3
5
jpny01
This review may contain spoilers
That was bad.
I think everyone here was in the same boat, wondering why on earth we were watching this, and yet we did. For me, it was about the discussion section, which was far more entertaining than the series. This wasn't the worst BL I've ever seen, but it was the most boring and pointless.
I'll start with negatives and end on positives, if I can think of any.
- There was no plot. None. Nothing happened the entire season. Well, one thing happened, but I'm putting it under positives.
- Even given there was no plot, the writing was truly terrible. Nothing really made sense. Like Kit and Mark practicing to be apart for almost the entire season. If there was a reason why anyone was watching this, I imagine it was MarKit, and we got almost none of them. There's an episode where a third of the runtime is taken up by a discussion about putting on a play. Not an actual play, but discussing the details of a production, like how the props would be done, and who would play which characters. Much of the rest of the episode was people texting each other. Riveting.
- The main character, Wayu, is the most useless person imaginable. He doesn't do anything, can't do anything, and he has no agency. He's everything wrong with the seme-uke dynamic.
- The romances were so tame that most viewers have likely had racier relationships in primary school. They are nauseatingly saccharine and totally passionless. The only moment of heat the entire season was when Pok attacked Tong in the shower.
- Sandee was criminally underused. Bank was easily the best actor in this, and by the end of the series even he'd given up.
- Big, who plays Pha, never once took off his shirt, and that bod needs to be shared. You'd think laying in a hospital bed for an entire season that someone would give him a sponge bath at some point. Speaking of which, why would you bother to have a character that does absolutely nothing but lie in a hospital bed for an entire season? Although I'm not complaining because his death, funeral, and tombstone are 95% of what's good about this series.
Positives:
- Bank as Sandee. The way he can pack malice into a subtle look, or mischief, loneliness, or all of the above made for a character that much of the audience was cheering on, and he was the villain out to destroy everyone. Sadly, he failed.
- There were things in here that were so bad that they were good. Kit and Wayu go to see Pha at the hospital. and as they arrive, his crying mother is exiting the room, and she says "he's gone! (i.e. dead)". So the boys go in and have a conversation with Pha, who has either resurrected, or he had been asleep and his mother just assumed he was dead and didn't bother to check. It's a good thing they're Christians and didn't have him cremated prematurely.
When he did kick the bucket, his funeral involved plopping onto a lawn a tiny casket that might possibly fit a small child, which suggests they had Pha dismembered and stuffed into it. I guess Pha's mother was on a budget and decided to forego gravediggers. She also didn't attend the funeral. That along with her apparent indifference to whether or not he was dead at any given moment created the impression she didn't much care for him.
In a later episode, it appears that wild animals dragged off the coffin as they are wont to do (which is why you need grave diggers), and in its place was the most hysterically funny tombstone you will ever see. That sounds exaggerated, I know. But it was. I couldn't tell if it was a novelty cake or made of styrofoam, except whatever production assistant made it accidentally ran over it with his car and tried to tape it together or something.
Story: 1 - There isn't one.
Acting: 5 - I hate to criticize actors, but none of them except Bank (Sandee) put in a good performance. I think it was probably terrible directing, because I've seen some of these guys do good work elsewhere. But here the directions seems to have been "keep your face and voice as blank as possible, pause for ten seconds between every phrase you speak, and always move unnecessarily slowly."
Music: 1 - you will want to smash things listening to that same two bars of music over and over for 12 episodes.
Rewatch Value: 1 - forget the gun to the head - you'd have to threaten to nuke a country to get me to watch this again. Except the funeral scene. That I could watch again.
Overall: 3. The suggested was 2, but a score that low would have to be for something aggressively awful, instead of passively awful like this series.
I'll start with negatives and end on positives, if I can think of any.
- There was no plot. None. Nothing happened the entire season. Well, one thing happened, but I'm putting it under positives.
- Even given there was no plot, the writing was truly terrible. Nothing really made sense. Like Kit and Mark practicing to be apart for almost the entire season. If there was a reason why anyone was watching this, I imagine it was MarKit, and we got almost none of them. There's an episode where a third of the runtime is taken up by a discussion about putting on a play. Not an actual play, but discussing the details of a production, like how the props would be done, and who would play which characters. Much of the rest of the episode was people texting each other. Riveting.
- The main character, Wayu, is the most useless person imaginable. He doesn't do anything, can't do anything, and he has no agency. He's everything wrong with the seme-uke dynamic.
- The romances were so tame that most viewers have likely had racier relationships in primary school. They are nauseatingly saccharine and totally passionless. The only moment of heat the entire season was when Pok attacked Tong in the shower.
- Sandee was criminally underused. Bank was easily the best actor in this, and by the end of the series even he'd given up.
- Big, who plays Pha, never once took off his shirt, and that bod needs to be shared. You'd think laying in a hospital bed for an entire season that someone would give him a sponge bath at some point. Speaking of which, why would you bother to have a character that does absolutely nothing but lie in a hospital bed for an entire season? Although I'm not complaining because his death, funeral, and tombstone are 95% of what's good about this series.
Positives:
- Bank as Sandee. The way he can pack malice into a subtle look, or mischief, loneliness, or all of the above made for a character that much of the audience was cheering on, and he was the villain out to destroy everyone. Sadly, he failed.
- There were things in here that were so bad that they were good. Kit and Wayu go to see Pha at the hospital. and as they arrive, his crying mother is exiting the room, and she says "he's gone! (i.e. dead)". So the boys go in and have a conversation with Pha, who has either resurrected, or he had been asleep and his mother just assumed he was dead and didn't bother to check. It's a good thing they're Christians and didn't have him cremated prematurely.
When he did kick the bucket, his funeral involved plopping onto a lawn a tiny casket that might possibly fit a small child, which suggests they had Pha dismembered and stuffed into it. I guess Pha's mother was on a budget and decided to forego gravediggers. She also didn't attend the funeral. That along with her apparent indifference to whether or not he was dead at any given moment created the impression she didn't much care for him.
In a later episode, it appears that wild animals dragged off the coffin as they are wont to do (which is why you need grave diggers), and in its place was the most hysterically funny tombstone you will ever see. That sounds exaggerated, I know. But it was. I couldn't tell if it was a novelty cake or made of styrofoam, except whatever production assistant made it accidentally ran over it with his car and tried to tape it together or something.
Story: 1 - There isn't one.
Acting: 5 - I hate to criticize actors, but none of them except Bank (Sandee) put in a good performance. I think it was probably terrible directing, because I've seen some of these guys do good work elsewhere. But here the directions seems to have been "keep your face and voice as blank as possible, pause for ten seconds between every phrase you speak, and always move unnecessarily slowly."
Music: 1 - you will want to smash things listening to that same two bars of music over and over for 12 episodes.
Rewatch Value: 1 - forget the gun to the head - you'd have to threaten to nuke a country to get me to watch this again. Except the funeral scene. That I could watch again.
Overall: 3. The suggested was 2, but a score that low would have to be for something aggressively awful, instead of passively awful like this series.
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