Let me start by saying that I love Shine the Series. I’m so invested in it that I write fanfic for the show, which, for someone who doesn’t have a lot of free time, should tell you just how much it means to me.

That said, one thing that stands out while watching Shine is how the female characters often seem to exist primarily to support the emotional journeys of the male leads. Take Claire, Trin’s first love, for example. Her tragic death after joining the 1968 Paris student protests leaves a deep scar on him. Her final words, urging him to stand up for his own country, stay with him as a moral compass. But we never really get to know Claire beyond the role she plays in shaping Trin’s development.

Then there is Tanwa’s mother, whose suicide adds another layer of trauma that defines him. We also see women like Dhevi, Trin’s aunt, who is trapped in a loveless and childless marriage, or Dao, Naran’s fiancée, who struggles with her parents’ disapproval while unknowingly participating in a relationship overshadowed by a secret affair. Even Moira, who initially stands out as a strong presence, ultimately seems defined more by her series of lucrative marriages than by a personal arc of her own.

One might argue that, in a show with only eight episodes, there simply isn’t time to explore side characters in any real depth. And to be fair, many supporting characters, regardless of gender, remain somewhat sketched in rather than fully developed. But what stands out is that the women are not just underwritten; they are sacrificed. Claire dies to catalyze Trin’s political awakening. Tanwa’s mother dies to deepen his emotional wounds. Dhevi and Dao serve as cautionary examples of what happens when women are trapped by social expectation or left in the dark. Even Moira’s arc is shaped more by the men she has married than by any interior growth we’re shown.

This is not a fate shared by the male supporting characters. While they may not all receive detailed arcs, they are not reduced to emotional stepping stones or narrative casualties. The imbalance lies not in screen time, but in how pain is assigned, and whose pain is allowed to exist for its own sake.

In the end, it is hard not to feel that Shine uses these women more as narrative tools than as full characters. And while the show gets so many things right, this is an area where it still has room to grow. The hope is that future episodes or future series from BOC will meet that challenge by treating their female characters as more than just collateral damage, and giving them stories that can stand on their own.

(Post written as of episode 4)

Some viewers dismissed the love scene between Krailert and Naran as a detour from the main romance, but in truth this moment is not filler at all. It is a vital thread in the series’ emotional throughline, deepening its themes and sharpening the contrast with Tanwa and Trin’s luminous love story.

Krailert and Naran’s connection unfolds in hidden spaces, underlined passages, and fleeting glances exchanged through letters and books. The setting, a dimly lit library, reflects the nature of their love: suppressed, coded, and weighed down by unspoken truths. Krailert, a man weathered by years of repression and bound to duty, reveals himself in this stolen intimacy. Their secret love-making is both a triumph and a tragedy, a release of long-buried desire that carries the bitter knowledge of impermanence. The intimacy is tender yet urgent, reminding us that queer longing in repressive contexts often survives only in exchanged objects, hidden rooms, and borrowed time.

The way they communicate through marked lines in novels transforms literature into emotional code. Each underlined phrase becomes a confession of longing and a plea to be seen. This is not just flirtation but survival.

Placed alongside this fraught intimacy, the main couple’s story feels radically different. Tanwa and Trin’s romance is slower, deliberate, and bathed in light. Their connection grows in open spaces, among trees and flowers, amid laughter, and the honest warmth of shared conversation. If Krailert and Naran show us what it means to hide love, Tanwa and Trin show us what it means to begin to claim it. Their love may still be fragile, haunted by class expectations and social pressures, but it carries an optimism that Krailert’s story lacks. Where one romance bends under repression, the other stretches toward possibility.

The tonal contrast is also striking. Krailert and Naran’s relationship is confined, secretive, and bittersweet. Tanwa and Trin’s is expansive, hopeful, and glowing with the possibility of something more.

By placing these two love stories side by side, Shine underscores the spectrum of queer experience. Not every love can thrive under the same conditions. Some romances, like Krailert and Naran’s, are doomed to secrecy. Others, like Tanwa and Trin’s, bloom slowly toward the light. This contrast makes Tanwa and Trin’s journey feel all the more urgent. We root for them because we have already seen the cost of repression. And in Krailert and Naran, we glimpse the haunting reminder of what happens when desire is never allowed to live fully.

Far from diluting the story, the secondary couple’s scene deepens it by adding pathos, emotional stakes, and a mirror that reflects both tragedy and hope. Krailert and Naran give us the ache of hidden flames. Tanwa and Trin give us the promise of open skies. Together they remind us why Shine the Series is one of the most layered, emotionally intelligent dramas of the year.

Up until Episode 4, Tanwa felt more like an archetype than a character, the golden love interest, flirtatious and free, always glowing in the light. Yes, we had hints of deeper wounds from the clash with his father and the quiet reference to his mother’s death. But he remained mostly untouchable, the dream figure who illuminated Trin’s life.

That changes in Ep 4. Even in the opening, we get a haunting prelude: Tanwa jolts awake, sobbing from a nightmare of a woman submerged under water. We suspect it's his mother, and that grief is drowning him from the inside. He looks to the dreamcatcher swaying above his hammock, a talisman meant to guard against bad dreams. It’s telling that this is what hangs over him, not just as decor but as a silent witness to a grief he cannot shake.

When, after Tanwa's careless "We are good friends" in answer to Trin’s demand to know what they are to each other, Trin finally snaps and says “Good friends don’t kiss each other.” It’s the first time someone pierces Tanwa’s easy charm. Trin names what’s unbearable about him: his refusal to commit, his habit of floating from one thing to another. And for the first time, Tanwa is left shaken.

It’s no accident that their next scene together is the beach sequence. There, Tanwa reveals the most vulnerable part of himself: the photo of his mother, and the truth that she committed suicide or chose to leave when he was twelve. That phrasing is everything. For Tanwa, life is a matter of choice. His belief in freedom isn’t casual; it’s existential. To choose is to live, but to choose also means to accept the fallout. His mother’s choice imprinted that lesson on him forever.

Trin poses a hypothetical question: If he had known what was going to happen, would he have tried to change it? And Tanwa answers no because everyone has the freedom to follow their heart. In that moment, Trin isn’t just hearing Tanwa’s philosophy, he’s thinking of Claire. The guilt he carries, that he chose not to follow her into the protest, bubbles up under Tanwa’s words. Her death was tragic, but it was also her choice. In that exchange, there’s a strange kind of understanding: Tanwa’s freedom illuminating Trin’s consequences.

And here we understand clearly Tanwa’s character arc. It’s about permanence versus impermanence, of loving when there is a real risk of loss. If he is freedom personified, then Trin is the embodiment of consequence. And only by colliding with each other do they both begin to change.

And it’s no accident that all of this unfolds at the sea. Water is where Tanwa’s greatest trauma lives. His submerged mother is the nightmare that still wakes him in tears. Yet it is also where he finally bares himself to Trin, offering the rawest truth he has. The waves hold both grief and rebirth, both loss and love. When Trin reaches for him and they plunge into the water together, it’s not just a love scene, it’s Tanwa stepping into the place that once drowned him, but now holds him and, in Trin’s steady arms, keeps him in place and eventuallypulls him out.

The beauty of Shine is that we learn this revelation at the same pace as Trin. Until now, we see only the archetype. But in Episode 4, when Tanwa finally lets the mask slip, we see the fragile human beneath. And suddenly, the golden boy’s story is not about floating, but about whether he will ever be brave enough to allow himself to stay.

(originally published on X)

When we talk about story structure, the midpoint is where everything changes. It’s the hinge that swings the whole narrative forward, sometimes through a false victory (a moment that feels like success but isn’t yet the real thing), sometimes through a false defeat (a setback that looks crushing but ultimately strengthens the characters). Either way, it’s the point where the story deepens, the stakes rise, and the characters can’t go back to how things were before.

Watching Shine, the two central couples are pacing toward that midpoint in very different ways.

For Krailert and Naran, their midpoint has already arrived by the end of Episode 3. Their love scene feels like consummation, like they’ve finally crossed the line between yearning and fulfillment. But in story terms, it’s a false victory. They can’t retreat into the intellectual sparring that shaped their early dynamic. Every choice from here on out will weigh heavier, and intimacy will carry consequences they may not be prepared to face.

Trin and Tanwa, meanwhile, are still circling theirs. Their kiss in Episode 1 was the spark or inciting incident that launched Trin into crisis. It forced him to confront desires he had kept buried and to begin reckoning with who he is. Since then, the show has drawn out the dance between them, letting us feel the tension of Trin’s hesitation and the bright persistence of Tanwa’s presence. Their midpoint is still ahead, likely when they finally cross into intimacy. That moment will feel like triumph, but structurally it’s the false victory, or the point of no return that will deepen, not resolve, their conflict.

Seen through a queer lens, these midpoints take on more gravity. For Krailert and Naran, intimacy means stepping into risk with one another, not yet knowing how it will shift their lives. For Trin and Tanwa, the midpoint is layered with existential weight. Trin isn’t frozen by fear so much as by grief and reckoning with Claire’s death, his purpose in making societal change, and the disorienting reality of coming to terms with his sexuality. His hesitation isn’t avoidance; it’s the stillness of a man who is asking, "What does it mean to live authentically, here and now?" and hasn't quite come up with the answer yet.

That’s what makes Shine so compelling. Each story beat is personal, yes, but also political and philosophical. One couple accelerates into desire, the other is caught in the pause of self-reckoning, and both arcs remind us that queer love stories carry more than romance. They hold the weight of risks taken, histories borne, and the profound act of becoming.

And in an age of revolution, every decision becomes a kind of defiance, every act of love a radical reimagining of what it means to live. We're not at the end, or the beginning, but the moment where love, history, and the self collide, and nothing in the story can ever be the same again.

I know this might seem like a stretch, but bear with me on this one. I spent years studying dystopian fiction, and The Hunger Games specifically. Therefore, I can't help but see the parallels between Katniss/Prim and Trin/Victor.

Both Prim and Victor are targeted, not only for what they do, but for what they represent. Prim is a symbol of innocence, the untouched promise of a better tomorrow. Victor is the embodiment of youth itself, hope, vitality, the possibility of change. Their deaths are also co-opted by the regimes that cause them - Prim's is blamed on the Capitol, Victor's is blamed on the Communists.

Authoritarian systems recognize the symbols of youth and the threat they represent. They cannot allow innocence or hope to survive, because both ignite resistance, especially when they take their places within resistance movements. As President Snow chillingly reminds us: “Hope. It is the only thing stronger than fear. A little hope is effective, a lot of hope is dangerous.”

Katniss spends the series fighting to protect her sister. Trin spends the series fighting to shield Victor. And yet, in the logic of these narratives and of the oppressive regimes they portray, the young are always the first casualties. They are marked by death in the story, and nothing their protectors do changes that fact.

Their deaths are not random. They are deliberate acts of power, stripping away the illusion that anyone can be spared from the oppressor. And the devastation operates on multiple levels: they shatter Katniss and Trin personally, galvanize resistance, and remind the audience of what authoritarianism always consumes first, the future itself.

As I was watching Ep 4 of Shine the Series, I couldn't help drawing parallels between its cinematography and that of Luca Guadagnino's Call Me By Your Name (CMBYN). No matter how you feel about the film, the cinematography is a phenomenon all its own.

Guadagnino once said that CMBYN was created in a world where “everything was on the side of the lovers.” This is why Elio and Oliver’s romance feels so dreamlike. He strips away the usual barriers of homophobia and judgment so the only real conflict becomes time itself. Their summer becomes a protective cocoon, drenched in golden light and lush with music.

Shine offers Trin and Tanwa a similar sanctuary. The outside world is waiting, with family expectations and social unrest pressing in at the edges. But when the camera lingers on the two of them, light, focus, and music create a little universe where only their love matters. This is clearest in the breathtaking beach scene at the end of the episode, where the setting sun and soft waves seem to conspire to push them closer, as if nature itself were urging them to love.

In CMBYN, Elio’s family, especially his father, provides support, culminating in that devastatingly beautiful speech about loving wholeheartedly. In Shine, we glimpse that same care in the conversation Trin shares with Kom during the dance scene in the Echoes of Euphoria garden. “I’ll be your friend no matter what,” Kom says, giving Trin the reassurance he needs. The garden has long become Trin and Tanwa's safe haven, where intimacy can blossom without intrusion.

The settings in both works are equally crucial. Guadagnino gave us the sun-soaked summers of Lombardy, with its villa and orchards, an environment that feels timeless. Shine counters with the dreamlike garden, the glittering city, and most importantly, the beach. That kiss and the nude swim are pure cinema, shot in luminous tones that make their skin glow and water shimmer. They hold onto each other as if they are an extension of the natural world around them.

And then there is the music. In CMBYN, Sufjan Stevens gives voice to the unspeakable. In Shine, songs like Far Side of the Moon, Dawn, Am I In Love, and Let Me Hold Your Hand, along with the original score, cradle Trin and Tanwa’s moments, heightening every kiss, every touch, every look. Both Guadagnino and the Shine team make the same deliberate choice: to strip away the heaviest obstacles so we can sit inside the pure experience of love in all its radiant and vulnerable inevitability.

Reality is never far off. Oliver must return home. The unrest in Bangkok keeps pulsing in the background. But in those luminous moments, in Italy’s golden summer or in the blue glow of the Thai sea, the harsh glare of reality is held at bay, and love belongs only to the lovers.

(Originally published on X)