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wen-kexing-apologist · 11 months

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Bad Buddy x ATOTS aka Damn You WMT

Dear @waitmyturtles, fuck you, respectfully wen-kexing-apologist. Turts, I have shit to do, I do not have time for this. But once again I CANNOT STOP THINKING ABOUT IT SO, FUCK ME I GUESS WE’RE DOING A FOREST EPISODE.

More specifically, we are doing an Our Skyy 2, Episode 15 Part 1/4 post, probably far earlier than I should be, and definitely instead of doing work I absolutely need to be doing. But Pat and Phupa’s interactions in this part of the episode have me thinking about Phupa and his relationship to queerness.

I don’t know about anyone else, but I had a marvelous time watching Part 1 of our latest Bad Buddy x ATOTS crossover episode. Why? Because it is absolutely incredibly fun to watch Pat personally terrorize the local gay elder.

What I have really been enjoying in these crossover episodes is watching the ways the similarities and differences in Phupa, Pat, Pran, and Tian play out. Each person spends most of the time paired with the character who play the same role in the relationship but whose personalities and approaches to their relationships are very different. Phupa is the support in his relationship with Tian, Pat is the support in his relationship with Pran, but Phupa never bends and Pat always gives in.

The thing I love about Pat is that he is unabashed in his queerness, he rolls up on to the scene and starts flirting the second he opens his mouth, and then he

Literally

Never

Stops

He annoys Pran, he tests the structural integrity of the house with Pran, sure, but he also wakes up next to Phupa and then proceeds to never let Phupa forget that a) he would and b) that they thought they might have.

He rolls up on the scene as Phupa and his coworker are getting ready to head into the forest, and he starts talking openly and loudly about Phupa’s boyfriend, and the relationship problems they are having.

Phupa is less than amused.

Phupa does not want Pat coming with him, Pat sneaks into the back of the truck, Phupa begrudgingly allows Pat to come with him and Pat says “you’re the cutest”

Phupa is less than amused.

I’m gonna skip ahead a little bit and then regress if that is okay with everyone, after Phupa puts bandaid’s on Pat says yet again “what a cute print, Chief”, “you have a cute side, Chief”

“No wonder teacher is head over heels for you,”

Here Pat is, one half of the first queer couple to interact with Phupa and Tian in god knows how long or possibly ever, talking casually, happily, loudly, and openly about Phupa’s relationship with Tian and Tian’s feelings for Phupa. Reaffirming to Phupa in a way that it is obvious that Tian is in love with him.

And still Phupa is not having it.

As they continue their walk, Pat starts smelling the trees and Phupa is like oh jesus fucking christ what the hell are you doing you are making my life a living hell- “What are you doing?”

And in response, Pat is very open and sappy about Pran.

gif from @liyazaki

“Pran smells so good, if he is nearby, I can find him,” and Phupa is flabbergasted. He just stands there for a second, looking Pat up and down like “okay, seriously…what the fuck?” and he is so obvious about it in the way he looks at Pat and in the way he walks away, that Pat is able to tell immediately that Phupa is, once again, not vibing with Pat’s casual references to his queerness, or overt and honest love and admission of intimacy with his partner. Pat knows Pran’s scent so well that he is confident he could pick it up in the middle of the forest. That suggests a level of familiarity with a body that would traditionally be considered uncouth, if you were polite, and doubly so if you are queer.

gif from @liyazaki

When Phupa starts walking like he’s over the conversation, Pat’s easy smile shifts to confusion “What? Haven’t you smelled Teacher’s body before?”

(Translation: Aren’t you also so in love with your partner, and aren’t you so intimate with your partner that you could recognize his scent anywhere you went? Looking at you watermelon soap sponsorship…looking at you tea bag smell pouch…)

And it’s the inclusion of the word body that really strikes me here, because to say “what? Haven’t you smelled Teacher before?” evokes a different relationship than “What? Haven’t you smelled Teacher’s body?” does.

“That’s too bad” Pat says, and leans suggestively close to Phupa. Like a cat toying with a mouse. Pat likes needling at Phupa’s discomfort around explicit references to Pat and Pran’s sex life. And while we know Phupa has most certainly smelled Tian’s body before, Phupa SPINS around, has this brief moment of absolute wide eye about being so blatantly asked a question that alludes to his physical relationship to and with Tian, looks Pat dead in the eye and says “I’m not a pervert like you,”

gif from @liyazaki

Harsh words. Incredibly harsh words, especially because of the connotations of queerness with perversion, especially because iirc from the KinnPorsche LGBTQ+ Facts special on IQIYI, pervert is often an insult used in Thailand for queer people. Phupa is uncomfortable with Pat’s open conversation about his queer relationship, about his queer intimacy and he chooses to meet Pat with homophobia in the way of a slur.

But Pat is having fun, and I honestly believe he expects that kind of reaction. Pat and Pran were awkward witnesses to Tian and Phupa’s little domestic about watching him shower and looking lovingly into their eyes, but Phupa is stiff the whole time, he is aware that he is engaging in that conversation while other people are present, and he can’t take it and he literally flees. And some of that is because he is getting riled up about their fight, but we see in part 2 of this episode that when Phupa is actually angry with Tian about something, he has no problem standing up and planting his feet to confront Tian about it.

Anyway, Pat is having fun, and Pat wants to test Phupa and so, completely unphased he starts talking about how Tian smells, as if he is familiar. He is like "my boyfriend smells soooo good, do you smell your boyfriend's body? Your boyfriend smells good" and it’s a direct display of Pat's comfortability with his partner, their closeness, and their level of intimacy.

“Teacher Tian smells so good” Pat says with the world’s widest grin

“How do you know that?” Phupa asks almost challenging

“I thought you said you’d never smelled him”

gif from @liyazaki

Caught ya. Phupa has indirectly admitted to intimacy. Pat has successfully engaged Phupa in a conversation that is completely about Phupa’s queerness.

And as Part 2 goes on, we are made more and more aware of how little outward public affection Phupa and Tian engage in. If Phupa and Tian touch around other people, there has to be a legitimate reason to do so (Tian fainted, Tian fainted again, Tian fainted a third time, Tian is drunk, Phupa is drunk, etc.). In this episode, Tian is weak and almost collapses in to Phupa’s arms because he exerted himself too much with his heart. Phupa’s hand is on Tian’s back and then Tian is away from him and standing upright, and when Phupa, Tian, Pat, and Pran exit the forest and enter the clearing of the safe house.

Pat is using Pran as a crutch, and Phupa and Tian have placed a child in between them. They are not touching, they aren’t even standing all that close to each other. Phupa is in ranger mode, sure, but he’s not really in front of people he has to impress, he doesn’t have to be completely professional and on guard when they are in the shack together. Especially when his partner with a body that is currently trying to reject his heart, is sitting there looking on the verge of a heart attack.

Phupa is making direct eye contact with Tian here, he is worried about Tian here, his focus is on Tian here, and yet he does not offer any physical comfort. No reassuring touch, no forehead kiss, hell, not even a hand on the back of his head to check for fever. He’s focused on getting the radio working, which is incredibly important in case there is a medical emergency, but he does not spare a second to physically ground him and Tian. He can only look from a distance. Because there are other people around, there is a child around. Phupa can’t be seen engaging in homosexual softness, Phupa has to be seen as a forest ranger, doing his job, his actual job that involves rescuing his stubborn dumbass boyfriend from yet again getting lost in the forest, but does not involve him being in love.

Again, Phupa truly has no one here he needs to impress, he’s in a room with a child, his boyfriend, and a couple of nuisances that have shown him absolutely zero respect since the moment they waltzed in to his neck of the woods.

At dinner even, after things have settled down, Phupa still cannot bring himself close to Tian in front of prying eyes.

Pat and Pran? Literally sitting side by side, knees touching. They are as close to each other as they possibly can be without literally sitting in each other’s laps.

Here is a close up of Pat and Pran literally making physical contact with each other at the knee and at the elbow.

And what Phupa and Tian do not know, is that Pat and Pran can't be outwardly and openly affectionate to one another in public when they are at school and so they make up for it by being disgusting when they aren't in school. Pat and Pran have to keep up a pretense, and its a tragic undertone to their ability to diffuse the brewing Tian and Phupa fight by looking at each other, nodding, and then improvising a fight realistic enough to get Phupa and Tian to pull them apart.

Because Pat and Pran’s relationship at home is a metaphor for external homophobia, because they are so used to it by now, the having to hide, to pretend they don’t like each other, to pretend they are mad, to pretend they aren’t in love, that they can just ease right in to staged fights at the drop of a fucking hat. But even in their fake fight they wind up pressed up against each other.

(hehe, screen shot funny, look at Phupa, he zoomin’)

Because for so long the only way they could have physical contact in public was by fighting, was by beating each other up, was by pushing or pulling each other away from a fight. Pat and Pran understand that Tian and Phupa are having a fight that they also once had, but they can also see the parts underneath it, the parts that make Phupa ask why the emphasis on him in Tian’s story is about Phupa being in love with Tian rather than his work.

Pat is simultaneously taking the opportunity of being hours and hours away from home, from where he has to hide his relationship, to be as openly and obviously in love with Pran as he has always been and is telling Phupa he is safe to be gay around. That he and Pran are safe people to be gay around, are safe people for him to be openly affectionate with his boyfriend around.

And that stems from the parts of Pat and Phupa that are wildly different.

Like, it is very very notable that Pat confesses his feelings for Pran practically as soon as he realizes that he has feelings for him and initiates the rooftop kiss which they share before they are even together, and then they have a bunch of little kisses, and they sneak as many touches as they can, and they make out multiple times in the show

And Phupa and Tian have…a single forehead kiss and then one kiss, at the top of a mountain, where no one would ever be able to see them after their story is complete.

In last week’s crossover episode, the level of intimacy that Phupa engages in with Tian is called out, even by Aof himself with the roleplaying scene between Pat and Pran where they pretend to be Phupa and Tian putting up a mosquito net and conclude that they absolutely must have kissed then.

But we know they didn’t. We know how painstakingly long it takes for Phupa and Tian to reach that level of intimacy with one another.

I'm even thinking backstory-wise, what is forest ranger training like? Is it part of the military? Did Phupa's gay ass have to enlist in a presumably male dominated field and like, go to training, and be around a bunch of guys, and make sure they didn't suspect he was gay?

I’m thinking about the moments in last week’s episode where it seemed like things were going better between Phupa and Tian, and it was always when Phupa was physically affectionate with Tian, putting his arm around him and not letting him go, when they were at karaoke, and when they were drunkenly stumbling home together, again locked in eachother’s embrace, where anyone could see them.

To regress as I promised back to the leech scene I am struck by what the approach to removing the leeches says about Pat and Phupa respectively.

Pat rips the leech off of him and Phupa takes time to put a lighter to them and pluck them off in a way that does not hurt Pat

Pat rips the leech off and bleeding for it, hurting himself in the process, because he is impulsive and impatient, Pat bleeds emotion, he's practically incapable of hiding what he's feeling, and he must obey his emotions before all else. Therefore, in Bad Buddy Episode 5, when he realizes he has feelings for Pran, Pat immediately has to talk to Pran about his feelings, immediately leans in to the emotion he is feeling in the present moment, and initiates a kiss. A kiss that leaves him feeling blissful, and that leaves him hurt because Pran walks away, because Pran has known forever how much he likes Pat, because Pat has only just figured out his feelings, he hasn’t had to sit with them for long, and yet that kiss is an equally strong release for both of them. When Phupa removes the leech from Pat’s leg he is methodical and patient, he tries to minimize the wound, it takes longer but it has the same result which is why it takes so damn long for him and Tian to get together. When I watches ATOTS and they touched pinkies under that blanket and I went "ah yes! This is the part where you start making out and fucking cause they are adults who have maybe been in a relationship before and who have both been obviously painfully aware of their feelings for eachother since the moment they laid eye on each other"...and then they don’t. Phupa waits, and waits, and waits.

I think the fundamental thing that I see replaying in this episode especially, and with Pat and Phupa’s interactions especially is the elder versus younger queer mentality we got in Moonlight Chicken, with very different characters from Jim and Li Ming, but following a similar pattern of restraint and time versus just jumping right in.

And it’s also why I think the conversation between Pran and Phupa is so important:

gifs by @nanons

Pat and Pran’s need to keep their relationship secret because of their family’s, and because of Pran’s mom specifically is a metaphor for external homophobia. Pat and Pran are extremely comfortable in their sexuality, very open in their love for one another when they are amongst other queer people, or amongst allies, when they are away from their hometown or when they are in the privacy of their homes.

There are a lot of different pieces in play around Phupa and Tian’s relationship, but there is ultimately a metaphor at the most or a blatant sense at the least of internal homophobia on the part of Phupa.

Pat has chosen to stay “in the closet” in order to be with Pran. In a convo with @shortpplfedup about this, Nini said it the most accurate and heart wrenching line: “It's honestly that Pran can't really ever compare to Pat's sacrifice here, and he KNOWS it,”

Similarly, Phupa believes that Tian has made a sacrifice to be with him, and he knows it. Which is why he can’t bring himself to go to Tian’s birthday, because Tian has left before, because he is scared every time Tian goes that he will realize that Phupa isn’t enough. Because Phupa is afraid of being seen as Tian’s partner. Because Phupa is really only capable of being physically affectionate behind closed doors. When they are completely alone. Cause even in the camp, when the child is sleeping and Pat and Pran are off literally fucking in the tent minding their own goddamn business, Phupa cannot bring himself to touch Tian.

They’re sharing place but not space, or whatever it was that Ayan said to Akk in their Our Skyy 2 episodes. When Phupa gives Tian his medicine, at most their fingers brush, they don’t sit down together, they don’t ground themselves with touch. They share this place, but they do not encroach on each other’s personal space…

…until Phupa falls asleep

gif by @earthpirapat

At which point Tian gets up, and places his blanket on him, and physical touches his arm, his shoulder, etc. as he is adjusting the blanket for him.

Tian initiates the touch, Tian stayed in the village with him, Tian is sacrificing his health to be here with Phupa. Phupa has spent 90% of his time alone with the bouncing ball of sunshine that is Pat, and 5% of his time with the chaotic homosexual energy of Pat and Pran together, and to be real, as much as we know about Pat and Pran’s relationship, and as much depth as we are able to pull from these specific characters interacting in the way they do, Phupa has no idea what Pat and Pran have been through to be where they are.

To anyone who does not know Pat and Pran’s story, they seem like nothing more than two horny young adults in love, who feel no need to hide themselves and their queerness away, that have never had a struggle in their life, and do not understand the trials and tribulations of navigating an older queer relationship, who will last the length of a honeymoon period and then disappear at the first sign of real conflict. Thus, I think Phupa grossly underestimates the company he is currently keeping.

So I think, personally, Phupa is kinda of struck by the sudden and unexpected depth that comes from Pran. That Pran is able to identify and then absolutely hone in and strike at the exact things that Phupa is struggling with. As much as Pat has both relished in the freedom he has to be disgustingly in love with his boyfriend in the woods, and as much as Pat has tried to make himself an obviously safe person to be openly gay around, Phupa is incapable of understanding what he can learn from Pat and Pran’s relationship until he realizes these boys have a lot more in common with him than he thought, and that their relationship and their relationship to one another is more complex and therefore more similar to him and Tian’s situation than he would like.

Pran and Phupa carry the weight of feeling like nothing they do will ever compare to the sacrifices their partner has made to be with them. I didn’t get much in to Pat and Tian here, but their interaction makes it clear that they both carry the weight of feeling like their partner does not need them.

Phupa has literally saved Tian’s life on numerous occasions, Tian is chronically ill, Tian has limitations. Phupa is a forest ranger, who is a foundation in his community, who is skilled and competent, and fiercely independent. Pat is disorganized, and impulsive, his father is the reason he and Pran can’t be open about their relationship, he is the reason Pran got sent away.

We get a fun reversal with dynamics in these Bad Buddy x ATOTS episodes because Tian and Phupa are older, but Pat and Pran have an entire lifetime of navigating and overcoming conflict under their belt. Pat and Pran have already weathered the storm of the fight that Tian and Phupa are having. They have already settled in to who they are, but Pat and Pran (Pran especially) are able to see the ways that always giving in and never backing down wears on a person. Pran learns from seeing the pain that Tian is in that being uncompromising might cause fractures in their relationship in the future.

Tian and Phupa (Phupa especially) are learning how to resolve their conflicts. Pran, who is holding on to Tian and Phupa’s story so tightly because it is shared, because it is open, because anyone who wants to can know about it, pushes Phupa, who cannot cope with being portrayed as being in love with Tian, to read all of the diary Tian published online. Pran pushes Phupa to push through the emotional blocks, to push past his initial concerns, and to assume Tian wrote and published this story with both an understanding of who is partner is and what Phupa is comfortable with, and with no intention of hurting anybody.

Anyway, all of this to say, that this episode has really made me analyze Phupa with an internalized homophobia lens, and though one can never trust a P’Aof trailer, it has left me with two impressions.

On the subject of Phupa and internalized homophobia, and needing to move past that (and more) in order for his relationship with Tian to survive this fight, @shortpplfedup said it best:

“Now I'm thinking about one moment from the preview (but just a moment!) where Phupha tells Tian he's not gonna sneak to look at him, he's gonna OPENLY look at him”