#timpai

Pai hoped they were beyond issues like this one, so when he finally speaks, the words burst out of him with so much force that his voice breaks.

"Why did you scam me when you could've sold the house to clear the debt?"

I saw in the tags some complaints about what was missing, and, I’d actually recommend treating those missing pieces as intentional elements in the series’ messaging—question marks sinking their hooks into you instead of letting you walk away empty-handed after the ceremony. We could flutter away along with our hearts, but the show doesn’t quite let us. The check books don’t quite add up. And in one way, the show makes this ambiguity evident: the exchange with our Empirical grandfather, half-jokes about his ability to destroy lives if he chooses.

My Romance Scammer was a profoundly economic and political show. It dissected the performance of marriage (explicitly labeling weddings as ‘fake’ and a ‘performance’ in the last episode by the most romantic character in the series) into its legal and social consequences. It has the licit power to uplift individuals’ social status, grant them financial resources, medical privileges, and new networks of relations. The right of gay marriage mattered not because love is love. It’s a beautiful sentiment but the love was there without the legal right to marry and it didn’t do much as far as economic and legal authority for people who couldn’t legally wed through the authority of the state. The weddings matter and the ability to understand it as an act of mutual respect rather than a scam for one group to use another is profoundly important to appreciating its function, because this was a very real, material way heterosexuality empowered its normalization and kept those who believed in it most in power.

However, it has its limits, and the ending of MRS seems to hint at those with its missing puzzle pieces. How fully does Pai understand Tim’s struggles, or North Yu’s? How conditional are Yu and Tim’s inclusion in this empire? We’ve already seen how conditional Pai and North’s inclusion were. And Yu’s mother’s point still hangs in the air, why should we care about the well-being of these ultra-wealthy gays? Is La Zhan just another helpless privileged rich boy in-the-making, an echo to North at the start of the series? A marriage license can only uplift on a case-by-case individual basis. Gay marriage is so important but it isn’t some universal liberation from the kind of income inequality that made Yu and North’s lives the kind of hell worthy of escaping through scamming.

My Romance Scammer with it’s swooningly sweet love story and unfilled bubbles of information offers a champagne socialist perspective of love in a country that’s making progressive strides in one arena due to the contributions its queer industries are making to its GDP while, on the other hand, it resists regulating aggressive capitalist impulses and attempts to bring about democratic governance that would benefit even larger swaths of the population. This is the subtext I see beneath the loveliness of the series. In five years, when the couples look back at their video time capsule, will marriage and family connections still be the only means to access safety and comfort for people like Yu and North? Or will love stretch beyond just the people you want to marry, bringing even bigger changes to the landscape?