Today's Document
Xuebing Du
oozey mess
Lint Roller? I Barely Know Her
Love Begins
KIROKAZE
dirt enthusiast
RMH
Alisa U Zemlji Chuda
Product Placement
Not today Justin
titsay
⁂
Kaledo Art
Game of Thrones Daily
d e v o n
No title available
Sweet Seals For You, Always
Misplaced Lens Cap
if i look back, i am lost
seen from Malaysia
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seen from Canada
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seen from Egypt
seen from Russia
seen from Malaysia
seen from Netherlands
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@virtualtadpole
Since people are talking about Jackie, and this seems like the sort of history some find interesting, you might like to know that Jackie and Marc were best friends back in their school days.
They were social media "cute boys" with a fair bit of following before either actually joined showbiz.
(Photos from Jackie's old Facebook)
I was wondering if people would be confused by A Dog and a Plane's lowly-rescue-worker premise, considering Thailand's unorthodox system of mainly volunteer-run emergency services who used to be (and still are, albeit to a lesser degree) seen as "body snatchers", compared to elsewhere where paramedics are well-trained professionals. But so far, I haven't seen anything to that effect.
Anyway, here are two documentaries that give a bit of an introduction:
Translated from ก(ล)างเมือง : บ้านเณรเล็ก สามพราน (13.... NekoCap lets you create and share community captions for online videos. SSA/ASS ca
With Ticket to Heaven now on the horizon, I'd like to share this Thai PBS documentary about seminarian life in Thailand for those interested in learning a bit more about the series' real-life context before it begins. (YouTube video with subs on NekoCap)
As of the 2025 fiscal year, GMMTV has overtaken One31 to become the top-earning company under The One Enterprise.
(Not sure if it's of interest to the folks around here - there are more details in the full write-up on Reddit.)
Random thought: It's kind of funny how Western observers will often talk about LGBTQ+ representation in BL, while if one goes by the general discourse in online kathoey spaces, they don't ever want to see themselves - they only want to see hot men. (It's hyperbole of course.)
So here are the lyrics to the Ticket to Heaven theme song:
I've heard for so long, there's a place somewhere out there A land of beautiful dreams Where life is eternal I dreamed of reaching it someday
But from the day I met you I finally saw a new world Just having you (having us), us here together I don't want to go anywhere else
Every second that I'm with you Feels like I've found the land of my dreams My world's so beautiful, I wish I could stop time And stay like this forever
If heaven exists, however beautiful I'm no longer sure it's what I still desire All I ask is to have you beside me If you're not in heaven, then there I don't want to go
ได้ยินมานาน ตรงนั้นมีดินแดนหนึ่ง ดินแดนที่เป็นฝันอันสวยงาม ชีวิตที่เป็นนิรันดร์ ใฝ่ฝันที่จะไปสักวัน
จากวันได้พบเธอ เพิ่งไปเห็นโลกใบใหม่ แค่มีเธอคนนี้ (มีเรา) เราอยู่ตรงนี้ ก็ไม่อยากจะไปที่ใด
ทุกวินาที ที่ได้มีเธอ เหมือนฉันได้เจอดินแดนที่ฝัน โลกของฉันดูสวยงามจนอยากหยุดเวลา แค่นี้ไว้ให้นานเท่านาน
สวรรค์มีจริง จะสวยงามเท่าไร ฉันไม่มั่นใจว่ายังต้องการ ขอแค่เธอคนเดียวที่อยู่ข้างกัน ถ้าสวรรค์ไม่มีเธอที่ตรงนั้นฉันก็ไม่อยากไป
Translated from ก(ล)างเมือง : บ้านเณรเล็ก สามพราน (13.... NekoCap lets you create and share community captions for online videos. SSA/ASS ca
With Ticket to Heaven now on the horizon, I'd like to share this Thai PBS documentary about seminarian life in Thailand for those interested in learning a bit more about the series' real-life context before it begins. (YouTube video with subs on NekoCap)
Been pondering it a bit more, and I'm thinking that a problem with the arguments on queerbaiting and BL-like fanservice is that they don't really hold when applied to Thai BL and its main audience.
We all know that the primary audience of Thai BL has always been sao Y. I previously mentioned elsewhere that the "I'm not gay, I only like you" trope exemplifies how this audience has never really cared about queer authenticity in BL. Despite how creators have increasingly introduced queer lenses and voices into their works, Thai BLs still cater first and foremost to the local sao Y audience, at whom the vast majority of promotion and fanservice is aimed. On the other hand, the majority of Thai LGBTQ+ people probably still would not say they feel represented by BL. (Not to mention that "media representation" is a recent Western concept that has not yet gained traction here in Thailand anyway.)
So the argument of queerbaiting - when works are promoted in a way that misleadingly teases or promises queer representation, then renege on that - doesn't really hold in this context, when neither the intended audience nor the LGBTQ+ population is expecting any such "representation" in the first place.
Nor does it make sense that non-BL actor duos engaging in the same promotional activities as actor pairings from BL works - using the "BL playbook", so to speak - are exploiting LGBTQ+ audiences, when LGBTQ+ audiences have never been the target of any of those promotional activities. On the contrary, the target audience of sao Y were the ones who created demand for such promotion, which they willingly consume, to begin with.
Of course, all of the above is considering only the local Thai context. With international reach, the context inevitably changes, and people elsewhere will naturally view the issue through their own frames of reference. But it would be misguided for them to make assumptions, without considering the local context, about how and why certain decisions are made.
Within the Thai context, the perennial controversy has long been (and continues to be) whether the entire BL genre itself is exploitative of the LGBTQ+ community, with how it appropriates the gay identity as a commercial product. This, I'd say, is a much more fundamental question that needs to be settled before the queerbaiting issue can be properly considered. Many of those commenting from overseas seem to have already made their own conclusions, equating BL with LGBTQ+ representation, which in turn enables the queerbaiting arguments. But on the ground, it remains a very much open question.
You know, it's kind of funny to see the term queerbaiting being discussed in the context of Thai works, when you remember that the biggest scandal around here over such an issue was when The Love of Siam did just the opposite and "straightbaited" audiences into watching. (Straightbaiting here meaning the literal opposite of queerbaiting, and not how the term has recently become appropriated for the "will they, won't they" trope.)
I’ve been lapping up Fourever You Part 2 likes warm soup on a cold dreary day, and one of the things it’s got me thinking about is how much I need to continue to resist an auteur theory approach to discussing BL. It’s so easy to blame or celebrate the big names for what they brought to the industry. But this has never been a solo project.
New Siwaj directed the first entry in the Fourever You project, and the company he founded, Wabi Sabi, produced it, but Fourever You Beside the Sky, as @doublel27 reminded me, is directed by one of his protégés, Natthanon Kheeddee. When I looked up Natthanon’s credits, I noticed he worked on editing or cinematography for almost all the New Siwaj series that stunned me with the choices in their color-grading, creating a vivid and unique atmosphere within the throngs of BL series: Between Us, We Are, Fourever You, and Revamp. (He also worked on P10Liners, which was less bold with its coloring but still looked sharp).These were also some of the series that fine-tuned the sound effects into something a bit more harmonious with the soundtrack and tightened the editing to more steady, musical rhythms. I was only surprised his name wasn’t listed under the other visual break-through for P’New, My Only 12%.
You see, New Siwaj doesn’t work alone. He doesn’t even just work at one company. Since the start he’s collaborated with different companies, codirectors, writers, and teams of people working to make one of the many series he’s directed happen. There are certainly patterns and interests you can see across New’s work, but to identify every single element as his own is using a view of film and television-making that doesn’t apply to any series in BL.
Auteur theory, developed by Francois Truffaut, imagined the director as the author/god of the film-making process who held total control and final say over every element. There have been few true auteurs in cinema (Kurosawa, Orson Welles, Ozu, Truffaut, Tarantino) and even fewer in TV with its smaller budget, tighter production schedules, writers rooms, and oversight by commercial interests. BLs have had plenty of unique styles and artistic merit and even visionaries, but none of them have acted in an auteur manner. They are all deeply indebted to commercial interest and depend upon the collaborative efforts of their teams.
Aof Noppharnach is someone whose name gets thrown around as an auteur. His works certainly have a distinct style, but how thorough is that style and in what elements does it show through. Aof Noppharnach is my favorite writer in BL. His lyrical realism with a deeply existential bent gets me OFF!!! The pacing of his plots are perfection, and his opening sequences sweep me into new worlds every time. He gets incredible performances (out of the 15 actors he’s willing to cast), but is that casting or coaching? Is writing all there is to a series? Couldn’t we credit some of his most visually stunning sequences in Moonlight Chicken, not to P’Aof, but to the incredible cinematographer Rath, who’s fluid neon-lit style has become a touchstone for the Aof-Jojo-Ninew corner of gmmtv. Shouldn’t we consider the fact that Aof had the future director of KinnPorsche and My Stand-In working as his assistant director for a large portion of his directing career? Or that he’s had production support from P’X since he entered the industry on the Bang Channel? And even his writing, which I adore, often comes about from a writing team rather than him alone!
You could play these kinds of six-degrees of separation games with any director in the industry. These are productions as complicated as any cathedral or temple they’re building for us on tv. It takes many minds and many hands to bring them to life.
I love when someone like Natthanon comes along out of the previous credits we paid less attention to so we can suddenly take notice of all the ways they might’ve been contributing before. Fourever You Part 2 is visually stunning, sunk in its deep sad sky blue, with some of my favorite sound-editing choices submerging the slapstick world of typical Wabi Sabi BLs within a hushed melancholy. The actors, too, understand the fragile realm that’s been rendered, vulnerable, trembling, like water droplets clinging to a window about to fall. The power of his direction here, similarly supported by others as he once provided to P’New, suggests the strengths he’s been offering when he was helping with the sails instead of the helm. As Phoon’s story shows, it takes many kind and helpful hands to lift someone’s artistic dreams into reality.
Feb 22, 2026 | When Oranges Fall Q1
Just from these pictures, I'm getting the feeling that When Oranges Fall is going to evoke such a visceral response from Thai Millennial viewers that inter fans will struggle to understand.
You see those pens in the actors' pockets? Those are Lancer Spiral 825 ballpoint pens - a Thai brand that everyone used back in the day and will still have deep-seated memories of. In 2020, the brand was briefly in the news when they had to halt production due to the pandemic. A flood of posts followed as netizens reminisced about their memories with the brand, with artists and bloggers joining in on the tribute.
I just know that the series is going to be filled to the brim with these little details calling back directly to our childhoods.
This article investigates the queered star image in Thai Boys Love/yaoi (BL)/Y media released after 2020 through the lens of sissyphilia, qu
Came across this article by Prof. Natthanai Prasannam, which reviews the origins of earlier Thai BL's exclusively masculine depictions of its main characters and argues how this has since been challenged by ITSAY and PP's subsequent rise to stardom. I think it'll be of interest to some of the folks here on Tumblr. It's open access.
THAILAND | When Light Fades - Pilot
This is a pretty unique subject matter to explore. The only major piece of media to look into this aspect of Thai history that I can recall is the 2001 film The Moonhunter (IMDb), and that was biographical.
The series' Thai title แสงดาว แสงศรัทธา, which translates to "starlight, light of faith", is a play on the song แสงดาวแห่งศรัทธา ("starlight of faith"), written by Jit Phumisak. It is one of the best known Thai protest songs, a symbol of the 1970s revolutionary movement that continues to be invoked by protest groups up to the present.
I jeer at the thorns that stab and prick the poor Masses sure stand defiantly When gloomy skies blot the moon so we don’t see Sparkling stars mock it all from afar
- Translation by Ann Norman
The series is set among the jungle guerrilla camps to which many student activists fled after the 6 October 1976 Massacre that brought an end to the 1970s democracy movement. There doesn't seem to be much English writing on their experiences that's easily accessible, but I found this memoir article that provides excellent background and insight: "Reflections of a student activist who joined the communists after the 6th October 1976" (Warning: includes a well-known photo that graphically depicts the violence of the massacre.) It should provide more than enough context for understanding the surrounding politics (though it doesn't seem like the series will be delving deep into that).
An excerpt:
More and more students joined us in the jungle until we had to build a new dormitory. It was wonderful being a new comrade in the jungle. Every night we would organise a welcome party for the new arrivals. There would be singing, dancing, poetry and always a play about the 6th October so that the jungle soldiers would know about the bloody events. I was prepared to die there in the jungle or stay and fight for the revolution until victory. I thought, rather naively, that it would take 5, maybe 10 years at the most... I was assigned to a group of 9 women intellectuals, half of whom were experienced comrades. The head of the unit would lead us in work and study. Various groups had different functions such as food production, fighting, agitation among the masses, transport, medical care, news, entertainment, sewing, cooking, library and newspaper production. For us newly-arrived comrades, it was agricultural work which was the heaviest. We weren’t used to work like farming, weeding, finding firewood, cutting bamboo or cutting down logs. We soon had swollen and blistered hands from using spades and our bodies ached from the strain of work.
After several years, most of the student activists grew disillusioned with the CPT and abandoned the cause. A shift in government policy allowed them to return to mainstream society, and many of them went on to become influential figures in civil society, academia, and politics.
I did some HIV awareness activism back in school (which was decades ago), so it's a topic I do have thoughts about.
For some background, back in the 1990s-2000s, Thailand was the world's poster child for its success in managing the AIDS epidemic. Awareness was raised through widespread public health campaigns, and the country was one of the first to provide universal free access to anti-retroviral therapy.
By the 2010s, the AIDS scare of the 1980s-1990s was already becoming a distant memory. But as in the developed world, the public health success ironically led to HIV/AIDS becoming more or less "forgotten" by society. Public education campaigns waned, and so failed to address the social stigma that continued to pervade society. Employers still routinely discriminated against people living with HIV, and people interviewed in the street would still express discomfort at the thought of sharing public facilities with people who had HIV. (And it's more complicated than you might think - try asking yourself if you'd be comfortable swimming in a public pool with someone who had HIV, or letting your child play with them.)
In the decade since, public education on the topic seems to have become even scarcer. Personally, I haven't seen anything that would seem to point to a shift in public attitude, though I am curious how today's younger generation, who never experienced the original AIDS scare, now perceive the issue. This is a point primed for 17th Spring to shine a light on and explore, and I sincerely hope that the team will give the topic the nuanced attention and care it so much deserves.
todays shared QL location: prison
Clairebell ep1
The Bangkok Boy ep2, ep3
But the inside scenes are at different places (of the prison? or generally whole different location) and the BKB release scene is at the backside of the prison? Sun leaves through a red gate, (implied to be behind anchor passage but the way it was edited it's probably not exactly there). Bell enters through a blue gate, the same fenced up entry Sun entered as well when he got into prison.
The cells are different. The men in BKB are in "open air" group cells while the girls in Clairebell are in closed single or 2 people cells with white-green walls.
Maybe they have different areas and buildings in there. Most of the BKB prison scenes seem to be in one main building (the canteen building of BKB is also the police office and the fitness room. Just shot from different anglers). Meanwhile Clairebelle has a lot more different prison areas with the same white-green walls.
But the prison location of "Winter is not the Death of Summer but the Birth of Spring" seems to be a completely different one. Tho some cells look similar too, just in brown. I don't know if Thailand has so many available prisons to shoot whole queer love stories in 😅
may I add- jack and joker ep2
The exterior appears to be the Bangkok Naval Base Prison. Here's a video that gives some glimpses of the facility:
This feels so weird. I assumed a prison would be one of the last places to offer film crew access, and that all these series must have been filmed in a studio. Apparently not.
i wanna know why fanbases of thai actors are obsessed with trends what is its purpose?
hiiii nonnie
I'm not the best person to explain this so allow me to quote and redirect you to one of my all time favorite post simply explaining the practice of "trending hashtag", written by friend @virtualtadpole and i think you might find the comments section also full of insightful sharings
The fan practice of coordinated Twitter trend pushing - let's discuss
For the average Twitter user: (Sorry, I'm old, I can't get around to calling it X)
Twitter hashtags originally helped people identify the topic of a tweet, and made it easier to follow what people were saying about it.
Live-tweeting as you watched and checking the conversation in the hashtags was one of the experiences of following a popular series In the olden days. (Say, 10 years ago. I don't know if this is still possible, given the deluge of tweets made for any given episode nowadays?)
The trends used to mostly reflect what people were organically talking about, i.e. they tweeted because they had something to say about the topic, not because they had to say something. This is no longer quite the case.
Since Twitter made personalized trends the default, most people haven't paid much attention to the country trends, but you'd still notice that over the past few years an increasingly large proportion of trending topics have been about celebrities.
For fans: (I've never participated in fandom Twitter, so these are outsider observations)
K-pop stans were always a huge part of Thai Twitter. As the BL fandom overlaps a lot with K-pop, it imported a lot of its culture.
Most fandoms have always had an interest in seeing their favourites and their works appearing in the trending topics, which can serve as recognition for the artists and their fanbase.
As the trending algorithm was designed to deemphasize perennial topics and hashtags (real oldies may remember back when Twitter had to adjust the algorithm to stop Justin Bieber from trending all the time), tactics were developed to hack the algorithm, so to speak.
These developed into "trend parties", with people coordinating timing and hashtags (not to be used before the scheduled time) for maximum effect. Main fan club accounts would announce these details in advance, and many companies and brands encouraged it, sometimes making the announcements themselves.
As the industry grew to increasingly value online engagement, fans took these coordinated tweeting even more seriously, working hard to push trends in order to help their faves gain exposure (and more work). Increasingly detailed instructions were given out, and people arranged to follow each other to boost their follower counts up to the point where they could contribute to the trending status.
This has become something of a competition between fandoms, and the ability to push a trend has somewhat become a measure of a fandom's size, power and dedication.
For companies like GMMTV:
The largest portion of GMMTV's bottom line has always depended on sponsors and advertisers - these are who they mean when they refer to "customers" or "clients". Though direct advertising in series and their broadcasting used to constitute half their revenue, as much now comes from hired artist events.
As most of their audience watches online, TV ratings don't mean nearly as much as engagement for GMMTV and their advertisers. Some metrics that they use to measure the performance of a series are OTT platform viewership numbers, number of tweets/posts, and actors' direct engagement in the form of Instagram follower numbers.
GMMTV clearly appreciates series (or artist events) making Twitter trends, as it's a metric they can sell to advertisers.
They must be aware that a lot of it is the result of coordinated action by fans, but do they mind? Should they? In the end, fans/viewers are part of the product package that they're selling to their real customers - the sponsors and advertisers. (Except when the fans are purchasing merch or concert tickets, in which case they become the customers.)
For advertisers and marketers:
This part I'm mostly curious about, as I don't know how they think. Surely they must know that the trends are mostly a result of coordinated fan action, but what do they make of the fact? Do they see it for what it is - a measurement of the degree of engagement by dedicated fans, but likely not the general public? Does it bother them? Or are they happy with it, as they're already targeting these dedicated fans as their target demographic?
Clearly, it must depend on what they're selling. So beauty and skincare products, sure. But inkjet printers? If I sold them I'd want my metric to reflect broad popularity over a diverse population rather than a concentrated group of hardcore fans, dedicated though they may be.
But even if the numbers are manipulated, they might still be a good enough indicator. Coordinated or not, there has to be a large number of people pushing these trending topics, and that's an easily reachable audience in any case.
But I guess in this age of influencer marketing, most brands probably love these dedicated fandoms, as they're easy to target and possibly convert. And even if they don't directly become customers themselves, the fans' loudness can still help amplify the exposure given to the products their faves are endorsing.
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In their post, @virtualtadpole is discussing trending specifically in relation to GMMTV since it's originally posted in that subreddit but I think at this point in time, it's becoming a practice across all channels. In the age of declining TV ratings, most Nielsen ratings not being made public anymore, Twitter trends become an attractive alternative metric to measure the success and reach of a series -> something crucial for project owners/producers to determine the things that might follow the conclusion of a series be it brand presenter couple job for actors of a series or fanmeeting of a series...
This is even more important to series that are exclusively online original series of platforms like WeTV or iQIYI that aren't aired on TV (for example: My Stand-In, Top Form, Knock Out...) that the streaming numbers also match the statistics for trending. Streaming numbers on the platform alone don't always translate to people who are passionate enough to spend 1500 baht on a ticket to the final EP screening or 300 - 1000 baht on merchandise for the show. For example, I've seen merchandise being announced and then retracted because there just wasn't enough pre-order numbers ┗( T﹏T )┛.
This practice might seem even more aggressive or competitive among fanbases of branded pairings within the same company like GMMTV or DMD, since I think it's pretty safe to say that resources are limited and the more exposure a pairing can have or the more popular the pairing is, they are more likely to receive job opportunities (this does not always necessarily mean opportunities in the form of an acting work) either as a solo artist or couple's work. The fanbase might seem obsessed with it because they want their favorite pairings to be able to work with better directors, get better scripts, work on higher value productions and if the current project isn't that good in trending/popular, there's a chance of the company won't give that pairing another work (not very true because GMMTV has given works continuously to couples whose first series weren't that 'popular' or 'well-received')
I hope that answers some of your inquiries nonnie. I'm not someone specialised working in PR and marketing so this is just my take as a 10 year casual viewer of lakorn and thai media consumer.
Graphical timeline of GMMTV artists
image in four parts below the break.
Full size here.
Original post on Reddit with comments here.
