Bl Rating: Color Rush
Rating: Liked it but it needs work
I watched Color Rush when it originally aired in 2020. I didn’t watch the second season because of how botched the first season was. I get this is early Korean bl and so people haven’t really convinced studios to give them a real budget with a real run time.
(15 minutes is a laughable run time and barely even a show. 20 minutes is a minimum for me to consider it a show. 15 is pushing it.)
That being said, Color Rush did make work of those 15 minutes despite being a mess. I get it’s based off a webcomic but I’ve never seen it so I have no reference point.
I watched the show because I heard Hwall—formerly from The Boyz—was in it. I stuck with it because of its interesting premise of having people who can’t see color (monos) and having one person who can allow them to see color (probes.)
There’s a lot of depth and intrigue the show opens up. Themes unexplored. Like addiction and obsession. Yeon U and Yu Han develop an unhealthy codependent relationship. Yu Han is a drug dealer in a sense that he’s Yeon U’s probe. Yeon U can only see color when he looks at Yu Han.
(I think it was stupid to have Yu Han have a disorder too of “face blindness” where he literally can’t see anyone’s face besides Yeon U. Like he’s a lonely rich kid whose family only sees him as a tool and not a person. So he acts out and gets obsessed with his mono. Literally people objectifying him was already enough to create this distance between him and everyone else. The following year, My Beautiful Man did this well with Kiyoi and Hira. An unhealthy-ish dynamic between worshiper and idol, only to be brought to an equilibrium.)
This is the whole stigma with probes and monos. If either one rejects the relationship, it could cause the other to become obsessed. Monos are more inclined to this because they’re experiencing something they’ve never got to before.
The other thing the show forgets (besides the unimportant side character friends) is that Yeon U’s mother is missing and possibly murdered. Her sister, I Rang, is a journalist who looks for her in her free time. Yeon U also wants to look for her but his aunt forbids it. Yeon U’s mother is a mono. His father was a probe but he died. His mother was kidnapped by a guy who killed monos specifically.
(Trigger warning)
I didn’t like they didn’t have a trigger warning for when Yeon U tried to kill himself. I also don’t like the implications that it was easy to break into the mental hospital.
Overall, too short with a lot of wasted potential. I would love for a different country to pick the show up and give it the love it deserves.
Rating: 5.5/10
