#shine meta

Symbolism in Shine

When Trin and Tanwa are talking at the party, Tanwa tells Trin that even if he went to the moon he wouldn't be alone up there because of the rabbit.

In Thai folklore rabbits (and hares) are associated with the moon.

In Chanthaburi (moon city) you can find rabbit symbols all over.

This is likely due to the Buddhist Jataka Tale

The Old Man And The Rabbit

In this story, four animals decide to perform some charity on the night of the full moon to accrue merit.

They find an old man begging for food and a monkey, an otter and a jackal all manage to find something to bring to the old man.

The last animal was a rabbit and having nothing to offer except for grass he threw himself into the fire, (dramatic sacrifices are pretty common in the Jataka tales.)

Luckily for the rabbit the old man was really Shakra, the lord of the gods in Buddhist cosmology and moved by the rabbit's sacrifice, he saved him from the flames and had his image preserved on the moon.

Jade Rabbit

In Chinese mythology the moon goddess Chang-e has a pet rabbit named YuTu.

Tu'er Shen

China also has The Rabbit God, a deity who arranges love and sex between men 🐇

Lost in Translation

Tanwa uses word play to make a joke here, one that the english subtitles really struggle to convey.

There is a Thai idiom called "shooting rabbits" which refers to men going to wee behind a bush or something. The idea being that sometimes when a man finds himself in a rural spot and just has to relieve himself, he may startle some unsuspecting wildlife in the process hence "shooting rabbits" 🤣

So, when Trin asks Tanwa what should a man do if he finds himself stuck on the moon with a rabbit, Tanwa suggests he try "shooting rabbits." 🌚🌙

Soon after the last episode of Shine ended, the fandom space on X erupted in dissatisfaction that quickly turned into anger, especially with respect to Trin's character arc and the Tanwa/Trin romance arc.

Although the showrunners consistently described Shine as a gay series, many fans accused BOC of exploiting MileApo’s BL fame and using familiar marketing tactics to lure BL audiences, only to deliver something that refused to play by BL rules. That tension between promise and expectation sits at the heart of this entire backlash.

A translator’s thoughtful thread about Shine’s artistic choices was met with anger and mockery, and soon the show’s writers, translators, and even production staff became targets of harassment. What began as a conversation about interpretation turned into a campaign of bullying. Watching that unfold has been disheartening, especially because the translator’s words revealed something vital about Shine’s artistic intent that many people refused to hear.

I’ve been thinking a lot about why that reaction feels so strong and why it also completely misses what makes this series so special.

To me, the backlash around Shine isn’t just about one ending. It’s about two different ways of understanding queer storytelling.

Heteronormative storytelling norms, especially in romance and BL genres, are the kind we’ve all been trained to expect. It demands that characters grow, fall in love, overcome obstacles, and end with closure in a very specific way. Even when the story is queer, we’re often measuring it by straight narrative rules: does it give us a happy ending? Is the arc complete?

But queer storytelling doesn’t always work that way. Sometimes it resists neat arcs. It lingers in tension, ambiguity, and longing. It values imagery, atmosphere, and emotional truth more than tidy resolution.

That’s what Shine does. It refuses to flatten itself into a BL fantasy. Trin’s story isn’t unfinished. His journey doesn’t follow a straight (literally and narratively) line from problem to solution. He embodies what the translator called queer aesthetics, which means he exists outside the usual rules of narrative progress. It is ambiguous, and so much of it takes place away from the eyes of viewers.

A lot of people are angry because they expected a BL ending: clear closure, emotional payoff, and fan-service catharsis. When they didn’t get that, they called it bad writing. But it’s not bad writing; it's a different kind of art that lives and breathes outside of heteronormative rules.

Shine was never a fan-service series. It’s political, layered, and deliberately queer. Its creators valued message and vision over meeting fandom demands. That’s not arrogance. That’s courage.

When audiences call that refusal flawed, what they’re really saying is, “I only recognize queerness when it behaves like heterosexual romance.” That’s the tragedy of the backlash; it turns queer resistance into an error.

Let's get out of the way my lack of qualifications to talk about this, I simply enjoy the topic and have half a decent eye for details, but that's basically it. No fashion or design degree, nor history and definitely not the 2 combined, I just Like things and I felt like spending the week reading up on stuff and collecting references, that's it. I hope you enjoy reading this.

Shine: Accurate? Anacronistic?

Bit of both, really.

The silhouettes are very correct and accurate and that's usually what makes a piece of period media feel right and not costumy, but Shine gives a slightly idealised view of Late Sixties Fashion in which no loud print is clashing with the next person's own loud print, in which hip party people all dress in harmonious cool tones and where make up sparkles under the club's lights.

...Where's the Brown?

Honestly, the past is always browner than we remember, the Sixties were no expeption, but this is the same thing they did with the 80s in Stranger Things and all the 90s Fashion Moodboards that we see around so i'm not faulting the show, I can see that, for most scenes, they kept it to cool tones and brown would clash immensely.

The anacronisms mostly come from the cinematography's colour palette and given the gorgeous results, you simply can't fault it.

And Moira needs her glitter, you will not get a single negative comment on her from me, not even under torture.

Let's start with the direct comparisons that i spent the last few days making, PLEASE.

Party Outfits:

Mod dresses, plastic dresses, blue tux jackets with black silk lapels, Big Hair, ruffled shirts, embroidery.

And Moira.

She's in a spacey costume and I love every detail, from the actual dress that looks like a late 40s Dior strapless gown, to the added structured corset (that she sheds in the scene when Krailert is at the piano, together with her head-piece), the jewels, the hair, the make up (YES SHE CAN HAVE GLITTER, SHE'S ALLOWED).

As it's been noted in @how-to-be-a-tree 's post , the lighting and colour contrast between Trin and Thanwa's scenes and Naran and Krailert's is pretty stark, with Trin's romance bathed in sunlight, open skies and flowers, while Krailert's is confined to dimly lit rooms and hidden messages.

I think this indicates Trin and Krailert's positions in their respective institutions and how their attitudes and circumstances affect their understanding of sexuality. Trin is new, and believes in the possibility of change and renewal within the NESDC as he discovers new things about himself and as we go on, his surroundings and their limits. He's afraid of radical change and disruption to established order, but ultimately curious and open to it.

Krailert, on the other hand, is weathered by the years he has spent violently repressing his true feelings for survival, and judging by the way he conducts himself (playing the piano in the dark at the hotel instead of at home, writing anonymous music reviews, meeting Naran exclusively behind closed doors), he cannot see a way out or forward, choosing to settle for the meager moments of self-actualisation he can achieve within his circumstances. He is so tied to the military by the sacrifices he has had to make, to cling to the privilege it affords him, that imagining life apart from it has become impossible. He would lose everything. His social standing, his income, any semblance of community he might have gathered, should he stop playing the part assigned to him.

Now, how is this going progress in the narrative?

lert and ran are a bright flame, full of passion but destined to burn out quickly, and they don't talk to each other face to face, they dont shoulder each others burdens. the only times lert and ran can talk honestly to each other is through prose, through metaphor, through their column in the newspaper. even their newspaper column they aren't speaking as themselves, they're speaking through the mouth of a persona, they're communicating as klai rung and sarasawadee. when they talk face to face there's always something someone is holding back. so though their sex scenes are lit in golden hour brightness, they're a flame that will burn out.

For anyone interested, Victor's father, Ivan Stalenko, and his manuscript about Stalin seem to be based off real life historian, Robert Conquest and his book The Great Terror: Stalin's Purge of the Thirties published in 1968 (later followed by The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror Famine in 1986). On the historian's death in 2015, Stephen Evans, raised in a devoutly Communist family in Whales, described for BBC News magazine how it impacted Communist discourse in the West:

It was a book which changed minds and dispelled doubt (mine included) when it was published in 1968, the year of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in response to the liberalisation of the Prague Spring. It laid out facts without adornment so they could speak for themselves, spelling out in clear language the detail of the purges and the executions. Fellow travellers of the Soviet Union sneered - and perhaps still sneer - but they couldn't find factual errors because Conquest's research was so meticulous. Even into the 1960s, it had seemed to many like there was a battle of equal ideas. But then came Robert Conquest's descriptions of Soviet reality. We were told clearly how hundreds of thousands of people were shot by the Soviet secret police in a matter of months in 1937 and 1938. We learned how the purges of officers by a paranoid Stalin were so fierce that the fighting ability of the Red Army was jeopardised. Conquest described how on a single day, 12 December 1937, Stalin and his henchman, Molotov, personally approved death sentences on 3,167 people - and then went to the cinema. The detail was unanswerable.

While wikipedia goes into some of the debates around the exact numbers Conquest arrives at--the mass murder of up to 15,000 people--there's no argument about the book's impact as the first of its kind to detail a devastating regime under Stalin.

The historian, Conquest, had no ties to Thailand nor was he Russian, himself. Shine, instead, seems to fictionalize another version of him and this publishing event to illustrate the Cold War tensions Thailand and its people were intellectually and politically navigating leading up to the real student protests and military crackdown the series depicts.

From the start of the drama, Tanwa seemed to be a happy-go-lucky rich hippie musician with undeniable charisma. He is always smiling and attracts a following wherever he goes, the second one being that as he returned to college, everyone started to greet him, even the one who is a cleaner, and his former junior who works as a professor in his college. It pretty much indicates that he was very popular in college before dropping out. However, this happy-go-lucky and smiley persona is all a facade. Tanwa holds deep wounds inside, which he later reveals to Trin that the reason why he does not commit is because he lost his mother to suicide. Mind you he actually was there when her dead body was present, even though his mother's friends were attempting to prevent him from seeing her body. Glimpses of his trauma were visible to us as the audience before this, for example, him arguing with his father in which his father tries to stop him from smoking weed, asking if he really wants to go back to his mother, and that scene where he gets a nightmare where there was a flashback of his childhood with his mother that suddenly transitions to her drowning, or when Trin recites a lyric from The Beatles and then Tanwa envisions his mother singing it. It was visible to us as the audience, but not to the characters. Undeniably, before things took turn for the worst, Tanwa was really good at hiding his past scars. 

His father was abusive to him as well, as evident that he would not even hesitate to slap him on the face multiple times in public, or condemn him from playing music in the same event, saying that he doesn't want hear "hippie music", to which Tanwa, as usual, would intentionally rile him up and even insult him, and even in the start, Tanakhom told Trin that "father and son damn hate each other to the guts" which indicates their strained and sour relationship that probably started after his mother's death, where his father used his influence to close the case and call it off an accident. 

But initially in the series, Tanwa used to cope with his trauma by escaping it. He wouldn't open up to anyone about it, and always resorted to drugs and his hippie companions as to escape what he went through. He always said ,"People leave in the end". His mother's death lead to his fear of abandonment, and hence his inability to commit that frustrated Trin. He always thought that he is okay with just being happy in a relationship, and didn't want to be a burden to Trin by adding his misery, something that frustrated Trin, who always thought that in a relationship, you feel sorrow as well. But after he chose to commit to Trin and get into a serious relationship, all was good till Victor died. Tanwa, under Victor's orders, didn't tell Trin about the protest, and Trin, repeating a vicious cycle of blaming the wrong people, punched Tanwa on the face and blamed him for Victor's death, not knowing that Tanwa was the one to warn Victor, and that Victor was the one to tell him that Trin doesn't need to know and to stay with him, and we could see the fear and shock in Tanwa's face at the sight of his lover being like this. This all lead to Tanwa spiralling into depression, drugs, and loads of guilt over not keeping any promises he made to Victor, and for Trin abandoning him again. He didn't say "people leave anyway", but rather he wasn't able to accept that Trin left him, and this made him relive his trauma. AND YOU GOTTA APPRECIATE HOW AMAZING MILE'S ACTING WAS!!! He, IN ONE TAKE, efficiently showed the pain, guilt, withdrawal symptoms, visual and auditory hallucinations of those who confronted him, and him screaming for all of this to go away

But this time, it was when his father finally showed his care for his son. He went to see him in his downward state, and gave him his mother's last, unfinished novel, which Tanwa read out and decided to complete. Both of them reading out the novel with Tanwa's dad remembering each word, line by line, turned out to be a bonding moment for them, and hence Tanwa decided to complete it in his own style. No more running away, Tanwa faced his own trauma and this turned out to be a healing experience for him. Under the name of Rimtara, Tanwa published the novel, part of it revealing what actually happened, about Victor finally accepting Trin and Tanwa's feelings for each other.

Tanwa did chase Trin again, after two years of their separation. He was always the one to chase Trin, but the difference is that he was his healed self when he surprised Trin in Paris, with no signs of resentment coming from him. This was a huge part of why both of them were able to stay together even in old age.