etoks21

I'm sorry to hear about the loss of your first love. I can't imagine how painful that must have been.

You keep using the word "reminded." What I don't get is that you already KNOW how painful love and loss can be, so how can anything remind you of it; it's not as though you've forgotten.

There are thousands of romantic, tragic movies out there. But it's THIS one you avoid, and it sounds as if it has more to do with the fact that you watched it WITH your beloved, then enjoyed engaging in discussion with him for an extended period about this film. Thus, watching AFF again would cause you to re-experience all of the above, except that he's not here to watch or discuss it with you. Seems like that's the pain you're avoiding, not anything in the movie itself. And there is nothing wrong with that.

Hell, I watched this film alone the first time and was devastated, a sobbing, gasping wreck. It affected me as no other film has done. It took me 18 months to work up the courage to experience it again. And I have nothing external to the film to cause me additional pain, as you do. I have now watched it four times, the last just a few days ago. I cried, but not anything like the first time, and with each watch I discover new aspects of the characters and plot that are fascinating. It's also worth a watch just for the beauty of the sets, locations, cinematography, and costumes.

So, I totally get it. AFF brings a lot of painful memories to the surface for you, so you choose to not put yourself through that. Got it.

May the joy of your memories one day be greater than the pain of your loss.

Well, it's boring but it is not a "pedophile's dream." Perhaps you should educate yourself as to the definition of "pedophile" before you start throwing around the term as if you know what it means.

Shim Ji Ho looks great naked, but I'm checking out after 40 minutes. This film doesn't know what it wants to be, a comedy, a drama, a dramedy? What it mostly is is boring. The FL is annoying af. No wonder she's banging teenagers; she acts like one herself, and not in a good way.

I hunted this down after Shim Ji Ho kept catching my eye during the four times I've watched "A Frozen Flower," in which he has a supporting role. I find him talented and appealing. I'm surprised he doesn't have any more films on his bio after AFF.

This movie is a disaster.

They committed suicide because of hateful prudes like you who made their lives a hell on earth via the Internet. Why is sex "gratuitous" just because it's hot? The hot sex here told us much better than words could have how into each other the characters were. You'd best stick to Disney and Christian Broadcasting shows.

Your movie/series-watching must be extremely limited, then.
If you already believe that love sucks most of the time, and I don't agree with that, then why would a movie that portrays what you already know upset you?

Regarding AFF, I believe the King loved Hong right up until the end. Despite everything, including the horror he had done to Hong, he loved him. So is that unconditional love? In a twisted way, it is. Although one can certainly argue that actions speak louder than words, and the king did a lot of things that don't indicate "love" in the typical sense. But his feelings are still there, though overcome by feelings of betrayal, sadness, heartbreak, rage, and everything else, as a result of which he did the god-awful things he did.

But that's the beauty of movies like this. They deal with the real, actual world, where love, nor anything else, is black and white, but infinite shades of gray. Maybe I'm a masochist but I enjoy powerful films that take me on frightening rides with the characters through the universe of GRAY where their emotions and actions can't be summed up in one, blanket statement.

Do you like films that don't confront you with the bad behavior of otherwise good people?

No, it is not a BL. It is a Chinese-censored, twisted bromance where the leads gaze at each other meaningfully a lot, but no romance, no kissing, no anything of a gay or BL nature. Pure gay-bait.

That's why JJM is #1 on my best feature film actors list, and A Frozen Flower is about #4 on my best gay-themed feature films list. Tonight, I watched this film for the fourth time. And it blew me away all over again. I love noticing details and nuance I missed before.

Why?

Lord, you're dense. "...he is having extramarital affair with a woman, he will be branded as a jerk and immoral,..." Ummm...kings at that time, gay or straight, had many concubines, who they plowed regularly. Many of them had a king's babies. Like I said above, you're an ignorant bigot. Try educating yourself.

For someone who claims to be straight, you sure are fascinated by this movie about a gay king and his male lover.

omg. f**k you. "harder to find true love in LBQTA community." First of all, it's LGBTQ, second of all you're a bigot and a mouth-breather.

Hong never knew the queen when they weren't f**king. He's bi. Banging her woke up his straight side. He'd been with the king for many years and loved him deeply. Did you see the love and passion with which he made love to the king, or did your bigot-glasses keep you from noticing that. Did you notice he laid on the king's shoulder and cried when he was first being asked to bang the queen?

You see what you want to see here, and nothing else. Hong said those hurtful things to the king about not ever having loved him, etc. because of all the king had done to him and the queen by that point, including cutting his nuts off. Then he turned as he died to gaze upon the man he had always loved.

One kid a few years older than another kid can't "groom" them. Quit throwing around terms you don't understand.

You may think I think the way I do because I'm gay; I don't care. But I know you think the way you do, not because you're straight, but because you're an ignorant bigot.

You're exactly right. The chief was on his way to getting her out of his system when she came sniffing around him again in the library and threw herself at him, pathetically so.

Thanks for the treatise on oxytocin. However, you make the opposite of the point you think you're making. The king and chief had a relationship of many years and truly loved each other. Did you not see the passion and lust/love in the chief's eyes when he was making love to the king. That kind of intensity in sex, after many years of being together, is a pretty good sign of long-lasting love.

Oxytocin is what the queen/chief were all about. The queen was a virgin, the chief, who I surmise to be bisexual, had never been with a woman, so yeah, brain chemicals were firing off in all directions but it wasn't "romance," it was lust, as the king said. Lust is OFTEN mistaken for love, which is why so many bad marriages are made when people get hitched too quickly, thinking they're in love.

Bingo. Hong loved the King, and had since childhood. I think he is bisexual and banging the queen woke up his "frozen" side, but those two hardly interacted outside of bed. They weren't in "love," in any real sense. It was all lust and the excitement of the new.

When he and the king were having sex...you call the lust on Hong's face and the passion in his eyes "loyalty and gratitude?" lol I call it love and lust. The king is only a few years older than Hong. He wasn't "groomed." You're applying recent, modern figures of speech to an ancient story when such concepts didn't exist.

They were infatuated, not in love. They had almost zero interactions outside of bed;; they didn't even know each other. It was all about new sensations, lust, and confusion. Had the king never put Hong in that position, he never would have thought twice about the queen.

It's ridiculous to refer to the king as Hong's "friend." Did you see the passion in his eyes and on his face when they made love early in the film? That's not the look of a "friend."

Hong Lim lied at the end to hurt the king the way he knew would be the worst. It was apparent a number of times early on that he loved him.

I reacted intensely the first time I saw it. Sobbed like a child. Tonight was my fourth watch. With every go-round I pick up new layers, subtleties and nuance I didn't catch before. It's just a matter of time before I watch it again. That's how good a film it is. But yeah, I was wrecked the first time, for sure.

Consider you're missing out on a lot you might not have registered in your only watch of the film.

Because the king/chief relationship was the central focus of the film, from the very beginning. It's not even close. King/Chief had been together for many years, whereas the queen was a late-comer to the show, so to speak.

In my view, queen/chief was about new physical sensations, natural lust, and sexual deprivation to that point, not actual love. They didn't even know each other out of bed, so how could they be "in love?" In lust, as the king suggested, yes. I see the chief as bisexual, but in love with the king. Then what the king forces him to do awakens his bisexual side, and he develops a crush, like you have in high school on the first girl or boy you have sex with.

The chief denied loving the king at the end purely to inflict pain, which it did, immensely so. But he turned over as he lay dying on the floor so that he could gaze upon the king until his last breath.

That's my take on it.

Thanks for letting us know you find seven short paragraphs an impossible challenge to digest. That's a good indicator of your intellectual capacity.

I don't buy that people need to live the rest of their lives after a "trauma" tip-toeing around everything they expose themselves to through media, trembling with anxiety, afraid they may encounter something that reminds them of what happened to them. That's living one's life as a crippled victim, and it's a choice, not a necessity.

This is what mental health treatment is for. The idea being to learn to live with what happened to you so that it doesn't ruin the rest of your life. My dad fought in WW2, was shot down and spent 18 months in a Nazi POW camp. He spent the rest of his life seeking out movies about WW2 and soaking them in. His favorite sit com was "Hogan's Heroes," which featured a group of American POWs in a, you guessed it, Nazi concentration camp.

My dad lived the rest of his life just fine without your precious trigger warnings to shield him from reality. And if he had had mental problems related to his WW2 experience, it was up to him to seek treatment so he could live life in the real world.

Trigger warnings are silly, and at the very least, should be put behind a "trigger warnings" button so the rest of us don't have our watch ruined by what often amounts to a list of plot spoilers. That trigger warning button would be a nice trigger warning for the sane among us to avoid your list of trigger warnings.

"...it was such a better more fun openminded place before twitter and facebook pulled every idiot on the web."

Well, not EVERY idiot. You're here, after all.