on a small break at work and my dash is dead so imma drop some thoughts on p'aof's shows under the cut so i won't be sniped out of the fandom
i think i realized why p’aof’s works don’t quite work on me anymore, and i think it’s because there’s a certain level of..'compliance' to them that i’ve started to question
when i watched bad buddy for the first time, i thought the line 'we can’t change the world, but the world can’t change us either' was incredibly powerful. but now i keep wondering why all of p’aof’s characters seem so fundamentally helpless against society. they don’t challenge the structures that hurt them, they adapt to them
pat and pran keep pretending to hate each other instead of confronting the absurdity of their families’ feud. tian has to leave and study abroad. day has to regain his sight, and mork has to find a more ‘respectable’ job before they can have their happy ending. tanrak still has to hold onto his faith. over and over, the resolution isn’t that society changes or becomes more accepting, it’s that the characters figure out how to fit themselves into it
it’s like the underlying message is: you can be queer, but only if you find a place for yourself within the existing system. you can survive it, negotiate with it, make compromises with it, but you can’t imagine changing it. the system itself is treated as immovable, almost natural. what stands out to me even more is that the system itself is rarely held accountable for the harm it causes. the families, institutions, economic realities, or social expectations that create the conflict are usually presented as facts of life rather than things that deserve scrutiny or criticism. the emotional work of resolving that harm falls almost entirely on the characters themselves. they have to forgive, mature, compromise, move away, become more employable, become more resilient. the burden of adaptation almost always belongs to the people who were hurt
and i think that’s what doesn’t resonate with me anymore. i used to read those endings as hopeful because they insisted that love could endure despite the world, which is great and all, but now they feel almost defeatist. the characters win by accommodating the world, not by transforming it. even when they refuse to let society define who they are, they still end up reorganizing their lives around society’s limits
maybe that’s intentional. maybe p’aof is interested in telling stories about survival rather than resistance, and there’s value in that. maybe his worldview is that the world is difficult, institutions are bigger than individuals, and maturity means learning how to preserve your capacity to love within those constraints, which don't get me wrong..it's still pretty revolutionary. but i think i’ve reached a point where im more interested in stories that ask ‘why should the characters be the ones doing all the adapting?’ instead of accepting that the world simply cannot be changed
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