BL (Sorted by Favorites)

Favorite BL EVER. And that’s saying something, since the kissing scenes in this aren’t nearly as satisfying as most of my other favorites. But these complex characters really got under my skin. I’ve watched and re-watched and re-watched this series, then sat down and literally wrote out a novel-length fanfic version (it’s on Wattpad if you want to check it out)  just so I could get into these guys’ heads and enjoy all their fascinating chemistry and emotion. It is that good. Read the manga, too, guys, because it adds so much depth...

See above ;)

Best Thai BL I have seen, mostly because the chemistry between the two main actors is phenomenal. Their kissing and love scenes are to die for, their storyline is sweet and relatable, and there is a lot less annoying side-character-plot-filler than in a lot of other series. 

This series is actually a prequel to a non-BL series called Bad Romance, in which these two characters were the side characters. Bad Romance was released first, and then they decided to tell the backstory of these two guys because they were so popular with fans of the original. This series is a hundred million times better than the original. If you watch only one Thai BL series, make it this one.

Takumi-kun was my very first foray into the world of BL so it will always have a special place in my heart. This is the best of the five movies, in my opinion, though the version I watched had such confusing subtitles that I had to watch it multiple times before I felt like I understood what was going on. The chemistry between these two actors is fantastic. Their kissing scenes in particular really pull at your heart. You want to see them together always and forever, because they really bring out the best in each other. Love this series. Watch it in order... but even if you don’t like the first two, keep going until you get to this one because it is wonderful.

My second favorite of the Takumi-kun movies. I love it because of all of the flashbacks that give you a glimpse of the start of the characters’ relationship, but be warned that the way this movie is filmed, flipping back and forth in time, is sometimes really difficult to follow. I wish they hadn’t told it that way but I’m not going to complain since if it weren’t for this film we wouldn’t get to see those iconic scenes with these two actors - the first movie has a different cast that isn’t even half as magical as these two are together. Also, the kissing and love scenes in this movie are by far the best of all of the movies, probably because the actors were so comfortable with each other by the time they got around to filming this, and it shows.

This is a Taiwanese movie with a strange sort of Groundhog-Day-ish type plot where a guy gets the chance to re-live the biggest choices of his life involving the man he falls in love with. This ranks highly on my list of favorites primarily because of the very realistic, believable chemistry between the two main actors. There are some gorgeous, intense love scenes in this that will take your breath away, and the overall plot is interesting, well told, and full of optimism about what can happen when you trust someone to love you - and what can happen when you don’t. Lovely film.

Charming Thai BL with multi-dimensional, interesting main characters and a lovely sense of humor. I am a sucker for actors who can draw you in with adoring, longing stares at their crush, and Kongpob is a champion at this throughout the entire series. The SOTUS hazing system is also fascinating and fun to watch. Wish the kissing scenes had more power, though, as they’re a little disappointing when it seems the actors had a lot more potential than what we end up with. Hopefully this will get remedied somewhat in the second season?

Another Thai BL favorite, if only for the beautiful expressions on Tee’s face as he tries to work through his feelings for Fuse. These two have a very similar relationship dynamic to Korn and Knock in Together With Me - gentle, adoring, obviously dominant guy with a huge crush on a somewhat selfish, mercurial submissive who keeps vacillating between the guy who loves him and the girlfriend he’s “supposed” to be with. However, I actually don’t like Fuse’s character at all. Knock is kind of annoying but has some redeeming qualities; Fuse is just really selfish and I have a hard time understanding why Tee is into him. 

That being said the first episode of this series alone is KILLER, and will definitely suck you in to the rest. Wish there was less unimportant side-character-story stuff going on. Also desperately wish the kissing/love scenes were more believable. You completely are certain these two guys are in love (or at least Tee is) only up to the point when they’re supposed to kiss and they get all wooden and weird with each other. 

Let your imagination fill in the blanks, though, and this is a toe-curling sweet drama ;)

Still watching this one so its final rank isn’t quite decided yet. The first five - six episodes are pretty boring, actually, super slowww moving with very little meaningful plot. The romance and tension have started to pick up a little now, hoping that maybe the last third of the episodes will redeem the first third. ;)

I love love love the “he doesn’t know I’ve been in love with him all my life” trope and this drama pulls it off in not just one but two ways. Sweet story with a cute campus beauty-pageant-like background story. Too many uninteresting side-character plots for my taste but that’s pretty typical with Thai dramas. 

Sweet and sexy little mutual-hate-turns-into-a-crush stepbrother story. I know a ton of people are obsessed with this trope because of the Addicted: Heroin series (which does appear on this list, but much further down) but I feel like this movie did it better. I much prefer it when both characters are mutually into each other. Bonus: the kissing scenes are actually good.

Worth noting that the My Bromance drama series, which was made after this movie, starts building on the same concepts but ends up being so awful in the end that it is being pushed down toward the bottom of this list...

Disclaimer: I am rating this solely on one section of this movie, because it is that section that I find so sweet and lovely, and the other plot lines don’t really interest me. This movie is more like a collection of short films about several different BL relationships. The one that captivates my little fangirl heart is a story that centers on a Japanese Valentine’s Day type holiday, and a guy trying to get up the courage to confess his feelings to the super-popular classmate he has a crush on.  Not only is the little plot adorable, but there is a great kissing/love scene in here (that includes cake!)

First Thai BL I ever watched. It’s addicting and sweet but kind of unsatisfying in terms of the kissing/love scenes. Remember when I said Make It Right’s romance was believable right up until the wooden kiss scenes? Well, that’s triple true for this series, sadly. Phun and Noh have darling chemistry together until it’s time to kiss, and then it becomes blatantly obvious they’re pretending and are both pretty uncomfortable with it. The sweetness of the characters makes up for it, for the most part, but it still leaves you feeling like there should have been so much more.

Also, this first season is far better than the second one. 

Also known as “I Love You Even Though You’re A Man.” Chinese drama with kind of strange pacing and I have yet to find a version that has really good, understandable subtitles. It feels a little choppy, which I think has to do with the translation and the general storytelling feel of the original web novel it’s based on. You really have to be able to put the pieces together in order to get a sense of the characters and what it is that makes this story romantic. However, once you do get the hang of it, this is a charming, sexy series with plenty of angst and a completely lovable, dorky main character. Please go for the uncut version, which includes the love scenes - the love scenes are by far the best part of this drama. Theoretically there’s supposed to be seasons one through three, but I’ve only been able to find the first two. The second season is actually as good as the first, which is very unusual. 

One of the few less fluffy, more heavy dramas that made it toward the top of my list. Watching these two fall in love is fun. Watching how their lives play out —however believably — is not at all fun. But the ending redeems itself, and leaves you feeling satisfied if kind of sad for everything that was lost...

Cute Thai movie that has a sequel, Love Love You. I adore the romance in this one, and the sweet angsty bits as the guys try to figure out what they’re feeling and why. Also, there is some amazing supportive work done by the guys’ circle of friends that you just don’t see in many dramas, and it’s heartwarming and leaves you feeling happy and full of hope for humanity.

Sequel to Love’s Coming. More adorableness from Gump and Nai. Not as good as the first movie in my opinion, but I’m grouping these two together since you really do need to watch both.

Cute movie using the stepbrothers-falling-in-love trope. My Bromance does it best, but this is still (in my probably unpopular opinion) a better love story than Addicted: Heroin. Bonus good kissing scene. 

I hate this movie for hurting so much. No, seriously, this one is devastating and heartbreaking and keeps you tense right up until the very end. One of the best non-fluffy, tragic dramas out there.

Cute, and a must-watch because the Takumi series itself is a must-watch and this is the movie that started them all. Very glad they recast the main roles after this movie was filmed, though, as these two actors have nowhere near the amount of chemistry that the new cast did.  This first installment in the series really sets the stage for Takumi and Gii and their relationship, and these characters are so intriguing and sympathetic that it’s easy to fall in love with them.

This one is weird to rate because on the spectrum of all the BL I’ve watched, this one is kind of forgettable. Yet I remember liking it quite a bit, which means it must have done some things right. You’ll find this one on most people’s BL-to-watch lists, and it’s definitely worth the time, just don’t be surprised if the storyline doesn’t stick with you as strongly as some of the others.

This season is a lot darker and heavier than the first season. There are things about that I love, but it also leaves you with a much more somber feeling than the bubbly almost childish innocence of the first round. I’m not really into Frame and Book, though their storyline is sharp and painful enough to be worth watching. Tee is once again an adorable little charmer and I was watching this mostly for his storyline with Fuse. 

Lovely romance, heavy drama, didn’t like the way it ended so sadly this one ends up lower on the list than it might have been. This is a more mature and less “fluffy” story than the ones I usually like.

SO HARD TO RANK THIS ONE. I mean, the kissing scenes and love scenes are fantastic, super intense and just really, really dang pretty. But the plot is bizarre - a jilted boy meets a dying vampire boy, falls in love with him and starts manipulating other guys into having sex so that he can hide/feed/care for his vampire lover. I had such a hard time getting into the romance between the two main characters because the guy was such a horrible person. Relatable, but horrible. The vampire was actually the best person out of all of the other sleazy characters, and then the ending wasn’t particularly happy (though it was definitely the right way to go with this story.) So I loved watching it, but didn’t really enjoy it, if that makes sense.

Well I’m not even sure you can really call this one BL since it’s the story of a dead girl’s soul entering a guy’s body where she tries to win her boyfriend back. I like the fantasy element, and I suppose that the boyfriend’s reaction to the cute guy who suddenly enters his life does qualify it for BL a little... but the girl-soul element diminishes some of the effect for me. Still a cute movie (as most of the History series is).

Bizarre but fun Chinese movie where a lonely guy in a struggling gay relationship finds that his new virtual-dating-fantasy app actually manifests the dreamboat character he creates into his real life. This is a strange movie that starts off fluffy and even silly and get surprisingly dark as it goes on. Some very sexy love scenes.

This series is cute but I felt like the plot was slow moving. There is some interesting family dynamics and a  fantastic real kiss scene that almost single-handedly warrants the higher rating...

This drama seems to top most BL fans’ lists as one of their favorites, if not their most favorite, of all BL out there. So I am guessing my opinion isn’t going to be popular, but hey this is my list so I can honestly rank things according to how much I liked them. This seems to be the story that launched the stepbrothers-fall-in-love trope. I actually find the trope romantic and sexy when it’s done right. But Addicted falls very short for me, primarily because of its use of another popular BL trope: the overly shy, resistant, hard-to-catch guy who spends the entire movie/manga/whatever adamantly resisting the advances of a more dominant guy, only to give in (amid oh so many protests) in the end. I hate this trope so much, both in hetero and homosexual stories. For me it is just not romantic.

Now, it’s true there is an absolutely thrilling scene where the resistant/shy character decides to finally take the plunge. You have to watch the uncut version in order to appreciate it, though.  Still, by the time he decided he was into the relationship, the bossier dominant guy had already lost all of my respect and interest so that it felt more like Stockholm syndrome than romance. 

I should note, too, that I am aware I ranked Takumi-kun very highly on this list when it also contains a strong element of this trope I dislike so much.  I’m honestly not sure why... I don’t know if it’s the characters’ backstories that make it more palatable or what. I just know this one didn’t sit well and I was pretty bewildered as to why everyone was praising it so highly. Maybe someday I’ll give it another watch to see if my opinion changes, but in the meantime I’m happy to settle for re-watching just the love scene I mentioned, because that part of it really is done well. 

Well written, beautifully acted, cerebral heavy drama. I liked it but wouldn’t re-watch it often, I enjoy the lighter sweeter romances far more.

Short little Thai series about several boys and their relationships. So many charming little moments in this one, and I actually enjoyed the “side-character” plots that didn’t feel like side-characters much at all because they were so engaging.  However, it was over so fast it didn’t really feel completed, so I ended up with a sense of unfulfilled potential...

Okay I loved this series up until the end. The hate-to-love relationship between two stepbrothers is really endearing. But, I HATED THE ENDING. HATED. SO MUCH HATE. So I like to pretend that the ending didn’t happen and that everything turned out the way I prefer in my imagination. Or, I just rewatch the movie which is much higher up on this list, because the movie ending is how it was supposed to be (says me.)

Oh... this one is barely worth watching, honestly. It is soooo bogged down with boring side-character plots that I ended up doing a lot of fast-forwarding to get to the parts I actually cared about involving Phun and Noh. They could have told their story in a third as many episodes - ten or less - but instead it gets dragged out for 36 episodes of side character junk I was not at all interested in. Watched it only because I loved Phun and Noh and wanted to see what happened to them. 

So one of the main actors in this one is stunningly beautiful. Also there is a great kiss scene at the end. But I found the plot so boring I’ve never actually been able to watch it all the way through in one sitting...

Nope.  Of all the Takumi-kun movies this one’s my least favorite. Not nearly enough Takumi and Gii, and way too much of the other characters whose relationship I don’t find sweet or delightful at all. I don’t even like the main kissing scene, even though it’s a “real” one and not just a fake lip-press like so many others... The scene feels sloppy and horny to me instead of romantic, more like watching the beginning of a porn than a romance. Worth watching only for the small glimpses of Takumi and Gii that you get here and there...