Bake Me Please (2023)

A one hour plot stretched to a four hour snooze fest.

As Thai BL goes, the production values are good. And a nice set of attractive actors.

But the BL is only skin-deep.

It suffers from unimaginative writing with a minimum of plot. There is an hour's worth of plot stretched to four hours, hardly the first time this has happened in Thai BL, but still.... As usual, the first few episodes are somewhat engaging, and then they just keep stretching and stretching until you beg for it to PLEASE BE OVER.

Second, I had trouble figuring out who the target audience would be. The portrayal of human relationships seems really limited. Idealized grandmother-ness. Jealousy. Friends are forever. Even most tweens would want more than that.

Third, as the time is stretched, I found myself paying attention to extraneous details. As an example, anyone who has ever visited a bakery or coffee shop know that they are fairly busy places. But in this world, the kitchen has a few listless pretty boys on their smart phones while one takes forever to twiddle with one cake. And then they all meet up to take a chunk out of the ONE cake they've spent hours making for tasting purposes. I totally get the need to build a fantasy world, but when hardly anything happens the ancillary things start becoming more interesting than whatever counts for plot/character development and it becomes harder to suspend disbelief to live in the fantasy world.

Finally, they've managed to take a BL and remove any sense of LGBTQ, queerness, freedom or even gender. Many fans of BL / Yaoi come because this genre offers an escape from a reality in which everyone / everything is stuck in some cultural role / expectation. This offers none of it.

I'm definitely going to watch some Japanese, Korean or Taiwanese BL next. I need something with some life to it.

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The cake is too dry.

It looks great on the outside, but it tastes like sawdust.

The cast is special. Atom is fantastic at everything, including perfect comic timing, Guide is both adorable and sexy, Poom is gorgeous and an excellent actor, and Ohm showed up to work.

The chemistry of the main couple is non-existent. Or I should say Guide makes a valiant effort but he pours his chemistry onto a fencepost. If only this series had Poom in the lead role - he and Guide had so much better chemistry that it was nearly impossible to cheer on the main pairing.

It's a mercy this was only 6 episodes, but it should have been 2 or 3. Or it could have worked as 6 if anything ever went anywhere or was explored. Why is Atom & Oab's mother like that? Why didn't Atom's character arc go anywhere? Why was Atom always wearing a shirt? What happened to Guy's store? Why did they wait until the last 2 minutes to sell grandma's cakes? Everthing is surface and there's no real character development. Shin SAYS he's become compassionate, but we never really saw it. Grandma is cute, but she's a stereotype of grandmotherly grandmotherness. (It's a minor miracle that she made it to the end - I lost a lot of money on that bet.)

I can't recommend this - it's dull and pointless, although if you want to stare for a few hours at a bunch of gorgeous men and Ohm, you may get some pleasure out of this.

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