#kbls

@iankuea thanks for the taggage 

CURRENTLY WATCHING:

 Minato Shouji Coin Laundry (Japan) - Shin is my PRECIOUS baby stalker seme edgey honeychild and Minato is going to break that desperate 17 year old need open like a balut egg. I just hope we get at least some kisses before THE PAIN. 

Triage (Thailand) - OMG SO GOOD, the tension, the twists, the flips, the acting the CAN THEY END IT HAPPY???? 

Love Mechanics (Thailand) - messy cheating chaos queers of epic stupid but SO WELL ACTED - can’t stop the YinWar 

KinnPorsche (Thailand) - I like 1/5 of it more than I should and the rest of it less than I ought 

Unforgotten Night (Thailand) - for a kinky BDSM there is not enough kink, B, D, S, or M sadly, still it marks the return of the trash watch! 

Senpai, Danjite Koidewa! (Japan) - my least favorite dynamic but watchable 

Love in Spring (Korea) - rumors of no kiss/bromance abound, it’s dumb, I love the psycho character... of course I do... I AM the psycho character

Check Out (Thailand) - messy cheating chaos queers of epic stupid

Star and Sky: Sky in Your Heart (Thailand) - yawn fest 

My Secret Love (Thailand) - it’s absolutely terrible

Kimi no Koto Dake Mite Itai (Japan) - I magically got ahold of it but haven’t had the courage to watch it yet 

Not BL... 

Alchemy of Souls - it’s CW level Kdrama historical craptastic and I have been waiting for this all my life. 

Love the Way You Are (China) - NOONA ROMANCE! basically China doing a remake of Something In The Rain only sappier, softer, and probubly with a better ending 

REWATCHING:

DNA Says Love You (Taiwan) 

Love Class (Korea) 

My Esports Genius Brother (China) 

Long Time No See (Korea) 

Old Fashioned Cupcake (Japan) 

LOOKING FORWARD TO THAILAND:

609 Bedtime Story - OhmFluke but not sad, I hope. 

Bed Friend - I’ve wanted James to get his own BL since Oxygen 

Between Us - of course

Chains of Heart - new premise, intriguing 

City of Stars AKA Fueangnakorn - An actor falls in love with a programmer and the narrative intends to “explore the ramifications of being public figure in the social network era who must endure critics, bullying, and defamation.”

Coffee Melody - Pavel MY LOVE 

The Eclipse - First + Khaotung at a sinister boarding school, haze the one you love, good boy/bad boy, suspense & horror elements, self acceptance themes, a curse, enemies to lovers

Fahlanruk The Series - one night stand, friends with benefits, pining seme, high heat

I Feel You Linger in the Air - from the producers of Lovely Writer. This is a time travel historical romance. FROM THAILAND!  H I S T O R I C A L ! ! ! 

My School President - It’s Love Sick meets the whipping boy trope. How exciting. Yes, I know, we’ve seen it all before. But this is me. I never met a high school set BL I didn’t want to grant a fair shake (even one that centers around singing). And I love me some whipping boy. 

Never Let Me Go - PondPhuwin in a decent show? Sign me up: mafia, attack dog (whipping boy + bodyguard), love triangle, obsession, suspense

Vise Versa - proud member of Jimmy nation here and this is alt reality, bodyswap, soulmates. Soem trope I love, some I don’t 

FROM KOREA 

Eul's Love - Reunion romance office set.

The Circumstances of Pungdeok Villa Room 304 - Same pair as Kissable lips - Korea’s first example of this kind of casting. Rich kid lay about meets poor nerd, cohabitation. 

Heesu in Class 2 - high school shy unpopular boy with a secret crush on best friend. 

Comfort the Boy adaptation of Dongmul's manwha webtoon A Shoulder to Cry On. Teasing confident gay, fake dating, rich/poor, school setting, homophobia/gossip puts scholarship in jeopardy. Stars idols Jaehan & Yechan BOTH from Kpop group OMEGA X, 12 eps. MADNESS. 

The Director Who Buys Me Dinner 

Love Tractor asame production house as Semantic Error, stressed-out law student meets hunky young farmer. This is a very underused romance trope in BL.

Oh My Assistant - sexy one for Korea about an artist who draws adult webtoons and spends most of his time horny because of it, who hires an assistant that turns out to be his biggest fan. We’re gone see how Korea handles thirst.

PT is Love - friends of 10 years who’ve been hiding feelings for each other enter the same university. Plus MURDER.

Love is like a Cat: A new star, called the Cat Prince for his cold arrogance, goes up against a charismatic puppyish director. Korean Thai colab project will feature Mew Suppasit. 

Space Bakery: A spaceship crash-lands into and destroys a small bakery shop. Of course this means the alien and the baker end up living together. At the same time, other aliens-in-hiding all around the city start hunting for them.

FROM TAIWAN

I Secretly Fell in Love with Student Council President (let the dumb titles continue) - director of H2: Crossing the Line; Love Is Science with possible alternate title: About Youth. 2 high school boys with different backgrounds, personalities, and values compete for student president, but have more attraction than animosity.

My Tooth Your Love (from Result Entertainment - We Best Love peeps) with script by Lin Pei who loves VERY traditional yaoi tropes, she’s the writer of mush HIStory stuff. 

FROM JAPAN

Bokura no Shokutaku AKA Our Dining Table - I LOVED THIS MANGA. Lonely salaryman (talented cook) gets accidentally adopted by a college kid and his baby brother. They build a family together. This is a sweetly gentle and cozy manga and it will make a GREAT live action piece. 

Kabesaa Doujin Sakka no Neko Yashiki-kun wa Shounin Yokkyuu wo Kojirasete iru - starring Matsuoka Koudai (I know him from Five) and Nakao Masaki (Kakafukaka, Bow Then Kiss - he’s a BIG DEAL ya’ll) slated to be released in October. 

To My Star (ss1)

Light On Me

Roommates of Poongduck 304

Semantic Error

Ocean Likes Me

honorable mention: Love Class 2

Hey Anon! It's definitely fine if you prefer Thai BLs more than Korean ones. Thai BLs follow a different style and are longer and a bit more vibrant. Thai BLs, to me, seem to be all about drama, but they have the time and room available to spend on that. Also, typically Thai BLs feature pairings that people have seen before and want to see again. Thai BLs like to pair up actors for multiple series. Of course not all of them are like that, but most of them are. It drives sales and viewership and ultimately creates popularity.

The market for BLs is more popular and lucrative in Thailand since that's really where the BL genre started to get the most hype globally so BLs are produced as frequently there as straight Thai dramas. Thailand has created a culture around the BL world and at this point they are a dime a dozen and it doesn't take much searching to find one with a plot that fits what you're looking for and several others that fall under the same genre.

I wouldn't say S. Korea is still experimenting with BLs, I'd just say they follow different guidelines. Most of them are always 8 to 10 eps and the typical runtime is 15 mins per ep and we usually get 2 a week for that reason. Usually they don't feature a pairing more than once or have a s2 (save for a couple of rare instances last year) and I think that's widely because Korean BLs aren't considered KDramas by Korea and therefore aren't taken all that seriously by the media as a whole.

I will say that KBLs are definitely evolving for the better, we're getting series with longer runtimes. We have 2 right now that both have eps that 30+ minutes. Lately Korean BLs definitely have been on the rise quality and content wise though. The ones that have come out since 2021 have definitely been pretty amazing.

To me I think Korean BLs seem to lean more towards realism than some of the outlandish plots that are just out there. I find characters in Korean BLs easier to relate to more than the Thai ones.

So it really just depends on what you like, anon. I don't know how new you are to BL, I'm noticing a lot of new people were introduced to BLs when KinnPorsche came out and aren't all that familiar with the other Asian countries that are producing BLs and usually find themselves thinking that they would be more like Thai BLs when really only Thai BLs are like Thai BLs, all the countries seem to have their own recipe to follow.

If you'd like I'm more than happy to recommend some Korean BLs if you want to give it another go, but if not, you don't have to like Korean BLs lol. We have Taiwan, China, The Philappines, and Japanese BLs too, and Vietnam is producing some good content too. There are plenty of options.