#ipytm meta

[What’s going on here? After joining Tumblr and discovering Thai BLs through KinnPorsche in 2022, I began watching GMMTV’s new offerings -- and realized that I had a lot of history to catch up on, to appreciate the more recent works that I was delving into. From tropes to BL frameworks, what we’re watching now hails from somewhere, and I’m learning about Thai BL's history through what I’m calling the Old GMMTV Challenge (OGMMTVC). Starting with recommendations from @absolutebl on their post regarding how GMMTV is correcting for its mistakes with its shows today, I’ve made an expansive list to get me through a condensed history of essential/classic/significant Thai BLs produced by GMMTV and many other BL studios. My watchlist, pasted below, lists what I’ve watched and what’s upcoming, along with the reviews I’ve written so far. Today, I conclude my thoughts on Nadao Bangkok's trio of shows, from I Told Sunset About You, to Last Twilight in Phuket and I Promised You The Moon.]

Whew! I needed to take a quick break from the OGMMTVC slate of reviews to live life: I moved domiciles, and took myself on a therapeutic journey of rewatching the very long and intense series that is Until We Meet Again (I therapize in weird ways, fam), but anyway! Ya girl is BACK on her bullshit, and I am finally reviewing (heads-up, dear @shortpplfedup!) the utterly wonderful Last Twilight in Phuket and I Promised You the Moon, ending the Nadao Bangkok section of this project that started with I Told Sunset About You.

Just to take a quick 10,000-foot-look at these three shows together: repeating myself from my ITSAY review, we know that ITSAY, LTIP, and IPYTM are on the OGMMTVC list as THE prestige BLs of Thailand -- the BL dramas that likely cost the most money to make, and that took the most solid cinematic turn of any of the BLs on this list. And they are centered and cemented by the mindblowing performances of PP Krit and Billkin Putthipong, who were both up for the very remarkable challenge of making theater-level content in two short series and one special episode. (For my tastes? We don't see this level of acting again until Bad Buddy -- but I'm a BBS girlie and thus very biased. But anyway!)

Forgive me as I pen this review a little differently from my previous ones where I lay out an outline, because the dominant thought I have about LTIP and IPYTM was that I will forever respect Nadao Bangkok for going in totally different directions with each piece in the ITSAY framework.

I spent a great amount of time in my ITSAY review celebrating the show's very intentional conversation about place by way of Phuket, and how the history of immigration and the demographic landscape of Phuket so very deeply influenced the layers of meaning in that show (and I thank the WONDERFUL @telomeke once more for spending so much time with me talking about this!).

As we needed a bridge from Phuket to Bangkok: I just love that Boss Naruebet, the main screenwriter and director for both ITSAY and Last Twilight in Phuket, took the time to create a singular episode in LTIP about place, and centering place for the sake of our two beloved leads, Teh and Oh-aew, in order to hammer home ever more deeply what Phuket meant to them, to Boss, and what Phuket should mean to us as the viewers.

Besides the gorgeous celebration of the spaces that meant so much to Teh and Oh-aew -- of course, what we also saw in LTIP was how time can change places. How the boys couldn't get to their special beach spot anymore because the entrance was boarded up. How their tutoring school had closed.

And that theme of change -- and the ache of change -- is, of course, what takes us right to the doorstep of I Promised You The Moon.

But before I go to Bangkok to unwind on IPYTM, I have one last thought on LTIP. In my ITSAY review, I felt the need to unwind and celebrate ITSAY's homage to Phuket as a melting pot, the meeting place of so many cultures (Thai, Chinese, Malay, Peranakan), because to me: Phuket, as a singular place, represented change at home, change from within the home and external to home. Teh's tremendous emotional outburst at the incredibly chaotic decision he made to give up his university spot for Oh-aew -- that devolvement happened literally inside of his home, a traditional Chinese-Peranakan home in multicultural Phuket.

Phuket itself represented a place where Teh could change himself, because the cultural fabric of the place of Phuket changed and changes with the nature of the people that live and breathe within Phuket. That's how immigration and migration change a place -- that's how time changes a place. I posited in my ITSAY review that that was exactly what Phuket was meant to represent as a place of home for Teh and Oh-aew: that a place that was historically and inherently built on change could sustain this very modern relationship between two young men, at least one of them (Teh) raised in an otherwise very traditional and old-fashioned Peranakan culture.

As LTIP unwound (gosh, the name cards of the places they visited, listing place names in English, just made me swoon), and we saw the boys SEEING the change of THEIR place happen before their eyes, I felt that what I was seeing was such an empathic metaphor for the steps of adulthood that they were both about to take. I totally remember taking IN the place where I grew up, one last time, before I hit the road for college. I think I was too young in that moment to put the following into words, but: I knew that the place I was leaving was never going to be the same.... in large part because the way I would see that place called home would change, as well as the place itself actually changing, and getting older itself.

From those steps of change, do we go to Bangkok and to I Promised You the Moon.

The most obvious structural change that separates IPYTM from ITSAY and LTIP is the change in the main screenwriter and director: Boss Naruebet is replaced by Meen Tossaphon.

Now -- oh man. I gotta get my thoughts together on IPYTM.

I. LOVED. I PROMISED YOU THE MOON. I. LOOOOOOOVED IT.

This is likely going to be controversial! There were many parts of IPYTM that I ended up loving more than ITSAY. Lemme get into it.

If you have been a regular around this blog, you might be able to surmise why I loved IPYTM. IPYTM did not beat around any bush -- it did not ignore the bullshit of everyday life in a relationship.

My very favorite BL of all time, What Did You Eat Yesterday?, deals with two middle-aged men in a long-established relationship. We meet them in the middle of their time together. We get all their origin material well within the series.

The wonderful @bengiyo often writes, in his Stray Thoughts posts and elsewhere, how refreshing it often is to see an established queer couple managing the quirks of their relationship as it happens. We so often watch shows that center relationships that start in a series with a queer revelation. The very high majority of our shows are about the chase, a confession, a fleeting sexual moment or two, that first kiss.

I think we were so lucky to get Teh and Oh-aew in their young adulthood, in their four years in university in IPYTM, to see a full life stage -- how AMAZING is that -- complete before our eyes.

But before I go on to talk about why I LOVED IPYTM, and why I think it's important for the OGMMTVC project, I want to explain why there were many parts of IPYTM that I liked more than ITSAY.

ITSAY had explosive emotional moments. They shook me so hardcore that I had to stop multitasking while watching the episodes, and nothing usually slows me down.

@neuroticbookworm and I have spoken, as two South Asians, about the nature of the depictions of these explosive emotional moments on the part of Teh in ITSAY. I've talked before (most recently in my review of The Love of Siam) about how important it is that Western viewers understand that while the interaction that Asian directors and screenwriters have had with Western and Western queer content is important and present (Jojo Tichakorn is revealing himself on this almost weekly as Only Friends airs) -- that there is a VERY long history of Asian content featuring non-happy endings and/or open-ended endings.

Why am I talking about non-HEAs with Teh? Because @neuroticbookworm and I both posit that ITSAY could have ended very authentically -- for the story itself, and for the region from which ITSAY comes -- if Teh and Oh-aew did not get together, especially considering the absolutely torturous emotional breakdowns that Teh was having about his attraction to and love for Oh-aew.

But they DID get together, and it was a triumph for prestige Asian queer content. ITSAY may very well have been talking to the heartbreaking ending of The Love of Siam.

I compare those emotional volcanoes to IPYTM's narrative process. We don't get those emotional volcanoes. Instead, we see a much more established couple (maybe not necessarily more mature, but at least established), two years into their relationship, about to start a new chapter in their lives as much as they can be together. And I think, without those emotional volcanoes: we were able, in IPYTM, to get more into tonally quieter, but still incredibly emotional and heart-wrenching details about Teh and Oh-aew's relationship that deserved time and the spotlight to work through -- such as Teh's slow falling for Jai.

To the point that their maturity is in question: give me a series about a developing relationship, and I will give you my heart. I want to see more and more shows about dudes working on their shit in a relationship. I want to see queer dudes experiencing the highs and lows of living a mundane life together, à la What Did You Eat Yesterday?

As we saw in ITSAY: Teh has a thing about change. Change is really, really, really hard for him. He had to change his mindset about the kind of person he was falling in love with in ITSAY. He was falling in love with a fellow young man, and it sent him off the rails.

Teh continues to be chaotic as fuck in IPYTM -- and that's all happening in the context of him watching, and being with Oh-aew, as Oh changes himself over time.

And: OH!!! MY. BOY. OH-AEW. CLAP EMOJIS. FIND YOURSELF! OMG. Oh-aew's trajectory in IPYTM stole my heart. Oh FOUND HIMSELF, AND found his community. The hair color change? The wardrobe change? The glistening legs? (PP KRIT.) The tattoo? Quitting acting -- which, of course, made Teh sooooo superior-feeling -- to find a career that he LIKED, and was GOOD AT?

Oh-aew was my boy in IPYTM. He was such a LIGHT against the continued darkness that Teh lived in. And Oh-aew knew it, and my god: Oh learned a lot about self-preservation in the time they had in college together.

As I wrote about in my Theory of Love review, I am a true sucker for behavioral change stories in dramas. Oh-aew gave me tons of that, in SUCH an empathic, well-lit way. Teh also gave us a change story, with the delightful essence of the kind of fucked-up chaos that only Teh, and Billkin as an actor, can muster.

Repeating myself from my ITSAY review: Teh, for me, is a reflection of my very favorite chaos boy, Fuse from Make It Right. In the second season of Make It Right, Fuse continues to date his girlfriend, Jean, while his attraction to his same-sex lover, Tee, continues to grow.

Teh watches Oh-aew change. Teh questions why Oh-aew got the teacup tattoo. Teh sees Oh-aew hang out with Oh's cadre of queer friends. Teh sees so much of LIFE happen through Oh-aew: that Oh is indicating a permanence to their relationship vis à vis the tattoo. Teh sees that Oh is comfortable in his own skin, in his growing, strong identity as a queer man. Oh-aew, to me, is truly reflective of the internal change that can happen when one leaves home, when one leaves a place to go to another place -- a tremendous journey.

Teh...... oh, Teh. Teh is not on that same journey. He goes to a more fucked-up place. He, idiotically, falls for Jai -- literally, verbally, visually, right in front of Oh-aew -- all while Teh increasingly becomes unmoored in his relationship with Oh.

Now, let me clarify something. I LOVE CHAOS BOYS. I needed @lurkingshan to check me as I was unwinding on Teh and Teh's cheating: Shan had to yell at me, "TURTLES, TEH WAS CHEATING!!!" lol.

Because! Because I actually sympathized with Teh a bit. Teh acted like a total fucking jackass, an idiot of the highest order. But I sympathized with him.

I sympathized with him because, unlike Oh-aew, Teh came from a more old-fashioned background. Of course, he learned early in IPYTM that his mother knew about his relationship with Oh-aew. That should have given Teh comfort to live his authentic life in Bangkok, and I think it did, to some extent. But, Teh was such a brilliantly written character as to have not actually be able to shed EVERYTHING about his past life, his past identity, his past values coming from an old-fashioned culture, in fast time.

That's what happens in fantasies, and it doesn't always happen that way in real life. Not to say that IPYTM is real life -- but I think Teh's path towards change and maturity reflected a different and difficult style of realistic growth that I am glad the show did not shy away from.

I understand that there are a lot of people that either don't like, or didn't watch, IPYTM because of the cheating plot. Let me just say, as an #old -- cheating happens.

Teh felt disconnected from Oh and Oh's change journey, his growth. Teh found an outlet for his misplaced emotional yearnings in Jai. Jai took total advantage of the moment to extract a performance out of Teh. Teh was used. Teh was dumb enough to not recognize this. And he jeopardized his relationship with Oh-aew. And to Oh-aew's damn credit, Oh said -- fuck THAT, and walked.

All of that? Waving my hand in a circle and clinching my fingers, all of that? REAL SHIT. Real talk. Man, do I LOVE IPYTM for going there.

I knew -- of course I knew, the gifs are everywhere -- that Teh and Oh-aew would get together by the end of IPYTM. But to see that their relationship NEEDED to take a very healthy break, and that Teh NEEDED to be faced with very real consequences of his unthoughtful, chaotic behavior, was a demonstration of accountability of the highest order in a drama that I heartily welcomed. It was mature AF, and it established Oh's boundaries and feelings in such a gorgeous, respectful way for a young queer man to represent. God. I'm clutching my hands. It gives me the same good feelings as Pharm setting his boundaries in UWMA.

I think, if this kind of growth story bores people (?) -- I unfortunately have to say that I think this is where more and more BLs are going, on this route, on the WDYEY route, on the Love In Translation route that my friends @lurkingshan, @bengiyo, and @neuroticbookworm are telling me about right now.

And to take this route in a prestige, cinematic BL. To take the route of demonstrating growth, maturity, accountability, and responsibility in a BL of the highest quality order, means a lot to me as an #old, who is fascinated by internal change over the course of time. Which.... is also the story of Phuket, the story of Bangkok, the story of the queer community in Bangkok, the story of the continued growing strength of the LGBTQ+ community in Thailand and globally.

And to tie this all together: in IPYTM, I did not question the ending. I LOVED THE ENDING. It was a happy ending for the romantics. It was an open-ended ending for the realists like myself. Oh-aew said: I don't know if things are gonna work, homeboy. But you're my man. You will be my man. (When Oh-aew wakes up in bed and sees a vision of Teh before they got together for the last time? Oh yes, I screamed. Asian family pain, baby.)

And Teh says: deal. And almost immediately commits another crime of chaos with that Instagram post. But, as I wrote in my notes as the show ended: he was now engaging in external chaos, not internal chaos. Teh will make the commitment to WORK on his chaos WITH Oh-aew, IN the context of a relationship. No more holding it in. If Teh takes risks, he'll take Oh-aew with him, together, because that's what being in a bonded relationship is about.

I felt unsettled when ITSAY ended. I felt that Teh's emotional peaks weren't fully resolved. I was so right about this when I went through IPYTM. And IPTYM closed that for me. IPYTM gave me the very authentic emotional journey and process of change that had been hinted at in ITSAY, the journey that, I think, could NOT have ended with ONLY ITSAY. IPYTM showed me that Teh was going to continue fucking up, because I knew it would happen with where he was in ITSAY. Man. And IPYTM sewed it up convincingly.

Nadao Bangkok, I think, took a HUGE risk to demonstrate this VERY sophisticated change journey in a prestige BL. And they did it of the highest order. It was a celebration of Bangkok, of finding your communities, of finding your friends, your love, yourself, and -- my head is spinning at how WELL it was filmed, and how well the story was told. I love ITSAY, but IPYTM will be my baby. I desperately want Thailand to go to this level again, and I believe they will.

[Alright! I am indeed back on my bullshit and crushing through 55:15 Never Too Late, for its macro BL storyline featuring Khaotung Thanawat and an EarthMix cameo.

Next week, we have my review of Not Me, which I personally loved, but I will not shy away from offering some quibbles about the quality of the storytelling.

A quick note on the list below, as I've made some additions! I've added a rewatch of The Eclipse, in part to compare issues-based series between TE and Not Me. And, on the high recommendation of @lurkingshan and @bengiyo, I am retracting a vow I made to never watch another MAME show again, and am adding Wedding Plan. Shan and Ben have remarked that this show represents a 180-degree turnaround from what I think of as MAME's basis of passive and aggressive bigotry in her work. Maybe she's learned that equity sells. In any case: I'm giving this show a shot to see if the turn is indeed an honest one.

But for now, the OGMMTVC weekly slate of reviews will pause for at least a couple weeks, as I rewatch Bad Buddy. I have a few ideas for a couple of pieces, as really: Bad Buddy is the reason I'm doing this project. To learn about the history of Thai BLs, the tropes, the styles, everything -- reaching the BBS rewatch is a touch of a culmination, as I undertook this project in large part to understand what Bad Buddy was built off of. I can't wait, I CANNOT WAIT, and I have been engaging with lots of friends over the past few weeks about our mutual love and respect for BBS, and I just can't wait to put some of our thoughts into reverent words.

Here's the status of the list; this list has been jacked by Tumblr's new web editor, so for a more up-to-date version, please click here!