This review may contain spoilers
AouBoom delivered. Everything else was a welcome bonus.
I'll be upfront: I watched this for AouBoom. That's it. After We Are I was already convinced they could deliver in whatever they were given, and Dream On proved that again. Aou as a sexy DJ, Boom as a sexy nepo baby, and a dynamic built on frustrated desire, bad timing, and the particular chaos of developing feelings for someone who's still mentally elsewhere — while accidentally hooking up with his crush's brother. I love everything about that setup. They could hand these two almost any script and they'd find something in it.
What I didn't fully expect was to find the other pairs engaging too. JossGawin's quieter friends-to-lovers arc was sweet and I appreciated the slower pace. EarthMix carried the most emotional weight, and the exhibition scene — a gallery built around breakups and the people left behind — was for me the most striking moment in the series. Someone please actually make that concept real.
The forest scene is where I'll admit I lost patience a little. Arnold and Dean don't actually do anything — they get emotionally close in a vulnerable moment, nearly cross a line, and stop. What follows is a compromising video, Tua interpreting it as betrayal by his best friend and his partner, Jack reading it as far worse than it was, and an enormous amount of conflict generated by something that technically didn't happen. I found both reactions disproportionate, and the drama that spun out of it felt like it was working harder than the actual situation warranted.
What I found genuinely interesting was Raffy's role in all of it. He witnesses the moment, takes the photo, and has every motivation to use it — he's been trying to sabotage the Jack-Dean dynamic from the start, and Rome even believes he did it when it comes out. That he decides against it is one of the quieter character moments in the series, and it landed for me more than the manufactured fallout around the scene itself.
Where I personally land differently from the narrative is the EarthMix ending. I think it would have been more honest if they'd gone their separate ways after the time jump — maybe staying friends, because the whole point of Mix's arc is realising he's been holding on to keep Jack in his life as a person, not necessarily as a partner. That realisation felt like it was building toward something cleaner than what we got. But apparently there's a third season coming, so perhaps the story isn't done making up its mind.
What I didn't fully expect was to find the other pairs engaging too. JossGawin's quieter friends-to-lovers arc was sweet and I appreciated the slower pace. EarthMix carried the most emotional weight, and the exhibition scene — a gallery built around breakups and the people left behind — was for me the most striking moment in the series. Someone please actually make that concept real.
The forest scene is where I'll admit I lost patience a little. Arnold and Dean don't actually do anything — they get emotionally close in a vulnerable moment, nearly cross a line, and stop. What follows is a compromising video, Tua interpreting it as betrayal by his best friend and his partner, Jack reading it as far worse than it was, and an enormous amount of conflict generated by something that technically didn't happen. I found both reactions disproportionate, and the drama that spun out of it felt like it was working harder than the actual situation warranted.
What I found genuinely interesting was Raffy's role in all of it. He witnesses the moment, takes the photo, and has every motivation to use it — he's been trying to sabotage the Jack-Dean dynamic from the start, and Rome even believes he did it when it comes out. That he decides against it is one of the quieter character moments in the series, and it landed for me more than the manufactured fallout around the scene itself.
Where I personally land differently from the narrative is the EarthMix ending. I think it would have been more honest if they'd gone their separate ways after the time jump — maybe staying friends, because the whole point of Mix's arc is realising he's been holding on to keep Jack in his life as a person, not necessarily as a partner. That realisation felt like it was building toward something cleaner than what we got. But apparently there's a third season coming, so perhaps the story isn't done making up its mind.
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