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Summer Lagniappe (A Minisode)
13 Plays2 months ago
Summer didn’t give us a lot to say, but we ALWAYS got something to say. Ben, NiNi and Shan talk a highlight of the season, Twig reports from the field, and we award summer’s Girl Who Tried.
Episode transcript available here.
00:00:00 Welcome
00:01:15 Introduction
00:02:21 Twig’s Dispatch
00:14:24 Spotlight: Tadaima Okaeri
00:20:34 Girl, You Tried
00:27:08 Celebrating 50 Episodes
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to The Drunk Knicker Podcast
00:00:20
Speaker
Welcome to the conversation about BL, aka The Drunk Knicker Podcast. on the porch in the rocking chairs.
00:00:36
Speaker
Four times a year we pop in and talk about what's going on in the BL world. We shoot the shit about stories. All the drama going into them. I review from a queer media lens. And I review from a romance and drama lens. So she like cracked out takes and really intense emotional analysis.
00:00:56
Speaker
If you like talking about artistry, industry, and the
00:01:15
Speaker
And we're back.
Weather Talk and Transition to Main Discussions
00:01:18
Speaker
We have reached the end of the summer season. It is hot as hell, and hurricane season is active.
00:01:26
Speaker
but we at least still have our shows to watch. Wow. What a way to set the mood. That's one way to start, for sure. Girl, I'm stressed. I feel you. I feel you. I feel you. We are here. The summer has been... It's been a lot. Let's just dive right into what we came here to discuss. Shan is here. Say hi, Shan.
00:01:56
Speaker
Hi! We're gonna talk a few things that we didn't talk through this season. Twig's gonna come in and leave us her dispatch. And then we're gonna round it up and award the girl you tried.
K-Drama Disappointments: Blossom Campus and Love is Like a Cat
00:02:10
Speaker
There are a lot of girls who tried this season.
00:02:21
Speaker
Dispatch! Thank you for having me back.
00:02:32
Speaker
While folks were lamenting having nothing to watch this quarter, I was as busy as ever. In the skipped section, sadly, Korea really dominated this category last season, starting with Blossom Campus. Honestly, this was the biggest disappointment this season for me. This was by the k Korean independent teen Strongberry, who I normally love. They released a full-length K-drama that I don't understand how it went so wrong. The story is about but a university transfer student who works at the library and ends a few interactions with a Taekwondo major, and they fall for each other. It was boring.
00:02:58
Speaker
The story didn't really flow, the chemistry was flat, the only good thing I can say for it is that when they do kiss, they kiss well, but it was not worth watching to get there. This was the least queer Strongberry has ever felt, and to add insult to injury, it
Mixed Reviews on Lady Boyfriends and Other Shows
00:03:09
Speaker
ends on a cliffhanger. This is a pass for me, friends. Love is like a cat. Mu of the newly public, mutual relationship, stars in this hybrid Thai-Korean production that did not manage to retain the good qualities of either country. It is bad, and not even in a fun way.
00:03:24
Speaker
The premise is a famous Thai actor is blackmail into doing a Korean reality series in which he has to work in a dog cafe despite being afraid of dogs. That sounds like it would be cute and fun and somehow it was neither. Poor acting, cinematography, chemistry, story, everything was mid. Also content warning for animal death, way to alienate your target audience. Grey Shelter was a Korean short series that barely felt like BL. Honestly, it was trying to walk a trauma narrative in BL line and I don't think it did that successfully.
00:03:51
Speaker
the romance felt rushed and the trauma cart felt like it was being sad for the sake of sad rather than having anything to actually say about trauma. Also had another cliffhanger ending, not my fave. Moving away from Korea, Lady Boyfriends is a show that has a high barrier to enjoyment so judge for yourself. It's a remake from 2015 and the premise is that it's an ensemble show in an all-boys high school in which a good percentage of the cast are actually trans girls in an all-boys school. There's a lot of infighting amongst the trans women They're extremely catty and mean and cliquey to each other. That part I actually found kind of fun, and I did enjoy them banding together against a common enemy. Unfortunately that common enemy is another trans girl who's looked down on for transitioning late, which calls her authenticity into question.
BL Genre Hits and Misses: Memory in the Letter and Two Worlds
00:04:31
Speaker
This show also has sexual assault played as comedy, which is honestly the main reason why it's in this section. There was a gay couple who got the bulk of the focus in the last few episodes, and while that storyline will likely be the most appealing to this audience, I didn't particularly like that the trans characters got short shrift in their own show, so.
00:04:46
Speaker
I didn't fully love it. Kiseki Chapter 2. This was a production by 9NAA. They have history of not paying and exploiting their actors and they've done it too many times so I didn't watch this one. Pay your actors and hire intimacy coaches and then I'll talk about your shows. The last one in this section is actually a GL Thai channel that I wanted to shout out. It's just not to my taste but I don't like gatekeeping GL because there's so little of it and it's so hard to find. So if you're a fan of the melodrama and the older toxic relationship type tropes you can give these guys a try.
00:05:17
Speaker
Last quarter they put out Friend with Benesits a series and C as an SEA you soon. And my favorite of the three was You Are My Star of the series which I enjoyed because it retread a lot of BL tropes so I watched it and played sort of spot the BL parallels. JPC mini channel on YouTube. Now on to the shows that you might actually want to consider. There were a few genre BLs this season that were varying degrees of hit or miss so I've grouped them together. I love genre stories so I don't want to be too harsh on shows that push the boundaries of the BL genre.
00:05:45
Speaker
But all of these had at least one fatal flaw that makes me not able to recommend them without caveats. Memory in the Letter is a Thai BL sci-fi fantasy in which a student falls in love with a stranger in the mirror. This is a short series that had real high highs and low lows for me, including some of the best chemistry across a painted glass I've ever seen. But also, the ending was so poorly handled that I had to call poor Ben to watch with me just so I have someone to share my psychic damage with. Without spoiling anything,
00:06:11
Speaker
This show involves an age gap, with actors not age appropriately cast to hide the fact that the age gap is so large. It also doesn't treat the age gap seriously or engage with the very serious problems that it raises in its own plot, and I found that very frustrating, so make your own choices on that one.
Critique of Age Gaps and Narrative Issues in BLs
00:06:26
Speaker
One thousand years old this series, this show is a Thai vampire show that spends the first three quarters being an extremely low stakes series in which a vampire owns a pork blood soup stand and a glorious umbrella collection, and is in love with a man obsessed with searching for alien life. it is exactly as silly as it sounds. But in the last few episodes everything turns into a tense melodrama, and I'm gonna spoil this so they don't know how not to. We find out that the vampire stays friendly with the other vampire who murders his human lover across multiple lifetimes. I was vibing and then I was really not. Two Worlds is another Thai series and a max nap vehicle. The premise of this one is as it says on the tin. There are two parallel universes connected by a glowing body of water,
00:07:06
Speaker
Our protagonist loses his love interest and travels to the parallel universe accidentally while grieving to realize that he has the chance to save his boyfriend's doppelganger in this new world. While he does that, he finds himself falling for someone else instead. This series is a relatively slow-burned show. Whoever made this show hated the most bewilderingly good job of undercutting every dramatic moment so that it had no stakes or impact that I've ever seen. This show was almost impressively boring considering how much was happening at any given moment,
00:07:32
Speaker
I liked that it seemed to be saying people weren't interchangeable, but then in the end, the show undermined its own message. Watching the show was informative for learning about pacing and how narrative tension works or doesn't in shows. The last in this section is The Spiral. This is a Chinese Danme adaptation that we almost didn't get because of censorship. It was heavily adapted so that rather than magic, the core of the unnatural happenings are a virtual reality video game in which our leads have to puzzle through dangerous mysteries to figure out the secrets of each level.
00:07:59
Speaker
It's fun in an, oh, this does feel like a video game kind of way, and I enjoyed puzzling through the mysteries alongside the leads, but the mysteries drag on too long and they're repetitive, and the ending of the book is actually really undermined from the adaptation choices. Also, if you're watching for a romance subtext, this is a very tame story even for Censored Sea Drama they barely touch. The shipping moments are few and far between in a long series, so be forewarned. Moving away from the supernatural and back to more standard QL fare, a secretly low,
00:08:28
Speaker
This felt like a very old-school tie series, a feeling that was helped by the horrifically bad subtitles, but an engineering student who's been in love with his senior for years and watched him fail miserably at bromance over and over. This heavily relies on the viewer enjoying the lead pining over someone who treats him badly for most of the series.
Charming but Flawed: Boys Be Brave and Deep Knight
00:08:46
Speaker
So in order to enjoy this, you have to be the kind of person who finds someone showing affection by being grumpy, rude, jealous, and demanding, cute. No judgment? Just giving you the information you need to know. Worth watching if you're nostalgic for 2020 tie bills.
00:08:59
Speaker
Please Teach Me is a vertical format micro-series from Korea about an aspiring idol trying to attend college that you have to grind through ads in order to watch. Honestly the series was fine, very middle of the road KBL, but the micro-series format and the barriers to watching make it not worth sitting through in my opinion. Blank the series is a Thai GL in the same universe as Gap, so if you miss Sam and Mon the characters they do appear though portrayed by different actresses.
00:09:24
Speaker
The main couple in the story have a 16-year age gap, and their romance starts when the younger one is in high school, though due to plot reasons she's of age. I know that's a barrier for some, so I wanted to mention it off the jump, especially because she acts young. That's the part that I actually struggled with most. The story is very LaCorne-like in terms of being very high melodrama. It also, especially in part two, gets quite sexy. The height difference is also really something. It's in two parts and both are complete. It does have a happy ending with a cute time skip, so, you know, manage yourselves on that one. Jazz for two.
00:09:53
Speaker
high school Korean music deal in which the main couple really fell flat for me and the side couple were a fully trimmed love interest that I also really did not enjoy. The show tried to incorporate internalized homophobia as part of its main storyline but it didn't engage with the characters overcoming it so everyone feels kind of like they suddenly switch from being in a drama to a romance and it was both jarring and honestly a little offensive.
Hidden Gems and YouTube Series Recommendations
00:10:14
Speaker
Trigger warnings are also important for this one so take care of yourselves if you're deciding to watch it.
00:10:20
Speaker
Boys Be Brave, another KBL in which a man who can't say no tries to get the person with a crush on him to ask him out to no avail. This felt like it was trying to be a manic pixie dream boy meets an assisted coded grump, but they didn't quite calibrate either of those characters right. The side couple also ended up landing kind of badly in terms of class politics, but it was pretty and they were cute. I actually had fun with this one despite everything I just said. Deep Knight is a Thai BL in which the son of a club owner is against the host club business model until he falls for one of his mother's hosts.
00:10:50
Speaker
decides to start working there to get closer to him. You might imagine that a setup like that would involve class and power politics, but you would be wrong. That being said, the show has a lot to recommend it, the main couple has great chemistry, and the side couple is a canonical throuple. There is another side couple of older sappics to enjoy as well. It's also very prettily shot. Lastly, close friend 3 Soju Bomb is a beautifully shot and cute friendship drama, another Thai-Korean joint series this time about Thai boys in a Korean band who go on a bender in Korea after the contract is cancelled. Honestly, my only caveat about this show is that it's absolutely not a BL. There isn't a romance subplot at all on this show. I spent the entire time and aired so confused waiting for the romance to appear. It does not. If it hadn't been advertised as Close Friend 3, a series which was previously all BL shorts, I would have enjoyed it for what it was. As it stands, I hold a grudge against it for being misled. Go in knowing what you're getting, and you'll be fine.
00:11:46
Speaker
Finally, let's get to the shows that you might have missed that I actually recommend. To be continued, a Thai second chance romance of a famous person and a doctor who were friends when they were in high school. This one tells a lot of the story and flashbacks that are poorly paced at the beginning, so the start of the show really drags. But the reveal for why they broke up with satisfying the pacing is the barrier in this one. If you can power through the first few episodes, it actually ends up being a really good little show. They have great chemistry, the story holds together, and I had fun.
00:12:15
Speaker
Jim Affairs is an absolutely bonkers but cute mainland China BL in which a guy gets a personal trainer and sparks fly. This show is a silly comedy that is also surprisingly earnest. It goes by extremely fast and I really enjoy the ride. That one's on YouTube. Blue Boys and Lonely Girl. Sukfilm is a Korean YouTube channel putting out QL short stories. Blue Boys was a little disappointing. The couple had too many issues that they cycled through really fast. The GL though, Lonely Girl.
00:12:41
Speaker
was a much more focused story with a single main problem between the couple and so it worked much better. And both are really beautifully shot and have some great kisses. Fake Buddies is another YouTube miniseries. It's a seven episode Korean series about a girl and a guy who are dating a sensibly but really both using the other as a beard because they're both in a gay relationship. The first few episodes are very funny as the two of them try to make the other realize what's happening.
00:13:06
Speaker
And then we get the prequel episodes for how the gay couple and the lesbian couple both came to be. It's a fun use of 45 minutes on the Gym Next Door YouTube channel if you're bored. To the Ex Who Hated Me is a Korean GL produced by RedQ. It's a series of micro series. There's two so far with three episodes each. They're both GL and solid short second chance romances that are very fun. City of Stars is the last one I'll be talking about.
00:13:34
Speaker
It's, in my opinion, the best hidden gem QL from this quarter. A charming celebrity, regular guy romance that tackles shipping, toxic fans, and the unreasonable expectations of people in the spotlight. Acting is a little rough and it's not perfect, but it had some really good things to say. It very smartly sandwiches those things amongst some pretty good sex scenes.
High Praise for Tadaima Okairi
00:13:52
Speaker
The two leads are My Communication Kings, and there's some decent trans side rep as well.
00:13:56
Speaker
this show really uses BL as a vehicle for having something to say, and I appreciated it. And the story really holds together in a way that's a little refreshing inside BL too. So I really liked it. And that's the dispatch for this quarter. Thanks again for having me.
00:14:25
Speaker
It's time to talk about my favorite show of the season that no one else watched except for Twig. We're gonna talk about an animated BL from Japan called Tadaima Okairi. It is the best show of the season and I'm begging you please to go watch this show.
00:14:48
Speaker
Today my O'Kairi is a 12 episode BL from Studio Dean that aired on Crunchyroll. Studio Dean is actually fairly important in the BL space. Pretty much all of the BL anime that we're probably gonna recommend to you offhand was produced by this studio.
00:15:08
Speaker
In this particular one, they're adapting a manga series about a gay couple in the Omegaverse that is trying to raise their kid in the suburbs. Our protagonist is named Fujiyoshi Masaki, that is actually his name, and his husband, Hiromu. Masaki is an Omega, his husband is an Alpha, and they have a son named Hikari together. He is a little baby.
00:15:35
Speaker
And they are living in the burbs away from everybody else because they had a very difficult time getting together. The show is not so much about the difficulties these two had getting together. It's about them building a life that they love and are happy with.
00:15:53
Speaker
after going through what they did. So like this is your favorite leads, married and trying to raise their family now and working on healing some of the relationships that were damaged over the course of them getting together. There's a great deal of healing and growth in this. There's healing between Hiromu and his dad who was not keen on their romance in the first place. There's the fact that these two guys love each other and love being parents. I am very often amused by how much my dad is still obsessed with my mom.
00:16:32
Speaker
And I really liked seeing that in a gay couple here. It was really restorative in a lot of ways because we don't ever really see dads in BL. This show was so healing. This was such a peaceful experience of a show to watch.
00:16:48
Speaker
What I like the most out of fluffy shows like this is for there to be a nice arc about what life are we building for our family and a strong thematic thrust of we're not trying to get back at anybody who hurt us. We just want our kid to grow up in a world where he and eventually their daughter too are loved by the people around them.
00:17:13
Speaker
Each episode was about a specific sort of challenge that the family was facing, and some of them were really huge, like, how are we gonna reconcile with the kid's grandfather who wants to be part of his grandson's life? Even if it's something as small as Hikari's getting older and he wants to run an errand, okay, we're gonna let him deliver a letter to his grandfather to the mailbox, and getting a two-year-old to deliver something successfully to a mailbox was a production unto itself, because he kept getting distracted.
00:17:41
Speaker
It was genuinely one of the most delightful and wholesome experiences I have ever had in the genre. I have said for a long time that I've wanted a married gay dad's show. I was not expecting it to come from the Omegaverse of all places, but this was everything I ever hoped it could be, and honestly so much more. If you can handle Omegaverse nonsense, including Mpreg,
00:18:10
Speaker
and the Alpha Omega pheromone shit and rutting behavior. This is one of the best shows I have ever seen. Oh fuck. You just said so many words that I've said. I know, I know. Like if you can handle, I can't handle none of those things, I'm sorry.
00:18:31
Speaker
If you're gonna be in genre, you gotta to take your shit seriously. And I think that's why it worked. This show was not embarrassed about being an Omegaverse show. It's not like, we're gonna do this in Omegaverse because we know the girls will fucking show up for it. It took the conceits of its own genre seriously and incorporated it into the emotional context of their characters.
00:18:54
Speaker
And so, like, I totally get it. Mpreg is not easy for a lot of people. The writing behavior stuff is not easy for some people. The way that Omegaverse is used to perpetuate some of the heteronormative kinds of misogyny that women face is not for everyone. Truly and sincerely.
00:19:10
Speaker
When I say like these are caveats to watching this, I am not being funny. These are real things that are being dealt with in this show, but they're not half-assing it. These are not normally things I enjoy. Tell a good story, and take your shit seriously, and we can show up for it, and that's what happened for me here.
00:19:32
Speaker
So I wholeheartedly recommend this show, but I do think it's important to not downplay that this is very legitimately an Omegaverse story. I appreciate that. It's a tent, baby! Perfect execution of its own premise, and genuinely it's the kind of show that was so fun to watch with other people.
00:19:54
Speaker
I have been so intrigued by the conversation around this show and I really regret that it has so many of my hard lines in it because I would like to see it.
Debate: 'Girl You Tried' Award Evaluations
00:20:02
Speaker
I don't think I'll be able to, but I have heard nothing but praise and love from the people who've watched it. I love this show with my whole heart. I do not recommend it at all.
00:20:16
Speaker
This show had really strong ideas and it wore its whole heart on its sleeves the whole time. What an experience. Great show.
00:20:35
Speaker
Let's hand out our favorite award on the show, Girl You Tried. Our nominees this season for Girl You Tried are Unknown, the series from Taiwan. Love is Better the second time around from Japan and living with him from Japan. Does anybody want to do propaganda here? Oh, let's start with reminding folks how we think about girl you tried.
00:21:06
Speaker
Girl You Tried For Me is meant to reflect on a production that missed the mark, but we felt like the core work and the intent was there to actually do something good. And for whatever reason, stumbled.
00:21:23
Speaker
But there's different ways that shows can stumble. There are shows that can be very well told and very confident up to a point and then a mistake is made that is hard to recover from. There are shows that never quite nailed what they were trying to do but did clearly have aspirations. There are shows that have a solid idea of at least the beginning and end points and something in the middle just got messy.
00:21:51
Speaker
So those are different categories of ways that shows can go sideways. And all of these different ways came up in this season. For me, a show like Unknown is not a girl you tried because they actually did succeed at what they were doing for the vast majority of their run. So I wouldn't call that a girl you tried. They made a mistake right at the end. And it was a big mistake. But their level of execution was so good through most of the show that I can't really consider that a girl you tried.
00:22:22
Speaker
For our two Japanese BLs here, Love Is Better was really solid through about the first four episodes and then it kind of veered off in a very strange direction that I still don't really understand why that happened versus living with him had a solid start had a pretty decent endpoint that it was trying to get towards and then got kind of messed up along the way trying to stretch out the story. So for me, I think I would want to give the girl you tried to living with him out of these three because I do think
00:22:57
Speaker
they had the bones of a good story. They executed parts of it really well. But in their effort to stretch it out into a longer format than the story really supported, they kind of lost track of some of their threads and got a little confused in the way that they landed at the end. So for me, that one makes more sense as a girl you tried because I see what they were trying to do. And I think that they just made some execution errors that got in the way.
00:23:27
Speaker
An interesting analysis, one I will be pondering. It feels mean to say that unknown is a girl you tried because they rushed to their sex scene. It ignores how good the family story was around all of that.
00:23:47
Speaker
but I'm also torn now if I'm going to choose between love is better and living with him. Because I feel like my angst with living with him is it doesn't release the implied sexual tension that really irritated me more than anything else. Which love is better absolutely did. Man, this is hard. Have we ever had a girl you tried tie? We have not.
00:24:15
Speaker
There's usually a fairly clear-cut winner once we talk about it, but I think part of the problem is that love is better and living with him sort of failed in similar ways, so it's hard to choose. If I have to choose between the two of them, love is better the second time around, knew exactly what it was doing, and it made very bad choices. And there's a difference between making stupid choices and struggling against something you couldn't do, in my opinion.
00:24:43
Speaker
I will give it to living with him because there's so much hang time, it's overly reliant on actor charm to hold itself together. And I do like how well the cast was able to hold this flimsy project together.
00:25:05
Speaker
I think weaker actors would have made this a more irritating experience than it was as opposed to it just being kind of disappointing. So if I'm backed into a corner and have to choose, it's gonna be living with him. Good job. Oh no, I'm about to throw a spider in the works because I'm gonna go for Love Is Better.
00:25:30
Speaker
very exciting. Go ahead, give us your reason. This is how this taught history. So for me, the original premise of Curly Tried was always a strong idea that failed in the execution. And I feel like the ideas from Love is Better were stronger to me than the ideas in living with him. Just in terms of A, what I was interested in seeing and be what they wanted to do, I feel like those ideas were stronger and love is better. So the failure of the execution part is not the part that I'm looking at in terms of comparing the two, but the strength of the premise part.
00:26:14
Speaker
Because both of these shows had really strong gay themes in them that I was really compelled by, I am going to allow them to tie and both get a girl you tried because I think both of these shows were trying to do something really cool. I think by episode three and four of both of these shows, I was like, this show's got something in it. This is a real contender. And then it was like, oh no, what happened, girl? Come on.
00:26:41
Speaker
So our first ever Girl You Tried tie. Girls, you both tried. Congratulations to Japan for getting your first Girl You Tried awards. Is it? And it's helpful.
Celebrating the 50th Episode with Listener Interaction
00:26:54
Speaker
At that, Japan always overheating.
00:27:07
Speaker
I think we have exercised the demon of the summer, so let's wrap this up. we are wrapping our summer lining up and wrapping our summer season see you in dot dot dot weeks for for our fall season beginning as soon as i can get my shit together and edit hey should we not doubt that this is the 50th episode oh my god didn't even talk about that yes congratulate just guys this is episode number 50 for the conversation
00:27:41
Speaker
There you go. If you are one of our listeners who has listened to us talk for all 50 episodes, please wow shout us out on Tumblr. I would love to talk to you and see how you're feeling about what we're doing after all this time. You're a trooper if you ask. Please, please, please. If you love us and you're hearing this, we are 50 episodes old today. Send us a note.
00:28:07
Speaker
Either send us a note on Tumblr if you know how to do that, or send us something in the Spotify down below, whatever. Answer the same thing. And the doobly-do. Listen, okay, auntie's old, okay? She doesn't remember what things are