamite, Samsee (Cooking Crush, TH)

Best Side Ship: Fire/Dynamite (Cooking Crush, TH)

Best Main Ship: Shiba/Haruto (Doku Koi: Doku mo Sugireba Koi to Naru (Love Is A Poison), JP)

Best OST Song: “Camino” - Let Free The Curse Of Taekwondo, KR (performed by Gogang, music and lyrics by Gogang and Jung Mijin)

Best Music: 4Minutes, TH (Banana Sound Studio, composer: Toy Terdsak Janpan, MS: Pimmata Patpibul, Jeerapat Jongkolsongkroh)

Best Production: Love For Love's Sake, KR (AD: Ha Ye Rim)

Best Original Story: Hwang Da Seul (Let Free The Curse Of Taekwondo, KR)

Best Adapted Story: Toyama Erika (I Became the Star of a BL Drama, adapted from BL Drama no Shuen ni Narimashita by Suzuri Machi, JP)

Best Direction: 25 Ji, Akasaka de (At 25:00 In Akasaka), JP (Dir: Horie Takahiro and Kawasaki Ryo, DP: Hanamura Yasushi, Ed: Kitani Mizuki)

Best GL: Tsukuritai Onna to Tabetai Onna (She Loves to Cook and She Loves To Eat) (NHK, JP)

Best Pulp: Knock Knock, Boys! (Kongthup Production/WeTV, TH)

Best Romantic Comedy: Doku Koi: Doku mo Sugireba Koi to Naru (Love Is A Poison) (TBS, JP)

Best Romantic Drama: 25 Ji, Akasaka de (At 25:00 In Akasaka) (TV Tokyo, JP)

Best Genre Romance: Love For Love’s Sake (Wavve Studios, KR)

Show of the Year: Let Free The Curse Of Taekwondo (Studio Him Energetic Company, KR)

Honourable Mentions: 

7 Days Before Valentine (TH) - Experimental

Tadaima Okaeri and Twilight Out of Focus (JP) - Animated

6th Man Awards: 

Dome Jaruwat Cheawaram (Cooking Crush, Jack & Joker)

Title Kirati Puangmalee (We Are, Wandee Goodday, Kidnap)

Standout Queer Narratives: 

Ossan no Pantsu ga Nandatte Ii Janai ka (Don’t Care For An Old Man’s Underwear) (JP) - family drama

Marahuyo Project (PH) - community drama

Love In The Big City (KR) - slice of life drama

Kimi no Tsugu Kaori wa (Fragrance You Inherit) (JP) - family drama

Interview With the Vampire (US) - southern gothic drama

00:00:00 - Welcome

NiNi

Welcome to The Conversation, the Queer Media And Brown Liquor Podcast.

Ben

I'm Ben, the media critic.

NiNi

I’m NiNi, the VIIBs queen.

Ben

And we are your drunk Caribbean uncle and auntie who are sitting on the porch in the rocking chairs.

NiNi

We’re here to talk queer film and dramas, with a special focus on Asian QL.

Ben

So if you like to dive deep into queer stories…

NiNi

If you like cracked out takes on art and commerce in queer media…

Ben

If you just enjoy simping for attractive people…

NiNi

We believe in simping!

Ben

Tune in!

00:00:55 - Introduction: It's Awards Season Once More

*trumpet fanfare*

Ben 

And we're back. It's time for our favorite annual tradition. It's time for the VIIB Awards.

NiNi 

Yes, we are here to discuss all the best things that we saw in 2024 and that you should watch, as well. We've got five main categories in the VIIB Awards. Acting, ships, immortal technique, top tings, and our special class awards.

Ben 

For those of you who are new to us, this is the Very Important Internet BL Awards. NiNi and I started our show on this and we will be handing out plates once again to our favorite boys, girls, and otherwise stellar performers.

Ben 

NiNi got deep into her cups before we started and she was late, so unfortunately I am also deep into my cups already.

NiNi

So we're just gonna have some fun and try to get through these as quickly as possible before we get blotto.

00:02:09 - Acting!

NiNi

Let's start with our acting awards.

The great thing about being an actor is that you're invited into people's worlds that you normally would never be invited into. People want to tell their stories, they want to be seen, they want to be understood. As an actor you just get to go on these incredible journeys that most people are never invited to or never have an opportunity to travel.

Mark Ruffalo

NiNi

And the first award is Rising Star. Our awardee for Rising Star this year is Aungpao Ochiris Suwanacheep, who played Dynamite in Cooking Crush and Khaopan in My Love Mix-Up. 

We love Aungpao on this podcast. We loved Dynamite. It was the first thing we ever saw him do, and we fell immediately in love with the character. And every time I've seen Aungpao since then this year, he has delivered. So I'm really looking forward to seeing what he does next. Very excited about him.

Ben 

I'm so excited for him. I thought he did a great job in both of his roles despite feelings I have about both shows. Congratulations, sir. We will be sending you a plate.

NiNi 

Did we ever decide what we're putting on these plates? We're going into the third year of the VIIB awards and we don't know what's going on these plates.

Ben 

It is clearly gonna be like two Caribbean mason jars full of like a fruity drink.

NiNi 

It’s gonna be brown liquor! [laughs] 

Ben 

Hell yeah.

NiNi 

Amazing. 

*xylophone sound*

Our next award is going to the Best Cast of the year, and this award is for the best ensemble performance, including individual performances, chemistry, and interplay.

Ben 

This is going to go to the cast of Unknown, including Modi–also known as Chris Chiu, Kurt Huang, Tammy Lin, and Kim Jae Hoon. 

This was really a special cast playing off a really complicated dynamic which takes place in-world over the course of years. So we had to watch them play maturing characters in ever-changing dynamics the whole time. Really stellar group performance from them and it resulted in some really standout individual scenes that are easy highlight reel footage.

NiNi 

They were the best cast that we saw this year in terms of the way that they gelled together and the individual performances. So congratulations, plate for you guys from Unknown.

What's our next award, Ben?

Ben 

Best Pair! Best Pair goes to the best couple performance, including individual performances, chemistry, and interplay between them. This is basically going to, because this is a romance show awards, the best couple that we saw from the acting pair this year.

NiNi 

Best Pair for 2024 is Tay Tawan Vihokratana and New Thitipoom Techaapaikhun playing Karan and Achi in Cherry Magic Thailand.

Cherry Magic Thailand was one of the best things that we saw last year, and Tay Tawan and New Thitipoom have been around for a really long time. They’ve been working together for about eight years, and every time they come back they're better and better and better, and I think that Cherry Magic Thailand was probably the best that I've ever seen them. I have not always been a New fan but he has shut my mouth lately, and I love Tay Tawan.

Best pair of the year.

Ben 

I was really impressed by them because taking over a work that is so beloved and having to perform characters that already have very strong, memorable performances is a really difficult task to do. And I think these two did a good job balancing our expectations of their dynamic based upon previous outings with meeting the demands of the work that they were adapting. That was an incredibly well done execution by both of them.

*xylophone sound*

NiNi 

Our final award in the acting category is our Best Actor, and that's for the Best Performance of the Year. Ben, who is our Best Actor for 2024?

Ben 

It's Lee Taevin for his role as Tae Myungha from Love for Love's Sake. 

Lee Taevin really wanted to take on a role like this, and he did such a great job playing the complex layers of darkness and difficulty that his character is carrying in this. It is hard to get too deep into the nuances of his performance without spoiling it for those who have not listened to our previous episode or watched the show. But in a year with some really, really strong performances within BL, the top performance goes to Lee Taevin.

NiNi 

He really stood out this year. I mean, we had a little bit of a hard time picking this one, but we landed up on him because Tae Myungha is such a visceral character. I felt everything that they wanted the character to have us feel. All the confusion, all the despair, I really, really felt the depth of his work.

Ben

Lee Taevin the veteran actor amongst the cast here, and he's the type of actor who clearly elevates other actors around them. That's a pretty important skill for him to have developed at his relatively young age. 

So congratulations, sir. Hope to see more of you next year.

00:08:00 - Ships Ahoy!

NiNi 

Moving on to our ships category.

Ben 

It's time for our SIMPY Awards! Let's go girls!

Hot Priest: Love is awful. It's awful, it's painful, it's frightening. It makes you doubt yourself, judge yourself, distance yourself from the other people in your life. It makes you selfish, makes you creepy, makes you obsessed with your hair, makes you cruel, makes you say and do things you never thought you would do.

Sister: There's something wrong with your priest.

Hot Priest: It's all any of us want and it's hell when we get there so no wonder it's something we don't want to do on our own. I was taught if we're born with love then life is about choosing the right place to put it. People talk about that a lot, it feeling right. When it feels right it's easy. But I'm not sure that's true. It takes strength to know what's right. Love isn't something that weak people do. Being a romantic takes a hell of a lot of hope. I think what they mean is when you find somebody that you love, it feels like hope.

Fleabag, Season 2 Episode 6

NiNi

I'm going to let Ben take it away with our first award in the ship category, which is the Best Ghost Ship. It should have happened and we should have seen it. So who is our best ghost ship of 2024?

Ben 

It's Mawin and Ton from 23.5.

This is how Euro can still win. We're gonna give him an award [NiNi laughs] because they should have let him kiss one of the twins in the last goddamn year or so.

NiNi 

He should have let him kiss both of the twins. He had the chance.

Ben 

We went with this one because there was an interesting narrative reason for them to have leaned into the tension that his character, Mawin, was developing with Ton, particularly because of his crush on a different character. In this case, more than any of them, they should have let them kiss…just a little bit.

NiNi 

Euro, we love you on this podcast. One of these days they will let you kiss a boy. I swear.

*xylophone sound*

Okay, moving on to the greatest of the ships, Best Friendship.

Ben 

This goes to our best besties of the year. This is not an award for the people who are the best at supporting the romantic outcomes for a couple. It is about the characters whose friendship itself is so critical to the function of these characters' lives that it in some ways challenges or even supersedes any of the romances that occur in the work. 

NiNi 

Our winners for Best Friendship go to the Three Must-eat-ers Prem, Dynamite, and Samsee from Cooking Crush, because without their friendship Cooking Crush does not work at all. It is probably more central to the story than the relationships between Prem and Ten and between Dynamite and Fire. They focus on each other and they care about each other and they're allowed to get angry at each other and when they're angry at each other they apologize for the stupid shit that they did.

Ben

We had two veteran actors who I love a lot playing Samsee and Prem with a newcomer in Dynamite. And I think it was really impressive to see the two veterans support the newcomer and create a beloved character as a result. 

This group has a real fight and breakdown in the show that challenges the core friendship itself. I found myself more moved by the resolution of the fight this friend group was having than I was any of the romantic challenges.

NiNi 

Congratulations to the Three Must-eat-ers. We will be sending you a plate.

*xylophone sound*

Ben 

On to Best Side Ship, NiNi's favorite award every goddamn year! [both laugh]

NiNi 

We decided this year that we were not gonna fight over this award. The best side ship goes to the secondary couple who best reinforce the themes of the primary couple's story.

Ben, you tell the people who has won.

Ben 

It's going to Fire and Dynamite. You thought I was done awarding Aungpao. [snickers]

NiNi 

We're never done awarding Aungpao.

Ben

You had this really interesting dynamic with Ten fighting his dad and Prem dealing with his own anxieties where on the opposite side you had Dynamite presenting himself as really forthright and open about what he is and Fire avoiding his mom. These two balanced out very well with their main couple of their show and it's not a surprise that the best side ship went to also the show with the best friendship because the character and relationship writing on this show was really stand out.

This was one of Neo's, not best known performances, but truly one of my favorites that he's done. I really liked what he did with Fire, especially coming off of playing Boston. That man is an incredibly talented actor and we are very lucky that he shows up so often for us.

NiNi 

Congratulations Fire and Dynamite, we will be sending you a plate.

Ben 

I just want everybody out there who thinks I hate GMMTV to know that, while I do have beef with them, I am not incapable of applauding good work when I see it.

*xylophone sound*

All right, Best Main Ship. We are in a romance genre. We're here for couples that we believe can make it. This always goes to the couple whose love story we actually buy into and believe. These are the people you return to. These are the ones you show people and they're like, what should I watch? These boys! Sit down!

NiNi, who is our best main ship of the year?

NiNi

Our Best Main Ship of the year is Shiba and Haruto from Love is a Poison, Japanese title Doku koi: Doku mo sugeriba koi to naru. 

The show was hilarious and had so much heart and Shiba and Haruto's relationship at the center of it all is really what pulled me in. The acting is amazing, the writing is amazing, this is a true battle couple (@lurkingshan). They got together and decided that they were going to stand shoulder to shoulder, back to back and fight off everybody who tried to come for them.

I believe in them. I believe that they'll last.

Ben 

This show has a fist bump involving rings that legit made me understand what it means to swoon. This show whipped ass! It may seem like an oddity show, ignore that part. Just go fucking watch it (@solitaryandwandering). 

This show understood all of the reservations the audience might have from their initial reaction to them and went out of their way to demolish them. This show was fucking fun and I really loved these two so much. I will be thinking about that man's fake posing during their photo opportunities. I'll be thinking about that towel sequence where he threw it on him in the onsen. Don't think I forgot! [NiNi laughs] These guys were great.

NiNi

They even got to have a yukata moment.

Ben 

They sure did! [snickers]

NiNi 

They fell in love so hard and it was delightful to watch.

Ben 

I just love when a couple fights for each other, especially when one of them can't.

NiNi 

My god. He squared up and then got his ass beat. And it was incredible. [both laugh]

No notes.

00:16:31 - Immortal Technique

Ben 

It's time to do some more traditional awards. We're moving on to Immortal Technique, where we talk about technical and production related awards.

This is one of my favorite sections every year because this is the one that rewards you for paying attention to details.

NiNi 

This is also the one where we basically talk about the people behind the scenes, the people whose names are in the credits but who don't get a lot of credit, and we always love to give that credit out on our show.

As a director I, I kind of, I, I have quite a good ability at—at the very beginning when we're first starting to write the screenplay—I have quite a good ability to imagine the film in my head. Like you know even the very first page of, of, of the script as we do it I can start to imagine the camera angles, the music, I can start to feel how the film's coming together and I sort of have this imaginary film starting to be put together and that's right back at the beginning. And uh, in this case we started this process about five or six years ago and then what happens during the course of the movie is that this this film that's playing in my head always gets modified because as you design the sets, you know then the sets that we've designed replace the ones that I originally sort of imagined and then as the actors come on board their faces put fit into the characters I imagined. And so my little internal movie is always changing and being updated so that, um, it's, it's you know it always ends up better. Everything, every time my film in my head gets changed it's, it's improving all the time because all these all these other people are coming on board and giving their input into it.

Peter Jackson, interviewed by Charlie Rose, 2002

NiNi

We're starting with Best OST Song, and this is for the song as recorded. The style or genre, does the song fit the mood of the show, composition and arrangement, production and performance, usage and listenability. Basically, is it a bop and do you think about it a lot? 

So Ben, what is our Best OST Song of the year?

Ben 

This was actually a pretty extensive discussion we had in the background about this one, but in the end, we are excited to award Camino from Let Free the Curse of Taekwondo, performed by Gogang, music and lyrics by Gogang and Jung Mi Jin.

NiNi 

Man, I love this song. Every time it came on at the beginning of an episode, you just felt yourself sinking into the place that the show wanted you to be. It starts off with this acapella harmonizing that just really got you into your feelings. And then a little bit of piano, a little bit of strings, It was very not flashy, but really effective. 

If you have not watched Let Free the Curse of Taekwondo, I don't know what you're waiting for. Listen to the song in context, then go listen to it out of context. It's a great song.

Ben 

I'm rewatching it right now with Emily. We just started the first episode and legit, the intro starts and she's like, it's one of those shows.

NiNi 

Exactly, puts you straight into the right place that you need to be in.

*xylophone sound*

Ben 

Our next award is for the Best Music. This is the use of music overall. Scoring, music supervision, music editing. It's all about where and how music is used throughout the entire production. As usual, we had a lot of feelings about this one. But in the end, NiNi, we decided to award...

NiNi 

4 Minutes. The composer is Toy Terdsak Janpan, music supervisors Pimmata Patpibul and Jeerapat Jongkolsongkroh and done by Banana Sound Studio.

4 Minutes, one thing that it did do well was everything around the production. And the music in particular was very evocative and very effective at setting mood. The show worked very effectively through the soundscape. It was well done. Kudos to them.

*xylophone sound*

Ben

On to Best Production! This is kind of a catch-all award goes into production design and art direction, set design and dressing, location choice, costuming and hair, makeup, and a little bit of sound design color grading and editing. This is about shows that do a good job with their world building, their aesthetic, and basically do they really capture the vibe.

NiNi 

Best Production this year goes to Love for Love's Sake, art director Ha Ye Rim.

Ben 

You've got a person who is essentially isekai'd into another world. Like he passes out in our world, wakes up inside of what feels like a video game. And they have to convey a lot of details about what's going on with the mechanics of the video game and all the ways that the world is behaving around him. None of this is very easy to do, particularly on a very short runtime. And they manage to give us all of the information and details we need without huge exposition dumps. And they do such a great job.

There are some key details, particularly the work they do with Tae Myungha's eyes and his hair in particular. This is one of those shows that really rewarded us as viewers for paying attention to more details than just what was happening in the subtitles or when the boys were at their prettiest smiling at each other. Paying attention was such an important part of really being able to embrace and understand this experience.

NiNi

It was incredibly impressive, the way that they built up the video game world and all the ways that the video game starts to glitch. It starts so subtly, you almost can't tell and then by the time it builds up you start thinking back to all the little things that showed up in the background that told you that the game was glitching. It is really serious attention to detail that they put into this show and for that we award them a plate.

*xylophone sound*

We're going to move on now to the writing awards, the first one is Best Original Story. So that is for premise, story, screenplay, stage directions, dialogue, character voice, all the things that go into writing an original story.

Ben 

This year's award goes to Hwang da Seul for Let Free the Curse of Taekwondo. Welcome back, ma'am, and well deserved. 

My goodness gracious me. Good job, ma’am. This was one of the most stunning experiences we got to have this year. Once again, you were determined to make us love some boys and then break them up for a ridiculous amount of time and make us really root for them to get back together. And holy shit, you did a great job this time. This was honestly such an unexpected and really special experience. 

The reason why we award Original Story is a significant amount of BL is adapted. A lot of productions, for a lot of valid reasons, rely on adapting existing work that already has a fan base that's ready to support it again and advocate for it. It's always really impressive when someone does something original that manages to cut through the noise and become one of the most memorable things we may have ever watched in genre.

NiNi 

The writing of that confessional scene where Shin Juyoung takes his cross off and puts his forehead on the wall and confesses through the wall. I mean, I don't know how somebody comes up with that, but I got goosebumps.

Ben 

There's the bit where Hyunho is going to Dohoe's house to get something. And Shin Juyoung shows up and we just see the three of them staring at each other in a hallway. There is not much dialogue in this sequence, but that is such a charged moment. Incredible stuff.

*xylophone sound*

NiNi 

So from original story, we're moving to the Best Adapted Story. This is for adaptation of a source work from another medium or another culture. 

Ben, who wrote our best adapted story?

Ben 

Toyama Erika for I Became the Star of a BL Drama, adapted from BL drama no shuen ni narimashita by Suzuri Machi. 

This was the first thing we watched on New Year's Eve into New Year's. This was the show that set the standard of the year for me. This show was legitimately funny. In a really short runtime, they captured the total essence of the story. 

What a solid experience to start the year. And good news, gays, theys, and thems—it’s getting a sequel. [snickers]

NiNi 

[laughs] We are. We are. I'm so excited about that.

Congratulations to Toyama Erika, who wrote, I'm sorry, the best line of the year when the writer of the drama within the drama says, “We will drown the audience in the BL goodness.”

Ben 

That line stands alongside “Every fujoshi has a dick in her heart.”

NiNi

Congratulations to our original story and adapted story writers, Hwang da Seul and Toyama Erika. We will be sending you plates.

*xylophone sound*

Our final technical award goes to Best Direction. This award is for overall vision, filmmaking style and visual impact, photography, cinematography, shot selection, and direction of actor movement and expression. This is usually awarded to the directing team, which usually consists of the director, the director of photography or the cinematographer, and the editor. 

Ben, which show had the best direction of 2024?

Ben 

It's going to 25 Ji, Akasaka de, AKA At 25:00 in Akasaka. Directed by Hori Takahiro and Kawasaki Rio, DP Hanamura Yasushi, and edited by Kitani Mizuki. 

We just awarded I Became the Main Role in a BL Drama. And then this show released and I was like, are we doing this again, but moody? And they said, we sure are! 

And we loved it. I cannot believe we got similar premises in the same year and both were standout productions of the year. I'm a sucker for actors playing actors. And I really loved the work that went into this particular show.

NiNi 

The way that the show plays with the camera, inside the show inside the show, the way the camera kind of zooms in to immerse you in the moment, and then pulls back out to show you how fake the moment is.  They really make an effort to blur that line between real and fake, which is a big theme in the show. So very well done.

Ben

My favorite section every year. BL is really silly sometimes and there's a wide range of quality. And I don't think it's always for a lack of effort on people's part. But damn is it really good to have some things that are good enough that you are willing to show it to some of your bougie friends to make them sit down and watch some fucking BL. Thank you to everyone.

NiNi 

Thank you to all of our Immortal Technique winners. You will be getting your plates in the mail if we ever get around to sending out these magical plates. [Ben laughs] But y'all did good and we love you.

00:29:05 - Top Tings

NiNi 

Let's move on to our top tings. All the best things that we saw this year.

Ben 

Historically we've awarded these on some genre lines, but primarily country lines. With the greater diversification of the genre and also the absence of certain countries for economic and political reasons, we have opted to not award based on countries anymore.

We are going to be awarding on genre-oriented categories only. With that being said, NiNi, take us in.

MC: Gentlemen, pray silence for the President of the Royal Society for Putting Things on Top of Other Things.

President: I thank you, gentlemen. The year has been a good one for the society. Our Members have put more things on top of other things than ever before. But I should warn you, this is no time for complacency now. There are still many things that are I cannot emphasize too strongly,  not on top of other things. I myself on my way here this evening saw a thing that was not on top of another thing in any way. Shame indeed. But we must not allow ourselves to become too despondent for we must never forget that if there was not one thing that was not on top of another thing, our society would be nothing more than a meaningless body of men gathered together for no good purpose. 

Monty Python, The Royal Society for Putting Things On Top Of Other Things

NiNi 

We're going to start with the Best GL. Well, there's no competition really in 2024.

Ben 

It is Tsukuritai Onna to Tabetai Onna, AKA She Loves to Cook and She Loves to Eat from NHK in Japan. 

NHK really delivered for us and I was so relieved when they actually came back to continue the She Loves to Cook and She Loves to Eat story. Because after the first 10 episodes, we were not finished.

The ongoing exploration of queerness and relationships between women in the modern era was just so excellent in this show. It had adult women of various ages interacting with each other across those age lines and trying to support each other in meaningful ways. And we got really great development on the core relationship.

There was a lot of new GL this year and I'm looking forward to some more projects and I hope we have a wider field to choose from next year. But this is unequivocally our winner of the year. Nobody can compete with the chosen family scene. It's over for everyone else. I'm sorry.

NiNi 

I love the way that they expanded the show, expanded the cast to bring in somebody new moving into the apartment building, to bring in Nomoto's internet friend that she turned into a real friend. Really expanding the world and getting more into the relationships between all of these characters, all of these amazing women. I love it so much. It's the best GL that we watched this year.

*xylophone sound*

Ben

Our next award goes to the Best Pulp for shows with a small budget that have a big impact. It's very hard sometimes when you're working on tiny budgets to say big things. And it's really impressive when that show clearly has a strong creative handle on what it wants to do and what it wants to accomplish. It's easy to award the studios that have a lot of money and a big actor pool and can produce a lot of stuff. Something's probably gonna be good if you try often enough. It's always really cool when a small team comes out of nowhere and delivers one of the best things you saw this year. 

With that in mind, NiNi, who is our best pulp of the year?

NiNi 

Surprising absolutely no one, our best pulp of the year is Knock Knock Boys! by Kongthup Production and WeTV from Thailand. 

Knock Knock Boys! was an amazing pulp that used its small budget incredibly well. Some great acting, some sharp writing, just incredible all around. Took what they had and ran with it. I still think about Almond and Latte not having sex at the beach. I think that's one of the best scenes that I've seen this year. A great little show.

Ben

This show absolutely fucks. Go watch it!

NiNi 

Nothing more needs to be said.

Ben 

[laughs] Girl, I am halfway through this bottle. I need to slow down.

NiNi 

I'm so leaving that in. 

*xylophone sound*

Our next award goes to the Best Romantic Comedy. Live, love, laugh. I'm leaving that in as well. 

Ben, What's the funniest and most warmed we felt all year?

Ben 

This year's winner is Doku koi: Doku mo sugireba koi to naru AKA Love is a Poison. 

The show was just that funny consistently for 12 weeks. It's hard to be funny for 12 weeks. This show earned every single laugh it got. And they use their laughs to tell some really dirty jokes.

NiNi 

I just keep thinking about the succulents. [both laughs] The succulents making all those sighing noises. The succulents were one of the best things about this show and if you want to know what that means you should go watch it. It's an incredible show, incredibly funny. I laughed out loud multiple times. It's a delightful romantic comedy.

*xylophone sound*

Ben

Our next award goes to the Best Romantic Drama.

NiNi, who is our awardee for this year?

NiNi

Once again from Japan, the best romantic drama is 25 Ji, Akasaka de, At 25:00 in Akasaka by TV Tokyo. I am stuck on this show in a way that I did not expect to be when I watched it. Just the emotions involved between Hayama and Shirasaki and how long they've been going on and how tangled up they are because they are working together playing lovers and can't really disentangle real from fake.

Ben 

I really think about the way Niihara delivers “Asami-san” across the entire show. And I really feel like this show kicked into overdrive. I think it's around the end of episode four when Shirasaki is struggling with delivering the big confession scene in the drama they're recording within the show. The way we arrive at the end point of that, it's really one of the most effective episodes of television we got in BL this year.

NiNi 

I'm not gonna stop thinking about it ever, I think. Congratulations to 25 Ji, Akasaka de. You get a plate.

NiNi 

Moving on to the Best Genre Romance. This is for romance blended with sci-fi, fantasy, horror, action, and or mystery elements.

Ben 

This year's winner is Love for Love’s Sake from Wavve Studios.

It's really hard to do sci-fi well and give the audience an interesting relationship to sit with. Without spoilers, I really like that the audience has had a wide field of complex reactions to the end of this particular story. I think that that is a really strong indicator of how well the show explored the various things it wanted to do. It's really, really hard in sci-fi to do relationships that are meaningful because in sci-fi, it's more about the human condition and exploring complex ideas. The characters are more stand-ins for societal ideas that the story wants to pick at. 

This was an incredible job with a newcomer, no less, delivering on a really compelling and complex relationship. Man, I'm still thinking about that shoes moment.

NiNi 

My god.

Ben 

Hold on, I'm in my feelings.

NiNi 

The VIIB awards when Ben gets in his feelings. No, it was really so good.

Ben 

He shouted that man's name and he said run and then his shoes let off sparks and I screamed in my house. The scream I scrumpt!

NiNi

This is really a great one. One of the things about genre romances, it's really important for the genre elements to matter, for them to be integrally integrated into the story and the themes. That's one of the things that we look for in a good genre romance. 

Ben 

When Tae Myungha got the ability to see who Cha Yeowoon dislikes the most and he's going around and surveying the field, that hurt my feelings.

NiNi

My lord that was a moment to end moments.

Ben 

This really was an excellent show. This was not an easy decision for us, but this is why this show pushed ahead.

NiNi 

Congratulations to Love for Love's Sake. You get a plate.

*xylophone sound*

All right, Ben.

Ben 

It's time, baby! Show Of The Year!

NiNi

We are ready to award the best fucking thing we watched this year in QL.

Ben 

If you ain't watched fuck-all this year because you're too busy, you got too much else going on. If you only have time for one BL, please go watch our awardee, Let Free the Curse of Taekwondo from Studio Him Energetic Company.

It wasn't even close. I'm sorry to everybody else this year. [both laugh]

NiNi

It was not. It was not even close.

Ben

Look, last year I almost fucking murdered NiNi over La Pluie. [NiNi laughs] 

NiNi

I do remember. 

Ben

We met in person and I almost fucking killed her over the show.

NiNi

But this year it wasn't even a discussion, really. Obviously we enjoyed some other things, but one show really stood out and this was it. Hwang Da Seul is back. And she's killing the fucking game.

Ben 

We already spoke extensively about this show in an earlier episode, but we barely scratched the surface of everything we could have talked about in that show. That was a complete viewing experience. Not a moment of our time was wasted on extra bullshit. This was a stellar show and it is hands down head and shoulders above the other things we watched this year.

NiNi 

I just keep thinking about Dohoe asking Juyoung if he dressed up for him while he starts undressing him. Amazing show, incredible show. We can talk about it forever. 

Congratulations, Let Free the Curse of Taekwondo. You will get a plate. That's gonna wrap up our standard class awards.

00:41:43 - Special Class Awards

NiNi

Now we move into where Ben really gets to enjoy himself. Ben would not do the VIIB Awards if we did not do special class.

Ben 

Here's the background for the new people. When NiNi first approached me about doing a podcast together, she's like, let's start with an award show. Like it's the end of the year. Let's award the shows we really liked this year. And it was all like super queer cinema type stuff. And NiNi's like, okay, but I want to give BL shows awards. 

So we compromised and we put all of the queer shit whose primary goal was not to tell romantic stories overall into their own special class so we could highlight them. We thought this was a good compromise because BL is a romance genre, and the shows that I typically like to award here are not romances. But these are the shows that I support BL for. The market that enjoys BL has enough crossover with some of these types of queer dramas that it enables them to get made. So, it's time to hand out our special class awards so I can once again talk about all of my favorite things.

00:43:11 - Special Class: Honourable Mentions

Ben

Let's begin with our honorable mentions. These go to shows that we think contributed to the genre for any number of various ways.

And I want to say to all of you out there nervously waiting. Remember one thing. No matter what happens tonight, you're all winners. Because as you know, it is an honor just to be *wails* NOMINATED! 

I’m fine, fine, fine. 

Nathan Lane, 1995 Tony Awards

NiNi 

I wanted to highlight in the honorable mentions 7 Days Before Valentine. We talked about this one a little bit in one of our grab bags. This was a highly experimental piece that I really enjoyed and has surprisingly stuck with me. I still keep thinking about it. It's not BL exactly. It's kind of BL-ish. It's not, it's queer, it's not queer. It's very genre, it's also not genre. It's a little bit of everything when I described it in the grab bag, I described it as something that made me feel like I was sitting in a theater watching actors do an experimental play.

Ben 

It is from the same screenwriter/playwright/director who also gave us 180 Degree Longitude Passes Through Us. We wanted to highlight that Punnasak Sukee is still working.

NiNi 

It's very different kind of work but, I think, really worth watching. Our other honorable mentions come from Japan.

Ben 

It's time for the Anime Awards. Brother in the booth, play the sound!

*bright sparkle sound*

Ben 

There were about 10-odd anime projects that were BL or BL-adjacent that came out last year, only some of which were reasonably accessible to Westerners.

I want to highlight Tadaima, Okaeri and Twilight Out of Focus. Tadaima, Okaeri  is the best Omegaverse project that came out in this year. Wild time to be in BL. But Tadaima, Okaeri uses the convention of that genre to tell a story about a married gay couple with kids who are still growing their family, and it's really heartfelt. So many stories we watch are about guys getting together and the uphill challenges they fight to do that and whether or not we believe in them. This story was one hundred percent about that belief we had in them. These guys are together. They've already gone through their BL drama. We're watching them build a home. We're watching them raise their son and then their daughter.

This was a really unexpected and really incredible viewing experience. Omegaverse is not for everyone, but truly this was one of the standout narratives that I got to experience this year. I still think about this family at least once a week.

On the other end of the spectrum, Twilight Out of Focus was about a film club at a high school that allows us to explore three different relationships where in two of them, someone is already a known gay. This was a really special show that was unpacking a lot of BL presumptions. Studio Deen came back this year with Twilight Out of Focus. And it's continuing to ask the question in a context where a lot of people's first experiences with queer storytelling and queer identity is coming through BL, what responsibility does BL have to the boys and girls and other kids who are discovering themselves and BL is informing how they're going to interact with their potential partners? This show does this in a really elegant way without dunking on BL in the process. Also, the animation is gorgeous, truly.

Both of these are available on Crunchyroll. Please give them a chance.

00:47:36 - Special Class: Mark Pakin 6th Man Awards

NiNi 

We are moving on in our special class to the Sixth Man Award, or what we like to call the Mark Pakin Awards, because that's who we originally awarded this award to.

Interviewer: What was your preparation as sixth men? 

Jamal Crawford: You have to warm up different. Got my body…I knew I'd be cooling down, so I'm over…I didn't go to the bike, but I'll go to the hallway 'cause. I was stretching when I was on the bench. I was stretch off and I was mentally, more than anything, I would mentally put myself in the game before I got in the game. Oh, they're playing like this. They playing that pick and roll. He's sitting back right there. Okay, he's going for hands up. Oh, he's going for the left hands, okay. So I'm putting myself in, so I'm playing the game before I actually play the game. I'm like, you got more more. How much you see on my other plan? You like this, okay. You got to stick to it right here because I'm trying to send you left back to your right mother. This guy. That one guy is blitzing because he can get up the other guy. So I'm just watching different things, dude, and so I'm putting myself in the game, but I'm making my own adjustments. Before the play even happened.

Jamal Crawford, 3-time NBA 6th Man of the Year

NiNi

This award acknowledges the most valuable and versatile supporting actors of the year for on-screen and off-screen contributions. Our sixth man is somebody who can come on to a project, and just fire away, go right in. Basically, it's a gunslinger. It's coming off the bench and doing everything that needs to get done.

We've got two sixth man awards to hand out this year and I'm going to let Ben take the first one.

Ben

My award is going to Dome Jaruwat Cheawaram for his acting work in Cooking Crush as Samsee and for his composer work on Jack and Joker. 

Dome has been around BL for a very long time. I still listen to the song he sang for Until We Meet Again. This man has been in the streets with us for a long time. And I think he did a really fantastic job with the Samsee character. This man is always working. He is in the background somewhere doing something to entertain people. And we really wanted to acknowledge that this year.

So congratulations, sir. Thank you for all the work you do. And I really hope that people continue to appreciate your presence.

NiNi 

He is a great actor. He's a great musician, and he is one of our Sixth Men of the Year.

Our second Sixth Man Award this year is going to go to Title Kirati Puangmalee from We Are, Wandee Goodday, and Kidnap. He's been around and he continues to be around. And this year he gave us three very different performances.

Ben 

He's been with us as early as Love By Chance and he started with GMMTV for us on Be My Favorite, playing a heel there. Once Gunsmile left GMMTV, he stepped into that role to be the dude we hate. Good job, sir. You're doing a great job.

NiNi

This year he also played people that we liked, so great. He was one of the best parts of Kidnap because his character was entirely unhinged and nobody ever called him on it. Delightful. Every time he shows up, I know I'm going to have a good time. He is a good, solid actor, he can show up and do whatever you need him to do. 

So congratulations to Title Kirati Puangmalee for being one of 2024's sixth men.

00:51:13 - Special Class: Standout Queer Narratives

NiNi

We are on to our final awards, our Standout Queer Narratives of the Year.

Talented, brilliant, incredible, amazing, showstopping, spectacular. Never the same. Totally unique. Completely not ever been done before. Unafraid to reference or not reference. Put It in a blender. Shit on it. Vomit on it. Eat it. Give birth to it. 

Lady Gaga

NiNi

These awards acknowledge queer drama works that are not primarily romances.

Ben 

We're going to be talking about five different shows this year. Ossan no pantsu ga nandatte iijanaika!, aka Don't Care for an Old Man's Underwear from Japan, a family drama. We're going to be talking about Marahuyo Project from the Philippines, a community drama. We're going to be discussing Love in the Big City, a very complicated adult coming of age drama,Kimi no tsugu kaori wa, aka Fragrance You Inherit from Japan, a very interesting family drama. And finally, Interview with the Vampire Season 2, a Southern Gothic drama from the United States of all places.

NiNi 

We almost never talk about Western shows in standout queer narratives.

Ben 

That's how good that show is. That's how good it is.

NiNi 

Let's start there then.

Ben

Interview with the Vampire Season 2 continues this narrative. Louie and Claudia are in Europe and we're dealing with the fallout of their attempt to kill Lestat at the end of Season 1. What's so special about Season 2 is honestly, Jacob Anderson. I also want to give some special shout out to Delainey Hayles, who has to take over the role of Claudia in this season. And she does an incredible job. Assad Zaman and Eric Bogosian really step up in this season and play some really stellar stuff, and Emily would kill me if I didn't mention Ben Daniels’ work as Santiago. 

This is fundamentally a gay drama about unwell divorced people. And it remains one of the most compelling watches that I get to look forward to.

NiNi 

I have not watched this one yet. I'm working on cutting down my list this year by actually watching things. So this is on the list, definitely of things that I'm going to watch. It's been making too much noise for me to not watch it.

Ben 

I will say sincerely, as someone who really swoons for really strong actor chemistry and performances, if you had watched Interview, you would not have awarded Best Pair to Doku Koi.

NiNi 

It's standout queer narrative, they don't go into the BL parts.

Ben 

You all see why this award show works the way it does! [both laugh]

But sincerely, that's how good the two of them are. they're not really in a proper romance because they're so fucked up. [NiNi laughs] But goddamn, Jacob and Sam are the two men I look the most forward to playing queer characters. And this show has a complex lens on queerness over the course of centuries, which adds an incredible layer to the performance.

It's hard to do sequels to romantic stories. I loved the second season of Interview in many ways more than I loved the first season, but I would not have been able to enjoy the second season without the first season. That is truly what makes a second season really good, when it builds on what the first season did and elevates that to a whole new level; a really special experience this year. It is rare that I go out of my way to recommend Western Queer TV on this podcast. But in this particular case, I highly recommend Interview with the Vampire.

NiNi 

It's on my list and steadily climbing.

The next show on our standout queer narratives list is a show that we actually haven't talked about yet but will be talking about coming up soon. Fragrance You Inherit, Kimi no tsugu kaori wa from Japan, a family drama. 

Without getting too deep into it, which we are going to do on its own episode, Ben, just give the people a little taste of what Fragrance You Inherit is about.

Ben 

Fragrance You Inherit is about a single mom and her son. And it's about her meeting the son's new girlfriend, who happens to be the daughter of her college crush. The son's girlfriend is the spitting image of her mom, and this is fundamentally a show about really kind people trying to do right by each other as they navigate some unresolved feelings across two different generations. 

This is a show that could have gone a really ugly route, but I really liked that this was fundamentally a show about people trying to take care of each other. And it was a lot of fun watching a show where the primary stress comes from everyone being really polite about some very difficult things. We get to see an older lesbian who knows she's a lesbian but hasn't told her son, navigate the unresolved feelings she had for her closest female friend in college while their children pursue a really meaningful romance between them in a way that I think honors the desires and perspective of all of the characters involved. It's a really special experience and was a real surprise for us at the end of the year.

NiNi 

This is from Ishibashi Yuhuo who also did Our Dining Table, Tokyo in April Is…, I think, and a few other standout Japanese dramas that we've watched in the last few years. 

Ben 

There were not enough shots of shoes. I would not have known it was her.

NiNi 

[laughs] She does love shoes. 

This comes from a manga by Ogawa Maruni and it really surprised me. It's a GL but not a GL. It's about having built, after disappointment, having built really good, meaningful, happy lives, and then having that rocked a little bit by unresolved things from your past and where that takes you. It's also about parents and children. It's also about being honest with people in your life and how not being honest with them can lead to a lot of stress and anxiety. It is a great show. We will be talking about in a lot more detail coming up in a subsequent episode, but we wanted to award it a Standout Queer Narrative Award.

Ben 

We already discussed Love in the Big City in an earlier episode, so we will not go on at length about it here. But we are once again stating for the official record of the VIIB Awards, that this is honestly the show not to miss this year. There is so much that went into getting this show even made.

The entire experience we get with Go Young across his 20s and four difficult periods of his life is honestly one of the most meaningful queer experiences I got to have in communion with other people in the last couple of years. Everything about reading Love in the Big City and watching Love in the Big City is one of the most memorable experiences I've had with queer media in a long time. And I cannot overstate how good this show is and how significant the existence of the show is. 

This show for many ways fills the same sort of place as Moonlight in my queer cinema taste in viewing. I can't really chat with a queer cinephile who hasn't watched Moonlight, and Love in the Big City  is very quickly becoming one of those things. If you haven't watched Love in the Big City do not talk to me. 

Watch this one, for fuck's sake! It's that good. You owe it to yourself to get this into your psyche.

NiNi 

We talked about this show for maybe close to an hour and a half of pre-edit time and we barely scratched the surface. Since our episode went out, we have been continuing to talk about this show and finding new things to delve into. We are not going to talk about it forever, but we could. Watch it, it's worth everything, and it is one of our standout queer narratives of the year.

Our next standout queer narrative is Marahuyo Project from the Philippines. Thank god JP Habac came back this year. I was starting to lose hope.

Ben 

I'm so glad that ANIMA Studios is still in it. And I'm so glad that they came back with a project like this. It felt really special to me in a year where I found myself really struggling to connect with youth queer storytelling, this show said it was LGBTQIA +, and it meant that with its whole fucking heart. And it put its whole ass on the line to tell the stories that it wanted to tell. This was a great viewing experience. And if you care about queer art, this show is available for free on YouTube. Please go give them some support.

NiNi 

I just can't stop thinking about the back of Archie's neck.

Ben 

Mmhmm. And about Adrian Lindayag and everything that he does for queer activism in the Philippines, and I'm so glad that he got to play King.

NiNi 

Amazing show, amazing music, amazing writing, amazing direction. Oh my god, King's fourth wall breaks. Amazing. It was just such a good show with a lot of heart, a lot of real deep complex feelings to delve into.

Ben 

The funniest thing about dealing with the VIIB Awards is, like, each one of these shows would have decimated other categories it was in. Like, Marahuyo Project would have decimated Best Music. It would have been no contest. 

NiNi 

It really would have, it really would have won best music.

Ben 

I almost fought for it. I was like, I don't care. I'm giving it to them anyway. They're like dragging me off stage so I–

NiNi 

[laughs] Shhh, come on, come on, come on. No, shhh, it's time to go to bed, come on.

Ben 

We would have given Love in the Big City show of the year. Interview, if everybody else had watched it, would have definitely won genre romance, flat out. Like, that's how good all of these shows are.

NiNi 

But ultimately they are not romances.

Ben

But that's the point. [snickers]

Our last show is Don't Care For an Old Man's Underwear. We talked about this show at length earlier. This was so spectacular. This was a show where our primary character is an ignorant, misogynist, middle-aged man, and we were rooting for this man very early on in this show. And we loved him by the end of it. This show is so aspirational in a way that even some of our BLs can't really stand up to. Like this show believes that misogynistic old men can do better and have meaningful, loving, supportive, and positive relationships with their families if they just listen to them a little bit more. Good job, everybody. Way to really shoot for the best outcome you could possibly get. 

This show really modeled what relationship rebuilding and healing could look like in a way that I think is really helpful. And I really liked that a very well-known and popular Japanese comedian was in the lead role of this. Dramas like this are often really important because you have people with clout they've earned well outside of the queer narrative space doing really meaningful work in it. And these are the kinds of projects that often reach a lot more people than the BL that we talk about. Like, I feel like more people are gonna have had a gay storytelling experience because of Interview with the Vampire, more than some of these BLs we've talked about on here by a long shot. And I think for the Japanese viewing audience, I think many of them would have probably engaged with Ossan no pantsu far more likely than they would have engaged with any of the BL we highlighted on this list earlier. 

Really important to highlight these kinds of projects because these are the projects that are useful for you to show your friends and family. If you're interested in sharing BL with them, these are very good starting points to get into the rest of the genre because they are not BL, but they do open people's minds up to viewing queer media from places they might not have normally expected to get that.

NiNi 

Well said and I just love Makoto's turns of phrase. I think about them a lot, saying that the idol that his wife likes is the Okita family benefactor.

Ben 

That is exactly where my head went, too. “So Random is the Okita family's benefactor. I understand.” [laughs]

NiNi 

It's such clever writing, the way that he recasts ideas into a way that he can engage with them in an attempt to understand the things that he doesn't understand. I really enjoy that the writing puts him into the role of doing that work.

All of the shows on these lists, of course, because it's our VIIB Awards, these are really the things that we loved watching. But I think I have a special place in my heart for Oppan.

01:06:00 - Outro

Ben

We talk about a lot of shows in this podcast. We highlight a lot of things. These are the things that will be talked about well beyond this year, or at least we hope they will. Please go watch them and be part of that conversation.

NiNi 

I think the other thing that the VIIB Awards forces us to do is even in a year that we're struggling a little bit, it reminds us that, no, actually there was a lot of good stuff, too.

So anyway, there we are. Those are our VIIB Awards. We're gonna put up our final awards listing as part of the transcript for this show. So look out for that when it comes out on Tumblr. But that's gonna be it from us. The 2024 VIIB Awards are over.

Ben

I'm currently showing Emily Let Free the Curse of Taekwondo and Love in the Big City at the same time.

NiNi 

My gosh, so you're giving her the exact same experience we had. Good job.

Ben 

I sure am! [laughs] Can you believe that we got both of these shows at the same time? Like, how did they think we were supposed to process both of these shows simultaneously?

NiNi 

They weren't thinking about us, bestie. They were just like, no, we're just going to put the things out. It's time.

Ben 

Incredible. I just love the idea that a bunch of new Korean viewers who might've become interested in QL following up on Love in the Big City had Let Free the Curse of Taekwondo right there being advertised at them. Like, that is so stellar.

NiNi

That was a very good four weeks.

That is going to wrap us up on the 2024 VIIB Awards. Oh my god guys, we're done for another year.

This year, let's see what's gonna happen. Is Ben gonna not watch in the summer so he doesn't get cranky? Stay tuned to find out.

Ben 

[laughs] No promises, no demands. Love is a battlefield.

NiNi 

Woo. We have drunk too much brown liquor, it is time to go. We out. 

Say bye to the people, Ben.

Ben 

Peace!

[the-conversation-pod]

The Diamond League: Fan-Favorite BL Classics

AND WE'RE BACK

Join us for our 2024 holiday special. We asked a few friends to submit to us their favorite BLs we haven't covered on the show. We had a lot of fun with this, and we hope you'll enjoy hearing some familiar and new voices from our friends.

Come for the fellowship and recommendations. Stay for Ben and NiNi shading each other.

The Diamond League by @Ben and NiNi

It’s our holiday special (because it's a holiday somewhere in the world)! Ben, NiNi and assorted friends of the pod look back on 10 years of

The Diamond League

Podcast Episode · The Conversation · 01/30/2025 · 1h 4m

The Diamond League - The Conversation | iHeart

<p>It’s our holiday special (because it&#39;s a holiday somewhere in the world)! Ben, NiNi and assorted friends of the pod look back on 10 y

Timestamps

The timestamps will now correspond with chapters on Spotify for easier navigation.

00:00 - Welcome 00:55 - Celebrating the BL Canon: A Retrospective 02:08 - Blueming (2022) | KR | dir. Hwang Da Seul (Megan) 07:35 - Dark Blue Kiss (2019) | TH | dir. Aof Noppharnach Chaiwimol (Shan) 13:59 - He's Coming To Me (2019) | TH | dir. Aof Noppharnach Chaiwimol (Captain Hands) 17:00 - His (2020) | JP | dir. Imaizumi Rikiya (Twig) 21:12 - Light On Me (2021) | KR | dir. Lee Yoo Yeon (Kyra) 25:40 - Make It Right (2017) | TH | dirs. New Siwaj Sawatmaneekul and Cheewin Thanamin Wongskulphat (Turtles) 33:29 -The Miracle of Teddy Bear (2022) | TH | dir. Paajaew Yuthana Lorphanpaibul (Pluem) 39:52 - Theory of Love (2019) | TH | dir. X Nuttapong Mongkolsawas (Bookworm) 46:15 - The Untamed (2019) | CH | dirs. Steve Cheng and Chang Ka Lam (Shan) 51:42 - We Best Love (2021) | TW | dir. Ray Jiang (Twig) 57:59 - Ben and Nini's Drive-by Faves

The Conversation Transcripts!

Thanks to the continued efforts of @lurkingshan as an editor and proofreader, we are able to bring you transcripts of the episodes.

We will endeavor to make the transcripts available when the episodes launch, and it is our goal to make them available for past episodes (Coming soon thanks to @wen-kexing-apologist). When transcripts are available, we will attach them to the episode post (like this one) and put the transcript behind a Read More cut to cut down on scrolling.

Please send our volunteers your thanks!

00:00 - Welcome

NiNi

Welcome to The Conversation, the Queer Media And Brown Liquor Podcast.

Ben

I'm Ben, the media critic

NiNi

I’m NiNi, the vibes queen

Ben

And we are your drunk Caribbean uncle and auntie who are sitting on the porch in the rocking chairs

NiNi

We’re here to talk queer film and dramas, with a special focus on Asian QL

Ben

So if you like to dive deep into queer stories…

NiNi

If you like cracked out takes on art and commerce in queer media…

Ben

If you just enjoy simping for attractive people…

NiNi

We believe in simping!

Ben

Tune in!

00:55 - Celebrating the BL Canon: A Retrospective

Ben 

And we're back. As part of our award season, we decided to call on some of our friends and highlight some shows that we have not talked about extensively on The Conversation that are really important to the BL/QL canon. So we got 10 shows from eight of our friends! They all submitted clips advocating for why you should watch these shows, some of which NiNi has not watched and should listen to our friends on.

NiNi 

So the initial thought behind this episode, the Diamond League, is that 2024 would have marked 10 years since Love Sick. Since, let's call it, the modern era of BL. So we wanted to highlight 10 faves that maybe we haven't given their shine on the show. And we asked our friends to pick them. So you're going to hear from some friends of the pod, some you've already met and some new people that you haven't met before. And then we are going to talk a little bit about what they have to say about these shows.

02:08 - Blueming (2022) | KR | dir. Hwang Da Seul (Megan)

Ben 

Okay, brother in the booth, play the first clip.

Megan

Hi! This is Megan, or @solitaryandwandering on Tumblr.

My selection for the Diamond League is Blueming. 

Cha Siwon is a college freshman in film school who derives his self-worth from his physical appearance and popularity. He devotes an inordinate amount of time to working out, adhering to a strict diet of protein shakes and not much else, and forcing his personality into pleasant contours. But another film student then arrives on the scene: Hyeong Daun, with seemingly effortless good looks, great grades, and all the money Cha Siwon doesn’t have. As the two continue to interact, Cha Siwon must peel back layers and layers of self-loathing to first discover then accept who he really is.

It’s a Hwang Da Seul joint, her first and only time directing an adaptation of a BL webtoon (“Who Can Define Popularity” by Tak Bon), though she had worked with this screenwriter (Park Young) before with To My Star. Her third foray into BL after Where Your Eyes Linger and season 1 of To My Star, Blueming sees her exploring themes she’s visited in all her projects to some degree, such as family, abuse, class dichotomies and interaction, social harm, and self-image—just to name a few. I feel like this show is where she really begins to refine her perspective and style.

If you love complex characters or narratives which hinge on character evolution, you should check this out. I feel like this show is not talked about nearly as much as her other projects.

It’s available on iQIYI, with eleven episodes lasting around 12 minutes each. Don’t let its short runtime scare you away. 

I’m sad we never got season 2.

NiNi 

Me too, Megan. Me too.I really wanted it very badly. 

So Ben, what are your thoughts on Blueming?

Ben 

I remember enjoying the production of it when I watched it. I remember liking the same things that Hwang Da Seul is always putting us through, where really imperfect guys are trying to sort their shit out and some gross things happen that aren't necessarily totally forgivable, but she wants us to. The difficulty is, when it premiered, it was a pain in the ass to watch. And unfortunately, that has really clouded my memory of it. 

So I personally don't feel as strongly about this, but I kind of want to watch it again because Megan is a very astute viewer of media, and I often really enjoy her takes. Part of how we ended up finding her was she was writing about disability narratives in QL and all of us showed up to watch her live blog La Pluie about two or three months after it finished. She was not expecting this whole group of nerdy essay writers to show up on every one of her posts to react to them. She's been a lot of fun to have around. 

I feel like I need to revisit Blueming, because I don't feel harshly about the project itself. I just feel annoyed when I think about trying to rewatch it.

NiNi 

I think that you should give it another shot. I love everything by Hwang Da Seul, honestly. And what I really loved about Blueming, more than the writing, which was pretty good, I really got a sense of Hwang Da Seul as a director on Blueming. The way that she directs the camera, the way that she has her actors move through space. It's one of the prettiest things that she's ever made. And Daun and Siwon are really great characters whom I love, especially Siwon. He's just so messed up and he really needs the kindness that Daun shows him. And when Daun shows him that kindness, he just goes okay, I need to stop being so weird about life. I have had this messed up childhood where I have been made to think that what people think of me is the only important thing. And here's this person just telling me to be myself, because he wants to know me and he likes me just as I am, and I am discovering myself through this. 

It's a great little show. I truly enjoy it. It is beautiful to watch. There are a couple of scenes in particular, the scene where they go on their beach trip, they kiss on the beach, and then they go back to a nearby hotel and they have their first time silhouetted in front of a blue light. It is the prettiest thing that Hwang Da Seul has ever done. So I would suggest that you give it another try if you can get past the annoyance, because I know there are things that I have not watched because I am annoyed by them so I will allow for that.

Ben 

I’m ‘bout to say! I was gonna let you have it for a little bit, but I'm like, mm-mm. No, ma'am.

NiNi

No, no, I know, I know. That's what I'm saying. If you can get past your annoyance, I would encourage you.

Ben 

She's like, you should watch it. It's not that long. I'm like, girl, we've been saying that about every Japanese project for three years.

NiNi 

I've been catching up! I've been catching up on them.

07:35 - Dark Blue Kiss (2019) | TH | dir. Aof Noppharnach Chaiwimol (Shan)

NiNi

Let's move into our next entry for the Diamond League and this one comes from our Shan.

Shan:

Hey podcast peeps, it's Shan. I heard that Ben and NiNi are making a list of shows they're calling the Diamond League and I am here to bust through the door like the Kool-Aid man and scream about Dark Blue Kiss. Dark Blue Kiss is from the classic GMMTV days when they were first kind of kicking off this BL wave, and it hails from the days when they were actually interested in good stories instead of just making branded pair content. I think it stands out to me for a few reasons. One, it stars TayNew, and you all know that I'm a TayNew girlie. I love them and they're excellent in this, as always. Two, it's a story about a long term relationship, which we hardly ever get. So the story begins when Pete and Kao are three years in and experiencing some serious relationship challenges. Related to that—my third point—his show is not in the bubble. It is very much dealing with the realities of homophobia, both external and internalized, and how that affects their relationship over the long term as they kind of tussle with whether or not they should be out to their loved ones. And fourth, this show does one of the things I love the most in the world that I've talked about quite a lot, which is a class disparity narrative. The story is very much informed by the class disparity between Pete and Kao. It takes it seriously and it plays it all the way through the threads of what happens and you know, that that is super rare in Thai BL. And I'm pretty sure this is the only GMMTV BL who has actually done it well. I think it's worth highlighting, I think it should be in the canon of great shows that we discuss when we talk about BL, and I hope you all are gonna give some more thoughts about why you like it. 

Ben

I love that you can hear Shan smiling when she talks about TayNew. That is absolutely ridiculous.

NiNi 

[laughs] It's true.

Ben

Dark Blue Kiss is one of Aof’s shows and it is one of my quiet favorites of his. And it's because he took something that could have been kind of forgettable with the Pete and Kao dynamic from the Kiss series. It's the very rare to get BL that's about an established couple. And these guys are having very serious, very normal problems. Pete's family is wealthier and his dad is more accepting of them. Kao is poor. He doesn't know how his single mom is going to respond to what he needs to tell her. And he's scared of those consequences and what upsetting her may look like. So he's kept them in the closet this whole time and it really prevents them from moving forward as a couple. 

On top of that, he's hustling to try and make ends meet to support his mom. This involves tutoring. One of the kids he ends up tutoring is played by AJ.

NiNi 

JJ. 

Ben

No, it's AJ. It's AJ. I looked this up before we got here.

NiNI

I don't know why I thought it was JJ, but yes, continue bestie.

Ben 

It's AJ because AJ is the one who kisses boys.

NiNi 

True, although—dot, dot, dot…

Ben 

No. There will be no other in here. AJ is the twin who kisses boys.

NiNi 

We love AJ and JJ on this podcast, just so you know.

Ben

Not necessarily. We do, we love both of them, but also, JJ does not kiss boys.

NiNi 

Continue.

Ben 

No, see now I'm going on side rant. JJ does not kiss boys. I'm pulling up in his history right now. Let's go look at the list. He's Coming to Me, no boy kissing. 2gether, no boy kissing. My Gear and Your Gown, he clearly should have kissed the boy in that one, did not kiss the boy. Enchanté, did not kiss a boy. Star and Sky, no boy kissing. Midnight Museum, no boys got kissed in that, unfortunately. Dangerous Romance, he should have kissed the boy in that, didn't. [NiNi laughs]

He was in We Are. Did he kiss a boy, NiNi? 

NiNi

He did not.

Ben

Exactly. This is exactly why I got pissed. AJ was in 23.5 near Euro and clearly should have kissed him. And we know AJ will kiss him.

NiNi

You mean Euro could have bagged both the twins? 

Ben 

In the same year, like this is my thing–

NiNi

One in Dangerous Romance and one in 23.5? My god. Okay, here's how Euro can still win.

Ben

All right, we're on a long tangent here. We love the twins. AJ plays Non in Dark Blue Kiss and Non is clearly into Kao. And Kao does not navigate this kid's crush very well. He doesn't want to put this kid in his place because this kid is paying a lot of money. He ends up lying to Pete and this causes some real problems for them, and really almost costs them their relationship in a way that felt really believable without it feeling super melodramatic. 

This is a really great drama about an established couple trying to take an important step forward in the face of real queer consequences. And it's well done. And there's a lot of great supporting work in this one. I want to back up Shan on this and say that you all should really check this out so that you can also yell fuck you to Non with the rest of us, because that boy sucks and he deserves everything he got.

NiNi 

I'm just gonna add one of my favorite things about Dark Blue Kiss aside from all the things that Shan and Ben have already said—

Ben 

—Girl, if you mention Podd, I'm gonna fight—

NiNi 

—I'm sorry, you know I love him. You know I love him. Podd, the Podd/Gawin ship and Podd and Gawin as Sun and Mork the side couple. I truly had a great time with them. I really did. They're not a good couple, but they're a good couple in my heart. I had a great time with them.

Ben 

They are not a good couple. 

NiNi

They’re not a good couple! But they’re a good couple in my heart. [laughs]

Ben

NiNi has created a version of them that makes them a good couple. To be clear, they are not a good couple. But if you write the correct fic—

NiNi 

[laughs] Listen, I love them, let's move on. 

Dark Blue Kiss is available on GMMTV's YouTube. Go look for it and watch it if you haven't watched it already.

13:59 - He's Coming To Me (2019) | TH | dir. Aof Noppharnach Chaiwimol (Captain Hands)

The next clip is from Captain Hands. (@wen-kexing-apologist)

Captain Hands:

He’s Coming to Me, which is written and directed by Aof Noppharnach, is a show about a ghost named Med who does not know the truth of his own death and a boy named Thun who can see ghosts and makes it his mission to help Med discover how he died. And, because this is BL, they fall in love along the way.

If you watched Bad Buddy and loved how Aof used warring families as a stand-in for homophobia, then you should definitely watch this show to see how Aof uses Thun’s ability to see ghosts as a metaphor around the visibility and invisibility of queerness. 

I’ve spoken about this show before and how its distribution and viewership was severely impacted by protests against Ohm and Singto being paired together in this series, which is a damn shame because this show is incredible. Ohm and Singto’s performances are stunning, their chemistry phenomenal, and the story itself is beautiful. 

Ohm’s portrayal of Thun as he slowly realizes his sexuality is gut-wrenching and real, from Thun’s mounting distress as he rambles about the assumptions people make about him, to how he acts when he comes out to his friends and family, to the breakdown he has in episode five’s rooftop confession scene. 

This show deals so much with loving and losing queer people and how we seek justice for the wrongs that have been done to them. It is only eight episodes, available for free on YouTube, and is so so queer, and I think everyone should watch it. 

NiNi

This is an incredible show. He's Coming to Me is absolutely one of my absolute favorite—not just BLs—dramas of all time. It stars young Ohm Pawat and Singto Prachaya. And it's just, it's incredible. It's amazing. I love it so much. If I had to put one caveat behind He's Coming to Me, it would be that I think that Aof dodged the ending, but other than that it's great. 

There's some great, really great acting from Ohm and Singto in this. One of my favorite scenes, as Captain Hands would have mentioned, Thun's rooftop confession to Med. It still gives me chills to think about it. You should go watch the show. 

Ben 

If there's one thing Ohm Pawat is good at, it's confessing to boys on roofs. [both laughs]

NiNi 

If it was the only thing he was good at, it would still be worth it, but he's good at so many other things at the same time.

Ben

Viewers are totally forgiven for having missed He's Coming to Me. There was a ton of drama around when this show released that we will not rehash here. The show was not really available in Western circles for a very long time. So I think anybody who missed it in 2019 is totally forgiven. But now that it is available on YouTube with subs, I think it's worth it.

There's a pretty decent mystery storyline that plays out across it, and I really love the queer writing in this. Aof was still expressing a lot of ideas at the time that he hadn't gotten out. And I think it'll feel fresh if you haven't seen it.

17:00 - His (2020) | JP | dir.  Imaizumi Rikiya (Twig)

NiNi 

All right, so let's move on to the next clip.

Twig:

Hi there, this is @twig-tea, here to advocate for the underrated Japanese film His from 2020. There is actually a prequel five episode series by the same name from 2019, which covers our two main characters Shun and Nagisa meeting for the first time in a small seaside town during their high school summer break. The series is a beautiful, quiet, yearning glimpse at first love and the awkwardness that navigating queerness piles on to an already awkward life experience. Worth checking out in its own right. 

But I'm here to talk about the sequel film, which takes place years into Shun and Nagisa's futures where they meet again in another small town, this time in the mountains. This film is an incredibly moving second chance romance story that does a great job of balancing the romance with reality. Just some of the huge themes covered deftly in this film are internal and external homophobia, adoption and child custody laws, how homophobia ruins the lives of not just queer people but everyone in their radius, the aging demographics of rural Japan and what that means for these communities, finding your place, and forgiveness. The relationship between Shun and Nagisa is the beating heart center of this film, but the relationships that both of them establish, build, and navigate with Shun's friends and neighbours, with Nagisa's ex wife and child, and with the town itself are also richly portrayed and beautiful to watch. Neither of these are readily available where I am, but if you reach out to me or anyone from the pod we can get you sorted. If you like quiet, beautiful media about the loss of innocence, giving and getting second chances, finding your place, and building community, take the extra effort to try this one out.  

Ben 

I am with Twig. The series is good. I like it a lot. I think it adds a great layer to the separation at the very beginning of the film because you are as shocked as Shun that Nagisa is breaking up with him. However, you don't need to watch it to enjoy the film, and the film is a very excellent piece. I think it is probably my favorite BL-adjacent film that exists. 

This one adds a great layer to the second chance component of the romance because there's no noble idiocy in this one. Nagisa just got scared and left. And now he's suddenly back with a fucking kid and a divorce. It's a really difficult and messy story, but it's executed with this incredible gentleness. And the community that Shun has decided to live in is really fascinating to follow along the way. It is a really excellent viewing experience. And it's rare that I think queer film covers this territory this well. I highly recommend finding it and watching it.

NiNi 

This film does some of my favorite things. Y'all know I love a second chance romance where they fucked up the first chance rather than didn't take the first chance. So there's that. There's all the drama that comes along with Nagisa having been married, divorced and bringing his daughter into the mix. Both in terms of his and Shun's relationship, also in terms of his relationship with his ex-wife, his relationship with Sora, his daughter, Shun's relationship with Sora and the town's relationship with all of them. 

It also has Nagisa coming back to basically kind of rescue Shun from becoming an absolute hermit essentially, because Shun, once Nagisa broke up with him, he kind of disappeared into himself a little bit and he disappeared into this small town that he's not really connecting with because he's sad, he's hiding, he feels guilty. I had some of the same feelings around 180 Degrees and Inthawut that I did around Shun at the beginning of His the movie. It's a great movie. I would urge everybody to watch it.

Ben

Let us know if you watch it. I wanna hear your thoughts.

21:12 - Light On Me (2021) | KR | dir.  Lee Yoo Yeon (Kyra)

Ben

Now, brother in the booth. Next clip.

NiNi 

Okay, I'm about to get slammed. [both snicker] Hold please.

Kyra:

Hello my name is Kyra, @kyr-kun-chan on Tumblr, and I want to talk about Light on Me. 

I love this show so much. It's a love triangle, but a very good and enjoyable one. It's about Woo Taekyung who doesn't have any friends and never cared about making friends until now. He tries to join the student council in the hope of making some friends there but that doesn't go as smoothly as he hoped. Taekyung is a little awkward and has a hard time socializing sometimes. 

The main student council members are Shin Daon, Noh Shinwoo and Namgoong Shiwoon. Shin Daon, the president of the student council, is at first glance a very kind person who loves to help others, but he has a problem of not being able to say no to anyone. Noh Shinwoo, the vice president, is also a bit of an awkward guy. He doesn't say much and everyone says he's a nice person but he seems to have a grudge with Taekyung. Finally, Namgoong Shiwoon is the guy who will make you laugh when you have a bad day. He's always there to back you up or offer you his precious snacks. There's a reason an award is named after him, the Namgoong Best Boy Award. So, these are our main boys and there is one more important character which is a girl named Lee Sohee, who has a big crush on Daon. 

This KBL really feels like a kdrama. I'm not gonna say who wins this love triangle because it's fun to figure it out while watching and they both have a good shot. Other than it being a BL, this show really is about the characters's growth. They all learn something and I really love that. 

NiNi:

Okay, Ben, hit me, I know. I'm just letting you know in advance, we just talked about this on the Year in Review, I have promised to watch this this year and I am actually putting it on my calendar for before the VIIB Awards. I promise.

Ben 

I just want to thank Kyra for that lovely summary of one of our favorite shows. [NiNi laughs] And I'm curious, NiNi, after hearing her put so much effort into delivering a concise pitch for the show, do you find yourself curious? Do you want to watch it, actually?

NiNi 

I always meant to watch it, I just had a little bit of a problem with the uncanny valley effect. There's a lot of makeup and Vaseline on the lens and I just needed to get past that. And I will before—

Ben 

You just watched We Are the series; I don't wanna hear shit from you. You made us spend 40 minutes talking about We Are the series. [NiNi laughs]

You spent 16 weeks with the GMMTV New Siwaj filter. Have several seats.

NiNi

[laughs] Shit, well I just got read. I will be watching it within the next week before we record the VIIB awards, I promise.

Ben 

Light on Me is probably my favorite execution of a love triangle in BL. Korea really loves second leads, and they have some interesting ideas about pining, yearning, and confessing in all of this. Woo Taekyung is one of the most interesting protagonists we've had in a long time because he's such an active participant in his own story. He is not just a beautiful BL boy who shows up and then just has hot guys throwing themselves at him. Our protagonist in a lot of romance stories is not often really that active of a driver of their own life. They have to respond to what the story is throwing at them. What I found really compelling about Woo Taekyung is that he holds his suitors accountable. He's very self-assured about who he is and what he wants to be without being stubborn to the point of being unwilling to learn and grow from what he experiences along the way. 

He's a really fascinating BL lead. And I think once you finally fucking watch it, you'll understand why this show is so important to so many of us, that even our best friend Kyra, who is often shy about this kind of stuff, was willing to put her voice on the line for it.

NiNi 

I have taken your many, many, many, many points and I promise you by the next time we talk, I will have watched Light on Me.

Ben

She says before she edits that out. [both laugh]

NiNi 

I'm leaving it in. I'm leaving it in for accountability. 

25:40 - Make It Right (2017) | TH | dirs. New Siwaj Sawatmaneekul and Cheewin Thanamin Wongskulphat (Turtles)

Ben 

Okay, brother in the booth, on to the next clip.

NiNI

Okay. So the next clip is from Turtles (@waitmyturtles) and let's hear what she has to say.

Turtles:

Make It Right! A classic, historic, and legendary show from the early annals of the Thai Boys Love genre for so many reasons. Make It Right followed, format-wise, in the footsteps of its immediate Thai BL predecessor, 2014’s Love Sick, allotting screentime to multiple couples and their unwinding romances. But unlike Love Sick—and other important Thai teenage multi-narrative series—Make It Right focused exclusively on same-sex couplings. This wasn’t a surprising move, given the creators of Make It Right—two budding screenwriters and directors who would go on to become stalwarts of the Thai Series Y genre, New Siwaj and Cheewin Thanamin. 

Make It Right wasn’t a perfect show, by any means. With New and Cheewin both at the helm, you have to expect some chaos, and there were a lot of moments in this series that left my head spinning. There were unexplained sex and food metaphors, unfulfilled romantic journeys among some side couples, and other loose threads. However, both seasons of Make It Right were anchored by the romantic development of its lead couples, TeeFuse and FrameBook, and the series went no holds barred on the complications these young men faced in their budding relationships. Fuse had to balance his growing bisexual attraction to Tee while managing a complicated, previously existing relationship with a cheating girlfriend. Book continually dodged Frame’s advances, while the experienced Frame made missteps in his eager courtship of Book. 

The second season of Make It Right, especially the ending, harkened back to some of Cheewin Thanamin’s best and most heartfelt work, particularly the ending of Bed Friend, as both series ended with optimistic proposals of forever among the beloved pairs. But most of all, what moved me about Make It Right is its unabashed devotion to the authenticity of experience of young teenage love and sex. New Siwaj and Cheewin Thanamin approached young gay male sex with a laser focus on how messy and complicated young love and sex can be. They made the experience of first gay love universal for all viewers. 

And most importantly, as my dear friend Ben, of The Conversation podcast, said to me in 2023, when I first watched Make It Right: the series, finally in that moment in history, did not punish young men for being gay, as so much queer media had done before Make It Right’s airing. Ben said, “New Siwaj and Cheewin Thanamin understand] that many early sexual experiences are with other boys. And Make It Right asks what life could be if they just didn't turn against each other for it.”

Make It Right treats its characters with the respect that developing teenagers deserve. The world wants to be so negative to immature youth. But Make It Right gives teenagers, young gay teenagers, the chance to grow without judgement, and to make that growth relatable to even the most experienced adult viewer. 

NiNi 

Thank you, Turtles. Ben, I know you are one of the world's foremost experts and lovers of Make It Right. 

Ben 

I am an apologist for Make It Right. Make It Right is not great, but I love it so much. P’Nine is still my hero all these years later. [NiNi laughs] Every time I pitch Make It Right to people, I talk about it as like, what if you gave a bunch of gay creators in their 20s enough money to go idealize what they wished had happened in some of their high school crushes and relationships? What would that look like? And Make It Right is the answer. 

It's a weird show. The humor is all over the place in it. And every single interaction these boys has starts off in such a weird and kind of fucked up space. None of the early encounters any of these couples have is what we would call ideal. All of them reek of dubious consent. But I really love that that's not the stopping line, there's a ton of exploration about what goes on after this. The main couple has this really great experience over dealing with having feelings for a boy who's trying to sort out his feelings for a girl who's cheating on him. The second pair has our beloved Ohm Pawat in it—

NiNi

In his first role.

Ben 

Baby's first role—has this really compelling dynamic about both of these guys being sexually experienced at like 15, but also having interesting histories that they bring to the table already. There's a really great third storyline with a very femme, gender non-conforming character and their best friend. There's a lot of really complex ideas in this show. The acting is nothing to write home about. Really only Ohm is the standout performer of this show.

NiNi 

I mean he shines. Shines, I tell you.

Ben 

But really, there is just so much interesting masculine storytelling as part of this. We have a lot of complex feelings about New Siwaj and Cheewin on this podcast. But they both had a lot of interesting things to say and explore about 10 years ago. It's one of the reasons why I stay engaged with their work, especially when I'm frustrated with them. At one point, I really felt like I understood and connected with these guys. And it's interesting for me to see where we are growing, sometimes together, sometimes apart.

NiNi 

One of the things that I like about Make It Right sort of as a early, let's say, proof of concept of the Thai BL space is the fact that they also tried to do something different than the blue shorts in terms of the aesthetic that they put together for the school. There was a lot of things that remind me of sort of early maybe 40s or 50s queer media where they were trying to do a little bit of cheesecake, a little bit of not with the short shorts and all the things. It was some fascinating ideas that Cheewin and New were working with in Make It Right, especially that idea of how do boys actually discover that they like each other? 

It's not always pretty to watch, but it is always compelling to watch. It is long, but it is worth watching the whole thing for, like, a very clear idea of where New Siwaj and Cheewin Thanaman were starting out from in terms of the ideas that they wanted to contribute to the queer canon. Great show, I highly recommend it.

I think Make It Right might be Ben's absolute favorite.

Ben 

Like, from a stylistic standpoint and I should show this to more people standpoint, no. But when people are like, what's your trash fave? As like, what's an imperfect show that's hard to show to other people who weren't there who won't get it, but like, you will defend for the rest of your life? Make It Right is that show.

NiNi

We all have those shows. I know what mine is.

Ben 

Oh, I need to know. 

NiNi

You know what it is. 

Ben

Is it Love by Chance?

NiNi

It is Love by Chance.

Ben

My god. Everyone's secret favorite show is a New Siwaj show that's not that good but that did like one or two things really well.

[NiNi laughs]

33:29 -The Miracle of Teddy Bear (2022) | TH | dir.  Paajaew Yuthana Lorphanpaibul (Pluem)

So, all right, let's move on to our next clown, another new friend of the pod. Let's hear from @happypotato84.

Pluem:

Hi! It’s me, ya boy Pluem. I’m here today to tell you lovely people what I love so much about The Miracle of Teddy Bear. Let’s start off with the writing, oh my god the writing! It's so tight and intricate. I feel like this show doesn't waste any of its scenes despite its very long runtimes, all the details, even the minor ones from the earlier eps, pay off in the later ones. And it made you feel rewarded if you were paying attention. Like, for an example, Nut doesn't eat his mother's lunch boxes in the early eps, which seems like a minor thing, pays off big time with the family trauma backstory. This show's writing is so smart and satisfying and I applaud everyone involved in the process of making it. 

And now time for a rant. Whoo! Let me tell you, after some researching I'm certain that this show was one of the most important Thai queer media in recent times. For people who didn’t know this show aired on the time slot called ละครหลังข่าว, or after news lakorn, on the most popular channel in Thailand, channel 3, and the rating was not good. It was bad, like really really bad, a lot of the BL girlies didn’t show up for it and the lakorn aunties just think it was too weird and was not ready for any gay leads lakorn. And it’s pissing me the fuck off because this show depicted the queer truth unapologetically and because of that reason that’s why there haven’t been a BL show in that time slot since.  

In my opinion, queer truth is as much as important as queer fantasy and because of this show’s failure in the rating—which is no fault of its own—it's one of the reasons why Thai bl has been on a decline in terms of shows that speak on queer truth. The balance is off and that sucks because as much as I love light fluffy BLs, queer Thai people deserve more than that. And also if you only consume sweet bubbly Thai BLs, especially GMMTV ones, it would rots your goddamn mind. It’s all about balance diet, baby! Anyways back to the lovely people of the podcast. Pluem, out! 

NiNi

I love Pluem so much. Thank you so much for that Pluem. 

Ben 

You gotta hang out with him sometimes. That boy is funny. [laughs]

NiNi

He is funny as hell. We gotta get there. 

So, Miracle of Teddy Bear is not quite a BL. It's also one that I have not had the time to watch as yet.

Ben

It's not a BL at all. This is like He's Coming to Me. It is no fault of the Western audience that they did not watch the show when it aired. It released originally in ‘22. There were rumors at the time that the show initially probably snuck by the censors because the premise seemed really ridiculous. A teddy bear turns into a human and, like, dates him. And they're like, oh my God, stupid BL trash. There's speculation that the show created a from-a-distance goofy-as-fuck-looking premise so that it could get away with saying a bunch of things it wanted to say about modern Thai society. And there's also rumors that are unconfirmed that the powers that be delayed the show's external distribution because they weren't that keen on the things that the show had to say. 

That being said, we do have access to it now and our boy Pluem is correct. It is an incredibly impressive family drama exploring intergenerational trauma. We sometimes joke about some of the soap opera level melodrama that goes into some of the Thai productions. And there is that element here, but it's grounded in some really believable human prejudice and bigotry that is really difficult to watch sometimes. One of my personal favorite things about this is how truly angry this protagonist was allowed to be. Our protagonist, Nut, is allowed to have a kind of recognizable queer rage and frustration that is not often afforded to a lot of characters in the maybe tourist-focused approach to BL financing and production.

If we have room for it in the transcript of this, I'll make sure to leave links to Shan and Twig's combined post about The Miracle of Teddy Bear and Captain Hands’s post about Nut’s rage. It is a really incredible production. While I would not say that this is a lovely BL to go watch for a fun uplifting time, if you really enjoyed Moonlight Chicken because it felt more realistic to you and you want to see what more honest to the queer frustration people live with storytelling maybe looks like in Thailand, this is very much a place to go. Also, Inn Sarin plays the teddy bear and he's really good in this and he's very beautiful.

NiNi 

Inn Sarin is very beautiful and The Miracle of Teddy Bear is on my list. This year my resolution is to catch up on my watch list and this is one of the things that's up at the top of it.

Ben 

I will say for those of you who are considering watching it, it is a marathon watch. Like a kdrama, it is like 16 90-minute episodes. It's long. So pace yourself.

NiNi

You know that that only makes me stronger, bestie.

Ben 

Oh, great! Our next one is gonna be about—wait, no, that show's not up yet. We'll save that comment for later.

39:52 - Theory of Love (2019) | TH | dir.  X Nuttapong Mongkolsawas (Bookworm)

NiNi 

But before we get there, let's get here and hear from Bookworm about our next show.

Bookworm:

Hello, this is Bookworm, @neuroticbookworm on Tumblr, and my pick for the Diamond League is one of my beloved BL favorites, Theory of Love. Theory of Love is a GMMTV show released in 2019, with Off and Gun in leading roles. The story follows a group of friends who are attending film school together, and one of the boys, Third, is secretly pining for his best friend, Khai. We watch as Khai’s promiscuity and generally shitty behavior towards Third cause a rift in their friendship, and he spends the rest of the show growing and rebuilding their relationship. 

To me, this show is a quintessential GMMTV gem because while it does have the common Thai BL pitfalls of weak side couples and a little narrative meandering, it does such an excellent job with executing its main narrative and themes that it cannot be ignored. The character growth arcs of both Khai and Third are well executed, and the storytelling tools employed by the show work effectively to support the writing. Khai’s arc in this show is one of my favorites ever, because very rarely do we get to see a character that is thriving in heteronormativity and patriarchy go through a convincing growth arc in media. Khai is extremely hateable because he is a bit of a dick to Third and his friends, but he is also a very successful het man among his cohorts. He’s good-looking and charming, hooks up regularly with a plethora of girls, who then fight over wanting to become his girlfriend. His fallout with Third pushes him to not only contend with and understand his bisexuality, but also realize how he had been an inconsiderate straight man who treats everyone around him like shit. And we all know and love Third and his crying in the shower antics, but he also has a lot of growing up to do in the show. He is a fan of the romance genre who lets the grandiose depiction of love in media influence his expectations in real life. He lets Khai mistreat him all the time in the name of unrequited love, and expects Khai to reciprocate his feelings without ever communicating them to him in the first place! Say it with me friends: mind reading is NOT an essential skill for a successful romantic relationship.

The show’s writing is very sharp and intentional in how it unpacks these characters and their communication issues. Each episode is titled after a famous romcom, which acts as an effective framing device, and also binds Third’s romcom brain rot to the narrative. The intentionality in writing also comes through in the special episode that goes beyond just serving fluff, further exploring the themes of the show, and bringing them to completion. As someone who enjoys good writing, Theory of Love was a very stimulating and enjoyable watch experience. The show is available to stream on Viki and the special episode is on YouTube for free. Thank you for listening, and I hope I've convinced you to give Theory of Love an honest-to-goodness chance.

Ben 

Well, NiNi, we have feelings about Theory of Love. Has Bookworm given you an inclination to re-approach it?

NiNi 

We have lots of feelings. So here's my thing about Theory of Love. I acknowledge that Theory of Love is a very good show. It is very sharply written. It is very well acted. Nevertheless, I hate it. And the reason that I hate it is because Khai reminds me far too much of somebody in my own past. I have a very personal connection to how much I hate this show, so I have always sat in the space of acknowledging that it is an excellent show while never wanting to watch it again. 

Ben, how do you feel about it?

Ben 

So, Shan successfully bullied me into rewatching the show, and I am unfortunately forced to admit that it's actually a very good show. And that it is one of the rare shows that makes a character suffer for the things that they did to harm the relationship with their friend.

I will say this as sort of a broader thing about OffGun while we're here. It's interesting reflecting on gems in the genre, particularly ones that GMMTV produced, and recognizing that I don't think OffGun have ever wasted our time when they've come back to play together in anything mildly romantic. I think Puppy Honey, for all its problems, has a good story with Pick and Rome. I think the storytelling of Theory of Love between them and the relationships that they're unpacking there is really good and a very familiar beat that happens with a lot of gay people with their best friend. I don't think they wasted our time with Not Me, Cooking Crush, or The Trainee.

So I genuinely think Theory of Love is good. I actually think, like, if I were to ever watch Theory of Love again, I think what I'd want to do is I'd want to rewatch the film that they named each episode right before watching that episode. That would almost triple the time it takes to watch it. But I think it would be really good as a sort of thought exercise to explore what that writing team, which is one of the better ones, what they're exploring in romance and what some of their foundational media is.

I'm sorry, NiNi, I gotta agree with Bookworm. It's worth including in a list like that.

NiNi 

I've never disagreed. This is written by the All Write team who have hits and misses, granted, but the All Write team wrote Bad Buddy. They were involved in writing parts of Kinnporsche. The All Write team has written some really good dramas for GMMTV in particular.

They really were on it in this show. I can fully acknowledge despite hating it, that this show is excellent. It's probably one of the best things that GMMTV has ever produced in terms of BL. I will absolutely give it that. I hate Khai so much that I don't think I can ever be objective about it, though. Maybe we will try your thought experiment with watching the films and then the episodes and see how I feel about it. That's going to be a longer project, though.

46:15 - The Untamed (2019) | CH | dirs. Steve Cheng and Chang Ka Lam (Shan)

NiNi

Speaking of long projects, let's move on to the next bit of propaganda for the next show coming from Shan.

Shan:

And another thing! This is Shan, back to yell some more about how this illustrious podcast that has covered so much of the best of the QL genre has never talked about the biggest goddamn BL in the entire world. I am of course referring to The Untamed, which is the live action adaptation of a very beloved Chinese web novel whose English title is Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation. This is the story of Wei Wuxian, his downfall, and his rebirth. And, you know, his companion—constant companion, enemy, frenemy, lover—through the years, Lan Wangji. Now, this is a 50-episode cdrama, so I could not possibly go into all of the many reasons it’s worth talking about, but I just want to name that this is a gap in the pod for us and I really think we need to dedicate some time to unpacking why this story has resonated so much with so many people all around the world that it continues to be globally popular. It continues to attract new fans every week. It continues to dominate fandom spaces many years after it was originally published, and after the show originally came out. It's still getting new adaptations as we speak! So anyway, putting that out there for y'all's consideration to think about The Untamed as a member of the Diamond League, and also, maybe, a show worthy of a full episode of discussion. 

NiNi

Ben, what do you think about Shan's plug?

Ben

Shan said illustrious with a hard R and I never moved past that. [NiNi laughs]

Ben 

So, NiNi, you mentioned during The Miracle of Teddy Bear that the idea of going on a 24-hour journey with The Miracle of Teddy Bear did not intimidate you. And yet, the idea of going on a 40- to 43-hour journey with The Untamed repulses you. Elaborate.

NiNi 

Not repulses. I am yet to really find an interest in cdrama. I have attempted some cdrama and the closest that I have gotten to watching, consistently, cdrama is watching Taiwanese BL, which is completely different.

Ben

Yeah, it does not count.

NiNi 

It's one of those things where I will probably get around to it eventually, but cdrama is not really my thing yet. Maybe one day. 

Ben

This show is so funny to watch. Like, the loop is the same for everyone. You watch the first couple episodes and you're like, what is this ridiculous nonsense? And then after a few episodes, you're like, wait, this is actually quite watchable nonsense. And then there's a turning point where something clicks and you go, “This show invented love.” And that happens to every single person who watches it. It really is an incredible viewing experience. 

And I agree with Shan that it is not a show to be ignored and put aside. If you have an interest in the genre itself, even a passing academic interest in it, it's one of those shows that you kind of have to watch. You need to understand, you have to go in and see, why is it this show? For so many BL fans, it's this show. The show came out years ago and still dominates. Active fandoms continue to make content, continue to engage around it. 

I think it is very much worth watching for so many different reasons. Because it's a censored romance, they have to sneak their story into the plot. And this creates some really interesting challenges and forces a lot more compelling drama. It's a historical costume drama, there's a lot of martial arts stuff and fighting in it, which leads to some really great political drama as well. It's a really compelling experience. This is probably the most plotty show you guys ever watch from a recommendation from us, because cdrama does not hold your hand on anything. They are constantly hitting you with details that must be processed and paid attention to. And I think that makes for an incredibly stimulating experience.

NiNi 

This show is a monster, I have friends and people who I know who don't watch BL, are not interested in BL, but have seen this show or have heard about this show. It's huge, it's everywhere. A lot of people have gotten into it in and out of BL space. 

It's one of those things that I probably will have to watch at some point. I'll work up to it. We'll see if I can get to it by the end of the year.

Ben 

I do want to see you watch it.

NiNi 

Once I graduate and I have some time, we'll see what happens.

51:42 - We Best Love (2021) | TW | dir. Ray Jiang (Twig)

NiNi

Our final entry in the Diamond League comes from Twig.

Twig:

We Best Love is a Taiwanese series from 2021 in two parts: No. 1 For You and Fighting Mr. 2nd. Both are six episodes long, and both are on WeTV, and I love both for different reasons. 

No. 1 For You is about Zhou Shu Yi and Gao Shi De, childhood rivals in their final year of high school. Shu Yi has always come second in all competitions since they were little kids, and is determined to come first before they graduate, but gets distracted by being rejected by his crush. Shi De steps in to help him forget about the rejection in the most annoying way possible. This series is fun, silly, sweet, earnest, and a really cute rivals to lovers story about first love. The line "my feelings for you are none of your business" will remain forever iconic. If you like rivals to lovers, the oblivious + pining trope, competence, the bokeh effect, and language shenanigans—as Shu Yi is half-Japanese and slips into Japanese when he's annoyed—you will love this part. 

Fighting Mr. 2nd comes with a time-skip; Shu Yi is now running his own company and Shi De comes back into his life as the head of a start-up that Shu Yi is trying to acquire. This part is more moody, full of angst, and generally more 'adult'; it's also beautiful.  I don't think it will be giving too much away to mention that this is the part that has the iconic line "you didn't believe in my forever," which is one of the best retorts to noble idiocy I've ever heard. I also need to shout out this part for containing one of the best drunk acting scenes in BL, and in general the incredible performances of Maruyama Yusuke and Sam Lin in this and both parts. 

There are also two side couples that run through both parts, at least one of which I think was supposed to have a third part but we never got it, so their stories are a little rushed. Still, for a story about falling in love, forgiveness, the trashing of noble idiocy, competence, the shift from competing to working together, and just crushing, devastating, off-the-charts intense levels of devotion to your first love, do yourself a favour and give this series a try. 

NiNi

I think that captures it. I don't know how you feel.

Ben 

I want Twig to write a fic called Determined to Come First about these boys.

NiNi 

[laughs] Oh my God. You dirty, dirty bitch. [Ben laughs]

So this is really, really a great one. I am more of a fan of Fighting Mr. 2nd than No. 1 for You because of the aforementioned greatest drunk scene of all time. But both are very good and I echo Twig's enthusiastic recommendation to watch these.

Ben

I agree. Sam Lin and Yu, I think, have had the most compelling chemistry I think I've experienced in BL. If I had to pick my favorite pair in a lineup of the 6,000 boys we've seen in BL, it would always be the two of them, at least in the top three, every time, without fail.I love Yu so much. I have Yu’s photo book here.

NiNi 

He is very, very pretty. And he is a very, very good actor. I think—correct me if I'm wrong, Ben—wasn't this his first role?

NiNi 

And he really blew it out of the water. I remember looking at some of the BTS from the show and them discussing how as an actor, Sam Lin is more experienced, so he was sort of guiding Yu through the whole thing and a lot about the process of working together and filming the show was very interesting stuff. If I can find it again, I will link it in the show notes or in the transcript, because it was some really interesting stuff about just the process of acting, which is one of the things that I really enjoy thinking about when I watch these shows.

Ben 

I don't want to get lost in the lore, but this show has some great lore.

NiNi 

It really does have some great lore and Sam Lin is just an incredible, incredible actor. There are things that Shi De does, his tiny little 'Hi'. I will never not think about that. I will never not think about the physicality that he put into the role. His actions are very tense and then languid in some really interesting ways that made me think about dance. He's just a fantastic actor and he really helped Yu pull himself along and give truly excellent performances, both of them.

Ben 

I agree. Their kisses are really great, too. Like the bridge kiss in the first part and the couch kiss in the second one. Really compelling scenes. Still thinking about these boys years later. I miss them! Bring them back to me.

NiNi 

I do miss him. What is Sam Lin up to? I know we last saw him in Unknown. I miss him a lot.

Ben 

Me too. 

This one's great, though. I really am glad that Twig put it out here because it's not like we don't love the show. It just premiered before we started the podcast. This show is excellent. I highly recommend going to watch it. You watch them as two parts, but they’re a complete experience. I feel that way about We Best Love, that No. 1 For You and Fighting Mr. 2nd are a complete story together. And I really do agree with Twig that it is rare to see a show punish someone for their noble idiocy the way this one did.

NiNi 

He suffered absolutely for being so dumb and we love to see it. 

Ben 

He really was so dumb. But so was Shu Yi? I mean, goddamn.

NiNi

He really was so very dumb. I mean, there were some dumb boys but they got it together after, my god, five years apart.

Ben

Speaking of lore, let's not get lost in deleted scene stuff, but the deleted scenes are required viewing for this one.

NiNi

Absolutely required viewing. Walk, do not run, find them all. This show is incredible. I like the long arc of it because I like when shows really follow people through their life and how the consequences of their actions show up in their life later on. I did enjoy that.

57:59 - Ben and Nini's Drive-by Faves

NiNi

Wow! That's it. That's our diamond league.

Ben

It was really fun getting to hear the voices of a bunch of our friends on here. It's very fun how international BL fandom is because you guys get to hear like five different nationalities on here with different accents as a result.

NiNi

Definitely a lot of fun. We always love to hear our friends' voices. Always expanding the conversation outward is our goal.

Ben

Alright, NiNi, before we go, what bonus show would you toss on here that we haven't covered that you really love and want in this conversation? And it cannot be Love by Chance, you plug that show constantly so it does not count.

NiNi 

I can't even describe how much I love Love by Chance. I am always rewatching it. I am never not rewatching Love by Chance. I have my embarrassing fave which is Love by Chance, which I'm absolutely not embarrassed by but if I had to put something in the Diamond League, it's gonna be The Eclipse.

Ben 

Interesting, why The Eclipse?

NiNi 

Because I think that The Eclipse is the closest that Golf has gotten to saying what they really want to say, and I feel very strongly about all of the characters in it as individuals, not just the romances. I love that they're allowed to be wrong and they're allowed to hurt each other and they're allowed to be angry and to lash out in anger and be forgiven or not be forgiven. I love that we have femmes in there who are stronger than everybody and who are out front and loud and who get the apology that they deserve in the end from the people who have harmed them. I love the special. I love that they focus on the fact that, once people get together, that doesn't change who they are. And sometimes who they are is in conflict and they need to decide if they care enough about each other to compromise or if who they are is more important than that. And I love that we got to explore somebody who is getting into art, who is not supported by their parents, but has their friends as support. 

I love a lot of things about The Eclipse. It is not perfect. It is rough in some ways, but I think the underlying themes are incredible.

Ben 

I got two. I'm cheating. I can do what I want. 

NiNi 

It's your show. [laughs]

It's from the Philippines. It's Gaya Sa Pelikula. We've mentioned it on the show quite a few times. 

NiNi

Amazing.

Ben 

We've not done a deep dive rewatch reaction on it, but it is excellent. It is one of the more interesting shows that came out of the Filipino BL’s pandemic surge. I really like the way they approach cohabitation in this one. I liked the way they explored someone being closeted, living with someone who is out, and navigating that space with them. I haven't had another show that I think really captured that experience that well. I really like the development of the relationship between Karl and Vlad. It also has a gay uncle. I'm always going to pimp out a show that's got a great gay uncle in it. It is a really excellent show from ANIMA Studios. Go check this out for your own sake.

NiNi 

I will say that it is required viewing for listeners of this podcast. It is one of our top top tops. It is incredibly compelling. It is tightly written. It is beautifully acted and it has the most banging soundtrack of music that I have heard in BL.

Ben 

My other show is Rainbow Prince. I love it so much!!

NiNi 

It's also on the list, bestie. It's also on the list.

Ben 

The first BL musical Rainbow Prince was the first. It's done it the best. I don't want to hear from anyone else. It is so fun. It is so good. Every musical should have like two songs you really love and one song you should just absolutely despise. And Rainbow Prince has that. It's so great. I love how ridiculous this is. Oxin Film’s stuff is usually very slapped together scripts that they're often letting actors ad-lib for no reason and long scenes. It is such a weird viewing experience sometimes, but goddamn is this show so much fun And if I ever marry someone, this soundtrack will be played at my reception, I will see you all on the dance floor.

NiNi 

I watched the first episode before I got distracted by other things. I do have to continue it. The music that I heard so far, I really enjoyed. Hiling is a very, very beautiful song, very well performed. I am looking forward to watching the rest of this.

Ben

I'm about to go play the soundtrack before I go to bed.

NiNi

[laughs] Awesome.

Ben 

I love this show so much. It's just so much fun. Go watch it so you can have complex feelings about Oxin Films like me and Twig.

NiNi 

With that, we are wrapping up the Diamond League, which was meant to be a holiday special and you know what? It's a holiday somewhere in the world so it's still our holiday special.

Ben

Thanks to our friends for humoring us and putting their voice notes out for us. This was a lot of fun to coordinate.

NiNi 

We out. Say bye to the people, Ben.

Ben 

Peace!

[the-conversation-pod]

Year in Review 2024

AND WE'RE BACK!

Come join Ben, NiNi, and Shan as we talk about the trends we noticed, air some grievances, hand out some of our favorite fan awards, and make some new resolutions!

Year In Review 2024 by @Ben and NiNi

Ben, NiNi and Shan discuss a weird year for QL and look ahead to 2025. Episode transcript available here. 00:00 Welcome 00:55 2024 Headli

Year In Review 2024

Podcast Episode · The Conversation · 01/23/2025 · 1h 9m

Year In Review 2024 - The Conversation | iHeart

<p>Ben, NiNi and Shan discuss a weird year for QL and look ahead to 2025.</p> <p>Episode transcript available here.</p> <p>00:00 Welcome</p>

Timestamps

The timestamps will now correspond with chapters on Spotify for easier navigation.

00:00:00 - Welcome 00:00:55 - 2024 Headlines: Industry Consolidation 00:06:49 - 2024 Headline: Self-Censorship 00:13:52 - 2024 Headlines: Vertical Format Micro-BLs and Other Shit We're Anti 00:20:14 - Festivus Airing Of The Grievances 00:36:51 - 2024 Fan Awards 00:55:49 - QL Resolutions 01:04:45 - Affirmations and Hopes for the Future

The Conversation Transcripts!

Thanks to the continued efforts of @lurkingshan as an editor and proofreader, we are able to bring you transcripts of the episodes.

We will endeavor to make the transcripts available when the episodes launch, and it is our goal to make them available for past episodes (Coming soon thanks to @wen-kexing-apologist). When transcripts are available, we will attach them to the episode post (like this one) and put the transcript behind a Read More cut to cut down on scrolling.

Please send our volunteers your thanks!

00:00 - Welcome

NiNi

Welcome to The Conversation, the Queer Media And Brown Liquor Podcast.

Ben

I'm Ben, the media critic

NiNi

I’m NiNi, the vibes queen

Ben

And we are your drunk Caribbean uncle and auntie who are sitting on the porch in the rocking chairs

NiNi

We’re here to talk queer film and dramas, with a special focus on Asian QL

Ben

So if you like to dive deep into queer stories…

NiNi

If you like cracked out takes on art and commerce in queer media…

Ben

If you just enjoy simping for attractive people…

NiNi

We believe in simping!

Ben

Tune in!

00:00:55 - 2024 Headlines: Industry Consolidation

Ben 

And we're back. Oh my God, it's time to review 2024 before we get to the VIIB Awards, where it's just nonstop us talking about our faves. Once again, we have brought Shan into the booth because we have too much to discuss. Shan, say hello.

Shan

Hello!

Ben

First, it's time for us to talk about the big ideas of the year. NiNi, as the person who loves Thai BL the most on The Conversation, let's talk about how clearly the money is drying up and everybody is having to shuffle to whoever's got something to offer them.

NiNi 

Is the money drying up or is it just being funneled all to the same place? Because it feels like more money is getting spent on fewer things. I don't think that's necessarily a good thing, but I'm not sure that I can put my finger up and say that's a bad thing, either. We have seen some definite dips in quality. We don't have as many faves this year as we did last year, or even the year before. But what we did love, we loved-loved. 

So it's a complicated picture, I guess, but definitely there's been a consolidation and we wanted to talk about it a little bit because we predicted this in our very first set of episodes, all those many, many, many moons ago. We predicted that there was a consolidation coming in Thai BL because everything just got so big, so fast, and that usually precedes everything's starting to shrink back down a little bit.

Ben 

Big things we noted this year was GMMTV absorbing a bunch of free agents and, in one case, basically the entire staff of a whole studio that they now hire to do production work for them. 

Shan

Mmhmm. It's been wild. Like every week, I feel like we've been seeing announcements of new talent acquired by GMMTV.

Ben 

Barcode is now at GMMTV.

NiNi 

That was a big get.

Shan 

All the Wabi Sabi boys this year, too.

NiNi 

Yeah, those were the two big headlines, Wabi Sabi getting folded into GMMTV was one and definitely Barcode coming right at the end of the year. That was a big one.

Shan 

They also got Dimple Fluke.

NiNi

I mean, we love Dimple Fluke, but I don't know how big Dimple Fluke is in the general fandom—

Shan 

—He's big in my heart, NiNi, big in my heart.

Ben

[laughs] We thought this was coming when they got Singto to come back. Clearly trying to do it on his own didn't work and they were able to get him back in their house. I don't know how I feel about it. Wabi Sabi is no longer doing talent management. BOC seems to be shrinking

NiNi 

BOC (Be On Cloud) has said that they're backing off of talent management, as well. They dropped most of their roster. I think they only represent Mile, Appo, and Bible now.

Ben

Wow.

Shan 

GMMTV is the big studio that seems to want to be in the idol management game. And so that's where a lot of the talent is going. What feels concerning about it to me—we've talked quite a lot on this podcast about the increase in output, but not a commensurate increase in quality from GMMTV.

Out of all of the BLs that they're putting out annually, which is around eight to 10, there may be only a couple that actually have really good scripts behind them. So they're acquiring all this talent, but we know they don't have enough good writing to support shows to support this much talent. They put out, this year, a script writing contest to the plebes to say, “Help us, we need help writing shows.”

NiNi 

I was just gonna bring that up.

Ben

With hostile as fuck language, by the way.

Shan 

They literally went to the fans and said, “Can you write us some shows? Because we got nothing and we're acquiring all this talent.” That's just on the BL side. They've got this whole side of the house of these great, talented actresses and very few projects to cast them in. So it's concerning to me to see all the talent going to this one place that clearly cannot handle everybody that they're taking on.

Ben

It worries me too, because we've noticed a lot less sponsorship deals in most of their shows. One or two shows per year will get the usual eight- to 10-plus sponsor cards at the beginning, but that number has dropped off overall. It's very clear that there's maybe not as much ad money helping fund the production in the first place.

NiNi 

Bestie, I haven't seen an Oishii ad in quite some time.

Shan 

Right, where did Oishii go?

Ben 

If the juice makers have given up, it's over.

NiNi 

It is concerning to see this consolidation happening. There's a few people who are out on their own, who I think might be able to survive on their own. Like Jeff is out on his own, Billkin and PP are out on their own, and they're probably the ones who can sustain. Everybody else is either going to GMMTV or they're getting into the other side of GMM Grammy, like the One31 kind of lakorn side. But even that is shrinking, we're given to understand, people are moving into BL because that's the growing side of the market. 

Actors are moving into BL who might not have done BL before. Big names got into BL this year, like Jes Jespipat did 4 Minutes with Bible, a Be On Cloud production. He's a big lakorn actor. And then JJ and Tor did Spare Me Your Mercy at the end of the year. The headline on that really is like these big lakorn actors who nobody would have ever expected to do gay shit are doing the—well, in the case of Spare Me Your Mercy, semi gay shit. But Jes did gay gay shit in 4 Minutes, you know what I mean? So that's one of the big, I think, headlines that we need to be looking at looking at Thai BL in particular going forward.

00:06:49 - 2024 Headlines: Self-Censorship

Ben 

We need to talk about Thai BL starting to self-censor, likely to reach specific markets.

Shan 

Yeah, it's concerning. I wouldn't call it a trend yet, but we've seen a few examples of it in the last few months and it's making me nervous. What I'm talking about is, productions that are publicly saying, admitting that they are censoring some of the more explicit romantic or sexual content from their BL shows so that they can focus on reaching a wider audience with their message. We've seen statements like that from the Addicted Heroin creator. We've seen recently the screenwriter of Spare Me Your Mercy talk about the decision to remove explicit sexual content from the show for the same reason. We saw some of this related to Love Sick as well. If you're gonna do a Love Sick remake in 2024, the one thing you would expect them to improve on is not having censored kisses, but nope, they didn't do that. 

So there's this drive and this stated intention by some of the creators behind these shows to create BL dramas that minimize the actual BL as much as possible. They want to take advantage of the market for BL. They want to take advantage of the fan interest and the fan engagement for BL while also getting away with keeping the actual queer romance in these stories as minimal as possible. That is pretty shitty. They're coming out and they're saying this openly, this is not us just guessing.

NiNi 

Just saying that taking the romance out is why I left a lot of Western media. I'm so tired of seeing people say things like, “Well this doesn't have any plot.” The romance is the plot, the relationship is the plot and not recognizing that in a genre that is about romance is the part that kind of makes me go like mmm, okay, like yes—

Ben 

The genre is literally called Boy Love. (all) Where is the love? 

How old is that song? Hold on, let me Google that real quick.

Shan 

Don't look it up. But this is what I mean. Like, NiNi and I are refugees from Western romance. We came over to Asia for kdrama, because we wanted to see a genre of television that respected romance, that took it seriously as its own storytelling, that actually respected romance fans and people who like love stories. That is one of the best and most consistent features of Asian drama. And so to have now this subset of Asian drama creators who are specifically working in a queer love space that is even more hard for people to find, even less accepted by the mainstream, to have them intentionally self-censoring because they are trying to prove some kind of weird point. It just completely misses the point for me of why people are here engaging with these dramas. Certainly it doesn't seem to be helping in terms of pushing forward the social agenda in these countries where they're making these shows.

Ben 

This is the part that always stresses me out when we're trying to measure how gay can it be and still get funded because this happens to us repeatedly in queer viewer space. Netflix pulled this shit on us where, when they first wanted to go to digital streaming, they set up deals with all of the gay distribution houses. And we got to watch all of these movies that we had never had access to before. And it was great. And we all were like, hell yeah, I'm going to go on Netflix so can watch my little gay shows.

As soon as they get tastemakers—read: queer and brown people—to pimp their shit, they try and immediately convert and get a bunch of normies in there.

NiNi 

Yep, that's basically what happens.

Ben 

This, again, this is not shit I'm making up! This is what really happened.

Shan 

These are the patterns and we've seen them play out so many times in so many places and it's the pattern we're starting to see play out in BL and it's alarming.

NiNi

I mean! It played out on Tumblr. The platform that we spend so much of our time on, this is exactly what happened. The people who built the ship got kicked out of the ship.

Ben 

It's been an actually horrible year on Tumblr for queer people, especially trans people. It's a bad look that the gays who make the shit who seem like they're in an accepted enough space are either choosing to or being pressured to straighten up their act so that they can continue to get fed and make stuff. That doesn't feel great. It feels really worrisome as a sign about what may or may not be going on. Like it's only a few things right now, but we're seeing this everywhere else.

NiNi 

What we're basically saying is support GagaOOLala

Shan

Please! If you're gonna spend money on any of these platforms, spend your money on the queer platform hosted in Taiwan that actually cares about queer people.

Ben 

If you have spent significant sums of money on iQIYI in the last year for two shows and you haven't spent money on Gaga, reflect and then message us. [all laugh]

NiNi 

And I mean if you need yet another reason to subscribe to Gaga, their social media manager is like the greatest person in the world.

Ben 

They're my favorite person. They made fun of Kidnap. They were like, Kidnap, the show that's probably poorly named, is back on this week.

Shan 

Let's just get on our soapbox about Gaga for a minute, okay? They are the only platform that streams the vast majority of Japanese QL, period. They bring us Taiwanese BL. They bring us Thai BL in increasing volume.

Ben 

The WeTV shows have been consistently airing on Gaga lately. GMMTV is also clearly trying to consolidate and are starting to put their shows behind the Gaga and iQIYI paywall.

Shan 

It's a good platform that is worth supporting and it's far cheaper than any other streaming you're paying for. You should have it. You should subscribe.

NiNi 

This is not an ad.

Ben 

They do. We are not being paid. But if you guys want to hang out—I'm just kidding. Don't put that in there, NiNi. [laughs]

NiNi 

Yeah, but yeah, support Gaga. That's the only platform that when Park Seo Ham came out of the military, sent out a tweet saying, “Tell the world the bitch is back.”

Ben 

I love her!

Shan 

They deserve it.

NiNi

She is us, we are her, and this is a non-binary she. We don't know the gender of the GagaOOLala social media manager, but she's one of the girls.

Ben

I'm using ‘she’ in a gay way. It's very affectionate.

NiNi 

She, non-gender specific.

00:13:52 - 2024 Headlines: Vertical Format Micro-BLs and Other Shit We're Anti

Ben 

While we're bitching about things, let's talk about all these stupid vertical TV shows that keep coming out and how we must continue to refuse to watch them. We have already seen one of the shows that [Iijima] was in is going to apparently be put on TV properly. 

Good job, everybody, in not watching that. [NiNi and Shan laugh]

Do not let this become a thing. We cannot tell them that we are willing to watch shows two minutes at a time on our phones only. Unacceptable.

Shan 

Not only two minutes at a time on our phones only, but only after burning through a huge number of ads. That's how you get to the shows.

Ben

Gross.

NiNi 

This is like Ben's whole conversation in one of our more recent episodes about the BL TikTok filter. They're trying to get you used to the BL TikTok filter in like a million ways.

Ben 

I won't. I will NOT accept this!

Shan

Because the aim of this is to stop making actual dramas and just get us to watch a version of TikTok on our phones and call that BL. That's the end game here, guys. Don't fall for it.

NiNi 

Do not fall for it.

Ben 

We are here to support storytellers only. We are not here to make ad guys happy.

NiNi

I think that's a good segue.

Ben 

Speaking of ad guys who clearly don't like us, Korea is not interested in BL right now. [laughs]

NiNi

Oh my God.

Ben

We got three good Korean BLs this year.

Shan

At least they were all excellent. I know we talked about it on our recent Hallyu episode but now that the year is complete and the data has been crunched, I just want to underline this. We got, not necessarily fewer shows total from Korea, but we got fewer shows of a decent length. We got fewer shows of quality. A lot of what Korea put out this year was junk, frankly. These little vertical series, these small little web series that are really short episodes and very lacking in narrative. And then they also put out three of the very best things of the year. 

So it was a real dichotomy. In years previous Korea was putting out a more steady run of quality shows. We saw a real drop off of that this year.

Ben 

Oh shit, did Strongberry even make anything this year?

NiNi 

I was just about to say this is the year that Strongberry pissed me off because they made that Happy Ending thing that was neither happy nor an ending.

Shan 

And they made Blossom Campus, which was terrible.

Ben

Ew…

Shan

Strongberry let us down this year for the first time ever.

NiNi 

I kind of feel it for them because the CEO of Strongberry has spent so much time telling us how hard it is to get shit made and to get money to get shit made. So I was just like, ooh, things must be getting, like, real rough if they couldn't put out anything good.

Shan 

Can we though just take a moment to shout out the CEO of Strongberry for putting out his own little story about what happened with that show and basically being like, I told the writer not to fucking do that and he didn't listen to me.

Ben 

I did love that. I love that he just said, I told her she ain't let one listen.

Shan 

He was like, this is not on me. Do not associate this with me. You love Strongberry. You will continue to love Strongberry. [NiNi laughs]

Ben 

He basically did say it like that. We were like, all right, girl. [laughs]

Shan 

We'll let you have this one.

NiNi 

Yeah, but I mean it's a year in which we had nothing good from Strongberry, and that to me is like, wow. We got other really good stuff, some of it came out of absolutely nowhere. And I think that it had to come out of absolutely nowhere to get aired, because, as we saw when things are in the pipeline and they know about it, they're going to try to kill it.

Ben

Our last big highlight of the year we want to point out is that there was a Japanese BL airing almost every week this year. That is unprecedented. Usually, even if stuff gets made, we barely know about it, it gets no distribution, and the fansubbers are having people show up at their houses over. [NiNi laughs]

So we almost never get a lot of the Japanese BL, but there was a significant amount that was just handed to us on legal platforms for us to support, most notably GagaOOLala.

Shan 

GagaOOLala! I started Japanese QL Corner in January of 2024 on Tumblr. It's just a weekly post that I do that tracks the Japanese QL that's out. And I had things to write about every single week for the entire year. And we weren't always having to chase things down in the dark corners of the internet. We had things that we could watch on a regular streaming platform every week from Japan, And there were weeks when I was writing about six or seven shows at a time. That's how much was airing.

NiNi 

Now were those six or seven shows great? 

Ben 

Not always.

NiNi

I would say no, not always, but in terms of batting average, I think Japan did pretty well this year.

Shan 

I'd say still about half of the shows that aired from Japan this year were good to fantastic. And the other half were problematic here and there. There were only a handful that I thought were, like, bad bad.

Ben 

My favorite thing about watching Japanese BL is that I am never mid about it. I either really liked it or I was like, who is this for? [Shan and NiNi laugh]

I love that there's not all this wishy washy shit about like, oh, maybe it's kind of okay if I squint this direction. I'd be like, no, fuck that show. A 4 for you, a 3 for you, a 4 for you. Stay away from the shows I love. All of you over here, my 9s and 10s. Don't look at them. They're not worth it. Averages are not the most useful metric but I really like that when I'm recommending or not recommending Japanese BL, I feel very firm about how I feel about these shows.

Shan 

I do think that there has been a lot more variation in quality with the high uptick in volume of shows. But the batting average is still pretty damn high. 

We've got two new Japanese QL productions starting this week. So I'm excited that it's gonna keep going.

Ben 

That's it for the big highlights.

00:20:14 - Festivus Airing Of The Grievances

Ben 

Before we close out this year, we need to vent a little bit of grief. We need to talk about the things that we were super hype about that made us look like clowns. We're gonna start with our biggest disappointments in no particular order. Starting with the worst. 

NiNi, Wandee Gooday!

NiNi

[laughs] The absolute worst. I am so pissed off at this show. I talked a little bit about how pissed off I was with this show in our mailbag episode, but friends, I still have more ire in me about the show. I was so stoked, and the show dragged me along for a solid five to six episodes and then literally dropped me on my face. And that's something that I do not forgive in any way. I will remain pissed off forever. 

This is not The Shipper level, but damn close and I can't do it.

Ben 

If you want to feel a little solidarity, David was actually bitching about this at brunch earlier this weekend. He said, I can't believe I wrote a whole post for the first time on Tumblr about this show only to be made to look like a clown like this. He said he's never writing anything ever again.

NiNi 

[laughs] David's like, how dare you embarrass me?

Shan 

How dare you? It sucked, man. It was a huge letdown.

NiNi 

And the thing is that it could have been so good.

Shan

Could’ve had it all.

NiNi

I'm convinced that the first half and the second half were written by two different people. That's the only thing that makes any sense to me.

Ben 

Yes, let's start talking about BL like Star Wars fans. STAR WARS COULD BE SO GOOD IF IT WAS GOOD. Before you bitches come after me, my very first email address I made is a Star Wars email. Don't come for me.

NiNi 

Don't come for him, period. Okay?

Shan 

Leave us alone, it's been a long year.

Ben 

Speaking of a long year of disappointments, Shan, I'm letting you have the entire disappointment that was all of Sammon’s collected works this year.

NiNi 

Oh God, here we go.

Shan

We're calling this the Sammon Omnibus entry in the disappointment list. This year there were four different projects associated with Dr. Sammon. She screen wrote three out of four, and was the original writer for one: these shows were Dead Friend Forever, 4 Minutes, Spare Me Your Mercy, and Petrichor. All QLs, all with her attached, all very heavily promoted and very buzzy. 

I'm not gonna say that none of these shows were good at all or had any artistic merit. I actually really liked Dead Friend Forever until it fucked up the ending. 4 Minutes I found to be a very beautiful but ultimately incoherent mess. Spare Me Your Mercy was just a flop for all of us, none of us finished the show after all of us putting it on our list of the most anticipated of the year. 

Ben 

After JJ put his whole ass into Great Men Academy, I can't believe they embarrassed him like this.

[NiNi laughs]

Shan 

We have all seen Tor and JJ in other projects. You are lying if you claim that they were on their game in this show. I'm sorry. They have both done better with other people with better material. This show did not live up to the hype. I did not even finish it because I was so disappointed.

Ben

I can't believe we're saying that Tor was better in fucking Midnight Museum.

NiNi 

He was! He was absolutely better in Midnight Museum.

Shan 

He was better in Midnight Museum! And he had better chemistry with Gun than he did with JJ in this BL. JJ was light yards better in Great Men Academy than he was here. I'm not trying to shade the actors. It's not their fault. It's the material. The writing was bad. The show was flat. They seemed not at all dialed into their characters. They seemed confused about what they were supposed to be conveying, probably because their relationship development arc didn't make any fucking sense. It's not the actor's fault. They are very good actors and this show did not give them what they needed to succeed. I cannot believe what a letdown this show was after all that hype. There's also Petrichor, which is the first GL that has her attached to it. And I had to drop that one, too. It was hard to watch. 

Sammon is kind of considered one of the best screenwriters in the QL industry in Thailand. She wrote Triage. She was attached to Manner of Death. She has a track record. She has all these novels that are very popular and well liked. So there's a certain level of expectation that comes with her shows. But this year, her big year of four QLs, this was not it. Not a single one of these projects left me satisfied. I started the year as such a strong fan of her work, and I'm ending the year kind of throwing my hands up like, well, girl, guess Triage was a fluke. I don't know what's been going on, but you have not even come close to meeting that standard again.

NiNi 

I liked DFF and 4 Minutes more than you guys did. We've talked about this already. But I will say that these are shows that they spent money on. I have no complaints about production quality on any of these shows. They pulled up some quality actors. They got Engfah in Petrichor. They got JJ and Tor for, as you mentioned, Spare Me Your Mercy. Bible and Jes put on a clinic in 4 Minutes. And the DFF boys, they put their whole pussy in. They acted these shows, and they produced these shows. They look great, they sound great, but the writing just didn't hold up to everything else that they were putting in. 

And they got progressively worse because the one that I enjoyed the most was Dead Friend Forever, that was the first one. And the one that I enjoyed the least was Spare Me and Mercy. Like, we all dropped it. For different reasons, I think, but we all dropped it.

Shan 

I mean, it was not working on any level. So no matter what you were there for, there was just nothing to hold on to. If you were there for the romance, if you were there for the mystery, if you were there for the euthanasia discussion, it didn't really succeed at any of those.

NiNi 

Let's move on. Because we could talk about this forever.

Ben

Oh, that's fine. It's time for me to go the fuck off. I've been holding this in for months. [NiNi] It's time to talk about My Love Mix Up.

NiNi 

God, here we go.

Ben

Before I hurt people's feelings about this, I like Fourth and Gemini a lot. I think they're both very charming. I think they are both real talents and I am very much looking forward to seeing how they mature over the next decade, the way we got to experience with the original GMMTV BL boys. That being said, part about supporting your faves, for me, is wanting them to get work that uses them well. And I do not believe that My Love Mix Up used anyone well. It's extremely disappointing to me that after doing such a good job on Cherry Magic Thailand, that GMMTV released a show that did everything I was afraid would go wrong with Cherry Magic Thailand.

Cherry Magic Thailand managed to make the Cherry Magic story applicable to the Thai context in a way that we all loved. My Love Mix Up was not a Thai adaptation of Kieta Hatsukoi. It was My School President in a terrible Halloween costume, clearly trying to sell more tickets for concerts for these boys. It was embarrassing and it was a waste of everyone's time. I am so mad about this because I had doubts about this the whole way into it, but really hoped that after the strong showing in Cherry Magic, that there was gonna be something really cool here. I had a lot of hopes about this. This sucked.

And so much of it comes down to casting. As much as I like Forth and Gemini, I like them as individual actors, not as a branded pair. I think they work just fine together, but they were not the correct boys to play these characters together.

NiNi 

It's especially noteworthy because there were other boys in My Love Mix Up who I think would have done a better job. 

Ben

[performately coughing] Aungpao!

NiNi

They put Aungpao in this show and they didn't make him one of the leads. Aungpao would have killed Atom.

Ben 

Yeah, Aungpao would have done a way better job.

Shan 

Yeah, he would have been perfect. 

Ben 

And I think Fourth should have played Ida's character.

Shan 

I watched one or two episodes of this before I dropped it. And to me, it was just such an obvious case of miscasting. They cast it based on wanting to shove a pre-existing branded pair into a set of characters that did not fit them. And so from the start, the whole production betrayed the story. That's just frustrating.

Ben 

And they clearly did not understand the major themes either. They really fucked it up.

NiNi 

I came at it from a different perspective than you guys, because you guys had watched Kieta Hatsukoi, and I deliberately did not watch Kieta Hatsukoi until after I had watched My Love Mix Up, because I wanted to be sort of a control, and I ended up in the same place on the whole thing that you guys did, watching Kieta Hatsukoi afterward. 

They did not get this right at all. They didn't have the spirit of it.

Ben 

I'm really glad you were able to arrive at this conclusion with us. Kieta Hatsukoi is really solid and I do not understand how they fucked that up that badly. It pissed me off. It was disappointing. Chop!

Speaking of chops, how dare they reboot Love Sick in 2024 and then fuck it up this badly. I loved Love Sick as what felt like the Thai Degrassi. How do you make a worse version of that? In 2014 Love Sick was absolutely insane. They had girls two-timing dudes in the same bed with them in their own apartment complex. They have motherfuckers trying to drown each other in the pools and shit. [NiNi laughs]

Shan

And they had sex. They didn't show it on screen, but those characters had sex.

Ben 

I get much of the stuff that we saw in 2014. Love Sick may have been adding stuff and they may have been trying to be more true to the book by just making it into this boring ass GL and BL experience, but it just wasn't good. And I was pissed because they went in a cool direction by making Aim queer that was really good, but it doesn't save the show.

Shan 

That was the only interesting thing I heard about this remake, is that they made Aim a lesbian which added a little bit of a layer to her desire to cling on to her boyfriend. But everything else they did worse on than the original show.

Ben 

I don't want to be super mean to these boys because everybody was new in Love Sick and everybody's clearly new here. But goddamn, the new kid does not match Captain. And the way that they went so hard in making him look like Captain undercuts him constantly because he's just not as good as Captain.

Shan 

You know, Ben, the moment I saw that buzzcut is when I knew that this production was doomed. [NiNi laughs] Because that is so not the fucking point. That's not the part of him you have to get right!

NiNi 

My whole thing about this is that to be disappointed you have to have expectations. I was not disappointed in Love Sick 2024 because I had no expectations. I did not watch it. From the time I saw that they were remaking Love Sick, I remember, I think we said on this podcast, “Who needs it? Nobody.”

Nobody needs a Love Sick remake in 2024.

Ben 

We were correct. We asked why it was made and they had no answer.

Speaking of why was this made, Yin and War had a great deal of fun with their friends in the show that they produced, Jack and Joker. I ended up dropping it because they killed Jennie and I refused to accept that and I left.

NiNi 

Jennie Panhan is a goddess and you cannot kill her on your show. I'm sorry, you just can't.

Shan 

They really shouldn't have. It was pointless and gratuitous and disgusting. 

But let me just say, I did finish this show and I don't wanna be super mean to Jack and Joker because here's the thing: it's not a real show. It is a self-funded vanity project from Yin and War so that they could hang out on a set with their friends.

Ben 

And Tee Bundit was there.

Shan 

And Tee Bundit was also there. I went into the show and I was like, I know this is not a real story. They cobbled this script together themselves. We're just having a good time here. That was my only expectation: this will be fun. It'll be entertaining. I have no expectations for a coherent story, for themes, anything like that. And even with that bar, the lowest bar I can possibly grant to a show, somehow this show disappointed me. 

It was a mess, but not a fun mess. It was boring. It was mostly sexless, which was the most shocking part to me. They had three pairings in this show, only one of whom actually kissed on screen. 

Ben 

They had our boy Pee in this show.

Shan 

They put Pee fucking Peerawich in this show and they didn't let him kiss anybody! I was pissed.

I'm livid, still. They had this great side couple that the fandom was super into. They never actually let them get together on screen. They did not become an actual romance. 

Ben 

The most useful thing about that side pair is that Shan recognizes Mark Siwat about 30% of the time now.

Shan 

I know what his face looks like now!

Hi, Mark Siwat, this is my letter of apology to you.

NiNi 

Shan has a very specific Mark Siwat face blindness.

Shan 

It's Mark Siwat-only face blindness. And I'm sorry, Mark Siwat, you don't deserve that from me. You were a delight in this show. And I'm so mad that your character did not get a proper story. 

The thing that frustrated me about this show is it's a fucking fan service project. So why aren't you serving the fucking fans? We spent 16 hours in this show and it was mostly boring nonsense. They stopped doing the capers halfway through for some reason and just made us sit in these endless plots about this stupid fucking mafia whatever, rich families playing squid games. It was stupid. It was boring. 

Meanwhile, they didn't deliver on most of the things that the fans wanted. What a pointless use of so much money. Why, Yin and War? Why?!

Ben 

We hadn't seen Mark properly in BL since Bite Me, so I was especially disappointed. I'm still mad about that, too! Don't you worry! I'm still mad!

NiNi

God, I'm still mad about Bite Me.

Shan 

This should have been the funnest thing that happened this year. And instead, it was boring and sad.

Ben 

I'm so sorry that you were on two of our disappointments, Jennie. You didn't deserve that, either.

NiNi 

That's an important thing to bring up. Like, where's the fun? I feel like there were things that should have been fun that were just a slog. Where did the fun go? If this is gonna be a caper BL, then be a caper BL. You know that it's bad if you can't get me to watch a Tee Bundit show. I have not watched a minute of it. You know I feel about Tee Bundit. I love him even when everybody else hates him. Except for Hidden Agenda, which we will never talk about again. But this show didn't even compel me to watch it, which is saddening.

Shan 

Yeah, it was lackluster and it was truly only the fan sentiment for Yin and War that made it popular. It was just fans supporting actors that they like, and there's nothing wrong with that. But there's no there there with this show.

NiNi 

Shout out to War’s pottery videos. Sir, you are hyper competent and I find that very attractive.

Shan 

And I really recommend just watching his pottery videos instead of this show.

Ben 

That's right, just head to IG instead. War did good work in Love Mechanics. That's why he's a fave. That doesn't mean I have to applaud everything he does after that, especially when it's not that good. 

I did like all of his outfits, though. Clearly he had a great time.

NiNi 

Okay, so now that we have completed our Festivus airing of the grievances… 

Ben

I feel better. I really do.

Shan

I'm happy we got that off our chests.

NiNi

Let's move into our fan awards.

00:36:51 - 2024 Fan Awards

NiNi 

In advance of our Very Important Internet BL awards, VIIB Awards that are coming up later this month for you guys, we just wanted to have a few awards that are just us having fun. And so we put the call out and we got some feedback.

Ben, take us into it.

Ben

We are finally awarding the Girl, You Tried winner of the year. Girl, You Tried, for those of you who have been with us, is something we like to award every season to shows that we think had really good ideas that maybe weren't executed as well as they could have been. We handed out quite a few awards this year. I don't remember all of them right now, but we have selected a winner.

Shan, would you like to announce the winner?

Shan

Ooh, do I get to announce? How exciting. Okay. 

The 2024 Girl, You Tried Award goes to Love Is Better The Second Time Around from Japan. [air horn]

Ben 

We've already covered this. I'm very happy about the yukata sex, but not about episodes 5 and 6.

Shan 

So close to being one of our favorite shows of the year. And that is why it gets this award.

NiNi 

Agreed. I am in 100% agreement.

Ben

Other shows that were up for consideration included The Sign, Living With Him, Ayaka Is in Love with Hiroko, I Hear the Sunspot—oof I got beef with that show—and The On1y One, Shan got beef with that one.

Shan 

I got beef with that show!

NiNi 

I think we made the right choice in terms of the final winner, though. I think of all of those the one that was closest to actually making it.

Ben

A bunch of those guys are in another MBS not-BL right now where they're all playing boxers, hugging each other without their shirts on, and sweatin’ and shit.

NiNi 

Yes, more information? You're burying the lede here. Like, I need to know where I can find it.

Ben

[laughs] Nowhere, man. It's not in the Western circles right now. 

NiNi 

The fan subbers are letting me down. 

Ben

I got a couple of Japanese fans keeping me in the loop. They send me little clips and it's all my favorite boys wrestling on the ground and shit in dark gyms.

NiNi

Why don't they make more shows like that?

Shan 

This is what I'm saying!

Ben 

Let me tell you, Petty's been demanding this BL for like four years.

Shan 

It's true.

NiNi 

I think we are actually getting a boxing BL next year.

Ben 

We are. [everyone laughs]

Onto our next award. It's time to award our Trash Fave of the year. 

NiNi, please describe the award.

NiNi 

Trash Fave is basically my favorite award. I cannot defend any of these shows, but I had such a good fucking time with them.

Shan 

Our Trash Fave winner of the year is Gym Affairs from, wait for it, China! Did you all know that China put out a real modern BL with kissing on screen in it this year? Well, they did, and it's called Gym Affairs, and it's winning the Trash Fave award because, listen. This show is not a quality production. It was clearly filmed on some iPhones with just whatever guys they could find around. But you know what? I respect it because it had a narrative, it had a clear story, and they are doing what they can in China to get these queer stories out, one way or another.

Ben 

It really spoke to guerrilla filmmaking, like they just really popped up somewhere, filmed what they needed to and got the fuck out of there.

Shan 

And it's a cute little show. It goes quick. Watch it on YouTube, it's free. It's a fast binge. It's charming. The actors are cute. It's a good time. We can't really call it a good show because the production quality is so low, but it's a fave. All of our friends who have seen it had a great time watching it. You should join in.

(Transcript note: The show has since been pulled from YouTube.)

Ben 

Our other two shows for consideration were Kidnap and OMG!Vampire. [NiNi laughs]

NiNi 

Yup.

Shan 

O-M-G Exclamation Point Vampire.

NiNi 

I was gonna say that y'all have very different definitions of trash than I do because even though I haven't seen Gym Affairs yet, from what I've heard about it, it is not trash it is just produced on a shoestring. Whereas Kidnap was actual trash.

Shan 

Yeah, Kidnap is super trashy. Like, trashy in the sense of, like, pulp novels.

NiNi 

It's called Kidnap, but there's only half a kidnapping, maybe.

Shan 

Did anyone actually get kidnapped in Kidnap? That was a Gaga joke.

Ben 

This show was so stupid.

NiNi 

At one point the guy kidnapped himself. Like, there was a lot going on.

Ben 

This show was so stupid that I got bored with Ohm Pawat, and was like I can’t do this anymore.

Shan 

I could only sustain myself by looking at Ohm's arms for so long.

NiNi 

This is what makes it my Trash Fave. I watched it till the very end because my favorite two things were in it, Ohm Pawat and being babygirl.

Shan 

You know what I think this is, NiNi? I think it's like when you open the trash can and you look inside, you sometimes find, like, this gem of a thing that someone threw in the trash. And that's what Gym Affairs is. And Kidnap is all the actual nasty, dirty trash around it.

NiN

Ohm, we love you on this podcast, sir. We love you so much and that's all we're gonna say.

Shan 

Free Ohm from this trash. That's what I want to say.

Ben 

We love you, even though all of Tumblr celebrated your character getting shot again, just like a few weeks ago.

Shan

And I don't think any of us actually watched OMG!Vampire.

Ben 

Our friends loved it. They had a great time with Lee and Frank's final show together.

Shan 

Several of our friends submitted it and they had a great time watching it. They highly recommend it if you're into vampires that are, apparently, very bad at being vampires. [NiNi laughs] You know, you should check that out if that's your thing.

Ben 

Onto my favorite award, it's time to award the BEST BOY!

NiNi 

The Namgoong Best Boy Award, which I promise I'm gonna watch Light On Me this year. I promise, I promise.

Ben 

NiNi, I swear to God.

All right. Shan, I'm putting this in my resolutions at the end of this. If NiNi does not watch Light On Me, we are not doing this show next year. [NiNi laughs] I've had enough. I have a list of shows that are non-negotiable for the next awards show. Light On Me and Rainbow Prince. 

NiNi 

Okay, I will. I absolutely will. 

Ben

You will watch them. There will be no more arguing about this!

NiNi

Okay, we're not arguing. It was never an argument. It's just more kind of, it always gets pushed down to the bottom of the list, but I promise you this year, bestie, this year.

Ben

Namgoong is the best boy and is the reason why we have this award. And this year, the award for Best Boy who did everything he could for the gays goes to Yai from The Sign. [air horn]

Congratulations, sir. We loved everything about you. We loved your arms. We loved your heart. We loved your wife.

Shan 

Mostly loved the wife the most.

NiNi 

I definitely had a lot to say about those arms. I'm sorry, I'm spacing out thinking about them now.

Shan 

This award is for the best supporting male friend who is all about helping the couple get together.

Ben 

He was so great. Good job, Yai.

NiNi 

Yai absolutely did that.

Ben 

What a mess of a show, but you had a clear throughline.

NiNi 

I just loved him saying, “Where were you discussing the problem? The bed or the sofa?” I think that was one of my favorite lines.

Shan 

He was mischievous.

Ben 

Other boys in consideration were Ryoga from I Became the Main Role of a BL Drama for his feathers and his support of his friends by tricking them into having a date and also telling Akafuji he was aggravating and then giving him useful advice.

Shan 

He was a real one. He was helpful.

NiNi 

He was the realest.

Ben 

Our last boy is Ryosuke from The Fragrance You Inherit, a last minute addition to this list.

Shan 

The drama did technically end right before the end of 2024. Ryosuke is the lead’s, Sakura, of the show, he's her bestie. He's been supporting her since college. He's the person who knows her and who props her up through all the hard things in her life, including her gay disappointment, her crushed, unrequited love, and parenting her son who is a perfect angel boy. He's there for it all. He is there to help her out. We love him.

Ben 

He is also played by Takeda Kouhei.

Shan 

He sure is! Looking excellent. Sir, I salute you.

Ben 

If you don't know who that is, you better ask somebody.

Shan 

You better not come ask me, because I'll get mad at you.

Ben 

On to my second favorite award. The Yiwha Best Girl Award!

NiNi 

Yiwha! We love her over here!

Ben 

I absolutely love Yiwha. I love that that show, all these years later, spawned the best girl and worst girls award. The Best Girl, like the Best Boy, goes to the girl who supports the boys the right way and is there for them and willing to scrap for them. 

NiNi, please hand out the award to our Best Girl.

NiNi 

Best Girl for 2024 is Lukpeach from Knock Knock Boys!. [air horn] All she wanted in life was to spread good information about sexual health and behavioral practices, to support her boys and to write non-creepy fan fiction about them. I salute you, Miss Mama. You are the best.

Shan 

Yes, support her in all her endeavors.

Ben 

She was a great character. I really like her as part of the evolution of the shipper character. I'm okay with them finding a way to write girls that really love gay boys and want them to have a good time without it being creepy. 

Beyond Lukpeach, we also had Jane from Knock Knock Boys!, Ju from Century of Love, and Pai from Cherry Magic Thailand on this list.

I liked Pai a lot and she was a strong contender for this award, particularly because she stole a motorcycle to make sure those boys had the scene they needed to have. And then she left. She explicitly said, “That scene is for them. I got what I needed. I know my boys are going to make this happen.”

Shan

Pai  was great at knowing the line between supporting and inserting herself where she didn't belong, and she never crossed the line.

Ben 

What a great character. This was a pretty decent year for fujo characters in the genre. That is one of the positive things I can say about this year in terms of trope-related stuff.

We have introduced a new award this year.

Shan 

What exciting stuff.

Ben

I'm gonna let you award this one, Shan. This is our Bridesmaid Award. This goes to…

Shan 

Hyunho from Let Free the Curse of Taekwondo. [air horn] Oh, I love it. This award is for the second leads. The character that can never win, but that still manages to make you kind of want them to and who makes you sympathetic for them when they inevitably lose. I think Hyunho was the platonic ideal of the kdrama second lead in Let Free the Curse of Taekwondo. He is definitely a deserving winner of this Bridesmaid Award.

Ben 

Our other two people in consideration were Sangwon for Love for Love's Sake, because he got into a whole fight for the gays and then got mad that they kept asking him for help for the rest of the show. And Kurosawa from Ossan's Love Returns, because this man has not won five times now. Incredible.

Shan 

He will always be the Bridesmaid eternally. But yeah, this is really Korea's category to lose, because this is what they do. Second leads are specifically a Korean trope.

NiNi 

Good job, Korea.

Ben 

We are once again awarding our favorite version of BGP!

Shan 

Ben, remind the people what BGP means.

Ben 

BGP is a term that we got from Bump Up Business, a terrible BL from the boys of OnlyOneOf, a Korean kpop group whose entire business model is pretending to be gay, and they made a whole show about idols who had to work together in a what they called a business gay performance to sell records, and wanted us to pretend that it was a real romance. Absolutely insane behavior. The audacity!

Shan 

I can't believe this show happened.

NiNi

I'm sorry! “Is our business gay performance over before it began?” [everyone laughs]

Ben 

Oh my god!

NiNi 

I watched that entire show specifically because they told me that line was in it.

Ben 

She, NiNi was like, Shan and Ben are just cackling. This has to be ridiculous if the two of them have completely lost composure over it. And she was not let down. 

We love the term BGP because it's about the performance of the relationship for consumption. Shan, please announce our winners.

Shan 

This year's BGP award goes to Daou and Offroad, the only potential winners of our hearts.

NiNi 

I have to agree, there wasn't even a question. This was definitely Daou and Offroad’s to lose this year because, sir, the performance is performance-ing.

Ben 

They got a really solid outing with Century of Love despite everything that we now know was happening on that set and around that production. And they have continued to make their music and handle their performances, and they're coming to America this year. That's a huge deal.

Shan 

They have a fan meet in the United States that is already sold out. These boys are making moves.

Ben 

I'm very excited for them. Also up for consideration were Chris Chiu, aka Modi, and Kurt Huang for Unknown the series, because they went way hard on their Taiwanese BGP. Tumblr may not have been paying that much attention to it, but those boys were working very hard. And of course, we're going to acknowledge Yin and War, who got a whole show financed on BGP alone.

NiNi 

That is impressive.

Shan 

Pretty impressive.

Ben 

All right, our final award, our most fun award. We are handing out the Blorbo of the Year Award. This is for the character that took over your brain and you just could not let them go. Every time someone tried to take it from you, you just bit down harder and shook.

Shan 

Ben, would you like to announce the winner?

Ben 

The winner of the Blorbo of the Year award goes to Go Young from Love in the Big City. [air horn] What a great year for us and that character.

NiNi and Shan in unison

He is the moment. [all laugh]

NiNi

Oh my gosh, I can't get it out of my head. You owe me a coke.

Ben 

Yeah, it's gotta be a coke because you guys can't have any more drinks after Friday night. [laughs]

NiNi

Oh my god, no more, no more, no more drinks, no more.

Shan 

Keep it, keep it to soda, non-alcoholic. Nope.

Ben 

Go Young was so important to us. He is one of the most dynamic and complicated queer characters we got to experience this year. I am so thankful that despite all of the drama, we were able to get Nam Yoon Su and friends’ version of these characters. My goodness.

Shan 

I feel unbelievably blessed that they got an actor of Nam Yoon Su’s caliber to play him in the drama. I never in my wildest dreams could have expected that.

NiNi 

And he put his neck, his back, his pussy, and his crack into that.

Shan 

Holy shit. Me and NiNi are kdrama watchers. We have seen him in other work. He transformed himself for this role. It was impressive shit.

Ben 

Our runner up, who we had a great deal of discussion about and who almost won this award until like five minutes before this recording, was Dynamite from Cooking Crush, another complicated queer character with a ton of heart that we deeply loved. I've been thinking about this boy all year.

Shan 

As often is the case when a character you love is misunderstood by others, it makes you love them even more fiercely. That definitely came up with Dynamite.

Ben 

A lot of you don't watch anime, but Twig and I were not gonna let this go unremarked. We wanted to acknowledge Hisashi from Twilight Out of Focus, along with Shion, who was my favorite boy from that show. I love that pink Twig so much! He said, I'm going to high school and I'm gonna get me a motherfucking boyfriend. And he did.

Shan 

The pink twink!

Ben

I love that pink twink so much! He said, I'm going to high school and I'm gonna get me a motherfucking boyfriend. And he did.

Shan

He did. He did it all.

NiNi 

Good job, anime twink. I think there is a missing person here. I can't believe that Ben left this one out considering how he started the year. Aoyanagi Hajime?

Ben 

He's not on my Blorbo list. I think about that boy a lot. But does he take over my whole soul like these boys? He does not.

NiNi 

Mmm, interesting.

Ben 

I admire him deeply, and I think Nachika did a great job with him, but they're getting the sequel, so. It ain't over yet! [laughs]

Shan 

We'll get to talk about him again.

NiNi 

We're gonna talk about them in 2024 and 2025. Fantastic.

Ben 

I'm winning. I might not see Go Young ever again, but I'ma see my boy again this year. A win for me.

NiNi 

Excellent, good job.

Congratulations to the winners of all of our fan awards and our runners-up. These are not VIIBs so you do not get a plate but we will figure out something, I don't know.

Ben 

I'm gonna send you a cup.

Shan 

Souvenir mug!

NiNi

At least it's not a koozie. A koozie is just disrespectful. We discussed this before.

Ben 

I know that if we sent Gap Jakarin a mug that said Best Boy, he would absolutely show it on the IG.

Shan 

He totally would and he’d pose with it!

NiNi 

I believe that. 100% he would totally do it. Maybe, maybe he would even put it next to his bicep.

Shan 

Maybe we should consider sending it.

[Ben laughs]

NiNi 

And I would have a plotz moment. He's large, people, you know how I feel about the large ones.

00:55:49 QL Resolutions

Ben 

It's time for our QL resolutions. Shan has pulled up the record on the things we said we would do for this year. It's time for the call-outs. We'll start with me. 

Shan, proceed.

Shan 

All right, so Ben stated a couple resolutions last year. His kind of not that serious one was he said he will watch 100 shows in 2024. And his second, which he was more serious about, is that he would be backing off of shows when he's getting aggravated with them sooner than he used to and just being more willing to stop watching shows. 

So Ben, you've definitely failed the first goal, but I think you did good on the second one.

Ben 

I did great. I engaged with 75 Asian QLs this year, but I dropped 26.

Shan 

That's big for you. That was a big mental wall that you had to move through this year and you did a great job, bestie.

NiNi 

Four for you again, Glen Coco. Four for you.

[Ben laughs]

Shan 

Are you feeling better now that you started backing off shows you're not liking?

Ben 

Honestly, yeah, I feel way better that I'm recognizing when a show is irritating me and I'm not forcing myself to watch it for this weird sense of ego. Like, “It's really important that I say something about this.” I don't care anymore. Who cares? It sucks. I'm not writing about this. 

The core of what I want to do is, I want to convince uninitiated BL viewers to watch BL. There is no value for me in watching a show that I despise or just isn't working for me, because I'm not using it as a reference to try and get people who might like BL to watch BL. I'm not gonna ask them to watch a mid-tier BL. So it gets dropped.

Shan 

All right, NiNi, in January, 2024, you said your resolution for the year was that you were gonna stop picking on New Siwaj. Let's check in on that, how you feeling?

NiNi 

I definitely had a great time with a New Siwaj show this year and talked about it on the show. These resolutions do have power so you gotta be real careful when you make them. I won't say entirely that I have stopped picking on New Siwaj. I'm still gonna pick on him if he deserves it. But I liked something that he did this year.

Ben 

Don't worry. He definitely deserves it.

Shan 

But you found something nice to say about him this year. You did.

NiNi 

I did find nice things to say about him this year. So I think that I have kept that resolution.

Shan

We did great this year guys, because my resolution from last year was to be more aware of when I'm getting no joy out of a show and cut it off and not feel bad about not finishing it. And I did that this year. I also got better at not starting shows I didn't think I was going to like. And I think that that was a good and healthy choice and I'm glad that I did it because as we've been talking about, the genre just keeps getting bigger. There are so many shows. We can't watch everything and we can't make ourselves miserable trying to force ourselves to watch the things we're not enjoying.

I'm real proud of us. I think we did good on our resolutions this year.

NiNi 

Excellent, good job. So let's look ahead. What are the resolutions that we're all making this year 2025?  

Ben?

Ben 

I have no fucking idea. What should I do?

Shan 

Do you have something about how you wanna write or how you wanna engage on Tumblr?

Ben 

I'm probably going to focus on writing more reviews this year. I stopped doing Stray Thoughts but I don't want to stop writing about things I loved. I think I'm gonna push myself to write more reviews and stuff. I think I'm going to start writing on Tumblr more about Western stuff. I think I'm going to start writing more reviews about more generalized queer work that I'm engaged with. That'll probably be my thing this year, writing more thoughtful pieces about work after it's done instead of yapping about it in real time.

NiNi 

Okay, Shan, how about you? What are you resolving to do this year?

Shan

I was thinking about this a bit. I think there's a couple things on my mind. I want to continue quitting shows if I'm really just getting no joy out of them. I want to continue being more selective about what I start in the first place. Another thing I've been doing more of lately that I think is working for me and that I want to continue is waiting to binge shows that I suspect I will not enjoy very much week to week. For me, it makes a real difference how I watch a show, because if I'm watching weekly and participating in a weekly discussion, I'm going to naturally think more about the show, I'm gonna dig into it more. And when these shows are kind of weak or mediocre, I'm spending an awful lot of time thinking about what isn't working. So, I'm trying to identify those shows where I just can tell I'm gonna have a better time if I get it over with quick instead of stretching it out. 

I also wanna stay committed to continuing to have variety in my media diet. I want to continue to watch things outside of QL, want to be better about continuing to mix in Western shows here and there. If you just watch too much of the same thing all the time, you really lose perspective. So I wanna be attentive to that this year and make sure I'm changing it up.

Ben 

You heard it here, friends. Shan is joining me in watching over 200 movies a year!

NiNi 

I'm not sure that's exactly what she said, bestie. [laughs]

Ben 

She said she wants to mix it up! I got a great Indonesian film for you to watch.

Shan

I will say this. This is my big gap. I just don't watch many movies. I like long-form stories. 

Ben

Mm-mm. I’m challenging you, Shan. It's not like I hate movies. You’re gonna watch some movies with me, Shan. I watched a great Chinese film from 2015 last night! 

Shan

Ben’s resolution is to force Shan to watch movies. I don’t hate movies. They just don't fill my soul the same way, you know? They're just here and gone so quick.

NiNi 

Yeah, if I really love something, I definitely need to sit in it for a while. So I am definitely more on the long-form storytelling side of things, as well.

Ben 

A great film just stays with you forever. All right, we're starting with Ghost Dog.

Shan

All right, you can make your list. NiNi, what’s yours?

NiNi

My resolution this year is to finally watch some of the shit I have been meaning to watch. My watch lists keep growing and growing and growing and I need to put some time and effort into actually watching some of this shit. Some of it because Ben is going to stop talking to me if I don't watch it. And we can't have that.

Ben 

It's true! I'm glad you recognized that that is a real outcome!

NiNi 

There's definitely some things that are on the list I gotta get past. I think I've finally gotten past the uncanny valley effect so that I can watch Light On Me. And I'm gonna watch Eternal Yesterday. Finally, I am gonna watch Rainbow Prince.

Shan 

I forgot you haven't watched Eternal Yesterday?! 

Ben

I haven’t!

Shan

Oh my god.

NiNi 

To be fair to me, I do not think that is the thing for me to have watched when I was in the mental state that I was in for most of last year.

Shan 

It's very true. You need to wait for the right moment, but I'm excited for you to watch it.

NiNi 

I am looking forward now that I'm feeling mentally better to getting into some of the things that I have meant to watch, but just not been able to hit play on. Like I said, these resolutions have power, so It's definitely happening this year.

Ben 

I'm excited. My resolution is to torment Shan into watching movies. That's great. I feel good about this one.

Shan 

He's getting revenge because I have forced him to like kdramas and he's mad.

NiNi 

You have gotten Ben to watch kdramas, cdramas.

Ben 

I have watched Goblin, I watched The Rebel Princess. What else did you fucking force me to watch? School 2013. That is like 6,000 hours of TV. You owe me a few movies.

Shan

I sure did! School 2013. He's starting Healer again. Listen, the truth is that Ben likes the kdramas. He hates that he likes them, but he likes them.

Ben

They're just so fucking long. I just spent two hours on a fucking episode of a kdrama. I could have watched one of my fucking movies during this time.

NiNi 

Speaking of movies, y’all have got to watch Paradise of Thorns as soon as you're able.

Shan 

As soon as it's out.

Ben 

I believe it becomes available very soon after we finish recording this.

Shan 

Yeah, I'm excited to watch that one. And I still need to watch How to Make Millions When Grandma Dies. 

NiNi 

Have you not watched that yet?

Shan

No, it was only on New York screens for like a few days and I didn't make it during.

Ben 

We have literally not had access in the US, girl! Like this, it's one of those things where like I've been intentionally waiting because we know it's coming to American distro.

NiNi

It's on that Oscar shortlist, so it's definitely coming.

Shan

Yeah, we need it. It's gonna come for sure. It'll be in theaters and I'll go watch it.

01:04:45 - Affirmations and Hopes for the Future

Ben 

Okay, affirmations for the year. Things that we really liked that we would like to see more of. Number one, Kongthup Productions. Good job this year, guys.

Shan

We love them.

NiNi 

We do. This is the studio that produced Knock Knock Boys!, Monster Next Door. There was a GL. 

Ben 

Apple My Love.

NiNi

Apple My Love, yeah.

Ben 

They have been a really fun breath of fresh air in the genre this year, and I really hope that whoever is having fun funding them is getting returns so that they can keep doing that.

Shan 

They are out here producing original scripts that are interesting and that have things to say.

Ben 

Next, despite how much I deeply despised My Love Mix Up Thailand, I would like to continue to see more of these cross-country collaborations. There were a lot of interesting results we got from that this year. We got Unknown the series out of it. We got Love in the Air: Koi No Yokan. 

Shan

I loved it.

Ben 

We got Cherry Magic Thailand. And we got a couple of interesting projects where it was kind of funded in both places. Like Eccentric Romance, Meet You at the Blossom, Battle of the Writers. There may have been Chinese money involved in that one.

NiNi

There definitely was.

Ben 

It's very interesting seeing these sort of cross-cultural collaborations. And even within the countries, Oxin Films and, what is the other group's name? They teamed up and made Haunted Hearts. It wasn't good, but they worked with someone else.

Shan 

I'm interested in these productions adapting works from other countries in these kind of joint funding models. Love in the Air Koi was great because the MeMindY team was deeply involved in that production and there was a lot of cross marketing. They had actors from the original Love in the Air Thailand cameo on the Japanese show. It was cool to see that kind of cooperation going on.

Ben 

Lastly, and we say this every year, more GLs. There needs to be way more lesbians in this genre than there are.

Shan 

And we need to give them good stories.

NiNi 

And even though there was a ramp up this year, because there was actually quite a bit of GL this year, I can't point to one GL that I saw or was truly that interested in this year that really hooked me.

Ben 

She Loves to Cook happened this year.

NiNi 

I mean, yes, yes, okay. She Loves to Cook, She Loves to Eat, but that goes in the category, the same category as What Did You Eat Yesterday? It's eternal, it's everlasting.

Ben

I'm sorry, you didn't think Chaser Game W changed the face of the game?

NiNi

No.

Shan 

There were a lot of GLs this year, but most of them had, like, really terrible writing. What's wild to me, and this has been a really interesting thing that we've started seeing in the recent months. These shows, even when they're not very good in terms of the quality of the story, they're really popular because the fans are so thirsty for this content. The QL viewership wants GL and these studios need to put some real resources behind making these shows and making them good because there is a lot of potential there.

NiNi

I think GL's kind of following the trajectory that BL followed, which is a shame because BL sort of set the trajectory already, so they could have shortcutted all of that.

Shan 

Can we not just skip to the good content part?

Ben

Well, they did try to make GL SOTUS, so hang in there, girls. [everyone laughs]

That's going to end it for us. We will see you all in the coming weeks as we make our way through the VIIB Awards. I'm very excited.

NiNi 

And a little super special little treat for you before we get to the VIIBs, which I will not spoil but it's gonna be fun. 

That is going to wrap us up on our Year In Review. Oh my god guys, another year. This is our third Year In Review.

Ben 

My goodness.

NiNi 

Absolutely wild. This is our 50-something episode. We're getting up to 60. We're about to be retirees up in here. We love it. 

See you guys next time, we out. Say bye to the people, Shan.

Shan 

Bye people!

NiNi

Say bye to the people, Ben.

Ben

Peace!

[the-conversation-pod]

Hallyu: Let Free the Curse of Taekwondo and Love in the Big City

AND WE'RE BACK!

Come join Ben, NiNi, and Shan as we talk about two of our favorite three Korean projects of the year. First we discuss Hwang Da Seul delivering a masterpiece in breaking up and bringing back a couple in Let Free the Curse of Taekwondo, and then we unpack all of the complexities in the relationships of Go Yeong in Love in the Big City.

Hallyu by @Ben and NiNi

Korea swung big at the end of the year and hit it out of the park on both the queer romance and queer life drama fronts. Ben, NiNi and Shan

Hallyu

Podcast Episode · The Conversation · 01/16/2025 · 1h 50m

Hallyu - The Conversation | iHeart

<p>Korea swung big at the end of the year and hit it out of the park on both the queer romance and queer life drama fronts. Ben, NiNi and Sh

Timestamps

The timestamps will now correspond with chapters on Spotify for easier navigation.

00:00:00 - Welcome 00:01:15 - Introduction: Let's Talk Hallyu 00:06:01 - Let Free The Curse of Taekwondo 00:12:36 - Taekwondo: Themes and Patterns In Hwang Da Seul's Work 00:21:54 - Taekwondo: The Separation 00:33:28 - Taekwondo: The Reunion 00:38:22 - Taekwondo: On Hyeon Ho 00:44:57 - Taekwondo: Final Thoughts and Ratings 00:52:33 - Love In The Big City 00:58:46 - Love In The Big City Part 1: Mi Ae and the Film Adaptation 01:06:50 - Love In The Big City Part 2: Umma and Young Soo 01:17:05 - Love In The Big City Part 3: Gyu Ho and Kylie 01:28:31 - Love In The Big City Part 4: Habibi and the T-aras 01:40:28 - Love In The Big City: Final Thoughts and Ratings 01:48:25 - Outro

The Conversation Transcripts!

Thanks to the continued efforts of @lurkingshan as an editor and proofreader, we are able to bring you transcripts of the episodes.

We will endeavor to make the transcripts available when the episodes launch, and it is our goal to make them available for past episodes (Coming soon thanks to @wen-kexing-apologist). When transcripts are available, we will attach them to the episode post (like this one) and put the transcript behind a Read More cut to cut down on scrolling.

Please send our volunteers your thanks!

00:00:00 - Welcome

NiNi

Welcome to The Conversation About BL, aka The Brown Liquor Podcast.

Ben

And there it is. I’m Ben.

NiNi

I’m NiNi.

Ben

And we’re you’re drunk Caribbean uncle and auntie here sitting on the porch in the rocking chairs.

NiNi

Four times a year we pop in to talk about what’s going on in the BL world.

Ben

We shoot the shit about stories and all the drama going into them. I review from a queer media lens.

NiNi

And I review from a romance and drama lens.

Ben

So if you like cracked-out takes and really intense emotional analysis…

NiNi

If you like talking about artistry, industry, and the discourse…

Ben

And if you generally just love simping…

NiNi

There is a lot of simping on this podcast…

Ben

We are the show for you!

00:01:15 - Introduction: Let's Talk Hallyu

Ben 

And we're back. This time we're in for a winners only discussion. We will be discussing two Korean projects that we all loved: Let Free the Curse of Taekwondo by the Hwang Da Seul team, and the drama adaptation of Love in the Big City—screenwritten by the author Sang Young Park.

We have brought Shan back with us. Shan, say hello.

Shan 

Hello!

Ben 

We want to discuss the Hallyu Wave, what that means and how we feel about it. 

Shan, why don't you walk us through the last couple of decades of what Korea's been up to with their media?

Shan 

Essentially, when we talk about the Hallyu Wave, what we're referencing is a very intentional plan by the Korean government in the wake of the 1997 financial crisis to start exporting their culture as a means of improving their economy, getting the rest of the world to see Korea as a place where they wanna spend their dollars. And so starting in the late 90s, they started very intentionally exporting music, drama, film—a very intentional inviting in of the international audience for Korean media—that really picked up steam in the early 2000s and accelerated pretty steadily into the early 2020s. With the pandemic, Korean media kind of globally exploded and they started dominating the global conversation on media. So that was through music, through very popular Korean pop groups that everybody now knows and also through dramas. In 2019, Netflix started producing Korean dramas and hosting them on their platform, bringing that content to new audiences. 

And then on the heels of that, we started to get Korean BL entering the BL space later than some of the other countries like Japan and Thailand, who had already been in the game for a while. Korea kind of showed up on the stage during those early pandemic years and started producing QL. It wasn't the very first QL they had ever produced—there are queer films and queer dramas from Korea earlier on—but that is when Korean BL as it exists in its current state really picked up, and it is definitely part of that explosion of the Hallyu Wave.

NiNi 

I kinda came in on in that real wave because my first kdrama I watched in 2019, and it was Pretty Noona Who Buys Me Food. That's the first ever kdrama I watched and I was hooked. I am not a kpop girl, but I'm most definitely a kdrama girl and I am most definitely a Korean QL girl for sure.

Shan 

One of the reasons that kdrama is so appealing, I think, to a Western audience as well as to their home audience is because the Korean stories really respect romance. They prioritize it in a way that we don't get in Western media. It’s serving a slice of the Western audience that the West has kind of let go of and has diminished and belittled. For people who love romance, for people who love romantic comedies and romantic melodramas, you can't top Korean content. It's not surprising that on the heels of huge success of their exporting of heterosexual romance media, they started getting into the BL game.

Ben 

Do you both remember the early kdramas you watched that really hooked you into it?

Shan 

I didn't start consistently watching kdrama as my main venue for het media until around the same time as you, NiNi, about 2019. But before that, I had seen them here and there. I think Coffee Prince might have actually been my first kdrama, which, wow, what a way to start. Good for you, Shan. And then when I came in in 2019 it just became easier to access these shows, like everything was going up on Netflix, Viki became bigger, it was hosting more things. That's when I started going really deep and I went back and watched a lot of dramas that predated that.

Ben 

So when we're talking about Korean projects, we're engaging from the perspective of Korea really wanted us to engage with this. And so we want to engage as earnestly as we can with it. These two shows stand out for us because Hwang Da Seul has made it abundantly clear that she cares a lot about telling queer stories well in her interviews and in the work she does. And based upon our interactions with Anton Hur, who translated Love in the Big City, we feel very strongly that they also wanted us to experience this too. 

So with that in mind, get your snacks, get your drinks. We gonna be here for a while.

00:06:01 - Let Free The Curse of Taekwondo

Ben

NiNi, let's get going on Let Free the Curse of Taekwondo.

NiNi 

Once again, you keep asking me to jump into the things I don't know nothing about. How about you tell us what Let Free the Curse of Taekwondo is about?

Ben Let Free the Curse of Taekwondo is a Korean BL from the Hwang Da Seul team. This is, I think, her second or third full original project.

Shan 

Hwang Da Seul has made several projects in BL, either as just a director or as a screenwriter and director. She began in 2020 with Where Your Eyes Linger. She wrote and directed that as a short film that was also cut as a show. From there, she directed, but did not write To My Star, then directed but did not write Blueming, then directed but did not write To My Star 2. And then she came back as a writer and director on Let Free the Curse of Taekwondo.

That's her resume within the BL space. She has only actually written two of these works, but there are very similar themes across all of them. She clearly brings a strong point of view.

Ben 

You have a really good read on one of the themes she really loves and I want to get to that. Let's start with the basics. Let Free the Curse of Taekwondo is about the teenage and then second chance romance between…

NiNi 

Lee Dohoe and Shin Juyoung, can't forget it ever.

Ben 

Thank you. Shin Juyoung is sent to the Korean countryside to straighten him out, literally, by having him get his ass beat every single day by his taekwondo teacher. While there, he ends up bonding with the teacher's son, who is a star student and very much a standoffish type. Their relationship develops but is then severed by horrible consequences of police being involved because they kept beating the shit out of our boy. The two separate for 12 years—a brutal amount of time—before running into each other again in the same neighborhood and having to unpack this huge mess between them.

There's a lot to unpack in this show, so I think we will go through this piece by piece. Shan, walk us through the first half of the show with their relationship as teenagers.

Shan 

God, this show. I'm going to get emotional just thinking about it. So this is kind of a classic second chance romance. And the first half of the show is about the first chance when they first met, the first iteration of their relationship that inevitably ended horribly. We had Juyoung who was coming to the town basically because he was banished from his own family. His parents were aware that he is queer. He's been sent here, basically handed over to Dohoe's father who runs the dojo to, as Ben said, get straightened out—to have the gay beat out of him, essentially. He, though, is a very optimistic person. That's just who he is at his core. So despite this horrific backstory and the trauma that he must have experienced, he presents this very sunny face to the world, which is not fake. It's not a facade. It's just, he's a very optimistic person at heart. 

He meets Dohoe, who is a very serious kid, who has grown up with this abusive father, who is like many abused and lower class children, trying to earn his way out of this horrible life circumstance that he's in by performing well academically. He wants to get into college. He wants to make something of himself. He wants to leave his father and this town behind. And he wants to do that by acing tests, by getting into a good school and by getting a degree that he can use to make money and support himself.

So these two meet, they initially have a lot of antagonism. Dohoe is a bit threatened by Juyoung when he comes into the dojo, but they also have a really clear spark together. Juyoung is immediately fascinated by Dohoe and wants to get close to him. Juyoung's persistent optimism eventually breaks through, they bond and they start seeing each other in a way that kind of surprised me. We were all pretty impressed, happy, amazed that they actually got into their relationship pretty quickly once they realized that their feelings were mutual. They started looking for places to spend time alone together to make out and do horny teenage boy stuff. They were sneaking around town knowing that this was not actually going to be acceptable to anybody and they always had to be on alert for Dohoe's father.

Juyoung is really trying to support Dohoe through his academic studies because he understands how important it is to him to get into college. And because of that, Juyoung is hiding things from him about what his father is doing. The thing that the show did really beautifully was that they showed that Dohoe wasn't actually oblivious to the things that his father was doing to Juyoung. He just didn't want to deal with them. He didn't know how to deal with them. It's kind of heartbreaking. They were grabbing these moments of happiness together, but always, always knowing how fragile it was and always on guard for something to go wrong. 

And then of course it did. It all converged with Juyoung getting beat by Dohoe's father on the day that Dohoe had to take a very important test. Dohoe seeing the altercation going down and deciding to do something about it, getting distracted, failing his test. And then, you know, the police who were supposed to come and intervene to protect Juyoung, of course, siding with the abuser and not protecting him at all. 

That's how their teenage relationship ended. Dohoe disappeared. And then they were separated for quite a long time.

Ben 

Complications in the teeny-bop section of this come from another boy named Hyunho, who was at one time a student of the dojo, and he and Dohoe were clearly vibing at some point before both of them backed off of it. Hyunho ends up clearly jealous about Juyoung and Dohoe. This is something I really want to return to when we start talking about Hwang De Seul's themes.

00:12:36 - Taekwondo: Themes and Patterns In Hwang Da Seul's Work

Ben

As I'm listening to you go back through the details of what happened in the youth section, it strikes me that at no point in Hwang De Seul's work does any character have an awakening moment. It's really fascinating how often her characters seem to be aware of this thing about them, and they're having to deal with the reality of someone else knowing about that and what it might mean to pursue that. I think that's why I connected so deeply with both of these characters. The uncertainty that exists between them is about is he actually vibing with me or not? And if so, what do I do with that? Not what is this in me? It's nice to watch work from someone who understands that that's how it is for a lot of us. We are not oblivious to what we've been feeling the whole time.

NiNi 

Hwang Da Seul definitely deals in The Knowing. That's the lane that she's playing in with her characters. It's all about the knowing. It's never about the finding out.

Ben 

She is the queen of the knowing. Every time she shows up, I'm like, who's about to be on my list, girl? Show me the new boys.

Shan 

That's right. 

NiNi 

Hahaha!

Shan

One, like, line or scene that I remember in this show that really lamp shaded this that I loved was when Dohoe asks Juyoung if he was his first kiss and his first love. And Juyoung was like, “Are you fucking kidding? Look at me. Of course I had already kissed people before I met you. Of course I had already had relationships before I met you.” I just love that this is not about a discovery of queerness. This is not about the very first time of having feelings. It's about the first time having feelings this deep in an impossible situation. That's more what she's interested in.

Ben 

NiNi, as our resident vibes expert, why don't you take us through your highlight scenes that captured that for you in the youth section?

NiNi

Before I get into the specific scenes I gotta just talk about Hwang Da Seul and the things that she does in general. Hwang Da Seul, she's not just the queen of the knowing, she's the queen of depression romance because the other thing that she likes to do is to get a character who is hard to love and give them somebody who can only love them. I keep thinking about how Dohoe treats Juyoung both in the teenage section and when they come back together in the adult section. Dohoe is just really standoffish, he's very arms length, not talking about anything, And then how basically the relentlessness of Juyoung's positivity, of his attention, breaks through every single time. As somebody who suffers from depression it feels very healing to see characters who have the patience to shove through something that you are trying to work through but in some ways can't control.

Ben 

All right, so let's talk about the snow scene.

NiNi 

That's definitely part of that for sure. Because let me tell you, if somebody made me snow, it would be a wrap. Ring!

Shan 

It's done. It's over. 

Here’s a thing that I love about Hwang Da Seul is that her work in the QL space is very referential to the mainstream kdrama space and to its tropes. She's clearly based in Korean media. So if you know kdrama romance tropes, they are everywhere in her works.

Shan 

And the snow is a great example of that. There is no greater signal of true love in kdrama than kissing in the first snow. [NiNi laughs] What's great about this one is Juyoung made the snow to make it happen.

NiNi 

I can't stop thinking about it.

Ben 

I'm getting fucking goosebumps right now thinking about it right now. That boy is everything to me!

Shan 

What a man.

NiNi 

The way I came into the chat screaming I was just like, “He made him snow,” I was like sobbing.

Shan 

It was really beautiful. The part that really feels consistent across the show is how much Juyoung saw Dohoe needed him and just found ways to show up for him even when it was hard.

NiNi 

Sorry, I'm very emotional about the show. I can't get over it. I thought that I had gotten past my initial reactions, but now talking about it again, I feel all the exact same things. It's amazing how it just came back just like that.

Ben 

Something fun: Hwang Da Seul has made enough work now that she can make references to her own work and make fun of it. [NiNi laughs]

Shan 

Yes! My god! It was so good!

NiNi 

Outside, trying to find a place to kiss and then saying, “Who would kiss at an underpass? [Ben laughs] I’m like, let me tell you who would kiss at an underpass.

Shan 

We know exactly who would do it.

Ben 

How about you dare not disrespect your seniors like that? [Everyone laughs]

Shan 

I love everything about that whole sequence because it was so real. Like two horny teenage boys, they really want to make out, but they know they're not safe to do it at home. So they're just wandering around outside. Like, where can we sit and make out where we won't be seen, where we won't be disturbed? 

Who hasn't been there as a teenager? It was such a good moment.

Ben 

Now for something really emotional. When Juyoung removed that cross from around his neck and then confessed his feelings to Dohoe through the fucking wall.

Shan 

With his forehead on the confessional wall.

Ben

Every lapsed Catholic on Tumblr was activated at once, found each other on the same post, held each other by the shoulders, and screamed.

NiNi

I felt that deep in my soul, I was just like, no he didn't, no he didn't. He's taking it off, he's taking it off. What is he gonna say? He's taking it off, oh my God. And then he put his head against the wall and I was like, no, I can't do this. I actually cannot do this.

Ben 

When he put his head on that wall and treated it like a confessional, I was like, somewhere Oscar Wilde is shaking about how love is a sacrament that should be taken on the knees.

Shan 

Oh my God. It was so good. There were so many little moments like that. And there's no monologue where Juyoung talks about his mother's faith and what it means to him. This is not that kind of show where they're gonna look into the camera and tell you what things mean and explain the themes. You really have to pay attention. You have to be present in this story to notice the things that are happening and what they mean. It's such an immersive drama experience.

NiNi

I feel like it's equal parts immersive and voyeuristic, because they're parts of it that feel like you are in there with them, and there’s parts of it that feel almost like you shouldn't be watching, like their first kiss in the van.

Shan 

It feels very intimate.

Ben 

Hwang Da Seul is really good at making emotional intimacy come through without asking her actors to make softcore porn with her.

NiNi 

This is not to say that we do not enjoy the softcore—

Shan 

—We do enjoy the softcore. Please do keep making it.

Ben 

—Make sure that makes the edit! Don't stop doing that too. Just make sure that you get the emotions right.

Shan

Get the emotions right.

NiNi 

The other thing that Hwang Da Seul likes to do is she likes to film in winter and I think that's one of the differences that we've often discussed between Chinese, Japanese, and Korean BL, and Southeast Asian BL. That difference between the intimacy of cold weather, the moodiness of winter, and what you get in terms of mood coming out of places that are hot and tropical. It's not that the angst isn't there if it's tropical. It's not that the moodiness can't be there if it's tropical. But there's a different sort of melancholy that comes with the winter stuff. And Hwang Da Seul really likes to sink into that stuff.

Shan 

She likes to put her characters in these really, cold, dark scenes, situations, settings, and then she likes to allow them to find the warmth and find the light together. That is the narrative that she's always pursuing.

NiNi

You mentioned that she both wrote and directed Where Your Eyes Linger and this. This feels like an escalation and evolution from Where Your Eyes Linger. Where Your Eyes Linger was actually one of my first QLs. So this is kind of a full circle moment for me.

Shan 

It was my very first QL. I was intro'd to BL by Hwang Da Seul.

00:21:54 - Taekwondo: The Separation

Ben 

So after going through all of this and making us really believe in the youth romance between these boys, Hwang Da Seul did her favorite thing. She broke these boys up for an unreasonable amount of time.

Shan 

Unreasonable. [NiNi laughs] When that chyron came up and we realized it was a 12 year time skip, my—

Ben 

We're calling the Koreans. Can y'all verify this?

Shan 

—My heart sunk into my stomach. I was like, not 12 fucking years. That's horrific.

Ben 

I want you to know that Twig and I are not well. That chyron said 12 years and I DM'd her and I was like, 12 years? Hell yeah, girl. She was like, it's about to be a mess.

Shan 

You are not well. We knew that.

Ben 

You've talked about this before, Shan, that she really likes to take audiences well beyond the acceptable point with the separation. So Juyoung ends up separated from Dohoe and is unable to reconnect with him. For the next 12 years, he seems kind of lost. Like, he ends up not really pursuing much for himself in an aspirational way. He ends up working in someone else's taekwondo dojo. He ends up continuing to maintain a relationship with Dohoe's father and was offered the dojo from him before he passes away. 

There's a lot here in the separation that was really difficult to sort of absorb. Not only was there this gap where Dohoe and he weren't seeing each other at all, I felt a whole lot of angst and stress about Juyoung having a relationship with the man who beat him like a drum. 

Shan

Mhmm.

Ben

I knew that when Lee Dohoe rejoined the narrative, it would be a huge pain point between them.

I want to go to NiNi first this time because this is probably the most emotionally difficult section of it. And we hadn't had a chance to talk too much about this section while you were watching. I want you to unpack how you felt during this period and what sort of threads you were most holding onto.

NiNi 

Man, watching Juyoung just sort of shuffle through life just kind of sleepwalk through it. The first time we see him at the end of that 12 year break, he does not look well. He just looks like all the life and optimism have gone out of him. For somebody who was such a sunshine in the teenage section, who was so focused and dedicated and smiley and happy and just a ball of energy, to watch him just sort of sloughing away. It was heartbreaking. You could see the pain that he was holding in and the whole thing where he's maintaining contact with Dohoe's father it's in the hope that at some point he will get some news about Dohoe. He just has not left this behind. He has not moved on from anything that happened. He is completely stuck in place, can't move forward. 

Meanwhile Dohoe has basically run away run as fast and as far as he could get but as fast and as far as far as he could get ended up being in Shin Juyoung's hometown, close to a place that he remembered as making him happy. Because there was this whole sequence in the teenage years where they basically ran away from home for a day. They went to Shin Juyoung's old hometown and they couldn’t find anywhere to sleep because no hotels would take them because they were minors, and they couldn't stay in the sauna overnight. And so they basically snuck into some kind of school building or whatever and slept on some seats. But it was such a moment that belonged to them and it was such a happy moment for both of them having that experience together. That happy moment is what Dohoe is drawn to and how he ends up being drawn back into Juyoung's orbit. He goes to his old neighborhood in some way, I think, knowing that at some point he's going to run into Shin Juyoung, even as he's avoiding it.

Ben 

Shan, you're the most powerful hater I know. 

Shan

Mhmm.

Ben

You are very specific in your gripes when people hurt one another in dramas.

Shan

Sure am.

Ben

Go in and let have.

Shan 

First of all, I really like the very complex decision to have Juyoung stay close to Dohoe's father. The way that this all fell apart is that Juyoung had an altercation with Dohoe's father that ended up interrupting Dohoe's exam. It is the reason Dohoe failed, lost his chance to go to college in the way that he intended to. Juyoung has a lot of guilt about that situation. And he also, as NiNi said, is kind of emotionally stuck in that moment where everything went sideways. So not only does he not leave, not only does he try to maintain some connection with the places and the people that he had when he was with Dohoe, not only does he keep trying to find Dohoe, he maintains a very close relationship and even grows much closer to Dohoe's father in his absence and takes care of him and acts the part of the filial son in a way that Dohoe is no longer doing. 

That's a really interesting choice I think is in part very much driven by his guilt that he has for messing up Dohoe's life. I think he is in a way trying to do penance for his role in what went wrong. But for Dohoe, that choice looks hurtful and absurd, that Juyoung would stay and take care of his abuser and be filial to the man who Dohoe has been afraid of and running from for his entire life. Dohoe has a lot of valid anger, I think, about Juyoung making that choice. 

At the same time, Dohoe really was cruel in the way that he ghosted Juyoung. And he was certainly cruel when he met him again 12 years later. It's something that you really have to give some time and space to think about, like, what is motivating him here? Because again, this is not a show that looks into the camera and tells you everything the characters are thinking. Why, when he saw Juyoung again, was he so mean to him, so belittling? He used Hyunho against him to imply things about their relationship that were not true just to hurt Juyoung. He put on this front, pretending to be this very successful, haughty guy who didn't care about Juyoung, who hadn't thought about him in years. He made some really cruel choices, but you can kind of understand why he feels so complicated about Juyoung. Juyoung is tied to all of these horrible things that he has tried to move beyond, that he is trying to let go of. He wants to get free of this curse on his life that is his father, and Juyoung is so wrapped up in those things. 

When we talk about Hwang Da Seul’s patterns, this is a pattern that she has across her shows. She likes to take a character to the limits, really push on how cruel she will let them behave in the name of whatever psychological shit they're dealing with and try to find a way to redeem them. What really worked with the way that she set up this conflict with Dohoe and Juyoung is that even though it was really hard to watch him be awful to Juyoung, a character that we all feel protective of, you could really understand why he was feeling that way, why he was acting that way. We knew enough about Dohoe. We saw enough of what he experienced to be able to extend that empathy to him and forgive him for the way that he was behaving just as Juyoung did. I thought that was just so well done in this show in a way that frankly it has not been in her previous attempts at this dynamic.

Ben 

Ha!As a regular defender of Hwang Da Seul’s wrong boys—

NiNi

Mmhmm. Mmhmm. I'm not even gonna, I'm letting that go. 

Shan 

Listen, we've talked about this. Let Free the Curse of Taekwondo is the culmination of everything that Hwang Da Seul has been trying to do across all these different shows. And she finally got it exactly right.

NiNi

I don't disagree but I also don't 100% agree. 

One of the things that I want to talk about that we haven't really delved into, we haven't delved into the violence as a motivating factor for why Dohoe was so cruel to Juyoung when he ghosted him, and when he's coming back to him. Because of Dohoe's experience with his father, Dohoe abhors violence. There is a scene where after he realizes that Juyoung has been sent away because of the fight he goes into the kitchen and he picks up a knife, and he gets really close to honestly stabbing his father and he looks at his reflection and he's horrified by what he sees there, because he has defined himself and everything that he's trying to do by being the opposite of his father—by refusing violence. He won't even do taekwondo anymore because he has decided against violence so deeply. And so to see that connection between his father and himself, to see that the violence could also be in him too, and that the violence and the rage could come from the way that he cares about Juyoung, freaked him the fuck out. 

That's a big chunk of why he ran away and why when he does come back, he's so cruel because he's terrified of that part of himself. And so the whole thing where Juyoung is now close to his father, there's another layer to that now of, I have removed myself from this situation because I was afraid of who I would become, and here you are not having that problem.

Ben 

I think about what was different on the day that Dohoe called the police, and I think the difference is that I think Juyoung fought back that day. I think there's a difference between accepting the beating and fighting back, and what Dohoe was afraid would happen once they both started fighting and it wasn't just beating him.

Shan 

Yeah. A really good layer there is that Dohoe knew all along that his father was beating up Juyoung. There were a lot of moments where we would see Dohoe notice bruises on Juyoung and look away from them and not ask the question. He has definitely seen them and he just kept his mouth shut. But on that day, he saw something that scared him. I think Ben is right, he saw Juyoung fighting back and he really worried about what the consequences of that could be. And that is why he finally intervened.

00:33:28 - Taekwondo: The Reunion

Ben 

Let's talk about the second chance! Shan, as somebody who has been a Hwang Da Seul critic in terms of how she's handled the reconciliation between couples when they break, I would like you to walk us through this one and why this one worked for you.

Shan 

I think what worked so well in this is that we were given enough of Dohoe's experiences and his background to understand where he was coming from, even without it being very explicitly spelled out. We were able to watch the whole process of him putting up this front for Juyoung, pushing him away, finally breaking down, admitting the truth of what his life had become, the truth of how he felt. We got to see them really take time on fighting through all of that. And then really importantly, we got to see them work together to figure out how to repair their relationship and to build a new life for themselves that worked for them and to see how it worked. We got to see that whole journey for them. We got to see Dohoe admit and explain why he had been behaving the way that he was, what he was afraid of. We got to see him own the things that he had done wrong or that he had been hiding and be honest with Juyoung and really drop his shield, and also be the one to reach out and start making some amends. 

Some of these aspects were missing in other shows, which is why I criticized them. Here, we see the whole arc of that. We got to really believe in their new start and why it works. I did not end this drama feeling like they're gonna have this problem again. I felt like they really moved past these childhood traumas that had been weighing them down and found a way forward together. And we got to see them experiencing not just a happy epilogue of cutesy moments, but an epilogue where they lived life day to day together and they had disappointments and they realized some things weren't going to work the way they thought. And they worked through that and they found a new way to be content. And so I really left the show feeling like I got to see Dohoe heal in a way that made me think he was gonna be okay fully.

NiNi

The flip side of that is that you got to see Juyoung get angry and really push about what had happened. They had a little bit of a false start reunion in the middle, things seem like they're going okay, but Juyoung wants to unpack what happened so that it doesn't happen again. And Dohoe is resistant to that because he's still hiding so many things. So part of the reason that all of that works is because like you said, there is the discussion, there is the amends, there is the coming clean, there is the fighting through it that you get to see. Like, Dohoe goes to jail!

Shan 

Yes!

Ben 

That man went to jail and got out of jail so fast! [laughs]

Shan 

I wanna go back to what NiNi said, because one of the things I love the most in this show is that in this adult reconciliation arc, they have the big dramatic reunion moment, they have sex, and it doesn't fix fucking anything. We got to see them have the initial reunion euphoria and then realize they still had to deal with all their shit and then watch them deal with it. It was fucking awesome. This is what I want from a drama about a relationship.

Ben 

Their particular sex scene is probably one of my favorites of the year. Because they intercut the current sex scene with a sex scene we didn't get before, when they were kids. And I really like the framing of it because the youth one is as furtive and uncertain, but excited about it as two young people are going to be when they're getting away with something that's really important to them and they're happy about it, but it didn't fix the issues that were gonna show up then and the sex they're having doesn't fix their issues now. And it was interesting seeing them have sex as adults where they know their bodies a lot more, but the emotions are just so off in that moment. It was so clever to mirror that moment with a moment we hadn't seen where their emotions were better aligned. There's more activity in the adult section, but the emotions are more enjoyable in the youth section. That was such an excellent choice.

NiNi 

I Promised You the Moon, episode 3. It's the same thing.

The use of the cross-cutting technique to show you two things being true while they're doing the same activity.

00:38:22 - Taekwondo: On Hyunho

Ben 

I loved the use of Hyunho in this show because he lets us know that Dohoe knows exactly who the fuck he is at both stages of the show, and that he is a shit to everyone that he interacts with when it comes to his queerness and all of the issues that he's hanging on. Hyunho is not blameless in this, he ends up bullying Doheo. And that has to be resolved. He's hanging around Dohoe, trying to make amends for what happened between them. And Dohoe is not giving this man what he wants. This man is desperate. He wants Dohoe to fuck him so bad it makes him look stupid. And Dohoe will not give it to him. This role that Hyunho has about how he probably should have had a shot in here at some point, but can't, works so well. Particularly because that character is given closure in the story as well. 

Hwang De Seul is really good at dealing with the trauma of someone ghosting you when you were really important to them and they were important to you. One of things I love about her work is that she doesn't think it's wrong for characters to break up. But she does think it's wrong for characters to not communicate properly with the other person. That person needs to be given the closure. They need to be given permission to mourn the end of something that was important to them. But by denying the other party the closure they need, neither of you is allowed to move on and it becomes this festering wound that both of you are forced to carry. I think that's probably why I've enjoyed her work so much. Because, for a lot of us, queerness complicates how you can handle many of these relationships. In some cases with guys I've cared a lot about life just snatched us from each other and we never got to conclude anything that we were going through and I'm just required to keep living after that. 

I really like how very clear it is in this that Dohoe's primary mistake he makes with all three of the men he has relationships with in this is that he never gave himself or them closure about anything that happened between them. That's why none of them can heal and none of them can get well until he's able to give that to at least two of them.

Shan 

I have to say, as someone who is usually a second lead hater, I really like Hyunho. When I say second lead, that's a reference to a very common character archetype in kdrama. Every kdrama romance, just about, has a second lead character who is the person who is vying for the protagonist's romantic attention, not necessarily in a love triangle way because it's often not actually a triangle. It's often that the second lead is just holding a one-sided candle, which is definitely the case for Hyunho. 

His inclusion in the story complicated things in a really nice way in the teenage years. He was there as a signal that Dohoe already knew himself. Hyunho was struggling with his own internalized homophobia in high school and so was really awful to Dohoe. And then as an adult, he really tried to make that up to him by doing what he thought was the right thing in helping Dohoe to run away from his trauma and helping him to build this new life, which turned out to be fraudulent. By helping him to perpetuate the fraud, by helping him to keep his secrets, by helping him to cover up his lies. He thought—incorrectly—that being Dohoe's conspirator in that way was going to bring them closer and going to make him the person who knew Dohoe best. And I really felt a lot of sympathy for him in the end, because it's not his fault that he didn't actually know Dohoe and didn't know that that wasn’t what was good for him. 

Dohoe never let him know him. He never let Hyunho really know him in the way that he let Juyoung. And so Hyunho didn't realize that the things he was doing because he thought they were what Dohoe wanted and needed were actually the things that were weighing Dohoe down. It wasn't his fault that he had it wrong and that he couldn't understand Dohoe in the way that Juyoung did. And it wasn't his fault that Dohoe used him quite knowingly as a lifeline, as a way to protect himself, as a way to dig at Juyoung. That was very wrong of Dohoe to use him and his feelings for him that way. And to Dohoe's credit, he realized that in the end and he apologized. That was one of my favorite scenes in the show, was Dohoe really owning that he had not done Hyunho right and that his behavior toward him was not okay. And apologizing for that to the point where they could move past it and become genuine friends. 

I really loved that arc and I really ended up respecting Hyunho. I respected that he still got his moment to share his feelings honestly and ask the question, why it wasn't him, and to take a moment to understand that and to mourn what he thought he could have had with Dohoe. It's so sad to think about him hanging on to this for so long—12 years of this separation, Hyunho was there as Dohoe's friend waiting for his moment that never came. 

Because of the way that it was presented and the way that he handled himself, I didn't end up thinking anything negative about him for that. I just felt sympathy for the situation he was in and I was happy for him that he was able to finally be free of it.

Ben 

I'm glad he was let go because the fundamental reason why Dohoe can never let him smash is that Hyunho lives an existence that is inherently closeted, and Dohoe doesn't want that. And he doesn't know how to say that properly to Hyunho. I'm very glad that there was a very gentle release of that for Hyunho. I really hope that Hyunho is able to reckon with the way his help of Dohoe inherently closeted him, trapping them in a lie that both of them are holding together. And I really hope that Hyunho is able to find his own ability to have a relationship that doesn't require him to hide so much all the time.

00:44:57 - Let Free the Curse of Taekwondo: Final Thoughts and Ratings

Ben

Let's talk about that child!

NiNi 

Why would you say it like that? [Ben laughs]

Shan 

I think you're right though, Ben, to call this out as another one of the common themes that she revisits. There's a tiny child and they help to bridge the gap in the separated couple. In this show, we got Gwangmo.

Ben 

Gwangmo represents for them this cycle that they're stuck in that they would like to see broken. I really love that they're able to do that for that kid, but in a way that further sets them back personally and professionally. The world can be made better by brave people putting themselves on the line. And a lot of the people who are first, they're going to get slapped down for it.

Dohoe can't remain a teacher because he's not technically qualified. And he embarrassed someone with money. Even if he's right, the powers that be are going to slap him down for what he did. Juyoung is still struggling to try and make something of himself that he has independent control over. I love that they were willing to accept that loss to make sure that a kid they cared about was safe.

NiNi 

One time that the couple moving into the smaller house made sense.

Ben 

Why are you trying to make me mad again? Don't think I forgot!

NiNi 

Such a good show so much to it.

Ben 

Let's talk about that epilogue, because you brought up the house, the ending of this show, that little happy epilogue we get, is the best happy epilogue we have gotten in a long time. Because everything we saw in that was perfectly calibrated for where these two are realistically, what sort of difficulties they're going to be facing personally and financially, what their lives are going to look like socially. They confirm that they are having the sex on the reg and finally Dohoe got to see all of that boys Yahoo! Answers. [NiNi laughs]

Shan 

Yes, we need to talk about those forum posts at the end. It was such a lovely little button on the show. we've seen their domestic life. They're making it work. They are compromising together. They are happy and content in what they have. And Dohoe has let go of some of his huge aspirations for himself that were really just pressure. One of the things I love about the epilogue is this message that actually having a loving partnership that you care about and that you're committed to is a life achievement that you can stand up next to anything else that you do. And so just because he didn't have a fancy degree or a high paying job didn't mean that he had achieved nothing in life, because he had this beautiful relationship that he cared so much about. 

And then we see Dohoe looking through something on Juyoung's computer and stumbling upon his forum history where we learned that Juyoung has for years been posting questions for advice. And they're nearly all about things he wanted to do to help Dohoe. That forum is where he went to learn how to make snow when they were teenagers. As he read through the questions, you could see him connecting them back to memories of their time together. He has always, always cared about Dohoe. And he has always been willing to show up and put in the effort for him. It was really beautiful.

Ben

NiNi, reset the clock. I'm going to mention What Did You Eat Yesterday? [NiNi laughs]

Dohoe got to have the moment that Kenji got to have when he opened that refrigerator and saw that there were peaches waiting for him.

NiNi 

Mmhmm!

Ben

The last thing I want to say about this is I really love the way Hwang Da Seul uses the bed in this show. That we can see Dohoe's current demeanor shifting by how he shares a bed with Juyoung. I love that by the end he is a sloppy sleeper, hanging on top of that poor man.

NiNi 

Yeah, because the first time that they sleep in the bed together that we see in the second half of their relationship, he says he doesn't remember the last time that he slept properly. And Juyoung is just like, just lying down and shutting your eyes gives you the same kind of thing. So there's this whole thing where he's slowly relaxing back into himself so that by the time you see him in the epilogue he's basically sleeping spread out all over the bed. It's just joyous to watch it happen.

Shan 

He's so comfortable.

Ben 

I would like to end this section by giving thanks. Everybody go around and say things they're thankful for. I’m thankful for quite a few things. I'm thankful that we ended on the shot of that cross being thrown away.

Shan 

Mmm, yes!

NiNi 

Amen and hallelu.

Ben 

And I would like to thank Lee Seon for his face. [Shan laughs] Congratulations, sir.

NiNi

The Koreans have a term: face genius. He is one.

Shan 

He's definitely a face genius! I would like to offer thanks to Hwang Da Seul for continuing to perfect this story until she fucking nailed it and delivered the perfect version of it. Hats off to you, ma'am. You did it.

NiNi 

I would like to thank Hwang Da Seul for Lee Dohoe. I think the Lee Dohoe character is one of the best things I've ever seen anywhere in drama. Not just BL, not just kdrama, anywhere in drama.

Ben

Let’s rate!

Shan 

He's maybe my favorite character of the year. I gotta think about that. He's definitely one of them. The other one might be the one we're about to talk about.

NiNi 

The VIIBs are coming, girls. Just think about it, okay?

Ben 

I love these boys, but I already have my favorite boy of the year.

Alright, let's rate this bad boy. Tens or chops, everybody. Shan.

Shan 

As if it would be a chop. I'm actually trying to remind myself what score I gave it.

NiNi 

Do you gotta think about this?

Shan 

I'm just double checking. I gave it a perfect 10, baby! 

Ben 

Very rare, congratulations. Golf clap for this show.

Shan

The first, the first and only 10 that I gave to any BL this year.

NiNi 

I mean, y'all know how stingy Shan is with these 10s. Shan is not me. Shan never gives shit a 10.

Shan 

It's so true. A Shan 10 is quite a momentous event. This is the only BL this year that's getting one from me. I love this show. I think it is one of the best BLs ever made. It's beautiful. Everyone should watch it.

NiNi 

It's a motherfucking 10 from me. I don't think I need to explain that anymore than I already have. Hwang Da Seul is my queen and this is a fucking 10.

Ben

This is a 10. It got everything right. It got the romance right. It got the gay shit right on multiple fronts. It got the gay shit right with the leads and the guy who can't win, because we do need to accept that the world does not perfectly align for everybody to have the first person they like and you gotta move on. 

Great job, everybody! 

Shan

Great job!

NiNi 

It will be a 10 from The Conversation. Go watch it. It is the greatest thing that happened this year, except for this next thing that we're gonna talk about now.

Shan 

Mmhmm.

00:52:33 - Love In The Big City

NiNi 

Let's move on to the drama adaptation of Love in the Big City.

Ben 

Love in the Big City is the second adaptation this year of a book by Korean author Sang Young Park, which was translated by Anton Hur and pushed into international distribution. The book became very popular internationally, which rebounded domestically to get more views there. Sang Young Park was not involved with the movie adaptation, which NiNi did watch earlier this year. He was involved with the drama adaptation and was the lead screenwriter for this. 

The story is about the narrator who we just refer to as Young. It's about four different periods in his life. The original book premise treats these periods as semi-distinct from each other, whereas the drama presents them as a more linear story. In the first part, we focus heavily on our narrator's college relationship with his best girl friend, Miae, and how their relationship eventually comes to an end as the pressures of heteronormativity and long-term survival requires certain concessions. The second part of the story is when Young is a little bit more mature, he's dealing with the impending death of his mother and he meets this somewhat older man, and it's about the complex relationship he has with his homophobic mother and this homophobic boyfriend. The third part has our narrator with probably the best boyfriend he has, and how their relationship was not one that our narrator was able to make succeed in the long term. And the fourth part is him recognizing that he fucked up pretty badly in the third part and having to reckon with a life after his big love had come to an end.

I want Shan to talk about why we were so excited about this drama, and why Shan approached me about organizing a book club on Tumblr.

Shan 

Maybe my favorite thing that we did this year was Love in the Big City Book Club. So in January of 2024, we got news that Love in the Big City was going to get two adaptations, a drama adaptation and a film adaptation. I had read the book, Ben had not. And I was like, what would be very cool would be to try to encourage some of our friends, some of the folks that we are in community with on Tumblr to read the book together. And so we decided we were going to spend the month of February 2024 reading the book together with anyone who wanted to join us in this book club, with the intention of getting excited about a queer story that was gonna be coming to our screens. 

We talked earlier about the Hallyu Wave and how BL started to come into that. I think a piece that we didn't really address was that queer representation in mainstream kdrama is still incredibly rare. There have been isolated characters and storylines in mainstream kdrama that are gay, usually very small side roles, usually not depicted as having full lives, usually don't get to have romance on screen. We knew that Love in the Big City was a big, messy gay story. And we knew that with Sang Young Park involved in the drama adaptation, there was no way that this was going to be some sanitized version, and that this would be a landmark queer media event for Korea. So there were a few dozen of us that read the book, that really were engaged in participating in the book club posting every week. And we knew that when the drama adaptations were released later in the year, we would be ready to come back to those discussions. 

A really cool thing that happened while we were doing our book club is that one of our members reached out to Anton Hur, who did the English translation of the book. Anton Hur is a Korean gay man. He had a lot of personal feelings about working on this project, he chose it as a passion project. When he heard from our book clubber that there was a group of us who were doing a book club together on Tumblr, he showed up on Tumblr. He made an account and he posted in our tag to say hello to us and to invite us to ask him any questions that we wanted about his translation work. It was, like, one of the coolest things ever. He opened himself up, he answered dozens of questions for us about how he thought about the translation, why he chose to work on this project, what the story meant to him in his context. And it just really enriched the story for us, really brought it to life, really helped us think about a lot of these questions about, when you're trying to translate Korean content for our global audience, what are the things that you're thinking about? 

When we found out that the film would be premiering at the Toronto International Film Festival in September and that the drama would then be dropping in October, we were ready. We had all really grown to love this story. We were deep in the weeds on its themes, on what Sang Young Park was trying to say with this work. And we were just so excited to get to see it on screen.

Ben 

I was really thankful that Anton was willing to talk to us. I think few things are more validating for the way you try to show respect to the work that you're engaging with—by taking it as seriously as you can and respectfully as you can—is to have somebody who is closely involved with it acknowledge what you're trying to do and allow you to engage with them. I really appreciate the time that Anton took out for us on that. That was probably one of my most memorable things that happened this year.

00:58:46 - LITBC Part 1: Miae, Namgyu, and the Film Adaptation

Ben

Now, getting into the drama itself. NiNi, you watched ahead of us because we were intentionally pacing the drama. Let's break down some of our big reactions to each part. So, quick feelings that you felt about the first part, particularly about his relationship with Miae. I'm curious about your reactions to the relationship he had with her because you also watched the movie which is, if I understand correctly, primarily from her perspective and focuses on that part of the story.

NiNi 

So that's, I think, a misconception. It's not really from her perspective. The film adaptation covers the first part of the book. So it is about that relationship between the, well—I'm just going to use the drama characters names because they have different names in the film—between Young and Miae. And it really is a two-hander but is not really from Miae's perspective. You actually see Miae mostly from Young's perspective. The film is a different story from what I gathered the book story is, because I haven't read the novel, and it’s definitely different from the drama story. 

The film is more traditionally what you would expect coming out of kdrama. It starred some really big names who are winning some really big awards now. The film's enjoyable, Kim Go Eun is fantastic in it. I think that the drama is more grounded and more focused on the things that maybe the audience who is here for queer drama would like to see. 

For me, because I had seen the film first, I had a little bit of a disconnect trying to get through it because I was mentally placing things that were happening in the drama next to things that were happening in the film. And…while I enjoyed it, there were parts that I was missing and looking forward to that ended up being in later parts of the drama. So I kind of had to watch it twice.

The main thing that stood out for me about the first part of the drama was that part you said, Ben, about how Miae in the end slips away from Young, and it's because heteronormativity and misogyny and conservatism of Korean society are forcing Miae down a path that Young cannot follow and does not want to follow. Whereas in the film they have more of a rupture, in the drama it's more of a gentle slipping away. It's not that they're not still friends, but Miae's priorities change in a way that Young can't follow her into. That was probably the biggest difference. 

Because Korea is such a conservative society and such an ambitious, capitalistic society as well, I think people make compromises. They compromise and they compromise to have the life that they think that they should have or they're a little bit beaten down into the life that the society expects them to have, I'm always fascinated to watching that trajectory happen when it does in dramas. That's the part that I really latched into there, the fact that the reason that they came away from each other is because literally, Miae is able to do that and Young is not.

Ben 

Shan, quick reactions to Part 1?

Shan 

It’s so interesting to me that we had such different trajectories. For me, one of the most surprising and wonderful things about the drama is how close it was to the book. There are changes and they start to become more pronounced as we go through, but I was so happy about how close this felt to the story that was originally intended to be told.

I really loved that in part one, Miae and Young, we got to really see their relationship and it was paired in the drama with a relationship with Kim Namgyu, who was a boyfriend of Young's that just was kind of out of step with him. They were not looking for the same things. Young was very young and he was kind of cruel to Namgyu about some of their differences. I thought that was a really nice parallel that he had these two relationships where he just wasn't really on the same page with the people that he was engaging with. And he didn't, I think, realize that Miae ultimately wanted to conform in a way that he did not. And that became a fracture in their relationship. 

They didn't have a big dramatic blow up in the drama version. It was a much gentler kind of drifting away that happens a lot with people that you're very intensely in relationship with in your early 20s. As life goes on, you make different choices and you kind of realize that you're not each other's confidant anymore. You're not the person who can understand each other best anymore. It was sad, but it felt real. It felt true to the choices that they both made in their lives. But it was also a really big heartbreak for him, I think his first big heartbreak in terms of having someone that he really let in and then having that person disappoint him and not stick around. That started a pattern for him of behavior and the way that he engaged in his relationships. 

I really liked the depiction of Miae. I thought the actress that played her, Lee Soo Kyung, really embodied the spirit of that character. Her and Nam Yoon Su had great platonic chemistry as friends. And I really enjoyed all of their scenes together. 

I also want to shout out Kwon Hyuk, who played Namgyu. He is a BL guy. We've seen him before.

Ben 

Yeah, he's my man Jong Chan! Don't think I forgot about my man!

Shan 

One of the cool things that Love in the Big City did was it cast quite a few people who have done BL before, which was pretty fun. And he was great too, as this older love interest that was more traditional and out of step with bratty little Young. 

The piece that really resonated for me when thinking about how it compared to the book in this first part was that the fracture between Miae and Young didn't feel as harsh. The choice that she made, we had more context for her decision in the drama than we did in the book. The most common thing that you'll hear us say is that the book was extremely interior. We were sitting with Young in his older age as he was looking back with regret and narrating to us what happened. The drama has a wider point of view. It takes us into the perspectives of the other characters. And so it just naturally lightens things up a little bit, because we're not so stuck in one person's very cynical perspective.

Ben 

The series being kinder to the supporting characters in Young's life makes the book much sadder because he was not accepting of all the love people were trying to give him. My favorite thing about the first part is about how in both major relationships Young has, he's struggling with their connection to traditional feelings about romance. Like, Kwon Hyuk is so perfectly cast because he fit this very specific ideal, a man who is kind of caught up in the whole kdramafication of love. And Young is like, I get called slurs, I am not about that. 

The great thing about Miae, and why this particular presentation is so important to me is because, despite how people who aren't connected to queer people might think gay men don't have relationships with women, every gay man has had an extremely painful breakup with a woman who was super important to him. Every gay man I know has a woman who was their rock in their early twenties that for whatever reason it did not work out with. None of us gets over that. And I really loved seeing that represented.

01:06:50 - LITBC Part 2: Umma and Youngsoo

Ben

On to Part 2! Let's talk about the worst man ever.

[Ben and Shan laugh]

In Part 2, Young is a little bit older, and Nam Yoon Su and the director of Part 2—they were fucking dialed in on how heavy that man's life was in part two.

Shan 

It was Hur Jin Ho.

Ben 

Hur Jin Ho uses long shots and wide shots so well in this section to communicate how stuck Young is. Young is dealing with his mother who is in the hospital because she is dealing with cancer and is not going that great and his mom is working his damn nerves with her Christianity. At the same time, he is caught up in this new relationship with a man named Noh Youngsoo. And it is difficult because as hot and smart and mysterious as he finds this guy, this man is super closeted and high-key homophobic. It is difficult to watch him dealing with his mom's version of homophobia and then trying to love a man with his own version of homophobia.

I want NiNi to go first because I don't want Shan and I's book experience to color your reactions.

NiNi 

This is actually my favorite part of the drama. There's something about the relationship that Young has with his mother that puts me in mind of something that I've seen with other people whose parents know but won't acknowledge what they know about their kids. He's constantly running away from his mother. He goes to the hospital to see her because he's a good son and he goes to take care of her and all of that. He loves her, but he also can't wait to get away from her. And as you go along, you see there's a kind of a brightness and a brittleness in their relationship that feels like they're dancing around something that they both know is there, but will not speak about. 

That comes to a head at the end of this section, what it culminates in is as his mom is getting closer to the end, he wants to be real with her. He doesn't want to have this false, brittle relationship that they have where they joke around and play and they don't talk about anything real. He wants to show her his life and who he is and he wants her to see him before she dies. So he is in this relationship with this horrible man and he knows that this man is horrible. But he is holding onto it because he wants to show his mother, look mom, this is who I am and I can be happy like this. I can have a life like this. And then this man bails on him in the moment where he needs him to be able to show that to his mother. I'm kind of glad that he bails on him because that wasn't the one. That wasn't the person who made him happy. And if his mother had seen that, I think she would have picked up on that as well. 

So it's this terrible, bittersweet thing where it feels like his mom dies without ever really knowing her son and that haunts him in a lot of ways, it feels like. It's probably the thing I related the most to in the entire drama. Despite the fact that this is low key the worst person that Young dates in the whole thing, the worst relationship, the worst everything, to me, this is the part, the part with his mother and everything that's going on there that really sunk into me.

Shan 

The book is much darker than what we got in the drama. And actually, that's the reason this is not my favorite part of the drama, because the book version is my favorite part of the entire story. I don't think that that's a bad adaptation choice, though. I think it was appropriate for the drama they were making. But I already have the book Part 2 in my heart, and it didn't really match up to that.

The juxtaposition of Young's mother, her homophobia and the way that it had hurt him, against the relationship that he was having with Noh Youngsoo, who is very much hiding who he is, who also has a very complicated relationship with a difficult mother. It really felt like Young was kind of burying himself a little bit in this relationship that he knew on some level was not good, but he needed the distraction. He needed somewhere to take all of these emotions that he could not unleash on his mother. And he sublimated them into this relationship that was ultimately quite toxic. That just rang so true to me. This is exactly who I would expect Young to be dating in this dark period of his life where he is trying to work through all of his guilt and all of his shame and all of his extremely complicated feelings about his mother. But I thought that the way it was depicted and the way that he was allowed to take a little bit of power back from Youngsoo at the end of this section, the way that even though he was never able to fully express himself to his mother, he did get to have some moments with her, at the end, of peace. I thought that was really beautiful.

NiNi 

I have a book question before we go on to Ben. You said the drama is more linear, puts these stories sort of in sequence in time, whereas the book is more vignette-y. One of the things that came to mind in his relationship with Youngsoo is all the stuff that's going on with his brother, yes, but also, this is after Namgyu has died and he's been pondering all these questions about how he treated him and whether it's that he didn't even try to love him. And so part of it is yes, everything that's going on with his mother and him sublimating himself in this dark relationship. But the other part of it is him pushing through to try to make it work because he thinks that he didn't do that with Namgyu and he feels a lot of guilt about it.

Ben 

I really love that as a drama read because in the book Namgyu is just Kia Guy to us.

Shan 

He's not even a real character in the book. So It's hard, as someone who read the book first and knows the quote-unquote true version of the story, to read it that way, because he just wasn't someone with that kind of importance in the original telling of this story. But I do think it's a layer that the drama added and that could certainly be read that way.

Ben 

I don't think there's anything wrong with your reading connecting those two things. It's just when we read the book, Young is so distinct in each section that he almost feels like a different character.

Shan

Yeah, it's very intentional, the book not drawing those lines of connection between the parts. Which definitely informs the way that we think about and interpret the beats of the story.

Ben 

No, it's a good thing to point out. Because the same author is telling this story. I think your read on that and connecting those two things is 100% valid and likely intentional.

Shan 

It’s a cool thing to mention. This is an autobiographical story that became a novel that became a drama and the same man is the one who authored all of these versions of it. I think that that's really interesting that he came back to his own life experiences and added layers to them for a television drama version of the story. I'm sure that just like he did when he wrote the novel, he drew from things that felt real and authentic to him.

Ben 

I got a couple of things to say about Part 2 before we move on. To all of the baby gays out there, if you're gonna fuck a guy with this much internalized homophobia, don't fall for him because they are not well. You cannot fuck the homophobia out of him.

I also will say this section has one of my favorite moments. The final scene in the park with his mom, to me, hearkened back to the very complicated feelings I had during part three of Moonlight, where Chiron is seeing his mom for the last time in the film and he says, “I hate you, mama.” And he cries and she cries, but then he still lights a cigarette for her. That's the exact same place I went emotionally in that scene in the park.

My big thing about this section and how they lighten some of this: in the book, Young doesn't have his blow up with Hyung, as we called him in the book, in public. He has this in private in his apartment and he legit tries to kill that man. I appreciate the drama's choice, but let me tell you, I really was hoping we get the intensity that he really, really wanted to kill that man.

Shan

The whole nature of the scene is different in the book. He really could have killed him and he wanted to.

NiNi 

I wanted him to kill him. When they're sitting in that restaurant and he's saying all the things that he's saying about leaving and going to America and I know what Young is going through in that moment and that he basically left Young hanging out to dry when he really needed him. He turns to go and I see Young launch himself away from that table. I was like, “Yes, baby, kill him!” That man needs to be stabbed.

Ben 

I think because of the medium, I liked the choice to have Hyung writing like a shitty research paper about how gay people are fucked in the head and then send that shitty paper to Young for him to throw away. In the book, he sends Young his own diary back to him with edits! That is the most insane thing I have ever read! And I will always hate that man with a fiery passion.

Shan 

He literally took a red pen to that man's diary and sent him notes. Despicable man!  [Ben laughs] We can talk about murdering that man all night.

01:17:05 - LITBC Part 3: Gyu Ho and Kylie

Ben

In Part 3, Young buries his mother, and when he's hanging out with his friends to try and blow off some steam, he has a connection with one of the bartenders at the club. The two of them start hanging out and this grows into something really important for them. They try to do cohabitation and make their relationship work, but unfortunately Young's brain does not allow him to have the relationship he wants to have with Gyuho. 

We learn in this section that Young has been sick with HIV for quite some time and he can't even say it. He calls it Kylie after one of his favorite singers. This becomes an insurmountable struggle eventually in their relationship. This section is about a really good relationship that just wasn't enough. Like I was saying to the gays in the last part, you can't fuck these problems out of people. Gyuho couldn't either. 

Reactions to Part 3. NiNi, how you feeling?

NiNi 

Once the whole Kylie thing comes to the fore, it completely re-jiggers how I think about everything else that's been happening. The first question that I'm asking in my head is, when did this happen? Because it's not really clear in this part, when he found out about Kylie. Is it before he meets Miae? Is it before he meets Hyung? When did he change?

Ben 

I think it's after he meets Miae, but it's before the T-aras go off to their military service.

NiNi 

I gotta think about that because that just recasts everything.

Ben 

It does, like the fight that he has with her where she outs him to her fiance, the reason why he's so mad there is he almost trusted her with that. And he almost made, in his mind, a mistake doing that.

NiNi 

Because this is not part of the film and I had not read the book, this came out of nowhere for me.

Shan 

He does the same thing in the book. You don't know anything about it until Part 3. Each part has two relationships that it focuses on. Part 1 is Miae and Namgyu and Part 2 is his mother and Youngsoo and Part 3 is Gyuho and Kylie. I still think about that, that choice to pair who he considers at this point when he's writing this story to be the love of his life and the companion that he did not choose, that he can't get rid of, who haunts his life. I think that's such an interesting thing, particularly in the context of the way that Gyuho ends up kind of haunting the narrative after this relationship fails.

These are the two relationships that really stick with Young and change him. The thing to know about Gyuho is he is the only named love interest in the entire book. Everyone else is referred to by vague descriptors.

Ben 

Like Noh Youngsoo, he is just Hyung to us. And Kia Guy is just Kia Guy. Young doesn't even tell us his name. That's why Gyuho was so important to a lot of us from the book reader perspective because this is our guy. And we were really excited to see our guy!

Shan 

We were so excited to get to him. This is Young's most important relationship as he sees it, in terms of romance. This is the one. This is the one that he was happiest with. This is the one that almost worked. This is the one that got away. This is the one that haunts him still. And so it was really important that they got him right. 

And they did. They really, really did. That is why for me as a book reader, Part 3 is actually my favorite. I think that it is the most successful in translating exactly what this part of the book was trying to do and living up to the exact same standard of it. It was perfect.

Ben 

In this section for me, a couple of things really come to fruition in a way that I thought were perfect. Like the fact that they kept Miae's apartment as a character in the drama in a way that the book doesn't. It really works here because Young has stripped sociability from the apartment at this point. Like he's gotten rid of the TV. Clearly he doesn't invite people over except to fuck. He's got books all over the place. Gyuho moves in and they have to purge some of his shit. He has to reorganize things in the place. He's managed to contain his writing to one table they've put up against the window. 

But you can see him struggling in this section. He knows what Kylie is costing him. And he wants to succeed as a writer because he wants to be independently wealthy in a way that can supersede the barriers that Kylie genuinely presents to his life in terms of professional and personal advancement. He's trying to make this work, but he's so fucking mad because he can't.  He and Gyuho are not great and they keep having the same fights over and over again. They really figured out how to show how difficult gay domesticity is. 

This pairs so well with all of the heteronormative pressures from the first two parts. For a lot of hetero people there are all of these expectations about marriage and child rearing that help them prioritize their relationship in such a way they can make it work. For a lot of queer people, those structures are not there to support a long-term romance. This is such a difficult section because Young is not wrong about how Kylie is going to hold them back. It's just so sad that he was unwilling to accept Gyuho's willingness to deal with that.

Shan

I think that's one of the things I really love about this story. Young letting go of this relationship doesn't feel like a wrong choice or a choice that I couldn't understand. I wish he'd chosen differently. I wish that he had tried to talk with Gyuho about what happened in terms of his Kylie getting in the way of their plans to go to China. I wish that he had tried to work it out. But I really understand why he didn't. Even if Gyuho was obviously willing to sacrifice things for him, he didn't want Gyuho to sacrifice things for him. He didn't want Gyuho to be held back by his disease. He had a lot of really understandable shame and guilt about that. He just couldn't cope with the idea that his Kylie would be the reason why Gyuho did not get the things that he wanted, and so he ended it. 

A lot of times in dramas you'll get a scenario like this where you have what we call a noble idiocy breakup where a character is being stupid for the benefit of the other person. This didn't feel like that. It didn't feel like he was being stupid. It felt like he was recognizing a very real limitation on his life that he did not want to pass on to someone he loved.

NiNi 

I want to talk about depression for a minute. Fatalistic sabotage:  it's this idea that no matter what you do, it's going to suck. So let's burn it all down now because at least that I have control over. The trajectory of Young's relationship with Gyuho, that's what I was thinking about. The decision that he makes to not go to China and why he's not gonna try to work it out and not mention to Gyuho why he's not gonna try to work it out. That's sort of the end of the trajectory. But along the way you see him, like you said, pull further and further away from Gyuho throughout the relationship. Part of that, I think, is that idea of burning it down before it can burn him down. 

It's very much a depression thing. Kylie completely depresses him. And I think he's probably at the end of the story just starting to dig himself back out. There's a thing that he does in Part 4 that makes me think that okay, he's going to start digging himself out.

Shan 

I think that's very real. And I think we actually saw an explicit acknowledgement of one of his depressive periods in this part. The whole segment where he was really struggling with his writing and he couldn't focus and he and Gyuho kept fighting and he was being really snippy with him. 

We saw Gyuho come find him at the cafe where he was working and say to him, “What can I do for you? Please tell me how I can help you.” Young told him, “You can't. The things going on with me are not things that you can fix by loving me.” And that's such a fucking hard thing to accept.

Ben 

Let's get into the Thailand trip and how this doesn't fix their relationship. And then he throws that shirt away. My feelings were hurt.

Shan 

It hurt me so bad.

NiNi 

I feel like talking about the Thailand trip in Part 3 almost feels preemptive. We understand that it happened and we get a little bit of it in Part 3 but we really delve into it in Part 4.

Ben 

We’re running into the book stuff now, NiNi, because we don't go back to Thailand in Part 4 in the book, all of it happens in Part 3.

Shan 

Apparently for many of the people who watched the show without having read the book, they interpreted these two versions that we saw of the Thailand trip in some wild ways. Because of the way Parts 3 and 4 are structured, we see this Thailand trip through two different lenses. We see it through this Part 3 segment that is about primarily Gyuho's relationship with Young and Young's relationship with his Kylie. We see this Thailand trip in the context of them going through a rough patch, taking this trip as a chance to reconnect with each other. We see it as part of Young's commitment to trying to make things work with Gyuho. He makes time for this trip, even though he is stressed and trying to write and lacking in funds. He makes time for this because he cares about Gyuho and he cares about their relationship. We see them go to Thailand. We see them have that reconnection that is probably really familiar for anyone who's ever been in a long-term couple and has taken a trip that's meant to be a reset. We see them be happy and content together in their time in Thailand. 

And then we see them come back and have it not fix anything. They come back and all their problems are still waiting for them and they have not addressed them adequately. That's the context of Thailand in Part 3. It was a little bit of a Hail Mary on trying to get them back on the same page and it worked to an extent, but it didn't address the underlying issues. So it didn't ultimately fix things, but it was still this really lovely memory for them as a couple, this time that they spent together in Thailand.

01:28:31 - LITBC Part 4: Habibi and the T-aras

Ben 

Now let's talk about Habibi!

Shan 

So in Part 4, we then revisit this drama, this Thailand trip through the lens of a Young who is mourning his relationship with Gyuho, who's looking back and remembering it a little bit differently, remembering different parts of it. 

Now, nothing in the two presentations of this trip in Parts 3 and 4 actually contradicts each other in terms of the sequence of events and what happened. Some of the shots contradict each other, some of the tone of the scenes feel different. And that was very intentional. There were different directors shooting these scenes in each part. There were different moods and different perspectives from Young that they were trying to get across in each sequence. It's not that, as some people apparently interpreted it, one of these trips was real and one was fake. There's not some alternate reality thing going on here. We're just seeing the same trip first through the experience of Young in the present with Gyuho as he's trying to repair their relationship, and then later in retrospect as he's thinking back and remembering it through a haze of regret and melancholy.

NiNi 

It would not have ever occurred to me that one was real and one was fake.

Shan

Bestie, same!

Ben 

I'm about to get re-triggered about The Eighth Sense all over again.

Shan 

So in Part 4, Young has achieved some measure of success in his career, but he's feeling very personally unfulfilled. He is very sad about the end of his relationship with Gyuho. He seeks solace in this weirdo that he meets, Habibi, which of course is not his real name. He's just this older guy that Young meets through an app. I really liked the drama's adaptation of this dynamic between them. I really like how deranged it feels. 

These are two men who are kinda in a super low point. They are looking to each other for distraction more than anything else. They're playing these weird power games with each other. They're fucking with each other. It's a very strange energy that has nothing to do with romance, and honestly didn't even seem like it had much to do with sex. It was really just about distracting each other. He's the only love interest, quote-unquote, that we saw in the show that didn't have a sex scene. It wasn't even clear if he and Young were having sex. 

It was a really interesting thing to pair this haunted man who is struggling in his life, with basically this mourning for Gyuho and the relationship that Young let go of. I also thought it was a really interesting choice in the drama to tell us that Gyuho is still kind of lurking in the atmosphere. He left messages to Young. He left that order at the bar where he used to work that Young always gets a drink on his tab when he comes in. Through their networks of people it became clear that Gyuho is coming back to Korea. None of that stuff is in the book. And I was very curious about the decision to include those details. I wondered if it was maybe intended to set up the possibility of a continuation of this story. I would have a lot of mixed feelings about that.

We haven't talked about the T-aras much, this group of queer men that he is friends with throughout the story. They are probably the biggest change and they really change the feeling of the entire story from the book by making all of it feel lighter, making it feel like Young always has support, that he wasn't so isolated and alone through all of these things that happened to him. In this Part 4, we actually get to learn more about one of the T-aras, Eunsoo—who has his own plot that was invented entirely for the drama—about getting engaged to his long-term boyfriend and then realizing that he didn't actually want that marriage and turning to Young for solace and for understanding as he was struggling through that. So that's what's going on in this part. It was a really interesting mix of stuff and I wasn't entirely sure how I felt about some of the changes.

NiNi 

I like the word that Shan used, deranged, because that really is how the relationship feels between Young and Habibi. 

Bringing up the T-aras, to me, the T-aras don't feel as close to Young. To me, they sort of emphasize some parts of his isolation. There's two things that really came up with the T-aras that make me feel that way about them. The first one is that Young does not tell them about Kylie and will not tell them about Kylie because of the reaction that they had to this other kid at the club who it's the rumor has HIV, how they were covering their glasses at the club and Young sees that and that he doesn't feel like he can tell them about Kylie. The thing that really got me was when he gets to the end of story and we see that Eunsoo is getting closer to Young. That also makes me feel like actually the T-aras, they're close for a certain value of close, but they aren't actually that close because now Eunsoo and Young actually are becoming close in Part 4. 

They clearly care about him, everything that happens at the end of Part 2 when he tries to end his life and they come to the hospital and they're basically fighting the nurses to be able to visit him. And after Gyuho leaves and they bang down his door to make sure that he hasn't done something again, it's clear that they have a close friendship, but it still feels at a distance for me. One of the things that really came across to me in the whole drama is that Young keeps people at a distance, even the people that he is close to or supposedly close to.

Shan 

It's so fun to talk to you about this, NiNi, because it's all relative, right? The book is so, so, so much darker than this show that to us, this show feels super light, but you aren't coming in with that book context. So you feel the dark elements of the show that felt very suppressed to us.

Ben 

The T-aras did not exist for the book readers until Part 4. And the way that they were presented in Part 4, I actually thought they were a lot younger than young.

Shan 

It was in Part 3 that we met them in the book. They're basically presented as his club friends. They are not necessarily close personal friends. They had a much bigger role in the drama. I think it was implied that they were a little bit younger, but I don't remember the exact details of that.

Ben 

What works for me about the T-aras is it feels like in some ways Sang Young Park was apologizing to his friends who read his book. [Shan and NiNi laugh] He wrote them out of the story for most of it and I'm imagining somebody called him onto the floor and they were like bitch, we broke into your house for you!

I get what you mean, NiNi. They highlight how isolated he is. But what I love about them is that this shows that despite his isolation, he was not as alone as he thought he was. There were people around him that cared about him, that stuck by him, that listened to his bullshit, that supported him, really wanted to be there. That dark moment where he hurts himself, and his friends are fighting hospital staff just so they can make eye contact with him and know that he's alive and let him know that they're there too. That had me and Twig sobbing in our DMs for two days. 

Their initial reaction to someone else who was rumored to be positive influenced Young's inability to be as open with them about that, because when you're in your early 20s you make goofy foolish mistakes like that because you're not thinking that one of yours could be sick. You hurt people and they don't trust you at that point with something really important. 

I don't know that Young ever reaches a point where he can tell them about that and that's kind of sad, but I just loved that they were also one of the throughlines of his story along with the apartment. And I love that when he leaves the apartment, he brings them with him. That felt so much better than the very difficult place the book left me. When we finished reading the book, Shan was like, “I'm feeling kind of optimistic about that.” Meanwhile, me and Bookworm were like, “No, we're not. We're going to need to sit with this for a bit.”

Shan 

I was very intrigued by NiNi's mention earlier that at the end of the show, she felt like Young was starting to come out of it. That is exactly the feeling I got at the end of the book. And the way we got there was a little different, but I felt like what I saw in Part 4 reading the novel was not a Young that was healed, but a Young that was starting to figure out how to be better, how to heal himself. And I felt hope for his future. 

Ben, on the other hand, was really caught up in the bleakness of where we left him, that we didn't get to see him get over that mountain. It felt right to me that we didn't because this is a story that is frozen in a moment in time, that was written at, like, the end of this man's 20s when he was looking back at his young life and the mistakes that he had made. He hadn't yet figured out how to get himself together. He hadn't gotten over that mountain yet. And so neither did Young in the story. It felt appropriate. 

I think that feeling of hope was present in both versions of the story. And I think it did come through stronger in the drama.

NiNi 

The thing that I was alluding to earlier is Young moving out of the apartment. That makes me feel like he's about to dig out because that apartment was such a part of him throughout the story. It became this constant in his life. And in the end, I think it was a little bit of a stone around his neck that he needed to get rid of; he needed to make a break with some aspects of the past in order to move forward. And part of that was moving out of that apartment, moving into the new place. 

The person who's there with him is Eunsoo, who he is becoming closer to because the two of them are having, I think, a different experience from the other T-aras and they are connecting over that experience. Eunsoo has been in this long, very serious relationship that was going to lead towards marriage and Young had this relationship with Gyuho that was incredibly serious and really defining and I don't feel necessarily like the other T-aras had something like that, but for the two of them it was a thing that they connected over, that they understood essentially why they left those relationships. They didn't have to explain it to each other, they were just able to be. So watching him leave the apartment, watching him get closer to Eunsoo, those two things are the things that made me feel like Young's gonna be okay, he's gonna dig his way out of this.

Ben

I'm glad that we all got there in the drama. I think that's the most important thing that he got right in this adaptation, after taking us on this long journey with Young, he doesn't give us any bullshit answers at the end of it. But at least he showed us that Young is not destined to suffer and spiral for the rest of his life. And I think that's a good place to leave someone after giving us their tumultuous twenties.

01:40:28 - Love In The Big City: Final Thoughts and Ratings

Ben

Before we get into ratings, I think we should talk about the production of this show and the distribution drama around it. First, let's talk about Nam Yoon Su. Nam Yoon Su is a phenomenal actor.

NiNi 

Amazing.

Ben 

It is very clear that a lot of very careful decisions went into his casting because he has, as of this recording, a very clean public record. Everybody loves this man. He's a favorite of a lot of people. I think it was really clever of them to cast an actor that had such a good reputation to play such a complex character.

Shan 

He has mostly played a lot of side roles in mainstream kdramas. So he's a very well-known face to kdrama viewers.

Ben 

What a beautiful face. Look at those dimples. 

Shan 

Nam Yoon Su doesn't have the visuals of a heterosexual kdrama lead, but he is perfect as Young. He has always been really captivating in every role that he's had. He's a phenomenal actor who, because of the very narrow standards of what is perceived to be the ideal masculine model for heterosexual kdramas, has not had the chance to lead a show. So I loved seeing him get that chance here and he ran with it.

Ben 

More important, I loved that he embraced this character so much. That gay little run that man executed? I will give that man every award that this silly little podcast is able to offer him.

Shan

Body language, his expressions, the inflections that he used in his voice. I've seen him in other stuff. This was all brand new.

Ben 

I really love that he and all of his co-stars were able to get to where they needed with these characters and I really love the way they clearly coordinated for their press tour for this show. Half the guys were like, I am in love with Nam Yoon Su now. They're like, don't you think that sounds kind of gay? Well, I guess that's who I am now. [NiNi and Shan laugh]

Shan 

I guess that's what it is. 

NiNi 

Who is the actor who played Gyuho?

Shan 

Gyuho's actor is Jin Ho Eun. He was so honored to be part of this project. He was so excited to play Gyuho. Seems like such a nice dude. The guy who played Youngsoo, Na Hyun Woo is his name. He gave interviews where he basically admitted to falling in love with Nam Yoon Su while filming this show and becoming a little bit obsessed with him. Relatable!

Ben 

In the interview, they're like, “Have you met any of the other actors that he worked with?” “Not yet. I don't know if I should.”

Shan

Gonna have some jealousy issues, was the implication.

NiNi 

The reason that I was asking about the actor who played Gyuho is because I did see something about how he had wanted to work with Nam Yoon Su for a really long time and when it came up the chance to work with him he accepted before he even knew what it was and when he found out what it was he was just like, “Okay yes let's do this” and he went full pussy in because he wanted to impress Nam Yoon Su. I thought that was a great story.

Shan 

Everyone in the production had nothing but wonderful things to say about Nam Yoon Su. He seems quite beloved.

Ben 

He talked about how this was one of the most difficult projects he was in, because he's present in every part. He has to work with these different directors who have different styles. He talked about, there was a little bit of a melancholy for him about how right as he was developing a rhythm with one director and their team, he would have to start that over again with another director with each part.

Shan

He basically made four different dramas inside this drama. He played Young differently in each part.

Ben 

Part of why they were able to cast Nam Yoon Su is they got two huge grants which helped make this possible. A lot of these KBLs we watch are made on really tiny budgets and a lot of heart. This is one of the few projects we get to see where a significant amount of money was brought to bear to make the drama happen. The fact that they were able to afford someone like Nam Yoon Su is telling about this.

And this led to a bunch of drama right before the series released where conservative groups were gathering to protest the drama to try and keep it from being aired. It led to the network choosing to just dump the show onto the internet instead of airing it properly. And I am frustrated because I do not think this drama was meant to be binged.

Shan 

That's the way that it got distributed, so of course that's the way that some people watched it, but it only got distributed that way because it had to, to make sure that it could all be released into the world. It was a choice that was made out of necessity and not because it was what was ideal for the story. Which is why Ben and I and some of our friends who were in the book club together intentionally paced it and only watched two episodes a week, which is how it was meant to air.

Ben 

I remember in 2016 when we watched Moonlight feeling like something has shifted in me as a viewer, and it's been so disappointing almost a decade later that it does not feel like the artistic impact that I felt in Moonlight has reached a lot of the follow-up media that I thought would speak to it. I really hope that Love in the Big City reaches a lot of people. Because this drama is special.

Shan

Sang Young Park shared that Love in the Big City is getting additional distribution after a really positive reception from the international audience. It aired on Netflix late in December, on Wave and Watcha, and it's going to be going to 15 additional Southeast Asian countries. So, despite the protest, despite the difficulty in getting funding and getting this made, it has reached an audience and that audience has returned love back to it. It has been heard and more people are gonna get to see this show.

Ben

That's beautiful news. I also heard that he may have gotten tapped for another project.

Shan 

I think that's right. Sang Young Park is continuing to get work. He's still writing books. He's going to be making other shows. I'm very excited to see what else he puts out.

Ben 

This was a really special experience. This is probably my favorite experience of the year. I really, really loved the book club experience. And I'm so glad that we were able to carry that forward into the show.

On that note, let's rate this bad boy! Tens or chops, NiN!

NiNi 

It’s a 10.

Ben 

Shan?

Shan

I gave it, in my actual rating, a 9.5, because, you know, I'm me and I had some notes, but I loved it. Loved it so much.

Ben 

Goddamn it, Shan! [laughs]

Shan 

Come on, you know me. But it’s a beautiful, beautiful drama. One of my very favorite things that I watched this year and honestly going on my list of all-time favorites.

Ben 

This gets a 10 from me because it's a show that I wish everyone would watch slowly and then talk to me about it.

Shan 

Slowly! Please do not binge it and then come talk to us. We're just gonna get mad.

Ben 

Please, at most, watch two episodes a day and give your brain a chance to absorb what you experienced?

Shan 

Somebody on Tumblr said today that they needed five to seven business days to process every section of Love in the Big City, and that is correct, that is the right way to watch it.

01:48:25 - Outro

Ben 

On that note, let's wrap up this discussion of two of our three favorite Korean projects of the year.

Shan 

While there is less Korean content overall in BL and in queer drama this year, they gave us some of the best stuff of the year.

Ben 

Thank you all for spending time with us on this. Please share with us your reactions, especially if you were in the book club. I'd love to hear how you're feeling about the show, the book, the movie after we're a couple of weeks and now maybe months removed from it.

NiNi 

That is going to wrap us up on Hallyu, our Korean Wave episode. We out. 

Say bye to the people, Shan.

Shan 

Bye people!

NiNi 

Say bye to the people, Ben.

Ben 

Peace!

[the-conversation-pod]

Lost Focus and Had a Consensual Workplace Relationship: AYAKA is in LOVE with HIROKO and At 25:00 in Akasaka

AND WE'RE BACK!

Come joins Ben, NiNi, and @ginnymoonbeam as we talk about two different takes on workplace romances, and the various challenges the settings brought to the table. It's time to discuss miscommunication and professional boundaries.

Lost Focus And Had A Consensual Workplace Relationship by @Ben and NiNi

More takes on the office romance, now with bonus miscommunication! Ben, NiNi and Ginny talk Ayaka Is In Love With Hiroko and At 25:00 In Aka

Lost Focus And Had A Consensual Workplace Relationship

Podcast Episode · The Conversation · 01/09/2025 · 1h 3m

Lost Focus And Had A Consensual Workplace Relationship - The Conversation | iHeart

<p>More takes on the office romance, now with bonus miscommunication! Ben, NiNi and Ginny talk <em>Ayaka Is In Love With Hiroko</em> and <em

Timestamps

The timestamps will now correspond with chapters on Spotify for easier navigation.

00:00:00 - Welcome 00:01:15 - Introduction 00:02:52 - Ayaka Is In Love With Hiroko 00:10:45 - Ayaka: A Split Narrative 00:17:20 - Ayaka: The Negatives 00:24:25 - Ayaka: Final Thoughts and Ratings 00:29:08 - At 25:00 in Akasaka 00:35:34 - At 25:00 in Akasaka: It's the Characters for Us 00:43:18 - At 25:00 in Akasaka: Hayama and Shirasaki 00:49:05 - At 25:00 in Akasaka: Filmmaking and Production 00:53:25 - At 25:00 in Akasaka: Final Thoughts and Ratings 00:58:45 - The State of J-BL

The Conversation Transcripts!

Thanks to the continued efforts of @lurkingshan as an editor and proofreader, we are able to bring you transcripts of the episodes.

We will endeavor to make the transcripts available when the episodes launch, and it is our goal to make them available for past episodes (Coming soon thanks to @wen-kexing-apologist). When transcripts are available, we will attach them to the episode post (like this one) and put the transcript behind a Read More cut to cut down on scrolling.

Please send our volunteers your thanks!

00:00:00 - Welcome

NiNi

Welcome to The Conversation About BL, aka The Brown Liquor Podcast.

Ben

And there it is. I’m Ben.

NiNi

I’m NiNi.

Ben

And we’re you’re drunk Caribbean uncle and auntie here sitting on the porch in the rocking chairs.

NiNi

Four times a year we pop in to talk about what’s going on in the BL world.

Ben

We shoot the shit about stories and all the drama going into them. I review from a queer media lens.

NiNi

And I review from a romance and drama lens.

Ben

So if you like cracked-out takes and really intense emotional analysis…

NiNi

If you like talking about artistry, industry, and the discourse…

Ben

And if you generally just love simping…

NiNi

There is a lot of simping on this podcast…

Ben

We are the show for you!

00:01:15 - Introduction

Ben

And we're back. This week we have brought along Ginny. Say hello again, Ginny.

Ginny

Hello.

Ben

We are discussing Japanese programming this week. We're gonna be discussing Ayaka is in Love with Hiroko, and we're also going to discuss At 25:00 in Akasaka.

NiNi

Yep, we've got one show whose title I totally understand, and one show that I am still confused by how the title relates to the show, but I incredibly enjoyed.

I feel that the common theme between these two shows was a little bit of, shall we say, misunderstanding?

Ginny

There's definitely a situation of each person having a very firm and incorrect interpretation of the other person's intentions and motives in what seems to be a very obvious romantic pursuit.

So if we're looking for a common thread, I would say that's the strongest one.

Ben

There's also the common thread of being engaged in a professional environment that discourages the immediate pursuit of a romantic relationship.

Ginny

That's true. They both have their career situations as distinct impediments in a way that not every workplace show does.

NiNi

Okay, so.

Ben

I think that's the one that works the most consistently for me because there are clear professional reasons why they shouldn't be pursuing the romance, at least at the outset.

NiNi

I like it.

00:02:52 - Ayaka Is In Love With Hiroko

NiNi

Alright, so let's start with Ayaka. Ben, what is Ayaka is in Love with Hiroko about?

Ben

Ayaka is in Love with Hiroko is an office place GL series in which a young woman named Ayaka has been nursing a crush for quite a while on her supervisor team lead who is one of the coolest girls we had in GL in the outset for a while, and who has an excellent fashion sense. 

I immediately trusted her. I would work for her. I completely understood the team's full confidence in Hiroko. She was so cool, and so steadfast, and so gregarious about it. You could see people actively, immediately relaxing once they interfaced with her. I completely understood Ayaka's crush.

Ginny

Hehehehehe.

Ben

Ayaka had originally presented at work in this very sort of stern, severe pantsuit model, and then decided to tailor her look to be more cutesy to try and attract Hiroko. And the early parts of the show are dominated by the comedy of errors of Ayaka desperately trying to convey her feelings to Hiroko, and Hiroko intentionally reading that as straight girl bait the whole time, and actively misreading all of Ayaka's desperate attempts to express her affections.

NiNi

fun at the front end. felt really. I was enjoying the comedy of watching Hiroko almost deliberately misunderstand what Ayaka was doing. It's like she couldn't even hear it. She was just like, “Nope, nope, nope, there's no way, there's no way.” I actually really responded to that because it made me think of all my lesbian friends and how they never believed that the girl who likes them actually likes them. It was very realistic to me.

Ginny

It's true. It was so deliberate because she does not trust this dynamic, because the problem with liking women as a woman is that there can be lots and lots of casual affection. Lots of, “Love you so much.” Lots of just like draping yourself all over your friend. And how are you supposed to interpret that?

Watching Hiroko wrestle with her very obvious horny responses to this and being like, “I cannot do that, I cannot go there, I cannot allow myself to believe that this might be real, because that way lies madness,” was very, very relatable.

Ben

The of it went on for about like four solid episodes of escalation that got steadily more ridiculous, but I held firm with it. I'm like, okay, I get it. Even to the point where, like, they go on a work trip and Ayaka is, like, cheering in the background when the little gay hotel manager is like, “I'm so sorry. There's been a mix -up with the rooms. We only have one room and unfortunately it's the honeymoon suite. Sorry, but you guys are gonna have to take it.” And Ayaka's like raising her hands to the skies in the background that finally the tropes are coming together for her because there's only one bed. And she had prepared for this moment by bringing, like, the cutesiest, horniest outfits she could possibly put together. And wears it coming out of the shower?

Ginny

Yup. That whole hotel sequence was so funny.

NiNi

Ayaka really doing her best.

Ben

There are a lot of great hijinks, too, out of the rest of the office. Like, she was trying to flirt with Hiroko at the office, but the rest of the crew kept accidentally interfering by doubling down on what Ayaka was doing. Especially with this moment where she was trying to give Hiroko, like, a massage because her shoulders were tensed out and the whole office gets involved.

NiNi

I think I was...you

That was such a funny moment because every time the camera panned back to the door there were more people just standing in the door like... It was so funny. I really liked the office hijinks and how the camerawork and the direction was really amping up the office hijinks. It made it super funny, super entertaining. I was really enjoying that part of it.

Ginny

Because everybody loves Hiroko.

Ben

There was also the interesting part because Hiroko was clearly gay to us and we knew that she lived a very active, if private, gay life separate from work. There was this really funny potential early on because Ayaka's sense of queerness was very personal and—I don't want to say underdeveloped—but it was extremely isolated. And Hiroko’s was not because she was like a boob monster who was famous at the local lesbian spot for showing up at the age of 18 in her school uniform, and then basically being the Brian Kinney of her local community for a while.

NiNi

You're gonna have to explain who Brian Kinney is for the babies.

Ben 

I will not. You will have to look it up. If you don't know, you better ask somebody. How am I supposed to explain a hundred episodes? You know what?

NiNi

I liked the bar. I liked the gay bar. I liked the characters of the gay bar. The one really femmy girl that Hiroko hates and who hates Hiroko right back. They say I would never date you. I hate you. They feel like exes.

Ginny

They've definitely hooked up. Definitely.

Ben

At least twice.

Ginny

The lesbian bar was probably my favorite thing about the show. I love seeing that kind of space that's so essential for real life queer community and just all these girls who know all of Hiroko's drama and history and will give her shit about it, but will also support her. 

The one thing that was unrealistic to me is they should have clocked who Ayako was way sooner. Like, no way are those girls missing that. When she shows up and they start to put the pieces together, they're putting them all together right away. But I just love the whole dynamic and that we got to see a space like that where Hiroko can be her lesbian self with a bunch of friends who love her and give her shit in equal measure.

NiNi

Is she the one who told him that he's a book

Ben

So this is actually where the first disconnect with the show I experienced was.

Ayaka and Risa have realized queerness in each other and they decide to go to a local lesbian bar together. They end up at the bar Hiroko always frequents. And...I just don't know that I really liked them just talking about Hiroko like that to these girls who were clearly referring to Hiroko as senpai and then later on telling more of Hiroko's business to these girls. That part threw me off because I don't see how her own people wouldn't be aware about how clear the line was for her at work, and would chat about her like that with her juniors.

Ginny

I think that didn't bother me because of the outrageous comedy space the show already existed in. I wasn't expecting people to behave like real people because none of them do in this show. Everything's notched up. So the fact that that situation was created made sense for me within the genre space that I felt like the show was sitting in.

Ben

I think it ended up sticking with me because after that error happens they apologize to Hiroko and then later tell Risa even more stuff. And that's the part where I was like, okay guys, come on.

Particularly because Risa was not on Hiroko's side in this at all.

NiNi

For me, it came down to like, is a community space, but how well do these people actually know and like each other? They're in this space together because they are who they are, but are they actually friends? I don't know.

I feel like the closest thing that Hiroko maybe has to a friend at the bar is Mama, and that's the one that bugged me when Mama kind of got into the business a little bit, but the other girls at the bar I could totally see them, like, talking about Hiroko's business.

00:10:45 - Ayaka: A Split Narrative

Ben

I want to go to Ginny for a little bit here you mentioned in the last response how you just sort of went with the show's absurdity. I want you to sort of talk through the way the show goes from Hiroko's straight girl reticence, to the reveals about her past relationship with her senior, and the way that affects the final arcs of the show.

Ginny

To me, it felt like a pretty coherent line. Once we saw what Hiroko's past had been, it made perfect sense to me that there's this other layer besides the straight girl danger refusal to consider. It's like, it's not true that Ayaka really loves her. And if she were to risk it and be wrong, that would be terrible. And if she were to risk it and be right, that would also be bad. Like there's no winning for her in this relationship because of her history, because she's already had this experience with her senior that kind of showed her this kind of relationship—especially in the workplace—is simply not something that she can indulge in.

I liked the show better as we got into the later half because as funny as the comedy is, it's really not my jam, the big hijinks. I was like, okay, this is a good joke, but it's the same joke. I'm not mad about it, but I'm not having as good a time. But once we got into the struggles that Hiroko is having with who she is in her career, which she's clearly very dedicated to, and who she is in her love life, which she also is very secure in. The idea of merging those and becoming a whole person, the idea of decompartmentalizing those things was unthinkable to her and very, very scary.

I liked it. It made sense to me. It worked for me as a character storyline.

NiNi

Listening to you talk about it in that vein, like, for me, it felt actually quite disjointed. The two things felt separate to me. What was going on in the front half felt different from what was going on in the back half. Even if they felt connected, they didn't feel like the same through line, and that was the part that got disjointed for me.

The straight girl thing that was happening at the beginning felt like one story. And then the stuff with, with Hiroko's former senior, and the stuff that was happening at work around Hiroko potentially coming out or not coming out. It's not that it didn't feel of a piece, but it felt like two pieces. It didn't feel like one piece to me. So when it shifted from one storyline together to me, it felt quite jarring.

The second half of things I was kind of confused. Like, what? This isn't the same story that they were telling before. It made me wonder because if this was adapted from a manga is because sometimes they tried to frankenstein two volumes of a manga together and it doesn't quite work, so i was wondering whether that was what happened here, because to me it just it really felt like two separate stories not one total story.

Ben

I struggled because the “I don't date straight girls” bit feels like a separate part of her queer history from the “my beloved senior who I cared a lot about was run out of the company because of rumors about us” don't feel inherently connected to each other.

I can maybe see the way the first is being used as a shield to obfuscate the second, but I don't think the show really handed a baton between one to the other really well. I was also just really put off by the constant outing of Hiroko in the backend by people who I thought should have known better. I didn't like the Bettys at the bar outing her twice. And I really didn't like... Risa revealing even more of Hiroko's business to Ayaka. That felt like a real lack of queer solidarity, which really rubbed me the wrong way. 

On top of that, there was weirdness with the way Hiroko shifted towards the end. I thought that weird breakup kiss she did with Ayaka felt really mean, and I was completely baffled by the “I'm gonna cherish her so I won't have sex with her for over a year” thing at the end. I'm like, they literally called her a boob monster. What is going on?

Ginny

That is my one beef with the show. That bit made me so mad and knocked it down a good half point in my rating. First of all, I don't believe it. You have not been together for a year and not had sex. And if you're going to bring that in, you've got to resolve it. But no, okay, rude.

NiNi

I have to concur that if you're gonna bring that in, you have to resolve it. What it felt like to me was the beginning of a third story because like I was saying, all these stories felt connected. They feel like they come from something like the same place inside of Hiroko and that feels like a place of, like, guilt almost. 

There's these three manifestations of that. But the first one to me felt the most true. The second one didn't feel connected to the first one. And then this third one feels like it barely got started as a story before the story was over. That really irked me because your girlfriend is here literally putting on all the hot outfits, begging you, and you're not going to do anything about it. Something's not adding up here. What's going on? You're a legendary boob monster, according to the girl at the bar and you haven't touched her. What's happening here? And then the show ends. I wanted to see that play out. To me it feels even like the first and third stories were better connected than the second story in the middle the stuff that was happening at work probably felt the most jarring to me out of the three elements of the story that they tried to handle.

If they had moved from the part where Hiroko walks into the bar and sees Ayaka and Risa there to the part where Ayaka is now openly pursuing Hiroko at work now that she knows that Hiroko is into women and is potentially into her putting extra effort into it…there's just a bit in the middle that for me just doesn't connect to those two things and then the end feels abruptly cut off. I want to see more of what happens there. Why is the switchies doing? How is Ayaka gonna deal with that? How are they gonna deal with that together? I really wanted to know and then it just stops.

00:17:20 - Ayaka: The Negatives

Ben

All the outing shit I think was used because I think it fits like the classic sort of meddling hijinks stuff that other romantic comedies like to use. I don't think it works well here because it involves outing someone. And I don't like that being treated as like a “this needs to happen so we can move this relationship forward” sort of thing. I was really bothered by the implicit idea from the story at the end that Hiroko needs to get over her closet issues because the world has changed. I don't know that I liked the execution of that. I don't know that the show felt like it was respecting Hiroko a lot in the back third. It felt kind of cruel to me.

Ginny

They did play that one a little fast and loose. I could see what I felt like they were trying to say. The message of “the world has changed, you can be out” is one that I like to see. And I like the generation gap of even though they're only a few years apart in age, how much things have changed from Hiroko's formative workplace years to Ayaka's. I enjoy seeing that, but I agree that it was not handled gracefully and kindly. And it kind of felt like Hiroko was being.

Ben

It felt like she was being picked on for the entire half of the show.

Ginny

Yes. Yeah.

NiNi

It brought me to mind a little bit of She Makes My Heart Flutter, that generational divide between the aunt and the niece about how public to make the bar. But also like one of the things that they did in that whole arc that I sort of showed me where they were trying to go with this but not succeeding was Hiroko and Yuya being in the meeting with the senior, and the senior being sort of like, “it's so great that the kids feel like comfortable to be out.” And then he sort of treats Ayaka's hitting on Hiroko as a phase. Treats the whole idea of women loving women as some kind of a phase that these little girls have to go through. That's the one part of the arc where I thought I could see clearly what it is that they were going for in trying to sort of be like, well, no, Hiroko is actually right because as much as they're saying the world has changed and she's still dealing with this kind of attitude. I see what they were going for with it, and they put some of the elements in there to make it clear what they were going for, but inevitably it got muddled by some of the romance arc things, particularly...the storyline with Risa and Risa's jealousy more muddled than it needed to be.

Ben

According to manga readers, they removed the arc where Risa and Ayaka earnestly attempt to date for a while and realize that it doesn't work.

Ginny

They didn't have room to do that, but I like that as a storyline.

Ben 

Fuck, that art just sent me. You're too odd! I lost it!

NiNi 

The way that you just said, You were like...

Ben 

She said, Ginny said, now hold up. I'm sorry! You can continue!

Ginny 

Can I watch that show? No, one of the other things that I really liked about the show was their complicatedly emotional never-were-dating breakup scene. That was very, very lesbian space. Like, yeah. Just everybody deep in their feels. They love each other so much.

Ben

I did feel very lesbian.

Ginny 

It's so tangled up, but they're certainly not going to separate from each other in any way. That is not what our people do.

NiNi 

No, never, never ever separate from each other.

Ben

I think something I would have liked to see them do—they dropped this entertainment article in the back end of Hiroko's senior doing well at some other opportunity now—I think what I would have really liked is for her to have a call with her and check in and free her from that last look she had of her senior. I would have really liked to see, like, a phone call or a mini reunion between them that would have allowed Hiroko to put that down so that she could advance forward. I kind of wish that Hiroko had had a growth on her own about the specific angst that was holding her back that she could have let that go. 

Also, a specific resolution about standing up to guys like the ignorant senior who she was about to replace in that position. I just don't feel like her character got that in the back half of the show, which felt especially mean because she's basically just getting beat up and let down by all of her people because she just won't be with Ayaka. But I feel like the show did a good job establishing why she didn't want to be with Ayaka for her own professional and personal safety and for Ayaka's personal and professional safety. And I don't know that Hiroko got resolution on how to manage her own fears and insecurities about real problems that befall queer professionals in the back half.

NiNi 

I don't feel like Hirako got much resolution about anything and that was the thing that made me sad about the show. I actually would have liked it to continue. As much as it felt like it was messy, it felt like it had some of the right ideas and I really did enjoy watching it happen but it feels like a lot of the decisions that Hirako made were responding to outside stimuli and not really internalizing what's happening, how she's feeling, what she wants to do. A lot of it felt like it was responding to all this other stuff that was going on and things that her coworkers were saying to her and all of that. 

I think I could have used more episodes of this show. I know Ben is over in the corner like shh, no new friends. But I think that this show could have stood to be longer. It feels like some of these ideas got cut off a little bit.

Ben 

I think there are definitely two more episodes in there. There's an episode of Ayaka and Risa trying to date, and there's an episode of them trying to be girlfriends of Hiroko and Ayaka.

NiNi (29:15)

I would have paid money. I would have paid money to see both of those. The other thing, I would take like a three episode spin-off of Hiroko’s old senpai. 

Ben 

My god. We saw Hiroko for the first time and I was like, wow, she's so hot. And then we saw her senior and I was like, wow, I get it! I just instinctively will just fall in line behind any lesbian who wears an oversized suit that well, she clearly is in charge. I will do whatever she needs me to do.

NiNi 

It was that, was the hair, it was the nails, it was everything. It was such a clear type. I was just like, I know you miss, I know you so well.

Ginny

It was very good.

00:24:25 - Ayaka: Final Thoughts and Ratings

Ben 

Speaking of the coworkers, there was a lot of fun in them. Honda Kyoya was in this show and he was clearly having a blast just hanging out on this set. They did not ask much of him and he was clearly enjoying it.

Ginny 

Yeah!

NiNi 

His reaction shots are fantastic.

Ginny 

He just got to be the chillest, best little ally buddy. It was wonderful. I was so happy to see him.

Ben 

Honda's character Yuya walking in on Ayaka instigating a Hiroko kabedon was so fucking funny. He stumbles around the corner. He goes, kabedon! And then he gives them an awkward thumbs up.

NiNi 

It was amazing. He just gave us exactly the little sprinkle of spice that we needed on top of this story. All his reaction shots are hilarious. Some of the great work that I expect from Japanese background acting.

Ben 

I love the other senior who's about in the same class as Yuya, who was playing her little dating games all the time, accidentally giving Ayaka advice. She was also great. I had a lot of fun with her. And then you had the boy who as soon as Ayaka announced publicly her desire to be with Hiroko was like, what? A rival? No, I'm going to win.

NiNi 

I like them. Aww. I love when men get weirdly competitive with lesbians. It's like, aww, sweetie. This is not gonna go the way that you think it will.

It was an entertaining show, it was a fun show, I enjoyed quite a bit of it. I think it got messy, I think it got muddled, but I don't think it is a bad show at all. There were parts that I was like, grumpy face, but I liked the show quite a bit.

Ginny 

I liked it a lot. I'm now sorting my list to see if it's my highest rated GL so far, would be a little bit... well, besides She Loves to Cook and She Loves to Eat, which speaks more to the quality of the other GLs we've gotten this year, but I did quite enjoy it.

NiNi 

Whew.

Ben 

I was gonna say, I'm really glad She Loves to Cook and She Loves to Eat came out this year, so I don't feel like I'm just being mean to Japanese GL.

NiNi 

Gosh, we're gonna have to talk about, like, the state of GL in the Year In Review, because my god.

Ben

It's in such a weird state, we got a decent amount of it, but it's all been fucking weird this year.

Ginny 

I'm just hanging on to the belief that this is early growth and we're gonna eventually get something good.

Ben 

Alright, so let's rate this bad boy—or bad girl, I guess.

NiNi 

And this is the thing though, we've gotten good stuff.

Ben 

NiNi, rating?

NiNi 

I give it an 8. I think it was a good show. It's got some flaws to it, but I quite enjoyed it. I like Japanese comedies. I think that they can be quite funny, especially when they have the amped up sort of energy to them. I liked a whole lot about Ayaka and Hiroko, the characters, and the way that they interacted. When Ayaka is really pursuing Hirako, very much enjoyed that.

Ben 

Ginny, rating?

Ginny 

I gave it an 8.5. Pretty much everything NiNi said, I really enjoyed it. The genre isn't my favorite, but I thought it was really well executed. Both the lead actresses were great, no complaints about them. I was taking everything in the spirit of this is a high hijinks sitcom, so a lot of the things that might have bothered me in a more serious tone didn't.

Ben 

Unfortunately, I was not in a forgiving mood about these things. And my serious gripes with all of the outing and the mishandling of Hiroko are why I'm giving this show a 4.

NiNi 

4? Ben, come on.

Ben 

I was super put off by it. The really solid execution around all of it feels kind of insidious for me.

NiNi (35:18)

Hmm. Math. How does it work?

Ben 

It's like 6.8 so we can give it a 7.

NiNi 

I feel like I want to bump that up to at least a 7.5.

Ben 

Nope.

NiNi 

7 range.

Ben 

I really had a lot of fun with aspects of the show, but I will not just hand wave the outing of the Hiroko character constantly by people who should have been protective of her. And I really did not like the way she treated Ayaka in the back half at all. And the whole like, I'm going to cherish you by not having sex with you thing is the kind of weird purity stuff I really don't like. And so, no. No, that's a 4.

NiNi (36:22)

We're gonna end up at a 7 from The Conversation, but it is a split score.

00:29:08 - At 25:00 in Akasaka

NiNi

On to the next show, 25 Ji Akasaka de. I actually got that pronounced relatively correctly I think. At 25:00 in Akasaka. 

Ben, what is At 25:00 in Akasaka about?

Ben 

About how it's totally fine for them to do... I Became the Main Role of a BL Drama twice in one year.

25 Ji is about an aspiring actor who gets his first big break to star in a BL across from a rising star actor and model who was part of his film club when he was still in college. And about the complexities that come out of them working together because secretly his co-star has been nursing a huge crush on him for years and our protagonist is not that perceptive of it. We deal with the complexities of Shirasaki, our protagonist, trying to understand the interiority of his character and dealing with the difficult separation of his own feelings from his character's feelings, complicated by his co-star not being transparent about his own feelings while they were working on said project together. And also the complications from their co-stars, I guess.

NiNi 

I fucking love this show. I loved it with my whole heart. I'm gonna do the thing that—Ben can laugh at me. I loved it unreservedly. I love the characters of Shirasaki and Hayama. I really enjoyed the way that the show was constructed, how we get those misunderstandings at the beginning between Shirasaki and Hayama, and then we get a moment where it all gets explained through a flashback, which, my favourite use of a flashback. 

I love that the Japanese managed to pull off this people starring in a BL falling in love in real life thing twice in one year, once in drama and once in comedy. I really had such a great time with this show and I have been wanting to talk about it for months and delve into the juiciness of it.

Ben 

Ginny, any initial reactions about how you felt about the show?

Ginny 

They made this show for me. They heard all my prayers and read all my group chat messages and delivered the actors falling in love while playing lovers story that I have been dreaming of and wanting for so long. What I love about this premise and what they delivered so well is the complicated interplay between the way art lets you express and release your emotions and the way doing that confuses you about what's really your emotions. They hit so many beautiful notes in that scale.

Ben (

I also really liked this show. I like when a character is holding back for valid reasons, but then it goes on too long. That's a really fun space for me in romantic dramas. I think the Hayama character was really enjoyable to watch for this. I also really like when in some of the reactions, the audience isn't certain about the motives of the person who's holding back. And you have to read into their behaviors to determine whether or not they're moving from a space of kindness or greed, maybe. I really enjoyed believing in Hayama the whole time and being rewarded for that. I also really enjoyed that Hayama had to face the consequences of his own actions, the break that occurs between them is well earned from Hayama not being forthright with Shirasaki, who he admires for being such a forthright person. I thought that that landed really well.

Like Ginny, I really like when the show navigates the complicated space that actors have to deal with when they're working in things like this. I'm gonna jump a little bit ahead. There's the filming of the bed scene that they have to do for the show, that they're filming within the show. And I really liked the show being clear about how unsexy a lot of that is because you are having to repeat motions from multiple angles for the sake of getting the correct shots and there's like 30 people around you. It is not a romantic intimate space at all because you're doing work. It's awkward. And I'm really glad that the show captured that specifically, but then also played with it by doing a very stylish zoom in to put us in the perspective of the viewer who's watching this to further confuse us as the audience who has to do the mental work of separating the two. It was a really cool reminder in the middle of a show that then later delivers its own sex scene, which was funny.

NiNi 

There's just so many moments in this show that blew my mind all the way from the beginning to the end. The moment, I believe, the end of the first episode where Hayama walks into the bar and he sees Shirasaki there basically about to make a terrible mistake. He has walked into this gay bar and he's like, I'm just gonna pick up any dude in here. And he's just like, well, let it be me. From that moment on, I was hooked. I was obsessed. It was everything to me. 

Because you're right, that idea of Shirasaki being an unreliable narrator because the way that he's reading Hayama is not necessarily what Hayama is trying to do, but you as the audience member in that moment also can't read Hayama. You don't know what Hayama is trying to do in that moment. You have a sense because of the genre you're in that maybe he's actually interested in him but you don't know for sure. He could be toying with him, could be playing with him, there's all these different things that it could be. But the moment has such amazing tension in it and you want to see what happens next. Straight up, from that moment on I was hooked.

00:35:34 - At 25:00 in Akasaka: It's the Characters for Us

Ben 

So Ginny mentioned that this was a premise that she's been hoping for for a long time. I want you to go through both of the leads and talk about what you enjoyed so much about them separately and together as a pair. Because you've been anticipating this show for a long time.

Ginny 

Both of them are people who struggle to connect with their own emotions. Shirasaki is very blunt and direct and forthright in ways that I think I saw even more clearly on rewatch after seeing him through Hayama's eyes because I think Shirasaki doesn't realize how blunt he is and how that comes across to people. And the narrative through his perspective almost shows that. But then you rewatch it knowing what other people say about him and you're like, damn, he really is. And he says he's never been in love. He doesn't really know what that's like. There's this incredible sequence where he's trying to get into the character confessing his love for the first time where he really has to process it. He doesn't struggle to connect with his own emotions, but he feels, I think, emotionally out of tune with what's considered normal for a lot of people, things like being in love. He just feels a little bit out of step, and uncomfortably so, but it takes him a while to find his way to, this is what liking someone, what loving someone feels like.

Hayama is very much out of touch with his emotions and you find out exactly why when we get to his flashback finally. He's suppressed so many things and he's controlled himself in so many ways and it's acting that really lets him express himself. The scene where they're just like, you're a pretty face, come be on camera. And then what his character has to do is yell in this scene that they've just kind of slotted this this guy in because he's pretty. My heart clutched because I relate to Hayama. I struggle to express emotions strongly. When I took an acting class, I challenged myself on purpose, giving myself a scene where I had to yell because I knew that was going to be very difficult for me. So that moment for Hayama, was like, my God, is he gonna be able to do it? Is it gonna be liberating for him? Is he gonna finally be able to express anger that he's held in his heart for years and just never been able to say? And that is what happened. And I was so happy. 

You really see both of them love acting. The craft and art of acting is so important to them both, emotionally as well as in their career. And that being a strong bond between them once they get over the misunderstandings it creates.

NiNi 

I like how they come at it from different sides as well. For Hayama, acting is not about putting something on, it's about taking layers off. It's about getting naked and being revelatory. Like he can only really be himself when he's pretending to be somebody else. Whereas for Shirasaki, it's more about putting on that persona, trying to get inside the mind of somebody else and then wearing that character. I really liked that juxtaposition for them.

Ben 

I thought it was really interesting that the very first sequence of the show is Shirasaki working in his food service job and being asked by a more shy coworker to tell a rude customer who screwed up his own drink to fuck off and that he wasn't getting a new drink. Because that told us everything we needed to about that character right away with his annoyance at people asking him to be confrontational with other people.

Ginny 

You see how it frustrates him in that context and then the fact that he's able to be confrontational and no one else is kind of developing into the heart of the romantic conflict is just a really beautiful touch.

Ben 

You've watched it twice, Ginny. Do you remember when they had to film that confession scene and Shirasaki was really struggling and they had to come back the next day to film it and so Hayama went to see him that night. Was that episode 3 or was that episode 4?

Ginny 

Yes, I think it was 3. It was definitely 3 or 4, yeah.

Ben 

I really loved that episode so much. Even if Hayama isn't going to say how much he cares about Shirasaki and how important Shirasaki has become to him, I love that his way of helping Shirasaki and also managing his own crush was to just go take care of Shirasaki for an evening, make him feel like somebody gave a shit about him, to give him something to pull on for use in the character. Niihara does such a great job playing an actor who's struggling figuring that out with his time with Hayama, and then finally landing on that feeling in the end. That was such an excellent end to an episode. It's rare that I get to be like super fucking amped about the end of an episode. And I love that that happened early because it then gave us this interesting space to work with with what does he do now that he's realized that he's not just finding the feeling in the character for the other character. He's finding the feeling in himself for his co-star, who he thinks is just doing a solid by him.

Ginny 

That final sequence and the way he tears up when he's saying it was, it was so good.

NiNi 

I like how that episode then goes on to connect to the flashback episode when you finally really get to see Hayama from Shirasaki's point of view but also get to understand Shirasaki a little better by having that interaction with them back in college, I think that he has never thought of the way that he thinks of Hayama as romantic until those moments in episode 3 when he really starts thinking about it. He had this intense connection to him in back in college, it didn't exactly go both ways, it was more that he was so intently focused on him and he felt very strongly that he was this talent and that he needed to be a person who was on screen acting because he did it so well. But he didn't make that connection from that to the romantic feelings that he was feeling even when Hayama comes back into his life, but the two things now when he realizes now what he's feeling for Hayama is romantic and it starts connecting back to all that stuff that happened in college it really resonates it for me as a full circle moment for them and I really like how the show structured that.

Ginny 

There's this amazing callback that I again didn't notice until rewatch. The first time you see Hayama's face, he's doing this model shoot. He's posing, he's looking good, he's handed a bottle of water, everything's great. And then you see Shirasaki waiting to cross the street and looking at a billboard of the result of that shoot. Some girls by him are saying, look at him, look at how beautiful he is. And Shirasaki gets pissed. He's mad because this guy is a wonderful actor. And he feels that strongly. And he wants him to be recognized for that. But he is doing this, I'm just a beautiful face thing, because that's where the industry has put him. And then when we get into Hayama's point of view, we see that shoot again and it's very clear at that point that Hayama feels the same way, that he has let go of something to be here and to do this glamour modeling thing. It's just, it's so tight and so resonant in all the images and moments that it repeats.

00:43:18 - At 25:00 in Akasaka: Hayama and Shirasaki

Ben 

Ginny, I want you to walk us through the goodbye sex that Shirasaki thinks he's having to his leaving and then Hayama coming after him.

Ginny 

So they've wrapped on the show. They had an incident in the previous episode before filming their sex scene where Shirasaki came onto Hayama and they made out a little bit and then Hayama was like, no, I can't do this. And they left. So Shirasaki is still locked firmly into this, “you like someone else,” which he has very good reason to believe. He knows Hayama likes someone and he thinks that it can't possibly be him because it's been going on for so long. So they're saying goodbye and Hayama keeps kind of extending invitations for him to stay but not really being explicit that he wants Shirasaki to stay. And Shirasaki is about to leave when finally Hayama stops him. First he pulls him into a hug and Shirasaki slowly accepts the embrace and accepts that okay, Hayama wants some kind of connection with him here so they go upstairs and they have sex and Shirasaki says, “I love you.”

Hayama does not say it back in that moment. I think in Hayama's mind, his feelings are so clear and so strong that he doesn't need to say them and he doesn't know how to say them. So he accepts it very warmly and they keep having sex and they cuddle and it's beautiful. And then the next morning, Shirasaki leaves because he's still so locked into what he believes is happening, which is that Hayama is hung up on someone else and for whatever reason he wants to have this connection with Shirasaki, but it can't mean anything significant. And he decides he can't do casual, he can't do a one-time thing, he can't sit with that. So he leaves. Thank goodness Hayama runs after him and they clear it up in a great little scene.

NiNi 

I appreciate that this happens after the show is over and they're not co-workers anymore because one of the things I think that Hayama is holding on to and the reason that he doesn't say what he needs to say to Shirazaki right until the very end is that he doesn't know how Shirasaki feels about him, and you don't want to be that guy who has the weird crush on your coworker and makes everybody uncomfortable. I feel like that was part of what was happening. So while yes, in some ways it's sort of this traditional Japanese misunderstanding or Japanese silence that I struggle with in taking a Japanese drama, it didn't bother me here because for me it made sense that these two were not talking to each other about their feelings. It made complete sense to me why Hayama wouldn't say anything and why, because Hayama wasn't saying anything, why Shirasaki would keep all these things to himself as well. 

It's also not a traditional workplace. A set is a weird place. Your emotions have to get involved when you're acting in some ways and you have to be able to regulate yourself. And so there's also that issue of them both wanting to be professionals about this. I really enjoyed how the show let that play out and how it got messy because of that, but they were only able to resolve it after the show was over and that stuff isn't hanging over their heads anymore.

Ginny 

Yeah, it's really, so much more than being coworkers because you're in this, their emotions have to be engaged with each other. They have to have these really intimate and vulnerable performances with each other and acting is such an intense space. It could be disastrous for either of them to confess while they're filming and to have that suddenly throw off the whole balance and the dynamic and the chemistry of this show that they both really want to succeed. So yeah, it's one of the few misunderstandings of this type that is fully justified by the circumstances for me.

Ben 

I think one of my favorite things about Hayama was how he genuinely wanted to get to know Shirasaki more. I really liked the way he instigated the let's fake date so you can get some experience thing to let Shirasaki draw up a list of dates he wanted to go on. I liked that he was gently asking how do you want someone to treat you?

Ginny 

It was so sweet. As obscure as Hayama is as a character until we get his flashback, we do get bits. Like when they had that scene after the first meeting and table read, it's very clear that Hayama retains an impression of Shirasaki much more strongly than Shirasaki thinks he would. And he's kind to him. There's this interaction with their other coworker where Hayama can tell immediately that Shirasaki has taken some light teasing in a bad way. And he immediately works to reach out and soothe him and say, I think that was his way of being friendly or trying to tease. And then at the end of their first date, I think it's their first date, when Shirasaki finally calls him Asami-san, his face, Hayama's face, is so subtly illuminated with joy at that. It gave me chills to watch. It's so beautiful. So you can see what he feels even though he's delivering everything in this incredibly held back way. It's so good!

00:49:05 - At 25:00 in Akasaka: Filmmaking and Production

Ben 

Since Ginny is here, let's talk about What Did You Eat Yesterday? and how Hayama lives in Kohinata's apartment.

NiNi 

You! My god! That is a great segue into, you know I always enjoy talking about Japanese set design and set dressing and everything. I want to talk about their two apartments. Well, Hayama's house and Shirasaki's apartment. Because to me they're just so them. Hayama lives in this big, very modern, very stylish house that's so empty. It doesn't have a lot of stuff in it. There's all this negative space in his house and all these dark corners.

Shirasaki's place is much smaller and more compact, but it doesn't feel very homey either. It feels kind of like a place that he's putting his body in, but not somewhere that really feels like a home. And whenever they're in each other's spaces, they instantly feel more homey. Shirasaki is there and Hayama's place, the lights get brighter and warmer and he's taking up space in a place where there's all this negative space. When Hayama comes over to Shirasaki's house again the place feels warm and it starts to feel more likely of somebody living there and not just somebody staying there. It's something that they've done with the lighting that really resonated to me. 

One of the first things that I mentioned when I started talking about the show with you guys was how much I enjoyed the camera work. All this is all of a part of it.

Ben 

I also loved that once again we got a Japanese apartment where someone had a big TV and it got used. Huge win.

NiNi 

Ben is devoted to the big TV life, okay? He is a film critic. He needs to see things on the big screen.

Ben

Another huge W from me. Not only did they finally use that big ass TV that I've seen across What Did You Eat Yesterday? for two seasons, but we also got to see them enjoy it. I was so happy about this. You have no idea. It was interesting too, because whenever we see that apartment in What Did You Eat Yesterday?, we basically only see the kitchen and dining area and a shot of Wataru on the couch while Kohinata is cleaning up in the background. It was cool seeing that apartment from different angles. It was cool seeing people cooking together actively in that particular apartment. And we got to go upstairs. I've been wondering what the upstairs of that apartment looked like.

NiNi 

It is interesting to see how locations get used differently. While we're talking about going upstairs in the house and seeing the bedroom and that area of the house, let's talk about the camera movements that took us there. One of the things—I think Ben, you and I talked about this a little bit when we talked about Tokyo in April Is…—one of the things that sometimes puts me at a little bit of a remove from the Japanese dramas is static camera. Sometimes it works really well for what the show is. And sometimes I am just antsy to watch the camera move. 

In this show the camera moves, it sweeps, it takes you on a journey with the characters. So going upstairs into the bedroom in Hayama's place, that's a journey that the camera takes you on in a way that I have not seen in a lot of Japanese dramas. Personally, that is a style that I really enjoy, the sweep of the camera, the use of the space, the use of light, the use of sound and music, the use of all the locations. When they actually go on location to shoot the show. they've got these locations like this little cafe and this outdoor garden space. And the way that they film them really worked. They get you inside the characters emotions, get you inside the characters heads when they're in these spaces.

Ben 

This was a really satisfying show. I think it was one of the most satisfying viewing experiences we got to have this year. I thought it was really cool seeing a show that people were initially worried about because it felt like it had the same sort of premise as I Became the Main Role of a BL Drama where you've got a struggling actor and a rising idol paired together in a BL and likely has more feelings for the other actor than the other actor notices right away. I was worried at first that it would feel trite, but I really liked that those shows feel very distinct from each other. They do not feel like the same thing happening.

Ginny 

They're very much each their own thing and each wonderful. But yeah, telling completely different stories, even though if you summarize in three sentences, they sound identical.

00:53:25 - At 25:00 in Akasaka: Final Thoughts and Ratings

NiNi 

I want to talk a little bit about Yamase because we haven't talked about Yamase at all.

Ginny 

Can we talk about how Yamase was auditioning for the role of Japanese Payu?I rewatched it after that announcement and I was like, it all makes sense now.

Ben 

Ha ha ha ha!

NiNi 

The character of Yamase, I really appreciated his role in the story and how he was really like gung-ho. He's like, look, I got bills to pay, I got things to do, I'm going to do my best with this role. They want me to be the one who comes in here and really puts a wrench in the thing between the two characters. I'm gonna do that on and off set.

Ben 

I think his character worked really well because the show wanted to reiterate kind of the same thing that happened in BL Drama Main where Ayanagi Hajime is talking to the female co-star who's playing the big sis role. He's speaking about this hypothetical situation where he and his co-star are making out with each other and she's like, “That's wrong. You shouldn't do that. Is someone doing this to you right now?”

Like he was another reminder of that, of this is fiction and we're having fun, but on the real, this is what it looks like when a co-star is being really aggressive about this sort of stuff, where he was forcing closeness with Shirasaki the whole time by using his given name, even though he was saying don't do that. And then trying to mack on him outside of filming. It was supposed to read as aggressive and unwanted and uncomfortable. And I really liked the show letting the audience consider that. Like, yeah, we're going to be having a great time with these two guys. But also, this is what it possibly looks like outside of this to the people who have to work with them and take care of them.

Ginny 

It shows you again, like, this is what neither of them want to be. This is part of why they're both being so careful not to reveal their actual feelings.

NiNi 

Ben talked earlier about how the sex scene of the characters inside the BL drama that is being filmed inside the BL drama, how that sex scene was filmed where they did the push in to put you inside the moment and then they pull back out to show you all the stuff that was going on on set while this is happening. They did a couple moments like that in the show that I found really effective. And one of those moments is Yamase being really really aggressive with Shirasaki where he's sort of looming over him and he pushes him up against the wall and he makes out with him. At first instance you aren't quite sure whether that's a moment in the BL drama they're filming or a moment in the show and then it pulls out and you see that that's a take of a scene that they were doing. But the camera deliberately wants to confuse you occasionally to make you think, “this is okay in fiction, but why would we think this would be okay in real life? Or why would we think this would not be okay in real life?” It's about making the audience really stop and think about their own immersion in these stories, and about what it must be like for the actors.

Ginny (

They played a lot with the ambiguity of the camera in that particular episode with both the kiss scenes with Hayama and Yamase where you see in one case a mutually agreed on practice kiss and in one case one that Yamase  is really trying to push for and you get a few back and forths of reality. Which does everything that you said, Nini and also I think really underlines the emotional complexity, when it's Hayama and Shirasaki's kiss, of their having this experience together and neither of them is fully clear on what feelings are real and what feelings are acting. It's muddled up together in a way that feels very true to where the characters are both at emotionally at that point.

NiNi 

I love Actors on Actors. It's one of my favourite genres of drama, film, whatever it is. And this is an incredible execution of Actors on Actors.

Ben 

Genuinely, think Niihara who plays Shirasaki gives a really, really excellent performance. I think he had a really difficult task with this character and I thought he did a really good job. No shade of any sort to the work of Komagine Kiita who played Hayama. He does a great job too and they work really together well together as a team. But I was really impressed with Niihara. Really standout performance this year for me.

NiNi 

Yeah, I give it to Niihara. Like you said, no shade. I have to equally give it to Komagine Kiita because Hayama is a difficult character. He's so internal. It is such a hard thing to get his interiority across in a way where he maintains that mystery and reserve, but you can also feel something else underneath the surface. I thought it was an excellent performance.

Ben 

We could probably keep gushing about this production, but let's rate this sucker. NiNi!

NiNi 

Come on bestie, you know it's a 10.

Ben 

Ginny.

Ginny

It's a 10.

Ben 

I genuinely don't know what happened. Like I have it as a 9.5 on my MDL, but I wrote a 10 in my initial notes. I don't remember what I was angsting over afterwards.

Ginny 

It's funny, because I had it as a 9.5, and then when I went back to rewatch it, I was like, why? It's a 10.

Ben 

I'll stick with my second rating of 9.5, but we'll give it a 10 from The Conversation because we loved it so much. Good job to 25 Ji Akasaka.

NiNi 

Great show, phenomenally done.

00:58:45 - The State of J-BL

NiNi

Going back through two of these now, what can we say about them and the theme of the show, which is misunderstandings? Or what or any other theme that we think that these two share?

Ben 

I think it's notable in our reflections on both shows that we have a really strong read on what's going on between Hayama and Shirasaki the whole time that we did not express while we were watching Ayaka.

NiNi

I'm, like, contemplating.

Ben

I'd say like if we're gonna handle these are two shows where for various reasons, the couple was facing professional barriers that kept them from each other. It's interesting for me that both shows force us to think about the actual presence of queer people in the world by making sure that we spend time in queer spaces, in bars in particular, and considering the kinds of people who go there and what this means to be in those spaces. Ayaka was kind of silly about it and didn't seem to really know what to do with that. I don't know that 25 Ji wanted to do too much with that other than being clear that BL doesn't exist in a nebulous vacuum world. I'm not certain I have a really strong linking observation beyond that

NiNi

I did like that in, I felt like I knew who all these characters were instantly. I understood them. Even when their stories or their backstories in the case of Haroko didn't quite line up for me. I felt like I understood who she was. I felt like I understood in some ways where she was coming from. All the characters just felt really clear, excellently performed.

Ben 

Here's a real question for Ginny. You mentioned when we were coming into the end of last year how you were starting to gain an appreciation for some of the Japanese shows. Where are you sitting with your feelings about Japanese shows, reflecting on these two in particular?

Ginny 

I still think when the Japanese shows do well, they do better than almost anyone else. Stellar across the line, top notch work. One of the reasons I remember being so wowed by Japanese BL at the end of last year is that every one of them had been good. And there've been a lot more mediocre or bad Japanese GL and BL shows that I've watched this year. So I'm less feeling like, well, if I show up to one, I know it's going to be solid. One thing I've learned is that I need to binge them. Watching week to week is a much more frustrating experience, partly because of the episode length. Just 20 minutes once a week is not enough story. I'm always wanting more and frustrated.

25 Ji, I think I did watch in real time because it's so dense and every episode is so packed with material that it really was satisfying week to week. But that's the exception instead of the rule for me.

NiNi 

I have to concur with you on the bingeing. When it comes to the shorter shows, Japanese shows, Korean shows especially, I find it easier to binge because of the length but also because those stories are written in such a way that the week between feels incredibly long but also almost unnecessary. I don't find myself most of the time needing to sit in a Japanese episode or a Korean episode the way that I found myself needing to sit in some other shows. And like you, I found 25 Ji to be an exception to that. At the end of an episode of 25 Ji, I needed to take a breath and really unpack a little bit what I had taken in, found it lingering with me over the course of the week.

Ben 

I will continue to be watching them as they release. That's what I do baby! I've been watching this stuff this way for so long, I just can't do it any other way. That is a feature, not a bug for me. I am really glad at this point that we are no longer struggling constantly with trying to access every Japanese show that we want to watch, though it is still a phenomenon we have to deal with. I am very glad that the state of the genre calls for multiple Japanese entertainment outlets to be engaged in making a lot of stuff.

Whether I like or don't like a Japanese show, I never have nebulous feelings about it. I'm never searching for what really worked or didn't work. It's always a very clear choice that the show made that either worked for me or really did not. And I like that I can always be really, I can always hone in on exactly what I want to say about these shows and I can point to the specific moments where the breakdown or uplift occurred. That continues to be, I think, my favorite aspect of watching the Japanese shows.

I'm glad we talked about these two, even if I was really frustrated with one. Thank you for joining us, Ginny.

Ginny 

Thank you for having me.

NiNi 

That is gonna wrap us up on, what are we calling this episode? I have a placeholder name as usual. The placeholder name is Japanese Telephone. 

Ben 

We are absolutely not calling it that.

NiNi

We're not calling it that. So that is going to wrap us up on this episode, which Ben will give a much better name when we actually post it.

So with that, we out. Say bye to the people, Ginny.

Ginny

Bye!

NiNi

Say bye to the people, Ben.

Ben 

Peace!

[the-conversation-pod]

Pulpmania: We Are and Knock Knock, Boys!

AND WE'RE BACK!

Join us this week as we discuss the nature and definition of a BL pulp, their role in the industry, and a comparison between two recent projects. We're joined by long-time fandom watcher @twig-tea to discuss We Are and Knock Knock, Boys!

Pulpmania! by @Ben and NiNi

The pulps are evolving in what seems like two distinct directions, and we have some thoughts on that. Ben, NiNi and friend of the pod Twig t

Pulpmania!

Podcast Episode · The Conversation · 12/27/2024 · 1h 20m

Pulpmania! - The Conversation | iHeart

<p>The pulps are evolving in what seems like two distinct directions, and we have some thoughts on that. Ben, NiNi and friend of the pod Twi

Timestamps

The timestamps will now correspond with chapters on Spotify for easier navigation.

00:00:00 - Welcome 00:01:15 - Introduction 00:05:56 – We Are: The Branded Pairs 00:14:37 – We Are: A Rorschach Test of a Show 00:30:47 – We Are: Final Thoughts and Ratings 00:38:21 – Knock Knock, Boys! 00:48:39 – Knock Knock, Boys!: Sex Positivity 00:55:51 – Knock Knock, Boys!: Our Fab Four (and Jane) 01:09:58 – Knock Knock, Boys!: Final Thoughts and Ratings 01:14:54 – Importance of Pulps as Labs

The Conversation Transcripts!

Thanks to the continued efforts of @lurkingshan as an editor and proofreader, we are able to bring you transcripts of the episodes.

We will endeavor to make the transcripts available when the episodes launch, and it is our goal to make them available for past episodes (Coming soon thanks to @wen-kexing-apologist). When transcripts are available, we will attach them to the episode post (like this one) and put the transcript behind a Read More cut to cut down on scrolling.

Please send our volunteers your thanks!

00:00 – Welcome

NiNi

Welcome to The Conversation About BL, aka The Brown Liquor Podcast.

Ben

And there it is. I’m Ben.

NiNi

I’m NiNi.

Ben

And we’re you’re drunk Caribbean uncle and auntie here sitting on the porch in the rocking chairs.

NiNi

Four times a year we pop in to talk about what’s going on in the BL world.

Ben

We shoot the shit about stories and all the drama going into them. I review from a queer media lens.

NiNi

And I review from a romance and drama lens.

Ben

So if you like cracked-out takes and really intense emotional analysis…

NiNi

If you like talking about artistry, industry, and the discourse…

Ben

And if you generally just love simping…

NiNi

There is a lot of simping on this podcast…

Ben

We are the show for you!

01:15 – Introduction

Ben 

And we're back. This week we have brought our good friend @twig-tea back with us. Say hello, Twig.

Twig 

Hi everyone!

Ben 

Twig, who has watched way too many shows—far more than me—is joining us to talk about two pulps this week. We're gonna be talking about We Are the series from GMMTV and Knock Knock, Boys! from WeTV.

Before we get into that, I think it'll be very beneficial for us to set a baseline on what a pulp is. Twig, you've watched over 600 BLs. How would you describe a pulp, considering most BL is basically indie cinema?

Twig 

One of the things that's characteristic of a pulp is normally low production values and formulaic plots; but formulaic plots, you could argue, is kind of one of the defining features of BL. So, when I think about what a pulp is in the BL space, I'm usually thinking about particularly inferior writing, sensationalist beyond the normal level of unrealistic storylines, racy, and anything that's, like, particularly cheap-looking or feeling.

Ben 

I feel like a lot of the times we're using pulp as a way to—maybe not intentionally—but it ends up being like a derisive way to refer to a project. And for me, if I'm describing something as a pulp, I'm talking about something that felt like it was very quickly produced to turn money—where it doesn't feel like there were a lot of people in the room who are overly concerned about individual choices that went down in the production and how they contributed to a whole. You can feel, sometimes, that different groups worked on different parts of a project, ‘cause some parts of it work really well, but maybe don't connect to others.

NiNi 

So, I have not watched 600 BLs. But my definition of a pulp, I'm thinking lower production values. But to me, that's not necessarily a bad thing. I think that when you are looking at a piece of work that doesn't have a lot of budget, it can bring out some really interesting things in the production depending on how creative people can get. And I think that's a good way to look at it going into these two in particular, because on the one hand, you've got a pulp that probably did spend quite a little bit of money. And on the other hand, you have a pulp that clearly didn't have a lot of money to spend, but used its money well. So to me, the low budget aspect, or the minimal production aspect of things, doesn't necessarily have to be a bad thing.

Twig 

Yeah, I completely agree with that. I think the characteristics of a pulp are about how it feels, but that doesn't necessarily mean that it's bad. I feel like people use the word ‘pulp’ whenever they just mean that a show is bad, and that's not the same thing.

NiNi 

I don't watch nearly as much as you guys. What are some of your top pulps? What are some of the pulps that you'll always watch?

Ben 

Make It Right, every time.

Twig 

Yes! Cosigned.

NiNi 

That is a great one.

Ben 

Despite our impending conversation, I still feel very positively about Make It Right.

NiNi 

What about you, Twig?

Twig 

I wasn't ready for this question and I always take forever to answer a ‘favorites’ question. So, I will say my favorite one that I've seen recently, the one that I still think about every so often after watching it, was Lady Boyfriends. I talked about it in the last season’s Grab Bag episode. It was a remake from 2014, and it has a lot of problems, but it's still doing a lot of really interesting things.

NiNi 

My favorite pulp is always gonna be Love By Chance. Love by Chance is extremely problematic in a lot of ways, but it's got a lotta heart to it.

Ben 

So much New Siwaj references in a lot of this. I think my other one will probably be... probably Rainbow Prince.

Twig 

Ahh Rainbow Prince is so good! See, Ben's actually naming good shows, I'm just naming weird shows. [Ben laughs]

NiNi 

I always tread lightly when Rainbow Prince is brought up on the show, because I still have not finished watching it and Ben will not let me rest until I finish watching it. 

Ben 

That is much to your chagrin.

NiNi 

And he is correct. I just gotta find the time.

Ben

Mm mm.

All right, so let's stop dancing around this thing. Let's dive into it.

05:56 – We Are: The Branded Pairs

NiNi

We'll start by talking about We Are. Ben, break it down for us. What is We Are about?

Ben 

We Are the series is about how GMMTV can make so much money by just putting boys that people like in front of you in an almost plotless device for 16 weeks. 

We Are the series is about a group of college students who are in two different schools that are vaguely connected to each other by one person in common. Through a series of interactions two of them come into conflict-slash-flirtation immediately between an art student and an engineer. Other guys have crushes on each other. And much of the show is about the slow matriculation of these crushes through the BL TikTok filter.

NiNi 

What is the BL TikTok filter?

Ben 

It's the fact that all of the sequences are filmed with the boys as close to each other in the center frame so they fit on a vertical phone for the quick hits on TikTok.

NiNi 

[sing song voice] The more you know.

Ben 

Well, it's about virality. The head of GMMTV has said that they no longer care about ratings. What they care about is virality. They care about hitting those kilig moments to make sure that you get all the butterflies you wanna feel. And they're going to blast that moment into socials so that it goes viral—the same way the gifmakers on Tumblr are going to rush to gif the most BL moment of the episode so that they can be first to get the notes—it’s the same thing that GMMTV is doing. As soon as that episode ends, they're gonna be on YouTube with the highlights and they're gonna be on TikTok and Instagram with the short reel so that those can go viral and get pushed out and they can draw more viewers to their socials to gain more advertising dollars as a result. And to maximize that on the thin frame of the vertical screen, almost all of your big BL moments now are gonna be filmed like you're watching a TV show from the 1960s and we're still on 4 by 3 screens again because the frame is so narrow on a phone.

NiNi 

I am not of the social media generation, so it's always fascinating to hear how this stuff has moved on while I have ignored it. [laughs]

So, let's get into the show itself. So, as Ben intimated, this is a show with a lot of boys and... multiple friend groups coalescing together into a whole. And along the way there's a lot of little romances. There are four main couples in this thing. GMMTV, what they've done here is that they have utilized casting as a shortcut for certain things, which I actually thought was kind of a smart way to use casting. 

We talked before, maybe a couple of episodes ago about the art/commerce nexus, and I talked a little bit about why because of it, the branded pair system doesn't bother me as much as it bothers others. I thought this was actually a good use of branded pairs if you're trying to get people to watch something—putting a show together that relies on your affection for some of these people. It really helped pull you along through the show until it got to the point where the show itself started to pull you along. I thought that was really clever, actually.

Twig 

I guess, if you're accepting the premise that we're not gonna use writing to do that, [laughs] which is the part that I'm upset about, but maybe I'm jumping ahead.

Ben 

Before we get there—twig-tea, you're an archivist who's been watching the genre for like 20-plus years. How about you walk us through the four major pairs of boys that are in this and how their current pairing in this show reflects the way they've been branded previously?

Twig 

There are four central relationships in this show. Phum and Peem, played by Pond and Phuwin. PondPhuwin have been a branded pair for, I want to say three years.

NiNi 

Started in Fish Upon the Sky.

Twig 

Have been in Never Let Me Go, and then the Our Skyy episode for Never Let Me Go, as well. They also do a ton of branded pair things in between their shows and have played in heterosexual series in between their appearances in BL. Pond and Phuwin tend to play…how do I describe this dynamic? 

Ben 

They really like for Phuwin to be low-key pissy about something all the time and for Pond to smile back at him for it.

NiNi 

It's a grump and a simp.

Twig 

Yeah, Grump and Simp. Thank you. 

The next one is Q and Toey, played by Winny and Satang.

NiNi 

They first appeared in Fish Upon the Sky as well.

Ben 

They have a minor appearance together in Star in My Mind.

NiNi 

They were kind of pre-paired in Fish Upon the Sky. Like, there was like a thing, but it didn't actually turn into a thing.

Twig 

They first appeared as a firm couple with any real time on camera in My School President in 2022. That was a rivals-to-lovers storyline. In We Are, they've changed it up, which was actually quite refreshing, and the relationship between WinnySatang is a mentor-mentee relationship. It's Winny who's the grumpier character, and Satang plays a very actually happy-go-lucky outgoing character that is very different to their appearance in My School President, so it's interesting to see them do something different. 

Aou and Boom play Tan and Fang. They first appeared in…Enchanté? But I don't think they actually got together in Enchanté.

Ben 

I gotta be honest, I don't remember.

NiNi 

I do not remember anything about Enchanté.

[all laugh]

Twig 

I want to say it was mostly unrequited with a hint of them getting together at the end, but don't hold me to that. I really don't remember very well.

Ben 

I do know that we saw them properly together in Hidden Agenda.

Twig 

Before that they were very heavily shipped in Vice Versa. And I think they got, like, one, like, cheek kiss at the end of Vice Versa. And then Hidden Agenda, that was their first, the show where they were properly a couple. Now what do I remember about them in Hidden Agenda? [laughs] 

`Ben

Nothing!

Twig 

That show is so forgettable.

Ben 

They had an interesting thing in Hidden Agenda, because you had Aou playing a known closeted jock type character who really cared about his boyfriend but was incapable of coming out of the closet, and it caused real strain in their relationship.

Twig 

Yeah. So they had an extra lot of angst because they were an established couple but couldn't be seen together. Most of the time we saw them was about that, about the tension in their relationship.

NiNi 

The best thing that happened in Hidden Agenda, easily.

Twig 

Interestingly in We Are, they play a couple that, apparently in the book, was an established couple, but they rolled that back so we got to see them get together. The dynamic is a little flipped almost, where Aou plays the very heavy simping character, and Fang is just sort of bemused by his energy and into him, but not nearly as effusive.

NiNi 

It's a puppy-kitten dynamic.

Twig 

There you go, puppy-kitten. [laughs] 

And then the last couple, ChainPun, played by Mark and Poon. Poon had to come in very last minute to replace Mark's former branded pair partner, who he's been with since My Gear and Your Gown—which was 2020, so actually quite a long time. 

But I will say that Poon stepped in and did a great job blending with the whole group and I would say after watching the series I could not tell where they had to reshoot and fit stuff in. That was one thing that I think they handled really well.

14:37 – We Are: A Rorschach Test of a Show

Ben 

I'm just gonna transition us to the next part pretty awkwardly. I did not like this show, and I had to drop it after five weeks because it was pissing me off. Because the two of you finished this show—I want to hear about what was holding you into the show before I start picking at it. 

We'll start with you, NiNi, because you loved this show so much. This show...upheld your psyche for like four months. How? Why? Please!

NiNi 

[laughs] It did, it did. It's a combination of things. For me, it came at exactly the right time and hit exactly the right buttons in me, in terms of what I needed at the time. And even looking back on it now, even though I'm a little ways out of what I was going through at the time, I still find it quite comforting.

The two big parts of it that I really, really love. I love the way that the center of this show is about the friendship, it's about the multiple friend groups and how they become this one big friend group. This one group of silly boys who just enjoy each other's company so much and wanna spend all their time together. It's got this kind of a real time nostalgia element to it where I could see this show being somebody's reminiscence about a time in their life that they want to remember incredibly fondly. When they were young and they had this big group of friends and all they wanted to do is hang out with their friends and have a ton of fun. 

I described it when I was writing about the show while it was airing as giving me Hospital Playlist vibes. Hospital Playlist is a Korean drama about this group of friends who are all doctors working at the same hospital, and it's just about their lives, and them bringing people in, and them falling in love with people. I'm not saying that this is at the Hospital Playlist level, but it gave me the same energy, and Hospital Playlist is one of my favourite dramas of all time. So I enjoyed that aspect of it. 

The other aspect of it that I really enjoyed, this is part where I was talking about where they use the actors that you love to sort of pull you along until the story takes over from that. Tan and Fang, as Twig said, they get together during the show. And at first you don't understand why and how and what is even happening there. And then I think it's episode nine, so it’s just a little past the halfway mark of the show, that Tan tells his friends the story of him and Fang, how they met and how they got together. And it makes you understand everything that's gone before and everything that the show is trying to do in terms of how it's trying to organize itself. 

I had so many thoughts about it, like, is there another way that they could have done this to front load this? Like I said, it's more than halfway through the show and you have to get there. And if you don't, if the show is not pulling you along to that point, then you're not gonna get there. But, it changed everything. 

The show is fluffy, and it's sweet, and it's just very wholesome. And I really responded to it. Just talking about it now, I feel kind of a glow. I enjoyed it a whole lot. 

I'll save some of the other stuff for when we're actually talking about New Siwaj and how New Siwaj constructs shows and why this show worked for me in some ways that some other New Siwaj shows haven’t.

Ben 

I was gonna say, are we excusing a New Siwaj flashback to justify an Episode 5 reveal four episodes later all of a sudden? Please play the Double Savage recording, man in the booth.

NiNi 

No, no, no, no, no, that's entirely different. [Ben laughs]

And that's what I'm talking about when I say that how they actually used the actors, and the casting, and the branded pairs in this was actually a really smart use if that is how New wanted to do it. 

I appreciate New Siwaj as a creator. He pisses me off, but I appreciate him. One of the reasons that he pisses me off is that he has great narrative strengths in some ways. He also has a lot of respect for, like, the minutiae and the details of daily life and shenanigans between friends, which I appreciate, but I find interfere with his narratives when he's working on something that's narratively focused. 

To me, what happened here is that this was not at all narratively focused. What he did here is the same thing that he always does. It's a big group of friends just hangin’ out with each other, the minutiae of their daily life. But it's not interfering with a narrative that I wanna get back to. And so I can just sit in the vibe of it. To me, if New wants to write a narrative show, I want it to be narrative. And now I've realized that if New wants to sit in a vibe, he actually knows how to do it.

Ben 

Twig, you finished this show. Why?

Twig 

I finished it for two reasons. One, I'm a completionist. And so I finished it for the reason why I watch a lot of shows that I don't like. Spoiler: I didn't like this. [laughs] And that was so that I can understand what it did to the end and fit it into my internal understanding of what's happening with the genre at any given time.

I summed up both reasons in one thing. I spent a lot of the time watching the show trying to figure out what it was trying to do, why it wasn't working for me, and thinking about how it fits in in the wider context of what's happening in Thai BL. 

Ben 

We heard NiNi's reasons for why she loved it so much. Please detail for us why you had such a difficult time with it.

Twig 

NiNi alluded to it a little bit. This show is not narratively driven; there's no throughline, and that's the reason why I watch television, is for a story. The way that I watch shows is I'm paying attention to what characters are doing in the scene I'm watching, but I'm always thinking about how they connect to the scenes before, what that could mean for the future. And this show gave me nothing for my brain to grip onto. Scene to scene, things were happening that were fun to watch, but I couldn't enjoy them because I was thinking about how they didn't connect to the scenes before. And I was getting frustrated by that. And then I would get sort of bored because a scene in isolation isn't interesting to me. I ended up, like, spacing out a lot and then having to rewind, and then realizing after rewinding that nothing had actually happened, and I didn't have to rewind at all. [laughs] Didn't miss anything. 

So it was a really frustrating watch for me just because of the way my brain works and processes shows. The show takes place in—it's not just a BL bubble—I almost call it like a plot bubble. Almost nothing bad happens. And any conflict that does arise is resolved within an episode. I understand why that would be comforting and relaxing to some people, but for me, I found it very anxiety-inducing, because I was constantly thinking about,  why is nothing happening? What is going to come? And there was nothing to be worried about. I wouldn't say necessarily that my experience of the show is a reflection on the show, but it is about how and why I watch shows. This show was not for me. 

I do want to challenge NiNi's comparison to Hospital Playlist, because I also have seen and loved Hospital Playlist, and the reason why I loved that show and couldn't get into this show was because Hospital Playlist has a very clear throughline. And that was the main thing that was missing for me in this. The part where it took nine episodes to get to the backstory, I found frustrating. And the part that bothered me most about that was that the reveals weren't rewarding you for having paid attention to anything that happened before. It didn't feel like they connected to things we'd seen but didn't yet understand. It didn't feel like the show was grounded in a story that it was laying groundwork for. It was just leading to particular scenes. 

We were often told that this is why a character's reacting that way, but there was nothing previously that made me understand it or told me that it made sense. Like, we're told that Fang is a bad boyfriend because he isn't attentive or doesn't show affection for Tan, but I don't think we ever see that before they tell us that, other than in the episode where they tell us that that's a thing. We mostly see him just be really fond of Tan the whole time, so I was really confused by why suddenly he's apologizing for being a problem.

NiNi 

That's definitely, like, not where I went with that.

Twig 

And the Q and Toey conflict happens because Q is upset that Toey didn't tell him that he was his secret Post-It note buddy and his first love. We're told that Q was stressing over feeling conflicted about his feelings for the cafe Post-It Boy and Toey, and then it turns out they're the same person. But we didn't see any of that conflict in any of the episodes that came before. So his anger felt like it came out of nowhere. It was justified within the episode, but we hadn't laid any groundwork for it. 

That was sort of my experience the whole time. It felt like I was watching 16 specials of a show that I didn't see. So, I've always felt like I was missing context for whatever was happening, even though I'd watched the whole show. It was an uncomfortable watching experience.

NiNi 

Twig is actually correct about that thing. It's just, in terms of how we interpreted it, we interpreted it in two different directions. The show treats the audience like they're a member of the friend group and not an omniscient observer of any kind. As the characters learn things about each other and their backstories, that's the same time that the audience is learning it. So the show in that sense has, like, a little hint of immersion, doesn't give you hints before. If a character is gobsmacked, so are you. If a character is surprised by something happening, so are you. For me, that works, for Twig it doesn’t. And I completely understand.

The show is almost kind of like a Rorschach in that way. Like, it depends on what things about media you like, how you like to consume media, what are things that you enjoy that you don't enjoy in media. I like sitting in a vibe. The show is a vibe for me. Like I get to see people just kind of hang out and do their thing and be themselves.

I really responded to that. And so the lack of narrative drivers and groundwork laying and all those kinds of things that if it was a more narratively focused show that I would be looking for, once I started to feel the vibe that the show was going for, I was able to sit back and just soak in it and enjoy that part of it. 

Twig is quite correctly identifying what the show is doing. It's just that worked for me and it didn't work for her.

Twig 

Yeah, it just hit us both really differently. I think that's valid.

Ben 

The show did nothing! And for that, I despise it. [Twig laughs]

Here's the thing. There is so much BL to watch. The idea that I'm gonna spend nine weeks to figure out what the deal is with these boys is just not gonna happen for me. There's too much to fuckin’ watch. And there was no driving angst or drama to any of this. 

We mentioned Make It Right as the big pulp we love from New Siwaj. In that show, there is real drama with the boys’ relationships. Both of our major pairs of boys have very unfortunate first times that create a lot of confusion between them in their relationships that they have to work through while also dealing with the coming-of-age pains of being a teenage boy. 

And there was really just no drama for me to hang on to this. The only real thread that the show had early on was like...Pond’s character punking Phuwin’s character about demanding indentured servitude for inflicting medical expenses on him for kicking him in the nuts or some shit. I just found that to be deeply repellent because I don't find slavery narratives cute? Like, you must work for me or whatever shit. No, I do not find that as a fun way to turn stuff into romance. And I got deeply put off in episode five with Aou's character confessing to Boom's character, and Boom's character cutting off the confession. Because it felt like every time the show was coming close to an important core emotional reveal about a character, it intentionally interrupted the moment to avoid any sort of specificity—and winking at the audience to be like, you know what this is.

That may be fun for some people, but I found it boring, because it means that there's nothing specific about these characters to hang on to. That was the point where I just couldn't deal with this anymore. They took all the B- and C-list BL boys at GMMTV and dumped them in a 16-week, basically, hangout project of IG reels to fulfill a financial obligation to iQIYI. 

That's the thing I want to talk about here, too. This was not like a freemium product on YouTube. You had to pay money to watch this for like the first month and a half before they started rerunning it on YouTube. So people were paying premium dollars on iQIYI to watch, essentially, a show about just guys hanging out. I was bored by it because these guys weren't that interesting. The most interesting thing we had with any of the guys going on was Phuwin's character's angst about his art not measuring up to what he wanted it to be. That was about it. 

It was frustrating for me seeing so many people raving about this because there was really just so much of nothing here. It felt like the ideal kind of pocket gay. New usually has interesting things to say about the queer experience in one way, shape, or form. Even in the shows we've talked about on here that we didn't like, like A Boss and a Babe, had some interesting ideas about queer reality that I just did not feel from this show in the first five weeks. I put over five hours into a show that had nothing to say. That's more than enough. That's longer than a J-BL. 

It's fine as, like, background noise, I guess, but I need to care about something going on in the show if I'm gonna sit down and pay attention to it and invest my emotional energy into it. I can't marinate in a show like this. There's nothing to think about for me, and everything I did think about felt kind of insidious. Like, what's the point of these gays clumping in a world where there's no problems with being gay? The reason we clump is because we're ostracized, because we're the only people who will tolerate each other. Why does that occur in these situations where there is no reason for gay people to feel weird about being gay? That's one of the constant frustrations I've been having with these sort of bubble shows. I can't feel gay empathy and connection with these stories because some of the foundation is missing.

30:47 – We Are: Final Thoughts and Ratings

Ben

I'm just very frustrated about this experience and what it means going forward, because this was probably super cheap to film and they probably turned a tidy profit on this. So that means there will be a lot more of this. And it's called Perfect Ten Liners, there will be 30 episodes of this. I'm looking forward to your report on that one, NiNi.

NiNi 

I think I'm only gonna watch one of those stories, actually. I see how there's a line from this to Perfect Ten Liners and it's also being done by New Siwaj. But for me, given GMMTV's now stated goal of, they're not tracking ratings, they're tracking socials, given what that means for how they're looking at some of their projects going forward, I don't think it's going to be everything that they do. But yes, they're gonna do more of these. And if they're gonna do more of these, I think as far as a template this is probably one of the better templates, ‘cause there are other ways that this could have gone. This one was balanced in a way that works. I don't think from what I've seen coming out of Perfect Ten Liners or so far it's going to be balanced in the same way. 

GMMTV is experimenting with the art commerce thing, sort of more leaning towards the commerce because that's what GMMTV is. I can't call them a CBS because they don't have that kind of thing, but they're like the CW, let's say, of Thai youth media. This is what you get from CW sometimes. If I didn't see other things coming both inside and outside of GMMTV, I would probably be more concerned, but for me there's so much out there right now. There's a ton of variety lately, I don't watch nearly as much as you two, and that's maybe part of the rest of it as well. For me, somebody who watches maybe 15 to 20 shows a year, it's just part of the constellation and it doesn't feel like a canary in the coal mine kind of thing, but that's just me.

Ben 

See, but the difficulty is we're seeing this in a lot of the shows, though. There's been this constant thing with not even just GMMTV, but they're sidestepping having to say things about gay shit in these shows. We talked about it in 23.5, we talked about it in Only Boo. The concern for me is, apparently, We Are the Series did really well. And GMMTV is brutal about what they're gonna fund. They're gonna fund the shit that's gonna make them money. If this sort of ungrounded fluff is what makes the money, that's what they're gonna make. 

The problem for me with fluff is I need to feel like the characters suffered to earn it. And there's not a sense that the fluff here is earned. There is a notion that is kind of romantic that, yeah, gay guys could just be just guys bein’ dudes. But mmph, did this feel weirdly alien while I was watching it. And I was really repulsed by it. That sucks because I like everybody involved. I just could not enjoy this at all and was deeply frustrated by it the entire time.

Twig 

To pick up something that you were saying, Ben, I think NiNi is right that the friendship as the core of the show is one of the better things about it, but one of the reasons why that wasn't enough for me is because I couldn't read this as found family because there was nothing for them to unite against? There was nothing for them to be there for each other about. There was no challenge to that friendship. They just ate a lot of barbecue and traveled a lot. I couldn't believe that they would last because they hadn't experienced anything to actually challenge that. You don't necessarily have to have it in the show. The show can be all fluffy, but if there's nothing even in the history to support that these guys have been through it together, then it's hard to know how they would respond to an actual problem.

NiNi 

So all that said, do we actually rate this because it's very clear that there's a dichotomy, not just within the group here talking about it now, but generally about the show. I'm not sure if a rating is useful. What do you guys think?

Ben 

In terms of where I always recommend from, I always rate on the, do I think people should watch this? Who do I think this show is for? I think I dropped this show at a 4 because I was really repulsed by it. I don't think that's fair reflective to the technical work that went into it, but for the type of reader that I think I'm trying to speak to, I can’t even  recommend this show at all. I found the whole experience rather empty. I don't go to TV to fill the show with my own, I'm smarter than the people who wrote this stuff or I will fill in the gap stuff. I don't like doing that in gay shows, so. I can't recommend this show. Not to the viewer I think I'm speaking to.

NiNi 

Twig, how about you?

Twig 

I don't always rate everything, so I really struggle to rate this. I'd probably put it at like a 6? I don't wanna take away from the fact that there are people who don't watch shows like I do who found this very comforting. Like you were saying, it's about what you're looking for in shows and how you watch them. 

But the part that's frustrating for me is that there was so much time we could have used to tell a story. [laughs] And so, I find it hard to forgive that. We don't actually get a lot of 16 episode hour-long shows, so it's hard for me to not begrudge the time.

NiNi

Obviously, I enjoyed this a lot more than you guys did, but I have two different ratings for it, actually. On terms of the enjoyability of it for me, it's hovering somewhere around like an 8.5, 9. But on the technical merits of the show, I would probably max it out at a 7.

Twig 

If I was going by my enjoyment, it would be a 4. [laughs] It was honestly painful for me to watch this.

NiNi 

That's valid, friend, that's valid. Two out of three means that it's not a recommend from The Conversation.

Ben 

I don't think we need to give it a harsh number rating, but legit, what's the angst of this show? What's the story? What are the drama here? I don't know, if you don't feel like swiping IG, put this on instead.

38:21 – Knock Knock, Boys!

NiNi 

Let's move on to the next pulp that we're going to discuss here. Knock Knock, Boys! by WeTV. 

Ben, what's Knock Knock, Boys! about?

Ben 

Knock Knock, Boys! is about four men who move into cheap housing because they're all running away from something in their lives. Together they form one of the more effective friend groups we've seen in a long time and pair off into two really satisfying relationships to follow for a solid eight episodes. 

We get in this show a really good presentation of age gap friendships amongst queer people. I really liked that we got to see developing relationships between young people alongside developing relationships between working people. We also got in this show a really great examination about how you love someone out of the closet. And for that, I will be forever grateful. 

I liked this show a lot, comparatively to the last one. This show also had a lot of our faves in it, and they showed up to work!

NiNi 

New faves and some classic ones, one of the classic faves being Seng Wichai who is well-loved on this podcast. Okay.

Twig 

Can we talk about Best? Because Best has been in the biz since 2017. He was in I Am Your King where he got to kiss Mark Siwat. I'm always so happy to see his face and I think this was by far his best role. It's really nice to see him in a role that can highlight his skills.

NiNi 

We talked a little bit about the overarching theme of it, but let's get into the details. The show has got, like we said, these four guys, they split off into two couples. Almond and Latte, who are in university, and Peak and Thanwa, who are just entering the working world. The way that these two pairs embody the angst of those two stages of life is really interesting.

Ben 

I think the difference between the last show and this show. During the last show we're mostly angsting about whether or not it's okay to like a show that's basically a glorified IG reel. This show has a plot and all of its characters have something going on with them. They have a clear want or desire. 

We've got Latte who is an amorous pansexual man who's having a great time in college. Too great of a time, in fact. One of his professors says if your ass is late anymore for my fuckin’ classes, you will not graduate. So he has to move closer to school because he's taking too long to get out of bed from one of his conquests to make it to class on time. Almond is finally out from under the maybe-too-sheltering thumb of his mother. And he is lying about his lodgings because he wants to live amongst the poors [laughs] instead of the security guard, ultra safe system that his mom wants him to live in. Thanwa is leaving a not great relationship with another man, and Peak appears to be running from compulsory heteronormativity. 

What's really interesting is when these guys are breaking the ice, they're telling each other truthful things, but they're also holding back in a way that felt really earnest. I find a lot of times in these shows, because they need to exposit things to the audience, these shows tend to have characters overshare with each other in a way that doesn't feel real. I thought this show did a great job of giving the audience the information we needed about why these guys were in the situation they were in, but giving the kind of polite answers that real people give each other about their situations. 

They needed a way to get these guys to start working together. So they create this conceit in which Almond really wants to hook up with this boy named Jumper, played by Pak Varayu. I totally understand why. He promises a year's worth of rent to whoever helps him score with Jumper. Hijinks ensue as the other three boys start trying to befriend Jumper and create scenarios for Almond to spend time with him so that they can get together. In the process of befriending Jumper, who we realize has a boyfriend already, Latte develops feelings for Almond and Thanwa and Peak end up growing closer together as well.

We follow Latte’s complex journey he has with people misunderstanding who he is as a pansexual person. Almond being an enthusiastic virgin who's very amped to explore his body and what he finds pleasurable. Thanwa is struggling with the thing we all struggle with in our 20s: Do we wanna do the job that's the thing we dream about doing or do we take the safe option, and what does that say about the other aspects of his life? And then Peak is deeply closeted because he doesn't want to let down his father. These are all really interesting threads to follow, and the show doesn't ever really forget where the characters are and what their experiences reflect in the way they respond to scenarios that arise. We get this great evolution of relationships over time.

One of the things that I thought the show did really well—I kind of want Twig to talk about this part a little bit more—is we get Almond's initial crush on Jumper, and then the show breaks that crush by systematically making Almond recognize that maybe Jumper is not who he wants to be with.

Twig 

I loved that sequence so much. Almond has a crush on Jumper and his new roommates are creating circumstances to bring them closer together in order to win rent for a year. That culminates in more and more situations where Almond and Jumper are in the room together and it's awkward. [laughs] Almond doesn't really know what to say, or Latte's with him and Latte and Jumper have more in common than Almond and Jumper do. It was very subtle moments, Almond's crush being whittled away at. 

And the party which they have at their house results in everybody getting really drunk, Jumper gets really drunk because the roommates are helping to make him drunk so that he'll be more receptive to Almond, and Almond is also being made drunk so that he'll be a little bit more relaxed. Jumper ends up getting so drunk that he gets really sick. We see this in so many shows where someone will get really drunk and then have a moment where they break and make out or have sex or confess or whatever, and what I love about the way they do that in Knock, Knock Boys! is that being really drunk is not sexy. It is not romantic. It is gross and it is unpleasant. And Almond dealing with disgruntled, loud, annoying, unwieldy Jumper and then a really gross Jumper when he vomits all over everywhere. And then he shits himself! Oh, it was so good. 

You could see the moment on Almond's face where the pedestal that Jumper had been on in his mind just collapsed and he realized, oh, this is a human being that I've been into and he's a gross human being, who vomits and shits and smells really bad right now and is actually [laughs] the opposite of attractive. So they help Jumper clean up and then Almond has to sit with his new realization and process his emotions.

Ben

NiNi, you're a big fan of Seng Wichai. I would like for you to unpack his character, Thanwa, and the work he did in this show.

NiNi 

Seng plays Thanwa and Thanwa is the mom friend. Thanwa is the one who takes care of everybody. He feeds the group, he guides them a little bit. And when he meets up with Peak, Peak basically is zoned out and also eats like an animal. Thanwa is a foodie, food lover, really into food and cooking and so he decides he's gonna teach Peak how to really enjoy and savour food. And that's how they bond. 

Thanwa himself is a complicated character. He's got this sadness to him, and Seng Wichai always plays these weird, cringey characters with an undercurrent of sadness to them very well. Thanwa is probably the least weird, cringey character he's ever played, but it's still got that undercurrent of sadness and melancholy. It makes you wonder, oh, what has this character been through? Why is this the way that he is? And over the course of the show, you get to see some of what he's running from, what is making him sad, and Seng plays every beat to me perfectly.

When things start to change with Peak, you see the sadness because Peak can't, in his mind, get all the way there in terms of how he feels about Thanwa. You can see that makes Thanwa really, really sad as much as he likes Peak and he enjoys his company and he is falling for Peak. It's a great little dynamic and Seng plays every nuance of this character so well. He understands Peak and what Peak can and can't give him. And when he decides that he's going to give Peak grace and support for whatever it is that he wants to do, because at this point it's not just about their relationship, it's about Peak's life, there's joy in there, but there's also sorrow. 

It's a great character for Seng and I am very glad to see him in this. Every character I've seen Seng play at this point has been great. The boy can pick ‘em. I will say that much.

Ben 

I think it's really notable that in the genre that's always using food as love, the not-so-subtle thing is Thanwa is literally teaching Peak how to experience pleasure, because it's clear that the boy does not when they first meet him.

48:39 – Knock Knock, Boys!: Sex Positivity

Ben

This was probably the most sex positive show we've watched this entire year. This show, through almost every single beat that it wanted to follow, had positive things to say about people's sexual relationships with each other, no matter how messy they got. 

Early on, we get this instance where Peak is fairly certain that he made out with one of the roommates the very first night he stumbled into the house. And at first he's not sure if it's Latte or Thanwa, because Latte's kind of a flirt. We get this eventual resolution where he realized it was Thanwa and apologizes for kissing Thanwa like that, and then asks if he can kiss him again properly. This is probably the point where I sat up and was like, hold on, this show might be actually serious about some of its ideas. Because that sequence when they were in the closet during the party was so pointed—particularly when Jane shows up the next morning and opens the door on them and they fall out. 

Twig

Yes!

Ben

Really excellent stuff.

There's another great bit that comes up. So, they have this friend, Lukpeach, who's a great character. I really love the new class of girl friend in BL who's doing supportive in a really fun way. It's the next evolution of the fag hag that we've gotten that I'm kind of into. I really like the way Lukpeach was constantly about supporting all of the gays around her so that she could write her stories about them. 

They have this sex ed club where they're talking about gender and sexual identity, safe sex practices, respecting people's privacy. So we get this whole bit where they're having a conversation about “don't record people without their consent, and especially don't create revenge porn about people by posting them without their consent.” And it feels like Almond's not really paying attention during that moment. And he has this moment where he realizes who Jumper actually wants to be with, that he's not actually available, and Almond's disappointed about this. This is right around the same time that someone records Jumper with Sean and then posts it. And there's this brief moment where the show leads the audience to suspect that Almond may have recorded Jumper and Sean in the shower and posted it online. They reflect this by having Latte turn on Almond and briefly think that Almond could have done that. 

This becomes a fault line between Almond and Latte, and then a huge line between Jumper and Almond, because this show plays the consequences of outing very seriously. Because of the video posted about Jumper, he is kicked off of the school's football team. He gets outed to his family and he was not trying to come out to them at all because he did not know how they were gonna react to that. Jumper confronts Almond about this, because he had ample reason to believe that Almond was there, and he's pissed at him. He's like, “I thought you were my friend. How could you do this to me?” 

It takes the Scooby Gang a really long time to suss out who was the actual culprit behind this. And there are social consequences for Almond for a while over this, where a significant portion of the student body is one, being super nasty to Jumper, but also simultaneously shaming Almond for doing that to his friend—or so they think. They end up revealing that it was Thanwa's ex who's been the one walking around recording people, and then they send his ass to jail. 

This was a really excellently handled plot. I like that the way the consequences played out across all of this happened in a believable way and was taken super seriously.

NiNi 

Because the plot line reverberates out, there are repercussions for Almond and Latte and there are repercussions for Peak and Thanwa. Almond at this point is kind of depressed, he's sad, so Latte tries to take him on a trip that leads to some new wrinkles and complications in their relationship. 

There was stuff going on with Peak and Thanwa, that when it became known to them that Thanwa's ex, who he had briefly moved back in with because of everything that was going on with Peak, that he had done it, something that happened in that moment of discovering that. This led to reverberations in Peak and his relationship. 

How the events reverberate and impact the group as a whole and then the individuals and the couples within it, I think it's actually constructed quite well for a show that clearly didn't have a lot of budget, didn't have a high production value or anything like that. They used their narrative time and they used their budget well, they built a story that worked for the time that they had, for the talent that they had, for the everything that they had.

Twig 

One of the things that I think might pass an international audience by, but really struck me as super important was the depiction of sex toys. Sex toys are illegal in Thailand, they're punishable by, I think it's, like, two years in prison if you're caught selling them, and owning them is also not legal. And so depicting sex toys on screen, it's actually quite a radical act for Thai television. To encourage the use of sex toys is also a pretty politically strong statement for Thai TV, so I just wanted to call that out as a really impactful thing that the show did, and I think did really well. It did a really great job of showing someone in Almond who had never seen a sex toy and was immediately fascinated and distracted. [laughs]

NiNi 

The way he stared at it. He could not believe this thing. He was just kind of mouth open looking at it like he couldn't even focus.

Twig 

Boy was thirsty.

Ben 

That boy skipped home. He's like, I got my first dildo and I can't wait to use it! [Ben and Twig laugh]

Twig 

And we got to see him experiment with his sexuality that way and to play with the sex toy a little bit and I thought that was an amazing thing to include in a show in any context, but particularly in a Thai television context.

One of the things that was a fun thing in any show but was a particularly political move in this show was Latte taking Lukpeach to the sex toy shop because they could have been arrested if they had been caught together going there. In context of where I am in Canada that wouldn't have really struck me as anything other than kind of a fun cute thing to do with a friend, and it speaks to a certain level of comfort and sex positivity but, it’s politically charged in a way in Thailand that you might not necessarily be aware of.

Ben 

I think it's important to point that out, because this show had an 18-plus rating and it's because they talked about sex the way they did. They actually didn't depict that much sexual content on screen.

55:51 – Knock Knock, Boys!: Our Fab Four (and Jane)

Ben

Speaking of, like, depicting the complex situations around sex, you mentioned the beach trip they go on. One of the better beach episodes we've had from the genre in a long time, because there's a lot of needing to unpack from some difficult things and big reveals about the characters that come out of that one. That's the first real moment where Latte and Almond physically acknowledge the attraction that's been building between them for multiple episodes at that point. 

They end up in a complex makeout that could have turned into sex, that then stops, that I think really sets the stage for the rest of what develops and makes Latte one of my favorite characters we've gotten this year. He was so patient with Almond and was always capable of meeting Almond emotionally where he was. Almond took a while to get comfortable with actually doing sexual stuff. And even though Latte made it clear he was ready and down and wanting, he was able to communicate that in a way that didn't feel like he was pushing Almond beyond his comfort zone. Which lets us later get these great I wanna have my first time conversations with both Peak and Thanwa where we get to let them give him useful advice. 

I really love the way these boys consistently rallied for each other when some shit was goin’ down. When one of them was having problems, they were really concerned about them and wanted to find a way to help them out. That was just really lovely. We know these boys have each other's backs, ‘cause they went through some real shit together.

Twig 

Latte was on it, being able lie to Almond's mother immediately.

NiNi 

It wasn't even a question. He's like, “Okay, we lyin’ to mom? I'll help.” Right up until they got caught. And then he was just like, well, you're gonna have to tell her what's going on. 

I wanna talk about the Peak arc coming towards the end and Peak and Jane and how all of that played out.

Ben 

Jane was a great character. We learned that the reason why Peak is so stressed all the time is his mom died and this sort of brings an end to this really loving, idyllic family that he had. His dad becomes cold in his grief and is constantly kind of hovering. Peak is struggling himself, he can't perform the way he used to about school and work and all of these things. He basically sort of closes himself off trying to be this ideal son for his dad. And so when his dad eventually tries to arrange a marriage for him with a family friend that's maybe financially beholden to them, he doesn't really say no to this because he doesn't wanna let his dad down. But he also can't hide from who he is, and so he just runs. 

Jane eventually finds him, and she tries to be patient with him. Like, she clearly knows his deal, tries to help him with Thanwa, but she won't say for him what he needs to say for himself, which I thought was really fascinating. Once he gets caught by his dad, he goes back with his dad and finally, after so many times that he should have said the damn thing, finally says to his dad what he needs to say about who he is. And we get this really great apology from his dad. 

What's so fascinating about Best’s performance in this is I think a lot of people conflated Best playing Peak as kind of spacey with his Love By Chance guest role. And I think that was maybe a little unfair because he was just doing a bit for that character as a very, very, very tiny role. But here, Peak spacing out is basically pain management. He can't stay present in the moment because he's suffering so much, which is, I think, one of the parts of the show that is understated, but in a way that I think is really good.

When I talk about being able to connect to the queer angst of a character, I can see how much Peak is suffering the whole time. That is most evidenced by the way he transforms as soon as everything is out in the open. The last episode and a half of Peak is like watching a completely different character because he's not burdened by the expectation anymore. You can see how quickly he becomes the boyfriend he's been wanting to be this whole time. 

And truly, Thanwa won because man, he put in real patience and effort with that man and he got what he wanted. Good for him!

Twig 

That whole arc is one of my favorite things in this show and I think the thing that is gonna linger with me most. One of the things that I really love about it is how carefully written it is. When Peak is earlier in the show being so frustrating—I mean the audience is frustrated, his housemates are frustrated, Thanwa is frustrated, Jane is so frustrated. The way that people relate to or respond to him differs depending on whether or not they know what's going on. And as soon as what's going on with him is revealed, that frustration shifts. Thanwa is still frustrated but so much more willing to give him space and time to figure himself out once he knows what he's figuring out, that it's not just about Peak holding back, it’s about his relationship with his father, he was so much more willing and able to wait. 

Almond and Latte similarly feel like they're sidestepping around Peak when they don't really understand what's going on with him, and then as soon as they do, they're ready to show up for him. They arrange to drive Thanwa to Peak at his dad's house so that they can be there to support him when he's ready to come out just to be there in case he needs them. I thought that was so beautiful. And then when Peak again does come out and shifts, the way that all of the characters respond to his changes. It’s also very organic and fluid and feels very natural. It was just so well done and felt really well thought out.

Ben

When we say the show is really sex positive, part of sex positivity is understanding that boundaries aren't bad. They're about establishing communication and understanding how your behaviors impact each other. 

Almond is running away from his mom kind of sheltering him too much. And when he finally expresses this to her clearly, she takes that in and apologizes for overstepping and maybe smothering him too much. So when they're like, “All right, now that we've gotten that resolved, we need to go save Peak.” And mom's like, “Can I come?” “No, mom, you can't come.” She goes, “Oh, okay.” And she doesn't push back. She's like, “Okay, well, I understand. I'll pay for your lodgings and your transportation." They play this for mild comedy, but this is actually really good. Mom does have a tendency to get over-involved, and they don't want her jumping into their guy problems here, but they don't want her to not be involved per se. They give her a way to feel like she's helping because she's got all this money. 

It's the same thing with Peak when he finally comes out properly to his father. His father apologizes for the conditions he created for Peak and tries to take steps to rectify that. That's actually a really special thing. Everyone loved Peak enough to wait for him to make the choice himself. We have so many stories about gay people being outed against their will and having to suffer the consequences of that. That happens in this show, too! I really love this show giving us the other end of that, where nobody outed Peak, even though we were all running to shake that man, they let him do it on his terms. And he had a good experience with it when he finally did it. And he says it's the fact that everybody loved him so much that he felt like it was wrong to keep running at that point. That's finally what made him come out on his own terms. That's the big point. You have to come out for yourself, for it to be meaningful and for you to have the courage and fortitude to be out and live out. 

This show was excellent and I loved all of these boys and their friends and especially Jane. My God, I love Jane. And she was gay! Good for us.

NiNi 

That actually annoyed me a little as why the show didn't get a 10 for me, because I thought they were entirely too cute about withholding the lavender part of that lavender marriage. 

Ben 

Oh, I sensed it the whole time. I was just waiting for them to confirm it.

NiNi 

It would be the one thing if they withheld it but they misdirected on it, and this was in the translations and the subtitles which is why it annoyed me. I know that the word that they're using in Thai is a gender neutral word but in terms of the subtitles, they are not using a gender neutral word. It felt like an unnecessary misdirect for me. That's probably, like, my only little quibble about it. And it's really a translation thing and not anything to do with the show as presented. So, eh, I'm fine. I just had to get it out.

We talked about Seng and Best and I want to give some love to Nokia and Jaonine because I don't think anybody could have done Almond and Latte as good as Nokia and Jaonine. I have some real appreciation for these two boys' talents.

Ben 

I wanna go to Twig because this is not our first time with Nokia. I did not watch all of Thank God It's Friday. Was Nokia this good at physical comedy in 2017 or ‘19?

Twig 

The short answer is no, he was not. I remember him in that show as standing out as one of the ones who can act. Thank God it's Friday, for context, was a show full of a lot of boys who had never acted in anything before and they weren't given a lot to do and it was a little bit rough to watch. [laughs] I remember him being one of the few who looked like he might have somewhere to go from there. So I was really glad to see him again, but he's definitely improved.

Ben 

I thought Nokia was so good at the physical comedy of playing Almond. Like, I really just loved watching that boy move around and react to literally everything that was happening. He felt so present in every scene he was in. Best and Seng are really good at that too. And it was nice to see a newer performer, for us at least, be able to match that energy. 

Jaonine was really charming as Latte. It was really fun to watch an actor play a guy who looked so comfortable in his own skin. All these guys are super tense about something going on. Peak’s fighting the closet he's in. Thanwa is struggling against normie expectations the whole time, and Almond just wants to get fucked so bad. It was so refreshing to see a character in Latte played by Jaonine that was very much not as stressed out as the rest of them.

Twig 

And he owned his sexuality in a way that was really refreshing, too. I love his refrain of, “I'm bisexual, but I'm still choosy. I don't do sleep with anyone, excuse you.” [laughs] And I think this is something that you actually have mentioned, Ben, in your thoughts on the show. I just love how he leaves all of his past relationships or interactions positively it seems like. So he keeps running into people who he's had sex with in the past and everyone's just happy to see him.[laughs] It was really refreshing to see people who have a very active sex life and have that be a positive thing in their life rather than a negative thing.

NiNi 

I just wanted to pick up on something that you said earlier about the fact that Latte is probably the only character who's not stressed and you enjoy watching that relaxation that Jaonine plays through the character. But when Latte does get stressed, I think Jaonine is also very good at making that feel uncomfortable. Like, Latte is not comfortable with the idea of being stressed out by things, that's not the life that he wants to live. And you can see the tension in his body and how it feels unnatural. I thought he was actually really really good at that aspect of this character.

Ben 

We got so lucky that we got such a talented cast here. Even in, like, the first episode or so, there was this weird flirty energy between Thanwa and Latte, and Twig and I were like, [laughs] are they gonna do it? Please let them fuck, we need to let this happen. 

Twig 

I'm still a little sad they didn't.

Ben 

Sincerely, the point at which I realized this show was gonna be something else was, Latte was living in the house alone first, and was throwing parties and shit and leaving a mess. He's not thinking about the fact that he has a new roommate that moved in and they left a fucking mess. And he felt bad about that, helped clean up a little bit and assured Thanwa that that would not happen anymore. And it doesn't! In so many other stories, his inability to stop partying would be a big part of his character. And it just isn't here. He is constantly capable of respecting other people's space and boundaries. He recognized that he had maybe overstepped with Thanwa, rectified that, and then corrected the behavior. It's a small thing really early in the show. But that was when I was like, this show might actually be on to something. There's a lot of people I like here and they seem to know what they're saying.

01:09:58 – Knock Knock, Boys!: Final Thoughts and Ratings

Ben

I was really relieved to genuinely enjoy the whole ride of this show. It was so refreshing to have a show that was solid, for the most part, the whole way through where we could follow where the show wanted us to go. There were some missteps where I think some batons didn't pass as smoothly as they needed to, but I had such a great time following this. This was a really robust experience with really memorable characters and performances.

Twig 

At a time when shows so often write boundary violations as romantic, it's just so refreshing to have a show depict boundaries as healthy and respected and positive things.

Ben 

Before we go, we have to talk about Almond and Latte having the perfect first time.

Twig 

Yes!

NiNi

It was so good. [all laugh]

Twig 

Best sex scene of the year.

Ben 

I have spoken at least once or twice on this show about a Mexican film called Quatro Lunas—you've probably seen it, Twig—that has a first time sex scene between two teenagers that is just as awkward as this one. [Twig laughs] And this sits up there.

I really liked how real that felt. It's Almond's first time. The boy’s clearly thought way too much about sex. He cannot relax. They can't really get into anything. It doesn't matter how experienced or good at sex Latte might be, until Almond relaxes they're not gonna be able to do anything. And I like that it's after they give up on trying to make it happen that that's when things click. Whatever happens after we fade away from them, Latte clearly had a good enough time that he was like, “Let's try that again” the next day, which is also capped off by Thanwa and Peak clearly post-coitus coming down to check on them and asking plainly, “Did you have a good time? Give us the review of Captain Dick here.” [laughs] And he says, “We had a really good time.” 

I really liked that even as part of the expansion of healthy sexual boundaries, they're still giving Almond the space to talk about these sort of things in a way that's comfortable for him. Like, you can tell your friends that you had a really positive intimate experience with someone really important to you. And it gives you the space to be able to tell them maybe if you didn't. I feel so secure about how those boys are gonna be because they're not gonna be isolated and alone whenever they run into any sort of difficulties. They have people who they can talk to about real shit.

I love this show so much. Oh my God.

NiNi 

Well, that said, let's rate it. Twig, what’s your rating for Knock, Knock Boys?

Twig 

I gave it a solid 9. I think it had something very clear to say and it said it really, really well. It wasn't a perfect execution, but it was really fun and it overall was a solid effort and I'm definitely gonna return to it. I loved it.

NiNi 

Ben, how about you?

Ben

It's also a 9. There are a couple of emotional beats that I don't think land correctly or at the very least did not translate well for me. And I think certain plot lines got closed off in a way that was a little too pat. But I respect what the show is going for with those moments. This show is really excellent and you really should watch it, but it is not, like, a greatest of all time show.

NiNi 

I also give this show a 9. I enjoyed a lot about it and my quibbles are minor. And I really loved all the performances. Great job, team!

Ben 

This is like a 9+ from The Conversation. Sincerely, do yourself a favor and watch this one. We've complained a lot about Thai BL just really not putting together a complete show. We've got one here and you deserve to watch this. 

In fact, I think one of the big things about the show is that in the first episode we commented this felt more like a romcom and not a BL. And the show said that in the mouth of one of the characters writing about the world, that they wanted it to be more rom-com than the baseline expectations of BL. I really hope this is a sign for the future of what we are capable of making out of this genre, because this was so enjoyable. I was about to give up on watching Thai shows before I started watching this one. I've been strugglin’ out here. It's been hard in these streets.

01:14:54 – Importance of Pulps as Labs

NiNi 

Okay, so all that said, what do we think that these two shows leave us thinking about pulps and the role of pulps in sort of the BL ecosystem?

Ben 

Man, it's just so much easier to talk about a pulp when it has something to say that's interesting. And you can talk about how what the characters do and say reflects the themes that the show cares about. Like, we're talking about whether or not empty fluff is fine in We Are, but we're talking about the actual themes and characters and choices that were made in Knock, Knock Boys! That's such a huge difference, and this is what we mean when we say like there's this huge range in pulps. You don't have to only like the show one way for you to get a lot from it. 

And that's what I like to see out of these sort of scrappier productions. You really wanna see people with a good story to tell that has a strong thematic core and is able to express that through all of the viewpoints that it has in its story. Like the villain of Knock, Knock Boys! is well calibrated for the themes of Knock, Knock Boys! That's actually really good writing.

NiNi 

Twig, what about you, any thoughts?

Twig 

I think at the end of the day, whether something is a pulp or not is not a good indication of whether it has something interesting to say, whether it's a fun watch, whether it holds together, whether there's a good story. So take the word pulp for what it means and not for what it doesn't. It doesn't actually tell you anything about whether or not you like the show, I think, unless you have very specific taste. [laughs]

NiNi 

I don't watch a lot of the pulps, like a lot of the classic Thai BL pulps are shows that I've never seen. One of the things that I enjoy about these two shows is that they give me some experimentation in two different directions. They are the producers trying something out, pulps are like a lab in that way. The pulp format allows creators to experiment with ideas. Some work, some don't. It allows them to experiment with actors in some cases, and that can be good and that can be not so good, it allows them to just sort of see what's going to work without spending a ton of money. And for that, I can't ever truly knock them. There are not a lot of them that I enjoy personally, but I think that they have an important role to play in the ecosystem of the genre.

Twig 

That's one of the reasons why I always try and watch them all, or at least as many of them as I can. I am always really interested in what people can only say in a pulp that they couldn't say in a show that's made by a major production company. 

I've had some good conversations lately with Shan about City of Stars, a pulp that had some really interesting things to say about being famous and being gay and being in a ship and how those things can and can't exist at the same time in Thai popular culture. Just comparing that to how the same themes are handled in shows by major production companies, you guys talked about it in the Only Boo episode, about how there's only so much that a company that makes money off of selling ships can say about ship culture, whereas a smaller production company is more free to criticize fans. That's the kind of thing that I'm listening for when I watch pulps, is like, what are the things that they could say and do that they can only do because they're under less of a microscope?

NiNi 

The scrappy upstarts that could. So, that is going to wrap us up on “Guys Being Dudes,” which is what I'm gonna call this episode.

Ben 

Absolutely the fuck not! [Ben and NiNi laugh]

NiNi

It's gonna be called Pulpmania. So that's gonna wrap us up on our Pulpmania episode and with that, we out. 

Say bye to the people, Twig.

Twig 

Bye! Thanks for having me again.

NiNi 

Say bye to the people, Ben.

Ben 

Peace!