I strongly disagree with all of the bad faith criticism of "Wu." Accusing a company that produces eleventy-billion BL and GL series a year of making one "queerbait" series to spite their own market is absurd to a level approaching satire, and I'm borderline amused that people are hopping mad about an imaginary situation they made up. I mean, if what people are actually mad at is that "Wu" is well-written and a lot of BL and GL series that GMMTV produces are not, then take that up with GMMTV, because that's a more reasonable criticism and one actually based in reality.
But anyway, having watched all of "Wu," I have a guess as to why the romance is there but also not, and I don't think I've seen anyone talk about it yet?
Like, I'm enjoying people's meta on NiranPete's relationship. I agree that not all queer love has to be romantic in nature, that it can be platonic and just as profound, and that there should be more representation of that kind of love.
Buuuut I also agree with viewers who've said that "Wu" reminds them of self-censored Chinese BLs. If you've never seen "Word of Honor," then…
These two are also soulmates. And are regularly making tender love just offscreen.
So I wouldn't be surprised in the slightest if "Wu" was made deliberately vague in order to safely market both the series and SkyNani in China.
That doesn't make it less queer, to be clear, and it's still not queerbait because literally no one said it would be queer. I'd call it more, y'know, strategic.
GMMTV gets a lot of money from Chinese fans. Not just when they come to Thailand for events, but from fanmeetings in China. So I wonder if SkyNani and DewTee exist partially so that GMMTV has a reliable form of media that they can promote in China, given the unofficial Three No's policy there.
As it stands now, when GMMTV sends their BL actors to China, the actors have separate events. They even fly over separately. They still talk about each other at their individual events, but other concessions seem to be made presumably to avoid accusations of queer promotion.
There's a part in this video below that uses Caitlyn and Vi from the show "Arcane" as an example of censored queer media.
It's pretty undeniable censorship, too.
However, what I found interesting is that some fans apparently believe that the queer content in "Arcane" might have been censored not by the Chinese government, but by the distributors, Tenchent/BiliBili, in order to transition the show from the U.S. to China as smoothly as possible. So the theory is that they self-censored.
What a lot of interfans seem to forget is that Thai media has to deal with censorship also. It just isn't always clear-cut what's allowed and what isn't, so sometimes writers are kind of taking their best shot while writing a script. The script for "Not Me" was probably several nightmares in a trenchcoat trying to get made, and there's a lot implied in the series that I remember Thai fans tweeting about while it was airing. Like Sean holding a book that references student uprisings without him talking about them in the dialogue, etc.
Or in "A Tale of a Thousand Stars", Earth's character was originally a soldier, but depictions of the military in Thailand is dicey, so they made him a park ranger instead. Then in the novel for "Wu", Li Puo shoots and kills a cop and ends up hunted by the police until he finds a kind of security in the cult(?) for Qi Rong. But in the show, we just see average college student Li Puo shoot a plainclothes guy who is heavily implied to be a cop, but then there's no explanation as to how he became a disheveled acolyte to a warrior god. Like, you can infer things, but censorship around the police means we don't get Li Puo's full story, which I'd argue would be just as interesting a series in its own right.
So considering that Thailand has its own form of censorship and creators there have a lot of experience trying to maneuver around it, I could easily see GMMTV deciding to come up with additional ways to market to their neighbor whose censorship is even heavier than theirs.
Again, this doesn't negate how beautiful NiranPete's relationship is at all. But western fans crying "queerbait" are, frankly, taking a lot out of context. It's more likely to me that GMMTV is trying to corner as much of the market as they can.
SkyNani succeeding doesn't mean GMMTV is going to make fewer BL or GL series. It literally just means they're successful in their corner of the market, and being mad at them for that is strange.
