trying to put my messy thoughts from this reblog+tags into a more coherent and connected comment.
for every single person talking about how they like the memes around jim's line of "is it not enough that you are poor?" and/or that it's a funny line to joke about but [something something jim character defense], i think you need to start asking "was this intended to be a funny line?"
a theme/question that has emerged quite a bit in thai bl lately grapples with thailand's outward social acceptance of queer people (particularly in the case of how they market their bl media) vs the country's lack of legislature to protect queer rights. there's no recognized unions, they're limited in what assets they can share, they can't adopt children together, etc.
jim's narrative in moonlight chicken is a very common queer narrative. he lived as openly as he could with his boyfriend -- they lived together, they opened a business together, everyone knew they were together. however, due to queer discrimination in that queer unions are not recognized as legal unions, when jim hit the heady combo of discovering his boyfriend's entirely separate secret life (with a legal union no less!) and died before jim could ever properly confront his boyfriend or separate his personal affairs from him, his boyfriend's parents were then able to legally take jim's life savings and several of his assets that were in his boyfriend's name (note also jim's seating placement at the dead boyfriend's funeral, that a statement in of itself). jim had zero potential recourse (as in, he wouldn't be able to argue his case that those were his life savings instead of only his boyfriend's in a court of law). the parents leaving him the business because they didn't want to be bothered with it was not a help because taking his life savings also wiped his business savings. these specific actions by his dead boyfriend's parents are the main factor in jim falling into a cycle of endless debt and poverty. these parents still could have been assholes had jim been a girl, but jim-as-a-girl would've still had a chance of fighting some of this in a court of law -- jim's narrative is a very very familiar narrative specifically about queer discrimination. the reason why queer marriage is often the centralized banner of queer rights is because legal recognition of queer unions is a Big Fucking Deal.
in the moonlight chicken fandom, people constantly section jim, wen, and li ming into "different generations of queer." They Are Not. jim is not an "elder queer" (p'aof is not an elder queer). ~40 is not that fucking old. jim, while having a strained relationship with his sister due to his queerness, openly lives as a gay man and is accepted by his neigherbors. he is socially accepted as a gay man, and frankly he accepts his own queerness as well ("I told my sister, 'i'll show you!'"). however, neither of those are enough when his queerness is not legally accepted -- his tragedy could still happen to wen, still happen to li ming. they are living in the same social environment, jim's just lived in it longer and does not have the financial safety net wen does. his "is it not enough that you are poor?" line is not intended, nor was ever intended, as an expression of internalized homophobia, but rather jim's lack of closure over his personal tragedy and his reality of living in poverty emerging as a fear for his nephew's future safety and security as a queer person.
online spaces already struggle a lot with acknowledging that queer people over 30 proudly exist. (frankly a lot of them can be bad about 20+ π) there's this extremely distorted online narrative that older queer people cannot be accepting of their own queerness, and that no one over 20 (25 if they're feeling generous) has ever openly fought for queer rights. never mind that the rather recent legalization of queer marriage was all thanks to decades of bloody protest by those """closeted and repressed""" old queers. (there. was a meta. that said jim is "from the generation of queer resigned to their queerness." im still fucking mad at that bullshit.)
and to top off this incredibly online mindset, western fandoms have always had a problem overriding eastern cultures with their own personal cultures/cultural assumptions. you see in anime fandoms, it hasn't gone away with the rising popularity of asian dramas in western fandoms, and it does seem to be much more prevalent in thai drama fandoms than others (again, tbf, this is potentially because they are a smaller space than those so it might artificially seem bigger). but it is still a huge fucking problem. you see it in the emphasis on western customs, holidays/traditions, stories, the specifics of queer politics and even queer language. the attitude of "you can't expect someone from another country to know everything about a show's culture/country of origin" is not a fucking excuse to never make an effort to learn about that culture, and at some point "it's just a joke" needs to ask themselves "is it still a joke or am i perpetuating harmful ignorance?"
moonlight chicken is a love letter to thai culture and a very purposefully sympathetic narrative to a common queer plight written by a ~40yo queer thai man. the constant memes and jokes about jim's age, queerness, and the specific line "is it not enough that you are poor?" are not funny in the larger fandom context of younger online queer people ignorance of queer history or western fandom's ignorance of cultures that are not their own.
origamiaround
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