I write for no man

This is a favorite. Hands down one of the best shows I’ve watched. It’s not anything major in terms of plot. There’s no action, the drama is all on a small scale, and there’s no poignant messages or anything like that. And I still absolutely love it.

It’s a slow-burn, slow-paced slice of life story. It’s fun and shenanigans and people supporting each other. It’s friendships and romance, in that order.

It’s not perfect. The slow-burn and slow-pace is a little too slow sometimes. This is most obvious with Phum and Peem’s relationship. They have their first kiss at the very end of episode 5 and continue to kiss pretty much every episode going forward, yet Phum is still only wondering what exactly his feelings are in episode 10, and they don’t start dating until episode 14. By the end, they’d kind of lost my interest. I love both of them as characters, and I like them as a couple just fine, but they drag out the process too much and they spend too long dancing around each other. It’s not made any better when they’re still constantly making out, because that just makes their hesitancy seem even stupider. Why are they always kissing if they don’t have feelings for each other?

In comparison, Q and Toey’s relationship is dragged out about as much as it can handle before getting too much, but without crossing the line. It’s a little slow to start, but once it does, the pace is fine. The plan to get Q to make a move starts in episode 6, they have their first kiss in episode 7, drama in episode 8, and in episode 11 they both acknowledge their mutual feelings. They don’t start dating until episode 13, but the last bit of lead-up isn’t too much when they’re flirting with the clear intention of getting to dating. They’re also not making out every episode along the way. Phum and Peem’s kiss is before Q and Toey’s, and yet Q and Toey start dating first. Phum and Peem get dragged out too much.

It also doesn’t help that there’s not really much to their story, nor anything keeping them apart. They have a hilariously bad start, with Phum accidentally ruining Peem’s painting and then not apologizing for it. Peem kicks him in the nuts in retaliation, and Phum decides to retaliate for that pain and humiliation by making Peem be his slave for a while.

Which is bad writing. I’m gonna say that right away. A slave plot? In the year 2024? Come on now. But on top of that, the slave deal doesn’t really make much sense. Phum also mainly uses it to outright annoy Peem by making him do things like buy three different types of drinks, clean his already clean apartment, stuff like that.

I understand this keeping them apart in the beginning. But it doesn’t take long for this deal to fade mostly into the background, and instead they spend time together because Tan, their mutual friend, starts merging their friend groups, until they kiss and then start spending time together mostly because they want to. And even though there’s this slave deal between them, that could make things weird, that doesn’t seem like a reason that keeps them from just outright dating most of the time. In fact, no reason is really brought up, except when Pheem tells Q that they had a bad start. I’m guessing we’re supposed to think it’s the slave deal, as well as Phum and Peem being unsure of what exactly they feel, but if that’s the case, why are they constantly hanging out and kissing every episode?

This is a thing I’ve noticed with P’New’s shows, actually. It’s almost like he doesn’t really know how to write established couples, so he keeps his couples apart as long as he can. At least, that’s how his main couples feel, and his main couple here is definitely PhumPeem. Officially, QToey are supposed to be a main couple as well, and they’re definitely the couple that gets the second-most screen time and story, but they’re not treated the same as PhumPeem.

None of this is too detrimental to my overall enjoyment, though, because romance is not the core of this show.

This show lives and dies with the fantastic friendships we see. P’New may not be good at writing romance, but he’s the master of writing friendships.

Through Tan, the common denominator, two friend groups are merged into one big one. Tan also brings in Fang, because he’s deeply in love with Fang, and they add Toey and Matt to the equation as well, through both Peem and Q, who are their university seniors, and through Phum and Fang, who have known Toey for a while. There’s lots of shenanigans, lots of laughter, and just lots of heart. Every character in this big friend group has a distinct personality, and the scenes where they hang out, no matter the combination, feels incredibly natural, almost like P’New just pointed a camera at the actors and told them to have fun.

I love any and all combination of friends, but my favorite friend group is probably Peem’s original group with Q, Tan, Chain and Pun.

My favorite friendship in general might be Phum and Beer’s. I don’t know, there’s just something very special to me about these best friends, who are mostly pretty lowkey on our screens, but who seem very ride or die. I get the feeling that Beer would protect Phum with his life, including from Phum’s own stupidity, and I love it.

I also love that, even as all these friendships merge, the original friend groups still find time to hang out just them, instead of always needing to gather everyone. That’s another thing that feels very natural, that they don’t all need to gather every single time.

Romances are still obviously a big part of the story. At least half the time, the shenanigans the friends get involved in are about romance in some form. For instance, the volunteer trip they all go on is mostly a way to get Q and Toey to talk and spend time together, after they have a big fight in episode 8 about Toey keeping it a secret from Q that they used to anonymously write to each other back in high school.

And most scenes are, in some way or another, focused on the development of the various romantic relationships. Which happens at four very different speeds. As mentioned earlier, QToey is developed at a very good pace and never reaches the point where it’s dragged out too much. PhumPeem is definitely dragged out way too much and spend way too long in this strange limbo where they’re almost dating but not quite. On the other hand, Tan and Fang develop very fast. They’ve both had feelings for each other since way before the start of the show, which is probably why it develops so quickly. Tan starts genuinely pursuing Fang in episode 2, and in episode 5, Fang agrees to be his boyfriend. And they stay like that, happily dating with no issues between them, for the rest of the show. They’re the cute couple in the background while everyone else is struggling to get their shit together.

And finally, ChainPun get pretty much no development at all, before they’re just suddenly wildly making out in front of the rest of the group. Chain starts flirting with Pun before that and talks to some of the others about his attempts to win Pun over, while Pun has no idea that’s what he’s doing, but that’s all the development they get. Pun doesn’t flirt back or realize Chain is flirting at all until Chain plants one on him at essentially the last minute.

In terms of storytelling, this is kinda bad. That’s not a good way to write a relationship, not even if it’s just the side-side couple.

In terms of my enjoyment of the show, it’s a good thing. Marc and Poon have zero chemistry, verging on subzero, and just really don’t work as a couple, to the extent that I actively didn’t like having to watch scenes with them where Chain flirts with Pun (of which there were thankfully very, very few). So I’m not mad that they didn’t get more development or screen time. That would have just meant that I’d have to sit through more scenes with the two of them trying to portray attraction and a romantic relationship, and it just doesn’t work.

So if I think the pacing is wonky with one couple (TanFang) and outright bad with another (PhumPeem), and I actively dislike one of the couples (ChainPun), then why is this a favorite? Why do I love it so much, if I have so many negative things to say about it?

Because it’s just really, really good in spite of it all. It’s not because QToey save the show (though they are the best couple and I love them with my whole heart). But with 3 out of 4 generally good romances, between couples that have good to amazing chemistry, and with friendships to warm even the coldest of hearts, this show fantastic. It plays to P’New’s strengths with friendships and vibes, and even though some of his usual pitfalls are still there, like an excessive use of slow-motion, and character archetypes, and bad pacing, he has managed to create a show that is heartfelt and warm and just really, really good.

Rather confusingly for a lot of people, this is half a continuation and half a remake. Instead of just picking up where season 1 left off, with AePete happy together and TinCan breaking off their kinda-relationship because Can is afraid a real relationship will result in a real break-up, season 2 opens with Ae and Pete broken up, while Tin and Can haven’t even met yet. Ae and Pete’s storyline has progressed, though with a massive jump from where they were last. And at the same time, Tin and Can’s storyline has been brought back to the start.

For the most part, it actually works out pretty well, I think. Tin and Can’s story ends up being a little different from what it was, because without Ae and Pete’s developing relationship bringing Tin and Can into each other’s orbits, they have a different start and a slightly different development.

But the main beats are still there: Tin doesn’t trust Can because he doesn’t trust people who aren’t rich, and Can hates Tin for being a rich, arrogant asshole, and Tin is eventually intrigued and charmed enough by this to fall in love and start pursuing Can. And eventually, Can falls for Tin as well.

So the first half of the show develops their story, albeit slightly differently, the way it developed in season 1, still culminating with their fight about whether or not to date for real. But here we get to see what happens next, and what happens next is pretty good. Tin and Can are a really cute couple, and Can’s unwavering belief in and support of Tin is beautiful. No matter what people say about Tin, Can remains firmly on his side. It’s what Tin deserves, after everything he’s been put through.

And because of what Tin has been put through, I was pretty relieved to see that neither his brother nor his dad are fully redeemed in the end. His brother gets his happy ending, sure, and Tin is a major part of making that happen, but Tin doesn’t seem like he’s in a hurry to mend his own relationship with Tul, and I appreciate that. Can ripping into Tin’s dad for how he’s treated his sons is also awesome to see.

Even if the dad had good intentions in keeping Tin from the family business, because he just wanted Tin to be free to do whatever he wants, unlike himself and Tul who had no choice, it still hurts Tin a lot to be excluded. So Can telling him exactly how much he sucks? Yeah, that was great.

Tin’s issues have issues. The kid deserves a break and some happiness, and Can is there to provide both.

Meanwhile, Ae has neither. He is alone with his and Pete’s side of the story. The actual reason for this is behind the scenes stuff with Saint, but it fits decently with the plot, because according to the novels, Pete’s dad forced Pete to break up with Ae and leave the country, because he’s a raging homophobe and threatens to hurt Ae if Pete doesn’t leave. So with Saint absent, they just move forward to this part of their story instead.

Except they don’t tell us that. Pete is just absent and Ae is depressed about it, and other characters hint or reference that Pete left because it was what was best for Ae, because his dad was threatening Ae, but the homophobia is never mentioned, and it all comes in bits and pieces along the way, so it starts out being very confusing for anyone who hasn’t read the novels, or hadn’t read that they would be picking up the story here.

Either way, Ae spends the show being very, very sad. At first he mainly drinks a lot and snipes at people, while Pond, the best friend ever, hovers worriedly around him. Sadly, it’s not Pond who eventually knocks some sense into Ae, but a completely new character. After that, Ae just mopes around in the background, posting a photo a day to let Pete know he’s always thinking about him and waiting for him.

And that is more or less Ae’s story in this. Really. He doesn’t do much else. His scenes are usually short and sad, even if they involve Pond or some of their other friends.

However, his storyline actually intercepts with Tum and Tar’s, making their storyline much more significant to the overall show than it was in season 1, really. They don’t seem quite as much like they don’t belong, and so time spent with them feels less wasted.

Tum and Tar haven’t reverted back to the starting point, but they’re also not quite where we left them. But that might be because they seem to have changed what their relationship is supposed to be, and thank god for that, because the whole thing where they’re stepbrothers who are in love and eventually start moving towards a relationship was really weird. Instead, they seem more like two boys who had feelings for each other, but because their parents got married they’ve had to move on from that, and in the end, they’re both happy to do so. Really, I like it a lot better than the weird thing they had going before. So their part of the story is definitely an improvement.

I’d probably also say that Tin and Can’s storyline is improved here. Since Pete and Ae aren’t flirting, we get to skip some of Tin’s most awful behavior, which I’m frankly not complaining about, and we keep most of the good stuff. Can is still feisty and kinda stupid, and Tin is still adorably baffled by both these things. They work great as a couple, with natural chemistry and good banter. Their friend groups, however, are not improved. Without Pete, Tin has no friends, and Can’s slow-speaking friend Good is replaced by some guy named Job, who makes a lot more fun of Can than Good ever did, and it doesn’t work that well. It’s meant to be all in good fun, but it comes across as mean sometimes.

But these three storylines are pretty good. Ae may be sad, but Perth is great at that sort of acting, so even if it’s not as fun or cute as his story in season 1, it’s still a good storyline.

And now, finally, let’s talk about Techno and Kengkla.

This is… a controversial one. In season 1, Kengkla bribes and blackmails Techno’s brother Technic into giving him photos of, information on, and time with Techno. It starts fairly innocently, with Kengkla giving Technic access to his car for a date in exchange for a picture Technic already has of Techno sleeping. In context with everything else, the fact that Techno is sleeping is obviously not great, but at the same time, it’s by far the most innocent thing, and let’s be real, accumulating photos of your crush is a classic in all types of media.

It ends, however, with a sober Kengkla “coercing” a stumbling drunk Techno into having sex. And that’s the nice way of putting it. Because you can, in fact, just say that Kengkla rapes Techno.

Except that’s not the story they’re telling, and so canonically, that’s not what happens, no matter how much the audience may be up in arms about it. Canonically, Kengkla and Techno just have sex while Techno is drunk, and their storyline here in season 2 is about the aftermath of that. Which is not the aftermath of rape.

Which. We’re gonna put a pin in that for a moment and just talk about the storyline we get.

Just like with AePete’s story, KengklaTechno’s storyline picks up some time after season 1 ended, without explaining any of the stuff that happened in between. Techno is mad at Kengkla, but not for the sex. Instead, he’s mad that Kengkla lied and told Techno that it was him who came onto Kengkla, which Techno had felt guilty about, because Kengkla is younger than him, until he found out that it was the other way around. None of this is mentioned in the show, or really hinted at, which makes it kind of confusing at first. And honestly, I’m not sure it got less confusing because of something in the show or because I found out from novel readers online what had happened.

Kengkla makes some very earnest attempts to apologize to Techno, while still respecting that Techno needs space (ironic, I know). Techno is confused about his feelings, but unfortunately, he can’t talk to Type about it, because Type is absent from the show. Real life got in the way of that one, sadly, so Techno is all on his lonesome with his struggles. Which is sad. I think it would have added a lot to the story if we could see Techno talking to someone about it all.

It’s not a bad story, actually. Because we get so little information in the beginning, I’m also not sure I’d call it a good story, but it’s fine. It’s kind of cute, how Kengkla tries to approach Techno, and it’s funny how Techno keeps running away from his problems, until he eventually admits to himself that he probably does like Kengkla back.

So if you can overlook that they more or less ended season 1 with Kengkla raping Techno and accept that according to the story, and thus according to Techno, they just had sex and Techno is not a victim, then it can actually be pretty enjoyable. And they’re pretty cute together! Gun and Mark make a good-looking couple.

But it’s a pretty massive thing to overlook. Which is not Gun or Mark’s faults, and it’s not even really the director’s fault, because this is the way their story was written by the author of the novels.

Taking the pin back out, it does taint their story that season 1 is what it is with them. It can be hard to know if you want Kengkla to succeed, because what he did was awful, and that also means that watching Techno grow fonder and fonder of Kengkla is odd, to say the least.

It’s clear that we’re supposed to root for them to get together. This is a love story, just like AePete and TinCan. Techno doesn’t consider himself a victim and the storytelling tells us that Kengla was wrong for lying and is being suitably punished for it. And because of this, I eventually decided, after debating with myself, that I was not going to hate this ship or this storyline. Hate those scenes at the end of season 1, yes, but not the ship. Gun and Mark make a very pretty couple, the sequel wants us to root for them, and regardless of the bad behavior here, they are supposed to end up mutually in love.

I’m not going to stop anyone else from hating this pairing. People can feel whatever they want about it. But I just decided to accept the story and not hate them.

I’m not mad that we never got more about them either, though. And I wouldn’t have been mad if they had completely tossed this storyline from season 2. It also adds nothing to the rest of the show, really. Techno is now the one feeling more removed from the rest of the stories, because while he still hangs out with Can and sometimes Ae, it’s less than it was in season 1, and Type isn’t there to strengthen the connection between the seniors and the juniors. And Kengkla has nothing to do with anyone other than Techno, because Technic isn’t here either, so they end up kind of isolated, just the two of them.

Overall, this isn’t as good as season 1. Yes, parts of TinCan’s story is better, and Ae’s story is still good, but it’s just not as good as the AePete storyline in season 1, and without Pete there at any point, they can barely give a resolution to that storyline. Tum and Tar is a clear improvement, and on the surface, Kengkla and Techno also get a better story here.

But season 1 was a little neater and tighter and did not require the level of knowledge of the source material that season 2 does. That’s one of it’s main pitfalls, really. There are too many things that are just. Not explained.

For anyone who enjoyed TinCan in Love By Chance, I’d say A Chance to Love is worth a watch, which I think was the point. I think this show is meant to be for those who really wanted more TinCan after Love By Chance. But you don’t need to watch Love By Chance to watch their story in A Chance to Love. If you didn’t care about TinCan, then this show is probably not worth a watch. No one who watched Love By Chance got attached to TumTar or KengklaTechno, who might have better stories, and AePete is just Ae being sad here.

Imagine writing a brilliant show. A show so good, it becomes an international success before it’s even finished. A show so amazing, everyone watching it is raving, week after week, about the acting, the chemistry, the story, every single thing about it. A show so utterly incredible that the main couple will remain popular for years, despite never doing a show together again.

And then imagine ruining it so completely in the last two episodes that it’s become legendary. An ending so bad, people complained about it for years. An ending so hated, it’s almost a meme. A cautionary tale of what not to do.

That’s 2gether in a nutshell.

The first 10 episodes were brilliant. It’s not a particularly innovative story, and I honestly think it would have been far less popular if it aired now, when there are so many shows, and perspectives on so many of the little details have changed. But regardless of whether it would have been popular now, it was certainly popular then.

And who can blame people for loving it? It has fake dating! That’s a great trope!

Hilariously, even though Tine asks Sarawat to be his fake boyfriend, to get another guy to leave him alone, he’s very resistant to Sarawat doing anything boyfriend-y or couple-y. Sarawat has to keep reminding him that they’re supposed to be pretending to date. Though of course, Sarawat has an alternative agenda with that as well, because of course it eventually turns out that Sarawat has been in love with Tine for a while already.

Sarawat helps Tine join the music club, even though Tine can’t play any instruments, because Tine wants to flirt with a girl (despite still pretending to be dating Sarawat), and Sarawat is too in love with Tine to not help him out. They grow closer while Sarawat teaches Tine how to play guitar for his audition, which feels like a really natural way for them to bond. For instance, Tine asks Sarawat why he’s studying political science instead of music, when he clearly loves music and is really good at it. Sarawat replies that he finds political science interesting, and that he wants music to continue to be a hobby he loves, rather than making it a work thing and losing that love. It’s a great scene, both for them as individual characters and for them as a couple.

And when they get together for real, boy are they cute. We don’t see them cuddle or touch much, never mind kissing, but they don’t need to do either. They still have a lot of really cute interactions and some good banter. There’s a great little montage when they move in together, where we see some of their domestic life. It’s extremely cute and funny and also extremely natural.

There are some also dramatic moments every now and then, and they’re (mostly) done equally well. Sarawat is an extremely popular guy with the ladies, and that leads to him getting attacked at one point, and Tine jumps in to help him. They nurse their wounds together and cuddle on a couch, and it’s all very cute, really.

Another bit of drama comes from a guy named Mil. He takes an instant liking to Tine (much like a lot of others, it seems) and does what he can to let Tine know that he’s interested, without ever going too far.

Mil has his own little admirer too, in Sarawat’s little brother Phukong. Now that one gets a little weird. Not because Mil and Phukong aren’t great together. They are! But that’s actually why it gets a little weird. The narrative keeps telling us that Mil likes Tine, but Drake acts Mil in scenes with Phukong like a man developing some serious feelings, which makes it odd to see him still pursuing Tine. It makes him seem either very indecisive or like he’s lying to himself, and I don’t think either was the intention. Drake and Frank just have too much chemistry and play off each other too well, I suppose.

The first drama they face as a couple is Tine’s protective older brother Type.

He comes to stay with them, and Tine is so worried how Type will react to him having a boyfriend that he makes them pretend to just be roommates. Type, as it turns out, is fully aware that they’re dating from the beginning, but goes along with their plan for a while, just to see how things work out and how Sarawat treats Tine. He’s still a little skeptical in the end, but he gives them his blessing.

In the meantime, Sarawat’s friend Man develops a crush on Type, and that is a really funny side couple. Anything Mike touches is funny, really, and Toptap is also a great comedic actor, so they work well together. But they’re also both just excellent actors in general, and they nail the serious parts of their short storyline really well.

There are also some great friendships in this. Mike pairs up with Gunsmile in a powerhouse comedic duo as Sarawat’s best friends. Tine’s friends are played by Khaotung, JJ and Pluem, which ensures that his friend group is not outmatched by Mike and Gunsmile. And while Man and Boss rely on Sarawat for most of their intelligence, Tine’s friend group seems to only have one braincell between them, and it’s not always the same person who has that braincell. They’re hilarious to watch.

There are lots of shenanigans, both in the friend groups and between Tine and Sarawat, to make this a really enjoyable show to watch. The plots are good, the pacing is good, the actors are good, the characters are well-developed.

The first 10 episodes are genuinely really good.

And then we get to the final two episodes. The episode 11 curse is in full effect, creating ridiculous drama to break Sarawat and Tine up, so they can get back together at the last moment.

The drama is about a girl Sarawat used to have a crush on. She comes in for a visit, where she confesses to Sarawat. He rejects her, and when she starts crying, he hugs her. Tine sees this and takes it as proof that Sarawat likes her. Without even talking to Sarawat, he moves out of their apartment. Mil then jumps in and gives Tine a shoulder to cry on, further keeping Sarawat and Tine apart so they can’t talk things out.

And that’s it.

No really, that’s it. Sarawat hugs a crying girl, Tine thinks Sarawat loves her, they don’t talk, and they break up. It’s so utterly, incredibly, unbelievably stupid. It’s not that he overhears something suspicious, or that Sarawat has been acting odd. Ok, Sarawat used to have feelings for this girl, but nothing in his behavior since she showed up has even hinted that he might be pulling away from Tine. Literally, there is nothing for Tine to get upset about when he sees that hug.

He doesn’t allow Sarawat to explain either, nor does he outright tell Sarawat that they’re breaking up. He just gets his things and moves out. But I suppose that’s because a conversation would make it too easy for them to get back together, since it would just go something like this:

“I saw you hugging that girl.”

“She was crying because I rejected her, because I love you.”

Which would make separating them a lot more difficult. But if they wanted to separate them that badly for last-minute drama, they should have come up with something better.

Eventually, Tine realizes that seeing Sarawat hug a girl does not automatically mean that he likes her, so he goes to Sarawat’s music performance, where Sarawat more or less serenades him, and the two get back together.

Which they celebrate with a high-five.

Really? A high-five?

That is why the ending to this show is iconically bad. Not only was the drama ridiculous in the bad way, the resolution was also thoroughly unsatisfying. There’s no reunion kiss, or even a hug. Just a high-five. Like that’s how a couple gets back together. And I’m not the type of person who will say that kisses and hugs are always necessary. I watched The Untamed, ok. But a high-five is just not it. Intense eye contact, like in The Untamed, would have been better. A high-five is less intimate than eye contact, actually.

And that is how you create a brilliant show and then ruin it at the last minute. An iconically good show, with an iconically bad ending.

Or alternatively, The Show That Wanted Too Much.

No but seriously, I’ll admit something: I didn’t think this was all that amazing. I thought it was good! But not the masterpiece most everyone else seems to think. Mostly because it has too much stuff it wants to include, and so it doesn’t really get to fully flesh out any of it.

Even the actual premise of the storyline is a little weird and vague. Aye switches schools to Suppalo to find out why his beloved uncle killed himself. Fair enough, and he does do some snooping around to find out more about the system at the school and the teachers, especially Chadok, the leader of the prefects, but there’s never any mention of what exactly it is Aye will do when he gets his answers. Especially because one of the very first things he finds out is who is behind the Curse of Suppalo, and he does nothing with that information.

Herein lies another part of the “wanting too much” problem: this is a bl and it wants a love story with a happy ending. So, naturally, Aye can’t make it public that Akk is the person behind the Curse, and that undermines a lot of his really good points about justice and fairness.

Aye arrives at Suppalo in a blazing glory of “give ‘em hell” attitudes, with anti-establishment opinions and the backbone to say it out loud. He rakes on Akk for blindly following authority and not considering that the school might not always be right, and he questions both Akk and the teachers about their ideas of right and wrong several times.

But he doesn’t reveal that Akk has been secretly scaring and even endangering students, in order to get them back in line when they make calls for change. It’s information that absolutely should be shared, at the very least with the three students Akk primarily goes after, but Aye sits on this information for ages without doing anything. And not just because he needs Akk to do things for him, or because he understands Akk’s reasoning, though he does threaten to reveal Akk if he doesn’t help Aye with his snooping a couple of times. No, he mostly seems to keep this secret because he likes Akk and doesn’t want him to be hurt or in trouble, even though keeping his secret goes against everything he’s said.

It's actually a little frustrating to watch. Aye talks a lot about fairness and works hard to go against the system at school, help others who go against the system, and expose how rotten it all is. Even though we never find out what his grand plan with the transfer was, he does seem pretty determined in the beginning to show the students and the world that Suppalo is a bad place. Except when Akk is involved, suddenly Aye is fine keeping quiet about the Curse and what (and who) it actually is.

Now, to be fair, this is also pointed out by Thua, so I think the show is aware that Aye was in the wrong for that. It just also never really matters.

Thua eventually has his own brief bout as the one behind the Curse, because he’s fed up with Aye talking big but doing very little to help. He also ends up exposing Akk as the Curse to the school, and thus also to Akk’s other prefect friends, who are pretty offended by his actions. However, Thua’s reasonable anger was dropped on the floor when they dropped a scene between part three and four of episode 11 on the cutting room floor.

No really. There’s a really sudden shift from this huge argument about betrayals to the friends getting along to make an emergency video project to save Akk from repercussions of Thua revealing him to have been harming other students. It feels like a whole scene is missing where they talk things out more. It’s very jarring to watch, actually.

Equally jarring is the change they make to Chadok at the end. When his backstory and connection to Aye’s uncle is revealed, Chadok suddenly turns nice. And not just a “he sees the error of his ways” kind of thing. He just becomes genuinely nice.

It’s extremely jarring. I get that he’s supposed to be an example of an adult trapped in this awful system too, to show that it’s not just kids who are harmed by it, but that doesn’t change the fact that the change in his behavior and attitude is jarring.

But again, this is not a bad show. The plot was genuinely very compelling in the first half or so. I tried to guess along in the various mysteries (who was behind the Curse (which I worked out very quickly, but that’s fine), who took Aye’s notebook (which I did not work out very quickly, but that’s also fine), why Aye’s uncle committed suicide, and generally what Suppalo’s whole deal was). It’s also full of brilliant actors who do extremely good work with their characters and the heavy emotional scenes they have.

Louis portrays Thua’s hopelessness and fear and emptiness so beautifully. He doesn’t have to say much or do much, and he still fully convinces me that Thua is teetering on the edge of being suicidal. He also manages to show Thua slowly growing more hopeful and determined, without even changing very much in the way Thua acts. It still comes across so well!

Neo portrays Kan’s hopelessness and fear just as beautifully, but in an entirely different way. Kan is tense and scared shitless that people will find out he’s gay and struggles so hard to repress his feelings for Thua, while also being far too concerned for Thua to not do everything he can to help, even if he has to do it secretly. That scene where Kan kisses Thua and then looks up at the ceiling with a small smile on his face is incredible, because he’s still so scared but also so excited and so in love, and Neo shows all of that perfectly.

Obviously Akk and Aye are well played and cute together. Aye is funny and sassy, and Akk is awkward and in desperate need of a hug, and despite their instant hatred for each other, the progression of their relationship is actually not bad. First and Khaotung can make anything work for them, and their abilities to cry at the drop of a hat are put to good use here. It’s not their faults that the plot wants too much and thus ends up hurting their characters. Aye ends up seeming like a hypocrite, and Akk ends up seeming more selfish than I think he’s meant to.

Akk’s reasons for harming students was never very convincing to me. He says he does it to keep everyone safe, but to me, it just sounds like he wants to make sure the world doesn’t discover how rotten Suppalo is. And to me, it mostly seemed like he wanted that so that he could still make use of Suppalo’s great academic reputation to improve his own future opportunities.

That’s not to say that I think Akk is mean or cold or anything like that! I think Akk believes that keeping Suppalo’s reputation was best for everyone. Akk is definitely meant to be a good guy with his heart in the right place, who has just been led astray by mean adults. And that is what I see too.

For the most part.

But even if the script tells me, through Akk himself and through Aye and their friends, that Akk is just a lost kid trying to do the right thing for everyone, I’m not convinced that Akk isn’t being at least a little bit selfish here too. Why is Suppalo’s reputation so important to him, if not for how he can use it to his own advantage?  What does he gain or lose from Suppalo’s secrets being revealed, except losing the boost to his university applications.

And I get that it’s a big deal to him. He’s from a working class background, from outside of Bangkok, and has travelled far for this opportunity to create a better future for himself so he can eventually help out his family.

That doesn’t make it ok for him to genuinely put the health and safety of other students at risk, just to convince them that a school curse will come for those who don’t follow the rules. And it’s also not as selfless a reason as I think the show wants me to think it is.

And in the end, the messages the show wants to tell about these serious topics end up falling a little flat. Genuine repercussions for bad behavior and strong ideals are sidelined in favor of happy endings for everyone.

I don't have a favorite movie. I love a lot of movies for different reasons. They do different things for me. The idea of having one movie that's the favorite feels like a disservice to the other movies I love, and so it's impossible to choose.

That being said, this is definitely one of my favorite movies.

It's also 2 hours of me crying on and off. It just hits, every single time.

The crying starts almost right away, when Christopher Robin says goodbye to his friends in the Hundred Acre Woods. There's a sense that he knows this might be the last time he gets to see them all, but all the furry little friends don't. And the crying continues during the montage, when Christopher gradually grows up and changes, while Pooh and Piglet keep checking on the door he usually comes through, to see if he's back yet.

It's especially the first half of the movie that's a tear-jerker. It's quiet, but full of emotions, as we get an idea of what Christopher's adult life is like. It's generally pretty good. He has a decent job that he doesn't seem to hate, and he has a wife and a daughter he loves. But despite that, he doesn't seem entirely happy. And maybe even worse, he doesn't seem aware that he's not happy. He's working hard to provide for his family and live up to his employer's expectations, and that means he doesn't spend much time with his family. There's a vague "one day, when I've worked enough", but Evelyn doesn't really believe that day will ever come. And she's clearly not happy about it, but she's also not angry with him, which is a really nice change from how these things are usually portrayed. She understands, even as she tries to nudge him towards relaxing a little and having more fun. She wants him to be happy! It's nice!

But there are still many, many emotional moments, as Christopher moves through the film and reunites with all his furry friends. The first half is about him and his internal journey, while he goes on an actual, external journey with Pooh.

The second half of the movie is more about fun shenanigans. Tigger, being his usual adorable self, creates a situation that can land Christopher in trouble at work if they don't get him some important papers. So Pooh, Eeyore, Piglet and Tigger venture out of the Hundred Acre Woods and meet up with Madeline, Christopher's daughter. Together, they go on an expotition to London, and it is absolutely hilarious.

It's also hilarious that they've made the decision not to make the furry friends a figment of Christopher's imagination. They actually exist, and everyone else can see them move and hear them talk, just like he can.

Some movie critics have said that this makes the tone weirdly adult for a kids' movie, or called it a mid-life crisis movie aimed at kids, which shames parents for not spending enough time with their families.

Critics like these have completely misunderstood the film, I think. Because this is not a kids' movie. It's a family movie, and kids can certainly enjoy it, but the target audience is not kids. It's Christopher Robin.

This film is for adults, who, like Christopher Robin, grew up watching Winnie The Pooh as kids, and who now have to find their way and their place in adulthood. It's not meant to shame people who work a lot for not spending time with their kids. It's meant to remind people to let their inner child survive into adulthood and to experience joy.

The middle of the movie more or less sums up all the themes and points, and tells us who this movie is for and what the purpose is.

Pooh appears to Christopher Robin in London, when he's too busy with a crisis at work to join Evelyn and Madeline on a weekend trip - something that happens so often, Evelyn hadn't even bothered to pack his bag. Pooh is kind of disruptive, so Christopher takes him back to the countryside so he can go home. Because Pooh couldn't find any of his friends before he appeared in London, Christopher goes with him to the Hundred Acre Woods to look for them.

While they walk, they talk about Christopher's work, and how he may have to let people go.

"Did you let me go?" Pooh asks, breaking my heart.

"Yes, I suppose I did," Christopher replies, breaking it even further. I'm already in tears for at least the third time here.

This is the first point the movie wants to make. Christopher has let go of his childhood, as most do, but he let go of too much of it.

He's had a lot of not great experiences in his life. His father died when he was a kid, making him "the man of the house". He served in World War I, and after coming back, he had a family to look out for. He also got to a position at work that has a lot of responsibility: he's the leader of a departement, which means he has to take responsibility for that departement's work to the company, and responsibility for the company's needs when it comes to the workers. He doesn't think of any of them as friends, in case he has to fire them, which is exactly what he's trying to avoid with the current work crisis. Deciding how many and who have to be fired is also his responsibility. He has to deal with a lot!

There are also aspects of his life that he hasn't thought as much about as he probably should. He's planning to send Madeline to boarding school not because it's what he wants, but because it's what his parents did with him. Madeline doesn't want to go, and Evelyn doesn't think it's a good idea, but to Christopher, it's just what's done. It's not something he has a strong opinion on, but he thinks it's for the best because his parents thought it was for the best.

And because of all that, he's let go of the joys and comfort of his childhood. He has let Pooh and his friends go.

After Christopher and Pooh get separated, Christopher finds the other friends, and already in this little journey does he seem to change. He shows genuine concern for them, laughs when he realizes the once dangerous river is just a shallow stream now that he's bigger, and he has a playful fight with air to convince them all that he's their Christopher Robin.

Eeyore doesn't recognize him at first but realizes that he is indeed Christopher Robin when he sees Christopher playing around, and that also just says a lot about the point of this movie. That Eeyore starts to recognize him when he gets playful.

Christopher eventually finds Pooh again, at their special place, and they have a great talk.

"I'm lost, Pooh," Christopher admits, bringing me to tears again.

"But I've found you," Pooh says, utterly shattering me (even just writing about it brings me to tears).

And that is the point of this movie. It's not to shame Christopher for being busy. It's to tell people like him "We see you and your struggles, and we'll comfort you".

The point is that Christopher has been slowly realizing how overwhelmed he is, and is now also slowly finding his way back to happiness and balance.

This movie is for people like him. People who feel lost, with all the responsibilities and expectations of adulthood, who maybe don't even realize how much it can all affect them, and who need a hug. Who need to be allowed to slow down. Who need a little help to find that joy they used to have when they were younger.

It's exemplified pretty perfectly, I think, with the two train rides Christopher has. On the first one, when he's taking Pooh home, he's working. He asks Pooh to be quiet and mutters to himself about savings and "that's not nothing", and eventually concludes that he will have to fire some people. On the second train ride, he plays the game Pooh was playing on the first one, "say what you see". He just sits there, naming things, smiling more and more. Because he's already rediscovering some of that joy.

Another hint that the movie isn't trying to shame people for not spending time with their families is that Christopher doesn't lose his job. He decides to go on holiday, yes, but he doesn't quit or get fired. Because that's not the point. The point is just to remember to be happy. And to remember to sometimes do nothing.

Because sometimes, the very best of something comes from doing nothing. Which is a funny line, but also true. People are happier and more creative when they get enough time to relax, and that makes them more productive, too.

Of course, this is still a family, kid-friendly movie, and it demands a sweet, happy ending. Christopher's boss agrees to his suggestions of how to avoid financial difficulty in the company, scolds his own son for his opposing ideas, and readily accepts Christopher's argument that "the very best of something comes from doing nothing."

Is it realistic? No, but neither are the talking, moving stuffed animals. It's part of the beautiful, wonderful charm of this movie, and I wouldn't have it any other way. It doesn't need Christopher to quit, it doesn't need a big crisis in his marriage. It just needs to show Christopher Robin becoming Christopher Robin again.

Normally, I'd just make a review of the show. Maybe a long one, if I had a lot to praise or a lot to complain about, but just a review nonetheless. However, this one is different.

At his own birthday event, Mark Pakin adressed his feelings regarding the lackluster response to Sweet Tooth, Good Dentist, and Ohm Thipakorn was quick to make a similar statement on twitter.

I have never, in my life, seen actors adress the failure of their show while the show was still airing. Not even outside of Thai BLs, and certainly never in that industry. When a show underperforms, the actors usually all still talk about what they liked about the show, their characters, how hard they worked, and all that, to maintain a positive attitude, even if the fans and viewers are being critical. Mark and Ohm doing this, talking about their show failing, is unprecedented. It says a lot about just how badly the show failed, I think.

It's also sparked a lot of speculation about why it failed. People had been talking about it for a few weeks already, with the show's quality dwindling as the episodes went on, and as a result, people started losing interest and started sharing what the issues were that made them drop the show.

And I want to ponder the same. What did go wrong here? Why is the show so bad? Because it is bad. Mark and Ohm know that people overwhelmingly think it's bad. But what exactly went wrong?

My guess? A lot of things. Some of them big, some of them small, but a lot of things nonetheless. Let's go through them.

The actors

I would say the actors carry the least of the blame for this. The actors have some control of the product, but a lot of it is out of their hands. They don't get to decide very much of the script, even less of the plot, and their input on the direction depends entirely on both the actor and the director. Whatever happened, it can hardly be their fault.

This show has good actors. Poon is a bit of a weirdo, but he's funny, with good comedic timing, and he's good at playing the kind of role he's given here. It's Jimmy's debut in a purely comedic role, but he's talented and does pretty well here. I've only seen Ohm in A Boss and A Babe, but I loved him in that (finding out that he was Mark's partner was a big part of why I decided to give this show a chance), and I've been told his acting in Kidnap was superb. Mark is an acting powerhouse, who has done brilliantly with both dramatic and comedic roles. I'm a big believer in comedy being more difficult than drama, and his performance as Tiw in My School President was absolutely brilliant, and cemented him as an actor with excellent comedic timing and understanding.

So why does Mark seem a little wooden in this? Jay should be right up his alley. And he's doing fine, but something feels off, when compared to the other roles I've seen him in. Ohm is the same. He's doing fine, but he's not shining in this role. The same goes for Jimmy and Poon.

The only actor who seems to be performing to their usual high standard is View, honestly. And Khaotung, but he's barely in this.

Of course, it's possible that the actors had trouble getting fully into the show they were making, or that their interpretations of the characters or the vibes were off. Maybe they had less time to prepare for the roles. If they struggled to accept the directions they were given, it may come off as wooden and off-kilter.

But all of them? At the same time?

A slew of good actors underperforming makes me think that it's not really their fault. It must be elsewhere. The scripting or directing, maybe, or a lack of time given to workshopping and getting a feel for their characters. Which brings me to my first genuine guess as to what went wrong.

The director

It's funny. No one wants to mention this as a possibility. People have blamed GMMTV, the sponsors, the scheduling, they've said the problem is just that there's no popular pairing to make people gloss over a bad script, but no one has pointed to the director maybe being part of the problem. If this was directed by New, you bet your ass people would be pointing fingers at him. I guess people really love this director's other works.

I haven't seen any of Pepzi's shows prior to this, but she's been both assistant director and director on some very good, highly praised shows. Her assistant director credits include Bad Buddy and Dark Blue Kiss, both of which were excellent, and as a director, she's probably most famous for KinnPorsche and My Stand-In.

I'm not going to say she's a bad director just because of this one show. She's generally very praised and her shows have had a lot of popularity. There probably is a reason no one has questioned the quality of the directing, and I simply don't know enough to call her bad. It doesn't sound like she's usually bad.

But I feel like it's worth pointing out that her two big shows, KinnPorsche and My Stand-In, are both plot-heavy and sex-heavy shows, which means fans will have been less likely to comment on messy, disjointed plots and scenes. I have heard a few people talk about both shows being messy. But with the kinds of plot they have, it's also possible that it was supposed to be messy, so not only are people less likely to point it out, they're also more likely to think it's on purpose.

I know it's happened before, that people overlook or brush away directorial issues because the plot is good. The Eclipse is generally lauded as a fantastic show, but that definitely has storytelling issues. Have Pepzi's shows had the same advantage? Maybe.

Again, I can't personally say whether Pepzi is good or bad. What I can say is that she may not have been a good match for this particular show.

Sweet Tooth, Good Dentist is a fluffy, silly romcom. It's practically the opposite of both KinnPorsche and My Stand-In.

With both KinnPorsche and My Stand-In, Pepzi worked with complex, meaty stories. There were mysteries to unravel and the characters could be morally gray. Sex was also a recurring feature on these shows

(And I want to make it clear that I don't think that's a bad thing. Sex in shows is not a bad thing. I don't even think the sex scenes have to be poignant or plot important to be a good inclusion. Sometimes a sex scene can just be there to show that this couple is really into each other. Also, there's nothing wrong with the viewers finding it hot).

Sweet Tooth, Good Dentist does not have a complex, meaty plot, and it has no sex scenes. Sure, Jay and Sant kiss, and we know they've had sex, but this is definitely an innocent show. The only exception is a sensual makeout scene, that's definitely leading to sex, in the very last episode. And hey, that's also totally fine! I'm just saying there are fewer sex scenes in this show than in Pepzi's other shows.

Telling the kind of story that Sweet Tooth, Good Dentist is, might simply not be one of Pepzi's strengths. She might struggle with a plot that stays pretty much surface-level, with very few deep revelations, that focuses mostly on simple character interactions and relationship development. She might struggle to portray a developing relationship when she's not allowed to use sex very much to do so. Not just because she's not allowed to have Mark and Ohm simulate sex on camera, but there's not much acknowledgement of them having a sex life at all, in any way (even though it's a normal part of a relationship, which is why Jojo uses it so much in his shows).

She wouldn't be the only one to struggle with that. New has shown that he has issues portraying established relationships and domestic couples in his shows.

So it's definitely possible that this genre, with these restrictions - an innocent, silly romcom - is just simply not Pepzi's strength. She may not be able to direct or edit Mark's comedic timing just right, or she may not have known just how to use Ohm's dramatic flair and sass optimally. She may struggle with filling out the time when she's not allowed to put in sex scenes.

It feels mean to write, but I genuinely think it might be a possibility.

It's also possible that she's not that strong as a director in general, and that it's harder for her to compensate for that when she doesn't have a good source material to work with. Again, she wouldn't be the only one. New has that issue. But also again, I can't say whether or not she's a good director, so this is just a theoretical possibility.

One that leads me to my next point.

The source material

No doubt, there are issues here. This is a JittiRain story, and JittiRain is sort of infamous for writing mediocre stories. They're the author behind both Perfect 10 Liners and We Are, both of which are in a very similar style to Sweet Tooth, Good Dentist.

JittiRain also wrote Be My Favorite, which is an excellent show. Among those who watched it, it's generally considered very good, very high quality. The story in and of itself is quite complex. There are some pretty deep character arcs, and it's one of very few modern BL stories that actually delves into things like homophobia, both external and internal. And there's time travel!

But that's not what most of JittiRain's stories seems to be like. Most of them are, instead, like We Are, Perfect 10 Liners, and Sweet Tooth, Good Dentist. And with the latter, a lot of the usual JittiRain issues are front and center.

The plot stays at a surface level. There's very little in terms of a story that isn't about Jay and Sant's developing relationship. Which is fine! But their characters and their relationship are pretty surface-level too. Neither has a whole lot of personality. Jay is weird, Sant likes sweets, and that's about it.

In other shows, not having more character details isn't a big deal, but in this show, it just doesn't quite work, even with Mark and Ohm putting their all into portraying their characters.

Another JittiRain issue is the random trauma that was included. It's happened in other shows based on their works, like Perfect 10 Liners, and it doesn't really do the story here any favors. I can't say whether these traumas work better in the original novel, but in the show, they don't.

Jay's brother dying on his birthday is not a bad story. Jay wanting to be like his brother, as if he's trying to keep him alive that way, or trying to honor him, has the potential to be very interesting. Maybe this is why Jay is sort of weird and wooden. He's behaving not like himself, but like Jeng, and that doesn't come off as natural. But that doesn't seemt to really be the case. The only thing that seems to be about is that this is the reason Jay is studying to be a denstis. This story got also shoved to the end of the show, with so little build-up, that a lot of viewers most likely forgot that Jeng was even a mystery. His name is seen on Jay's dentist kit in episode 1, but then he's not even brought up again until episode 9. If they'd given it more build-up, more momentum, it could have worked even better than it does, because this particular storyline does actually work. Somewhat, at least.

What doesn't work is Sant's trauma. There are even two reasons why it doesn't work. The first is that there's no need to create extra drama to have him be dramatically scared of going to the dentist. Plenty of people hate that, and get scared and nervous. Jay can still gently guide Sant through his dentist fears without the added detail that his mother abandoned him while he was at the dentist.

Which, by the way, makes no sense. Why did she take him there, promise to be there, and then leave as soon as he was in the chair? Who paid for his appointment? Who took him home? Did the dentist have to awkwardly call his grandparents when they realized that his mother was no longer in the building?

The second reason this story doesn't work is that the resolution of it is Sant forgiving his mother. And part of why this is a problem isn't even this particular show's fault. People were mad that the brothers in Perfect 10 Liners forgave their mother for the damage she caused them, and so Sant forgiving his mother for abandoning him had peopel throwing up their hands at why these crappy parents always need to be forgiven. It's possible that Sant's story would have been slightly less unpopular if Perfect 10 Liners hadn't just done the same thing.

But that is an example of what can be wrong with JittiRain's stories. These parental traumas that are fairly easily forgiven are something of a recurring theme, and people don't like it. It makes people mad. Paired with a story that in general is pretty weak, having Sant forgive his mother fairly easily is not just angering, but also frustrating. With so little plot otherwise, if they were going to include trauma, they maybe should have made it take up more plot and more time.

The storytelling

By this I mean plot and pacing. And after going through a lot of the issues with the plot in the previous section, this will be pretty short, but I want to touch on this as a show thing, rather than a source material thing.

A problem with the plot is that quite a few things happen, but none of them are given much time or really delved into. Not just the trauma thing, but other things as well. Sant's root canal was something I expected would take up a lot more time than it did. They dragged it out so it took him two episodes to agree to let Jay do the work, and then the actual work took no time at all. And yes, it's not like the details of a root canal would be all that interesting, but I was expecting there to be just a little bit more to it.

Similiarly, Sant's financial issues go nowhere. They popped up one episode and disappeared the next, with very little time dedicated to it.

Then there were plot points that seemed to make no sense at all. Sant panics when he's told his nephew will come to stay with him, because he's told his family that he's doing better than he is, and so he begs Jay to let him use his dorm for the duration of the visit. Only, when they celebrate the nephew getting into a Bangkok school, they celebrate in Sant's actual room, and we never see Sant or the nephew use Jay's room. So what was the point of that? Did they just not have any other ideas for how to bring these two together again, or to point out that San is relatively poor?

Gugg and Yada's story has been heavily criticized from the beginning. Yada having a girlfriend, whom she then breaks up with, seemingly to open up a path for her and Gugg to date, was not a good call. While it's good bisexual representation to show someone dating people of either gender, choosing the girl to be the one breaking off a same-sex relationship was not the way to go. There's so little GL content, it very quickly ends up seeming like GMMTV is still shying away from it too much. It would have been better if Gugg had been the one dating a man and breaking up with him to open up the path for him and Yada.

Except that's not even what happens. Yada gets back together with her girlfriend, leaving people wondering what exactly the point was of having them break up in the first place. Like with Sant's nephew's stay, it's a plot point that seems entirely random and has literally no impact on anything. Except maybe teaching Gugg that he can't always get what he wants.

And all of this is impacted by the pacing, which is all over the place. Things go very, very fast, and then sometimes things are dragged out, and the combination of the two makes the whole thing feel off.

The source material may not have been stellar, but the adaptational choices did not make it any better.

And now...

GMMTV

A lot of people point the blame here. For various reasons, most of them boiling down to a claim that GMMTV half-assed this. One person made a detailed analysis of why GMMTV may have intended for this show to be a failure from the beginning. And that post has a lot of good points, but I want to point out something as well: why would any company purposely create something bad? There is no way GMMTV set out to have this show fail. Did they aim for it to be a huge success? Maybe not. But a failure? Absolutely not. GMMTV never wants any of their shows to be a failure, no matter what. They want them all to make money, after all.

Now, did they intend for this to be a more mediocre show, with middling success, that could help make money and fuel interests for other projects? That is entirely possible.

On paper, this is exactly the kind of show that GMMTV can churn out with very little effort. It's a university BL with a simple romance story and a small cast. Not a lot of sets, costumes or special effects were needed. GMMTV makes shows like this all the time, and they can be the bread and butter that helps fund bigger, more complex shows and endeavors. My Golden Blood, for instance, will have required more spending just for props, special effects, and work hours in post-production. That Summer takes place on an island, so they'll have needed to spend a lot of money to shoot on location and house cast and crew for the duration. Shows like Sweet Tooth, Good Dentist can help fund that.

Some have said that part of this show's unpopularity comes from not having an established, popular couple to help pull in viewers and make them overlook issues (people who say this are usually the same who think shows like We Are are bad and/or boring), but I have a counter to that as well. No, it doesn't have popular couple, but it does have one of the most overall popular actors in his first lead role: Mark Pakin.

I wouldn't be surprised to find out that GMMTV didn't bother to include a lot of popular actors or a great plot because they assumed Mark's popularity and hype alone would bring in the viewing numbers and content engagement. And hey, Mark probably is the reason why a lot of people seemed to start this show, because there's not much else, really, to draw people in. The plot is basic and the cast is small. There's no side couple, no large friend groups, and actors like Jimmy, View and Khaotung have very minor roles. Khaotung is basically just a two-episode cameo! Which is fine and normal, but noticeable when the cast is so small.

Mark was most likely meant to be the drawing factor. Unfortunately, even if he did manage to draw in a lot of viewers at first, the rest made a good portion of them leave.

But no, GMMTV is not the big bad that set out to create a terrible product, that Mark and Ohm, and all the others, had to suffer through to earn money for others. GMMTV made yet another version of a type of show they've done a lot, and this version, unfortunately, did not turn out so good.

Did anything else play into it?

The earthquake

This one might seem random, but people have suggested that they maybe had to remove an episode from the show because of the big earthquake earlier this year. It meant that all shows were off air for a week, but GMMTV had already made all the preparations for a Sweet Tooth, Good Dentist finale party on a specific date, and if they wanted to stick to that, they had to cut an episode. And I can actually see them having done that. In the final episode, there's a montage explaining how Jay and Sant decided to move out of Bangkok after graduation, and it's not entirely unlikely that this storyline was originally meant to take up more time. But then the earthquake happened.

International differences

I'm most certainly not an expert on Thai culture or Thai audience preferences, but I do feel like I've heard and noticed that Thai fans and international fans don't always like the same things. It's possible that some of the backlash to this show is because international audiences don't like a lot about it. For instance, I feel like I've generally seen more international audiences say that university bls are boring, whereas Thai audiences seem to like that. There's also sometimes talk of a specific type of Thai comedy, that not all international audiences fully understand or think is very funny.

Now, Mark talking about the failure of this show at his birthday event tells me that the Thai audience also wasn't too pleased with the show, so the international audience being hard to please sometimes was definitely not a huge factor, but it may have been a factor.

CONCLUSION: What happened with Sweet Tooth, Good Dentist?

Obviously, I can't say with 100% certainty and accuracy that this is what went wrong. I think all the things I've mentioned might have played a part, and I'm sure there are other possibilities I haven't even considered.

But with that being said, I think this is what I would point to as being the biggest, most defining issues: the source material and especially the director.

JittiRain is infamous for these mediocre stories, but plenty of them have been popular in the past. This might very well have been one of their weaker stories, and the adaption did not make up for it.

And listen. I know Pepzi has made very popular shows. I know that. But usually when a show is considered bad, the director gets a good chunk of the blame, if not all of it. And regardless of whether this simply wasn't her strong suit, if it was a fluke, or if she's secretly not a very good director, I don't know. All I know is she had the most power over this show, and so most of the responsibility for why it failed falls to her. The same way New gets the blame for things that go wrong in his shows. Pepzi simply wasn't capable of creating a good, silly romcom with the source material and the actors she was given.

On the one hand, I wish I could go back and get the time I spent watching this back. On the other, if I did that, I’d probably still be curious about it and want to watch it, so maybe it’s for the best that I got it out of the way. Because this is not a good movie. Plain and simple.

I can’t speak to whether or not it’s more authentic to Chinese culture and the original story of Mulan. A quick Wikipedia read tells me that neither Mulan movie gets particularly close to the original legend, but I don’t know. This review will thus not take that into consideration. This review is just about whether or not this was an enjoyable movie to watch. And it was not.

The main pitfall, by far, is the characters. All of them. Literally, not a single character is compelling or interesting. Mostly they’re just annoying. There is one character who manages to be likable enough that I didn’t want him to die in the final battle, but even that was lowkey. The rest I didn’t care enough about for it to matter if they lived or died. A lot of the characters are also never properly introduced. It took me most of the movie to find out what the name of the love interest is, and I could only recognize the “friends” based on quotes from the original Mulan and a few somewhat similar characteristics.

But these friends do not get the treatment they deserve. The cartoon introduces them as bullies of Mulan, who eventually grow to respect her a great deal as she proves herself as a soldier. They make a genuine effort to apologize and start over, so they can be friends, and after all this, they sing the song “Girl Worth Fighting For”, which describes their ideal types of women. It’s a fun song, not meant to be taken super seriously, but rather just to jam along to and learn a bit about what they’d like in a wife.

It's not the most feminist song ever made. It’s also not the most sexist. They reject Mulan’s suggestion of a woman who has a brain and speaks her mind, and instead have what might seem like more superficial ideals, but even these aren’t actually too bad. None of the three friends mention wanting a wife who only takes care of the home, or who fit a certain beauty standard, or who only speak when spoken to or any such nonsense.

Yao’s ideal wife admires his strength and scars, but says nothing about her looks or her personality, so theoretically, he could marry an outspoken, independent woman, as long as she doesn’t think his physique (short and stout) is ugly. Ling’s ideal wife is pale and has sparkly eyes, which is indeed about her looks, but there’s no mention of body type, and again, no mention of personality. And let’s be real here, most people have certain looks that they like more than others. He’s superficial, yes, and there’s certainly things that can be said about the “pale” bit, but it’s no bigger than that. And finally, Chen Po, whom we know from his looks likes food, wants a wife who can cook. Which was one of the few things my mother wanted in a spouse when she was younger.

I go into detail with this song because I feel it’s important to mention the song’s placement in the movie and how it portrays the guys who sing it. I feel this is important because in the live-action version, the lyrics of this song are used for dialogue the very first time we meet the friends. Their ideals for women are their introductions. There’s no leading up to it, where we get to know them better first. And because it’s not done with a jovial little song, it also comes across very differently.

The men sit around a table talking about their ideal types as a way to get to know each other, and it comes across a lot more like “these are the only things that matter” than “I have wishes for a wife, but not very many”, and as Mulan again makes her suggestion of a woman with a brain who speaks her mind, they laugh at her. It’s a far cry from the way they shrug off the suggestion with a “nah” in the cartoon. Mulan’s determined delivery is also a far cry from her cartoon counterpart’s more awkward delivery.

The whole scene makes the guys a lot less likeable, because it means that from the beginning, this is all we know about them: they want beautiful wives who marvel and them and cook for them, and they laugh at the idea of a woman who can do more than that. It’s not particularly appealing as we move forward.

But as much as I’m angry about the portrayal of the friends, it’s the portrayal of Mulan herself that dooms this movie. Because Mulan is boring. And a little annoying. She projects very few emotions, by being blank-faced and monotone in most scenes, and as a result, she becomes a very flat character. Her cartoon counterpart is famously clumsy and awkward, but this Mulan is just plain stoic. She doesn’t bond with any of the other soldiers (who, again, don’t seem like people a woman would want to bond with anyway), and is instead mostly a loner. Which, newsflash, is actually not a very compelling trait in a main character. And to top it all off, part of the reason she’s like this is that she has extremely powerful chi that she needs to hide.

The addition of magic (they call it chi, but it’s basically magic) also takes away from the plot and the message of the cartoon. That Mulan was nothing particularly special, but she was incredibly brave and didn’t let her gender stop her from helping her family, her friends, and her country. Her gender is a huge deal when it’s revealed, and it’s then so cool to see that her friends don’t care in the least that she’s a woman. They have the same trust in and respect for her as they did when she was a man.

Because this Mulan has extremely powerful chi, that becomes the focus instead. Her gender is a minor detail, like pretending to be a man and joining the army isn’t something that could get her killed. I get that there’s a different message here about accepting what makes you special and not trying to blend in, but it just doesn’t work for me. Though admittedly that may just be because the movie is so bad.

Of course, by the end of the movie, Mulan realizes she needs to release all her chi magic potential and use it for the greater good to save everyone, and this act of self-acceptance of course spurs one of the villains into rooting for her. This villain is known as a witch because she can use her chi to transform herself into birds and basically cast spells. She and Mulan bond for a couple of minutes over being special and allowing the world to see it. It’s one of only two special bonds we see Mulan have. The other is with the captain of her army division.

Well, of course she has a bond with her sister, but they barely spend any time together, and there’s something almost like a bond with the love interest, but it’s so surface level, it might as well not be there. In fact, if they wanted to go down the road of minimizing the romance in favor of the feminism, they should’ve done what Brave did and just discarded the romance completely.

This show has two things that made it an instant success before it even started airing: OffGun and political criticism. OffGun is an extremely popular ship. Pretty much anything they’re in together is immediately branded as the best thing to come out that year. And with most BLs staying primarily in the romcom genre, shows with political and societal commentary and criticism are regarded in high esteem as soon as the direction is announced. So does this show live up to all that?

I’d say yes. For the most part, this is a brilliant show.

There’s a reason OffGun is such a popular couple. They work immensely well together, and it is definitely shown here. They play off each other so well, no matter what the scene is. Sean and White are a great couple, with some pretty great buildup, and all the emotions around them seem very raw, in the best way. Their apprehension, their anger, their love for each other, all of it comes across so strongly. They have great chemistry as well (of course), not just with each other, but also with the rest of the cast. And I’m very impressed with OffGun’s acting in this because while Sean and White have great chemistry, Sean and Black do not. Even with Gun playing both White and Black, they actually manage to kill their own chemistry when he’s Black. It’s quite the feat.

There’s also great chemistry with the rest of the characters, and the rest of the characters are mostly great. The gang that the show is centered on has very big personalities that sometimes clash, and yet it’s obvious that they care deeply about each other. There’s not a lot of banter and fooling around, because this isn’t that kind of show, but what there is works very well.

My favorite side character might be Nuch. She’s sassy and logical and seems to be the only Law student of the bunch who actually knows what studying Law means. Gram certainly doesn’t. He’s very smart, and he’s got a big heart and lots of passion, but while his arguments against things like monopoly might be morally right, they have absolutely nothing to do with the law. What he usually talks about is an idealized version, how he wants things to be. Nuch gets that the reality is different, and that this is the basis from which they have to work.

She also helps provide a nuanced picture of the political and societal criticism that the show’s plot revolves around. In fact, we get quite a few different arguments and viewpoints to help showcase what the issues are and why they’re not easily fixable. Yok may want to boycott everything Tawi touches, but his mom refuses to quit her job at Tawi’s factory because it’s the only job she can get, and beggars can’t be choosers here. It presents Yok, who is very passionate and all about ideals and morals, with a point of view he hadn’t considered before.

Likewise, White brings in new viewpoints as well. Where it’s clear the gang has previously tried to create change through actions, such as vandalism, White shows them that spreading information and influencing public opinion can be a far better weapon sometimes, and that their actions can actually end up backfiring instead.

The journey White goes through is very intriguing. He starts off seeming sort of distanced from his own life, sort of indifferent to what he’ll be doing following in his dad’s footsteps as a diplomat and what’s expected of him, only to be confronted with the ways in which the world can be massively unfair. The gang shows him some of this, but his biggest turning point comes from a guy who also tries to become a diplomat. This guy is not wealthy or well-connected, unlike White, and he tells White how hard he’s had to work to get an interview, because no one has been able to pull strings for him. White, meanwhile, may have worked hard in university, but he’s coasted to this interview without having to lift a single finger. His dad got him the interview and introduced him to the interviewer over dinner a few days prior. White even discovers that he can intentionally fuck up the interview and still get the job.

Only at this point he’s realized how extremely unfair that is and decides to walk away from this predetermined career path.

But this is also where some of the cracks in the show start to appear.

The thing about plot-focused shows is that it becomes much more obvious when there are holes in the plot, like details that have been left out and loose threads that don’t get wrapped up at the end. This is a very plot-heavy show and it has exactly these problems.

Most BL characters are either outright rich or have undisclosed finances but live in apartments nice enough to signal they probably have some money. In this show, money and poverty are important points. They’re part of the story. However, that just makes it all the more noticeable when their finances are then still undisclosed. Gumpa owns a garage, but nothing about it looks like a business that actually earns any money. Sean lives there and seems to be an orphan, but we don’t know how he pays for his tuition or his bike, especially if Gumpa’s garage isn’t an actual business (and it really doesn’t look like one). Black comes from money, but has cut himself off from it, and yet we’re never told how he affords his apartment or living expenses.

White has money, of course, but how long will he keep having money after he turns down the opportunity to be a diplomat and walks out on his father after a big fight? In fact, that’s the last we see of the father. We never hear what things between him and White are like afterwards, and we also never get even a hint at what White might want to do instead, not even just him thinking about it.

When Black comes back, he kicks White out of his apartment and out of the gang, but we have no clue where White goes or what he does in the few days before he decides to go back anyway. He gets new clothes, but we don’t know from where.

And then there are the bigger details that get left out. When Dan tries to help the gang on a mission by using his job as a policeman to keep the police from interfering, he gets dragged to see some dude who makes him stop helping. This is a pivotal moment. It truly reveals to Dan how corrupt the police are, even the ones who, like him, don’t want to be, and it creates huge drama for the final episodes that the police do intervene with the gang’s mission.

And yet this man is never introduced. I have no idea who he is. A politician? A police chief? Just a really important businessman? We don’t know. We don’t even get his name, let alone his position and why he can scare Dan the way he does. We don’t hear about him before or after this scene. He pops up for that one scene specifically and then vanishes again. It’s a pivotal scene, and I was underwhelmed by it because we got to know so little about why he even mattered.

Also, White’s mission to find out who beat up Black is dropped almost immediately. He concludes very quickly that it wasn’t anyone in the gang who did it, and then pretty much stops looking and instead starts living Black’s life. It coincides with both White discovering and discarding his own privilege, and his growing feelings for Sean, which might be why, but it’s a bit of a misleading description. And I never really felt like we found out why Black got beat up, either.

I love the happy ending we get, but I was also left with a lot of big, unanswered questions. “Where do they go from here and what happens next?” are common questions at the end of a show, but usually in an excited way. What will their lives together look like, you know? With this one, it was much bigger questions that were unanswered.

Not to mention when we got to the end with all these loose threads that were never tied off, I started to notice the little details that were missing even more.

I still love this show. The acting is great, the chemistry is great, and the plot is, for the most part, great. But I don’t think I love it quite as much as a lot of other people do. Those plotholes matter to me more than plot holes in simpler stories, and I need more than OffGun and political criticism to declare this the best show ever made.

I’ll be honest, I don’t really know how I feel about this show. I don’t really know what to say, either. On the one hand, I could say so many things. On the other, I feel like there’s not much to say. But here we go.

From the beginning, this show was both incredibly hyped and incredibly, intensely divided. In Love By Chance, Techno alludes to Type having a very interesting story. Fans of the novels could reveal that it involved Type being a victim of sexual assault as a child, becoming homophobic, and then falling in love with a guy, and people were intrigued. When it was announced that it would be a show, people were excited.

But from the very first episode, people also had Big Issues with the show. In the very first episode, as part of a feud between Tharn and Type, Tharn decides to give a passed out drunk Type hickeys for a prank. Now, this is far from the first time this kind of prank has been shown in a piece of media. And while I recognize that in real life, it has the potential to be so uncomfortable and cross so many lines for the victim, that it’s probably not something people should do, I also see what it’s intended as: a prank. Something to make someone laugh or make someone huffy, which is what Tharn’s intention is here.

The problem for me is that Tharn very clearly gets some sexual enjoyment out of this. That makes me uncomfortable, and it made people rage against the show in hordes. Some abandoned and crucified it immediately, others stuck around, only to continuously get angrier as we see Tharn give Type a blowjob in the shower despite Type telling him to leave, and watching Type hit Tharn and shout at him did not make people any happier.

With all this, TharnType is probably one of the most hated shows I can think of.

But it’s also incredibly popular.

Plenty of people stuck around and loved it. They’ll point to how we see throughout the show that Type is clearly capable of pushing Tharn away, so when he doesn’t in that shower scene, it’s because he does want it, and he did not feel victimized or assaulted after the hickeys prank.

I was one of the people who loved it. I have always recognized that it has some very dubious elements, but the story and the acting and the chemistry pulled me in. I loved this show so much, I pretty much immediately rewatched it when I’d finished binging it. Watching Type go from hating Tharn to loving him to admitting that he loves him was exciting. Finding out what exactly Tar was up to was interesting. Admittedly, the big reveal of the mastermind didn’t shock me that much, since my best friend had kind of inadvertently spoiled it for me (she’d told me there was a special episode on the villain before the final episode and given that his name was attached to the link, I figured it out), but still, finding out his reasons, and all of what he had done, was very interesting.

There’s also no denying the chemistry. Gulf and Mew do a great job of genuinely making it seem like they’re not just attracted to each other but want to be touching each other. Watching Tharn and Type together in the intimate scenes felt exactly that, intimate. It felt real.

But then I watched more shows. I got a little distance. I talked with my sister, who had also watched the show and, unlike pretty much everyone else, had been mostly neutral to the show. And when I returned to TharnType next, it wasn’t the same. Things that had maybe bothered me a little the first time, when I didn’t know what to expect, bothered me more now that I knew they were coming, or knew what the story behind everything was.

And one of the things that bugs me the most, unfortunately, is Mew’s acting. I just don’t vibe with it. He makes Tharn seem annoying and childish when he doesn’t get his way in a way that isn’t endearing or funny. I thought about it, and my best guess as to why this is, is that Tharn might actually be a difficult character to play.

A brief comparison: the Norwegian show Skam had two characters, Vilde and William, who were usually the ones fans said were the most difficult for the many remakes to get right. And that makes sense because I bet it’s very difficult to get someone like Vilde right. She’s gossipy and vain and desperate to be popular, and kind of judgmental, but also has a heart of gold and the best intentions and wants good things for the people in her life, including herself. Portraying that, without making her gossip and vanity and judgment too much, so that it overshadows how wonderful she is, might be very difficult. William is similar, in that he’s arrogant and rude, but can also be sweet and considerate.

From what I gather, Tharn in the novel is cocky, spoiled, and can get whiny when he doesn’t get what he wants. This is what Mew has to work with, and perhaps he’s just not quite up to the task of portraying these traits in a way that makes me laugh instead of roll my eyes.

Or it’s possible I simply, for no particular reason, don’t vibe with Mew’s acting choices. Or maybe Mew just isn’t a very good actor. I don’t know. But this is my best guess. It’s a little sad because I do think that Gulf is a very talented actor. His portrayals of Type’s inner conflicts and bitterness and anger at the world, as well as his clear affection for Tharn and desperation to keep their relationship together, are well played. That scene where Type copies Tar’s phone number while Tharn is asleep, and then carefully holds onto Tharn’s thumb, clearly so afraid to lose him, is so good.

And like I said, I recognize the very legitimate complaints people have about the lack of consent that is sometimes shown. I agree with some of them, and even the ones that don’t matter to me, I can see why they matter to others.

In a similar vein, I do get what people mean when they say that Tharn and Type’s relationship is toxic. It’s not what I see, but I get it. For a long time after I watched this show, this was actually one of my favorite couples. Now, not so much, and part of that is the new perspective that online talk has given me, but much bigger parts are my own growing reservations with Mew’s acting and the wide variety of other couples I’ve seen since.

But I also can’t deny just how much I loved this show when I first watched it. Or how excited I was for the first special episode, or for season 2. I’ll also be honest, season 2 in general changed my perception of season 1. My inability to vibe with Mew’s acting came much more to the forefront, and as I looked back on season 1, it became more glaringly obvious that it was the same here. But in a recent rewatch, I discovered again that I really, really like parts of it. I find some of it genuinely really good and enjoyable, much more than I would have expected, given the negativity I had sort of surrounded myself with.

I definitely skipped over a lot of stuff too. It’s not all of it that’s good. But I think for me, the highs are high and the lows are low with this show.

Baby’s first thai BL drama! For that reason, it’ll always have a special place in my heart, and maybe that’s part of why I love it as much as I do, but I’m pretty sure I would have loved it regardless. I have other “Baby’s firsts” that don’t hold a special place in my heart like this does.

Or at least, half of it. Because one half contains two really great couples and a treasure trove of side characters.

Part of this show is so cute and so pure. Ae and Pete’s developing love for each other is so sweet, and their story is very well told. Pete is naïve and sheltered and has faith in people, and Ae protects him from those who would use that against him, to gain access to Pete’s vast wealth. He also helps Pete develop more confidence and get a secure foothold on his own life. When Ae says that he knows he’s the best for Pete, he’s right. Ae is the best for Pete.

This is one of very few shows where sexualities are not just discussed but are also part of plots. Pete is gay, and that’s something he has to deal with several times. Part of how Ae and Pete grow closer is that Ae helps Pete when he's being blackmailed over his sexuality by a guy whom Pete had a crush on, but who turned out to just be using Pete for his money. He also comes out to his mother, in a very touching, very emotional scene, where the mom is a Boss with how well she handles it. Lastly, Pete’s sexuality comes into play as he and Ae get closer to officially dating, when Pete starts pulling away because he's afraid of what might happen to Ae if he starts dating (or even just associating with) a gay man. Ae has to track Pete down and convince him that he doesn’t care and that he would much rather be with Pete than with the girl Pete had convinced himself was a better match for Ae.

Ae’s sexuality is never defined, but he has a great conversation with his best friend Pond about how he’s never experienced love or sexual attraction before.

Pond, by the way, is an absolute gem. In his very first scene he’s masturbating to porn, and his perpetual horniness is present in almost every single one of his scenes. You’d think then that he would be some type of annoying dude-bro, but no, that’s not the case. Instead, Pond is a great and considerate friend to both Ae and Pete. He gives them stupid advice sometimes, yes, and Ae frequently calls him an asshole, but he also genuinely helps Ae navigate his new feelings and the beginning of his and Pete’s relationship. His horniness and obsession with sex also comes in handy at one point, when he helps Ae understand that the reason Pete is snippy with him is because Pete wants sex. Something Ae hadn’t picked up on at all.

But what truly cements Pond as a gem is his own little love story. He falls for a girl named Cha’aim, and through gentlemanly persistence and respect he charms her. When they start dating, he never pushes her to do more than she’s comfortable with. When she asks him if it’s okay that she’s not ready for sex, because all her friends think she should be, he tells her to get better, more supportive friends. Pond for best boy, I’m telling you!

Right, I’ll stop talking about Pond.

The other part of the good half of the show contains Tin and Can. Now, Tin is a dick, and he tries to break up Ae and Pete, but his reasons aren’t actually bad. He has a truly tragic backstory and has been used for his wealth and influence more times than he can count, so when he sees his only friend, Pete, who is naïve and sheltered, start a relationship with a guy who is probably lower middle class, Tin’s alarm bells start ringing. He thinks Ae is using Pete, and that’s why he tries to get them to break up. It doesn’t make the way he acts, or the way he talks about Ae and people of his income okay, but it is understandable that he’s so protective.

Can is also protective, but protective of Ae. Kind of like how Tin doesn’t want to associate with people below his level of wealth, out of fear of being used, Can doesn’t want to be friends with people who are rich, on the assumption that they’re dicks. Pete is the exception. Tin is most certainly not.

They butt heads ferociously over Tin’s treatment of Ae, and also kind of his treatment of Can, though that doesn’t actually seem to matter much to Can. Can is a self-admitted idiot, but he’s damn loyal and he will not let Tin treat Ae the way he does.

Now, watching their relationship develop is nothing like watching Ae and Pete’s relationship. It’s not soft or sweet or cute or pure. It contains a lot of fighting, and sniping, and insults, but it’s still really good to watch. These things are also what draws Tin to Can. Tin is used to people sucking up to him for his wealth or good looks, and here Can is, insulting him for those very things. It intrigues Tin, that Can cares so little about the things people usually care the most about. Can even goes as far as to get mad at Tin for buying him gifts, because he can’t be bought. Except with food. And to watch Tin, who has grown up seeing people buy love, who has felt pushed aside and unloved for years, finally feel seen as a person and to some degree understood, is beautiful. Can has no idea how much something as simple as rejecting Tin’s wealth or listening to him talk means to Tin.

The ways their relationship unfold aren’t always great. Not just because Tin can be genuinely mean, but also because he uses kisses as a way to get Can to pay him back after buying him a phone, and Can is not entirely happy with this. Had this show aired just a year or two after it did, it would’ve gotten a lot more flack for this.

As it is, Can does clearly have feelings for Tin when most of this is happening, even if he’s not entirely aware of it. When he finally does become aware of it, he very quickly becomes unsure what to do about it, because as much as he likes spending time with Tin, he’s too afraid of them one day breaking up to date him. His rejection absolutely devastates Tin, and this is where the show ends. With Tin crying in his shower because he feels utterly hopeless and alone.

It's a stark contrast to how Ae and Pete end the season exchanging their first “I love you”s and being cute.

So those are the couples in the good half of the show. The two couples in the other half are not nearly as good.

It’s sad, really, because the four actors here are really good, and there are plenty of good scenes, especially when they interact with characters from the good half. Can frequently, and generally successfully, pesters his senior Techno to buy him food, and that’s always fun to watch. As is watching Techno and his best friend Type bicker and tease each other.

But the couples leave a lot to be desired, to say the least.

Tum and Tar’s story is really strange. They’re stepbrothers, but unless that’s made obvious linguistically, it’s kind of hard to tell when you watch the show. Half the time they act more like they’re biological brothers, which makes it really weird when the other half makes it obvious that they have feelings for each other.

It’s also confusing because they feel very far removed from the rest of the show. They interact with Type, who is a side character to Ae, Can and Techno, but there’s not a lot of these interactions, and mostly Tum and Tar are on their own. The show also doesn’t go into a lot of details about Tar’s traumatic past, which is kind of important to understand why he remains so reluctant to try anything with Tum. It is mentioned, but only briefly. Honestly, Tum and Tar’s story feels unnecessary. They could’ve used their screen time better on the other couples.

I’m not gonna talk about Techno and Kengkla until season 2.

In 2019, I went on vacation to Seoul with my sister. We saw this ad for a TV show a lot, and we both thought “hey, that looks pretty good”. But because everything was in Korean, we didn’t know the title. A couple of years later, after discovering MyDramaList, I scoured the website, twice, to see if I could find that show. And I think I did. Class of Lies or Mr. Temporary, depending on translation, a show about a lawyer going undercover on a prestigious high school to uncover the truth behind the murder of a female student.

And holy fuck this show is good.

It had me by the throat from the very first episode. At the end of every episode, I couldn’t stop watching, because I had to find out what happened next, how the mysteries would be solved, and what secret would be revealed next. The mysteries were also so well done that, aside from our main character Gi Moohyeok and his sunbae Ha Sohyun, I didn’t trust anyone at the school or involved with the school for a while, no matter how helpful or victimized they seemed to be.

Because the thing is, everyone seems to be a victim of some kind, even if they’re also a perpetrator. With the exception of the dickass adults, who seem to use their kids for clout more than anything, but even among the adults, there is a hierarchy, and anyone stepping out of line will be put down in one way or another.

Among the kids at Chunmyung High School, the show’s main setting, there’s also a hierarchy. It depends a lot on whether or not the kids come from wealthy, influential families, or if they have a use to the kids who are wealthy or influential, and so a chain of command is established. Even bullies get bullied, and even among the kids in the top clique, the VIP students, there’s a hierarchy. The kids here also seem to pick on each other a lot, even though they’re all supposed to be best friends. The result: a lot of mutual slander and backstabbing, especially as Moohyeok starts to stir the pot at school.

The web of deceit that Moohyeok eventually uncovers involves, among other things, parents and students, in coalition with the school administration, making the teachers give them false grades, awards and accomplishments, in order to secure their futures at good universities. Now, while Moohyeok probably doesn’t care much about that, at least not at first, it’s a really interesting look into what might be the real world of the rich and wealthy cheating in order to make sure their kids are ahead (remember Felicity Hoffmann and her college scandal?). And the kicker in the whole thing is that, while the kids don’t exactly seem to mind not having to work for it, it’s done for the sake of the parents’ pride, not the sake of the kids.

These parents are also the bullies of the top clique, because almost every single parent we meet is emotionally if not physically abusive of their child. So yeah, everyone bullies everyone.

Moohyeok comes to the school with a revenge plan. He’s been set up, lost everything as a result, and is now determined to find out what really happened in the case that turned his life upside down. As the show goes on, though, it becomes not just a revenge plan for himself, but for Kim Hansoo, the subject of the case that Moohyeok, in order to actually help Hansoo, got fired for messing up. It becomes about bringing down the injustice happening at Chunmyung High, and about ensuring that the real culprit won’t be free to deceive, control and harm others any longer. It becomes about taking down the people, the adults, who have not only used and abused systems, but people as well.

While Moohyeok grows to be a better, more caring person, Sohyun grows to be smarter and more realistic. Actually, the two of them influence each other’s development a lot. Sohyun asks Moohyeok about caring why people do the things they do, which is not something he’s ever questioned much before. And where Sohyun starts out barraging at anything that looks like trouble with noble intentions to fix everything here and now within all the boundaries that exist, she grows to understand that sometimes, in order to get the truth and fix the problem, you need to approach things with more subtlety than asking a student if he’s being bullied in front of the whole class. Moohyeok teaches her to pause and make a plan before she tries to fix a problem. In general, they have a good influence on each other.

There’s plenty of good characters and good character developments, not just with these two. It's clear in the end that the whole ordeal has had a deep impact on the remaining named students, especially the ones at the top. With a lot of their own secrets being out, they get new perspective, and they finally feel guilty for what their actions have done to the people around them. They show genuine remorse and very clearly try to turn over new leaves for better lives.

It probably also helps that the teachers have basically taken back the school, in an amazing show of solidarity and resistance, from the people corrupting the system. Which means that the VIP students will no longer get VIP treatment, and the fact that they can’t just get whatever they want probably also has them reconsidering how they’ve been living.

It’s sort of perfectly symbolized in the VIP students’ lounge, or “Veritas debate club room”, as it officially is. At the start, it’s full of expensive stuff: sofas and chairs with animal fur (cow, but still), a whole racing chair and steering wheel for gaming, a VR setup, a grand piano, a lit vanity station, and a bunch of other furniture, decorations and gadgets that look expensive. The VIP students use it for meetings, but also clearly as just a hang-out den in between classes. At the end of the show, the room is empty. The privileges the VIP students had is gone. They can’t buy good grades anymore, and they can’t lounge around in expensive furniture anymore.

The unnamed students working mostly as background noise? They don’t really seem to learn anything. But that doesn’t mean that the culture at school can’t still change.

Am I too forgiving and overly hopeful? Maybe, but the ending really, truly left me with the feeling that everyone has grown for the better and will continue to do so.

The plot is also amazing. Like I said, the mysteries kept developing, new secrets kept coming to light, and yet nothing ever felt like it was too much. In fact, all the bullying, cheating, and scamming felt very realistic, as horrifying as that may be. Everything unraveled at a good pace, and nothing was ever overly dramatic (with the exception of lawyers being kind of dramatic as lawyers can be when handling a case). The confrontations in the end were chilling, in a lot of ways, but there wasn’t suddenly any big stunts or fights or shootouts. Most of it was mind games, and it was incredible to watch people try to outsmart each other, with varying degrees of success.

Media and public sentiment, another type of mind games, also play a huge part in the show. Reputation is the most important thing to a lot of these people, and that is weaponized repeatedly by all sides. Moohyeok uses it to get information or keep people from blowing his cover, the adults use it to get what they want from each other, and the kids use it to keep each other from revealing each other’s secrets.

It’s a very realistic portrayal of public sentiment, especially for these kinds of people. If your reputation at school is ruined, your life can be ruined. Powerful families can lose all their influence if it comes out that they’ve done something wrong.

You don’t always have to be able to prove something in court to ruin someone’s life if you have just enough circumstantial evidence to convince the public.

I was on the edge of my seat. I couldn’t stop watching. I got almost exactly the ending I wanted.

(Edit: a lot of things I dislike about this, I don’t mind or actively like in other shows, so idk I DON’T VIBE WITH IT)

I don’t remember if I had any expectations for this before I started it, but it doesn’t really matter. I was disappointed anyway.

It did sound really good. The sons of two companies are in an arranged engagement, in which one doesn’t want it and the other wants to win him over. Sounds good, right?

No.

Let’s start with the plot. Firstly, the above description is not what the plot is or ever really tries to be, so I don’t know where they got that from. Secondly, it’s almost like the show can’t decide on what plot it wants.

The first story we get is that Kuea is madly in love with Lian and excited to marry him and is hiding almost every aspect of his personality to make sure he’s the perfect prim and proper fiancé for his very busy, very serious, and very sophisticated partner. And he seems to think that Lian is in love with him too, until he confronts Lian one night about never saying “I love you” back when Kuea says it, and Lian straight up says that he doesn’t love Kuea. Kuea is very understandably heartbroken and tells Lian he’ll break off their engagement.

From here, I thought the story we would see going forward was Lian trying to get Kuea to not break off the engagement, because it was arranged by their parents, with Kuea making him work for it, because he very much doesn’t want to be engaged to someone who doesn’t love him. One of the things Lian told Kuea the night Kuea decided to break the engagement was also that he didn’t want to be engaged to a ghost, which Kuea’s persona for Lian kind of was. So based on that, I thought that Lian would gradually discover the various exciting and playful aspects of Kuea’s personality, like his love of race cars and motorbikes and his singing gig at a nightclub, and eventually fall in love as he learns about Kuea.

This is not what happened.

What actually happens is that literally everyone, including Kuea’s mom, brushes off Kuea when he says he wants to break off the engagement, like he’s a child refusing to go to bed. Despite his vehement protests, Lian and Kuea’s mom even arrange for Kuea to move in with Lian.

It also turns out that Lian knows pretty much everything Kuea is hiding from him, and I guess is waiting for Kuea to tell him himself, and is using things like moving in together to hopefully get Kuea to trip up and reveal bits of himself. And I guess that’s a nice gesture, waiting for Kuea to open up, but boy it drags out.

Also, Lian and Kuea are childhood friends, and yet Lian never seems to ask why exactly Kuea thought he had to hide his personality, and I personally feel like that’s a pretty important question.

I was also very frustrated that Kuea told Lian and his friends that he wanted to break off his engagement and had been so heartbroken to find out that Lian didn’t love him, and yet he continues to act a lot like the engagement is still on. He never removes his ring, he never makes any official announcement, and he keeps going on set weekly dates with Lian, like nothing has changed. His friends comment a few times that it must be because Kuea doesn’t actually want to break off the engagement, but Kuea was legitimately upset to hear that Lian didn’t love him and continues to be sad again and again when reminded of this.

And of course the reality is that Lian is in love with Kuea and has been for ages, but for some reason he’s incapable of removing the stick in his ass that stops him from just telling Kuea this in episode one, when Kuea wants to hear it, and Lian instead says “I don’t think it’s love yet”, like he’s placating an upset child. If he had, all this “I’m breaking off the engagement”/“No you’re not” bullshit could’ve been avoided, and that would have fit better with the second story they seem to want to tell. Not that it would’ve fit all that well there, but it would have been better.

The second story is that of two more recently engaged people getting to know each other. Like, once Kuea moves into Lian’s house, the way they interact seems a lot like two people who aren’t very used to each other, who want to make things work, but are awkward because everything is kinda new, and it’s an arranged engagement, so there are future expectations making things awkward.

Which is not at all what the story actually is, but it would’ve fit a lot better with the vibe of those episodes in the middle of the show.

Maybe the clusterfuck that is the plot could be good with good characters. But alas, the characters are not good.

It’s really sad because Kuea is actually a super interesting character. His real personality is full of spark and snark and even some swag, and a few filthy-rich-bad-boy vibes. And the fact that he’s hiding this from Lian and from his parents is very intriguing. What made him hide himself? He’s clearly very spoiled, and not expected to take over the family business (his parents allow him to study computer engineering), neither does he seem to want to (he actually studies automotive engineering), so why does he think Young Master Kuea Keerati has to be so polar opposite from who he actually is? Was it something someone said, or was it something he just thought himself?

These questions are never answered. Because Lian doesn’t seem to deem that important. Ugh.

Kuea’s persona for Lian is boring. He’s the epitome of prim and proper, as well as soft and demure, always walking a little bit behind Lian and always following his lead on everything. So he doesn’t really bring much of interest to any scene with Lian, not even with all the baggage he has.

But far worse is the fact that Lian is boring. Lian doesn’t have a secret, true persona that is spunky like Kuea does. Lian is just… really, really boring. He talks in pretty much the same tone (and it’s a monotone one) to everyone he ever speaks to, about every topic, with the only difference being that his voice is sometimes softer when talking to Kuea. Half of his conversations with his best friend Yi sound like they’re vaguely threatening each other.

Lian is boring and Kuea’s persona for Lian is boring, and so their scenes together are really boring. Yeah, Kuea’s fake persona is meant to be boring, but it just doesn’t work for me when Lian is also boring, and, frankly, always boring. Did they have chemistry? Yeah, sure. I could see why people said they did, anyway. I just never felt it. I was too bored to feel it. And to top off my boredom is the frustration I felt over them never talking about the big secrets they were keeping from each other, or why they kept them.

I was also frequently frustrated with how little power Kuea seemed to have over important parts of his life. I mentioned earlier that his protests about moving in with Lian were brushed away like he was a child throwing a tantrum. This was a continuous thing. Despite saying otherwise, Kuea’s mom and Lian both treat Kuea a lot like he’s still a child that needs protecting, and Kuea doesn’t seem to appreciate it much, but they don’t really listen to that either. And Kuea, despite his protests, which all seem very genuine, never manages to truly make them understand what he wants and doesn’t want.

So all in all, I was either bored or frustrated when watching most of Lian and Kuea’s scenes.

The saving grace of this show is, without a doubt, the friends. Lian’s best friend Yi and Kuea’s best friend Diao have their own convoluted love story going, and it’s decently interesting. It’s a lot more structured, and they are less boring than Lian and Kuea. But mostly when I say the friends, I mean Kuea’s friends from university, and Lian’s friends from the club. Two of them are played by Boun and Prem, and they completely steal the one scene they’re in. They have excellent chemistry without every really touching each other, great banter, and very obviously came to this club to have fun, not to have serious conversations and intense eye contact like Lian apparently did.

Kuea’s friends are hilarious. Syn says prayers and inspirational words of wisdom a lot, and the others always indulge him, if a little exasperatedly, but always very fond or amused. Ton says a lot of general stupid shit and made me laugh a lot, which was definitely needed.

And it’s among Kuea’s friends that we find my favorite couple on the show. Unfortunately, they only have maybe 10 minutes of total screentime together, but damn they make it work.

Nuer joins their friend group mid-semester and starts flirting with Kuea pretty much immediately. Syn, a devout Buddhist, does everything he can to stop this, because he doesn’t want his friend to sin and be punished in the next life. He’s extremely distrustful of Nuer for a while, but the two eventually have a good talk, work together on the group’s project, and yeah, they fall in love. They’re very cute.

During Lian and Kuea’s big romantic proposal scene, I was entirely focused on Syn and Nuer in the background.

This is one of those shows that has people crying about how sequels to Thai BLs are cursed and ruin characters. It’s one of the shows where large amounts of people seem to prefer the side couple. It’s also yet another one where I just completely disagree.

I think this show is pretty amazing, and I think the main couple is by far the best.

Anyway, this is the last installment of the Kiss series, but continuity is a river in Egypt and not something you take notice of when making a sequel to two previous shows.

It fits okay with Kiss Me Again. It does not fit at all with Kiss: The Series.

Last we saw the gang, Thada and June had very dramatically and very hilariously found out about Pete and Kao’s relationship. When we start up here, Sandee is the only one of the friends who knows.

Well, actually, when we start up, we start in the middle of a very dramatic, very intense fight between Pete and Kao and a baby-faced kid who will quickly turn out to be a capital B Bitch. It’s probably one of the most gripping openings I’ve ever seen, because you spend the rest of your time with this show knowing, in the back of your mind, that there’s a huge fight coming.

There’s a lot of small fights until we get to that, and I suppose that’s part of why people think this ruins Pete and Kao’s relationship and/or characters. While we do get a sleuth of cute scenes of them being a cute couple, as well as lots of scenes of them supporting each other through thick and thin, we also get plenty of arguments. I would like to defend these arguments, because at the center of them is a very real issue: coming out.

Pete’s dad knows of their relationship, and from the very first episode, it’s clear that Pete is desperate for Kao to tell his mom, while Kao is desperate to continue keeping their relationship a secret from everyone who doesn’t already know. Understandably, this frustrates Pete. They’ve been together for three years at this point, and Kao is still refusing to come out. Understandably, this frustrates Kao. Coming out is no small thing, and he’s anxiously afraid of in any way disappointing his mom (there is an amazing scene where they talk about how it feels like they have to work twice as hard and achieve twice as much to not be a disappointment because of their sexualities, even though I’m 100% sure both their parents would them that’s bullshit, because their parents are great).

No one is in the wrong here. Both sides are understandable. I tend to agree more with Pete, because they’ve been together for three years, how long is Kao gonna continue hiding? And it’s also obvious that Kao’s mom has figured it out and is just waiting for Kao to tell her about him and Pete, so it really seems like Kao is making a mountain out of a molehill.

But it’s also the kind of thing where a molehill can become a mountain. Coming out is not always easy and Kao not being ready, despite his mom already knowing, is ok.

This is the cornerstone of every argument Pete and Kao have. Every time Pete gets angry, and Kao gets annoyed or exasperated, this is the underlying reason, even if on the surface, it looks like they’re arguing about Non, the capital B Bitch kid from that very first flashforward scene.

Non may not be aware of what the real issue in Pete and Kao’s relationship is, but he does know enough about it to use it to his advantage.

And oh boy does he do that.

Non uses it to his advantage that Kao is supposedly single and revels in angering Pete by reminding him that he can’t act on his jealousy or show his claim of Kao, because they’re supposed to just be friends. He’s the source of a lot of Pete and Kao’s arguments, and he knows it.

It’s not fair of Pete to ask Kao to give up a tutoring job, especially one that is connected to his mom’s boss, but it’s also not fair that Kao lies about continuing to tutor Non, when he’d promised not to. For one thing because, as much as Pete can act out, Kao should give him another chance to understand why it is Kao can’t turn down this job, especially when he did try to. For another, Pete tells Kao that he can’t stand being lied to, and yet Kao lies to him.

But the real issue between them isn’t even Non. It’s the coming out thing. Pete says it himself one time, that if people knew about him and Kao then Non wouldn’t be as big an issue, and he really wouldn’t be. Pete would be able to tell Non to fuck off, or at least to stop flirting with his boyfriend, and Non not respecting that would be very different than Pete seemingly just being rude to Non for no reason. But Kao brushes it off, because he’s not ready to tell people, and so Non continues to have this way to get in between them.

It works so well that we eventually get to that super dramatic fight from the very first scene.

When Kao tries to make amends with Pete afterwards, Pete outright asks Kao if he’d tell his mom and their friends about them if he forgave Kao, because Pete is not an idiot, and he knows that this was the real issue all along. When Kao implies that he won’t, Pete walks away. Because as he tells Kao, this will keep being a problem for them.

While they’re fighting, their friends invite them both out for drinks, in an attempt to help them reconcile, and while out, they talk about that time Pete made Thada and Sandee think they’d slept together to stop Kao from being jealous. The part that in Kiss: The Series ended with June and Thada finding out about Pete and Kao. Being referenced here. When the show started with Thada and June not knowing.

Continuity is truly a river in Egypt.

Now, Kao does come out to his mom and their friends in the end, but not under very good circumstances. His mom is great, though. And his reunion with Pete leads to the best pool kiss I’ve ever seen.

While Pete and Kao has all this going on, the side couple, Sun and Mork, have their own whirlwind of trouble to deal with. With them, continuity is also clearly a river in Egypt, because while Kiss Me Again ended with Mork seemingly crushing on Sun, this begins with Mork very clearly being nothing but annoyed by Sun and his constant meddling and nagging. He eventually warms up to Sun when he realizes that Sun’s meddling and nagging comes from a place of caring.

Sun spends a lot of time being worried about Mork, berating him for being reckless and getting into fights, and is extremely close to demanding that Mork leave his little brother Rain alone before he gets Rain into serious trouble. It’s actually very understandable, given that Sun at one point has to bail them both out of prison. But Sun eventually warms up to Mork when he realizes that a lot of Mork’s reckless fighting is about protecting and defending the people he cares about. Which at one point is Sun.

Their relationship develops with a lot of banter, nagging, sulking over miscommunications, until it all comes crashing down when Mork gets into a fight after promising Sun that he won’t fight anymore. Sun gets mad about it, and Mork gets mad that Sun won’t hear him out, and rightfully so, because Mork didn’t start the fight or even fight back when he was getting beat up. He makes Sun work for his forgiveness afterwards, as he should.

They’re very cute. I like them. In fact, on my first watch, I sometimes enjoyed them more, because the drama between Pete and Kao was painful at times, and Non was so fucking annoying.

But Pete and Kao are just so good. They’re definitely the ones I come back for. And this is a show that I sometimes come back to. It’s excellent.

So this is the first one made, but the middle one in the Kiss series overall (again, don’t confuse the Kiss series with Kiss: The Series). And aside from some set changes, it does fit reasonably well with what happens in Kiss Me Again. That will not be the case in the third installment.

Unlike Kiss Me Again, this show very much does not have too many main couples. It has two, and they’re balanced out really well in terms of screen time.

Neither of these couples, by the way, is Pete and Kao.

Yes, Pete and Kao are there, but they’re a very minor side couple, and while their existence ends up being important, there is so little of them and their relationship that I hardly count them as a couple in this series, let alone a main one.

So. Two main couples, both of them straight, but not alike in dignity (I’ll get to that in a minute), focusing on the two sisters from the group of five that were not involved in Kiss Me Again, namely Sanrak and Sandee. The other sisters unfortunately never appear and are only referenced very sparingly. If you watch this before Kiss Me Again, these namedrops will mean absolutely nothing to you. But Chacha is still around, and we still love him! He takes on part of the role that Sansuay has in Kiss Me Again, actually, by sort of acting as a big brother to Sanrak and Sandee. Especially Sanrak, who actually, unlike Sandee, wants to talk about her feelings and problems sometimes. Sandee does not.

Her story is about eventually getting together with Thada, and I thought it would be my favorite. I love Sandee and Thada, so I’d love their story, right? Not… not really, actually.

That’s not to say that I don’t like it! Some of their interactions are really cute, and Sandee’s internal struggles with possibly having lost her virginity in a drunken one-night-stand with a friend is very well told. The Cool Gang is still around and is, as always, the best part about any show they’re in, this one included, but to be honest, the actual story of Sandee and Thada’s blossoming romance is… not knocking my socks off. Even though the start is hilarious.

I knew from the beginning that Sandee and Thada didn’t sleep together, but I could still see why they would both struggle with the idea that they did. They have a hard time acting normal, and Thada starts displaying some Not Cool possessive tendencies, while at the same time refusing to actively pursue a relationship – not that Sandee wants one either. He insists on taking responsibility, she tells him to fuck off, and things are so tense between them that they end up failing a group project with poor June.

Their story also isn’t helped by the fact that for a period of time, Sandee kind of strings along Thew, a sweet guy who has unfortunately fallen in love with her. He pursues her but can also tell that she’s not that interested and gives her several opportunities to back away or tell him to stop.

Only she doesn’t. She agrees to date him. And so the poor guy has to deal with Sandee insisting on being his girlfriend while being reluctant to do most of the things a couple does (like kissing, for instance), and she eventually breaks up with him because she’s pregnant, though she doesn’t tell him that. When she finds out that she’s not pregnant, she agrees to date him again, and I hate it every time. Thew is strung along a few weeks more before Sandee finally cuts him loose. Poor guy. He deserves so much better.

Since I knew from the beginning that Sandee and Thada never slept together, I obviously also knew that she wasn’t really pregnant. Maybe that’s why I felt like the show dragged the drama between them out a bit. Though the discussions they have about what to do are, again, very well done in their seriousness.

Now, with that being said, I did very much enjoy the big reveal of how exactly Sandee and Thada ended up naked in bed together.

Pete accidentally reveals that he arranged Sandee and Thada in bed together to stop Kao from being jealous of him and Sandee, and thus they also have to reveal that they are in fact dating. It’s hilarious. As is the fact that Kao is hardcore rooting for Sandee and Thada to get together even before they think they’ve slept together, because he thinks that will get Sandee away from Pete. It’s the kind of jealousy I can get behind, for the most part, and I appreciate that he does stop when Sandee gets genuinely uncomfortable with it.

The show then goes back to kind of dragging on, this time even more, by having Thada suddenly, and for no explained reason, vanish right as Sandee is about to give him a chance. It feels very unnecessary to me, and I kind of wish they’d just dropped it.

Sanrak’s storyline, on the other hand, is great. She starts out being very naïve and a little airheaded, a bit of a wallflower and a whole lot insecure, in part because of her absolutely terrible boyfriend, First. Everyone knows he’s cheating on her and manipulating her, but Sanrak is too sweet and naïve and innocent to see it.

But her story is about how she blooms into an amazing, self-confident young woman who can stand up for herself. She has an internship at a magazine run by a family friend, Na, and while she starts out struggling with basically every task she’s given, she does start learning. Na’s secretary Jane takes Sanrak under her wing, and the two eventually develop a really beautiful friendship. Jane builds up Sanrak’s confidence by entrusting her with tasks and helping her succeed, until she eventually accepts Sanrak’s help with her own work as well.

Sanrak and Na also develop feelings for each other, which First and Na’s bitchy kind-of-girlfriend Ella aren’t too happy about. Na also helps Sanrak grow, and also helps her escape from First several times. When she finally, after far too many episodes, find out that First is cheating on her and doesn’t give a shit about it, Na takes Sanrak on a business trip and runs interference with First for her.

And damn, they’re cute together. They have cute inside jokes, they have good chemistry, and Na asks both Jane and Chacha what he can do to win her over, after she tells him that she doesn’t want a relationship with him, in part because she wants time on her own after First (you go, girl), and in large part because she doesn’t want to be just another one of his flings. Their storyline may not have as many funny side characters as Sandee’s does, but they have the superior relationship.

Speaking of funny side characters, one of the absolute funniest things on this entire show is that The Cool Gang has one teacher for every subject, and he’s teaching so many classes that he can’t find the right building he’s supposed to be in or remember what he’s supposed to teach. He’s a scene stealer every time he’s on the screen.

Now, two things to note before we move on to Dark Blue Kiss. Firstly, I highly encourage people to watch this show. Yeah, it’s not really a BL, but the straights can have it sometimes, and this is one of those times. It is actually really good.

This is the first installment of the Kiss series, in terms of in-verse chronology. Not that chronology or timeline in-verse is always that important, but still, this is the first. The first one to be made and aired is Kiss: The Series (don't confuse this with the Kiss series, which is the name of the overall trilogy), but the events of Kiss Me Again happen before the events of Kiss: The Series, and honestly, some parts of the latter make much less sense if you haven't seen the former, so start here. It’s a really good start to a really good trilogy.

It does have a problem, though: it has too many main couples. 4 in total, which is one or two too many when the show only has the standard 14 episodes. And I know exactly which storyline I’d drop, but I’ll get into that later.

Lots of people will tell you to only watch Pete and Kao’s storyline. Those people are wrong. I highly recommend giving the full show a chance because it’s actually very good. Yes, the other couples are straight, but guess what, the straights can have cute and funny stories too.

The show begins with the second-most confusing time skips I’ve ever seen, a close second only to Together With Me. But the gist of it is that Pete and Kao really did not get along in high school. Pete was a badass who wore his shirt entirely unbuttoned and beat up Kao’s friend Rain for flirting with “his girl”, and Kao was a quiet kid who kind of dared to stand up to Pete.

So of course they end up at the same university, in the same faculty.

They’re forced into the same friend group by June, who is one of the best characters ever created. He’s funny, he’s caring, he’s an absolute idiot, but also sometimes says wise things. He’s a top tier friend. He randomly announces that they, along with Thada and Sandee are The Cool Gang. And they are the coolest gang. Honestly, it’s one of the best friend groups I’ve ever seen in a BL.

Sandee is what ties Pete and Kao’s story to the other three stories. She’s a minor character here, but this show has its core in a group of five sisters, and Sandee is the youngest of them. She’s one of the main characters in Kiss: The Series. In this one, we follow her older sisters Sansuay, Sanson and Sanwan, and of course Pete and Kao. So yeah. A couple or two too many for them all to be basically a main couple.

Sansuay and So’s story is pretty cute, and fairly simple and inoffensive, but not a lot of time is devoted to it, which means it doesn’t have a lot of meat and is thus kind of forgettable. And I don’t just mean after you’ve finished the show. I mean, I tended to forget about Sansuay and So any time they weren’t on my screen. Which is sad, because Sansuay, the oldest sister, is hilariously great at giving good advice but horrible at following any of it herself, and especially because So is played by Earth Pirapat.

Sansuay is also the one who interacts with Chacha the most, and he’s an absolute treasure. He’s a designer at Sansuay’s dress boutique, fabulous, and acts like the older brother to all the sisters. I love him a totally normal amount. Just like I love June a totally normal amount. Or something.

Now, Sanwan and R’s story is actually well and truly amazing. It’s got romance, drama, action, Gunsmile, enemies to lovers and fake dating. What more could you want?

I started out wanting Sanwan to be free of R and just wanting R and his bitchy girlfriend (because he obviously has one of those) to stay together because they kind of deserved each other for being so annoying. I would much rather have Sanwan with Gunsmile’s character. But R realizes he has feelings for Sanwan, starts acting on them, and eventually wears down not just himself and Sanwan, but also me. They’re pretty cute.

He’s helped just a little by the fact that this storyline also includes the biggest betrayal I have ever experienced in a piece of media: Gunsmile’s character is a dick. A dick who plans gangrapes and stabs people.

Okay, so he only stabs one person, and he’s just as shocked as everyone else when he does it, but still!

No one calls the police, by the way. That’s just not how you do it in a Thai drama, I guess. He apologizes to R for stabbing him and for being a dick to Sanwan, and R tells him to just stay away from them for a while, and that’s it. “See you around, person who tried to murder me.” It’s chill. Which is funny.

In terms of plot, Sanwan’s story may be the best one, actually. It truly is really, really good, and I thoroughly enjoy the twists and turns. Enemies to lovers and fake dating are both great tropes, so it already has a leg up on the other storylines in that regard, and the fact that Sanwan and R bring out the best in each other the more they grow to care about each other makes their relationship really good to watch.

Then on the other hand, we have Pete and Kao who, um… don’t really bring out the best in each other. Kao makes Pete more arrogant, and Pete makes Kao violent. They have a very turbulent start.

But of course this stems from feelings hitherto unknown and unexplored! They try to be friends at first, because June the Incredible (he doesn’t call himself that, though he absolutely would) forces them to, but when Kao rescues Pete from being beat up by Rain and his friend Mork, the two fall on top of each other and accidentally kiss. As you do. Pete promptly freaks out.

His freak out makes him revert back to a dick, who tries to force Kao to leave the gang by outright telling him to leave and telling the others that Kao doesn’t like them anymore. Sandee intervenes and Pete and June punch each other. Everything is solved when Pete gets into a bad situation with Mork and needs to be taken to the hospital.

The hitherto unknown and unexplored feelings start to emerge after this. Pete gets jealous when people flirt with Kao and stupidly thinks it must be because he really hates Kao. Silly boy. He does eventually realize that he’s in love with Kao, though because of how he’s acted, Kao refuses to believe it. Pete shows him. With his mouth. And other body parts.

But this doesn’t mean an automatic relationship. Kao makes Pete work for it. He’s scared of Pete hurting his feelings, so even though he openly admits to Pete that he does return Pete’s feelings, he refuses to date Pete until Pete can prove that he’s genuine and won’t hurt Kao. This makes him bring out the best in Pete, rather than the two of them bringing out the worst in each other, which is a really interesting dynamic to see, and part of what makes them such a good couple. Kao makes Pete want to work harder and try harder.

Part of Pete working for Kao’s trust is something that will become interesting later, because Pete freaks out when his ex takes a photo of them kissing. Kao then asks if Pete would be comfortable making their relationship public, and when Pete can’t say yes, Kao doesn’t want to be with him. This will be very interesting in the third installment of the Kiss series, lemme tell you.

Pete eventually decides that Kao means more to him than anything else, so yes, he’s willing to make their relationship public. However, they’re stopped by Pete’s dad asking them not to.

Pete’s dad is amazing. The best bl parent to date, I think. He’s perfectly comfortable with Pete’s sexuality, and as we’ll see later, an amazing dad in every single way. He asks them to not be open about their relationship not because he’s ashamed or anything, but simply because he’s aware of how society will look at them. He knows that some will hate them and some will love them simply for being two boys in love, and he wants them to be comfortable and secure in their relationship before they subject it to outside influences. He does it out of concern, and I love that.

And now I have to talk about the couple I would remove from the show and why.

That couple is Sanson and Mat, and I would remove it because I really, really don’t like Sanson. I don’t know if it’s the writing or the actress, but she seems so completely unfazed by the affects her questionable acts have on others that I just really don’t like her.

See, Mat’s mother is paying Sanson to find out whether or not he’s gay, and potentially in love with his best friend Pat. Sanson goes about doing this by making Mat and Pat hold hands while posing for photos, which clearly makes both of them a little uncomfortable (not because of the potential gayness of handholding, but simply because that’s not something they do), and she invites Mat to karaoke, where she then gets a bunch of women in short dresses to come in and try to undress him. Mat takes the whole thing very calmly, and I applaud him for that, but he does push the women off him, because, you know, he doesn’t want strange women undressing him while he’s at karaoke with a friend. He then strikes up a conversation with a guy outside the karaoke bar, who mildly hits on him at Sanson’s request, and since Mat doesn’t push him away or leave, Sanson takes that to mean that Mat is gay. I was very uncomfortable watching this.

Mat is, in fact, not gay, but he does have terrible taste in women because despite all that she does to him, much of which he’s aware of, Mat is in love with Sanson.

For reasons entirely unknown, Sanson then starts a one-sided competition with Pat for Mat’s affections. Pat is actually gay and does have a crush on Mat, but it’s nothing he ever intends to act on. Sanson challenges him to see which of the two of them can get Mat to love them, but Pat doesn’t really want to play, because he knows that Sanson will win. Why Sanson gives him this challenge is beyond me.

It does lead to a very sweet moment, though. After the three of them have gone camping, Pat confesses to Mat that he’s gay, and Mat is the sweetest, most supportive best friend. When Pat reveals his crush, Mat is surprised, but promises that nothing will change, and he will root for Pat to find someone who will love him back as much as Pat deserves. It’s basically the only good thing to come from Sanson’s storyline.

I wasn’t even moved in the least when Sanson eventually realized the wrong of her ways and apologized to Mat, because at I just didn’t care enough. That’s why I’m not sure if it’s an acting thing or a writing thing.

But other than Sanson, this show is great. Even Mat and Pat are great! It has a lot of truly amazing side characters, one of the absolute best friend groups, and some really great storylines and couples, even if there are too many for the amount of episodes and the amount of time they want to devote to them. So watch all of it!

Real quick: in between Together With Me and this is Bad Romance. My trusted source has informed me that Bad Romance is a terrible show, so I have not watched it. And honestly, with the exception of Cho being properly introduced in that and starting a relationship with Yihwa, you really don’t need to watch it for this show to make sense.

So this is not a very popular show. It’s heavily criticized for “ruining Korn and Knock’s characters and relationship” and for “romanticizing cheating”, and many people will tell you not to bother.

I loved it.

Makes me wonder how many other criticized sequels I’d actually love even though people hate them.

The reason why people don’t like this show seems to be, at its core, very simple: Korn and Knock have relationship drama. Really, that’s all there is to it, as far as I can tell. The rest of this show has much the same kind of chaotic but hilarious tone that Together With Me had, so if you liked that, you should like this. That’s not to say that a sequel can’t ruin something good, or that relationship drama can’t be a bad plot. But in this case, it’s actually pretty good, so long as you don’t go into this hoping for 13 episodes of domesticity.

The drama is seeded from the very beginning. Korn and Knock are now grown-ups with jobs, but Knock seems stuck in his college years and is not majorly responsible for his own life. Korn starts out being mostly fond of this, but the more he has to look after Knock to make sure he gets up in the morning, doesn’t spend all his money on app games and drinks, and doesn’t turn up to work hungover, the more the fondness starts to slip.

But as this is going on, Knock also gets his own frustrations in the form of Korn staunchly refusing to come out to his parents, or even allowing Knock to come out. When Korn’s father finds out that his son might be in a relationship with a man, he flips his shit and immediately informs Korn that he’s coming to visit. Korn panics and demands not just that he and Knock pretend to not be dating, but also that they both get fake girlfriends, which Knock is less than impressed by.

This is very draining on their relationship because Knock is more than ready to come out. It’s perfectly understandable that Korn isn’t, especially given how his dad reacts to the mere idea of it, but it frustrates Knock that he can’t even tell his own parents. And that’s also perfectly understandable. No one is in the wrong here. They’re just kind of stuck between a rock and a hard place, and don’t have the necessary conversation to figure it out.

So Knock starts acting more immature, and Korn gets more frustrated that he keeps having to pick up after Knock, and things get tense. It’s not helped at all by Knock revealing that he doesn’t really like his job, and only took it because it’s where Korn and their friend Cho works. It’s probably part of why Knock never bothered to make an effort at work, actually. Korn overreacts to this and gets pissy with Knock for doing something like that, and Knock gets mad at him for being pissy over something so stupid.

Now add to this mix a sleazy boss who wants to sleep with both of them, who pretends to care so they’ll both confide in him and then uses what he hears to lie to them about what the other said, and well…

I really don’t get why people say this romanticizes cheating. It really, really doesn’t romanticize cheating.

Together With Me had Korn and Knock indulge in an affair we’re supposed to root for while Knock has a girlfriend. She’s a bitch beyond compare, yes, but what he does is still cheating, and neither the show nor the fans seem to care about that.

When Korn cheats on Knock with their boss, it is very much portrayed as a bad thing. Korn’s slowly dawning horror the minute he realizes what he’s just done is beautifully acted, as is the way he clearly feels helpless and desperate when Knock displays complete trust in him. Knock’s devastated reaction to finding out is equally brilliantly acted and truly, truly heartbreaking. And to make the whole thing worse, Korn cheats on the night that Knock is coming out to his parents, which is really a stroke of genius on the director’s part. It’s just… awful, but god damn it’s good.

The tension has been built up on both sides, and Knock is not entirely innocent in pushing their relationship to bad places, but he also very much doesn’t deserve to be cheated on. So no, it is very much not romanticized.

Knock does forgive Korn, which I guess is why people say what they say, but he rightfully makes Korn work for it, and only forgives Korn because he loves Korn too much to not forgive him.

And the people who say that nothing is solved by the end have completely missed the point. Korn is so upset about Knock breaking up with him that he comes out to his dad. They no longer have to pretend, which means Knock won’t be frustrated with Korn, and the combination of this and the fact that the whole thing has made Knock quit his job means that he stops acting out. By the end, everything is kind of solved – even if cheating, morally, isn’t the right way to do that. But again, it’s not portrayed as the right way either.

Elsewhere, there is other cheating drama of various kinds.

Yihwa, now dating Cho, is a queen in every single way as always, with one exception: she gets a crush on her boss. Now unlike Korn, this is an actual, legitimate crush. One that has her agonizing over who to choose and acting weird as a result. She kisses her boss at one point, which means that when their friends start badmouthing Korn for cheating, she’s kind of awkward in the corner, because she did a similar thing. Everyone is always quick to reassure her, though, because Yihwa is too amazing to let her feel bad for any length of time.

She eventually chooses neither of them. Well, she kind of chooses Cho and rejects her boss, but she also tells Cho that she needs to be on her own for a while to process what she’s done, because what she did wasn’t fair to him, and it’s so mature and heartbreaking because they are a really good couple, and Cho really doesn’t deserve what Yihwa did, but he still wants to be with her.

Cho, because he’s amazing and cute, decides to woo Yihwa again like they’re newly in love. Yihwa is pretty into it. So am I.

Rounding out the cheating theme is Farm.

Farm is an absolute mess, and if I didn’t already love him from Together With Me, I’d probably hate him.

Following Bright’s ill-fated attempt at a threesome, Farm is now pretty much exactly who Bright was, except more cynical. He sleeps around with anyone who’s willing and has no remorse for any potential hurt he might inflict. Fai tells him to pull himself together and get into an actual relationship. Farm, because he’s an idiot, simply asks his latest squeeze Rit to be his boyfriend.

And then cheats on Rit with Bright pretty much immediately.

He’s attempting to get revenge on Bright by being available only for sex, but he kind of disregards Rit in the process. The fact that he’s cheating on his boyfriend doesn’t seem to faze him at all.

Rit and Bright eventually find out about each other and team up to get their own revenge on Farm, but other than Farm being kind of uncomfortable when they reveal to him that they know each other, he doesn’t get much punishment. Rit dumps him, he starts dating Bright, and things are fine. Well, Rit rightfully tells Farm that they can’t be friends, because Rit loved him and was hurt by him, which Farm is clearly upset about, but that’s pretty much it.

Farm is lucky he was so cute in the first season.

Fai isn’t doing any cheating, thank god. Instead, she’s struggling to get a job as a female engineer. Her gender being an issue is actually pointed out, and I applaud the show for doing that. Good job, show!

Romance! Drama! Chemistry! Drama! Deceit! Drama!

What a wild show this is.

You get a sense of just how wild when the very first scene of the show is Korn and Knock wildly making out and then having sex.

Get your pearls ready, cause it won’t be the last time.

The creators have then decided to make the world’s most confusing time jumps ever seen on TV. We go back in time to when Korn and Knock were kids, then to their first day at university, then the end of their first year, all without telling anyone what the fuck is happening. So what it ends up looking like is a mess, and it took me a good 10 minutes, I think, to finally be certain that I was at the end of their first year, that’s when they sleep together, and the rest of the show then takes place during their second year. But it’s very confusing.

Unlike the rest of the show, which is generally pretty straightforward. The humor is also straightforward and it’s absolutely hilarious.

Korn and Knock have some of the best chemistry I’ve ever seen. It’s great both in terms of domestic/romantic chemistry, like the great chemistry between Phun and Noh, and in terms of sexual chemistry.

This might also be why it’s so hard for them to stay away from each other. Knock agonizes and flip flops back and forth between whether he wants to be with his girlfriend or Korn. I love him and his big dumb heart, but he’s kind of annoying about it and he kind of mistreats Korn in the process. He keeps kind of leading Korn on, only to then insist that he can’t dump his girlfriend. Korn eventually puts his foot down and tells Knock to stop messing him around, which is a powerful scene. It ends with them having sex, because of course they do. Pearl time!

Their story has a lot of twists and turns, lots of agonizing and “Oh my god, Knock, stop doing that!”, because he’s a (lovable) buffoon. A hilariously memorable moment is when Korn literally runs away from Knock to avoid a conversation. Of course there’s a happy ending, but it takes them time and fights to get there, and their fights are valid. That means that when you get to the end, you really feel like you’ve earned their happiness. Yes, you have earned it. It’s your reward for watching all the drama.

All of it is made a thousand times funnier by the fact that Knock writes posts on a chat forum about sleeping with his male best friend (letting Korn fuck him, really. It’s a point at least once that he’s the one getting fucked), and the people commenting on it are almost all his friends. Korn himself comments on it. And no one has any idea of what is happening.

Possibly one of the most hilarious things, in terms of plot, is Yihwa’s determination to bring down Knock’s girlfriend Plern Pleng (which you have to say like it’s gross, like Yihwa does), with any means necessary and for any reason. Like, Yihwa doesn’t even have a specific thing she wants to expose about Pleng, she just wants to take the bitch down for being a bitch.

Which is entirely valid, because Pleng is probably one of the most annoying villains I’ve seen in a BL. At first, she’s portrayed as Knock’s sweet girlfriend, but there’s something off about her from the very beginning. It’s increased when all it takes for her to become suspicious of Knock’s relationship with Korn is for Knock to accidentally grab Korn’s hand instead of hers when he’s distracted by a phone call.

From this point on Pleng is cruel to both Korn and Knock. She has Korn beaten up for daring to be into her boyfriend. She cheats on Knock, and when he finds out, she manipulates him into thinking she only did it because he’s been mistreating her. She’s rude to Korn pretty much any chance she gets, and whenever Korn bites back, she makes sure to fake some tears so that Knock will think Korn is the mean one. She also manipulates, uses, and even threatens her friends to make sure everyone falls in line behind her so she can get what she wants.

She has nothing going for her. Not even her looks, because even though she’s very pretty, she suffers from My-Ugly-Personality-Makes-Me-Physically-Ugly Syndrome, and she unfortunately does not catch the William Magnusson Syndrome that can cure it.

Fortunately, Detective Yihwa is on the case and relentlessly pursues Pleng until she finally has the evidence to take her down. Knock overhears and fucking finally dumps her. All of it happens in a university changing room that is all black and has an old-fashioned high-backed chair, and in general the room looks like a mob boss’ throne room more than a locker room. It’s hilariously overdramatic.

Yihwa is a fucking queen all throughout the show, but especially in that scene. She’s a good friend, too, to everyone. She’s not out to take down Pleng because she knows Korn likes Knock, but because she cares about Knock and what Pleng is doing to him. She works hard to get Korn and Knock to talk after fights, and she listens to just about anyone’s problems and tries to help out.

Friendships are another great element here. In fact, while Korn and Knock have their insanely high, multi-dimensional chemistry, they also have good chemistry with their other friends. Together with Yihwa, Fai, Farm and Phu, they have a great little group who are always looking out for each other and willing to do pretty much anything to help. The best example is probably when they take pictures of Yihwa and Fai and Farm and Phu kissing to make people think a leaked photo of Korn and Knock kissing was just an inside joke.

While Korn and Knock angst about being in love while Knock has a girlfriend, their friend Farm agonizes over being in love with a guy who just straight up doesn’t do monogamous relationships. His name is Bright and he’s a doctor and a player. From the very beginning, he lets Farm know what to expect from him, and Farm goes along with it, but it’s clear that every time Bright mentions seeing other guys, Farm is upset.

All of it culminates in what might be one of the most upsetting and uncomfortable scenes I have ever watched. In fact, I didn’t really watch it. I just couldn’t.

Bright invites a guy over for Farm’s birthday to have a threesome with. Without discussing it with Farm first. His actions not only have Farm running back to his friends to cry (right when they wish him happy birthday with a little cake and everything), it also significantly damages Farm and his view on relationships.

Farm starts out innocent and naïve, but he ends the show cynical and dragging some poor guy into a bathroom stall while sending Bright a look that says “This is me now. Jealous?”

On a funnier note (because with this show, there’s always a funnier note) in Farm’s story, for the first half of the show, he has a kind-of-girlfriend, Prae who really, really wants to have sex with him. Her attempts get wilder and funnier, until Farm eventually shuts her down for good. At which point Prae sets her sights on the first guy to show interest in her. Girl be horny as fuck. But it’s all fine. At least the next guy she’s into is straight.

You go get that straight dick, girl.

Except the straight dick she tries to get at one point belongs to the guy Pleng is having an affair with and has promised to date once she’s gotten her revenge on Knock and then dumped him.

But in an amazing turn of events, her little bit on the side eventually also realizes how horrible Pleng is and dumps her. He then starts dating a girl who is not as classically pretty as Pleng, but he does not give a shit. She’s nice and likes him and, apparently, the sex is good. Pleng is outraged. I am infinitely amused.

It only gets better when Prae finally has enough of Pleng and helps expose her creams as a hoax. As much as I had to grit my teeth whenever Pleng was on my screen, the satisfaction of seeing her get taken down in the end makes it all more than worth it. And that right there is what good TV is all about. Making the journey, even the annoying bits, worth it.

There’s not much in the plots themselves that is annoying. The timeline is weird and jumpy, yes, but all of the ridiculous drama does make sense. All the plots are good, intriguing, and captivating.