#bl fads

BL fan psyche & capacity for nostalgia

Do I think a show has to pull off the execution to be remembered for it or can the attempt at doing something help elevate it?

What an amazing question. And it kinda gets at the fan psyche and capacity for nostalgia. Which means to tackle it, I gotta go historical BL for a sec. 

Older BL 

I think maybe at the beginning (for Thailand 2014-2016) the attempt was good enough. Nostalgia is a very powerful emotion and it makes it nearly impossible to judge a pice of pop culture in hindsight, but it isn’t too much to say that both Love Sick and SOTUS were ground breaking, and that broken ground, while it makes for a rough journey, also made them particularly memorable. 

At the time, there was so little content, and certainly nothing like Thailand's style of BL. (Bright, cheerful, happy endings, less yaoi trope reliant.) Anyone who started watching early, or started watching in order, will remember these two shows differently (and probably with greater affection) than someone who watched them more recently after being immersed in the copious modern BL content. 

Post 2017 BL 

TharnType will always be remembered for the first example of Thailand giving us high heat and amazing chemistry in a way that HIStory Obsessed will not (although it did exactly the same thing for Taiwan, it's because Taiwan already had both chemistry and high heat on the table, so it wasn't as ground breaking).

Until We Meet Again will always have pride of place in Thai BL for its story structure and casting choices and solid pairings all treated with integrity, because it was the first Thai BL to do all this well. A Tale of Thousand Stars had many of the same qualities and while amazing, it will always be dimmer by comparison because it wasn’t first. (At least for those of us who didn’t see it first.) 

There is something about “doing it first” that equates with good and worthy in the human brain. Doing it best isn’t necessarily the same thing, although we struggle to separate them. I, for example, will never be able to think of UWMA without seriously rose tinted spectacles. Because, while it wasn’t my first BL, it was the first BL I truly LOVED. 

I think we as fans can be this way about any piece of pop culture we latch onto first, I could write a whole essay on BTOB’s WOW and how it’s a terrible representative of their discography, ghastly fashion, and objectively pretty terrible K-pop but I will never stop listening to it... And if you’re Melody your hackles are raised, but if you’re newer to K-pop go watch it and you’ll understand exactly what I mean. Harry Potter holds this place for many readers of fantasy because while it wasn’t the first portal fantasy, nor was it the first magical boarding school, and all its tropes and archetypes are seriously old school for the genre, it WAS the first of it’s kind that many younger readers encountered. And that’s what counts for them and made it stick. In the end, it kinda doesn’t matter whether it was objectively good or not. Quality is irrelevant to its retention power. (Twilight and 50 Shades also fall into this category.) 

Despite low viewer numbers and poor distribution, Manner of Death will probably be remembered (rather like HIStory 3: Trapped did for Taiwan) for pushing the boundaries of BL in Thailand and trying to elevate the genre into something more serious, compelling, and capable by inhabiting other genres (romantic success). Despite the fact that as a BL I thought it was ultimately not particularly successful (I did love it though).

Then again 3 Will Be Free was an an insanely interesting and ground breaking piece and I feel like it's utterly neglected and forgotten by all but the most devout fans. 

Grey Rainbow was the first Thai BL to go seriously dark (and also seriously domestic), and no one (quite rightly) remembers it. The Effect, was the first Thai BL to tackle the truly damaging nature of many of the tropes we all enjoy so much, and no one remembers it, either. (To be fair... RUN AWAY!) 

So clearly this tactic doesn't always work. 

Now?

I think if JaFirst's paring and LeoFiat's Don't Say No had really had the courage to go hard into their kink component, whether they were ultimate successful or not (and I suspect they would not have been), they would have been A LOT more memorable. 

They teased it a bit at the beginning, but seem to have lurched away from kinky and for that reason, ultimately, there's going to be very little about Don't Say No that remains in the collective zeitgeist. It's going to fall in with A Chance At Love as yet another MAME offering that was ultimate disappointing except amongst hardened fans. And most of us will just be sad because we all remember Love By Chance and what an odd kind of magic that once was and can never not make comparisons. Don’t Say No at least isn’t being directly compared to TharnType as much as it might have been (if that was the origin of their couple, as opposed to TharnType 2). 

All of which is to say, in this case, I don’t think the attempt is good enough because what’s being attempted isn’t unique enough to Thai BL. 

If it's unique and new to the genre I think the attempt, if genuine, can elevate the show. Or at least make it memorable. But that's because I am personally invested in seeing BL, particularly the stuff out of Thailand, branch out and break ground. 

So far as DSN is concerned I think it’s going to ultimately just fall in with the noise of the 34 (yes 34!!!!) Thai BLs we got in 2021 and fade away.

(source)