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My Extraordinary philippines drama review
Completed
My Extraordinary
2 people found this review helpful
by Not a Robot
Dec 9, 2020
8 of 8 episodes seen
Completed 1
Overall 7.0
Story 5.0
Acting/Cast 9.5
Music 9.5
Rewatch Value 3.0
This review may contain spoilers

Ended up Being Pretty Ordinary

The series started out with potential as the first BL shown on prime time television in the Philippines. The characters did not look like movie stars, there weren't any gratuitous shots of shirtless men with ripped muscles. One of the characters comes from poverty, so many potential positive messages were discarded by employing the bury your gays trope in order to redeem heterosexual transgressions and to finger wag about homophobia being a killer. This series possibly sends a message that gay people should stay in the closet because it is much too dangerous to live their authentic lives. Your parents will be against you, your best friend will betray you and you will lose your life.

Ken and Shake meet in school and develop a relationship. They are comfortable enough where Ken practically sits on Shake's lap, and they hold hands during the play Ken wrote. Even though this doesn't take place in 1920, Ken's friend Sandee, doesn't realize that gay men are not attracted to women, so she outs Ken and Shake's relationship to Ken's mother, who immediately flips out and starts yelling and screaming at Ken about rutting in the grass (they were sitting on a blanket in a selfie) and to get home first thing in the morning. This leads to a car accident where both Shake and Ken were killed. Some people complained about lack of relationship development. This is because we got treated to 3 episodes (out of 8, almost half) where Sandee and Mom are redeemed and everything is okay because the dead guys are now frolicking in heaven.

In reality, it would have been better to show that in spite of Mom's homophobia, that Ken and Shake built a life together. Ken's mom would see him happy with Shake, and making a decision to love her son and support him. That would show that homophobia doesn't always win.
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