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Spring Grab Bag Part 1: Genre Shows

And we're back! This week we're talking about all of the shows that blended other genres with BL, including mystery, horror, and science fiction. Because only NiNi and Ginny watched everything, we brought Shan and Ginny back to the booth to cover all of the shows. Today we're talking about how Playboyy failed us, 7 Days Before Valentine landed in a specific niche, our reactions to Dead Friend Forever, and the different things we walked away with from Love for Love's Sake.

Timestamps

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

00:00:00 - Welcome 00:01:15 - Grab Bag Part 1: Genre Shows 00:02:31 - Playboyy the Series 00:18:42 - 7 Days Before Valentine 00:29:35 - Dead Friend Forever 00:50:03 - Love for Love’s Sake 01:13:39 - Outro

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The Conversation Transcripts!

Thanks to the continued efforts of @ginnymoonbeam as transcriber, and @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.

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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 your 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 - Grab Bag Part 1: Genre Shows

NiNi

We're literally doing it live, Ben. [Ben laughs]

Shan

Great start. [Ginny and NiNi laugh]

NiNi

We’re keeping that in! We're absolutely keeping that in! [Shan and Ginny laugh]

Go on ahead, Ben.

Ben

And we're back! This week we are doing our Grab Bag episode. We will be talking about quite a few shows. But first, we have guests.

NiNi

Say ‘hi’ Ginny and Shan. Say ‘hi,’ Ginny.

Ginny

Hello!

NiNi

Say hi, Shan.

Shan

Hi, people!

NiNi

Like Ben said, we're here to do a grab bag. Actually, we're here to do two grab bags. It's a two-parter, fun times. The first part, we're gonna talk about a bunch of genre shows. It's gonna be fun. We're gonna have a good time. It's always a good time when Ginny and Shan are with us.

Ben

Today we are talking about Playboyy the Series, 7 Days Before Valentine, Dead Friend Forever, and Love For Love's Sake. You may use the timestamps we provide to jump to your relevant section.

NiNi

Look at Ben being a good cruise director. I love it.

00:02:31 - Playboyy the Series

Ben

We begin with Playboyy the Series. Since I did not watch this show, NiNi or Ginny, would you like to describe Playboyy for the people, or do you want me to describe it based on my three episodes’ experience?

NiNi

I feel like this is all you, Ginny, go.

Ginny

Playboyy is a show that tried to be about the complex lives of sex workers and people exploring new thresholds of kink, and instead was simply a hot mess that devolved into several different directions. Did not say what it intended to say—or perhaps intended to say horrible things, we’re not clear on that—and disappointed nearly everybody. How's that?

Shan

Very well done.

NiNi

That is it in a nutshell. Ginny and I watched this to the end. Shan quit. Ben quit way earlier.

Shan

I wanna just give myself credit for hanging in there for a long ass time. I think I made it all the way to, like, episode 9 or 10 before I had to stop.

Ben

I'm just gonna own it right away. I quit at the end of episode 3. I said this is not for me, and I have nothing nice to say. I'm gonna just leave now.

NiNi

You really did. We're here to talk about the genre BLs of the season. And Playboyy technically counts as a, I guess, murder mystery? But ugh. Okay, I'm invoking The Shipper.

Shan

[gasps] Wow.

NiNi

I know we said we're never going to talk about this again, but I am invoking The Shipper.

Ben

Proceed.

NiNi

What a hot fucking mess this was. This show wanted to be about so much and in the end ended up being about nothing. It's offensive. It's sensationalist. I found it bad in a particularly banal, uninteresting way, and I'm mostly upset because when it started—it wasn't great, but it had some ideas. And then those ideas just completely fell by the wayside.

Listen, guys, I am the sex in story person. This was right up my alley. I don't know if you've ever seen the phenomenal classic Shortbus. Ginny was like, ‘this is giving me Shortbus,’ and I was like, ‘ohh tell me more, I’m seeing it.’ That was maybe episode 4, and by episode 6 I was like, I don't know that it's giving Shortbus.

I thought it was saying something about sex that it actually wasn't saying because in the end it's all about monogamy and the power of love. Which, yeah, okay, it could absolutely be about that. But that's not what it was sold as. I can't even continue on it. Ginny, you have to take over for me, it's just bad. I don't like it.

Ginny

What you said is key because it wasn't sold as being about monogamy and the power of love. And it's fine for a show to be about that, but if a show is going to give you a bunch of seamy underbelly, kink, sex work, highly stigmatized sexual topics, and then it's gonna come around and being like, but actually monogamy and the power of love is what it's all about, then you are only further stigmatizing those topics. If you put them in, and then you don't land on a positive note with those topics, you're just reinforcing what everybody already thinks about them.

That is not what the show was sold to us as, and I'm furious about it because I want to see more material that deals honestly with some of the more difficult sexual topics and the more controversial areas of sexuality. This show promised us that, and then it ended up being like, ‘buuut if you're in true love, then all problems are solved, and the kinkiest people are somehow also the evilest, oops, we don't know how that happened.’ And it's just infuriating.

NiNi

I'm not even gonna get into what Playboyy is actually about, because in the end, it doesn't matter. I'm just gonna be straight. There are people who enjoyed this. I was not one of those people.

Ben

I have a couple of questions I'd like to ask so we can unpack some stuff here. Let's go around the table, starting with Shan.

When we all signed up to watch Playboyy originally, what were you hoping for based upon the initial promotional materials?

Shan

Oh, this is such a loaded question. Now I have to invoke Only Friends.

So, Playboyy and Only Friends share a writer. Only Friends, as was very thoroughly discussed on this podcast, also ended with a message reinforcing monogamy and the power of love in a show that claimed to be about something else. And so I went into Playboyy, actually really eager to see another work from this screenwriter, because I wondered if maybe some other things had happened on that show that got in the way of this message that he has been claiming to be trying to put out in the world.

And so I expected, based on the promotional materials, based on the way the folks behind the show were talking about it, I expected this to be very much a sex and kink positive show, very much a show exploring the many different ways that sex and sexual relationships can evolve, can look, trying to also shine some light on the lives and experiences of sex workers. All of that was part of the promotion of the show, alongside the murder mystery aspect. It was never clear to me going in how much about each of those things the show would be. It seemed to be trying to tackle a lot, so I was interested to see how it would weave those things together. And it just didn't really, and it didn't do a lot of those things it was claiming to be doing.

Ben

What about you, Ginny?

Ginny

Very similar to Shan, I expected and hoped for a lot of showcasing of sexual diversity, and as NiNi said, I was hopeful in the first episodes. She and I hung on so long trying to defend what the show might be trying to do. It did look like it was trying to show somebody who was averse, maybe to touch, maybe was asexual, maybe had trauma, we weren't clear. That was an interesting thing to explore. People in sex work for various different reasons. People who were very clear about their kinks and interests.

And I was hoping for a mature, in-depth exploration that didn't treat sex itself like it was this shocking new frontier, that sort of accepted this is something that's a part of many people's lives and can be treated with seriousness and playfulness at the same time. I did not expect the plot to hold together because there were simply way too many characters, but I at least wanted the core messaging and character development around sexuality to be consistent and interesting and positive. And the longer the show went on, the worse it got in all of those respects.

Ben

So going in, I was expecting there to be some really fun examination about masculine sexuality, and then very quickly I realized the show was doing porn setups as basically just a joke? They weren't really doing with that what we thought they might be. Like, they're introducing porn setups to talk about the inherently artificial nature of porn and the lack of genuine connection happening for men who are projecting their expectations of sex onto the false notions they might be getting from adult content. And that is not what happened. At all, so. I left very quickly because I was like, I don't need this. And I thought their sex ed 101 messages were deeply muddled by some of their own unfortunate choices.

Speaking of unfortunate choices, let's go around the table again. What was the unfortunate choice that this show made [laughs] that pushed you over the edge and either quit it or decided you hated it by the end?

Shan

I gave it a long time. I really tried with this show. I tried to read some of these deeper themes and messages that both makers of the show and people watching the show were claiming were embedded in the work, and I couldn't find it. I think it was kind of a slow trickle for me of things that just kept adding up, but what might have really been the snapping point for me was what they did with Zouey's storyline. Someone who was maybe sex averse or sex repulsed. I was very much looking forward to development of that as he fell in love with somebody and was trying to work through that. The way that the show resolved that storyline—his falling in love with somebody just made it go away. He just suddenly was fine with sex one day, just like that. That's all it takes, apparently. And then even further down the line in the show, they undid it even further by completely retconning his entire issue and changing the source of it from the beginning.

But that moment when they just showed him just suddenly, magically being fine with sex through the power of love after what had felt like a setup of a serious sexual dysfunction issue that he wanted to work through, it just felt so disrespectful to me. It was a moment where I was like, ‘Oh, nothing this show is doing matters. It doesn't take any of it seriously. I was silly to trust that it did.’ That was just kind of it for me. I was like, I can't do this anymore. I'm out.

Ben

Ginny?

Ginny

There wasn't one moment. It was just a slow decay of trust and interest over time. I think the storyline between First and Soong—first of all, it was badly acted.

Ben

Is First the thermometer boy?

Ginny and Shan

Yes. [both laugh]

Ben

Yeah, that's—spoiler alert!

Shan

Was that your moment, Ben?

Ben

—that's why I left. [laughs]

Ginny

I hung in with them well past the thermometer. That story could have been really interesting about the complexities of a dom-sub relationship that also has a very real financial angle. They keep being drawn to each other for reasons I did not understand, and the show did not really justify. It could have been such an interesting exploration of a really complex power dynamic, and instead it was just two people taking turns being mean to each other and then senselessly coming back to each other with no kind of nuance or complexity. So frustrating.

Ben

NiNi, did you have a breaking moment with this show that you recall?

NiNi

There are so many moments where I had to push through, like the toe sucking incident, I had to push through. There was a dog food incident, I had to push through that, as well. When I was over it, though, was, the main character is supposedly pretending to be his twin brother, and there were hints along the way that maybe there was no twin and there was maybe a disassociation happening there as this person tries to come to terms with their self-image in the wake of having kinds of sexual experiences that he enjoyed but didn't think he should. And there was a lot to unpack there. But then they showed the twin brother’s dead body, and I was just like, ‘Okay, no, this show is shit.’ I was over it at that point.

I stayed till the end because as I said to everybody, I wanted my complaints to be specific and comprehensive. But yeah, that was it for me in the end. The fact that they sold it as some sort of psychological deep dive and it ended up being not even a bog standard murder mystery with a cartoon villain.

Ben

I'd like to follow up with something Ginny mentioned in her response. You talked about how this show was a slow betrayal of trust for you. Let's talk about this creative team.

So with Cheewin and Den, this is their second outing together. How are we feeling about Den and Cheewin as a creative duo?

Ginny

I don't trust Den anymore, which is a shame. He's very, very vocal on social media about the shows he's doing and the way he talks makes it sound like he's coming from this forward thinking, sex positive, ‘Let’s push the boundaries’ way. But then the two shows, as Shan mentioned, Only Friends and Playboyy, just felt so regressive in their ultimate messages, and in how they treated their most boundary pushing characters. So I—with much regret because I was very excited about him as a new voice and a new presence in the scene—fully do not trust him anymore.

Cheewin I have more grace for because he's got a much bigger resume and he's made some things that I really loved. Secret Crush on You is one of my shows of all time. Why r u? is also a favorite of mine. I am watching Deep Night and I'm curious to see what he's doing with Den's involvement maybe less in this story side of things.

Ben

I'm glad for your answer. I've been dealing with my own version of BL burnout for a while. As you all have gotten here in real time on this show, so I am currently not watching Deep Night, so I've been curious about your reactions as we get deeper into that. I'm tired of getting disappointed around the 50 to 70% mark of these shows and then being grumpy for a month as they stumble their way to the end. I’m about to be like NiNi and just binge shows after they're done.

NiNi

It's a technique that I highly recommend for a lot of shows, actually. Not every show, but a lot of shows.

Ben

Shan, you traditionally used to like to binge shows after they were mostly done. You started watching live because you unfortunately met me.

Shan

[laughs] It's all your fault, bestie.

Ben

Where are you currently on Den, Cheewin, and your general vibe with showrunner teams that have let you down, and engaging with future work?

Shan

I really agree with what Ginny said about Den and Cheewin in particular. Cheewin has a long history. I've really loved some of his work. I've really disliked some of his work. I think that's how it's always gonna be with Cheewin, he's a little bit hit or miss. He tries things and it doesn't always work. But I'm willing to come into each of his new projects with benefit of the doubt to see what he's trying to do.

With Den, I'm much more wary after these couple projects back-to-back. I'm always wary of creators who speak so much on social media outside of their work to try to shape opinions about it rather than letting the work speak. That has been a wariness that I've had around him from the beginning because he's been very vocal about his active projects, trying to shape and define the fan response to them in a way that I find a bit off-putting. With these projects in particular, I feel like he's been really trying to claim a mantle that he is not actually owning and earning with his work. So yeah, similar to Ginny, I don't really trust him anymore. I will not be live watching any more shows that he's writing, and I'll be waiting to hear from other folks that I trust about whether or not I should be even venturing into them at all.

NiNi

I'm going to give it a 0 which I never give shows. I was actively offended and I don't want to talk about it anymore.

Ben

Ginny, you have any final thoughts about Playboyy you wanna share?

Ginny

No. I want someone to make a good sex show, that's all.

Ben

This show is going to get a DNF from The Conversation. We did not finish it. You don't need to either.

NiNi

And with that, let's move on.

00:18:42 - 7 Days Before Valentine

NiNi

The next show we're gonna talk about is 7 Days Before Valentine. Wait, so which one of us watched this, was it just me and Ginny?

Ben

Yeah, just you and Ginny. I'll talk a little bit about it and then I'll let you two take over. We jumped onto 7 Days Before Valentine because Punnasak Sukee was running this project. We all know him from 180 Degree Longitude Passes Through Us, which is a favorite of mine. So we were really excited to see additional work from him. He was adapting someone else's work this time.

The initial premise is about this guy named Sunshine, who is an aspiring actor who has a kind of ugly breakup with his boyfriend, who's now seeing someone else. He meets this supernatural being which is able to grant him a wish to erase someone from existence in order to help him reunite with his boyfriend. He gets seven days of attempts to erase someone, and then the world resets, and he progressively erases different people who he believes are the person responsible for why he and his boyfriend didn't work out.

I ended up not finishing the show because I was struggling with it as a weekly watch. NiNi came behind it late and watched it basically in two or three sittings and seemed to have a much better experience with it.

I want to go to you first, Ginny, because I think you live watched the whole thing.

Ginny

I did live watch the whole thing, and I do think that NiNi did it better, because I think it was better suited for a binge. Obviously, we know going in that this guy is not gonna end up thinking that erasing somebody every night is a great thing to do, like, that's a horrific premise. His journey of really internalizing what he's doing and the horror of it is slooow to unfold over 10 weeks or so. It moves too slowly. I think it actually would have been a better show with shorter episodes. I think the episodic breaks are where they need to be, but I think that each episode could be tighter and brisker.

NiNi and I both also read the source novel. I don't know how much we want to get into that, but I think we both were fascinated by how much the adaptation team added and enriched the very simple core story. It was a beautiful show, I think NiNi will talk a lot about that. The sort of root of this man who's lonely and has felt like he's had one person who loves and is a partner to him, abandon him and his desperation to get that back, being slowly replaced by his attachment to this other person who's locked in this weird Faustian situation with him.

There was some good meat in there and some really good scenes played out. So I am glad I watched it. I think I would have enjoyed it better on a binge and I think it would have been a better show if it had been, just edited more tightly and moved faster through this character’s realizations.

NiNi

I think that's mostly how I felt about it. So I did watch it on a binge and I remember when we were discussing it saying that it felt like being in the theater for some really experimental play. Just sitting in the dark, thoroughly enjoying watching this thing unfold, not knowing where it's going but having a real good time. That's how it felt to me going through it, it was a little trippy. It was deep and interesting in the places that it needed to be deep and interesting. I liked the rhythm and meter and cadence of the dialogue. I don't speak Thai, but I do sing, and getting rhythm and meter, you could kind of feel the way that it was written, the kind of poetry, maybe, that it was meant to evoke. I was thoroughly enjoying this soothing rhythm of how it was written.

The set design is outstanding. And then there's some stuff happening on like TVs and signs and all kinds of things in the background that was just crazy fun. It's a very moody, atmospheric kind of piece. It's sorta kinda like folklore or fairy tale, something supernatural. I had a really great, engaging time with it. I truly enjoyed it. I thought it was beautiful to watch.

I also agree, Ginny, that it feels long, but then when you go through it, you're like, well, what would they cut? Where would they cut? Everything that's there feels like it needs to be there, and then the things that you're thinking, well, maybe they could shorten this or that. They add to the atmosphere of the piece in such a way that helped me immerse myself in the work. Like, there's some lull portions of it where it's just a character singing or, like, Sunshine doing the monologue from Macbeth. Maybe they could have cut this, but then when those things are happening, I'm literally glued, I can't turn away from them.

It's definitely not BL, it's very experimental work that I personally enjoyed, but it's not a traditional narrative at all.

Ben

Shan, did you watch this show at all?

Shan

I did not. When the show started airing, I still hadn't watched 180 Degree Longitude Passes Through Us. So I remember when you all started this show live, asking whether I should watch it. And you, I think Ben, are the one who told me no. ‘No, I want you to watch 180D first.’ And as I was working through that binge, you all were continuing with 7 Days Before Valentine and kind of realizing, oh, this is not really holding up the same mantle as that show. So I ended up never diving in and then the final reviews of the show were pretty much mixed. It didn't feel like something I needed to prioritize to watch. I still haven't watched it. I'm not sure if I will.

NiNi

The only similarity really between 180D and this is that they both feel theatrical, but they feel theatrical in different ways. 180D is not anything like 7 Days Before Valentine.

Ginny

I think what you said about this feeling kind of folktale- or fairytale-esque was spot on, NiNi. In contrast to 180, which is all about these really deep, complex character interactions, all these characters felt very archetypical, and we were kind of watching these archetypical themes play out. In a way that was quite effective for a lot of it, but yeah, very different story strengths than 180 had.

Ben

So since the two of you finished the story, do you have any comments on the arc that Sunshine and Kyu go through over all of the resets they do together?

NiNi

I mean, I think here is where we would actually do like a little bit of novel comparison. The novel is so much more simplistic. There is so much less happening in the novel on a narrative standpoint. Kyu is not a character that gets his own arc in the novel. Kyu is just a character that shows up every night, gives Sunshine his wish, who he's gonna erase, and then disappears. Whereas in the show, Kyu is a fully fledged character in its own right with his own arc, and it is suggested, as well, his own Kyu?

I enjoyed Sunshine's arc in the show, a very lonely character who is sort of figuring out that he doesn't need to grab onto this one person and hold on to them super tight and be terrified if that person leaves him. Basically kicking and flailing to save the relationship once it's over. The way that that arc plays out, the way that Sunshine learns over the course of the seven nights. He starts with, ‘oh, we'll just get rid of the new guy, that'll bring him back to me’ and then he goes deeper and deeper and further and further out trying to find the ripples of how his relationship went wrong. Until, I think, it's the sixth night he asks to have himself erased? And then by the seventh night, he just wants Kyu to be happy. It’s really so well done.

Ginny

I think the nicest little storyline is around Sunshine realizing the importance of community. You see him initially very fixated on ‘I need this one person to come back to me’ and as the story wraps up and everybody's restored, you see him starting to see these other relationships with people who are in his life because of his ex, but also maybe care about him, who he could have some kind of community with. I think that was one of the most important character growth lines of the show, specifically with the ex's friend, and realizing that maybe the way he had seen her and his relationship to her had been very clouded by his own self-image and assumptions about people seeing him as somebody who should be discarded.

NiNi

What did you think about the Mephistopheles-esque character? Because he wasn't in the book.

Ginny

Oh, he was my favorite. The liquor and flower shop, so much fun. Every scene. There were a lot of scenes in the show that I was kind of bored during because again, I think they were just not paced very tightly, but every scene with this liquor flower shop owner, I was riveted. He was so engaging and dynamic as a atmospheric character, he brought so much richness.

Ben

What did the two of you rate the show?

Ginny

I gave it a 7.5. I think it's worth watching if the premise interests you, if you like great theatrical settings or cinematography. It was beautifully shot. And if the sort of Faustian theme and things like that are interesting, definitely worth a watch.

NiNi

I gave it an 8.5. I think that because I binged it, I had a slightly different experience and there were some things in the pacing that maybe I enjoyed slightly more because of that. I don't think it's for everybody, but if you like Faustian stories and you like experimental storytelling, I think it's a good one.

Ben

It's getting an 8 with an asterisk.

NiNi

I think that's fair.

00:29:35 - Dead Friend Forever

NiNi

So next up, we are going to be talking Dead Friend Forever. Be On Cloud’s, horror-slasher-thriller.

Shan, you pick up this one. Tell us what Dead Friend Forever is about.

Shan

Dead Friend Forever is, I think, maybe the first attempt in the genre to do a long form horror story. One of, actually, the big discussion points about this show is exactly what genre it lives in and what it's trying to be. It ended up blending a lot of different horror sub genres. It did some good mystery work. It did end up having a couple BL love lines, but that didn't follow the normal beats because of the genres it was living in. I think ultimately, it is the story of a teenage boy who was harmed by many people and the fallout of that.

Ginny, I feel like you know more of the lore behind the show and kind of the build up to it. Do you want to add to that?

Ginny

So this was a showcase for Be On Cloud’s new stable that they first brought in through their reality show The Hidden Character. And then this was the drama that a large number of these new guys got to star in. So some of the storytelling choices, there were some scenes that I felt like, oh this is really just for your resume reel, isn't it? But that said, it was well constructed. It was, I think, a good choice to make kind of the slasher genre that lets you have a lot of different characters with very vivid personalities that let these new actors demonstrate their talent without taxing them too hard on too much complexity.

I really enjoyed this show. I have some notes, but overall, I thought it was fantastically well done, and especially as a way to launch about half a dozen new faces into the scene. And also a way to launch the cooperation between Be On Cloud and Sammon, the very beloved writer of Thai BL suspense. Her skills and Be On Cloud’s orientation and vision seem to be a really good match, so I'm excited to see her writing and their production team do more together.

Shan

I think actually finding out that she was the writer is the thing that finally sucked me into this show. [laughs] I jumped in, I think after episode 8? I kept hearing how good the writing was, and then I think Ginny told me that Sammon was the writer and I was like, ‘Oh! Let me get in there.’

I'm with you, I want them to do a lot more collaborations in the future because she is one of the stronger writers, I think, working in Thai BL, and they are one of the stronger production houses, so it's a really nice pairing.

Ben

I was watching this weekly with you all and then we got to the end of episode 4, and the teaser indicated a flashback and I was like, ‘I saw The Untamed. I'm not spending 27 episodes on that.’

[Ginny laughs]

Shan

Oh not The Untamed catching strays! Rude!

NiNi

I will allow it.

Ginny

We're gonna get so many notes.

[Shan and Ben laugh]

Ben

Look, I enjoyed The Untamed, but it was so ridiculous. And I just was not in the mood because I am not that keen on horror. As a black person who was raised in the South, I do not need to watch horror to trigger my fight or flight instinct for fun, so. I'm not that keen on the genre. It does not do much for me. I find that I can really only give about two-ish hours to a slasher concept before I get tired of it and need to walk away. And that happened to me with Dead Friend Forever, ‘cause we were in it for about four episodes, which was about three-ish hours, and I was like, ‘I'm done. [sigh] I'm taking a break.’

And then Shan, after episode eight, was like, ‘This show is very good. So, jot that down.’

Shan

I was like, ‘I'm so sorry, bestie. You're gonna have to finish it.’ [laughs]

Ben

I was like, “Goddammit!” [laughs]

Shan

It was really good!

Ben

I enjoyed a lot of the character writing. When they decided to delve into the horrors that these boys had inflicted on Non, played by Barcode—who was really good in this show—the show decided to really full commit to it. Holy shit!

NiNi

Like it was Korean level, how deep they got into the bullying.

Shan

Yeah. Like, they did not hold back, they really went for it.

Ginny

Everybody wanted to see all of those boys die by the first flashback episode. Everyone was like, nevermind!

Shan

Kill ‘em all.

Ginny

Whoever’s out in the woods, killin’ ‘em? Get ‘em all.

Shan

Here's another axe.

Ben

I think they did a good job in illustrating the ways that boys just choosing to be a little bit shitty can snowball. There were a lot of points in the flashback where one person not being a coward or not being cruel could have saved all of them from the disaster that befalls them. It's important that we understand, like, why all these boys need to die if we're going to watch them all get brutally murdered.

Speaking of the brutal murder portion of it, let's talk about the final episode and the bloodbath we got. Let's start with our favorite deaths. Who is the most bloodthirsty of all of us? It's definitely Shan.

[NiNi laughs]

Shan

There's no contest.

NiNi

It is 100% Shan.

Ginny

100%.

Shan

The highlight reel of deaths, which was my favorite? I really liked Fluke and Top kind of taking each other out together. So these are both characters who had been antagonists throughout the show. Top had been the most overtly aggressive antagonist throughout the show, he was just horrible, annoying, like you could never see why anybody would ever like that kid. And Fluke had been the bystander who saw everything happening, didn't actually do any of the perpetration directly, but also never intervened and never tried to make any of it stop.

In their final scenes before their deaths, they were both standing in the same place they had always been: denying their accountability, saying, ‘I refuse to accept blame, I refuse to apologize, I refuse to die,’ and then they got into this little battle with each other and ended up going over the banister. They had already both been grievously injured, Fluke’s injury probably being my favorite. He ended up stabbing his own eyes out, which I thought was just such an appropriate poetic ending for him before then falling to his death.

Ben

Ginny, you were a huge fan of this show the whole way through. You're up next. Who was your favorite death?

Ginny

My favorite death was New. I think he's the last confirmed death because it's left sort of vague what happens to the last few guys. What I love is that he's been on this big revenge chorus and as far as we can tell, he's been doing everything. He overdid it. He caused the deaths of two people who weren't at all involved. Narratively, he needs to die, but he goes through this whole cycle of, ‘is this what Non would have wanted? Non, did I let you down again?’ He's got huge guilt on him.

He's been shot. He's bleeding out. He sees Non come to him and sort of say, ‘yes, big brother, you did a great job destroying all these people who destroyed me. Thanks for that.’ So it's this very cathartic and almost sweet moment, even as he is dying. And I really liked it.

Ben

NiNi?

NiNi

Whoo, so, in my view, the people who most needed to die didn't. Or maybe they did, who knows. But the death that I found most satisfying��Por dying slowly in the background while everything is not about him, given that his need for the spotlight pushed almost everything that happened. I thought it was really elegant that he just literally gets dumped on a couch and basically forgotten to die.

Ben

Because I'm last, I get to cheat. My favorite death was Fluke because all he did was watch people be cruel and do nothing to help, and he was driven to insanity and stabbed his own eyes out. I thought that was excellent, really good thematic death for that character. A+.

But my favorite death in terms of playing with genre themes has to be Tea stabbing White to death. A lot of folks in the discourse were hoping that he was gonna be the Final Girl.

Shan

It's me, I'm folks! I did not want White to die!

Ben

[laughs] I didn't think that boy deserved to die, but I thought it was appropriate. And he died in a really fucked up way.

NiNi

Genre-wise, it was definitely appropriate that he died.

Shan

It was a totally fair storytelling choice. I'm not mad at the show about it, but I'm really sad.

Ben

Oh, but we do have things we're mad at the show about.

Shan

We sure do. [laughs]

Ben

Let's talk about that bullshit ass final 10, 15 minutes [Shan dramatically sighs] with Phee and Jin.

NiNi

Phee and Jin and technically Tee, but let's focus on Phee and Jin.

Shan

Phee and Jin are the bigger problem here.

Ben

Who wants to go first? [brief pause] Oh, good, I'll go. [laughs]

NiNi

Oh no, no, no, no, no. No, no, no, no, no friend. I am going to go first, okay.

Shan

I was gonna say, NiNi’s gotta go on this one.

NiNi

Because let me tell you, Jin was the living worse because Jin was the Nice Guy. Jin just thought that his friends could be shitty as hell to Non forever, and as long as he smiled at him and was sweet to him and he put enough quarters in the Non machine that maybe Non would fuck him. And then when Non—trigger warning—when Non ends up being assaulted by his tutoring teacher and Jin sees that, what does he do? Does he try to stop it? Does he try to comfort him? Does he try to help him? No! He records it and puts it on the internet to ruin Non’s life. He needed to die, bloody, and he did not die bloody for me to see. And I was upset by that.

Now Phee. I have words for Phee because your man is basically run out of town on a rail by these losers. You are all set to get revenge with his brother, and then one of them slangs you the dick and you're done with the whole revenge thing? Really, you gave up on the revenge? Are you serious right now? You ain’t hard. You ain’t bad. You ain’t serious. You're really trying to protect Jin? After everything? You know what he did!

Ugh, I can't even. Phee and Jin needed to die bloody so that I could see. That did not happen. The psychological horror of whatever the story is saying happened with them at the end—that they never left the house, that they’re trapped in there—I don't care. I needed to see them die bloody. The end.

Now you can talk, Ben.

Ben

Thank you! [NiNi laughs] I'm just gonna say it straight up, I fuckin’ hated it. I feel like that was where the BL aspects of it got in the way of the horror aspects of it. It feels like the show didn't want to show them dying horrible, bloody deaths because they were the primary BL pair? And I was not that keen on them doing the whole, ‘they didn't make it, but here's a little bit of fluff for the people who need that so that they can check out from facing that reality.’

I didn't like it! I wanted to see them also die bloody, painful deaths. They hedged. They showed Jin also being affected by the toxin that New inflicted them with when he was taking a knife to his hand, but they didn't finish it. And I was grumpy about it.

Shan

I agree with both of you and I think it's a shame because, I thought that what the show was doing with Phee through, like, episode nine was so interesting and so smart. Phee cared about Non, but he had also ended things with Non before he disappeared. He thought that Non had been cheating on him. Things didn't end with them in a good place. So he kind of reluctantly came along with New into this plan to get revenge on these boys who had ruined Non’s life.

That whole arc that played out was honestly some of the best mystery writing I've ever seen. It was so masterful, the reveals were perfect, the pacing was awesome. I was so hype about this show. And then around episode 10 is when they started pulling their punches on Phee and it seemed to me to be related to this Phee and Jin stuff. It started with Phee and Jin finding out the roles they each played in Non's life and his downfall. I expected that to be a big moment of realization for Phee, like ‘oh, this boy that I've been interested in was the person who filmed Non being assaulted and put it on the internet.’ Like, that should have been a very, very big deal for him to find out that Jin is the person who did that. But it wasn't. Phee didn't care, really. He had a very brief reaction and then moved on and continued protecting Jin but it didn't create a fracture in their relationship at all, which it absolutely should have.

That for me is when the writing of the show started to falter, and when I started to feel like, like you said, Ben, there were some other influences external to the show interfering with the story revolving around Phee and Jin being a popular BL ship and them not wanting to bust them up. And then that also led to, I think, this weird choice with the ending to imply that Phee and Jin survived and got to be happy. ‘Oh, but maybe they didn't. Maybe that was a dream and they're in the woods. But we're not gonna show you. We're gonna leave it open. Shippers get to interpret it the way they like. The horror fans get to interpret it the way they like. Everybody wins.’ But, when you make those kind of weaselly, non-choice choices, nobody wins.

Ben

At the end of episode 11, they dropped that axe, and then they panned over to it and I'm like, ‘oh boy, I can't wait to see somebody get fucking chopped up with that fuckin’ axe.’ And no one got fucking killed with the axe! I am so disappointed.

NiNi

Ginny, what about you? Where did you get off, so to speak?

Ginny

It didn't feel ambiguous to me so much as it felt like a classic horror movie gotcha. You think they got out free and they're fine and they're all happy? ‘Whoops. Nope, they never left the woods.’ I think if they’d landed on that just a little bit harder, if for example, we'd seen a hand pick up that axe and drag it along the ground and then cut to black.

NiNi

Oh, that would have been so good.

Ginny

Right? I think it might have been wenkexingapologist who suggested that so I don't want to take credit for it, but lovely, my alternate ending. I do think because the ending was so brief and we don't actually see them back there, as Shan said, it leaves a little room for people who really wanna believe in Phee and Jin's happy ever after to believe that. And I think that's a bit cowardly, although I do understand the market forces that maybe led them to do that.

I also would have really loved to see, like, a full character devolution the way that we got with Fluke very appropriately poking his eyes out and Tee stabbing his new innocent love. I would have loved to see that kind of character-driven end for both Phee and Jin, so I'm a little disappointed in that. But my real quibble with the ending that we got is just that they didn't land quite hard enough on it for me.

Ben

I don't like a psychological ending to a slasher when I'm in a slasher I'm expecting my bloodlust to be sated. I don't wanna think through the horror at the end of a slasher.

NiNi

[laughs] Gotta agree.

Shan

That's fair. My only other real strong critique of the show is, given the way that White died, given that he was a victim in the end, I was frustrated by how underwritten he was relative to all the other characters. We just never got to know him. We didn't understand what motivated him. We didn't understand why he liked Tee. We knew he had nothing to do with what happened to Non, and that was intentional, he was meant to be an innocent victim in this. But I would have liked to know him better.

I think where my frustration with this really came bubbling to the surface is he had a hallucination at the end, just like all the other boys. And he was hallucinating boils on his skin and we never knew why. We never got any backstory to explain why his specific fear was centered on this visible disfigurement, this idea that he was going to be rejected because he was dirty, quote unquote. We can fill in some guesses. A lot of folks have put forward theories, but we shouldn't have to put forward a theory for that, all the other boys had hallucinations and fears that were very clearly tied to what we knew about them and what they had done. We didn't get anything like that for White’s. They wanted him to be part of it, but we never knew enough about him to understand what brought him to that state, and why those were his fears, and that felt a little lacking to me, in the end.

Ben

So, final ratings. NiNi?

NiNi

I ended up at an 8.5 because I just thought that it was egregious that I did not get to see Phee and Jin die bloody, A. And B, I also thought that the way the show was structured was really good, but, I think that it may have been more effective for the flashbacks to have been interspersed with the present day rather than being a section on their own in the middle.

Ben

Ginny?

Ginny

I also gave it an 8.5. It was so tight and so well written, did almost all of what it set out to do. Did pull its punches a little at the end. Did weaken story-wise over the final three episodes. That's why it's not higher, but I did really love and appreciate it.

Ben

Shan.

Shan

I gave it an 8 for the same reasons basically that NiNi and Ginny just said. I think it was an excellent show for 9 episodes and then I think it kind of weakened in the final arc. I give a lot of weight to the ending of a show like this and I think having to leave on the bum dissatisfied note at the end of a slasher is just kind of a bummer.

Ben

For the reasons Shan gave, I gave the show a 7.5. Release is a huge part of horror storytelling and not giving us release after three months pissed me off. I don't want to give the show a 7 ‘cause that feels disrespectful to how well executed this whole project is. My primary feeling with Dead Friend Forever is dissatisfaction when I think about it. I should be reveling in the bloodlust at the end and I did not get that feeling.

NiNi

[laughs] I know, right? One thing I did enjoy at the very end is everybody hallucinating baby Barcode basically coming for their asses.

Ginny

That was so good.

NiNi

Barcode had such a great time playing that character.

Shan

We shouldn't leave this segment without talking about how good Barcode was in this show.

NiNi

He was amazing.

Ben

They let Barcode play off of a lot of different characters in a lot of different ways, particularly with some of the fantasy scenarios. And I'm really excited for future work from him.

That averages out to 8.125. We'll give it an 8 from The Conversation. Recommended if you want to watch a long-ass horror experience with the caveats that we have some consternation about the ending.

00:50:03 - Love for Love’s Sake

NiNi

Let's head on to the main event for this episode: Love for Love’s Sake. Ben, you got this one. Take it away.

Ben

Finally, a show I watched properly the whole way! We've been here for an hour and 20 minutes, talking about shows I either quit or started late!

Love for Love’s Sake is a Korean BL. A 29 year-old man wakes up in some sort of strange world where he is back in high school, dealing with some sort of game interface telling him he has to go make his blorbo happy. The show initiates from him meeting with an old friend who's a writer who asked him to beta read his book. And he was pissed about this het nonsense, going, “Why does this boy have to be sad and suffer in other people's happy ending?” His friend goes, “Well, they're adapting my book into a game. If you could, would you make him happy?” And then he passes out drunk, because that's what happens in Korean shows, and he wakes up in the fantasy world, and now he's got this game interface telling him to do stuff. And his mission is: Make Cha Yeo Woon—his blorbo—Happy, or Die. As the show goes along, the game gives him different rewards, sends him different quests. And this gets complicated by some reveals we get late in this, but let's pick up there with the initial conceit.

Shan, you watch this live with us. Let's talk through the live watch experience of this. I was very familiar with this type of storytelling, where someone dies in our world or whatever and then wakes up in another world and has to deal with the fantasy conceits of it, particularly around gaming and such. And also I've played a lot of fucking video games. So a lot of this stuff was super legible to me right away and I did not need a lot of handholding. But you expressed some frustration early on with this.

NiNi

Just so that I understand when Ben teaches me Japanese terms that I remember them. Is this what they would refer to as ‘isekai’ Ben?

Ben

This is what we would call isekai.

Shan

Look at you, NiNi.

NiNi

Thanks! I learn things every day.

Shan

The live watch of this show was extremely fun. A lot of the discussion week to week was about like, what exactly is going on here? Because the show didn't want to tell us. [laughs] I think what might have frustrated me a bit in the beginning was not understanding fully the rules of the universe, which as we get to the end becomes clear why that was. There was a purpose to that in the storytelling. It's not always that easy to tell at the beginning of a show how confidently the story is being told, and like how intentional all the choices are versus what's just a misstep.

But the show, I think, was confidently told, like it knew what it wanted to do and what it wanted to do, ultimately, was leave a lot of room for interpretation in what this game world was, why it worked the way it did, what the choices of the characters meant, what the characters themselves even were. So I thought it was great as a live watch, honestly, and I'm really glad that we watched it that way. I got a lot out of those weekly discussions where we would all unpack what we thought was going on, the questions that we had, things that we noticed as we were trying to figure out what this world was about. An early moment in the show that just gutted me and, like, had me clutching my chest and like in it—no matter what—was when Myung Ha was in the game he would get these scores over the heads of people to see what Yeo Woon—what was it called, Ben? The attractiveness score or the like score or something like that?

Ben

It was the score about his affection level; how much Cha Yeo Woon liked you.

Shan

Right. So because his original mission as we understood it was to make Yeo Woon like him, he would see where his affection level was sitting—it was always hilariously low. And then he unlocked this new power to be able to see how Yeo Woon's affection level was sitting for other people as well. The score was very low for everybody, but then we see that the lowest affection score that Yeo Woon has for anybody is for himself.

Ben

I screamed.

Shan

It was a knife straight into the heart, like, oh my God, this poor boy. And you just fully understood him in that moment. It was done so craftily through this established power that Myung Ha had the way that the show moved on from it quickly. Like, I'm not even sure how deeply Myung Ha even processes it as the player in that moment. It was just so artfully done, and I was like, “Oh, this show knows what it's about.” It really instilled confidence in me from that point forward that I was along for a ride here, and that the things I didn't understand, it was because I wasn't supposed to understand them.

Once we clicked into that, the experience of watching each set of two episodes each week, having deep discussion about them, and unpacking them along the way was such an awesome way to watch. It's not that it's bad in a binge, but I think it's one that really benefits from stopping to think between installments and let your mind wander and process all the different things that it threw at you.

Ben

With that in mind, I want to ask Ginny, because NiNi's been very busy. But, Ginny, you generally receive through the grapevine what's going on with the project, even if you're not really watching it at the moment. What was it like for you seeing this show engender such positive brainrot in people, and then going into it yourself fairly spoiled for some of the big reveals?

Ginny

It was a totally different experience. The main reason I didn't watch it live is that Korean BL is real hit or miss for me, so I always let you guys go into it first, and then tip me off if you think I might like this one. Around episode 6, I was like, “Hey, should I watch this?” And Shan was like, “No, just wait till it's all over.” But yeah, I was seeing a lot of hype. It was clearly making people think a lot. And then it was really cool watching the conversation turn.

I didn't realize right away what was happening, but it was clear that this was getting really existential all of a sudden in ways that people hadn't necessarily been anticipating. Seeing people suddenly less up in their heads about what exactly is going on and more like, “Oh, I'm suddenly hit with all these emotions about all of these ramifications of what I've learned.” And then I did, not intending to, pick up the gist of the big reveals, and so I went into it kind of knowing what it was going to be. So, I had a very different watch experience from those of you who watched it live.

It was a good watch experience. It might have been better for me because I was immediately looking out for all of these little indications and all of these deeper ripples of meaning. For me, it was more like I know what we're getting to, so as soon as I saw that, I knew what it meant. Which was also a good experience, just a different one.

Ben

From this point on, listeners, we are going to discuss major reveals and spoilers about the end of this show.

I have a personal family experience around drowning, and so when we saw Tae Myung Ha's eyes in that sequence when he kept, like, teleporting around the world, because of all of the water sounds we have been getting in the show, I was like, “Oh no… I'm not gonna put that out there.” But I very much felt it coming. This show ends up being about Tae Myung Ha’s suicide, and we end up in an uncertain place about what all we're experiencing with him.

Shan

We started this show thinking that it was a game. And recognizing that the show was dealing with some heavy themes, recognizing that there seemed to be an element of Yeo Woon being a stand-in for Myung Has's need to develop self love. And I don't think we realized how literal that was going to get. It was heavy to realize this character that we had gotten invested in…was gone.

Ben

In her notes, NiNi has a comment about The Good Place relative to this show, so I want to come to you now, NiNi. You went into the show with us basically telling you, “We know you're busy, but in no uncertain terms you must watch [laughs] this show. We will not be telling you about it on the podcast. You will be watching.”

NiNi

So, I actually went in unspoiled, but I did binge it after it was over. It played with genre in away you start up thinking that it's a sci-fi thing where he's trapped in the game, and it ended up being this sort of existential, heavy magical-realism thing. When the game starts malfunctioning is when I realized it all was not quite right in terms of how we were processing originally what the show we thought we were getting is.

In the beginning, it's cool and fun to look at the show as a video game and try to be like, “Oh, there's the NPCs, there's dead pixels, there's the background map." Yes, Ben, I do know game things. Thanks. All the little video game elements of the story. You're picking up on all that and you're having a good time. In the meanwhile, it is giving you flashes of these things. Like, it's giving you that flash of Yeo Woon being the person that he hates the most. The game malfunctioning in little bits and pieces, things like that. You're getting all these hints, but you're not putting them together until something big and catastrophic happens. It's so well done. I was having such a good time with it, and then I get to the end and you realize exactly what's happening, that this is all…it's the gods playing dice, right? It's them saying this is the way that we have decided that you deal with your afterlife.

Ben talked about my note about The Good Place. For me, that's what it was. It was about Myung Ha having to find a way to accomplish the things in death that he didn't accomplish in life, of death not being an ending, of death being an opportunity to still learn and grow, and maybe have a life afterward. Whatever it is that you have to learn to take with you into the next life. Basically, it's Myung Ha learning to pour so much love into himself that he can feel it either in his afterlife or in the next life.

And that idea of death not being the end; people found it bummed them out. I found it really comforting.

Ben

I really want to get into how everybody received this project and the major feelings it engendered in them that they walked away with. Ginny, where are you sitting with this resolution of the show and how you're carrying it forward with you?

Ginny

Good question. It left me feeling, I think, less sad than it might have left you. NiNi compared it to The Good Place. I found myself thinking a lot about The End of the World With You, which is also about characters wrestling with the desire to die—the theme that I often am wary to engage with in stories. But I found both of these to be very affirming and loving towards those characters, while also saying, “What if you made a different choice? Not because it's the natural or the easy thing, but because there's reasons to do that.”

For Tae Myung Ha to turn his focus away from meeting other people's needs and say, “Actually, what if your happiness mattered? What if you gave yourself the love and care that you want to give to this character that you see yourself in?” is such a resonant theme. I came away not needing necessarily to know how I interpret the characters final state or status, but feeling like I'd been gently led through this experience of “Love yourself more. Work to make yourself happy instead of walking into the sea.” It was a very life affirming watch experience for me, although it did have this deep melancholy around it also.

Shan

One of the things I really like about the ending of the show is that it is so open for interpretation. There are no two people who have the exact same interpretation of what the ending means. People took what they needed from it, I think, and what they preferred to believe, and the show left it open for people to be able to do that. I ultimately didn't actually receive this show as a BL or a romance at all.

Important note here perhaps is that I am an atheist and I don't believe in the afterlife. And so for me, this was a show about something really tragic that happened, and maybe being able to be given this small chance to find self love. I don't think Yeo Woon is an actual person that Myung Ha fell in love with. I think he is a representation of Myung Ha's own self and his need to learn to love himself. And so I did find it quite sad and quite melancholy, but in a way that I thought was just so lovely. Such a lovely way to deliver that message about the importance of self love, about the importance of trying, about not giving up. I really loved it. I find it beautiful.

Ben

It's the rare instance where a show ends ambiguously, but the audience is not fighting with each other over the interpretation. As the resident Sad Boy of the podcast team, let me tell you: I chose the saddest interpretation possible for this.

NiNi

[Ben and NiNi laugh] Of course you did, bestie. Absolutely you did.

Shan

You sure did. Even sadder than mine, somehow. [laughs]

Ben

I was talking about the end, and Shan was like, “Damn, Ben shit. [laughs] “You live like this, girl? Shit!”

I was really caught up in the character of the nebulous writer, the God figure, and author of this world, seemingly. I like the idea of someone who clearly cared about his friend not really knowing what to do with his friend's tragedy, and trying to find a way to remember him kindly. I think that's where I connected to, less so in Myung Ha's final moments or afterlife, but more in the grief that the people in his life have to live with after his passing. I like the idea of somebody immortalizing a friend of theirs in an experience where the player is asked to please make him happy.

NiNi

This is why you're the melancholy boy, because I didn't even go there.

Ginny

Yup! [laughs]

Shan

One of the really interesting live discussions that we had was around the role of the game creator—a lot of speculation about who he was, this idea that he was a friend who would lovingly created this place for Myung Ha. And I was like, “No!” because why would a friend force these cruel choices on someone he was trying to help? The cruelest choice that I think really stands out for people in the game is when Myung Ha is forced to choose between saving his grandmother or saving Yeo Woon, and that was a big point of focus for a lot of the speculative discussion.

Who put him in this game and for what reason are we talking about God-like figure who is putting him through trials? Are we talking about a friend who's trying to give him a path to self love? One of the things that I love about this show is that there are so many things like that throughout where you could focus on a thing that happened, or something that was going on in the background, or like an interaction, and you could unpack it and come up with so many different interpretations for it that could be true. The show is just loaded with stuff like that and so many details.

Once you know where the ending is leading, if you go back and watch it from the start, or just think back, there are clues the whole time about the drowning. There are water sounds from the first episode. You can hear water when Myung Ha is in like a certain state. The place that he is talking with this author in is in some kind of otherworldly dimension that never connects to anything else in the show.

NiNi

He always looks wet, his bangs are plastered to his forehead. He always looks like he's soaked.

Shan

They definitely knew what they were doing the whole time, and the show is just loaded with these small details that the production baked in. It's just so well done.

NiNi

The show is basically a Rorschach test. It's so interpretable. It’s hard to do that in a show. It is an incredibly difficult balance to maintain.

Ben

That was part of the fun I had chatting with everybody. Shan was talking about the back and forth we're having where she really rejected my interpretation because she thought a lot of the choices in the game were cruel.

NiNi

I'm on Shan’s side. I think it's a cruel and whimsical God.

Ben

And I was talking about how ugly grief can be sometimes, and how sometimes some of that will come out where you get mad at them. I like that a big part of the resolution from Myung Ha is to reject the bullshit choice of choosing the boy he likes or his grandmother. That seems like the kind of frustration that somebody who's listened to a friend who's suffering fall into a really negative spiral over something that is not a correct way to place things against each other, like an either or in their life. And I interpreted that as sort of a…externalization of their frustration about that kind of stuff.

Shan

And I remember liking that interpretation, Ben. Not really a denial of the cruelty, but like an acknowledgment that sometimes we're cruel to people we love because of our own frustration. I really ended up liking a lot of different interpretations of the show, even if I didn't share them. I really enjoyed reading people's thoughts about it.

Ben

I really like that part a lot. I really loved that everybody took something from this and it was appreciable. Someone gives you their interpretation and you just go, hmm. And then you sit with it for a bit. And there's not a ‘I agree’ or ‘disagree,’ you just receive what that person is connecting to, and you've learned a little bit about somebody else as a result. We didn't talk a lot about the side characters, but I liked Cha Woong Ki in this because he was very funny on Boys Planet, and I really liked what Oh Min Su did with Chun Sang Won, because that boy was a very fun version of queer, and his crush on Tae Myung Ha but we'll get no satisfaction from it.

Shan

[laughs] I remember Ben being very disappointed that we never got to meet Kyung Hoon's boyfriend in Canada.

Ben

Right! We never met the Canadian. I'm so mad. I'm like, “That boy doesn't exist!”

Shan

Yes! And I said, “Ben, you're not allowed to meet the Canadian partner. That's the joke!”

NiNi

That's literally the joke. You go to a different school. You don't know them. That's the joke.

Ben

Yeah, but you showed me—what's that show—Goblin? We went to Maple Nation! We can go find him!

Shan

I do think maybe one of the consequences of the way the show ended and how that absorbed our attention is that the side characters got maybe a little bit of short shrift. Who are they? Are they players in the game? Are they characters in the game? Are they real? They kind of got lost a little bit, but those performances were great, and I really liked the dynamics between the characters inside the game.

NiNi

So ratings, let's start with you, Ginny.

Ginny

I gave it a 9. I thought it was really excellent. Beautifully done. A really good experience. As a story, it's not something that I want to go back to.

Ben

Shannon.

Shan

I also gave it a 9. I do think that there was some fuzziness here and there. It was short, and there were maybe some shortcuts that had to be taken because of the time that they had. It didn't quite get to the 10 level for me. It's a strong recommendation with a big trigger warning caveat about some of the really heavy content that it gets into, and I'm leaving it at a 9.

Ben

NiNi?

NiNi

So, I gave it a 9.5, and the reason that I gave it a 9.5 is I often come to this show and to our watches in the spirit of “let things play out and see what happens.” Because of doing this show, I have become a long view kind of person, and so, on an episode-by-episode basis, I now tend to give things a lot more latitude as being links in a chain. I am always the one here being like, “Okay, it did this, but you don't know what they're going to do next. Let's give it some space.” And I think that this show, I think more than any other show that I've watched, has really rewarded that way of processing it for me. The fact that I let it play out, and let it play out, and let it play out, in the end, it tied everything back up that I had noticed.

Ben

I gave the show a 9. It ends ambiguously and the audience does not have consensus. I think that is a totally fine choice, but considering how heavy this show was, I don't know how I feel about how much of the audience just walked away only connecting to the BL romance arc of it, and so it's a 9 for me from a recommendation standpoint. I have to gauge the viewer when I'm recommending it to them, because I don't know that the viewer ends in the same place with the show, and I'm not entirely certain where the show even wants us to land. I think it's fine for the show to turn that mirror back on us at the end as a completely valid choice, but it complicates it as a recommendation.

NiNi

It’s 9 from The Conversation.

Ben

I think a 9 is a valid recommendation from us. It is a worthwhile show to watch if you are okay contemplating suicide and the social impacts of that.

NiNi

Well...should we end on a joke after that?

Shan

[laughs] I was gonna say! Maybe we should not end on such a sad note. [NiNi laughs]

01:13:39 - Outro

Ginny

I am really excited that we're getting more and more genre BL. It's something that I've been eager to see. Me and NiNi probably are the most forgiving viewers. I love seeing shows take wild swings, even if they end up kind of missing. So my feelings overall are: Bring it on, bring us some wacky combinations, give us some things that make us incredibly moody. Let's expand this media world and give us BL with all of these other genre flavors added. I love it.

Shan

I'm agreeing with Ginny on that. I think it's cool to see BL venture outside of the basic middle of the road romcom model that it started in and really try out some new stuff and its storytelling. I do appreciate when shows are going to go into genre that they have a firm grasp on the genre that they're playing in, and that they try to meet the standards and expectations of those genres. I think the shows that we discussed today—mostly—really came to play in the genres that they were in, put together some really interesting, provocative stuff, gave us a lot to think about. And I'm really excited to get more of that in BL.

NiNi

I really enjoy good genre blend. All genres have their own conventions, and I enjoy when people who are writing in those genres are playing with the conventions, and they understand them, and they know how to bend them and twist them, and maybe even in some cases break them. It's interesting watching BL experiment with that—to different levels of success, granted. But I like watching it happen though.

Ben

What I really like about genre blending and BL is it gives these creators a chance to really say something, and there was some of that here. I think the Playboyy team had things they wanted to say, but they made a goddamn mess of it. I walked away from Dead Friend Forever and Love for Love's Sake with a lot that I was thinking about in response to the narrative and the events that the shows wanted to unpack. And even though I didn't manage to finish 7 Days Before Valentine at the time, I was with them for this examination of Sunshine’s character, and the nature of his relationship, and the selfishness at the core of his character and unpacking that.

This was a really cool experience beyond just, “There's two pretty boys. They smile a lot. There's some juice. They're going to kiss.” Which was a really nice change of pace. Despite the sort of mixed responses we may have had here, I really enjoy that the space exists enough to allow the people who have the money to let people try to do stuff like this.

NiNi

Okay, and on that note, that is going to wrap us up on this Genre Grab Bag. Next up in Part 2, we're gonna talk about some Japanese BL.

We out. Say bye to the people—in chorus—1, 2, 3.

Ginny and Shan

Bye.

Ben

Peace. [Ginny laughs]

NiNi

Oh, my God, y’all are so bad at this.

#playboyy the series #love for love's sake #dead friend forever #7 days before valentine #ben and nini's conversations #podcast #the conversation #lgbtq #on art #spring series #thai bl #bl series #korean bl #Spotify

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The Pillars: The Return of OffGun and TayNew

And we're back!

NiNi and Ben bring Shan back to the recording booth to discuss how BL is not just a young man's game. We break down why we enjoyed Cooking Crush and Cherry Magic Thailand so much, and what makes OffGun and TayNew so special.

Come and join us for a healthy mixture of simping, genre appreciation, examinations of conflict writing, and love for queerness in BL.

Timestamps

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

00:00:00 - Welcome 00:01:15 - Intro 00:03:58 - Cooking Crush: A Surprisingly-Good Romcom 00:08:02 - CC: Comedy Ain't Easy 00:16:59 - CC: Dynamite’s Queer Writing and Ten as a Rare Romantic Lead 00:32:08 - CC: Final Comments and Ratings 00:41:14 - Cherry Magic: Beating Expectations and Simping for Tay Tawan 00:54:13 - CM: Relationship Development and the Powers 01:02:15 - CM: Other Characters 01:13:51 - CM: Ratings 01:19:34 - The Pillars: Overall Thoughts

The Conversation Transcripts!

Thanks to the continued efforts of @ginnymoonbeam as transcriber, and @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 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 - Intro

Ben

And we're back. Welcome to the second spring outing with The Conversation. Shan is here with us today. Say hi, Shan.

Shan

Hiii.

Ben

And we're going to review the GMMTV pillars.

NiNi

So, Ben, what are the pillars? Let's do a little GMMTV history.

Ben

So when we refer to the pillars, we're talking about the original BL ships at GMMTV. The two we're going to talk about today are Off Jumpol and Gun Atthaphan, and we're gonna be talking about Tay Tawan and New Thitipoom, who've been together four times now — soon to be five.

Shan

I think what's important in the BL context about these two pairs, OffGun and TayNew, is that they have been at this for years at this point, like nine years, I think this year?

Ben

Nine years? Yep.

Shan

They have been at GMMTV, leading BLs, for almost a decade. And they have aged with the genre. They are now in their 30s. It's great, in my opinion, to see them continue to make shows and come back.

There was this idea that Thai BL was only for very young actors, that actors, once they exited their 20s, would also exit the genre, to move on to, quote-unquote, “mainstream” work that was heterosexual. And I think that these pairs sticking around and coming back to make new shows in their 30s is really important because it just shuts that whole line of thinking down: that BL is only about and for young people, that it is a phase of a career that actors need to quote, “move on from.” And also it gives us the opportunity to actually see adult stories in GMMTV BL, which is not something that we've gotten much of yet. To see stories about adult characters actually played by adults who are the right age for those characters is really refreshing.

So it's been really interesting to see these pairs come back into the public consciousness and to see that the fans are actually happy for them to stick around. I think that's been pretty cool.

Ben

I think what I enjoy the most about these two pairs coming back together is, both of the shows they're attempting have a more grown-up feel than their previous work. And in both cases, I think the fact that these actors are experienced and know each other really well genuinely benefits the work that they're doing.

00:03:58 - Cooking Crush: A Surprisingly-Good Romcom

NiNi

So let's dive into the first of the pillars. We're going to talk OffGun, and we're going to talk Cooking Crush. So, Ben, what is Cooking Crush about?

Ben

Cooking Crush is about how the most effective way to introduce a new actor at GMMTV is to slide them in around a bunch of other veterans.

Shan

[laughs] That's what it's about for you, for sure.

[all laugh]

Ben

Cooking Crush is a college-set BL about a team of culinary students who are trying to win a cooking competition, and the complications in their romantic lives around them. This show is actually really simple. Like, our protagonist, played by Gun, is named Prem. He lives with his grandmother and his sister. His grandmother runs a formerly very popular restaurant, and he has a goal of helping his grandmother's restaurant become more successful, and he wants to open a chef's table type of restaurant in the future.

He and his two friends, Samsee and Dynamite, are kind of the oddballs in their culinary school? They're considered the lowest ranked students. They get kind of picked on a bit. Prem is considered kind of clumsy; Dynamite is just really young, because he's kind of a prodigy; and Samsee is just picked on because he's old, because he's pursued three different degrees without completing them.

They're having some difficulties with school and Prem ends up having an interaction with Ten, played by Off, who is a med student who was a little bit overworked at the time and has accidentally starved himself to be pissy with his dad. The two of them have a very cute moment and a little relationship starts to build between them, originally off of Ten wanting Prem to teach him how to cook more, and Prem basically scamming that man because his little sister lost her tuition money.

NiNi

I think that's a good explanation of this setup. Shan, I want to come to you first. What's your headline on Cooking Crush?

Shan

Ohh, Cooking Crush is a warm hug of a show. And I love it. And it's not perfect. But it left me with such a good feeling and I intend to rewatch it, many times.

NiNi

OK. Well, Ben, I think we got your headline: Cooking Crush is about Aungpao.

Ben

That's about him.

[all laugh]

NiNi

Cooking Crush for me… what is my headline on Cooking Crush? That everybody in this is really good at comedy! Except maybe Gun, who's a little less good than everybody else, but everybody that they put in this is a very funny person, including Gun’s real-life sister, who I laughed my ass off at several times.

Shan

It's surprisingly good comedy. This one has been kind of a weird one in terms of the way it's been received by fandom. It didn't really fit the mood of the moment, I think. I think right now Thai BL fandom is very much paying attention to like, these more high-concept shows that are doing really fancy shit. Crazy visuals, supernatural, and mystical stuff. Cooking Crush is just a sweet romcom that wants to be really good at being a sweet romcom [laughs] and that's kind of it. It has kind of modest goals, but I think that people underestimate how hard it actually is to make a romcom that is actually sweet, and actually funny, and actually makes you want to support the couples in it—and this show succeeds at those things.

00:08:02 - CC: Comedy Ain't Easy

Ben

I think that's probably the biggest thing I would want to highlight about this show. Comedy is not easy. [laughs] At all. Comedy and comedic timing is really difficult to do, and Gun’s admitted that it's not his strongest skill as an actor—that he needs a lot of help from the crew and his cast mates to do comedy well.

Shan

Whereas for Off this is where he thrives, and he hasn't gotten to do it before in a BL.

NiNi

I think that they had the right idea in making Gun’s character Prem sort of the straight man of the ensemble, so to speak.

Ben

A great joke unto itself.

NiNi

[laughs] And surrounding it with a bunch of really good comedic actors who could sort of take up the zip and the zing of it all. Like I think that was the right idea. And I did enjoy, like, all that sort of zany, madcap stuff that was supposed to be happening around him from a writing standpoint, and the shape of what I saw it was supposed to be. I absolutely enjoyed that. My little niggle about it was that the direction doesn't zing enough for me, in terms of how I feel like this was meant to go.

It's really surprising for me because this was directed by Golf Sakon, who did my nemesis Fish Upon The Sky, but [laughs] Fish Upon The Sky, for all that we could say about it—and trust me, I have said plenty—it was visually interesting, it was zippy, it was well directed from that standpoint. And I feel like Golf’s direction in this was a little bit flat. It didn't have the zing. That sort of is my main complaint about the show, but the show itself is really, really good. I just wanted it to zip a little bit more.

Shan

Yeah, I agree with that critique, NiNi. I think the directing and the editing—[laughs] cannot forget the editing—is definitely the biggest ding on this show. There was some weird stuff going on in the production. The most notable of course being right in the middle of the show when we suddenly had an episode that was mostly reshoots, which was extremely obvious because Off got a haircut after they finished wrapping this show, a very obvious haircut, and then they had to come back and do reshoots. There was some really hinky editing throughout the show, like some dropped beats, some confusing scenes, some flashback sequences that didn't make sense as flashbacks… They were trying to do some stuff in the editing booth that I just think didn't work, and sometimes really undermined the good work that the writing and the acting was doing.

In terms of overall production, this show was not quite at the level it should have been. In the end, that didn't get in the way of what was a really strong story and really good performances from the cast, and so it still came together well enough, but it's a definite ding.

Ben

I want to talk about the writing portion. Shan, you're usually really good at detailing conflict writing. How about you go through the various major beats of this show and how this show executed them?

Shan

Obviously, we had the main romance, which was between Ten and Prem, and that was a pretty straightforward, simple romance, that actually worked amazingly, because what this show did extremely consistently was it set up all of these really annoying like classic drama tropes for the romance, and then every single time it just knocked them down by having the characters communicate with each other. An obstacle came up for the couple that would normally cause a one- or two-episode conflict. Instead, Ten would insist on talking to Prem about it, coming to some kind of alignment and understanding each other, and they would sail through it. That was kind of the consistent throughline with their relationship, and it was really strong and really lovely to see.

We also had a side couple romance that was between Fire and Dynamite. That one was a little bit more contentious. It was tied to a couple different things that were going on with Fire, with internalized homophobia, with some struggles that he was having in being his authentic self in his family with his mother. Dynamite was someone who kind of pushed him, and kind of made him aware of the things within himself that he was stifling. And so they had a very adversarial dynamic when the show started: Fire was very committed to kind of trying to be the son that his mom wanted him to be, including dating a woman, and so really fighting against what he was feeling for Dynamite. Dynamite is a great character, who I'm gonna let you talk about more, Ben, but I think their dynamic really pushed both of them along a good character growth arc through their relationship.

Alongside that, we had a couple big threads about the friendship between particularly Prem and Samsee and Dynamite. They were working together on this cooking school dream, they were trying to get through their classes, they entered this cooking competition and there was a lot of story about them as like a group of people who are kind of considered losers within their cohort, trying to get to a place where they were a good and efficient cooking team who could actually play at the level of some of these other folks that they were competing against.

We also had another big thread for Ten’s family situation. His mother had passed away some time ago. He had a lot of anger and resentment with his father about the circumstances around that, and a lot of trauma around his mother's death, and he was kind of working through that as he was falling in love with Prem.

So we had all of these different things flowing into the same story, and one of the things that was so impressive about this show is that they actually did all flow together. The writing was very consistent. The characters were figured out from the beginning of the story. It's one of those things where, once you have all the context of who these people are, you can look back at all their previous behavior and it totally makes sense, and everything tracks. And all of these plot threads came together in the final three episodes through an actually pretty well executed conflict arc, which is something that doesn't happen very often in Thai BL—usually that's where Thai BLs completely fall apart. But here all of the conflicts were well laid throughout the show and built to kind of come to a head at the same point, and then we had them converge in the final arc.

Not everything about the way they played out was extremely perfect or satisfying, but most of it was, and the characterization stayed true the whole way through. So it was some pretty strong writing for a show like this.

NiNi

I have to concur that the writing was really strong on this show. It's logically laid out. It makes sense, the characters behave like recognizable human beings, which I can't always say [laughs] is the reality of a lot of these dramas that we're watching. For example, Dynamite, who is a complicated character—with the mix of the writing and the acting, I could see underneath where his pushing of Fire was coming from, and why it was something that he felt like he needed to do?

We find out through a flashback later, which—was a weird way to get this information—Fire was the one who made Dynamite who he is. He made Dynamite feel like he had to stand up for himself and be out there, and all he's doing is trying to do the same for Fire. It just plays out in this way that I think made some people uncomfortable, but I could see it once the context information was there. This is where [their] editing got hinky, because clearly the character was written this way. The hinky editing needed so that it took almost 2/3 of the show for the motivation to meet up with the character. That's not a writing problem, that's an editing problem.

I found the writing on the show was incredibly strong, everything logically follows on from everything else. There was a lot of surprisingly deep writing around Ten’s whole issue with his dad about his mom, and his feelings about his mom. Around Samsee's feelings of potentially getting left behind because he's older, and they're getting into these relationships and he's starting to feel like, ‘what is there for me? It took me so long to find my people, and I feel like they're leaving me.’ And that was a particularly strong thread that I really enjoyed. I enjoyed Metha, who is Fire and Ten’s friend—hilarious, played by Tum, super good actor. I love him, very, very funny. I really enjoyed the writing on this thing, and I can't always say that for, particularly Thai BL… it was delightful.

00:16:59 - CC: Dynamite’s Queer Writing and Ten as a Rare Romantic Lead

Shan

All the characters in this show are great, but there's a couple that really, really stood out, and I think we should talk about them. And Ben, you should definitely lead us with some Dynamite talk. Tell us why that character matters so much to you.

Ben

Dynamite has the great honor of getting The Conversation’s first blorbo of the season award.

Shan

[laughs] So early in the season, too.

Ben

I know. He is the winter ‘24 blorbo for me! I love this boy. Here's the thing. With Dynamite: he is canonically young, he's like 17-18 in like his third year in school. And his only friends are played by Gun Atthaphan and Dome Jaruwat, who… create this very visibly queer friend group dynamic? This communicates a ton to me almost instantly, very early in the show, particularly with Dynamite living in some sort of like tenement housing, and then having really no one else to rely upon when someone died in the apartment above his, and contaminated the apartment he lived in, so he ends up moving in with Samsee.

It’s a very obvious story to me as a queer person, that he had to finish school early because he could not stay home. And he has no one else to rely upon except his closest friends when he's in trouble. Samsee is communicated as a person who is like ‘I don't want nobody in my house,’ but immediately opened up his house to Dynamite when Dynamite was in trouble, because where else was that kid gonna go?

And so, with Dynamite, we eventually learn that he was kind of getting picked on when he first got into the school with the rest of them, because… obviously he's a kid, and boys suck. And Fire saves him from this bullying instance, which almost read as a bashing? And this clearly rearranged his view about who he is in his life, where he recognized that he was gonna get clocked regardless. And so he was just going to be who he is. Fire gave off this whole fuck-you aura that he was clearly drawn to, and so he didn't go at Fire timid, because that's not what he saw in Fire.

Dynamite spends the early part of the season determinedly pursuing Fire, who feigns annoyance about this, but is eventually revealed to… not want Dynamite to stop pursuing him. When he gets drunk and calls Dynamite out to come hang out with him, he tells him very directly: ‘even if I say no, don't stop.’ Which, very familiar to me dealing with my own closet issues and a bunch of other closeted folks growing up.

Fire and Dynamite work really well for me, because familial acceptance is something that they're both struggling with. When Dynamite reveals his story to Fire, he tells Fire that he's okay with Fire not being ready to come out. Even if it's something he would prefer they do, he has lived through the worst things you can experience when you come out, which is losing your family support network. I really like that Dynamite’s understanding and belief in him is clearly what allows Fire to rebuild his sense of himself when he finally tells his mom that he cannot live up to this ideal that she has of him. That's built out from him recognizing who he is, because Dynamite has helped him figure that out.

Dynamite hits a really specific queer note for me, because they create a character who I think is genuinely funny to watch, but you can feel a lot of his queer angst running underneath him the whole time, and they don't overextend it and make it be [laughs] way too melodramatic. Like his character’s just not gonna behave that way. I really like the way Dynamite has accepted the reality of his world, and has decided to build his own space in it, and it started with his friends.

Most of these shows often get queer characters wrong in that they don't have like a reliable queer support network around them before they go rushing into some fuckin’ romance with some guy that's supposed to be the romance of their lives. Very glad that in this particular case, Dynamite has rock solid besties as he's pursuing Fire.

NiNI

In terms of other characters that I really responded to—and Shan's gonna like pick up the torch and run with it here—I loved Off as Ten.

Shan

Yeah!

NiNI

I am a recent Off convert. I really started getting into Off around Not Me, because the roles that I was seeing him play, from Not Me and continuing, I could see the growth that he's had over the years, and I really liked the energy that he was starting to bring to his roles, the maturity and the gravitas that he was starting to bring, whether it was something serious, like playing Sean in Not Me, or Mote in Midnight Motel, which I really enjoyed—or even, especially actually, playing Ten in a comedy like this. I mean, I just bought it 100%. They put Off on screen in those glasses, and the first thing we saw him do was argue with his dad, and I was like, yes absolutely, I am here, let's do this.

I love the character of Ten. He's such a combination of tightly wound ball of stress and also incredibly fun and relaxed human being. I don't know how those two things work in one character, but they do, and Off plays both sides of him, I think brilliantly. I really enjoy getting into why he wanted to be a doctor, and the little mini arc that we had towards the middle of the series where he gets to recommit to being a doctor because he had sort of slid off course slightly. And he gets to recommit to, ‘no this is really what I want to do, I want to save people.’ Really loved that. The angst that he had around his mom dying, the angst that he had around his dad moving his girlfriend in, apparently it seems not too long after that… there's just a lot happening with Ten, but through it all he's just so delightful as a character. He saw Prem, he decided: ‘Yep, that's the one for me.’ He pursued him openly, he was just very forthright and honest at every step of the way, communicating all the way through… just love it. Love the character, loved Off in the role. I know. Shan's gonna, like, take that and run with it. [laughs]

Shan

I just want y'all to know—

NiNI

Shan is a babii, Shan loves Off.

Shan

I am living. I am getting my whole life right now. I just want you all to know, all of you listeners, that I was pretty much the lone babii around here until very recently. [laughs] I have always been an Off girlie, I have loved him since way back in the Puppy Honey days, I've always found him so charming.

He started out as a pretty untested untrained actor and we've seen him grow across his roles, and so a lot of people have only kind of recently, in his last couple of shows, like fully come on board. But I have always been an Off girlie. I know that this show has turned Ben into a full blown babii, finally, [laughs] and that NiNi has come around on Off, and it's been very amazing to see.

For my money, Ten is Off’s best character. They found the perfect character at the perfect time for him to play to all of his strengths. What's great about Ten — everything that NiNi just said is true, he's a very well written, very well-rounded character, and I love him specifically as a romantic lead. He has some really important qualities that you typically don't see in romantic leads, and that's why so many romcoms and romances are frustrating. Ten is a very honest person. He's a straightforward person. He is loyal. He kind of insists on building trust and on talking things through.

One of my favorite things that happened in the final stretch of episodes was, Ten found in Prem’s room this sticky note that Pang had written, that said something like ‘the money from scamming Doc’ or something like that, basically making a joke about Prem scamming Doc for money. Ten found this sticky note and… he got his feelings hurt about it. He was like, ‘wow like, this kind of seems like you all were mocking me, this hurts my feelings.’ And in a typical drama you would see that turn into a big conflict. You would see the person who found the sticky note not saying anything about it, maybe be passive-aggressive, probably leave and go sit in their hurt feelings by themselves and then later it would blow up into a big fight. That's not what happened here, because Ten wouldn't let it happen. He takes the sticky note directly to Prem and he says ‘I found this, it kind of hurt my feelings, can you explain what this is about?’ And then he actually listens to Prem. And Prem apologizes because it was kind of mean-spirited, and he admits that. And then Ten says ‘OK, thank you for telling me. I forgive you, I'm gonna let it go.’

And I just love that! You don't see that kind of mature communication very often in romance at all, let alone in BL that's typically centered on younger characters. That was what Ten was like through that entire arc. He was just so honest. He wouldn't let silly misunderstandings get in the way. He always made sure to be very clear with Prem about what he wanted and what he was feeling. And he was respectful when Prem wanted space, but he always made sure that Prem knew that he was waiting there for when he was ready for more. Such a good model for a romantic lead, and because of those qualities in him, he and Prem ended up becoming a great couple that just—were a team. They faced things together. Our friend Twig called them a battle couple. They faced challenges together and didn't let things come between them.

We haven't really mentioned Chef Chang Ma, who sucks and we hate him.

Ben

Sorry, Victor, your character sucks.

Shan

Your character sucks! He's a mentor to Prem, but he's also trying to hit on him the whole time. He's super inappropriate, he's always crossing boundaries, he's kind of a piece of shit, if I'm being real honest. But that guy was not able to get between Ten and Prem at any point, because every single time he tried, they communicated with each other, and figured out how to get back on the same page, and worked around him or shut him down.

This couple's gonna stick with me in that they were able to work through so much together, and that they really sincerely made each other happy and made each other more confident and better at the things that they wanted to be better at. It was just lovely. I really loved this romance.

Ben

I'm going to continue behind Shan and continue praising Off Jumpol on this one, because I have not been kind to that man for the last decade. [laughs] He has not always been necessarily my favorite ambassador for BL. He's come a long way. This is definitely his best BL role.

I'm making a Venn diagram after we're done with this recording, and it's just going to be Patts from La Pluie and Ten from Cooking Crush, because these characters have a lot of great crossover traits I really like. They're really kind with their partner and their friends, but… they have a temper, and it comes out with people they don't like. Off is funny, but also he's really good at playing… kind of pissy characters, and I'm really glad that they were like, ‘we gotta have Off be pissy with somebody. Let's make the correct choice for once, and not make it Gun that he's gonna be pissy with.’

Shan

[laughs] The crucial change!

Ben

Let's make him be pissy with his dad!

Shan

Mhm.

Ben

An excellent choice. And why is he pissy with his dad? Because his dad's a doctor. He didn't save his mom. That's a fairly valid reason to be pissy with someone about. And I think it works in terms of the family dynamics they go into. The dad's not going to tell his son that he's hurting because he feels like he failed to save his wife, the only woman he says he'll ever marry. He clearly cares about his son, because despite the way his son’s always talking out his fucking ass at him, he's not really punished him in any way. Despite the fact that Ten is clearly upset about the mom, and the dad in relation to that.

Shan

Yeah! Ten’s scenes with his dad were intense, and he was not being respectful and backing down in those scenes, ever. In this finale, he, like, took a power pose across the table from his dad, sat down at the other end of the table, planted himself firmly, and was like, ‘this is my boyfriend, and you are gonna fucking deal with it.’ I love that shit!

Ben

This is what I mean with the implied writing, because the way the stepmom is playing, she is way too familiar. It's very clear she's meant to be read as younger…

Shan

Mm-hmm.

Ben

And is trying to figure out what line she's supposed to take between being the partner of an older man, but also being closer in age to the kids. And like they mirror the positioning, she's sitting next to the dad, at the same position that Prem is sitting next to Ten. And there's this whole, ‘you brought this woman here. I wasn't consulted. This is my boyfriend. You're not getting consulted.’ And so I think the conflict between Ten and his dad is really great. Off needs to have, like, hostile conflict with other characters, because that's what we want to get out of him as an actor [laughs], directed in useful ways at his dad and at Chang Ma, and not at Gun's character, which is usually the problem I have with them in their shows.

00:32:08 - CC: Final Comments and Ratings

Ben

I was really glad to get a solid romcom out of OffGun. They also gave us some really ridiculous hilarity moments, like, they got that shot with their hands in the oven glove, twice? [Shan laughs] Unhinged. Holy shit.!

Shan

The interior oven glove shot? Amaaaazing.

NiNi

Off getting hit in the face with Chinese kale? Not something I ever knew that I needed, but oh my god, I needed it.

Shan

Ten—he’s a big-ass goofball, which we saw with his fantasy sequences! Every time they were having cooking lessons, he was having fantasies in his head about Prem and various food items. [laughs] And they were the wackiest shit. Listen, I wish GMMTV would stop playing these games, but there was a YouTube version that had a lot of scenes cut from it and a WeTV version that had the full scenes. A lot of these food fantasies got cut from the YouTube version, but these sequences just really let you into Ten’s head, how wild and weird he was getting in there, and I just loved seeing that aspect of his character.

NiNi

It was a lot of fun. I have some dings, I have some critiques. The final episode went a little bit flat. They did round out and complete every single arc, except maybe one. But it did feel a little pat at the end? And out of left field, Pang and Samsee getting together in the end of the final episode.

[all laugh]

Shan

That was quite a choice—I was shipping Metha and Samsee for the whole show.

Ben

I was—

Shan

I was kind of disappointed.

Ben

I was disappointed.

Shan

I didn’t expect to actually get Metha and Samsee, but I kind of hoped that they would have left the door open for it. Firmly closing that door with having him get together with Pang at the last episode? I didn't hate it, but I didn't love it either.

NiNi

It was a choice. But. It did kiiind of work, and the only reason that it kind of worked is because of my first nominee of the year for the Mark Pakin 6th Man award, and that is Dome Jaruwat.

Shan

Mmm! Dome was great.

NiNi

Dome is a great supporting actor.

Ben

You wanna know how good Dome is? I've been half joking about rewatching Until We Meet Again since we started doing this show. I haven't actually started until recently, because watching Dome every week reminded me that he sang on the Until We Meet Again soundtrack. And I had to go back and start watching the show.

NiNi

Yeah, cause Dome is primarily a musician, you do forget, but he is actually a very good supporting actor. When he shows up, I am always delighted anew by how good he is.

Shan

I've seen other shows that had him in it, but this is the first one where I really sat up and paid attention to him. He was fantastic as Samsee. And he got some real shit to do. One of the big conflicts in the final run of the show was about the way that these new romances were affecting the friendships. Dynamite and Prem were paying attention to their boyfriends, they were blowing Samsee off, they were missing cooking practice, and he was feeling some kind of way about it. He was kind of feeling a little bit abandoned. And it was just awesome that the show actually took that seriously, not just in letting Samsee express his feelings and get mad and have the other characters take that seriously and care? But they actually very deliberately, in the narrative, prioritized the friendship reunion and makeup scene over Ten and Prem getting together and making their relationship official. They had Ten approach with the intention of asking Prem to be his boyfriend, and stop and see that they were repairing their friendship in that moment, and back off and walk away.

Ben

It felt really important for BL, because BL friends are so ridiculous. BL friends are basically shippers half the time. Like, if they see, like, one of the boys is possibly getting with another boy that becomes the only thing that that character cares about.

Shan

Everyone's a fujoshi.

Ben

I like that that wasn't the case here! I like that Samsee had genuine beef with his friends deprioritizing him, when they were in the midst of something really important to them as a group that they've been working towards for a long time. Like, are you all fucking up our big project for dick? Come on!

Shan

This show really let its side characters shine. It was a really good showcase for a couple of actors: I think Dome and Aungpao, in particular…. Tum also got great stuff, Neo got to do great stuff… We haven't even mentioned Prem's grandma, who was also awesome.

Ben

She was great.

NiNi

Amazing. She was so good.

Shan

Fantastic, no nonsense, cut the bullshit, but at the same time, very loving and supportive. She was awesome. I loved her.

Ben

There's a little bit of a dropped bit that happens in episode 11, that I kind of wish the show hadn't cut out as much. Fire and Dynamite go back to Fire’s place and the mom comes out of Fire’s room in this very weird jumpscare, and Fire has the closet panic and ends up kicking Dynamite away from him. And he kicks Dynamite hard enough that he goes flying across the room and gets hurt a bit. And I kind of wish they had followed up on that scene. Because… I feel like Fire, recognizing that he actually hurt Dynamite is probably one of those things that tilts him on to the other end of ‘I'm going to come out now.’ And I kind of wish the show had followed up on that properly and let us see Fire make the decision.

Shan

Yeah, I do wish that the pacing of the Fire and Dynamite plot had been a little different in the final episodes? I think that it ended up feeling a little bit rushed at the end, and I think that was just about the timing of the beats. If a couple things had shifted back a little bit, I think it would have worked. As it was, it kind of all got shoved into the finale, and so it felt a little too quick, a little too easy. I like where it landed… like NiNi said earlier, the way that all of these story arcs ended felt correct and felt right. They rounded everything out. It's just that some of the beats in the final stretch got kind of weirdly compressed.

Ben

It was a little bit frustrating for me because Dynamite and Ten are both very forward and overt pursuers of their romantic interests, and I kind of wish that the two couples’ romantic pacing had been better aligned across the show.

NiNi

And again, that goes to the editing. It's a good show, it's incredibly well written and incredibly well acted, but I think that the direction and the editing let it down a little bit, and that's why for me, it got an 8.5.

Shan

I gave it a 9. The show was such a positive experience. I was so excited every Sunday morning to watch it, it was such a great way to start my rest day, to like, have a good vibe to take me through my Sunday. The writing was so strong, and that's the thing that I tend to care most about in shows. If the writing is strong, if the characters feel right to me? That is what I prize most in a show. The editing, the directing, definitely had some flaws. There are some things that I would change, but the most important parts of the show held up really well for me and I definitely will be returning to it often.

Ben

I think I'm going with a 9 because they got the gay portions of the show right, and I really liked the character drama of this. All the big moments for the characters in this show land correctly for me. This show held together the whole way through. And that's kind of what's good about the writing. Like when you're noticing editing issues in a show, it's because you're following the writing, and you see the editing stumbling to try and not let it down. I think the character writing is really strong and holds together for the whole show. I think the conflict writing that comes out of who these characters are is really good, and I just really like the way these characters work together. When I see these folks together in the ‘It's been years later! Let's go to Prem’s restaurant!’ it doesn't feel like a ridiculous impossibility.

Shan

I loved that flash forward. I love a time skip when it's used to tell us that everything is still good in the future, after all the conflicts have been solved in the present. I hate a time skip when it skips over conflict, but once all the conflicts are solved, yes! Take me to the happy epilogue. I love that shit.

NiNi

So that's a 9 for Cooking Crush from The Conversation.

Ben

It's a good show, it's an easy recommend.

Shan

Thank you for coming back, Off and Gun, and thank you for sticking around for The Trainee in 2024. We look forward to seeing you again.

00:41:14 - Cherry Magic: Beating Expectations and Simping for Tay Tawan

NiNi

OK, so moving on, and it's time for us to talk about Cherry Magic Thailand! Now, I am not so big an original Cherry Magic girlie as a lot of other people. I enjoyed it, I had a great time with it, but I'm not a stan of the original Cherry Magic live action from Japan, in the way that some other people are.

Ben

I was!

NiNi

[laughs] Let's see. So, go ahead and lead us in. What is Cherry Magic Thailand about? And maybe you could talk a little bit about the original Cherry Magic as well.

Ben

Cherry Magic is about a young man, in this case named Achi, who is a low-ranking member at some sort of large corporation, who at the age of 30, because he's a virgin, gains telepathic powers. When he touches someone and makes any sort of physical contact with them, he can sort of hear their current internal monologue and what might be going on with him. He learns fairly soon after getting his powers that the hotshot salesperson in his company has been nursing a long-time crush on him, and complications ensue. There's also a very great supporting cast, which also in one portion features the same power.

NiNi

So this is an adaptation of an adaptation, or an adaptation of an original that was also adapted in another way… like [laughs] it's a little confusing. So this is originally a manga. The manga was adapted to Japanese live action. The manga has now also been adapted to a Thai live action, and then there's a third adaptation currently ongoing, which is a Japanese anime version. So there are three adaptations of this manga. We're going to talk about the Thai version in the most detail here, but I think we're going to come maybe to a couple of things to be said about the Japanese live action and the anime version.

Shan, what were your overall initial thoughts when you heard Thailand's gonna adapt Cherry Magic and it's going to be done by GMMTV?

Shan

I was so skeptical. I am a TayNew girlie, I love them. I loved Dark Blue Kiss back in the day, so I was really excited to see Tay and New doing BL together again — I was not at all excited to see them doing Cherry Magic [laughs] when I first heard about it. I did have an affinity for the original Japanese live action. I don't think it's a perfect show, I have my own notes on it, but I did enjoy it a lot, I thought it was really well done. And I was just unsure of why GMMTV and Thailand needed to do their own version.

That said, I was also hoping that if Thailand was going to do this, that the main purpose would be to address the biggest shortcoming of the Japanese live action, which is that in this narrative about a virgin who acquires magical powers, and then falls in love and then loses those magical powers via having sex with the person he's in love with, there was no sex! There wasn't even a kiss on screen! That was a huge flaw of that version that I hoped to see Thailand correct. And honestly, what I thought was going to be the main thing they could bring to the table in tackling this adaptation, was kind of finishing that narrative in a more sex-positive way that Thailand is kind of known for that Japan doesn't always do, particularly when they're doing their lighter BLs.

NiNi

Ben, what about you? When you heard about this adaptation, what were your thoughts?

Ben

Opposition. I was deeply opposed to this. [everyone laughs] I was not keen on a Thai attempt at this. I was kind of curious about what Thai humor would look like for this, and I was interested in the adaptation because I don't know what corporate culture in Thailand was like. So I thought that there was a real opportunity there. I was interested in a TayNew comeback, particularly because Tay hadn't really lost a step—even when he was doing other work—and I thought Newwie had gotten a lot better. And so I was excited about the two of them getting back together, and I thought that they were the best choice at GMMTV if GMMTV was going to do this. But I was not looking forward to it.

How about you, NiNi? Did you have any initial feelings or concerns about it?

NiNi

I had no intention of watching this. [laughs] I was gonna give it a pass. I love Tay Tawan—I'm just gonna spend a few seconds here being a simp. That man is gorgeous.

Shan

He's so beautiful.

NiNi

He is so beautiful. And he is such a good actor. The first thing I ever saw Tay Tawan in was 3 Will Be Free, and I literally remember thinking, who is that? I think I might have said it out loud. Since then I have been a devotee. He can do no wrong as far as I'm concerned. Tay Tawan is everything to me.

I have not been a big fan of Newwie. When I watched the parts of the Kiss series that I watched, loved Tay, was into Tay, Newwie I wasn't really feeling. I came around on Newwie a little bit last year after watching him in The Warp Effect—I thought he did really well there. And so I was not as down on him as before, but I still didn't feel like Cherry Magic was a story that I was interested in seeing Thailand adapt necessarily?

A, it felt like an incredibly Japanese type of story and B, the director, X Nuttapong, is not one of my favourites. I do not tend to like his work. X did Vice Versa, Theory of Love, neither of those are my favorites. So I was saying, ‘OK, I'm only now kind of starting to feel like Newwie could maybe do something. I don't really like X’s work. I think I'm going to give this a pass.’ And I did give it a pass initially [laughs]. And then all of you started watching it and getting incredibly excited about it. Somewhere near maybe episode 10, I was like, ‘ahh! Fine!’ and started watching it. And I'm glad that I did!

Ben

So Shan, since you are the TayNew girlie—I don't remember their fans are called—of The Conversation—

NiNi

Polcas, they're polcas! How do I know that? I don't know.

Shan

Yeah, I don't know what polca means, but that's what they're called. I do not identify as a polca, ‘cause I hate the name. But I do love TayNew.

Ben

Why don't you break down why this was such an excellent viewing experience for us?

Shan

I mean, you heard all that skepticism that we were all bringing to the table, right? And this show, just, like, blew us all out of the water. It was such a good adaptation, it was so impressive. There's a lot of reasons for that, and we'll get into all the things that this production did well, but right at the core of it, the most important thing, is that Tay and New just killed it in these roles. They were just absolutely perfect as Karan and Achi.

If you're familiar with the story of Cherry Magic, you know that Karan, or Kurosawa in the Japanese version, is meant to be this kind of otherworldly perfect man, like he's excellent at his job. He's kind to everybody. He's beautiful. His very presence is just intimidating, because he seems too perfect to be real. And of course, he's not actually perfect, he's a human being. But that's kind of the image that he has. And so Tay Tawan [laughs] honestly, is a perfect casting choice for that role.

NiNi

No notes, no notes whatsoever.

Shan

Right? That man is beautiful. Every single time he is on screen in this show, I just got to get a hold of myself, and it's difficult every single time. Seeing that man and his beauty properly appreciated by the camera, wardrobe working, hair working, everything working for him… it was just such a good role for him. Not only on the looks either, but on his performance!

He really nailed the inherent kindness of Karan, but also the inherent loser goofiness of him, which is the part of him that you don't see on the surface, and that's the secret. He seems like this cool, suave guy, but he's actually a total simp. He's super in love with Achi, and real fuckin nerdy about it. I think Tay Tawan was really able to… balance those aspects of him so well, so that they came together believably as one person.

And then New as Achi, I think brought a really interesting dimension, because in some versions I think that character can feel a little bit self-contained, to the exclusion of being able to empathize with others. And Achi didn't feel like that. He felt like someone who had self esteem issues, he felt like someone who was intimidated by others and wasn't always sure what he could bring to the table, but who was interested in other people, and kind, and really wanted to learn how to communicate better with others.

I thought they both did such a great job, both as their individual characters, and then together. We already knew they had awesome chemistry, but they really brought their A game to this show in terms of developing a believable chemistry between these two characters. We got to really see, over the course of the show, Achi's awareness of his attraction to Karan build, and his feelings genuinely grow, from kind of liking him in kind of a generic way, to actually getting to know him as a real person, taking him off that idol pedestal he'd had him on in his mind, and falling in love with him genuinely, and learning how to return his affection and develop a mutual relationship together.

This Thai version really hit all of those really important landmarks in a romantic relationship, including the physical intimacy, with perfect pacing, such genuine emotion… they just really, really sold it. They did such a good job with this show, and I'm just so happy to eat my words and to have all my skepticism proven wrong. They did awesome.

Ben

I think you're right about Tay Tawan being a good choice, ‘cause Kurosawa slash Karan is… eminently charming in a really accessible way. The big part that works for him as a character is the fact that he's such a fuckin dork! And Tay Tawan is a dork. [laughs] That is a… important piece of his public persona, that he's really charming in a way that's not always intentional on his part? It's funny when it is intentional, and it's hilarious when he trips over himself because he's like, wait, did I just do that? It's great. It works really well here. Tay Tawan.

Shan

What a man.

Ben

I say like, these boys are beautiful, like every week, but he really is gorgeous. He's just absolutely stunning to look at all the time and he is just so delightful as Karan. This is probably my favorite role for Tay. I don't think, like, it's Tay’s best work, but I think it's my favorite role for him.

NiNi

I understand exactly what you mean, because I think that his best role is Shin from 3 Will Be Free, but in terms of like a great just nailed-on role for him? It's exactly like you said: he's gorgeous and the camera loves him. And so every time the camera turns on him and shows you Achi looking at Karan, and the camera is Achi in that moment—he takes your breath away!

When Karan goes to see Achi during Songkran and he has to basically wash himself, there's a slow-motion thing when he starts throwing the water on his face, and I just kind of literally was watching that with my chin in my palm, and just like, wowwww, full zone-out moment. The camera loves that man. And it spent so much time on letting us see how gorgeous Karan is, but especially how gorgeous he is to Achi. I thought there was some really clever camera work and it was a good use of Tay’s good looks.

00:54:13 - CM: Relationship Development and the Powers

Ben

Speaking of Tay Tawan being a dork and being perfectly selected for this: at the end of episode 3, when they are returning from the company trip, and [laughs] Achi falls asleep and ends up leaning on Karan and wakes up because Karan starts screaming in his head—

NiNi

[laughs] Screaming internally, that's so funny.

Shan

That was so perfect. There has never been a more perfect moment on television. I don't care.

NiNi

It was amazing. It was incredible. It was delightful. It was fantastic. I can't even describe it well. Like you just have to see it.

Shan

It's the way that he keeps his face so controlled…

Ben

But like you can see like his mouth opens slightly, his eyes widen a little bit.

Shan

His eyes are screaming, while his face—

Ben

Ahhh!

Shan

And then you see the “AAAAHHH” Like on the subtitle, which is perrrrfect perfect perfect. They did so well. They had so much fun with the mind reading jokes, and there were so many of them.

Ben

There were, they got a lot of traction out of it, it was great. Like, even after that moment ends and he wakes up Achi, Achi leans against him again, and he's like, ‘I wish I could fight all of Achi’s nightmares.’

[laughs]

Shan

Every time we heard his simp thought it was so perfect, it was always something so cheesy, or he's having a fantasy about like wiping Achi's nose or something, or like dreaming of their future together. Or he's singing a love song off-key in his own head. It's just so good! [laughs]

NiNi

I actually really like the way that the Thai show used the mind reading power. I like the jokes that they made out of it better than the Japanese version.

Ben

I think that's one of the things that they had extra time for, and I think they calibrated the humor for the Thai approach really well.

NiNi

Just simple things like, after Achi tells Karan about the mind reading power and Karan decides to use it to A) get Achi to move in with him, and B) once Achi has moved in with him to quote-unquote “test” the mind reading power at every potential opportunity by saying, ‘can you hear me now? Can you hear me now?’ And just like touching him randomly… [laughs] He touched his ankle and I was just like, oh my god, ok, this is ridiculous.

Shan

My favorite—he stuck out his elbow. He stuck out his elbow like a huge dork, leaning on his shoulder. And he was like, ‘can you hear me? Can you hear me?’ It's like, it was just so charming!

Ben

My favorite thing about Karan is he was never embarrassed about how deeply attracted to Achi he was. There was a toothpaste moment, where he started having a fantasy and Achi was like ‘oh my god, bro, please step back,’ and he's like, ‘wait, you see those things, too? So you saw… oh! ok.’ And then he walked away giggling to himself.

Shan

He just thinks it's funny. Actually that is an under-discussed, really cool thing that this adaptation did. Once Achi confesses to Karan that he's been able to hear him the whole time, Karan doesn't get upset. He actually thinks it's awesome. Because to him it's so meaningful to know that this whole time, Achi has known how he feels, and Achi has decided to be around him, he's OK with it. Karan, he’s someone who seems very confident on the surface, but he's very insecure about his feelings for Achi, because he doesn't think that they're returned, and he's always very worried about whether or not he's being a burden to Achi with his feelings, whether or not he's pushing something on him that he doesn't want, he's very conscious of that and respectful of boundaries.

Ben

It's an excellent gay choice.

Shan

Right? And so for him to learn that Achi has known the whole time how he feels and has been comfortable being around him anyway actually really made him happy. He was delighted to know that he didn't have to hide himself in that way.

Ben

Achi called that out, too. He's like, ‘why is the real beneficiary of my powers Karan and not me?’ That's actually a source material joke that they brought over really well. Kurosawa learns about the powers and starts actively flirting with Achi at work. And he's like, ‘why is he better at using my powers than me?’

NiNi

As much as we love the use of the powers, I actually want to talk about the moments that he chooses not to use his powers and instead to, for example, use his words. Because part of this story is about Achi coming more into himself and learning to be bolder and to be more open with himself and his feelings. And I really enjoyed that story happening alongside the powers. One of the things I found in the Japanese version was that Adachi really, I felt, leaned on his powers perhaps a little too much, in his relationship with Kurosawa? Achi, in this version uses his powers more sparingly, and also more accidentally? Whereas in the Japanese version he uses them more deliberately.

Shan

I thought they were so intentional about it. Achi confesses earlier about having the powers in the story. He expresses clearly to Karan his fears, about how their relationship will stay intact when he doesn't have that crutch to lean on. They talk about it directly. They do their really silly practice long-distance thing because Achi's feeling so nervous about whether they'll be able to maintain their communication while they're apart and he can't touch Karan to hear what he's thinking.

Like you said NiNi, in some really crucial moments in the later stages of their relationship development, he's not using his powers, and he doesn't even think to, because he has grown to be so comfortable with communicating with Karan, using his words and listening to Karan and trusting what he's saying. We saw that evolve over time, so that in the end, when they finally decided to have sex, it really wasn't about the powers at all. That had already been resolved and they were already on really solid footing, Achi wasn't even using them anymore in that way. I like that they did it that way, that they separated those things a little bit. They had sex when they were ready to have sex and it wasn't related to wanting to get rid of the powers; the powers were not a barrier for them.

NiNi

I really liked how they went about the whole progression of their physical intimacy.

Shan

I think it felt…really right. I felt like I could trust this show to address it in a way that not only tied off the plot of the story and the narrative, which was rooted in sex or lack thereof, but also to make sure that it felt emotionally authentic to where the characters were, that any moment of intimacy between them was building their relationship development arc. And they pulled that off so beautifully.

Ben

They have their first kiss in a way I think is really satisfying, because Achi initiates it. Which I think is an excellent choice for Achi compared to Adachi.

Shan

And it felt very earned because their relationship was already so deep at that point, and you felt like Achi was ready for it. And of course, the build to them deciding to have sex for the first time. I like the way that that played around their temporary separation. Achi went away, and they hadn't gotten there yet in their relationship—not because of any big reason, it's just the natural progression, hasn't happened yet. And I like that when Karan went to visit him, things just felt right, and they progressed. I like that the story never felt like it was artificially holding that up to get to a certain beat. It really felt cathartic to finally see these characters get there in a way that felt so, so correct.

Ben

I thought every moment of intimacy between these characters was really well calibrated for the moment, and that the two actors involved understood what they were trying to accomplish in the scene. It was really nice to see two actors with experience, who trust each other, really deliver good emotional and intimate scene work, and that is supported by even all of the non-kissing they do between their characters. Just overall, I really, truly enjoyed watching Tay and New work together with these characters.

01:02:15 - CM: Other Characters

NiNi

Let's talk a little bit about the characters outside of Karan and Achi. I really enjoyed the way that these particular versions of the side characters were done. I particularly enjoyed Pai and Dujdao from the office. Dujdao is me, I am Dujdao. She is my fave. She is the one, I love her. Pai in this version is Fujisaki in the Japanese version, and then you've got Rock who is Rokkaku, you've got Min who is Minato, and you've got Jinta who is Tsuge.

I really liked the way that this adaptation played with those characters, and I like how they intersected with the Karan and Achi story. I always like to see the wider world of these characters and the friends and family that they have, and how their relationship fits into their relationships with their friends and their family. Watching, particularly the little office family that formed with Dujdao and Pai and Rock, and then the friendship between Achi and Jinta, which I felt a lot more strongly about in this version than I did about the friendship between Tsuge and Adachi—it's a different kind of relationship. And I personally enjoyed Achi and Jinta’s relationship a little more than I did Tsuge and Adachi’s.

Shan

I really, really loved Min and Jinta in this story. I thought those actors did a great job with these characters, I felt like they fit in really well into the narrative. Jinta and Min in their own romance, as well as Jinta's friendship with Achi—both of those threads that they were carrying complemented the main story so well: supported the themes, helped move the plot along, they were just really well integrated into this story.

Jinta is a great character: he’s awkward and kind of introverted and weird, because he spends a lot of time alone, but he's also a kind person, and he has a generous spirit, and I think that all of that came through really well. I loved that he and Achi kind of came into their powers in parallel and then worked together to figure out how to use them and what they meant. They got a lot of good additional mind reading jokes and humor out of Jinta, both in his scenes with Achi, where they would slyly touch each other and then have mind conversations, which eventually Karan caught on to, and that was also hilarious [laughs].

With Min and Jinta, I liked how much in this version that was about Min figuring out what he wanted to do with his life, whether or not he should continue to pursue his passion of dancing, and through his relationship with Jinta, getting encouragement, finding new confidence, and figuring out how to do that in a way that he felt like he could make a living from. And I thought that nicely supported the themes that were going on with Achi and Karan, also learning to communicate with each other and care for each other and support each other through new opportunities.

This show also did something really interesting with Pai and Rock. One of the big reservations when this adaptation was announced was that in the Japanese live action, Fujisaki was an aro-ace woman. She explicitly identified that way, it was plotline of the show. And I just knew that in Thailand, they were gonna put the same character in a romantic relationship, cause Thailand loves side couples and they just can't let anybody end the show single, even people who are supposed to be single [laughs] according to their identities. And so I was dreading that, honestly, I was like, ‘they're gonna have Pai get into a romance with Rock, I'm gonna hate it.’

But you know what? I didn’t hate it. The way that they got them together in the end was really sensitive, I think, to the fandom that they were clearly aware was out there hoping to see this character retain some of that aro-ace rep that was so meaningful to people in the Japanese live action. So I thought they were really respectful of it, I thought they did a great job with it. I think even though they got together in the end, there's still a very clear aro-ace read on Pai, and I like them together. Their scenes were fun, they have a good easy chemistry and charm, even if it doesn't feel particularly sexually charged.

And I thought that Rock and Pai were both as well, great supporting characters in the narrative. Their connection supported the story when it needed to. All of these side characters came together really well in a way that never distracted from, and always bolstered the main narrative, which is the most important thing to me for side characters.

NiNi

When Sing Harit picks up Tay Tawan and runs off with him while he wais at the client —

Shan

[laughs] It was perfect!

NiNi

[laughs] He literally just picked him up off the ground and just runs away!

Shan

He was so good in this role, he was perfect.

Ben

I'm glad we get to keep Sing. I've been watching that man for nine years.

Shan

He always brings something great to every show he's in.

Ben

So, I am a fan of original Cherry Magic adaptation Tsuge and Minato. I like how extra Tsuge is. Asaka Kodai: I like the way he played Tsuge. I like how he focused on how weird Tsuge is, and how passionate he is about things. I like Jinta as a take on that character…I appreciate why people like him more. I don't think I like him more? But I like them both specifically.

I like the Tsuge character, and I like how in the three versions of him I've seen adapted now, each adaptation has approached him. I genuinely enjoyed the version of Tsuge and Minato we got in Jinta and Min. I really liked the way they played together. I don't necessarily think Mark succeeded at all of Min, but I really like the way he and Junior work together.

I like Rock in this version because Rokkaku is an aggravating character, intentionally, in the Cherry Magic story. He is far less annoying in this version than he is in Japanese versions of this character.

I liked Pai in this one, I like the corrective fujoshi behavior that they were doing with her. I was worried at first when they leaned into the fact that Fujisaki is a shipper who has been shipping Adachi and Kurosawa for a very long time [laughs]. I like the way the Thai show ends up using that. I like the presentation of her as, ‘you can help your ship when they need to overcome an obstacle, but their moments don't belong to you.’ I loved her, genuinely. And I liked — what was her name? The manager's character?

NiNi

How could you forget my girl Dujdao?

Ben

I really liked the way they made the office manager kind of like a…auntie figure to a lot of them.

NiNi

I love how Achi accidentally brushes against her, and hears her positive thoughts about him. Because that's not a moment that they had to put in there. But I thought that it was really nice and important that Achi got to hear how much she truly cares about him.

Shan

We didn't mention the other coworkers who came at the very end of the story, when Achi traveled, but there was a whole new crew of colleagues that he got to meet on his one-month assignment at another branch. They started that episode with a little bit of anxiety around, you know, are they gonna be mean to Achi? Are they gonna pick on him? Do they think he's a snooty city person? Are they going to be homophobic?

I love that they just turned out to be like, a good group of dudes who were pretty good at their job, needed a little help getting set up, and once Achi proved that he was there to help them and he was competent, they completely accepted him and they were lovely to him. The show is just like—everybody was trying their best all the way through and I really like that. With one exception.

NiNi

Let's talk about that exception now, let's talk about the dreaded episode 8.

Shan

Dreaded is the right phrase.

Ben

My thing is, if you're going to add to Cherry Magic, why would you add workplace sexual assault? Why would you make the boss worse? The boss is really good prior to episode 8 and he's really good after episode 8. I don't understand why in episode 8 they would have him put some sort of bullshit ‘employees can't date each other’ rule into play, and be like, ‘Alright gays: if you can prove that you are economically viable to me by hitting an unrealistic sales target and whoring yourselves out to shitty clients, maybe then I will consider letting you two homos date each other.’

I hated that. I hated that Karan felt like he had to go face her again, I hated that the boss knew it, and sat with Achi to be like, ‘how do you feel about that, bro?’ And then there's like, this whole sequence where she further tries to embarrass him, but then the boss decides to be like, ‘No, I have morals.’ Where were they 40 minutes ago? I just did not like the inclusion of any of that.

It sucked too, because it was a holding pattern episode for Achi and Karan and the crew around them. Nobody really grew as a result of the events that happened there, and it just made me really resent the boss as a character. After that episode, he has a completely reasonable professional response to Achi clearly being frustrated with his role at the company. Achi, who—Karan has shown him through the course of the season—is actually a really good and really valuable employee whose efforts have gone maybe unnoticed, but that's because he's shy. And so when he recognizes that Achi is struggling professionally and wants to maybe do more, he gives him a very reasonable opportunity. Has very reasonable expectations about it, does not withhold how difficult the position may be, and has a reasonable expectation for Achi to make a decision about it.

It was really frustrating for me to try and reconcile that version of a fairly sensible boss, who is trying to give an employee an opportunity to succeed professionally, with the guy who we got in episode 8.

Shan

It felt wrong, it didn't feel like it was of a piece with the rest of the story. We found out pretty quickly that it was not from the source material, and it was an original episode that they've decided to write because they think they needed to fill a little bit of time. It's the one blemish on the show which was otherwise so wonderful, and so it just kind of sucks that they made this choice and tarnished things a little bit by doing such an ugly extra subplot, that just wasn't needed and didn't do anything for the story.

NiNi

In the end, I'm glad it was just a subplot. And it is, to my mind, pretty easily excisable.

Ben

We just deleted the episode. Boop!

Shan

Just pretended it didn't happen and carried on, and that worked great for me personally. [Shan and Ben laugh]

01:13:51 - CM: Ratings

Ben

I will say at this point, before we get to rating that this is now my default Cherry Magic version.

Shan

Same.

Ben

I think the Thai show feels complete in a way that the Japanese experience didn't. And that's…honestly, for me, reinforced by the anime that's running simultaneously right now. What I am enjoying with the two active adaptations right now is the very different approaches to the characters.

Karan is really sensitive to Achi and Achi is really sensitive to him in a way that I find really useful in the story, but there's a chippiness to the Japanese anime version of these characters. They are not as emotionally intelligent, they have a temper about them, there's a little bit of selfishness. Like, I think Adachi’s kind of a dick in this one, he complains about people being irritating normies a lot in a way that I find very amusing. And Kurosawa’s far more possessive—internally, he doesn't express it externally that often—in a way that I find lands more correctly for him, in comparison to maybe the way Keita Machida played Kurosawa and the way they presented him.

I really like the Thai localization of the Cherry Magic story here, and I think it exists very peacefully alongside the current Japanese anime version and the source material, and I think it sits favorably against the original Japanese version.

The intent of the powers to enable greater empathy and better communication between people lands far more consistently in the Thai version. I am really, truly glad that they actually did this and did a good job with it. We did not have high hopes for this motherfucker when they told us about it, and this ended up being one of the most pleasant experiences we've had in genre in a really long time.

NiNi

So, ratings. Shan, you go first: what's your rating for Cherry Magic Thailand?

Shan

I gave this show a 9.5. Could have been a 10 if not for that episode 8, but episode 8 exists, unfortunately, so it's a 9.5 for me. I found it to be such a good time, such a well-executed story. I think it was a masterful adaptation. It did such a good job taking this Japanese story and translating it into something that felt of a piece with Thai culture. The performances were excellent. The whole production was great. I loved how thoughtful everything was. It was such a good show for me. I wish I could go back to before I watched it, and watch it again and be delighted anew.

NiNi

Ben, how about you?

Ben

Similarly, I gave it a 9.5; I think this was an excellent experience. I think it was really enjoyable week to week, and this is what I want out of my BL TV viewing experience. I got to look forward to it every week, and I walked away from it satisfied. One of my favorite TV experiences is when a show is really good, without me instantly yearning for more. I had a really great anticipation of it when a Saturday morning rolled around, and I felt really good for the rest of the Saturday after watching it, and I didn't feel like I was missing something all week because it wasn't on. It was something that I really looked forward to on Saturdays. That is the ideal TV show experience, for me. And I don’t get to have that very often. I really, truly appreciate it that this show was one of the better or best week-to-week viewing experiences I've had for years.

9.5 for episode 8.

NiNi

I scored the show a 9.75.

Ben

Oh my god.

Shan

[laughs] Wait, are we allowed to do .25?

Ben

We're not. She can do it, though. [laughs]

Shan

She’s cheating!

NiNi

I am calling producer privilege to give it a 9.75! No, but the subplot in episode 8 really is a ding, but also I really loved this show. The ding had to be dinged, but I will find it very easy to excise that subplot from my memory of the show and move on. Also, I didn't have to sit in it for a week like you guys did because I was binging it, so it's easier for me, I think, to just kind of be like, pfft! Over that.

Ben

Let me tell you, that was a difficult week for us.

Shan

It was a bad week. We were scared.

Ben

We have been in this position with Thai BL where things are going great, and then episode 8 rolls around and like, oh, here we go. That was not a great week with this show’s experience. We were not really anticipating—we were hoping it wouldn't be shit, picking up with the cliffhanger of Achi revealing his powers to Karan. That was a good choice, that allowed us to focus on the future, not the past.

NiNi

And then you were immediately rewarded in episode 9 with the kiss!

Shan

Sure were!

Ben

And then they reminded me of the boss's bullshit in the finale. He's like, I'm throwing away my stupid policy. I'm like, ‘why would you bring that back up?’

Shan

Don’t bring it up! We’re trying to pretend it didn't happen!

Ben

I had just forgiven you, you motherfucker. Shut the fuck up. [all laugh]

NiNi

All right. All right. [laughs] OK, so 9.5, 9.5, 9.75 fine, it gets a 9.5 from The Conversation.

Ben

We highly recommend it! It is a good viewing experience.

Shan

Everyone should watch it.

NiNi

Fantastic show.

01:19:34 - The Pillars: Overall Thoughts

NiNi

OK, so we've just spent the last — I don't know how much time this is going to be edited—

Ben

It's going to be a long edit for you, that's for damn sure. [laughs]

NiNi

We have just spent the last maybe two-ish hours talking about our OGs, and the stuff that they've been in this year. OG to new G, so to speak. Let's talk a little bit about the pillars, about the experience of watching these people do what they know how to do really well at this point. Shan, what's your experience been like?

Shan

It was so lovely for me. I am an OffGun and a TayNew girlie. I have been a fan, I love those pairs. I am not a big fan of the branded pair system, to say the least—I think that it can be really damaging sometimes in the Thai media landscape, but I think that these two pairs have worked together for a really long time and they've figured out what works well for them. And they have also gone off and done other things, they don't only work together making BLs. All of these four actors have very full careers. And so I'm very happy that they were able to bring them back and pair them with such great projects.

Candidly, these are my two favorite Thai shows of this entire season. They knew what they were about, they executed them really well, and they used the pairs at the center of them to all the best of their abilities and their strength. I'm glad to see that they're planning to continue to work together. Both TayNew and OffGun have announced their next projects already for 2024, and I'm excited to see more adult BL from these guys.

Ben

To be clear, we are not certain that Peaceful Property or whatever it's going to be called is actually going to be a BL.

Shan

I don't need them to make out to enjoy their presence together, so I'll be happy either way.

NiNi

I don't care if it's a BL—I would prefer it to be BL, but Peaceful Property just looks like a good-ass time, so I'm going to enjoy that. I wasn't planning to watch The Trainee, but after Cooking Crush I'm gonna watch The Trainee. I've dialed in to the OffGun of it in this particular direction. I just like Off doing comedy.

Ben

He is good at comedy.

Shan

So good at it

NiNi

I really enjoy it. Not only watch him doing comedy, but watch him doing comedy now. Because he has improved, he has grown, he's really dialed into what he's good at, and he can portray it in a way that I don't think he used to be able to. So, I am looking forward to watching The Trainee definitely.

News news, apparently the third of our pillars coming back is a possibility? So there are three OG pillars for GMMTV. Like we said, OffGun, TayNew, and the third OG pillar was Krist and Singto. We got word recently that Singto’s coming back to GMMTV? So that's an interesting thing. I don't know necessarily that there's going to be new KristSingto stuff, but…

Shan

Krist has already teased it on social media.

Ben

Krist has teased it, but he said that they won't tell him information because he usually leaks it.

Shan

Right. But he said he wants to do another project with Singto. They've put it out there, maybe as a little bit of a test balloon to see if people are interested in it. So I wouldn't be surprised if we find out next year that they're going to be doing another BL together.

NiNi

I wouldn't be surprised if we find that out in April, when the Part 2 of the GMMTV thing comes out.

Ben

[sigh] OK, I'll talk about this. We need to own that has not been a good run for Singto, for about three to four years now. He hasn't really had a solid win in a while. And I don't know that I want him and Krist back together. This is such a weird choice to make, coming off of Be My Favorite where I was like, ‘OK, Krist, you've grown as a performer. I thought you were used well here, I thought your reputation, whether it be right or wrong was used well here. And I'm willing to put all this aside and move forward.’

And now I'm feeling triggered [laughs] by the news that he and Singto will be back together. I'm not necessarily thrilled about it. Like, yeah, we had a lot of skepticism about Cherry Magic, blah, blah, blah, coming into this. And that ended up being fine. But like… [sigh]

Shan

None of my reservations were about the pairs, though. It's all about the material. Here, Krist and Singto don't have good chemistry.

Ben

I don't think they do at all.

Shan

We know that. They did two, three shows together over several years of working together. Did not manage to produce believable chemistry as a pair.

Ben

I'm not keen on it.

NiNi

OK, so here's what I'm gonna say.

Ben

Go ahead, bestie.

NiNi

I have been wrong about all of their recent projects. I haven't watched any really old things or stuff since he left GMMTV, but in terms of Be My Favorite, in terms of Cooking Crush, in terms of Cherry Magic Thailand, I have been wrong. And so I am willing to give any new KristSingto project a shot.

Shan

Oh I'm going to watch it. If they make it, I'm going to watch it. I need to know.

Ben

It's not about whether or not we're going to watch it.

Shan

Yeah.

NiNi

[laughs] They're all like, ‘oh, no, we're watching it! Nobody said we weren't gonna watch it.’ [laughs]

Shan

We will be watching it and we will be having takes! That is what we will be doing. I continue to be skeptical about the two of them being able to generate believable chemistry together. Maybe they could do a show that's not a BL. Maybe they could try that.

Ben

I won't watch that, that's for sure! [Shan laughs]

NiNi

We're talking about OG to new G. Maybe we could do some mix-match merry-go-round with Perth and Chimon.

Shan

I'd be OK with that!

Ben

Oh my god.

NiNi

Get some new pairings out of it.

Ben

There are no more—I—why are we giving Perth and Chimon another ch—Why would you bring them up in this conversation?

NiNi

Mix match merry go round! Mix up the pairs! Maybe they'll work better with other people.

Shan

I think Krist and Singto both need to be paired with strong screen partners who can bring that chemistry piece, because neither of them is particularly good at it on their own, and together it just doesn't happen. I don't know how much of this we should even allow to air. We're going to get shot by their fans.

Ben

I do not care about them. You can be mad.

NiNi

I don’t care [laughs].

Shan

What is their fandom called?

NiNi

It's Peraya.

Shan

Peraya that's right.

NiNi

Peraya ask me how I know. I don't know how. I know. I just pick up these things by osmosis.

Shan

I am not a Peraya. I want this to be very clear.

Ben

I am not either.

NiNi

But like, OK, so we've established that Perth needs a good lead and Chimon needs a good follow, and Krist is, I think, a better follow than a lead, and Singto is a better lead than I think a follow. So maybe they mix them up, maybe they get something good out of it.

Ben

Mm, anyway. So. [laughs]

NiNi

Y'all are mean to my baby Perth and I'm not having it.

Shan

NiNi I appreciate the spirit of this brainstorm. I think it's worth a try [laughs]

Ben

I don't. [laughs]

NiNi

Perth, if you ever listen to this, don't listen to the mean people. It's OK. I love you.

Ben

Look, I love Perth. But it's not been a good year for him. I'm sorry, baby boy.

Shan

I think it's been very cool, though, sincerely, to see the OGs come back around. I like that we're no longer saying [laughs] that BL is a young man's game, you gotta get out when you turn 30. I like that we're letting some of GMMTV's older talent headline these shows and that we're getting some shows about adults. That's all super welcome, and I think it's really nice too, to see pairs like Tay and New and Off and Gun, who are real veterans with handling all of this stuff around making BLs together—handling the BGP, handling all of the fan attention, they do it with a lot of grace and very professionally, in a way that I think is helpful to see a model for for some of the younger pairs.

I think it's helpful for fans also to be reminded of how they should engage with actors who are doing their job when they're making these shows. GMMTV is going to continue to dominate Thai BL for the foreseeable future, so I think it's good that they're bringing these veterans back and doing good work with them.

Ben

I agree. I think OffGun and TayNew have been on the forefront of the development of Thai BGP for a long time, and it's really good to see them seem confident and comfortable about it at this point. Both of these pairs have had some negative experiences with fan behavior, so. I'm very glad that those two pairs were able to continue working together, continue to make projects together, and in this particular case, deliver two of the most satisfying viewing experiences we've had in the last three to four months. I'm pleased.

Shan

They killed it. Amazing work.

NiNi

I, too, am pleased. I wasn't in the OG thing. I wasn't shooting with y'all in the gym then, but I'm here now and what I saw this time around I truly enjoyed. I'm never going to be a babii. I'm not going to be a a polca. I'm never going to be a peraya. I'm just not a fan like that. I fan, I don't stan, I always say, except for, [laughs] you know, the large ones.

Shan

For a couple exceptions.

NiNi

Except for the bigguns. The pillars thing has always been like the super weird thing for me, and this is the first experience that I've had with it that it wasn't weird and slightly creepy for me, which I truly enjoyed. So yeah, good job, boys. Excellent work, 10 out of 10, no notes.

So, that is going to wrap us up on our pillars episode: we out! Say bye to the people, Shan.

Shan

Goodbye people.

NiNi

Ben, say bye to the people.

Ben

Peace!

#cooking crush #cherry magic thailand #cherry magic th #podcast #lgbtq #ben and nini's conversations #the conversation #on art #thai bl #bl series #spring series #spring 2024 #cherry magic #cooking crush the series #offgun #taynew

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