#putpat

And then some sweet sweet boundary crossing horizontality.

(Oops, I ending up writing an essay, so I guess I did have lots of thoughts.)

Feelings about Put being so eager to love Pat properly this time, that he can't acknowledge that he is still putting his career first, that he's distant in a way that is actively hurting Pat, all for the need to protect his job.

Feelings about how clear it is that Put and Pat still love each other, but can't yet allow for the reality that it's not what they need.

Feelings about how what Put is doing isn't even wrong -- he's not being cruel intentionally! He's protecting himself and trying so hard to make it work with Pat! -- it's just unfair to both of them. He wants to be with Pat, he wants to stop being lonely as he builds his career, and I genuinely believe that he loves Pat! It's just not enough for them to fit together now.

Feelings about how Put is realizing these things, but is unwilling to give up the chance to fix things; to admit defeat. Feelings about how he sees what's there between Pat and Jeng, and he's jealous, but it doesn't make him immediately possessive, he's scared to lose Pat, and he's guilty about the things he can't offer him.

Feelings about that scene with Put and Jeng, where they establish that they Know what the other wants from Pat, and low-key threaten each other, but both walk away feeling guilty and called out.

Feelings about how Pat wants Put to be able to love him the way he needs, and how he has, since the moment Put became a part of his life again, so easily gravitated to him. To the comfort that familiarity offers, to the respite from his own loneliness, and the promise of healing the part of him that still loves and misses Put.

Feelings about how lonely all three of them are:

What I mean by this is that, in the original Pride and Prejudice, Darcy and Wickham served partly as parallels and partly as foils. They are both men with similar backgrounds that come from respectable families (Wickham’s family wasn’t gentry but it is still made obvious that Mr Wickham senior was a good man who worked well and honourably, much like Mr Darcy senior). However, they went on wildly different paths due to their very different personalities.

Darcy is awkward and quiet but underneath that is a man who treats his people well, is honourable about all things and above all, learns from what Lizzie has to tell him. While Wickham is charming and friendly, he is ultimately a man who is completely out for himself with very little regard for anyone who might be hurt or suffer in the pursuit of him getting what he wants.

Most importantly, both feed into the narrative that being prejudice for or against someone can be very bad. Again, Wickham is presented as charming and friendly, someone Lizzie gets on well with almost immediately, while Darcy is almost the exact opposite. He and Lizze butt heads almost immediately due to their differences in lived experience and world view. Wickham’s charm hide his insidious nature, while Darcy’s awkwardness hinders his ability to relate to other people and often renders him as that guy at a party that others tolerate because he is rich and they don’t want to be on the outs with the rich guy.

How does all this connect to Step by Step…well, Jeng and Put basically are these two archetypes. Jeng is that awkward guy that people tolerate because he’s rich (the son of the company president, the one you don’t want to piss off if you want to have success) who is ultimately a good person, who wants to continue learning how to be a better person while Put is the charming and friendly guy that everyone loves but isn’t all that he appears to be.

To reiterate, I’m not saying Put is a bad person, or a bad character. He is a much better person than Wickham, that much has already been shown. He genuinely cares about Pat, but ultimately he is not going to win the battle for Pat’s heart, because while he loves Pat and wants to be with him, he doesn’t want to be with Pat at the same time. He wants Pat, but he wants the idealized version of Pat that he spend the years since their breakup pining over. But that isn’t the Pat that exists today. I find it very interesting that much of flashbacks we’ve seen of their relationship, have been on Put’s end. They’ve been obviously rose tinted from the beginning and present a version of Put to the audience that looks like he is just a guy who loves Pat and wants to get back with him and who is sorry for what he has done in the past to cause their break up (you know, the part where he ghosted Pat).

One only needs to look at his initial interacts with Pat after Pat comes back to Thailand and they meet again. He is so focused on Pat and their past that he can’t seem to see that he is making Pat uncomfortable. Or at least, if he does notice, he doesn’t care. He shows up at Pat’s apartment, possibly drunk and proceeds to ask questions that are definitely not his business (asking who Pat got a ride home with and seems upset that Pat would accept a ride from another man). He ignores Pat’s feelings at almost every possible turn until Pat has to almost yell at him to stop because it’s making him uncomfortable and he’s trying to do his job…and then once again asks him on a date.

This episode just kind of made it all worse. Even if we didn’t have the scene with Jeng to parallel, his reaction to Pat making him dinner is lacklustre to say the least. He almost completely ignores Pat for most of the evening, too concerned with his job (I’m not saying his being concerned about his job is a bad thing, it’s not). I get the feeling that his being so concerned with his job was a major issue in their relationship in past. One that Pat never had the confidence to bring up, and probably still doesn’t. Pat seems like he has just accepted that this comes with a relationship with Put. He is always going to have to put his job before Pat.

The longer time goes on, the less likeable he becomes. He clearly cares for Pat and isn’t a bad person, but it’s becoming more and more obvious that he also clearly hasn’t thought about all of the ways their relationship likely wasn’t working before. Pat’s first impression of him before ended up not working out for him. His first impression this time seems to be working out even worse. Has Put changed? Yes. Has he changed for the better? I’m not so sure about that.

This is all made even more interesting when I think about it in the context of the broader message the show is trying to make about the BL industry as a whole. So often, actors have to act a certain way in public. They have to be a nice, more charismatic, open and personable version of themselves. They have to hide their flaws and only showcase the good things about them. Any time Put is shown to be around people who are not in his private life, Put acts exactly like that. He is more friendly, more open, more charming, more everything. In private, it is not like he isn’t still those things, but he has also been shown to be selfish, manipulative, smug and even uncaring (or at the very least, unobservate about the feelings of others, especially Pat). None of these traits make him a bad person, not even all of them together. But they do make for a person who is very different from the way he acts on a stage, so to speak. It also speaks to his emotionally immaturity. Self admittedly Put broke up with Pat because he needed to come to terms with a lot of things about who he was as it related to job and how some part of him are incompatible with his chosen profession. The part I don’t think he spent nearly as much on, is the emotional maturity required order to have the kind of relationship that Pat wanted to have with him.

One of this shows central thesis’s seems to be (to me at least) that the way a person presents themselves in public is not the full story, especially for a BL actor (I mean, most of them are straight guys who are being paid to pretend to be with their screen partner, both on and off screen in some cases). In Pride and Prejudice, besides Darcy, Wickham is the most obvious example of this. His first impression is fantastic and his initial relationship with Lizzie one of ease and that of two people of a similar mind getting to know each other, even if Lizzie never truly considers him a suitor. As the novel goes on, this impression gets worse and worse until it is ruined beyond repair, when Wickham convinces Lydia to run away with him. The same looks like it’s happening with Put. While his initial impression to the audience isn’t a great one, through the tiny POVs we get from him, we see that he is not a bad person. He is sad and heart broken and utterly aware that he has no one but himself to blame for feeling that way. He is overall, a sympathetic character that the audience can root for, as any good second lead love interest should be. As time as gone on, we are seeing more and more of the unflattering character traits that he has. We are seeing more and more the reasons why him and Pat wouldn’t have worked in the long run, even if they hadn’t broken up before.

The irony of it all!

Bonus: