#aaarghhhhhhh

i'll start with the good stuff. it had some decent moments. ilya was good. the sideplot with the gay captain and his barista boyfriend was good. shane was so fucking wooden. ilya should have bottomed at least once. I genuinely really liked ilya the performance was great the accent was great the emotional depth was great and the facial acting OUTCLASSED the FUCK out of whatever was going on with shane. I also really liked the depth from the captain and his gay-conflict actually felt Good.

I hated every moment shane was on screen except for the bit where he was high on pain meds and i was like "wait he actually can be emotive????" and i get the point where he's meant to be bland but he was bland to a point of oh my god this guy is genuinely taking me out of the moments and not just. boring. Like. I'm the guy who likes stoic characters who can't express their feelings well. Ilya and the captain hit those notes for me. Shane was just a rock. You could replace him with a lamp and he would be just as interesting.

Part of this (most of it apart from the performance) is because the narrative never... punishes him? He can't express anything for Ilya past physical relationships, but ilya still spends years chasing after him anyway. Once he realizes he actually does feel something, he buries it in trying to fuck discount jlaw (which shot me in the head 27 times when i realized "x squad" was xmen. also did they lift her name from rose byrne who was also in xmen. laughing) Anyway. Discount jlaw isn't mad at him for being gay and technically leading her on. She loves him. She creams her jeans when he says he's a bottom. It's fucking weird but again: he's not punished by the narrative for making mistakes, and nothing particularly interesting happens to him to give him any emotional depth until the very last episode where he has to confront his parents and even that is undercut by his mom making it about herself (which is hilariously realistic but also OH MY GODDDDDDDDDDD). The only time he was remotely interesting is again when he broke his collarbone and was high on pain meds but that lasted like 4 seconds.

The pacing was absolutely fucking abysmal why were the first two episodes just montages instead of building the chemistry between shane and ilya??? The gym scene at the start was good but then there was no more of that, just fucking. I don't care that they're having sex! I'm not even against gratuitous sex scenes but they were a dime a fucking dozen and they didn't mean anything, which was the point at first but when it starts to mean something and the sex is still completely fucking boring then what's the point? I liked that some of the first ones were awkwardly set up but the sex itself wasn't. I'm still mad about the weird cuck chair jerkoff scene where shane throws his boxers at ilya and ilya doesn't even pretend to consider the idea of hanging on to them or smelling them. Fake fucking perverts the lot of you. WHERE WAS THE LUBE???? Even the mildly hairier gays weren't hairy even if they actually did succeed imo in making the sex scenes build their character and convincingly pulling off the "closeted in public, uncomfortable, but way more enthusiastic in private" that they tried to do with shane but failed. miserably.

i'm also coming at this from a gay-man-watches-gay-media pov and not from a Yaoi Consumer pov, which... i am well aware this is functionally a mainstream BL show. It's not realistic. There's no lube. That's fine. The problem, and why i'm still considering it as a "gay media" show, is that it's gone so mainstream that people ARE considering it as a Gay Media show. It's not. It's PWP AO3-worthy fanfiction material, but it's not like. the adult coming of heartstopper. or maybe it is i never actually watched that but like. god. i hate everyone. i hate this show. i'd give it a solid 2.5/5 stars because i did genuinely enjoy it when i enjoyed it but the parts that i didn't enjoy i wanted to DIIIIEEEEEE. if ilya bottomed it would be 3 stars, but he didn't.

gamestop just emailed me saying they cancelled by order of zelda special edition