Fudanshi Bartender no Tashinami (2022)

High level male BL fan shows his powerlevel

First of all a thanks to the fansubber Furritsu for doing English translation.

Story:
Not a BL but also has enough content to keep a BL fan very happy if you can manage to get over the super weird male lead. A male BL otaku (a fudanshi) works as a bartender. Here he ships his male customers and really any guys near him into pairs in his fantasy while he prepares their drinks. Meanwhile his co-workers kinda watch the insanity unfold. The bartender is commited to getting every guy into a couple in his fantasy so he can make new BL content at home. So different guys enter the bar and different fantasy stories unfold based on what they say. It's a super short story too so if that sounds interesting to you then definitely check it out!

Acting/Cast:
The ability of the actors to not laugh during the situations is next level. The main guy also acts like one of the most odd characters I've seen and I watch jdramas so that limits high at this point. He's super neutral until BL situations happen in which case he'll go wild. Also the BL fantasy scenes were nicely acted as well, I got invested in some of them lol.

Music:
Pretty calm music. Jazz stuff and all that, very fitting to the bar location where almost the entire drama takes place.

Rewatch value:
As a BL fan I could definitely rewatch this show a bunch to see the BL fantasy scenes again. One of them looked super pretty too. But I can imagine that for non-BL fans there's less reason to rewatch.

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Simply Not Funny

To call this short series quirky would not quite do it justice. It is odd and almost appeared to be a story of a man with a multi-personality disorder. Labeled as a comedy, I frankly just did not get it and subsequently did not find it funny. But I have a difficult time with what is funny in different cultures as humor can be a very culture-centric concept. Another distracting aspect of this series is also a flaw (at least to me) reflective of Japanese BL and that is this constant use of ‘talking to oneself’ to explain actions. Several Japanese BLs use the technique of talking out loud as if they are having conversations with themselves. This is getting overused and tends to 'lead' the audience into what they should be feeling rather than what is.

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